skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that Android OEMs deserve some apology, if anything so that folks can better understand the realities of the situation. People want updates like Apple provides with iPhones, but given how vastly different the business structures are in the Androidverse, that may not be realistic.

Apple provides updates to old phones because it has a strong financial incentive to do so: They don't just sell phones, they also operate an app marketplace for those phones, and they get a cut of the sale price of every app sold through that marketplace. So they want to keep all their users buying apps, even the ones with old phones. Part of doing that is giving existing users a reason to stay checked-in - and pushing new features to users of old phones through OS updates allows them to do that. They also want to have as much "awesomeness" in the app store as they can get, and one way they can facilitate that is by minimizing the hurdles that might prevent developers from using all the latest and greatest features in their APIs. On that front, the biggest hurdle imaginable would be if only a minority of the platform's users had the ability to run apps that depend on the latest API. So Apple really, really wants to keep old iPhones up to date as long as they can, not out of some sense of corporate altruism, but because doing this maximizes app store profits for them.

On Android, on the other hand, there is absolutely none of that. The only time Android OEMs see any money is when you buy a new phone. They don't care if you can run ICS+-only apps, because they don't see money from the app store. They don't care if you keep buying new apps, because they don't see any money from the app store. They don't even particularly care if you prematurely decide your phone is janky and outdated and you need a new one on account of no OS updates, because. . . oh wait, they do care there. They want that to happen, because the only time they see money is when your current phone gets tossed in the dustbin.

Meanwhile, as the article points out, providing updates to old phones is quite an expensive process. Especially if you're doing anything beyond pushing patches.

So. . . given that the incentive structure built into the Androidverse serves to heavily disincentivize OEMs from providing iPhone-style support, the question remains: Why on earth, then, should they?
I think the real headline should actually say "It's time to stop submitting articles from Extreme Tech."

Their headlines never say the true intent of their article, and their article never comes to the conclusion that has been set up through the arguments. There is extreme bias and non sequiturs riddling the entire site.

It's a difficult read because of the logic errors, and everytime an article is posted from Extreme Tech, it seems everyone comes away with a different opinion of what was really meant. This isn't creative literature class. This is not a good way to run a website.
Is the "something using Markdown" Dustin's blogging engine?

Anyways, it's great to see this come from concept (Dribble) to a detailed mark/brand. What other languages have their own mark?
Ask HN: How many scheduled tasks/jobs (cron-like) your project have?
How many scheduled tasks/jobs (cron-like) your project have ?
I'm just curious to know, which is the project with more scheduled jobs and how to manage so many.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the idea of acquihire preclude the possibility of single founders? Companies want to buy whole teams who presumably can build a product, not just single founders. Again, I could be wrong but from what I've seen the deal is to form a nucleus of founders for the purpose of extracting investment from investors or selling the whole team to a big corp. If this is the case, you want to have to strongest nucleus you can put together.

As far as experience level... In my experience with startups, there is a need to have people fill spots as investors are paraded through, and in this case, the younger the better. I say this kind of tongue-in-cheek, but if you enroll in some math classes and play into the prodigy role you will be doing yourself a service if you want to go this route.

If you're a single founder focused on building a product, why not build the product then use that a nucleus to build a team. I get the impression that incubators are for people who want to build a team and then build a product.
Crisis Communications After Greg Smith's Goldman Letter
If you dress differently because of what other people think then perhaps you're not the rebel hacker you think you are ;) that includes not wearing a suit if you're comfortably in one.
Personally I don't get get why not more people wear suits, you have lots of pockets for your gear, they make dressing well easy (as long as your suits fit you) and effortless. Just go suit and a nice t-shirt to dress semi-casual, so suit up! :)
I see that nedit (a text editor that usually runs on X11) and Gnu Go have been ported to Minix 3.

Do any non-toy web browsers run on Minix 3?
You don't want to test external APIs. You probably do want to test how your application behaves in response to using the APIs. One way is to mock the API calls with canned responses. Another way is to use a tool like VCR (https://github.com/myronmarston/vcr) to record and playback API interactions.
I got two solicitations yesterday to place infographics on some sites I own. Here's the pitch:

+++++++++++++++++

I came across __________ while searching for resources around education and quality and was wondering if this is the correct contact in regards to the content on the site. My team just created a graphic on these topics, would you be interested in taking a look? I'd appreciate any feedback.

Thanks in advance.

+++++++++++++++++

My site ranks highly for several keywords related to online education, which is why I got this pitch. The other pitch came from someone who saw that I once posted a gag infographic on another site.
JS faster replacement for elem.innerHTML
"I don't always test my code, but when I do, I test it live."

I wish I wrote tests more. Maybe I'm to impatient. :(
I agree that going public hurts companies but not because the partners/founders can cash out. At least in the tech world once a company reaches a certain size, it seems as though founders can liquidate a large portion of their stock pre-IPO; Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need to worry about Facebook's IPO in order to get rich. Rather, I feel that having a somewhat-arbitrary, short-term indicator in the form of stock price is what hurts public companies and their culture much more than the loss of its leaders.
That makes sense.

I realized just now that I sounded very critical of Posterous. I also hope they do very well.

Posterous' "badness" is more of a matter of corporate moral personality. As a company develops, its leaders will have opportunities to make decisions which show their opinions on things. It doesn't surprise me when their future decisions also reflect those opinions.

For a high-profile example: Remember when Google decided it was going to start censoring search results in China? At the time, it was huge, extremely surprising news. However, it also showed a change in corporate opinion. Given subsequent developments, you can "see" the change in corporate decisions.
No, I do not advocate just unlocked bootloaders, but freed operating systems.

The overhead of these phone manufactures comes from their horrible customizations and differentiation practices. I find the idea of paying $10 for the privilege of updating the OS just so I can get the new version of Sense, or TouchWiz, or MotoBlur, or whatever Sony runs now repugnant. I think this idea pushes the market in the wrong direction.

The fact that volunteers create functional ICS installations shows that it doesn't take time or money to get ICS itself running. The vendors themselves add cost by leaving their taint on every interaction I have on the phone.

And the article itself says "OEMs that want to engage in paid updates should have a bootloader unlock solution for users that want to update on their own." with no reasoning at all besides it would make the writer feel warm and fuzzy.
No, 20% doesn't require any approval. Your manager can ask you to set it aside during crunch time (one quarter max) and you might eventually get dinged if you're doing something wildly irrelevant. 20% time is alive and well and not at all "deprecated".
Square Competitor? Cashier Live Launches POS App For iPhone
I, for once, would like to know how he managed to make that kind of income on a side-project. Perhaps up to some extent it can be applied to less "criminal" (if his was criminal) project.
All that energy, inevitably generated from coal, used to power the deleters! Hmm....
When I was working at a mid-tier bank I wrote software responsible for pricing over a trillion dollars of transactions while in a vp-level position
Garbage collection is throwing away stuff that can't be reached anymore. What you're doing is cache eviction; dereferencing stuff you probably don't need so it becomes garbage and won't occupy memory for long.

Although that is possibly a battle of definitons.
A slight mod from Nicola Armellini's

http://i.imgur.com/pQzzk.png

Thought it would look better like a button or badge.
> He uses circles with dots in the middle to represent the size. So is the value being plotted proportional to the radius of these circles or the area? Not clear

It's worse than that. Is the size of the circle proportional to the number of incidents, or to the density of incidents? Large circles look like they should the most 'dangerous', but that would imply a high density, which would imply a small circle.

The entire visual representation serves no purpose except to contradict the data it presents.
So what is the offence he committed in the UK?
The challenge really is setting these things up from an early stage. I don't think as a founder at a company that has not yet been funded you have the luxury (time, brain power, etc.) of thinking about these things, you're so busy trying to get the company off the ground that everything else is secondary. Even more so once you get funded, because all of a sudden it's not just you pushing yourself, it's a group of investors that are all of a sudden breathing down your neck (not to say all are like that or that it's a bad thing...) Especially if it's the first company you've founded and you're stumbling along, the learning curve is exponential...
Thanks, Fabian, I really appreciate it
Yes, this is pretty much it. I think it's more a habits thing than anything and I will have to force myself (at some point) to jump ship completely unless I see some improvement from FF. I understand Firebug, I just need to be able to fully map those onto Chrome, so need to spend a few hours re-learning.

Only other thing I need/want is the FireQuery plugin to help with any jQuery development.
That's true, but that page says nothing about desktop statistics and how they compare to server statistics.
You probably just don't know how to test properly yet. Testing should ultimately give you more time and make your life easier. If it's making it harder or making you take longer (unless it's a really trivial task), it's not being done correctly (yet).
If it's maketshare I assume the graph is in % and it could mean that there is a lot more servers being added and not a decline in installs of RHEL. I can see that with Amazon EC2 instances and other cloud platform Ubuntu would be really popular on those. Buying a RedHat license for you VPS instances might not be worth it but then CentOS vs Ubuntu would be more interesting there.
This sounds ineffective. To most consumers, a software update is an annoyance whose benefits are often hazy. Look how hard they procrastinate free updates. So expecting money for an update to a device that's often replaced within a year or two is a non-starter.

The most effective thing Google can realistically do is ship desirable Motorola phones that get updated to the latest Android version the day of release.
This is probably quite an excellent idea. We ran our startup for three months from central mexico. It was great in every way that matters. The cost of living was really cheap. The neighborhood was really a lot safer than the ones in america. Nobody ripped us off or tried to or overcharged us. Everyone was pretty nice. Only downside was the internet sucked where we were staying but that could be rectified I'm sure.

IF there's an airport, might even be close enough for people to come down in their gulf streams for board meetings. (I don't give a damn about being close to silicon valley, but do like the idea of working near there startups.)
I've seen code in productions apps with comments along the lines of "this isn't optimal, but it's easier to test". Every time I do, I die a little inside.

Unit tests are THE most overrated buzzword of the last 10 years.
New iPad Photos, Retina Screenshots Hit the Web
Sure, but "All critical, most important, and lots of trivial" wasn't an option.
I work in science. We agree that testing would be beneficial, but nobody codes well enough to actually get it done.

To all language designers, there is a HUGE space for a better scientific language. Make it easy for Matlab users to understand, but include better encapsulation and library support. Tie in testing and proving from the core.
I like many of these much more than the submitted version in the original article.

I wonder though, shouldn't any serious effort to do this try to get Gruber on board? He seems to have some design sense and declaring "this is the markdown logo" without his approval just seems a bit.. disrespectful?
Why Did Georgetown University Specifically Insult Me?
Indeed. Google is a free service and Google Apps is a paid service, but I wouldn't expect significantly more longevity from the latter just because I'm paying them $x a year than I would from the loss-leader service.
The article is all about the hominem. He says he left because of how he felt. It's entirely appropriate to ask if there might be other feelings involved.

As another reply points out, he didn't manage that much money. Goldman had clients who managed that much money, and he apparently handled equity derivatives for those clients.

I once worked at a company that worked on an internal web app for one of the largest advertisers in the world, but that doesn't mean I "ran advertising for clients with a multi-billion dollar marketing spend."

To be clear, I can sympathize with someone who used to be in the business of working as an agent for his clients, and who is now in the business of executing the same transactions but taking the opposite side and then hedging his risk. I just don't think moral outrage is the right response to a change in the macro situation. One could argue that while financial markets got more sophisticated, Goldman Sachs coincidentally got evil, but I think it's more likely that markets evolved, Goldman evolved with them, he didn't evolve with Goldman, and he took it personally.
You will find that even though GCC spends 80% in the optimizing stage (I won't bother to refute your claim), impact of this is negligible in the grand scheme of things. The build is slow is because it scales O(n^2) with the number of files, and because there are many more steps involved in building a product, not because the compiler is slow (although GCC is).

Go is designed to handle dependencies between objects in such a way so that it scales O(n).

The Solaris/OpenSolaris/illumos build builds with two compilers at the same time. The Sun/Oracle proprietary compiler that generates better code, and GCC. GCC generated binaries are not usually used, instead GCC is used a shadow compiler to catch potentially not portable statements.

You will find that if you disable GCC and build with only one compiler, build time decreases by 2%, not 50% as you might have expected.
Personally I was aiming to get them interested in writing simple Python programs, perhaps with PyGame so they can quickly get some graphics on the screen (text console output doesn't have a lot of appeal I'm afraid..).

I know some (adult) people who are itching to get into (video) game design. The first thing I always tell them is "Learn to program. Start with Python." Then I point them to PyGame to let them get started building the kinds of programs they set out to build, quickly.

This despite Scheme being my favorite programming language, and the one I "think" in. But Python really is the micro BASIC of the 21st century. It's the best "type commands at it and see what happens" language for beginners. Not to diminish its obvious appeal to professionals, of course.
Faux G: New "4G" indicator on iPhone 4S is the tip of a standards iceberg
This is an interesting analogy, yet laughably impractical and wrong.

Paid business models do not guarantee success. If they did, Posterous would have charged. It seems land is so cheap, landlords have concluded the best possible chance to find a business model is to be a free landlord. That is a great world for tenants since they don't have to pay rent, and it's a tough world for landlords since they have to maintain beautiful buildings with donation boxes and ad banners.

Given the lack of tenant laws (imagine if there were tenant laws...) paying rent is no guarantee of anything. You can be evicted, abused, moved around, neglected, or anything else without warning or compensation. That's a good thing, which demonstrates how strained and poor this analogy is.

Good luck finding quality, innovative, paid services to match Facebook, Twitter, and Posterous. Let us know how that goes. You'll have some luck, but I'm not sure your chances are much better. I call bullshit.
Software Bugs
HTML5 Slides with reStructuredText and Sphinx
I never understand people who say Firefox is as fast as Chrome. It's nowhere close, and can't be.

My normal use case is to open 15 tabs, all at once, from a single page (e.g. Hacker News homepage).

Firefox is single-threaded, as far as I know, and the whole interface freezes while it does the heavy lifting in loading the contents for each new tab. It takes me 30 seconds total of waiting 2-3 seconds for each tab to load, just so I can scroll/click on a new link.

Whereas with Chrome, I just breeze through clicking on all the links, it takes 5 seconds total, and every other tab starts loading on separate threads. I can switch to the loaded ones instantly.

This has nothing to do with extensions, and everything to do with the fact that Chrome has a separate UI thread and separate threads per-tab.

Please correct me if anything I'm saying is wrong...
For future reference if you have issues booting a vm you can add:

config.vm.boot_mode = :gui

to your Vagrantfile to have Virtual Box boot into a window instead of headless.
We’re creating the future, now. What it looks like will be down to us.
Part of that is building creditability. If he had said nothing about himself, how should you believe him?

But as the ancients implied, one who testifies of themself is not trustworthy. :-/
Consider striking the "exhibit for the portfolio" bit.
2012 Beats Headphones By Dre
cheap price for all 2012 Beats Headphones By Dre at here
Good logos don't beat you over the head with what they mean. The original version is pretty amateur in that respect IMO, it is almost the first thing anybody would come up with.

Having a bit of delight and 'aha!' in a logo is a good thing.
how do you deal with threaded conversations and tracking the 1 liner replies to those mails?

I only save that last copy in the same .txt file. I email it to myself, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, X-Delete.
Defining What "Done" Means
There are three things in life that make people act funny: drugs, women (or men, you get the point), and money. They don't act rationally or human, and you should be prepared.

that being said, wow.
Huh? You didn't see those links on the left? You missed those emails that told you Perf is completed and please go in and check your reviews?
I think this is a great idea.

I personally don't have one all consuming idea that I'd choose to apply with and that has stopped me applying in the past.

I have many ideas, all of equal interest & potential, each compliments a different side to my personality/experience.

The idea of running these ideas past the YC team for their input would be amazing!

I could imagine that a team with a single-minded focus on one idea would have more difficulty changing aim if it were suggested they pivot.

I think the 'no-idea-yet' teams that get chosen will be steered well by the YC team. They'll have a much more objective view on their business and will follow head not heart.

I'm also glad they'll consider single founders :)
I fail to see why I was down-voted for this.

"I've learned that 5% of a business is the idea, 15% is the product, and 80% is the selling. The number one reason companies fail is because they do not know how to sell? Isn't it better to spend more time at "Sellathons" learning how to sell - and less time at Hackathons?"

There is absolutely nothing in here about a newsletter. I feel it's a valid question.
I think the copy at my parents' house is about 1968. I remember when I was young and we got it. I guess I'll have to duke it out with my sister for who gets it!
Some of those banks do very well, and it wouldn't be terrible for their PR to hire him.

Possible, but unlikely.

Smith must have known he'd be attacked personally (as in that ad hominem piece you posted), and it's unlikely another bank would want to touch him, regardless of their true feelings towards Goldman.

Do you know anyone who pays people for saying stuff like this on random message boards?

Sure: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pku22/iama_former_koch...

I tend to say this kind of thing because I think it's true, and because I'm unimpressed with the quality of opposing arguments and would like someone to refute me.

I'll give you credit for the latter (if it's true), but not the former.
Firefox is dead to me, replaced it with Chrome. On a relatively new iMac I get the spinning rainbow all the time, scrolling is jittery, everything takes ages. This is even with just 2-3 tabs open. Scandalous Firefox, you were great a couple years ago.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988, Section 107, (2A), which establishes provisions for criminal infringement.
I think this is a completely inverted misinterpretation of Tesla's recent history.

1. For better or for worse, Martin Eberhard was ousted by Elon Musk and the Tesla board in a power play, not the other way around.

2. The slander suit was long afterwards and has little to do with power plays at all.
The tiny little detail that drives me nuts is that, in Chrome, to disable a CSS rule, the checkbox is on the right side of the rule, not the left.

The problem is that I can't visually tell which checkboxes match which rules, because they're too far away. Even worse, the checkboxes only show up on hover, and disappear when you hover just one pixel to the right of them, because the hover area is set wrong. (At least on OSX.)

It's just all the little details the Firebug gets right, and Chrome doesn't seem to, but day after day, they add up.
I achieved something similar in bash, in a terminal-agnostic way a while back. I have this script saved at ~/cdf.scpt : https://gist.github.com/2037421

Then my .bash_profile contains the line:

alias cdf='cd "`osascript ~/cdf.scpt`"'

Now if I type "cdf" in a terminal window, it will automatically cd to the directory of the front-most Finder window.
What you've alluded to is actually how people will interact with nearly all services in the future, through a proxy. Great effort is taken by social media sites to make it difficult to migrate off. But what they, and their investors, don't want you to know is that eventually these services will be reduced to API's that your proxy (an intelligent agent) communicates with.

Proxies already exist for linking your Twitter and Facebook feeds, and this trend is going to continue and possibly one day even replace the WWW we use today.
Ideas are worthless (dispelling the myth of the big idea)
Firefox 11 released with Style Editor and 3D DOM viewer