skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its a bit of a two edged sword. Walmart-ism democratized stuff.

Just before my grandfather died he gave me a circular saw he got in the late 50's. It cost him a months salary. Its a monster. 100% metal right down to the trigger you pull to switch it on. It works as well as the day it was made. Its a piece of fantastic quality engineering... that my grandfather couldn't afford until he was middle aged.

The existence of plastic throwaway circular saws at Home Depot is a good thing. It means that some people who would never have had them at all can now have one, albeit a poor one. The trouble is, it makes it harder to find a saw like my grandfather's when you decide that its what you want.

And it is what you want in the end. Carefully buying top quality things as you can afford them is brutal at the beginning, but as you build up a cache of high quality things, you can stop buying the cheap garbage over and over again and begin to enjoy the things you have, even as they save you money, time and hassle in the end.
"I can't recall a single other industry where journalists are the top-tier talent attraction"

Back in the last bubble analysts like (the disgraced) Henry Blodget and Mary Meeker just to name two got plenty of celebrity.

Added: Ok they weren't journalists (Blodget is now) but it was similar in that they became part of the dot com success story by creating it.
This telco is claiming that they have the technical means to prevent that - while in fact they have no technical difference (other than storing your email encrypted) than any other.

That isn't my interpretation.

They seem to be saying that they will do everything technically and legally possible to prevent tracking.

That's a significant difference from the current situation where telcos hand over information whenever the government asks, even if not ordered to do so.
Man attempts 2,400ft skydive without parachute!
There is a very large difference between what you write and what your computer actually does.

Something may look like it is O(1) but in reality it may be much slower. The only way to find out is to put the program through its paces with various values for 'n', and to measure the time it took to compute the answer.

Prepare to be surprised.
1. If you're considering buying a phone now, WP8 is not an option. If you like the Metro interface, you can get it now with a Lumia.

2. It's cheap. In fact you can buy a Lumia for free, since it's $200 - $100 promo - $100 rebate for a data glitch. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/04/nokia-to-give-lu...

3. Maybe people are buying now because they actually bought into all the marketing hype. I mean Nokia rented Times Square, so someone probably found that compelling.
While this site is sort of useful for looking at screen size, it gives the false impression that users don't scroll. They do. Don't ever show this to anyone that isn't fully aware of this, else you'll fall into the trap of trying to put everything "above the fold", a terrible prison to escape.
Awesome, great to hear.

I've got a few side projects I'm trying to start, and I'll look at using DB to track some metrics where it makes sense.

Thanks, and good luck
Charity Through SHOPPING
Personally, I don't like Cucumber because it attempts to bridge the worlds of development and business but ends up serving neither very well. Its syntax gives it the verbosity of English while removing none of the brittleness of the underlying code. A non-programmer editing tests would need to learn Ruby to deal with the leaks in the abstraction, while a coder is better off describing behavior directly in rspec or Capybara rather than wrapping it in a "story" that should have been a two-line comment.

As for non-programmers reading tests, they could read the comments or README.md instead. Why force the documentation to test, and the test to document, if it decreases the efficiency of both?
For a much longer and more involved write-up, see [1]

[1]: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/justice-fil...
"because the "agency model" encourages industry collusion."

Wait what? Is there collusion in the digital app industry built from the ground up with the agency model?

"As long as every agent in the industry is doing the same thing,"

Wait under which model were all ebooks, regardless of length, quality and demand were $9.99?

Simple observation of what's happened since the agency model has come out should explode your notions that it's some price fixer's paradise.

The top books in Amazon's Kindle store today are:

7.70
7.99
5.00
7.14
2.24
2.24
2.99
9.99
7.99

Most of the ones at the same-ish price point are from the same series/author/publisher.

The agency model has been a huge boon for self-publishers and this is exploding price levels the industry has relied on for decades.
The filesystem is in pretty much the same situation as databases. Computers have supported multiple user accounts for decades, but every user of a web service typically runs as the same user(s) on the server.

I realize that there are huge scaling/throttling/DoS issues with, say, creating a new UNIX user every time someone signs up for your online meme generator, but that's mostly because UNIX wasn't really designed for millions of users on one box.

On the other hand, as an unprivileged user on a Linux box, you can't really do much damage beyond hogging resources and possibly spying on other people's poorly-secured files. If there's a bug and you do find a way to trash the system or escalate privilege, it's front-page news.

The problem right now is that every two-bit web app implements its own ad-hoc permissions system, often at the wrong layer of their stack. If it could be commoditized into a widely-used and widely-audited system, I think it would do a lot to improve security on the Internet.

(To open up a whole new unsupported argument, on some level the fact that one needs a key-value store, a filesystem, and a hand-optimized in-memory cache to build a reasonably fast web service smells like we're still making humans do a lot of things that a machine could do a much better job of.)
It tells me I need to update to Flash Player 11, but the Adobe site tells me I'm using Chrome and that will keep Flash updated on its own. Frustrating! I'm using Chrome 14.0.835.186 on Windows 7.
Well, it could decline in value after you buy it. The point is that having debt of $N doesn't always mean the value of the house is automatically adjusted by $N. Value is in the eye of beholder, or buyer in this case.
This kid's ingenuity, determination and commitment toward his customers are very inspiring. It's obvious his dad is his role model. I expect great things from him in the future.
A monopoly is more than just having the largest market share. There has to be no viable competition. With Google and Amazon in the game that's clearly untenable.
I deleted my Google+ account because:

1. I couldn't post the hyperlinks of my choice.
2. Google was inserting content at the top of my stream that didn't come from any of my circles, and I couldn't turn that off.
It is kind of sad that there are no real results since Okasaki 1996. I remember reading that while I was doing my startup-interrupted PhD in the late 1990s. A result that lazy eval was algorithmically equivalent to imperative would be very compelling.
To my knowledge, mutating memory is asymptotically the same as just reading it. Hence any asymptotic slowdown purely functional language have will translate, regardless of how long memory operations take.
Totally off topic: why did you use contra- versus counter-?

I have never seen that before.
None of the mass-produced Android tablets have the same form factor as the proven hit, 60+ million units sold iPad. Why?

Aside from some dirty cheap Archos 4:3 tablets (which were actually 4:3, and still dirt cheap, before Apple unveiled the mighty iPad), they don't because it isn't a benefit. Again you're drawing from the notion that Apple's choice is right and everyone else's is wrong, which is a pretty questionable starting point.

Regarding the cost-cutting, it absolutely was cost-cutting to move from 16:10 to 16:9, and few complained because really is it different enough for many to care? It was not cost cutting to move from 4:3 to 16:10 beyond that users demanded a wide screen overwhelmingly, not least because playing video on our desktop became so common.
Very useful indeed. I use a similar 1680 x 1050 rotated 90º (so it's 1050 x 1680) with a browser. When I'm doing frontend work and having a browser fullscreen gives plenty of room for the viewport and web inspector or firebug. It's a real productivity improver.
Great execution, but I wish that websites would stop using the same stale layout. It almost made me not try the app just because it feels like zero effort went in to the presentation of the webpage.
I don't think it's true that they agreed on a set price. eBooks are sold at various prices. What they agreed to was the ability to set end-user prices. Do you have any insight into the legality of that?
It's even more interesting than that. One of the things that the BIOS has to do, if I recall correctly, is to set up the memory controller. Until it does that, it's only able to execute out of registers and cache, no RAM.

If you're interested, Coreboot (an open source BIOS replacement) has interesting information on this.
Using a thin font + small font + gray on white font = hard to read.

There's a better math joke in there somewhere...
Looks cool -- do you do Fun NAT Tricks to be peer to peer through firewalls?
One part of this is that computers are now so fast that you can get the answer to fairly complicated questions for large amounts of data without getting anywhere close to the optimal analytical solution.

The need to optimize and the associated knowledge is not quite as much of a problem as it was in the recent past.

This leads to a hidden form of bloat, programs written in a terribly inefficient way that still perform adequately in isolation but that fail to compose in a useful way because that quickly slows things down to the point where it no longer produces an answer in acceptable time.

That probably falls under ignorance in your enumeration but it may be a sub-category labelled 'appears unnecessary'.

There ought to be a an energy label for algorithms :)
Not totally worthless, but most likely not worth the full $700M. They have $2.2B in Plant/Property/Equipment on their balance sheet. Then they have $500M+ of goodwill and intangibles. And only $500M of equity, which is constantly declining quarter after quarter. One stupid move, and the equity is easily wiped out, leaving debtholders with goodwill and a bunch of newspaper printing equipment.
The Microsoft MCSE is Back
I would love to see this guy succeed, but can anyone enlighten me as to why Kickstarter won't allow his project to be funded?

His pseudo-kickstart page is unlikely to generate anywhere near the amount of funding it would on the KS site. I'm wondering why they wouldn't allow it to be funded there.

Is there something dubious about this project that the typical tech blog cheerleaders are ignoring, or is there some reason this kind of project is not allowed on Kickstarter in general?
I figured out how much water to drink right before bed so that I wake up naturally 7.5-8 hours later. There's no ignoring a full bladder, and once I'm out of bed I'm up for the day.
If there was any doubt as to whether this is a joke, listen to the theme song. Good lord.
This is something many people have been asking for, and we always listen to what people say :)

The feature is in design phase, we're pretty close to implement it. Expect to see it landing in the next few weeks.
It looks like several people have interest in this as a career path. Personally, I'm tired of it and am trying to move up the stack. But for those interested in terms of a career path: http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded
Tablets and smartphones are replacing computers. If we're using the game console model as our standard, we are, pardon the expression, fucked.

I shudder whenever someone so easily uses it as the comparison.

No one in the world has a problem with the App Store in general. Apple does a fantastic job running a storefront, lubricating a world wide payment and gift card system, etc. They run a tight, gorgeous system. The problem is when they push their reign of influence such that alternatives can't exist. When Amazon can't even link to a web store from their own app. That is just egregious overreaching that is indefensible.
Absolutely not, for two reasons:

1. AWS is a far bigger growth opportunity for Amazon than their video service, it wouldn't make sense to sacrifice the former in favor of the latter.

2. Even if Amazon did kick them off, it's not like Netflix will simply fold up shop, they'll just go somewhere else to get their storage and processing power, so from Amazon's perspective why not keep that revenue stream?
Yes, email us there :)
Accustomed to any of the countless apps and services that only exist on the iPad? Ready to do without them?

Severing business or consumer relationships with anyone but a totally incompetent supplier or commodity service involves a trade-off. Some benefits you are accustomed to may not be present, but others which are more desirable presumably exist. Understanding this is part of being responsible for how you spend your money and it applies universally.

Are you arguing that consumers should be protected from having to understand and exercise this responsibility by the government?
Great! I think moxie's RedPhone has been shut down for awhile now, since twitter hired him. Any word on whether this is a solid replacement?
All in all, minor issues, but: you filter out "target" attributes on URLs. I have links in my dashboard that I want to automatically open in another window so I don't close the dashboard window. Not sure why "target" is a banned attribute.

Also, public loop URLs don't appear to actually loop: I have 2 dashboards both added to the public loop, and nothing I seem to do will make them do that in either Firefox 11, Chrome 18 or Chrome 13 (on my Google TV that I use to display on a big screen).

Also, making your push interface public WOULD be a significant improvement over the existing interface: it gets tedious having to write authenticated web handlers purely to feed data to the dashboard, I'd much rather write cron jobs to do that.
To avoid big A/B testing mistakes, perhaps you shouldn't use phrases like "To counter that noise it is important to first “prove the Null hypothesis.” To prove the Null hypothesis you..."

One of the most important underlying statistical principles in inference tests is that the null hypothesis can never be proven. Any data you collect can only reject the null hypothesis or fail to reject it.
OK, here's a proof:

O(f(n)) means that an operation takes less than k f(n) time to complete (where k is some constant) for all n.

I predicated my assertion on bounded memory, hence n is constant. Therefore O(log n) means that the operation is bounded in time by k log n. But since n is also a constant, this is equal to some other constant k'. This is equivalent to saying that the operation is bounded by O(1).

QED.
do you use Websockets? and the new WebRTC? The jobs section does allude to webrtc but there is also a lot of AIR/Flash related stuff (AFAIK webrtc doesn't use RTMFP for transport).
I worked on enterprise projects "at a similar company" with a few hundred "top notch" engineers. We had no more than 30% coverage, most of it from SDETs. No tests were being written by the devs before checking in for months, the test devs were understaffed, unqualified and thus behind. At one point someone made a checkin that prevented login from happening. Nobody noticed for a full work week, until that version made it into preproduction and someone finally attempted to login. Apparently hundreds of mils spent on the project can't buy you a team able to write above high-school level code.

I can see the usefulness of SDETs in doing system / end-to-end testing or testing of really obscure scenarios, but most of the test writing should belong to devs. I love the Rails approach to UT, functional and integration test split. The first time you try BDD, especially if you're coming from an after-the-fact testing culture like the one above, you almost want to cry from joy. I agree that Cucumber might a bit of an overkill, but perhaps I don't get it. For a non-prototypey project you should absolutely add other types horizontal testing like performance, security..
Do you need to be on MFI to access the bluetooth on iOS? If so what's the process of getting on?
[Edited to add: on reflection, this is a bit negative; it is a really cool app, and I guess if you're worried about security, latency may not be your highest concern. ]

I've put off getting an android device because of the appalling audio latency[1][2]. Given that telephony is the most demanding application as regards latency, I suspect this sadly may not sound very good, depending on the android device. Unless someone has found a cunning workaround?

[1] http://www.musiquetactile.fr/android-is-far-behind-ios/
[2] http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434
This is a great story. There is a website for the arcade http://www.cainesarcade.com. They are accepting donations for a scholarship fund for Caine and so far has received over $85,000! It's nice to see that not all kids are glued to the TV or video games.
CloudFoundry.org launches - Fully Open Source PaaS
Sharing and Discovering Experiences
Yammer Acquires OneDrum - Takes on Box and Dropbox
You do if you want to transfer custom data. Some controllers get away with using the keyboard Bluetooth profile. You apply to MFi here: https://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi/

But pretty much everything else is under NDA, unfortunately.
Creating Appvocates via AppStori.com
9 Year Old sets up his own DIY Arcade
Show HN: Learning to let go - our hosted real-time platform
> There ought to be a an energy label for algorithms

Isn't that what we use asymptotic analysis for?
I have the same problem, I'm using Chrome. It might be related to linux.
A few days ago an article on "delayed launches"[1] was posted here on HN. We took a step back from our computers, looked at each other, and laughed nervously. The article was about us. The thing is, the author couldn't possibly have known about us as we've been too afraid to leave the comfort of our stealth mode.

We've wasted so much time tweaking our concept in utter fear of how the community would receive us. Mantras about releasing early and often, or letting our users shape the product, to no avail; we subconsciously wanted our entire (ever-changing) vision to be implemented to perfection before showing you anything.

A lot is happening in the "real-time" business at the moment and now we're asking ourselves: "why the hell didn't we launch a year ago?".

So, as an exercise in letting things go, we're throwing our little project to the wolves. Despite our wishes to have implemented X, Y, and Z before doing so.

[1] http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/04/02/how-we-fooled-ourselve...
So you're complaining that you can't get a filtered stream of posts without having to use the feature for filtering your stream?

No, I'm not.

It's not like you have to do it more than once per circle you want to exclude.

I have, say, a dozen circles. Can you tell me how I can quickly choose to view a stream that consists of all of the content from only a subset of those circles? Then quickly choose a different subset of circles? Or view a stream of all content except those in the PostTooMnayPictures circle?

I know of no way to do any kind of circle grouping/ungrouping, but if it's there I'd love to know about it.

The plus/minus extension allowed this by turning the list of circles into a multi-select checklist. Two seconds to change to any subset of circles to view.

Edit: It looks like the +/- developer is planning on updating his extension to work with the new layout

https://plus.google.com/117134788479394921938/posts

I'm thinking the other layout issues (too much whitespace, useless menu-y cruft) can be fixed with greasemonkey.
I bought it, I'm a flight sim fan and loved all the user reviews comparing it favorably to X-Plane (which isn't bad). I'll tinker around with it a bit later when I'm not up to my eyeballs at work, but on first glance it looks pretty sweet!
Google+ and the curse of instant distribution
Yes - but the test would fail when the invariant is mistakenly changed. On the test run after the invariant was changed, you would get new information (the test does not always pass) and change your behavior (revert the commit which altered the invariant).

That is the point of the "changing behavior" rule - you do not gather the benefit of running a test until it has failed at least once, and the benefit gathered is proportionate to the benefit of the action you take upon seeing the failure. The tricky part of the rule is that you must predict your actions in the future, since a test that might have a very important failure later could pass all the time right now. Knowing your own weaknesses and strengths is important, as is knowing the risks of your project.

There are possible design benefits to writing tests, since you must write code that is testable, and testable code tends to also be modular. However, once you have written testable code, you still gain those design benefits even if you never run your test suite, or even delete your tests entirely!
One note: The summary email after ending a session gives me times in PT. I assume meetings.io knows my location (if they know my weather) so it would be better if it use my local time.

Other than that this is one of the most exciting apps I have seen in a while, simple and elegant.
Chrome 14 is a really old version. The current stable version is 18. Try to upgrade it.
Actually I couldn't even get him to agree that a 6:8:10 triangle was equivalent to a 3:4:5 triangle.
And It All Went Horribly Wrong: Debugging Production Systems
While it's true that most network access is restricted, there is one network call that can be made without any permissions: the URI ACTION_VIEW Intent opens a browser.

Android has no "Trust Links" permission?
Killing sickness: is DRACO a doomsday device for viruses?
I am glad DHH has put up this piece. This is one of my favorite topics to be contrarian about. I am a strong believer in the importance of developer testing to ensure code quality, but some people take it way too far. I gave a talk about this at RubyFringe: http://railspikes.com/2008/7/11/testing-is-overrated

I also am utterly opposed to the Cucumber-style programming-in-English-via-regexp testing approach. Unless someone who doesn't know how to code is writing those step files, why subject yourself to that?!
I think this is just a case of MVP-itis. They can make their page more distinctive later.
Getting Rid of Paper with Evernote
I made sure to donate for the sheer fact that it will change this kid's life to see his dream come to fruition. His story alone has hit the media and will be sure to inspire god knows how many other young children.
36 kinds of Pong playable in your browser
It looks like vmware is really starting to figure out 'the open source way'. There were a lot of problems at the beginning - disparity between cloudfoundry.com vs .org distributions, inability to pull community features, lack of .org documentation, no strong leadership, zendesk for support (no mailing list!) - but they've brought on some really good people (like Patrick Chanezon) who definitely seem to understand developer concerns.

Hopefully this new open workflow should make upping the code quality a much smoother process, as it's a medium-sized codebase that could use a bit of polish.

I'm actually surprised vmware was able to stick with CloudFoundry this long until they started to get it right - are there other examples of 'open source' (in quotes) project by huge companies that ended up finding their way?