skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They can track you via your phone already. The dedicated devices are presumably more reliable for them and were used so they didn't have to get a warrant for phone tracking.
> when does reasonable criticism become hate mongering?

From the point somebody starts to criticize Israel.

Criticizing Israel, at least in the West, has become the modern day equivalent of religious blasphemy. All the usual tactics for protecting religion come into play: whining, playing offended, asserting persecution, while at the same time trying to totally and utterly destroy the critic by false accusations.
> He says he wants and needs the app, it's worth the money but he still didn't pay? That's not a very convincing argument.

Even if you want, need and can, doesn't mean you should.

Personal purchases are almost never about economy but always about psychology. You buy to feel good afterwards. If high price spoils the pleasure for you then you are better off not buying even if you need, want and can afford.

Similarly low price or other circumstances like service or affiliation of the seller can spoil pleasure for some.
Www.gmail.com
Nowadays, emailing is a reputed action that conveys communication service across platforms, thanks to the technological advancements. In fact, marketing, advertising, personal conversations, advertising among others have boomed due to support of cool Gmail features and services available. Below is a summary of some well liked Gmail characteristics.
> Rafe reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored.

The classic idea of how easy it is to criticize someone's work without having a full appreciation of how hard it is to do the work (because he does not do it himself)

It is one thing to write about a startup, another thing to build a product/build a customer base.
16 PInterest-Clones in China (and More's Coming)
If you visit the http://crash-stats.mozilla.org site, you may have noticed the obfuscated Flash symbols starting with F followed by some random number.
Absolutely true. As strange as it may seem, a (terminal) masters degree is almost always less indicative of programming skill than the undergrad degree. I'd expect to be more impressed by a random UWashington Bachelor with no Masters over a UWashington Masters degree holder with a bachelors from somewhere I didn't know.
We are all pretty similar to me. At least, I am.

(I think the general term for this is the typical mind fallacy: we all model others by generalizing from ourselves. It's usually a pretty reasonable way for our minds to work; after all, as humans we are much more alike than we are different.)
Even someone knocking on my door when I work is enough to totally distract me...
If you want feedback, ask a smart friend (or a professional service) to mock interview you and give detailed feedback. That's better than what any official employer could do.
Don't be sorry; you're not derailing anything. Just having a discussion on a specific part of the post. It's not obligatory to address the main point of a post; in fact, sometimes the main point is boring and some minor point is far more interesting.

I find it interesting to read these various clever technical solutions for the same problem, even so mundane as "users don't want to touch the doorknob on the way out". As long as they acknowledge it is a problem and don't get into the moral argument about what ought to be.

Some of the ways in which this issue can be addressed may have analogs in the problem space actually being addressed.
Are there any benchmarks for parallel algorithms done with/without STM? What is the performance hit?
I agree with his point, but I dislike how he talks of it as right versus pragmatic. It should be moralising versus pragmatic.

'Right' means 'true', and the moralising stance he talks about is not the correct way to deal with the problem. It's not 'right', it's blinkered moralising.

Calling such things 'right' muddles the notion of truth. We don't need more of this. Most of the people I come across seem to think there's no such thing as truth because it's all relative, and uses of 'right' like in this article serve to reinforce such beliefs.
Will be interesting to see if and when we'll see another Rails fork.
Good point. Considering that the phone companies have a long history of secretly sharing foreign call data with the NSA, and a recent history of secretly sharing domestic call data as well, we can expect more of the same.

Rather than fighting this Supreme Court Ruling, maybe law enforcement will instead push for real-time access to GPS data from the carriers.
doesn't change what you're saying, but "totally" is an adverb
Try again next year. Consider the math (not exactly how it works, but you'll get the idea):

A job offer depends on 5 flawlessly decided "hire" votes. A mere 5% of interviews are flawed due to interviewer weaknesses (poor training, bad attitude, bad day) or miscommunications. What are the chances that a desirable candidate gets an incorrectly decided "no-offer" result?
I think if you'll look back through the thread, I've made two brief comments demonstrating how your assertions that we should all know about prorated battery warranties are faulty. Others have made similar comments. This is neither ranting nor dumb.

If you don't want to be challenged on your assertions, you should probably find somewhere other than HN to make them. It's kind of what we do here.
I studied this a little.

Pepsi tastes better than Coke on a single sip because it's sweeter, but the preference among consumers gets murkier if you have to drink a whole can of the stuff. And even moreso if you want to have two cans.

Sweeter == better to have a taste. Not necessarily to have larger quantities though.
I have seen a lot of people who think they have awesome ideas for a startup, but they do not know how to code. The lack of coding skills actually does not let them see the actual complexity and use of their idea and hence it's feasibility.

Also having coding skills, really gives you the power to innovate, its quite common that the idea can change drastically over the course of development, and that happens only because when you start coding you can see the merits and demerits of your ideas. You understand where you can improve and what you drop.
> $24.90 per computer, when the software is literally useless without two computers, should be $50 per pair + $24.90 for 3rd, 4th, etc.

Uhm, but the price is just that as you said: 2 x $24.90 = $49.80 which makes around $50 per pair.

The decision to sell individual licenses is made because it makes it easier to offer add-on licenses which you can conviniently add later at any time. I agree though, that we may need to improve how to communicate it.
The question is: what way do most people go in case of an emergency and how can we make that way the easiest?

If the door of a bathroom would open to the outside, the door would block the path (the hallway) people would take in case of an emergency. It would block more people than it would help escape the bathroom. The same with the doors of offices, etc. No one needs to enter a bathroom in case of an emergency (well, a different kind of emergency...), so it doesn't matter if it may blocked to the inside. So doors to closed rooms adjacent to a hallway open to the inside, while doors in the emergency path of the entire stream of people open to the outside.

Of course, there are situations where emergency paths cross and neither option is ideal. However, for most cases, the rule is pretty clear and obvious.
Those examples of elastic pricing are for consumer purchases (e.g. games).

The app in question is free for home use; but paid for corporate. Corporate customers have an unbelievably different concept of "expensive" from you and me.

I experimented with different prices for a corporate product, and found charging too little or too much reduced profits. (Sadly, this experiment seriously irritated at least one developer. Who knows, maybe a cheaper price would have lead to greater volume in the long-term.)
I would love to price by customer (price discrimination), so corporates pay what suits them, and individual developers/small businesses pay what's reasonable for them.
The standard approach is to have extra features in the "Enterprise" version, but I haven't found a way to make this work for me. Anyway... I'd rather everyone enjoy all features; not have version-config complexity; and get feedback/bug reports from everyone.

{rant: "Enterprise customers are an unbelievable pain. They take weeks to answer the simplest questions, they misunderstand, miscommunicate, make unfathomable mistakes, they have to go through Legal, Licensing, Management. And they tend to be discourteous, seemingly without realizing it. Their money - and they will spend more than you could realistically imagine - isn't worth it."}
We doubt it because it is a niche market, not a mass market.

Additionally, as said in the article, the support load increases and the "quality" of support inquiries is affected by the app price.
For me, I really enjoy living alone (less/zero distraction, more privacy). Admittedly, my sleep cycle is weird and the kind of meals I have may not be all that healthy. But I do exercise regularly to keep fit. Hopefully, I'd enjoy a better lifestyle when I finally settle down.
Natural evolution is just super lazy - it does just enough to get by, and won't lift a finger for anything else...
Business plan writer
Essays generally feted from solid business plan writer perfectly aided me to routinely utilize notably pretentious conclusions shortly!
Downvoted you both. Both attitudes are neither arrogant nor absurd. They just stem from different expectations and beliefs. These kind of statements aren't going to convince anyone. Explain why they are wrong. 'Being arrogant' is not an explanation: it's an accusation, that'll immediately get the other on the defensive.
Bit rot is a feature. It allows genes that don't impact survival to attain greater diversity within the population so that, if the environment changes and the gene becomes relevant, some part of the population may be better able to adapt.
This sounds like quite an odd way to raise money, and I too would be much more hesitant to giving money to this situation rather than straight out to a charity. I do not see what helping someone get fit has to do with curing cancer. I think you need to take that into consideration when judging someones donation.
Thinking the unthinkable. The seed of creativity.
Please re-read what I wrote and clarify that you read what you think you read.

The nature of the opinions I voiced here are pretty much Chomskian in nature. If you're picking a fight with that spectrum of opinion with respect to Israel and Palestine as being to pro-Israeli, then I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you actually just misinterpreted what I said. Easy enough to do as it is an emotionally volatile subject.

I have some pretty strong emotional reactions to the existence of an apartheid state. But for real peace to happen everyone will have to set aside personal and historical feelings (or rabid crazy born again send me your money so that Armageddon may come craziness) and come up with a compromise where no one is happy, everybody is still breathing, and with a full belly from supper to boot. A moving apartheid wall of course has to go, the 1967 borders form a (sans US) international consensus, and efforts to create a mutually beneficial economic interdependency have to occur. I really believe that Israel has been moving in the wrong direction. I also believe that Israel's utility to American interests will also slowly begin to wane over time and Israel should have a long term dove-not-hawk plan to survive past their usefulness.

You might not agree with how I presented it. But I think it's important to talk about Palestine and Israel whenever possible and the way the conversation was going wasn't productive for what this forum is from a technological, business or political view. I tried to shift it to a direction where it could be honest & productive and not get down-voted out of existence from rabidness.

I'm upvoting your comment because it does look like you have both parties best interests in mind as well.

And I'm going to try to put this into a positive note:

This is also might be completely naive on my part. But the thought of one city, Jerusalem, being the capital of two different countries sounds like it should be the basis for peace and not the shitstorm that people make it out to be.

Both sides have to meet and both say, "This is fucked up. Let's fix it. Real prosperity and security is mutual prosperity and security."

I frankly would love to be able to fly to Israel, do a contract, fly to Iran, do a contract, fly to Palestine, do a contract, fly to Sweden, so on and so forth. Free mobility of labour AND free mobility of capital would require new labels. It wouldn't be your standard messed up crony big-C Capitalism of today and it wouldn't be socialism either.
A char might always be one byte but one byte isn't necessarily 8 bits.

I'm often puzzled by the fact that the size of basic datatypes isn't platform independent.

If I need to count to x I, more often than not, need to count to x on all platforms. Yet for some reason that is something that varies on platform.

Yes, there are of course times when this is useful but that should be the exception (right?). And apparently the industry is on my side on this by making the situation even worse and saying that an integer on a 64 bit x86-machine should be 4 bytes. Now the sizes of the datatypes not only vary by platform but they also have nothing to do with the underlying hardware architecture either. It's just some arbitrary number that is different on platforms just for the sake of giving you a headache. Thanks?

Of course a large datatype, x, might incur a severe performance penalty on platform y but just changing the size of x behind my back is not constructive.
The question is whether the patches would be accepted. There are still people in charge. When they make a choice to go route A and you say: I have a great patch to make route B work, they are not going to take it. Secondly, if you disagree with an architectural decision, you can't be expected to make the chosen architecture work. Especially not if your patch may be rejected anyway.

The number of patches that get rejected is staggering. Practice shows that 'patches welcome' is just not true.
I was thinking about this a lot of times. There are many companies that still have more traditional approach to software development where software development process is considered as "second order citizen" in the process of bringing value to the users. Business oriented people in such companies are completely not aware how abilities of software enable or disable some value to be brought to the users and especially not aware how to optimize environment for better production of software in order to bring this value most efficiently.

Deciding deliberately not to learn to code (or at least to develop good understanding of software development process) in environment where software is expected to be the crucial part of the business is deciding to stay blind for the (most) important part of your business. From my point of view that is doomed to fail unless you are aware of that and deliberately take measures to prevent failure.

Someone would say that the most important is to bring the value to the users, which is not false at the end. What I saw is that business people too often underestimate how much software that brings value is part of the value itself and how it as well puts constraints on how value is brought to users.

Motivated by discussions with my peers regarding this topic I wrote small blog post on that some weeks ago. http://ivanjovanovic.com/2012/02/11/nobody-cares-about-your-...
I too have found this, and thought it was very weird. I get a lot of emails from people using my apps (I put a highly visible email button for people to get in contact with me with problems of suggestions), and welcome not getting as many emails with the more expensive version.
Personally, I haven't tracked my time as I find it very frustrating to be "clocking" every step. That said, I've seen quite a few people using https://www.rescuetime.com/ on daily basis; supposedly it helps.
Weight loss through Realistic Approach and Motivational Workout
There still is. It is the default way to sync Zune HDs and WP7 devices.
I don't think page was saying that $10 is a generous donation, just that it's >$0. There are a lot of people who don't give a lot to charity, or are uncomfortable putting $$ amounts on relationships/friendships/etc.
I just released my Hacker News reader app on the Windows Phone marketplace, and saw your post while I was testing mine. Why are so many people developing Hacker News app all of a sudden?
Olfactory and gustatory analysis of flavors are intricately linked; losing smell severely diminishes one's ability to discriminate between subtly different aromas. Indeed, smell generally dominates here. So I don't think that's what happened.
What's the point of the story? Don't get it. Do you agree with Oliver's statement, or do you think people should have talked more about sudoku solvers?
I find it interesting that both the Israeli and Palestinian drinks differ from the American version.

My American friends always preferred the Palestinian one, which lead me to believe I the Palestinian version was using the American concentrate, and the Israeli version an Israeli-adapted one.

And as I'm already discussing the topic of Israeli Coca-Cola, there's a famous story (though citation needed, so take with a grain of salt, &c) that the highly guarded secret formula was disclosed to Rabbi Moshe Yehuda Leib Landa, so he could certify the drink as Kosher. After the Rabbi's death, his son continues to certify the drink as Kosher, but wasn't disclosed the recipe: he took his father's word for it being Kosher (a highly unorthodx [pun not intended] practice)
That's not true xmlhttprequest should support all methods but there are some quirks eg see http://www.mnot.net/javascript/xmlhttprequest/ to test though that does not cover PATCH.
1) The starting point is always the observation of anomalies in an existing system or pattern. 2) You reason on those anomalies in your head, alone. 3) You come up with a possible response, alone. 4) You visualize in your head how this response would actually works. This should be practiced until you see it working smoothly from beginning to end. You do this alone. 5) Finally you set to work in order to bring this response into our physical world. Either alone or in a group-work
Ask HN: How to backup database?
I've been looking to deploy my first rails app. I've decided to go with dedicated server, and move to cloud, if it grows large.

Since, the application will host user data, I want to be safe on hard disk crashes, Especially I want to backup databases.

Is it okey to have db on the same machine, or should I go for services like amazon rds for safety?

In case of backups, What solutions work well, to backup databases offsite?
NBA Turns To Twitter
People will take any opportunity to talk about what they know. Software engineers are like athletes, they need their ego's stroked more often than they should. And if no else will do it, well they might as well do it themselves. At least peacocks are more honest and upfront when they do it.

Speaking of which, who want to talk about incredibly fast methods of protein folding, just re- this comment... kiddin'. Please don't.
I feel like I would have read this article really differently if the headline didn't have the moralizing tone that Marco is talking about: http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic

The article itself doesn't really take that kind of position, it's just a linkbaity title, but gearing up for some moralizing annoyed me.

And it made me read the whole thing, so I guess the joke's on me and I should stop moralizing.
I found this is an attractive and well thought-out resource for understanding vim motions: http://naleid.com/blog/2010/10/04/vim-movement-shortcuts-wal....
OT: I just noticed the hover effect on results seems to happen via javascript (e.g. an "highlight" class is applied) rather than ":hover".
Is the reason for this the fact that results can be navigated via keyboard, or something else?
Yes clearly that is what the article author is suggesting. However, this core concept, that humans should / will start genetically engineering ourselves, needs much more discussion and thought before being charged ahead into. Because remember, its not so easy to unshit the bed once genetic material is released into the world. For instance, farmed fish that are cloned as well as gmo corn have been shown to reproduce with native species, forever changing the population. The ethics of doing such a thing are highly suspect, much less involving humans. There should be a much more mature discussion prior to any such serious efforts to monkey with the human genome, particularly on a wide scale.
It's very likely that you know someone who's vehicle is being tracked by the FBI this year.

You're assuming that the rate is evenly distributed. I think it's very likely that it isn't; if you're involved in espionage or organized crime, you probably know several people who were being tracked by the FBI.

Based on your "more than 3256" people you know by name and the (bogus) equidistribution hypothesis, you should also know 1 or 2 victims of violent crime and about 10 victims of property crime each year, and at some point in your life you should know a homicide victim.
There's an interesting ethical question here. If you charge more for your app, you may make the same amount of money and save on support costs, but you're also denying less wealthy people access to a good tool. It's much like, for instance, the clothing business. Some low-end luxury brands sell clothing of comparable quality to what mass-market brands offer, but mark up the price. This means that only wealthy people can afford the clothing. While you could just as well sell it for less with possibly similar profit margins.

Do you think it's ethical to exclude lower-income consumers just because it's more convenient for you? If you really believe in what you're doing, wouldn't you want it to be accessible to as many people as possible?
I find it a little odd that he spent so much time haggling over a $50 tool that is obviously providing a lot of value to him.

The response from the vendor (about it being hard to make money to pay his developers when selling a fairly niche tool) resonates with me, though. I built a fairly specific-use tool on the side last year and started selling it on the Mac App Store. I found that prices weren't very elastic, and I had to drop the price down to $2 to sell very many copies.

Even then, people think I'm some big company selling this software, when the revenue I generate from it isn't nearly enough to pay my bills, much less hire others to work on it. Even last year when I spent a while in the top 5 in dev tools, I wasn't netting more than $25 per day.

Ultimately, I think the app store concept is really cool and will be a net positive in the long run, but I wonder how many useful tools will fall through the cracks because buyers have been conditioned to think that a $5 app is "expensive", even though it isn't nearly enough to support some tools.
You can see R movies as long as there are no Mormons in your class. Poor Mormons... I bet none of their friends called them for at least a month after the big movie-watching week at the end of each school year.
> For instance, he said, agency is now “wrestling” with the legality of whether agents can lift up the lid of a trash can without committing trespass.

Um, I thought it was pretty well-established that you cannot do this? Is the FBI just stupid?