skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had some whoppers in Erlang, where "garbage generated" ends up costing N-squared, even though the operations were just N. In fact, the garbage collection footprint turns out to be one of the most significant markers for functional performance in my experience. Erlang's per-process heaps help here, because each heap can typically be tiny, but it's still something that needs to be managed as closely as, say, stale pointers in C++.
Nice, quality imagery on the demo pages. And looks like they have a pretty full feature set already available.

But the title is rather telling - do they make a compelling argument why I want Google Hangouts without Google? Do you hate using existing GMail contacts without having to grant complete access to a 3rd party site? Do you often invite people from Facebook or AOL to your business meetings?

Seems they should ditch the "hangout" with coworkers (a la the defunct SocialEyes), and focus on "meetings". But then Google isn't their foe at all - it's Cisco.

Feels a little me too with the "Hangout" and "Telepresence" allusions, but no convincing reason why I should use this product. Will check back in, but it's a tough gig getting people to use browser-based conferencing (so many little hassles both tech and cultural), and corporate is pretty strongly wed to WebEx/TeamViewer/GoToMeeting.
I didn't have to think twice about backing this project. I can't wait to be able to view some statistics (like daily page views) from a website on my wrist. This will help satisfy my information addiction!
Well it is certainly true that there are countries in europe that have even more renewable energy than we have.

The other countries in europe that have more renewables than we have are mostly smaller countries that don't have the population or industrial output that germany has.

The numbers in the article you cite are also terribly outdated. Some more up to date numbers can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#St...

As you can see there germany has made BIG advances in the amount of renewable energy produced, as well as its overall share of energy consumed.

My point was:
* Germany was 20years ago pretty conservative about energy, relying mainly on coal, gas and nuclear.

Then the green party came into the political landscape and now
* We are on the forefront of converting our highly industrous economy completely to renewable energies. No other country in europe has increased the amount of renewabled energy produced by 5x in the last 10 years alone. At this rate, we will be overtaking even the smaller countries that may have more renewables than we have now.
* We are the only country of this size and economic gravitas that is fully committed to quiting nuclear.
* We have very strict environmental protection laws, with environmental protection even enshrined in the national constitution , more so than in other industrous european countries (yes there's always switzerland or other small countries that are nominally "better" at this but you can not compare their impact or structure with large countries such as germany) See also: http://www.goethe.de/ges/umw/ein/en5099932.htm
* Gas is more expensive in germany than elsewhere in europe (again there might be exceptions) because of "ecological taxing" that was proposed by the green party

So, in all what i wanted to say was:
Germany has changed a great deal due to the green party in the last decades. Where once we were very conservative about ecological ideas, we are now at the forefront, if not the sole leader, in many of these areas.
And that is,to a large degree, thanks to the greens because they have put those issues on the agenda again and again - and that way changed the political discourse at large.
Good point. Not sure where I picked up that phrasing - especially since the wikipedia article linked by the phrase specifically says:

> It is important to understand that the null hypothesis can never be proven. A set of data can only reject a null hypothesis or fail to reject it. For example, if comparison of two groups (e.g.: treatment, no treatment) reveals no statistically significant difference between the two, it does not mean that there is no difference in reality. It only means that there is not enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis (in other words, the experiment fails to reject the null hypothesis).

I'm going to update the post to fix that mistake. Thanks.

Edit: I updated that section. This part and the next part of the series are the ones I'm most anxious about because of all the math and the questions that have right and wrong answers.
Bjarne Stroustrup hit a similar point in his recent Going Native keynote (skip to 45 minutes in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-bdWKwXsU
A/B split test: cartoons vs photos
Best Pinterest Promotion / Contest I've Seen - From Harrods
I would like to keep an open mind about this because I like the theory of decoupling.

But the only thing I use mocking/stubbing for is to mock out external services that make tests unreliable and slow (like HTTP requests).

Expectation based tests seem particularly easy to mis-use. Who cares how many times a method is called?
This is great - seeing something like this made me so happy. It's almost as if my belief in the human spirit is vindicated by this alone (of course there are many many other examples).

Kudos to his dad.
They moved from 4:3 -> 16:10 -> 16:9. And the switch to 16:9 happened because of panel cutting and cost, not because of consumer demand.

I do wonder if there was some consumer demand, or at least rising consumer acquiescence, because (I'm speculating) as laptops have become less expensive and more powerful the market consisted of relatively fewer developers and business people and more folks who see their computer as an entertainment system.
You've gotten a lot of comments on this, mostly because you've asked a very open-ended question. Let me try to offer my interpretation to the question.

There are a bunch of active parts on the mainboard even when the power is off -- for example, your clock. You wouldn't want to reset the clock every time you power off, or even every time you unplug -- it lives on a battery while you're not looking. Some things like BIOS passwords also lives on that same battery -- so, at least, it used to be the case that when you wanted to bypass someone's boot password, you would break into the case, pop out the battery, unplug, wait five minutes to make sure that everything is dead, pop the battery back in, and start up from scratch. It's been a while since I last had to do that though. ^_^

The moment you press the power button, what you are really doing is completing a circuit between two pins exposed on the mainboard. Your power button literally has wires connecting to a socket which sits atop those pins. One of those pins has a voltage, one of them expects it, so the very first thing that happens is, "a burst of current flows from pin A to pin B." The motherboard is an electronic system which is already "on", and which is expecting this and waiting for it. (And you can trigger it with a screwdriver in a pinch.)

So that is "the thing that tells the firmware to initialize." To be fair, it might have a whole cascade of effects -- it might have to trigger the power supply or so, has to get the fan on the CPU running and then the CPU itself needs to start from a predictable state, and the mainboard needs to load its own firmware -- but the basic idea here is to just have a circuit which knows what this one little current pulse means.
Did anyone else see how they executed on the launch of the new product that if not successful the company will die:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/04/09/the-very-s...

Most stores closed on Easter Sunday and recordings talking about the iPhone 4S. I would say Nokia is done.
technically, TI doesn't make this, but the Metawatch guys are very tight with TI, and, IMO, well ahead of inPulse.
My JS code beats the native Array.sort() by a factor of 10 in Chrome, but why?
Some competition for us, I like it! You will soon find the major disadvantages of using flash p2p. We completely abandoned using p2p for tinychat.com as it caused way more issues than it solved.

The one bit of advice I will give you is to choose what you are trying to do. If you want to be a meeting site for teams/business, do that. If you want to be social, do that. Trying to do both will make things extremely difficult and likely alienate both sides.
Nokia did adapt, it made one hell of a move backed by lots of Microsoft and AT&T cash for promotions and had /has a special relationship with Microsoft. Their native OS was no where near ready and being another Android phone maker wasn't appealing (Other than Samsung, is anyone else making money on Android?).

Sometimes, it just doesn't work out.
"Today is 11/Apr/2012. Under penalty of perjury, I have not been served with any legal threats."

Under penalty of perjury is a meaningless phrase unless a court or other authorized body is requiring that statement of you. Look: under penalty of perjury, I am Chief Justice John Roberts of the United States Supreme Court.

Well, I'm not Chief Justice John Roberts. I lied about that. Am I in danger of going to jail for contempt of court? No, because nobody with judicial or administrative power required me to make a truthful declaration. Rather I made a statement I wanted you to believe and attached a common legal incantation to it - little different from a religious expression, such as 'God strike me dead if I lie.' In earlier times when people had little understanding of science, the sheer randomness of the world was attributed to mysterious divine provenance, and of course every so often these beliefs are validated in such dramatic fashion that the story is repeated (http://members.tm.net/lapointe/Lawyers3.htm for example, from 1988).

An awful lot of hackers I've met seem to think that law is strictly a matter of form, that if you say certain words in a certain order legal validity (and thus, truth-value of some sort) automatically attaches to them. This is not how law works, this is how magic works - and it's a good example of Arthur C. Clarke's comment that 'any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Legal conventions are a form of social technology, and can not be taken at face value this way, any more than nontechnologists can foretell the future from blinkenlights.
I can't help but think that I'm missing something obvious...
Love Radiohead, they're an intellectual group. They're also competitive bridge players too, cool piece on them: http://www.followmearound.com/presscuttings.php?year=1993...
if inPulse has the Apple MFI authentication part on-board, then yes, they can talk Bluetooth 2.1 to iOS devices, from a backgrounded app.
Knuth is probably the only (major) author that I can think of off-hand who took the application of his algorithms and data structures so seriously (going so far as to invent his own little RISC instruction set, MIX (later MMIX.) in a book that concerned itself with the theory as aswell as the practical aspects. Most books focus almost exclusively on one or the other.

I think aside from things like cache coherency, memory models and things like SIMD, computer scientists will have to think of their algorithms (or at least cover it when they write books for undergrads or professionals) in terms of commutativity and associativity so people can see how parallelisable an algorithm is or can be.
New Google+ #WhiteSpace is trending
The Insane Economics Of Not Legalizing Marijuana In One Handy Infographic
Quantum Number Generator
FindMe by SMS
Why wouldn't I be surprised to find out Andrew Mason had joined to record this in the studio?
As usual, the capitalist view has it in terms of the individual (as opposed to the collectivity or even the whole planet). One can think about the (perceived) benefits of buying (allegedly) cheap products. But like many things, the figure on that price tag is not the real price. It leaves out externalities.

Indeed, there was both a human (e.g. low salary for those workers, incredibly long working days for those Asians manufacturing the cheap product) and an environmental cost (e.g. pollution in countries where the anti-pollution laws are non existent, carbon emitted during transport). Those costs are not factored into the figure one can see on that price tag.
As a counter-argument to the "don't aim for 100%" thing, I would say that code coverage is more important in interpreted (and loosely typed) languages. Particularly with preventing regressions. For example, if you change the arity of a function, it's nice to be able to run the tests and see all the calls to it that break.
I love how he sits there and tends his shop; cleaning when idle, drumming up business, or thinking up new ideas. This was really special, and touched me the most.
Life and weekends
I personally thought kickstarter wasn't funding commercial ventures? This is a commercial venture, is it not?

Can someone please enlighten me?
Looks really neat, but I won't buy it, because:

* It requires regular charging -- at least once a week, according to the kickstart page. Who wants more cables dangling from the desk or night table? Who wants to keep remembering to charge one more device?

* Apps for this watch are necessarily inferior to those already available for smartphones. (Indeed, the whole point of modern smartphones is that they 'appify' specialized devices like this watch.) Who wants to carry an extra device?

Instead of simplifying my life, this watch would make it more complex!
Another noob article on Hacker News. Dismissing mobile screens in this count? How ignorant!

Calling it responsive design? Do your job and show the website on any device. You noobs are embarrassing. PHP blows, which is probably why you suck so bad.
Dermandar posted $2000 competition (stitching graphics)
If they were joking I would imagine each character would be a satirical look at each VC character that bought in on the Groupon disaster.

Come on Groupon amp up the creativity
I am not sure I understand the point of making code into a library if it isn't going to be reused outside of the application. YAGNI and all that.

I would agree with unit test logic, integration test glue, but that is heading into truism country.
> This project’s goal is to raise funds for my nonprofit organization, Calyx Institute, which will launch a privacy-focused Internet Service Provider and mobile phone service using end-to-end encryption technology.

http://www.indiegogo.com/calyx

--

> A project is not open-ended. Starting a business, for example, does not qualify as a project. No charity or cause funding.

http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines
Music Industry Strikes Historic Deal on Mechanical Royalty Rates
May be the plan was just "get a competitor out of the way." Whether they end up buying them or putting them out of business and purchasing all their patents doesn't matter. Though, hopefully for Microsoft, someone else doesn't beat them out on the latter.
Other than Samsung, is anyone else making money on Android?

HTC? Somehow the myth that HTC is losing money has become a meme, when actually HTC is doing gangbusters, just not as handsomely as they did before Samsung started soaking up Apple-like profits. I suspect HTC will do quite well on the backs of the One X and One S.

Motorola would have long been a gravestone if not for Android. So would have SE and LG.

Most reviews of the last Symbian phone saw it as a quickly evolving, credible device. Elop seemed to give up right when it was coming to fruition.
Check out http://www.noexcuselist.com. Lots of basic programming resources.
Your comment reads like you can know when a test will fail in the future (how else can you know the difference between a test that "always passes" and a test that will fail in the future to identify a regression?). You may have a test that passes for ten years. When do you know it's OK to nuke the test?

Based on your follow-up, it is clear that my reading was not what you intended.
For a few things, yes, but there's no way to disable the Google-wide badge or the iOS push notification badging.

I ended up deleting my Google+ account because that was the only way to avoid this constant badge spam.
Isn't the agency model exactly what enables new entrants to publishing (whether publishing houses or self-publishers) to operate on a level playing field with established publishers?

It seems to me to be the best thing that's happened to the book industry for decades.
We'll take you more seriously when you're in a position of power where you can put these desires into effect with the wave of a pen.

There is a big difference between the inner thoughts people entertain, and discussions and negotiations where people actively consider pursuing illegal actions.

If you began meeting with friends about how to assassinate the president and the authorities found out, I'm pretty sure you'd get a legitimate knock on the door from the Secret Service.
This does not actually work for being added to circles.
No what Apple did was force all sales of virtual goods to use their API, with a 30% cut for them, while also forcing all book sales to only give a 30% cut to the retailer, ergo no one but Apple can sell ebooks via iPhone apps. I can think of at least one YC company that might have been forced out of the market by this.
For a long time, I had a deep hatred for RSpec because we used it on a project before the API stabilized (and before it was easy to maintain an environment where all developers had the same gems).

We got stuck on some particular revision in the RSpec Subversion repository. The choice was re-write all the specs, or stick with that ancient version. We re-wrote all the specs -- to test/unit.

Several years later, and I have never picked up RSpec for my own use. However, I am working on another project that chose RSpec and it is working out pretty well. I have turned on render_views so I don't have to test those separately and am only using mocking for external services.

Cucumber, on the other hand, I do not understand at all. Why write tests in English when you have Ruby?
Do you ever try to understand the asymptotic performance of a program in terms of the source code, or only read compiled binaries?

You can describe the performance of a functional program in something like asymptotic number of reductions. You can write compilers that will run those programs on real hardware in time related to the performance bound you get by working in the source model. Also, perfect optimization is undecidable. So, the question is whether there are problems where you necessarily lost asymptotic performance by working with a purely functional programming language.
Eating disorder treatment center 
weird.
Take a look at the KDE Free Qt Foundation: http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...
"Only Amazon seems to be interested in creating an ebook market rather than just gouging consumers."

Oh please, prices are [edit] often [/edit] lower now then when Amazon controlled the market.

Apply every observation you've made about "the agency model" to smartphone apps and your conclusions fall apart.
what does a 'relaunch' mean?
Other relevant links:

Live hexadecimal stream http://150.203.48.55/RainHex.php
(They also have a binary and "color" streams, as well as static info.)

A (small) article in phys.org http://phys.org/news/2012-04-fastest-random-silence.html

A prior HN entry (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470490) about a "quantum number generator", from a different lab: http://qrbg.irb.hr/
You won't buy it because it requires charging and because it displays things from your smartphone?

I'm... not really sure what to say.
> With Walmart disallowing songs to be bought from anywhere other than Walmart.

But that's not the case, you can buy kindle books directly from Amazon.com and the process has nothing to do with Apple.
He should really salt that security function...

I loved how he got in the box and pushed the tickets through...Awesome.
I loved how he checks for counterfeit fun passes! "The check mark" on the calculator. So cool.
What a bunch of hogwash; 1000 lines of code to to test validates_presence_of? What testing framework is he using? x86 assembler?

The only part I agree about is the view testing and partially cucumber.

Then again I dont think 37s has a large amount of business logic to test (compared to some of the other commenters in here) and their testing is mostly front end, and testing front end ajax-y stuff with cucumber, does indeed suck.
Congrats on the launch!

Some feedback:

"A hosted real-time platform"

This is okay.

"that gives your project a lift to the forefront"

This is fluff. It'd be better if you were more specific and focus on end user benefits. For instance, "Easily create real-time apps with worry-free scaleability"

There should also be a big sign up button directly underneath this tagline. There's really no need in the top nav to highlight the fact that you're on the home page – what should be highlighted is the Pricing & signup button.
If you were really pedantic, you'd make a distinction between executing beta-reductions directly, and executing them in zero time.

Here's hardware that does the first http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/
Big boost to DOM performance - WebKit's innerHTML is 240% faster
How would you test, say, payment processing, in any sane way, without mocking?

How do you test failure handling code when the failure can not be reproduced in a known way by the current code base?

I agree these tools are often overused, however they do have their roles.
Travel Hack: How to travel the world and stay for free
Isn't the problem more "but Instagram don't sell anything".

Bestbuy and Nokia are facing very different problems. For Nokia, the market's there and even speeding up because of tight upgrade schedule, it's just they failed to move on smart phones for too long and are playing catchup. For Bestbuy, computers, routers, printers, etc. are reaching saturation and the things that aren't, the iPads and Kindles, their margins will be razor thin because people are buying the brand, not the generic product. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you were Apple would you give Bestbuy anything more than scraps?
Agreed. This is probably the first time I've seen anything on Ebook pricing and not have to hit my head against the desk because people are being retarded with people calling for all ebooks to cost $.99 because they're cheap assholes, or people completely misunderstanding the fact that printing and distribution costs only attribute 20-30% of the cost of selling a book. (Retailer takes 30%. Printing/distribution, essentially the dead tree portion takes 30%, the publisher takes 30% to pay for the editors, etc., and finally the writer gets 10% (and their agent gets about 1%, or 10% of the writers cut.)

Ebook pricing has been anticompetitive outside the Amazon market.

Of paper books I own, I've (or my wife has) read over 90% of them. 5% are in my to-read list, and probably the last 5% are books that I've gotten out of nostalgia, or ones that I've said "I'm getting this one for when I have kids". That last 5% mainly consist of books that I personally haven't cracked open and read that book that's on my shelf, most that I've found at garage sales that are in great condition and I've said "I love that book, I'd rather see it go on my shelf than into a dump" and yeah when my kid gets old enough, that copy of Enders Game I found for $0.25 is so getting stuck in their hand. (supposing the printed word still exists in the next decade and kids understand how to read off of the mysterious bound fibres called 'books')
This is what happens when you don't pay a real artist.

Also I am totally gonna start shipping Foptop and Swarmz.
Anyone with a start-up should leave the tech blog schmoozing to the professional CEOs/VCs who do it on a daily basis.

The bootstrapped start-up with no connections in the industry has slim chances of being featured in any tech blog.

My best advice is to keep your head down and keep coding and improving your product.