skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The iPad will further digitize the construction industry in a way analogous to the way it will digitize the restaurant industry by replacing printed menus - those people looking to justify deploying iPads will find such justification and the product will be successful because there is a great deal of pent up demand among an increasingly well educated cadre of construction management professionals.

At the abstract level, construction is an exercise in estimating financial and temporal costs in light of various ongoing relationships and relationships of convenience. The revolutionary application will make playing "what if" a low friction exercise with a high degree of accuracy while accounting for the wide range of comfort levels with technology among people who actually build stuff. The 37signals paradigm comes to mind.

The tough problem is not replacing printed sets of plans, construction takes time and success comes from avoiding the sorts of crises depicted in the article through planning and information management - at the point the crane cannot swing 30kips of concrete into place due to lack of clearance, one is trying to minimize losses not maximize profits.

The focus on the iPad is allowing the team to address the non-critical problem paper plans present for construction professionals traveling between jobsites rather than the tackling the critical path impediments to radical change.

That critical path requires dealing with BIM. On the other hand, BIM is information modeling not 3D virtual construction. 3D is for solving design issues (and impressing lay people).

The representation of that information does not need to be 3D for most construction management purposes - i.e. answering the questions of how many, who can do it, when can they do it, and how much will it cost in terms of budget and schedule.

Except for trivial cases or those involving very close established working relationships, those questions are answered in days, not the length of time one is standing next to a trench with a broken sewer main.

Young guns shooting aggressively from the hip at design professionals during a crisis is not revolutionary, even if an iPad is involved.

AutoCad changed the industry because it lowered the cost of technology into the $10k range - $40 retail boxes of homeowner design software didn't even though they were a profitable product.

The revolutionary product for the construction industry utilizes business intelligence to better manage project timelines and budgets while weighing the impact on working relationships among the various parties in a way which minimizes uncertainty.
A Dad’s Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children
Asking the Ether
We've been working on a similar idea for a few months now, and have some pretty solid data and sophisticated algorithms which are now giving us quite reasonable insights. We support iOS App Store and Android Market. We want to really focus on how to get better at organic distribution within the app stores (e.g. what keywords should I focus on based on my competition and, most importantly, where the search volume is in the app stores).

TechCrunch wrote about it a couple weeks ago and since then we've been on a tear (thousands of signups representing tens of thousands in monthly revenue):
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/aso-app-store-optimization-...

App Store Optimization (ASO) is a big deal today, and is going to be a HUGE deal shortly. The growth of mobile is just too much, too fast for search not to become massively important. You can see Apple bet on this fact with its acquisition of Chomp recently.

Even more broadly, there are too many players in the mobile app ecosystem who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through various paid means, but not enough (virtually none) who are searching for ways to help app marketers get distribution through organic (unpaid) means. Yet this is exactly where the vast majority of downloads come from.

We want to focus on the organic side of app distribution: search, rankings, social/sharing, earned media, web landing pages, etc. All things that help app marketers promote their apps without paying per download. Marketing channels that really scale. It's the SEO/social/viral channels for mobile.

Check out our product at:
http://www.mobiledevhq.com/aso

And always feel free to email me with any questions, ever: iseff@appstorehq.com
Will Corporations Prevent the Singularity?
I am sure the benefits of savings accounts (4% p.a. return on average?) are not sufficient to foster an entire class of people living on them. Most businesses would give returns far higher than this, making the risk-free saving account not a great option.
std::function can store function pointers (and member function pointers) by value, but using a function-like object that defines operator()—or by extension std::bind()—requires dynamic allocation, which can throw. The templated version, on the other hand, always stores its parameter by value. Come to think of it, you could also make the constructor take an rvalue reference (F&&) to use move construction instead of copy construction.
I am also missing the real-time simulation, after seeing Bret Victor's talk and his demo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&feature=playe...
"Finally, there is no easy way to edit text that we enter in the terminal. Going to the end/beginning of the line depending which place it’s closer to the point you want to edit, and then moving your cursor over one character at a time to get to the destination - sounds familiar? I was so frustrated with that, that I made it a habit to enter all the commands in text editor then copy & paste to the terminal window!"

You do know there are emacs and vi modes for bash, right?

http://www.hypexr.org/bash_tutorial.php#emacs
http://www.hypexr.org/bash_tutorial.php#vi

Seriously, the command line is a fantastic programming environment. Learn more bash and your life will be better.
Working at a Startup vs. a Big Company
I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to recruit friends of mine to come work with me at my super early startup. In doing so I’ve had to educate a lot of my friends on what it’s like to be at a startup, and why you might want to join one. This post is a summary of all that advice.

My hope is that I can inspire more people out there to quit their job at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, The Man, and join a startup :).
I have a Microsoft webcam. The kind that is sold with a big label on the USB plug saying INSTALL THE DRIVER BEFORE PLUGGING !

It never worked on my wife's Vista. It worked without installing drivers on Ubuntu. A microsoft hardware failing on a microsoft software. This day I decided Ubuntu was ready for mainstream.

A few hardware makers play foul (I am hating nVidia a lot on the whole Optimus issue) but when it comes to software, I think that it is superior in usability under linux.

It is easier to install new software, new hardware, to share files. On the subject of file sharing, I have seen people on a network using different versions of Windows (XP, Vista and 7 IIRC) they couldn't manage to see each other easily. I had to copy from one to the other using my ubuntu laptop.

Sure, you can find cases where linux will be inferior, but on average, I think it is more than ready for mainstream.
YC states fairly openly that it's looking for the outliers and that it makes its real money from the Dropboxes, AirBnBs etc. If the top incubators only make their money from the top companies in them then it makes me wonder whether if a market has already been tapped (London by Seedcamp, SF and further by YC etc) anyone else can make the returns they need.

Multiple VCs and Angels can exist in the same segment because funding at that stage is polygamous. You get funding from multiple angels or VCs so a number can compete. The ecosystem may not support many but it can support more than one.

If an incubator can only make its money from the top companies though and there is another incubator that already has the top companies in a particular market then do the economics actually work?

YC, Seedcamp, TechStars etc all arguably cover overlapping but different markets but I wonder whether the economics literally stop you dead from doing another incubator in SF or in London.

It strikes me that the only entrance is either to go above or below the incubator or go to a completely different market.
Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh
President of The Author’s Guild about Online Book Stores
1. I mean are willing to accept outside contributions of code if people submit them, and put them in the codebase if they are acceptable.

2. I have the stats, but given that the vast majority of open source projects (Google or otherwise) don't ever grow past a few people, I don't see why it would be relevant? I also don't see why it's relevant whether they work for Google or not. It's not like we require projects follow a different process for Googler committers vs non, so i don't see how it's any different from a project where the committers are all really good friends who work on an OSS project together. We also hire a lot of committers to our open source projects. I'm guessing you want to make a distinction between "corporate open source projects", and "non-corporate open source projects", but in reality, making such a distinction would be a mistake, because the typical differences are in policies and preferences, and they apply equally well to either. IE What matters is the policies the project applies to committers and contributors, not whether they all work for the same company.

3. Again, I have stats, but for the vast majority of open source projects, just because most are willing to accept them, doesn't mean anyone ever contributes. This has nothing to do with Google, of course. If you look at the hundreds of thousands of projects on say, sourceforge, you will find the number that have either at least one not-same-email-domain-as-owner committer or non-trivial LOC written by a not-same-email-domain-as-owner committer else is quite low.

4. This seems to be a governance and social issue, I don't track it formally, as it would be quite difficult to do so.
It would also be wrong for us to try to force a model on folks. We give folks info about what we thinks are best practices, and in fact, free copies of the producing OSS book (Karl used to work with us :P), how they run their projects is generally up to them. We are happy to give them advise when asked, and are happy to consult in general.
>The Software Center... [is] far better than what's available on Windows at the moment

I agree on this, though not everything that can or should be installed on Ubuntu comes through the Software Center or even as a .deb or apt repo. For things outside of this, a .exe file on Windows has the upper hand. .exe (or .msi) is a Windows universal. .deb and .rpm are not Linux universals.

>Installers can block each other on Windows as well. This point just seems like nit-picking.

And it's frustrating. You will notice I said "it has to be better than 'better than Windows'", because "better than Windows" still means "learning something other than Windows".

I use Ubuntu. I like it. I'm excited to see where they're going. I'm one of the seemingly few people who don't condemn Canonical for their tight-fisted control over their system. But this article is flawed, and I think throwing some constructive criticism into the mix would be helpful.
Porting Wordament to Windows 8
Working on it. Or rather "Working on it after I know shell well enough to identify the problems with it."
Kuiperasteroid Playbook Android application
Oh please, don't get me started on installing software on Windows or OS X. Linux package managers are the nuts!
Yeah, there sure aren't....

groan. There are 10s of thousands of very graphically rich games doing well on the Android market.
HTML5 as a gaming platform
You should click on the link to the youtube video. The whole thing is worth it.
Reddit could make a fortune - they just don't try very hard. We'll see what the next CEO does. But if profit was a concern for Conde Nast it wouldn't be hard to deliver it.
People are really not reading my last paragraph, are they?

If Windows rates a 6/10, you don't unseat them by being 7/10 or even 8/10. You need to be better than "better than Windows". Ubuntu is striving to not be "better than Windows" but rather "really good on its own merits, without need for comparison". I like this and I appreciate this, but they're not quite there yet. Two years, maybe.
It probably should have been called Onanistic Ocelot.

Ever tried installing it on a Mac (the best, if not the cheapest desktop hardware available today)?
I actually find this criticism hilarous because I have observed that using a software center is far more easy for novices to do than downloading a file, choosing the correct one, saving it to a folder, finding it and opening it. And sometimes (far less frequently nowadays I admit) manage the software dependencies and download another thing.

This clumsy way is an habit from windows, debian has been light years ahead for a long time. Search your package name, click, click, install. Now App stores are all the rage and people fail to recognize that they have existed since a decade on linux...
Thanks blush :)
Stephen Wolfram has much better data on his life than you do
Firebug is now on GitHub
Wow. This thread is bringing out the ABA trolls in full force.

For those that don't get it:

Guys. Code signing is a good thing. It prevents code being screwed with by a malicious third party or some form of malware before it ends up on your device. Apple's implementation on the generation side leaves a lot to be desired, admittedly, but the concept is sound.

You'd best get used to it now. You're only going to see it more and more as time goes on - and not just on "jailed platforms".
dude seriously if reinventing for the sake of reinventing there is no point, what's wrong with having a irb terminal and do copy and paste over a skype chat?
I feel like Business Insider is doing the same crap. Top 10 XYZ regurgitated 10 ways and split testing headlines to get more pageviews. No quality whatsoever.
See my above post. Not being able to install 2 unrelated packages at once is a legit criticism. The merits of Windows/OSX installation are irrelevant to that point.
>but then I think OS X and Windows are not really ready for the masses

They're not, I agree, but they're there regardless. And it takes something special and completely different to break out of that (see, iPad).
They seem to be managing revenues and their share price just fine.
first congrats to Pete Cashmore and his team... now let's be honest here CNN is buying the traffic ...hate it or love it Mashable is driving a lot of traffic with their "spammy tactics"..CNN don't really care about the quality because they can add their own staff later...However $200M is a huge price tag ...is it as valuable as the huffington post? what's going on here...is it a race for page views with cheap content...news media is dying....
CNN Will Buy Mashable For $200 Million
Interestingly, the original XML specification states that it "SHOULD be used for evil, but MAY be used for good".
What System76 needs to do is become an Amazon partner (as well as their current business). If I could go on Amazon and order a System76 laptop with the backing of Amazon, I would be much happier.
Samsung bests Apple in smartphone marketshare in China
Draw Something: 5 week old app with 20 million downloads
Obligatory rms "Can You Trust Your Computer?": http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html
It's not a binary either/or, though. Something like 6 years ago, the company I was working for went Ubuntu for pretty much everything, including the computers of the call center staff. Since we took care of the installations, all they had to do was know how to open a browser and openoffice, and they were just fine. In other words, Ubuntu was ready for 'prime time'. My wife has been using it for year as well. For her it's ready for 'prime time': I rarely have to fiddle with it. For other users, it's probably not ready. That group continues to shrink, though.
People may make light of this, but as the dzone.com article points out, it's what's known as a Field of Use limitation [1], and it's an actual problem.

The "good" vs "evil" thing is perhaps a red herring, but you can imagine the practical consequences if "free" software developers licensed their work for all purposes except competitors, etc.

The Free Software Foundation raised this issue in the context of royalty-free patent licenses years ago [2], and the Open Source Initiative went so far as to say that if a license allowed for a "Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" then it wasn't an open source license at all [3].

I'm sure D. Crockford didn't do this to be malicious in any way, likely he even did it just to be cute, (maybe he even meant well by it!), but it's also a shame that it's persisted this long, as it sets a bad example for others.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-of-use_limitation
[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html
[3] http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
I agree. I don't see why a normal "surf-the-web, read emails, import/upload pictures" -person couldn't have Linux as their main desktop, especially if it's a user friendly distro like Linux Mint or Ubuntu. The main problem is that people haven't used a Linux desktop before and most are reluctant to try anything new (just notice how everyone curses every time FB changes something about the interface). It helps to have a family member well versed in Linux.
this is pretty cool. it's very close in philosophy to bret victor's last demo at cusec https://vimeo.com/36579366
Hacker Richard Stallman interviewed
X Prize Founder, at SXSW, Seeks Ideas to Fix Education
Well that's a bummer.

RDARs have been filed. Actions will be taken. The mothership will come back up. Haters will still hate code signing and provisioning profiles.
ICANN Falls Short on IANA Contract Requirements
I never understood why they removed the "start" button in the later releases. I was used to using the "win" key so I didn't really care. Only after few weeks I found out that it is possible to open metro using the mouse.
How he's right! I have one soldier with outmaxed stats (only 2 skillpoints missing), and how was it fun! Then day job and family demanded their share... but still farming, YEAHHH!

And yes, all the rest about addcition, token economies etc... he' right, too! ^

What a read!

P.S.: Nicely written, completely in line with the game, I almost pissed myself Chaz... mina!! :-))))) And typing errors, well who cares!
Anyone who knows anything about the way mobile phone distribution works will know that this doesn't matter. Android will capture at least 50% of the mobile market in the coming years, but Apple and the iPhone will capture the majority of the profits.
China's Sina Weibo microblog nears identity deadline
Never heard of such "hidden log file" and I've used Ubuntu since version 7. I've also installed 11.10 on a spare machine a few months ago and I didn't encounter anything like that.
غباء بعض الحكام والأنظمة
And of course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX0f07IT_EU

All the jews are gone. Long live moldova. /s
Can he now be accused of being an accomplice of the evil doing of IBM?

If this evil thing is also illegal, is he putting himself into legal risk? After all, he explicitly agreed on the evil task.
Draw Something (like Pictionary) is in a sweet spot. To begin with it's a game and people play with their friends. They leverage Facebook to find your friends that have the app already. You can still invite people that don't have it yet, but knowing someone already has the app makes it a lot easier to start a game.

They limited some features so they can charge for them. You only get a few colors but can buy more. You get "bombs" that act as hints and can buy more.

One thing they don't do yet is have a way to share your drawing (or animated replay) on Facebook. That would be a big help. I read about a "paint for cats" iPad app (I think the one below) that added a "Share this painting on Facebook" button and it blew up his traffic. Not sure it really applies to illico but it could to a more visual app.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paint-for-cats/id427702410?mt...
"I think part of the problem can be solved if there was some nice hardware that came with Linux preinstalled, with all the driver configuration work already done for you."

Something to think about: How many percent of the non-tech people you know have installed a fresh copy of Windows by themselves? It's always the tech savvy family member who does it
I stopped using Ubuntu-like distros 1 year ago. As I was there, I also dropped the DE, now using a tiling windows. Doing things in a terminal most of the time. It feels right, fast and robust enough. If something is not packaged for linux (free or not, I don't care), then I don't use it. Simple as that. I so reduced the ammount of junky software of half probably and I only install things to play/learn with (haskel ghc, python libraries, postgres, and all I feel to play with).

Then I work on a company windows laptop. It is slow, takes ages to start up, it is full o crappy software some of it updated last time around the year 2001. GUIs that kill productivity as they are not scriptable, so say bye to automation. And the fun part is that this "paradigm" keeps going, so you find the same problems on SAP, data warehouse, etc. Instead of APIs, you have to log into every system you use, choose your option, download in a folder, change data format, copy in a power point slide... and half day is gone.

So, this "Ubuntu is ready because it just works and it is easy", meaning basically that you do all from GUIs, it just does not give the world anything new. If we keep chasing the same old paradigm, I wonder why we bother developing new software then.
Dream Team get credit by Apple as “2012 iOS Jailbreak” for exploiting the kernel
The many, many health benefits of owning a dog
The same thing will happen when a user upgrades from gnome2 to unity, kde3 to 4, gnome2 to gnome shell. i just dont understand the point. should we stop innovation or what?
Appstorm reviews the all new Basecamp
Sorry to be blunt. Will this BS all work? As in like SEO etc or even now ASO.

Honestly no, what does? Make a great app.
you just made my day sir. I never knew vi mode existed for bash.
Developing a simple HTML5 space shooter
What is with the semicolons at the end of each example shell command? I'm only familiar with bash. Is this a new shell's syntax?
Hello? McFly? My tablet doesn’t have a phone number
I wonder how the experience would have went if he hadn't set the desktop up for him initially. For many new users, I imagine they would be starting with Windows 8 from scratch on a new PC or a fresh install, which surely provides a guided tour and lots of hints and tips.

I still agree that excluding the Start button seems like a bad idea. Many novice users don't ever think of using the keyboard for navigation and it's clear from the video that switching back to Metro with the mouse is non-obvious.
One user's review doesn't "prove" anything. All it shows is that Windows 8 fails for that user, at that time.

James Randi's lecture [1] on proving a negative (in this case, "windows 8 doesn't work for users") is highly relevant and poignant.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWJTUAezxAI

EDIT: fixed link formatting
Visual.ly opens it's doors for infographic creation.
Some comments are on the original blog posting: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/03/09/monkeying-with-baye...
A Few cURL Tips for Daily Use
Yandex Opens Offices in Europe
What a rotten shame that an author decided what he did or didn’t want others to do with the fruit of his labours. As you point out, this sets a bad example for others.

Seriously? He’s an adult, he makes his choices, if it means people prefer other, fully free software that doesn’t necessitate lawerly wrangling, so what?

His software isn’t free, and I’m fine with that, he did the work, he decides what we can or cannot do with it.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/the-freedom-to-drink-coffee