skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This blew my mind. It seems such a simple idea to "move the instruction set closer to hardware". I am amazed no one thought about it before, because it seems so obvious.

The author provided convincing examples that 1% floating point accuracy is sufficient in many domains.
I've always been confused by the "choices" argument: it seems to be a false dichotomy. Why not have good defaults but then let determined users change whatever they want? If you don't care, you just use the system as is; if you are consistently annoyed by something, you can dive in and fix it.
> That is exactly the debate between loading upfront and loading on demand. Either way, you'll have to load resources.

Everybody seems to be missing the third way: load in the background as the user can already work.

Take those fonts, you could spend 5s loading them during the splashscreen making the user wait, you could spend 5s loading them when first requested making the user wait again. Or you could load them after the program has started, in the background.

Will the user go from "empty document" to opening the fonts dropdown in under 5s? Pretty damn unlikely, and if he does he'll wait for the remainder of the load. In either case, he just "won" 5s.
I got a voicemail last week from an LA area number. It was a cute-sounding girl saying, "Hi, my name is Kayla, I'm taking a marketing class, and for one of my projects I wanted to use your domain xxx dot yyy, so I was wondering if you would sell it to me. Ok, please call me back!"

Not suspicious at all!
I just wanted to make a universal binary for our iOS library
Is there an alternative to Berkeley DB which has a hash database file on disk? Rather than in RAM? The problem is I use BDB 1.86 on Windows, because it's free, but the DB size is limited to 2GB. I want to use an alternative which is just as fast and pretty much the same interface.
You can always stay in the current version until you feel safe. Plus, if you don't like Unity, you can use Gnome, KDE, XFCE or whatever makes you comfortable.

I really don't see the fuss about it. If you don't like the new version, skip it. It's not like the next Ubuntu release will be more than 6 months after the current one.
That's the definition of scare quotes.

"Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase to indicate that it does not signify its literal or conventional meaning."

"If scare quotes are enclosing a word or phrase that does not represent a quotation from another source they may simply serve to alert the reader that the word or phrase is used in an unusual, special, or non-standard way or should be understood to include caveats to the conventional meaning."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
According to asymco(and apple's data), the average selling price for iphones is around $650(Q2-2011).

http://www.asymco.com/2011/10/09/the-new-iphone-portfolio-an...
Well, you do have to admit that Obama and Mussolini both end in vowels!
I'm looking around for alternatives too after using 11.10. I have been happy using Ubuntu for about 3 years.

Is there anything Ubuntu adds that I would miss in changing to Debian? Not including the Unity interface of course.
I think we're seeing a shift in this circumstance though. A central tenant of the Lemon effect is that it "appears in markets where buyers know much less about goods being sold than sellers". With regard to consumers, we have far more information available than ever before, and not in the most basic sense like spec sheets and feature lists. I'm referring to social intelligence, which provides far more subtle details.

We are individually connected to more people than we have ever been in the past. As we, collectively, begin to share more and more of our experience in the open on the internet, the data set from which we can assess the satisfaction of a user base grows larger and larger.

It has become trite to say that "big data" is where it's at for 2012, but I think we've all become a little bit numb to what that means. I would consider issues like the Lemon Effect to be "big problems". There's a very real possibility that we could solve this problem in the near future. That's pretty exciting.
There's an "IT Security" stackexchange?! WTF?! How many almost identical communities does stackexchange need?
>How can you bypass something that is not a barrier?

So if tomorrow Chrome uploads all your keystrokes to Google, will that be a valid defense?

>P3P means "we would never..." in computer speech which is unenforceable therefore useless.

Stopping Chrome from uploading your bank passwords with today's update is unenforceable as well and hence thereby useless.
clever :)

Btw, I'm not defending Google, they're clearly not acting perfectly here. I'm simply pointing out that this is a clear case of, "what did you expect to happen?" Any spec that still sets a cookie that is declared as not being used for any purpose seems deeply flawed.

I also found it interesting that Microsoft called out Google and not Facebook, which gives the article a political overtone.
I would try to remove as much caching as possible. It is complicated and hard to test.
It is not in Googles or Microsofts interest to do that with their browsers. They both have a very large commercial interest in people using browsers that make it easy to track them.

This is the main reason I stick with Firefox. I don't want to use a browser built by an advertising company.
Did this (using jquery):

var loadingLayer = {
step: 0,
add: function(){
this.step += 1;
//didn't know how to call checkState() automatically after any other call
this.checkState();
}, remove: function(){
this.step -= 1;
this.step < 0 && (this.step=0);
this.checkState();
}, clear: function(){
this.step = 0;
this.checkState();
}, checkState: function(){
if (this.step === 0){
$("body").removeClass("loading");
} else {
$("body").addClass("loading");
}
}
};
$(document).ajaxStart( function(){
loadingLayer.add();
});
$(document).ajaxComplete(function(){
loadingLayer.remove();
});

I know the JS is uggly but i'm not an js expert (it works).
With a SSD and plenty of RAM load-times are a non-issue for the most part. I often leave applications I use frequently (or even infrequently) open for weeks at a time. There's not much downside in doing this besides some extra clutter in your dock/taskbar. For any fairly modern machine an upgrade to SSD + 8GB of RAM will mostly solve the problem. That's about $250-$300 to avoid the problem almost entirely. I feel like this is a byproduct of the race to the bottom of PCs over the last 5 years or so. Just because you can buy a $500 computer with a spinning disk and 2GB of RAM doesn't mean you should buy it. There are trade-offs to consider.

Developers also have these trade-offs to consider. How much money can a developer justify spending to optimize load-times when there is an easy and relatively inexpensive fix available to all consumers? If they deliver 10 second load times on an average PC that is acceptable enough. If a user wants 2 second load-times they can buy a better computer. It's always been the case with PCs that your results vary depending on the hardware you purchase.
> Some times I reopen a window of preview let's say just to close the whole program.

You could just close it from the dock you know. Or switch to it and command-Q immediately.

In fact, I don't even understand how you'd go around to "reopening a window" of preview, preview will not open any window without a document in it, do you open a document just to close preview or something?
Parking a domain makes somebody a bad person? How is this any different than a speculator buying undeveloped parcels of land and waiting for a developer to come along and buy them for more money? Are they bad people, too?

It is annoying when you need to buy the domain you want from a reseller and have to pay more than if it wasnt registered, but saying it makes the reseller a bad person is going way, way too far.
The nefarious bit is in IE- which, although it pretends to allow you to "instruct the browser not to accept 3rd party cookies, full stop," actually accepts third party cookies from any site with a P3P code it doesn't understand.
Offtopic, but my Gnome 3 status menu has a separate shutdown/restart menu option. :-)
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5/alternative-status-...
What I meant is that nearly all internet articles are optimised so that I only need to scroll down. Scrolling up only is necessary if I need to reference something that I already read.

Both your case and a single-column layout fulfill that need. The linked article does not.
Good news for the guys at Volunia, I guess.
Location can (sometimes) also be detected from writing style:

http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2011/January/jan7_twitterdia...
Sure, Π is irrational, so it can't be exact :) What I meant is that 1147 is the closest integer to Π*365, which IMO is still an awesome coincidence!
Any news since 2010?
This is a great take on it, although I might offer that Jobs never really solved the innovator's dilemma -- he just managed it. (Solve implies the problem goes away; not sure that applies here.)

Rather, what Jobs did was willingly accept potential cannibalization of some products in favor of others. Normally, in a large company, you have teams representing core products that morph into influential forces of nature inside their organization and spend a decent amount of time and resources protecting their turf. Jobs was the central decision-making authority, and he simply wouldn't tolerate that type of environment. So, territorial fiefdoms had no chance of surviving in Jobs's pressure cooker.
It's not so much that they are intentionally ignoring users privacy as they preferring the privacy settings their users have directly given them rather than those set in the browser. I've long been opted out from all of Google's ad tracking, on their site and elsewhere:

http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

Privacy is something that few of these companies truly respects. Does Google really respect it? Probably not as much as they'd like you to believe, but at least they are willing to discuss it and provide opt out solutions.
FPGAs really wouldn't help much. The theoretical gains sound good, but frankly, the practical speed of a cpu is measured by how fast it can run crappy code. FPGA in a cpu would just be a pointless waste of silicon that almost nobody would program for.

Application-specific hardware is already being added to the cpus -- the newest Intel ones have a hardware RNG and hardware video encoders and decoders.
"Being legal doesn't change the fact that parking domains makes you a bad person."

Bad person?

Well then in that case since you are being so absolute about that you might want to resolve the dns for a domain that you own that isn't going anywhere. Even to a parking page.

DNS server handling your query: localhost
DNS server's address:	127.0.0.1#53

server can't find TWIDDLA.ORG: SERVFAIL

DNS server handling your query: localhost
DNS server's address:	127.0.0.1#53

server can't find www.TWIDDLA.ORG: SERVFAIL

(query the server in the whois directly now):

nslookup

> server ASE-CONSULTING.COM

Default server: ASE-CONSULTING.COM

Address: 207.162.212.91#53

> www.twiddla.com

Server: ASE-CONSULTING.COM

Address: 207.162.212.91#53

www.twiddla.com canonical name = twiddla.com.

Name: twiddla.com

Address: 207.162.212.93

(ok it knows about the .com, what about the .org)

> www.twiddla.org

Server: ASE-CONSULTING.COM

Address: 207.162.212.91#53

server can't find www.twiddla.org: NXDOMAIN

Domain ID:D150745067-LROR

Domain Name:TWIDDLA.ORG

Created On:25-Jan-2008 10:00:15 UTC

Last Updated On:22-Aug-2011 12:22:43 UTC

Expiration Date:25-Jan-2017 10:00:15 UTC

Sponsoring Registrar:Omnis Network LLC (R101-LROR)

Status:OK

Registrant ID:OMNIS-1210584221

I'm sure that's an oversight on your part? And you feel totally entitled to that domain name since you own twiddla.com and of course nobody could possibly want the .org could they?
Journey into Professionalism - Reflections of a serial entrepreneur
Leveldb? https://leveldb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/index.html

Dunno about performance numbers vs BDB etc.
[citation needed]

Depending on how many cores you use, what processor you use, and other use cases (e.g. copy-on-write, which is free with RC and super expensive with GC), one of them can be significantly faster than the other. But for a non-specific use case, it has been my experience that they are roughly equivalent.

The place where GC consistently excels is the "no random pauses" - most GCs will occasionally need to stop the world, even when they can mostly do incremental collections. Note that this does not mean they are slower - it is just that the overhead tends to be concentrated in bursts instead of uniformly spread out as in RC.

The place where RC consistently excels is reference loops, and less dependence on implementation robustness.
Quick Questionnaire: How do you Navigate?
Dead for 32,000 Years, an Arctic Plant Is Revived
I'm working on a smartphone app idea around making navigation easier in situations where turn by turn GPS isn't appropriate or available. It would be incredibly helpful for me to understand how people navigate in different situations, and what their frustrations are. Any amount of detail will help:

https://docs.google.com/a/eightyonelabs.com/spreadsheet/view...

Thanks everyone.

ps. As a small incentive, I'm going to give away ten $10 Starbucks gift cards at random to participants.
I remember being asked this question in interviews when I was starting out in the job world in the late-90's. It certainly came across as a cliché, and I suspected the interviewers were just following an uninspired script.

I still suspect that most interviewers are being trite with this question, but the years of experience have taught me that the question does have a kernel of relevance. Ideally, the goal of working with a team (i.e. a company) isn't just to have a linear productivity amplifier, but to build something greater than the sum of what the individual members could build. This means understanding not only the strengths that you bring to the table, but also your weaker areas where you can benefit from the strengths of others. In the context of building a strong team, I now think this could be a very valid question.
I actually think he's right in dismissing those studies as ludicrous. You can't honestly take one or two (that I can recall) "studies" with only a dozen participants and then brand your product as "usability tested." That's just paying lip service. When you're changing a complex, deeply-ingrained interface for hundreds of thousands of people, doing two studies on a dozen people--and AFTER the fact!--and then calling it a day does indeed seem ludicrous.

Though at least Canonical can say they've done SOMETHING, which (at least I think) is more than Gnome has done. Gnome Shell gives itself a handful of breathless superlatives but I don't think they've ever once actually done a study of how real people use software. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

In the end, though, such studies are very expensive and time-consuming, so free projects would have a tough time pulling it off. Though that doesn't discount the silliness of Canonical's attempts.
What about IE tracking what users are searching for?

Microsoft should admit that they only care about privacy when it's convenient for them.
open source != community driven

This person has some other version of open source in mind in which it means something other than 'I can download the source code with the program.'

I don't take community suggestions for features on any of the projects that I have on github;

A.) because no one uses any of my stuff.

B.) because I don't care if they use it, I'm doing it for myself.

If the makers of Ubuntu have a vision for their idea of a perfect desktop experience, they should go ahead and do it. Sometimes it does take a dictatorial visionary to get important stuff done. We already have gnome 3, yes, and it is fine, but there is plenty of room for others. Particularly successful others like Ubuntu/Canonical.
I also think KDE has come a long way. You can configure it all you want and if you ignore the plasma-stuff widgets, then it doesn't get in the way and is very space-efficient (just a panel really?).

I keep hearing good things about Fedora's support for KDE but have not tried it personally.

I run KDE on openSUSE and am very happy with it, as well as the community there.
To be fair, C++ is a mess. It is, however, a very capable mess with extremely broad adoption and compatibility on pretty much every platform anywhere.

Yes, learning C++ is a pain. And it will bite even its expert handlers pretty badly occasionally. But the kind of maintenance overhead suggested by the stackexchange question really isn't there. For non-trivial code (as in the example here) the maintenance and correctness burden of the problem itself is going to be far higher than that of the programming environment.

So yes: just say no to C++ for web server middleware, system maintenance scripting, probably most GUI work, etc... But for the truly hard stuff, I honestly don't see much advantage to anything else in particular. And as pointed out earlier, C++ can be deployed as a straightfoward program or shared library on everything with zero dependencies, and that's a HUGE advantage vs. languages with elaborate runtimes.
Ask HN: Looking for technical co founder to move forward
Currently I am a one-man show, however I have my prototype working and for me to move forward (either get funding, more technology development, or accepted in incubator program like Y Combinator and others), they all require 2nd co founder.

I am currently located in Southern California, and would prefer my partner at least in California (Silicon Valley or southern California would be better).

As for me, I am what you say a non technical co founder. However I am a do-er and I get my things done. I refused not to be able to achieve my goal. My personal motto is better to have a 0.00001% chance than not trying at all. I have a vision on how I see this, and I would like to move forward with someone who shares the same passion and vision with me.

I would like to find out more about you, so please email me at rush.tea AT gmail DOT com about your passion in startup, what it would take you to be successful, your skillset (of course. :) ), and questions on what you need to know about me. It takes two to tango and I hope we can take it to the next level together.
The functionality being "broken" is functionality that users DO NOT WANT and have EXPLICITLY OPTED OUT OF by configuring their browser to reject tracking cookies. If they weren't tracking cookies, you could send a VALID P3P header and your app would work.
Apple Reveals Energy Efficiency Secrets of the iDataCenter
First, I think there needs to be clarification that I'm speaking from a developer standpoint interrupted with support or training issues.

If the role is primarily support this might not apply as much.

I consult in a lot of non-startup environments.

People rarely can wait an hour or two. Hell, they can't even wait 10 minutes. They over trivialize matters, wave their hands at developers to go away and fix it right away.

Building the process to teach them to prioritize those things that "can't wait" -- teaches them to understand everything isn't a priority and can't be. Resources, time, and attention are limited and ultimately you have to pick what to do first.

Each request is fundamentally different. Each request does not need immediate processing, or there is likely something that is reactive that should be pro-active.

I've worked in the IT food chain from the front lines, to hardware, software, networking, sales, management, architecture. It really comes down to a culture of reactiveness vs. proactiveness.

What do I do? We use a case manager heavily, with different priorities meaning different response times. There's no room for misinterpretation. An emergency is a fire alarm. Urgent client impacting issues need to be resolved under 24-48 hours, if not the same business day. But, every request does not get looked at immediately. I've handled hundreds of thousands of cases in 15 years of getting requests.

Immediate action doesn't meant constant interruption. Raging fires of an emergency should get our attention. If other requests rae coming into a queue we're already working on, we don't need to see more, we just keep working through the queue in the order we need.

On a side note, I can't wait for ICS letting me dismiss individual notifications, long over due. Also, I hope I can turn off the audio notifications that are happening in Gingerbread even though I turn off all notifications in the apps.
David Letterman interviews Grace Hopper, who wrote the first compiler
Not exactly. The user setting is inaccurate, as it actually should have said "Do not allow 3rd party cookies, except for those from sites which have a code that indicates they aren't tracking cookies or a code we don't understand."

Instead it says "Third Party Cookies" with choices of Accept, Block, or Prompt.
Reasons for using a BaaS provider in your startup
I have switched to mint Ubuntu 12. It solved the frustration I had with unity and not finding things. I'm not their targeted audiance, I guess.
This is just like Dropbox without cross platform support.
I think I understand what he's saying. Sure, your Dodge Neon may take longer to go 0-60 (i.e. it's okay if Photoshop is slower overall), but there would be something wrong with it if it takes significantly longer just to get in the car (i.e. Photoshop shouldn't take longer to boot up).
i've been very happy with the emacs available in brew.

/usr/local/Cellar/emacs/HEAD (3792 files, 113M)
Installed with: --cocoa, --use-git-head

resulted in a very happy GNU Emacs 24.0.92.1

this also includes the nice full-screen patch. (note, it's not the standard lion full screen app).
I think this is a good read for HN audience. I changed the title because the original title of the blog post doesn't really make justice for it.

Lots of interesting insights in the post. I haven't heard about the paperclip story before, quite stunning if the numbers true: kindergarden kids invent approximately 200 uses for a paper clip, elementary school kids 75, high school students 35, university graduates only 15
This might be a good opportunity to connect with my fellow Edinburgh based developers. If anyone wants to get together or if anyone from further afar needs a local for a source of information, email in HN profile.
Not all expressive generic programming techniques have run time costs. The parent poster mentioned Lisp, in which macros are also usually expanded at compile time. Furthermore, Template Haskell offers type-safe compile time metaprogramming.
I should just point out, contrary to the really true-to-life dialog, that mathematics is NOT a branch of science.

You don't apply the scientific method to establish a law in mathematics, you prove that it is true.

This confusion is one of the four pillars that comprise the Law of Unintended Consequences.
I would have thought the "proposed" and "defunct" clauses would indicate that "standard" was in name only. The term "scare quotes" indicates to the reader that the writer is intending to mislead or persuade. I don't agree that my usage constitutes what is generally accepted as scare quotes, but even if you disagree, the point still stands. IE is stomping its feet complaining that Google isn't supporting a standard that only IE supports (when even the standards body doesn't support it anymore).

Come up with a better standard, then complain when Google breaks it. Otherwise it's just another example of Google being "evil" (that's scare quotes).
No, the choices are: send a bogus P3P header, send a legitimate P3P header, or accept the user's tracking cookie preference.
Live demo: http://jsfiddle.net/NXqe5/
Prem Ganapathy – 0 Money to a $12 Million Fast Food Empire