skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. It seems we have a problem where things that are most likely just opinion or preference are treated as fact and to worsen the situation there is a disregard for evidence or the need of it.

For example, take the argument why indexes should start with zero. [0] Some people will claim that it's easier to learn without providing evidence or that those who use such a system produce less bugs, again without evidence.

[0] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
Agency Shares Adwords CTRs From An Automotive Campaign
Ehhh, let's leave the google is dying bit out - neither of us, nor the OP, is saying that.

As for the unifying, that is indeed google's goal at this time. Do they have to unify them all? No. Are they trying to unify many with social features of dubious utility? Yes.

My issue is simply that they should go back to the drawing board instead of adding features to existing products. They can break free of the current paradigm and really make some wild new stuff. Plenty will fail, but some key ones will succeed.

This is google after all, one of the largest concentrations of brilliant people in the world - I do believe they can do it.
As I understand it, the NDAA is an annual act specifying the DoD's budget, so bad things would happend (TM) if he had vetoed it outright because there was a reasonable expectation that the DoD would have a budget by a certain date. There aren't the same expectations around CISPA, so a veto may be more realistic.

I don't mean to excuse or justify any acts on behalf of the president, just to point out that the surrounding circumstances are a lot different.
Google Drive: A Lazy Boy's Dream
In the end, we are talking about a finite resource, because the Internet can only handle so much data transfer at one time. One way or another, your packets have to travel over physical infrastructure which, just like your home network, has a maximum capacity. Use of this infrastructure costs money; charging by bandwidth should help prevent users from "clogging the tubes" willy-nilly because there is a cost associated with excessive use.
Here's a good "play with turtles" chapter in an online textbook if anyone is interested: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/html/book005.html

Did porting your project to github mess up the formatting, or did you actually use 8-space tabs?! Because I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
I disagree. Regulations are absolutely necessary for a functional market.

Corporate espionage, sabotage, outright lying about your products, financial fraud, tying, price fixing, collusion, bid rigging, geosplitting, ponzi schemes and dozens of other manifestations of bad corporate practices that regulations prevent (or try to) were put in place in the first place because they destroy markets. These aren't hypothetical problems either, there are many many instances of these practices happening over the last few centuries.

Hell, this article effectively says that medical providers are engaged in product tying and it is destroying the market!

Truly free markets are a myth. The best you get is mostly fair markets.
The problem is the number of patients and the amount of data that has to be entered into different systems means you would spend 90% of your time washing your hands or taking gloves on and off.

Imagine programming where everytime your hand went between the keyboard and mouse you had to go and wash your hands!

The problem is that adding more computers is always a 'good thing' - how can more info about a patient be bad?
Java programmers, code to the interface, even if it's a class
Try Wells Fargo/Verified by Visa: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=54 Passwords cannot be longer than 8 characters. WTF!

As if they were using UNIX crypt()...
Please don't call anyone simple-minded, particularly when you don't know them.

Nobody is saying that politicians are the root cause. We elect them. Ultimately it is our fault for allowing it. Then some of these folks appoint people to other positions. The appointments are probably worst than the already-challenged elected official.

When I hear someone carry the "corporate greed and corruption" flag I have a viscerally negative reaction to the statement. I don't know you, so I can't know where you are coming from. To be clear, what I am about to say has nothing to do with you and is not aimed or intended to represent you at all.

Whenever I've heard this from people in person that either I know or have an opportunity to learn more about the profile almost always falls within a certain range. Liberal, democrat, sometimes government worker or union member, no entrepreneurial experience, no understanding of the business process and no experience attempting to launch and run a business.

A lot changes once you've experienced the realities of business. I can't name one business driven purely by greed other than boundary examples such as the Madoff mess. Even the most maligned financial companies have to sell a product and cater to a customer base. Oil companies, for example, are a favorite punching bag. Are they driven by greed? Of course not! They sell a product. And they sell a product that requires huge investment. They are perfectly entitled to earn a profit and they are entitled to earn as much as the market will support. Supply and demand. If they take legally allowed action to enhance their standing or ability to compete, well, that's the law. Until it is changed they are doing nothing different than engaging in the "SEO" of their industry.

Somehow there's an automatic trigger point that says that large companies are driven by nothing but greed. Really? At what revenue level does greed become the underlying driving force? What where they driven by until they got to that level? I don't see anyone talking about companies such as Apple that way? Why? They are large. Very large. They don't do anything any other enterprise does not do. They manufacture in China. So do others, except that, when it is Ford that does it "they are greedy" is the first response.

Anyhow, let's agree to disagree. My world view probably does not intersect with yours in but a few places. And that's OK. I learn a little from everyone. Maybe one day I'll see things as they really are. Thanks.
Another approach: use a persistent data structure ala clojure's:

http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/02/01/understanding-clojur...
when facebook launches their adwords/adsense competitor, they will cause serious opposition to google. They're the only company out there with the reach and most importantly, demographic data for 1 in 7 people in the world, to disrupt google's stranglehold on internet advertising.
No, that's not exactly what he means. The "token" isn't the OAuth native token, it's a 6-digit code that is based on the current time and a device secret embedded in the app on your phone.
Vmware source leaked by anon
I don't see this trend picking up beyond the scope of web applications for some time due to one simple problem: search engines. A large amount of content on the web is still meant to be openly consumed and found, and until search engines are able to run the resultant JS to generate the page, any sort of content-generating website will need to be able to render the pages as HTML. This client-heavy paradigm fits perfectly for "applications", but for now I don't think it can pervade elsewhere--unless someone's come up with a solution to this I'm unaware of.
Buying a house reduces likelihood of starting a business by 20-25%
It's a shame that Gabe denied the rumours that he was talking with Apple. I was hoping for a Steam client embedded in Apple's new TV thingy.
From a purely financial perspective, the net present value of AH's future earnings is almost certainly much higher than the net present value of the money deployed elsewhere, assuming their hot streak continues.

Two things mitigate this:
1) The likelihood that they can keep doing return >25% a year on their whole portfolio is very very small. It's much easier to earn $25m on $100m than it is to earn $25000m on $100000m. See, e.g. Warren Buffett - still a great investor, just too much money to invest efficiently.
2) There are incredible tax advantages to money given to charity, because the charities are usually tax exempt.

That is, a charity that's allowed to grow the money at 10% a year with no taxes, does better in the long run than someone who can make 12% a year with 20% in taxes.
GitHub used to have a graph that showed clones over time as well, but they took it out.

In general, I wish GH had more data you could pull out about your repo through the API. That would allow me to track my own metrics.
I have: John Lakos' "Large-Scale C++ Software Design"

Free to anyone that will cover the shipping cost. Glad to see if goto a good home.
Felix Salmon: Could the NYT make money from its scoops?
RuggedCom - Backdoor Accounts in my SCADA network? You don't say...
The unlocked, no-contract Nexus phone on Google Play
Huh? So if I go into a store and take a magazine, it's okay as long as the store owner doesn't explicitly tell me I need to pay for it?
Personally I believe that the purpose of charity is to give unyieldingly and without reserve or provocation, without any personal gain to you...not to look good to others, not tax breaks, whatever.

Anonymous charity is irrational from a survival perspective. It makes no sense to help someone unless you have something to gain. So therefore helping others at the expense of yourself is the purest form of selflessness.

> What about when your deed might inspire/put pressure on people of similar stature to do the same? Ie: Gates or AH?

Depends on your goals. If your goal is to increase the amount of donations to a charity, then by all means, do it publicly...inspire and/or pressure others to do the same. If your goal is a personal exercise in selflessness and giving, then do it anonymously.
That would be Caroline Shepherd-Baron [1234] 'One by-product of inventing the first cash machine was the concept of the Pin number.

Mr Shepherd-Barron came up with the idea when he realised that he could remember his six-figure army number. But he decided to check that with his wife, Caroline.

"Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard,"'

[1234] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6230194.stm

As an aside: A credit card I recently received came with a default PIN of 2468. Doh!
Pixel artists will probably use nearest-neighbor scaling to display their art on high-resolution screens (so one pixel would become a sharp 3x3 block of pixels, or 4x4, 5x5, etc). That is already the technique being used to create games with an “old-school” aesthetic on modern gaming consoles.

I don’t think that drawing 1920x1080 (or larger!) images pixel-by-pixel will ever be practical, and it probably wouldn’t even look like pixel art to the eye at that point.
This article and you guys' comments in this thread are really interesting and suggestive. I hope you continue writing and talking about it. It's great marketing for blekko too :)
I bought it right away (I could've built it myself, but didn't feel like opening Xcode). It doesn't work unfortunately (I'm in Iran).
But the important thing is that there's no reason they can't. Google's release partners understandably target the browser that is used by Google fans, since they will be the early adopters.

So long as this is a temporary situation, which I think it is, I wouldn't be worried.
Why is it necessarily much simpler to generate bytecode than machine code? Aren't they basically the same thing except one is run by a virtual machine and the other by a real machine?
They probably shouldn't couple too unrelated things then.
Oh cool, thanks.

I never knew there was a feature in HN that immediately turned it into reddit!
> There are huge categories of popular games that really don't fit well to a touchscreen.

Then why are you not selling bluetooth gamepads yet? :)

This presentation [1] that was just posted explains it better than I possibly could. Mobile is replacing console just like console replaced arcades. Which also had much better hardware and controlers, and games that didn't fit the console style. Until consoles' hardware evolved... and arcades died. Likewise, mobile hardware is evolving. There's nothing stopping you from building a android box with 10x the CPU power of an xbox, plug controllers in it, have instant access to many more games in the Play Store that all consoles together ever had. Then develop games with much better graphics than current AAA titles.

And I'm personally betting (literally) that both Apple and Android OEMs are already working on this.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcousins/when-the-consoles-die-wha...
Given that you admittedly don't have that level of experience, who are you exactly to decide that again? You haven't even justified that position, you simply state it as fact. If anything, I've found your comments to mostly be "irrelevant".

Working in reduced resolution and color constraints is actually something rather challenging. Lesser artists are going to particularly suffer because they won't have experience to fall back on when they need to find workarounds, especially if their color theory is weak. You aren't going to hit Ferrari's level unless you've already got a solid foundation in place. That's easily five years to be competent at, then you can learn to work within those limitations.

I personally oversee a number of artists around five years in and I wish could get that quality of work out of them consistently.

Why I suggested you see his other work is because I don't think you're actually qualified to assess just how difficult the work is and you should see whose work you're dismissing as amatuer/entry level.
That use of const is fine, as it's never modified after the initial value is assigned.
Somewhat slow here in Aus using Telstra 3G, 45 seconds to connect to TOR network and about 7-12 seconds to return search results form DDG. Good app though and am looking forward to browsing in privacy, thanks.
President Obama Drives Sphero the Robotic Ball
I'm surprised more application developers or 'scalability engineers' don't boot up d/sTrace as their tool of choice. It's probably between d/strace & heap allocations profilers for single most valuable tool in my toolchain in the general case for identifying performance problems.
That's exactly my point, however – both Google and Facebook are in a similar business – connecting advertisers to consumers. Their supply chain is driven by their ability to get consumer attention/eyeballs. In that light, Facebook's supply chain is much more precariously situated, in my never to be humble opinion.
Thanks for elaborating on your program, Hani. 15 weekly office hours is a great resource. I'm also glad to hear that your program can be tailored to the needs of the students. I'll doubtlessly have some more granular follow up questions, but will address them over email (if you prefer).
Agreed about the importance of making sure you donate to the right charities, which is why I was disappointed to read this: "And, to begin, they have sprinkled $1 million on Silicon Valley nonprofits that focus on everything from urban forestry to homeless families."

Another good essay about this stuff is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...
All good stuff, but I'd want to emphasize that directing your philanthropy based on doing the most good does not require you to be a utilitarian, nor (if you are) does it require the utility function be denominated in QALYs.
There is a vast difference between liking to have interesting and energetic discussions or debates about something you care and/or are interested in and provoking someone for the sake of having an argument.

Provoking someone for the sake of having an argument is a passive-aggressive way for insecure people to get their rocks off by either winning an argument or simply upsetting someone. It may not be hitting someone, but it is bullying.

As someone who used to do it when I was much younger, it simply isn't a good trait to have.
It doesn't seem clear to me that demographic info will make Facebook's ad platform significantly more compelling to advertisers than Google's. Remember Google has a lot of data too (ie search logs).
When the Dyson was invented, the bag-vacuum incumbents wanted to licence his technnology and shelve it. He had to go solo to "bring his superior technology to market".
What's wrong with trying to get rich on a product? And using the profits as seed money to bring more useful things to market?
One of the questions I haven't been able to track down that has prevented adoption by me is how efficient the caching around MapReduce queries are in Riak.

In CouchDB MapReduce queries are completely incremental; if only a little data changes, only the relevant parts need to be rerun through the MapReduce process.

Riak looks really promising as:

1. It allows chaining MapReduce functions together

2. It supports sharding

Looking into Riak, it looked like there was a cache for part of the MapReduce system, but I wasn't sure how that cache worked or if it would be enough for large datasets that only change in little increments.

Edit: formatting.
I would not recommend an all out only SEO only strategy...I'll try to explain.

Depends on the type of keywords and target audience you want to rank for and how crowded or competitive that space is.

In 2012, there's a lot of noise and niche is better when trying to rank for particular keywords.

You can optimize your site for all on-page SEO, making sure everything is properly labeled and crawlable for search engines...but that's not going to be enough to drive traffic. You can't set it and forget it like the crock pot.
In order to get real traffic you'll want to be in the top search results to get anything decent traffic wise.

The other half of SEO is link-building and off page stuff, where other sites point links and references to you. You'll have to work on building links or getting creative in making people want to link to you.

So in short- SEO cannot be ignored for driving organic traffic but it is not the only tactic you'll need to utilize.
My understanding is AdSense is only a small portion of Google's revenue. For their Adwords competitor to be successful, they'd essentially need a search engine for people to specify their intents which they'd either need to write themselves or license their technology to work with a search engine such as Bing.
Is it compatible with Apple's policies? I thought they don't allow open source apps in the appstore. Or is that only for the GPL license?
TechHive from Macworld's Jason Snell
"Your argument seems adrift from reality and increasingly resembles mere ranting."

I really have to thank you for that. I appreciate personal comments of this kind in the middle of an otherwise civil discussion. I apologize for not agreeing with you and moving on. Thanks.
I think so. I am neither a lawyer nor a cryptographer, though, so I might be missing something.
Are you saying Google isn't distributed?

In any case, it may not be a denial-of-service, but if you can find someone with an S3 bucket with large files you could maliciously cause them to rack up a huge bandwidth bill using this mechanism. I guess you could say it's a DDOM (Distributed Denial of Money).
Big Data Reference Model
Amazing programming joke
Ah, got it. Well, its the only suggestion so far. I guess not a lot of people think about it.
There is nothing dubious about collecting information if you do it legally.

Further, it is what you do with it not the potential that would get you into legal trouble, otherwise Google, Facebook and every other company would be under legal uncertainty.

Indeed, your hacking actions were far more risky without prior consent from all parties involved.
This is especially true assuming that the economy gets better over time, that the poor of today are worse off than the poor of tomorrow will be.
Note to Facebook Shareholders: What to Do After You Make a Zillion Dollars
So why is this "technology" ground-breaking then? I thought the point of this is that it that you 1. take picture 2. send over the internets 3. wait 3~6min to get a response on what the picture is about.

Try scaling this out..."highly-trained" means poor scalability and lots of liability.
Citation? (note - not trying to be snarky...moreso curious)
A genius platform !!!
The backdoor has national, international, and local security implications. The user name is "factory" and the password is based on the unit's MAC address. That pretty strongly indicates it was intended for factory initialization and recovery of mis-configured devices, not a backdoor in the name of "national security".

"Factory" user/password combinations have long been a problem - often not revealed to the purchaser of the equipment[1][2]. This one is especially bad because it cannot be disabled even if the user knows about it.

[1] http://all.net/CID/Attack/papers/BadDefaults.html

[2] Oracle is notorious for default users/passwords http://www.petefinnigan.com/default/default_password_list.ht...
True, but at the point what you've just built is basically a console. In fact you may as well plug it into your HD TV too and you now have your "TV tablet" that you leave next to your TV (in the same way that you have a dedicated HTPC instead of plugging your laptop in every time). Then somebody else comes along and says "hey all of these people are buying tablets just to plug into their TV, I wonder if they would buy a tablet without a screen" and thus the whole cycle starts over.

I'm not sure that the console/arcade analogy holds, Arcade games had a bigger barrier to play. You had to physically move yourself to a place that contained arcade machines (whilst dodging teenage drugdealers) and stick money into the machine every time you died because the arcade owner had to cover the rent on this massive building (this meant the games were usually designed so that you died a lot). With a console or PC you can sit in the comfort of your own home and play for free (once you have bought the game).You can also save the game and resume from where you left off last time, a feature critical for longer, more complex games and missing from arcade machines.

The real issue here is whether the platform providers store (play store, app store, windows store etc) will do away with the need for Steam altogether and if it only had temporary value because MS did not have a compelling alternative at the time.
From what I understand, it’s only GPL that doesn’t work since GPL has some hefty restrictions on even binary redistribution (basically you have to open source ALL of the related bits, not just yours — which you can’t do since every iOS app Apple-provided pieces that aren’t available in source).
Keeping the offtopics together. Now you dont have to be in the circle to kudo, just around it. At least in my chrome.
It would also help if Google's bouquet were a bit more fragrant.

In particular, I find Google+'s non-write access api to be my major stumbling block to using it, socially that is. I want to push twitter/fb to it. I want openness and I think it would help their adoption. That would be a bouquet I'd want to smell and I know many others as well.
I hear they made a rule internally that WWDC is supposed to pay it's own way. I certainly agree that it doesn't need to, but just thought you might find that interesting.
There are plenty of technically smart people who are politically completely naive, geophile! Most of them are also blissfully unaware of Oblabla's statements that he would veto the NDAA, until the last moment, of course, when in the dead of night on New Year's Eve, he had a "sudden change of heart", and signed it. Oops!