skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What's to stop Facebook from going after this exact same space? (snip) [To be fair, they don't currently have all the stored credit card info that Apple does. So that's a big hurdle to starting up.]

Google (Android) is probably more likely right now. Or PayPal. If Google or Facebook were to takeover PayPal, or PayPal (Ebay) were to takeover Square or whoever's huge in mobile payments right now, things might start to get interesting.
The setting is explicitly stated to have been inspired by Myst.
It didn't keep my formatting for the letters, but you can imagine a 3x3 board with those letters ;)
Applications in general, I think they have a ton to wade through. It's got to be a mind bending task to go through thousands of applications. On a personal note, Every time my iPhone gets an email my wife asks "is it from ycombinator?" ;)
ThoughtLeadr announces partnership with Imgur
I'm not sure that it was at all obvious. You suggested that all ramp building and such accessibility activity should be replaced by a stair climbing chair. I, via a bit of snark, pointed out that such a suggestion is impractical.

You and I will have to disagree on whether or not my 1 line of snark (respectfully labeled as such) in an otherwise civil and respectful reply about the practicalities of ramps constitutes incivility. I personally would say that in a conversation face to face, and very few people find me offensive (and many of those who choose to be insulted by my views not my conversational style).
You're shackling yourselves to a platform from a vendor widely known for bloated and buggy products. You can expect the strangest and most bizarre bugs ever. Here's an example from today: I updated flash to its latest version and now youtube videos have their red and blue channel swapped. But only when using hardware video acceleration. Or how about Machinarium - it's also based on flash and is unplayably slow, but only when run fullscreen. When run in a window, it's perfect.

You should really sit back and think hard whether you can replace Air with something like python+qt+... or perhaps java (well, the jvm+libraries, you can still write in jython or clojure or whatever's hot these days). I'm sure there must be a platform to suit your needs that isn't Air.
Start Up Bloggers listen up! If I click on your blog's logo I want to see your product, not the blog's main page.
Basically yes. It feels like lag. I click on the first letter and drag, but only a later letter (not neccessarily the first, sometimes also the second) gets highlighted. The simulation has ended now, so apparently it wasn't due to my CPU being maxed out.
I think I'm going to type one of these out this weekend. I really could have used it this past December.
I'm using the mouse.
I just reread my previous comment and I apologize for how aggressively I came across. I guess it's hard to say "I disagree incredibly strongly" in a non-aggressive way, but that wasn't what I intended.

I'm not saying it's the be-all-and-end-all at all, there are lots of design problems. But arguing UX design with someone who believes sites shouldn't be using JS? It's just not a credible position.

Simple web pages are not simple. What makes them simple is that the complexity is hidden. JS is a major part of hiding that complexity, whether it's for preloading data, "don't make me click", or just hiding away things you don't need yet.

The search is a great example: I suspect almost nobody uses search, and I also suspect that those who use search use it a great deal. I suspect that Lifehacker has those "where do people click" charts that show them that information, and that as a result they made it powerful, but decided against giving it a whole bar.

Likewise comments. They hid away most of the commenting chrome because 99% of people dont comment, and they want to engage them with the existing comments.

There is no such thing as "a simple web page with some content". It is naive to think that it is, and I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong) that it shows that you have not spent significant time working on web UX issues in a cross-browser environment.
Ah, well I'll take a look then because that shouldn't be happening
I agree with most of Blow's supposedly controversial points (on Zynga, social games, and the juvenile nature of most games...), but I just can't get excited about his games. Who wants to spend 30 hours speculating on the psychology of an alienated prude with a bunch of pseudo-philosophical garbage about the meaning of life slapped on as affect? Maybe if he was really good at it, I'd give it a shot. But he's not Ingmar Bergman, he's not even close.
As perhaps an aside, I think the first-mover advantage is quite debatable.

I'm pretty sure the benefits of Unix have not primarily accrued to the firm that generated the original creative act. Neither did the benefits primarily accrue to the firm that generated the original creation of the Windowed GUI. Nor the web browser, web server, search engine, blog platform, flash-based personal media player, social network, smart phone, tablet, etc.

I believe a strong argument can even be made that followers-on have an advantage in seeing the landscape laid out before them and planning for the future, while the first-mover is mired in legacy concerns.

Granted, much of this rests upon the definition of a discrete invention and thus the original creation of it. But it seems things are quite a bit muddier than Abrash claims.

Edit: Indeed, his citing of any Zynga games as examples of first-mover advantage seriously undercuts his argument.
I would do well to remember this, and not just professionally.
The case for self-doubt
Original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810058
An important point, it's true, but you've gone too far in the other direction. It's more like:

"If you use my code, you have to share yours under the terms I determine."

It muddies my main point about the relative value of the code in question, however.
Now imagine if one of those cyber-stalking startups is successful at large-scale stylometric identification. :P

On the Feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identiﬁcation: http://randomwalker.info/publications/author-identification-...
Zack - we would be fools to not consider that option!
"Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene."

Not true. Cockpit door opens when the captain takes a piss. Flight crews are usually sleeping at the back of the plane or stuck behind those beverage carts. Very few flights have air marshals and most passangers are tied up in their chairs with the seatbelt. I agree it is less likely than in the past, but definitely not impossible.
Proceeds to list example that isn't valid JavaScript.

The example is in fact completely valid JavaScript, used in what I consider to be a very typical way: calling a function with an anonymous function as an argument.

I don't mind if you use CoffeeScript, but don't try and force-feed me some BS about concise syntax, make broad generalizations (complex CoffeeScript is harder to debug than JavaScript), or attack someone as a 'whiner' because they said "It's nice, but not my cup of tea."

I'm confused that anything in the article came across as "force-feeding". My impression was that he attacked someone as a 'whiner' because they said people at Posterous who use CoffeeScript are not "real" JavaScript engineers.

Opinion: Your mistake parsing his JavaScript example damages your credibility as a JavaScript programmer, and your rant suggests that you didn't read the article very thoroughly before coming here to tell everyone how wrong he is. I would downvote this comment if I could.

Personally, I've played with CoffeeScript and I am a fan of the syntax sugar, but I use exclusively JavaScript for all my projects because I disagree with the scoping rules.
Perhaps you could make comments part of the ast decoration. Hover over a function call and the IDE can popup a display showing comments for that function. The popup could be easily switched back and forth between comments, the parameter list, or possibly other info about the function. The comments could be plain-text, rendered HTML, or even crazier stuff like audio/video recordings for particularly important comments.

People could choose whether they wanted comments rendered inline with code like usual or displayed elsewhere.
What about /r/games, /r/kickstarter?
What range of sites are they going for? Do they consider blogs and news sites like CNN to be "Social Media"?
"Start doing the math and it gets scary: Apple would have massive margin, and vendors who didn't accept iPhone payments would be at a massive disadvantage..."

That's if we do Jason's bad math. His assertion that X% of $Y billion market is pure profit assumes that 100% of the X% of mobile are iOS purchases. Even still X% must be further drilled down to Apple's actual cut. So, assuming Apple could take 1% of the $600B restaurant market and facilitate $6B in transactions, their cut assuming his crazy 10% transaction fee would be only $600M. Common jCal sensationalism.

I'm the furthest thing from an Apple analyst, but it seems that all "built-in" Apple things like iCloud, the App Store, etc. are not simply cheap entries into a market to make money. Each deeply complements and satisfies a fundamental need with a piece of Apple hardware. A payment application of this nature doesn't seem to sit quite at the "essential" level of Apple's other apps/services.
Completely different contexts. These are startups with fire at their backs running as fast as they can. They don't have time to be methodical and their brands are completely in flux. They have far fewer stakeholders to please and much quicker reaction time. In short: they are not American Airlines.

An outside contribution at this stage is as valuable as anything the companies themselves have the resources to put together. Meanwhile, we all see different angles to attack these problems while learning about a great designer. Everyone wins, and it sounds like it matters a great deal.
> It's been a while since I've done work in Java, but I'm pretty sure the GC is not to blame for this. Java uses a concurrent mark and sweep GC.

Part of the problem is that the default GC is not the ConcMarkSweep collector in most installations but rather its the parallel "stop the world" GC that is optimized for throughput, not latency. For web applications (or anything with latency issues) step one is almost always to modify your JVM opts to enable the CMS collector.

Unfortunately even the ConcMarkSweep collector can have issues. Its not that hard to create a workload that it can't handle resulting in your app slowing eating through all available heap space because the collector can't keep up ultimately forcing a full collection which on large heaps can be devastating, think 60 to 120 second pauses.

The G1 collector, which is no longer considered experimental in Java 7 is 'better' and you can specify a maximum pause time, but it can still run into situations where it has to force a full GC and there are situations where the CMS collector is still better.
Massive hidden pool in San Francisco
Don't Fear the Press
Isn't it true that when Cockpit staff wish to leave a none Cockpit staff on the outside have to go up to the door and stand guard as they open the door?
The redistricting affects which district you will be voting in this November but your representative is still the same as it was before the redistricting until that time.
Google BBS over 300 baud modem
Solving co-founder search based on skills matching
As an avid tabletopper I really resonate with your prioritization on social. Chipping in and spreading the word to my gaming group as well. :)
There is a lot of money in them still. Perhaps even more than ever. Top titles, in both indie and AAA spaces, are pulling in revenues that would've seemed absurd a few years ago. Modern Warfare 3 grossed $400 million in its first 24 hours. By comparison, the top-grossing opening weekend for a film in 2011 was the Harry Potter film, which grossed $169 million.

And in the indie space, if you're one of the handful-per-year breakout successes, you can make millions, perhaps double-digit millions, on typically much lower production+marketing costs. Super Meat Boy grossed somewhere above $10 million, Minecraft about $80 million, Bastion somewhere in the single-digit millions. The trick is being one of the few breakouts...
Hi, Arek!

You can sign up here: http://impressi.me/users/sign_up

Or, just create a new presentation, and you'll be prompted to create an account when you attempt to save it.
I agree with you but I think with big studio games it isn't always the case. The graphics can carry a mediocre game very far. On the other extreme they can crush a really fun game if it doesn't look "current generation" or has other technical issues.

Planescape Torment is fantastic. I still play Fallout2 these days. I love that game :)
It would be great if I could look at the board for some more time and maybe choose to skip a game.
Thanks for the feedback!

I'm glad you enjoyed it so far. I agree that getting image support in the product will go a long way.
Assange TV show to be aired next week
I've read the '2012 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers'. And trust me it is not the juicy salacious slamming of Australia that this article makes it out to be.

Read it for yourself, it's very tame: http://www.ustr.gov/sites/default/files/Australia_0.pdf

For those who don't want to read the article there is essentially one Victorian(Australia State) dept. that is "sending negative messages about cloud computing services to potential Australian customers in both the public and private sectors"

And that's pretty much it. The article is a beat up.
It means they are features, not products, as Steve said to the founders of Drobox. They exist to support the true products where Apple makes money. The same will be true of iCloud. They charge money for larger storage allowances, but will never make real money on it - it exists to strengthen the ecosystem that supports the real cash cow.

Thank you for asking that question. I only realy, fully understood what Steve meant, what his thinking was by his comment on Dropbox when writing this reply.
How in particular do they work well together? Backbone is something I've been meaning to try out.
I totally agree with that. When I build my websites I systematically refuse to use the whole "social" stack. I don't really care if I have less users or if they have to register, I think these things matter more than the extra effort you have to put in to think about an alais.

Sadly this article illustrates also the hypocrisy of these claims because down below you can see "Post your comment with Disqus" and not a single alternative... Ironic isn't it ?
It should be interesting to see what happens when Sergey and Larry gain complete control over the company after the stock split. "Tech Dictatorship" seemed to work well under Jobs, maybe these guys will make some riskier decisions in the name of progress.
In Silicon Valley, designers emerge as rock stars
I had (still have, actually) an Amdek Color-I Plus on my Apple //e. It was relatively common at the time.
If it were me, I'd be terrified.

The patent will likely be granted - the America Invents Act changed the patent process to first-to-file rather than first-to-invent, and so Apple doesn't have to prove that they were the first to invent this system to be granted the patent (though prior art may still be used to invalidate the patent). Apple is notoriously litigious. Apple can - without blinking - spend more money on a court case than you will earn in your lifetime.

The combination of those factors should scare the shit out of anyone working on a technology that Apple files a patent on. Our patent system is not your friend. Apple doesn't even have to win the court case - they can just tie it up in court, bankrupt you and drive you out of business.

Good luck. I hope it doesn't become a problem.
great post. direct and to the point, although there are many more flaws that I am sure you could have shared.

we tried MongoDB to consume and analyze market feeds, and it failed miserably. I can add a couple of things to your list:

* if there is a pending write due to an fsync lock, all reads are blocked: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-4243

* data loss + 10gen's white lies: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3367?focusedCommentId...

* _re_ sharding is hard. shard key is should be chosen once and for all => that alone kills the schemaless advantage

* moving chunks between shards [manually or auto] can take hours / days depending on the dataset (but we talking big data, right?)

* aggregate (if any complex: e.g. not SUM, COUNT, MIN, MAX) over several gigs of data takes hours (many minutes at best). Not everything can be incremental..

Those are just several. MongoDB has an excellent marketing => Meghan Gill is great at what she does. But besides that, the tech is not quite there (yet?).

Nice going with Riak + PostgreSQL. I would also give Redis a try for things that you keep in memory => set theory ftw! :)
I suspect you and I agree on this, but I'd like to reframe your argument a bit. I would argue that a good manager should strive to never explicitly say "no". There are plenty of ways to limit misguided ideas without explicitly saying no. For instance, you can say "Yes but...", "Perhaps, but only if...", or (my personal favorite) "Good idea, but I personally like your other idea much better". The advantage this approach has is that it makes sure that you're not shutting down a good idea that has some major (albeit fixable) flaws.

Of course, sometimes you have to just set your foot down and just say "No". But I've noticed that as managers get more experienced, they tend to rely on their ability to do so less and less.
I think the difference here is that I'm already on my phone or iPad looking at the item in the first place. It's a pleasant experience for me to look up things that I might like, or to grab something I know we need. Oh, we're out of light bulbs? Pull out the phone, Prime them, done, don't need to think about it. It's not that it's easier on the phone/tablet over the laptop, it's that more and more those devices are becoming the first thing I go to.
> "the Australian government is quite right in advocating against using US hosting"

It's not the Australian government, it's only the Victoria Privacy Commissioner. The article is a beat up.
According to http://dns.comcast.net/dig-tool.php Comcast's DNS resolves news.ycombinator.com correctly.
I like the concept of people being allowed to work freely on things like wearable computers. The downside is that it might go nowhere, the upside is that you might end up with everyone in the world using steam and paying for groceries through steam wallet.
This really makes me want to fire up the Contiki browser on my Apple ][ - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMzgp7xTp1k
Apple slams Amazon for behaving just like Apple
Thanks! I'm glad to know there are so many others out there who share that perspective.
blekko has been running a crawl+index of several billion pages for 2 years now, so perhaps I can talk about this a little.

If you want access to a big crawl to grep through it for interesting data, then Common Crawl is awesome and inexpensive and I don't think you can get anything like it for the price, unless your query is simple enough to run as a blekko webgrep (https://blekko.com/webgrep).

If you want to build a search engine, Common Crawl isn't so useful. Search engines want _directed_ crawling of the pages that they think are good. Crawling is only a small fraction of the total work done in a search engine. Search engines generally aren't on AWS, because the right configuration of machine isn't rented by Amazon -- serving queries needs SSDs or more ram and less cpu than what Amazon offers. So, what Common Crawl offers a search engine is higher costs and mostly bad data.
Yep. I use disqus because there isn't an alternative that does a good job of keeping out spammers. I guess that's another angle entirely - that we use the "social stack" as a way to band-aid more obvious and pressing problems like "FREE IPAD TAKE THIS SURVEY" etc.
Look at Apple as an example. In their early phase they were often a first mover. Today they've moved into a different phase where they tend to be a strongly innovative later mover. The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player, but it also wasn't just a clone or even a slightly evolved clone of earlier designs. The same applies to the iPhone, the iPad, Macbooks, iTunes, etc.
I am current working on an algorithm for unsupervised grammar learning. Part of what made me change my mind about this, is that I realized that what is required to learn syntax of language is also what is required to learn semantic relationships between objects, based on this syntactic data. You just have to go up one level of abstraction.

I believe we are not too far from having algorithms, which can parse a natural language sentence into a semantic representation which link abstract concepts in a way that is powerful enough for e.g. question answering beyond just information retrieval (statistical guess work based on word frequencies). I am not so sure how or if we can build this into strong AI, though.
Ruby as a language feels a little strange. Maybe it was designed for hipsters. If I had a dog, it would bark at Ruby code.

I'd love to know why. The way this is written makes it feel less like opinion and more an opportunity to take a pop. Ruby seems susceptible to this sort of "hipster" callout in a way other languages aren't. Confusing a language with its comically unfairly defined userbase, perhaps?
A major rewrite of the core engine is exactly what's needed. Sounds like a fun project. If they don't do it, someone else will.

Adoption is hard to replace. Modifying API's is really hard. Rewriting a core engine? Reasonable and in this case probably necessary given the issues.

There are lots of people here who could replace that core engine and someone should if the MongoDB guys can't.
The thing with Java is that the compiler (that is, javac) does very little. It will replace constant variable accesses with the value (things that are defined as static final.....) but that is about it. This is why its very easy to decompile Java source, complete with method and variable names.

All the real optimization is done by the JIT which usually doesn't 'kick in' unless a segment of code gets called many times, in client mode I think the default in the hotspot vm is 1500, while in server mode is lower but I can't remember the default. I generally manually set it to something around 200 for sever apps.

As a result of this, the JIT may optimize this loop, it may not, it may optimize in the middle of a test, it all depends on how often the code its called. You can easily get different benchmark results by changing the -XX:CompileThreshold JVM parameter and will see variability in performance unless you 'warm up' the JIT forcing it to optimize.
CoffeeScript is far more like Python than Ruby. The irony..!
The rise of atheism in America
When you sell your share, someone else buys it. How do THEY value it?

someday in the distant future, the stock is going to pay a dividend. cash flows are what enable them to do it. eventually the company has nothing to do with the cash but to pay it out.
I think he's getting this idea from Asian countries where their payment information is linked to their phones, so that they can make purchases with the swipe of their mobile device. I think we're heading in this direction. Google Wallet is already thinking like this. It's not too far of a leap to think Apple will do something similar.
To make JavaScript look like Python, even. List comprehensions, significant whitespace, etc.
Pushed a fix for that, let me know if it did the trick!