skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All this pre-retina? I find pre-retina text display blurry to the point of distraction after long periods of reading. Also, how do you hold your iPad? I like the newest and cheapest Kindle's size and weight for holding it an almost any position for long periods of time.
Why mobile is what decides whether Google will live or die
I think part of the explanation would be that the underlying eInk displays have not evolved very much either, and thus the devices themselves have limited potential to grow.
> It's a silly American notion that every job can be (or worse, has to be) the worker's "passion" --and only few get to have the privilege of that notion, and then again only after they have a lot of lucky breaks.

I agree with this, but I don't think we should take the opposite for granted either-- personally I dream of a world where no human being has to scrape shit off the sidewalk to survive.
Cloud Services for Business – Finding Reliable Partners
Great idea. I like the idea of a command line flag (like the rate limit flag) to run it with a percentage failure rate or something along those lines.
We are trying to build a system where users can share papers (both published and preprint) they deem important, write a short review/commentary on the paper: why it is good or not good, what else can be done, whether the experiment can be reproduced, is the conclusion solid or not, etc, then people can comment on the paper, comment on the reviews, upvote/downvote, any everything.

This is our fun side project, and we just launched 3 days ago, so badly need feedback from the community. Thanks for your comment!
I know! I love it as a place to shop, would never try to make money as a seller. But if they wanted to change that, they could -- run calculations for sellers as to how much they should charge to be profitable, all the stuff that the average seller wouldn't think about.
Perhaps I'm being a little selfish here, but is that /really/ such a bad thing? While bands on average may sell less now, how many active bands are there now than there were in, say, 1998? While sales numbers dropped, has the pool of musicians grown?

Well, it's great as a consumer since there's an endless flow of new stuff, though some critics have wondered whether there's a tendency towards the ephemeral. But people don't get into music or film or any of the other creative arts because of economics; they get into it because they have some degree of talent and a great deal of passion. The economic aspect is a secondary necessity if you want to do it full time. But a lot of people will do it for very little, hence the stereotype of the Starving Artist. It's rewarding on other levels besides the financial.

why doesn't the same idea of cheaper means extend to music production? We're not talking film scores here, so what's wrong with a bedroom mix?

It depends on who's doing the mixing. This is a particular skillset I happen to have, but it's not one that was developed easily or overnight. So the idea of cheaper means most certainly does extend to music production (and indeed film scores and so on), but you still need skill to exploit the means. If I give you a Ferrari for $5, it doesn't automatically make you a good driver, does it? Likewise, you can get instruments for fairly cheap - I've got a bass guitar that cost me only $150 that I like very much. Unfortunately I'm a pretty terrible bass player, so if I was making a recording that required some great bass skills, I'd have to pay someone who had them. The low price of my guitar doesn't make it any easier to play than an instrument that costs 10x as much.

suboptimal payment processor and web host

Couldn't agree more.

(haven't seen FB since 2009-2010), what's wrong with a simple link to the Bandcamp page? After streaming a few things, are FB users just not clicking through?

I don't use FB much anymore either, but my understanding is that yes, they don't click through. Avid Facebook users want their content within Facebook's standardized UI and relatively well-curated system. Like AOL, Facebook is the online equivalent of the mall - somewhat bland, but fairly clean, safe, and above all well-organized. Myspace was just as technically impressive as Facebook back in the day, but because it included a host of customization options it wound up looking like a shopping district that had gone to seed and was covered in bad graffiti and flyposters. You could tell it was doomed when some people were making a business out of selling sparkly animated gifs as page backgrounds. Myspace was so freely customizable that browsing and navigation ended up becoming a chore for visitors; you'd go to someone's page, loud music would start, and you'd be frantically looking for the transport/volume controls - like multimedia Geocities. With Facebook you never get lost as a visitor, and if the site limits a page owner's visual expression somewhat, the same is true for everyone else so you're not at a real disadvantage.
I'm sure someone here will know the answer for this off the top of their head so.. how does this work under the hood? How does it get to act as a sort of 'filter' for stdout?

I've recently seen a system that can 'record' your terminal session for replay on the Web - http://ascii.io/ - whose 'recorder' forks off a psuedo terminal for this (https://github.com/sickill/ascii.io-cli/blob/master/bin/asci...). Would something like Grc use a similar approach or is there another way?
Wow, that's not a hasty generalization at all...

I'd say ereaders are generally owned by people who enjoy reading.
Here's an interesting dimension to look at: prevalence of e-readers (and iPads etc) vs mass transit use. My train to work in the morning is stuffed with people using various hand-held non-phone devices; I can't imagine they'd be as popular with car commuters :)

Another (silly) one: e-readers vs holidays taken in hot places. Maybe people don't buy e-readers in California because they're already somewhere sunny, so they don't take beach holidays? ;)
Ross Perot Jr and Google's Founders Launching a New Asteroid Mining Operation?
Surge in racist remarks on Internet prompts [S. Korean] state intervention
Monads are intellectually difficult at first, because it's hard to see how such disparate concepts (IO vs. List vs. Random vs. Async) so neatly follow the same pattern.

I personally find it more useful to start by "playing with" the black-box system, and then back-filling in theoretical knowledge if I need to do so. I find that, once I understand the motivation for the problem, the mathematics itself is pretty easy to understand. Math isn't complex or hard. It's simple. The hard part is figuring out the best way to provide the tools it provides.
That's much broader than the truth: what I can claim credit for is Twitter's adoption of Scala for Hadoop jobs (and the Scalding framework that resulted from that). Scala services were already in heavy use at Twitter long before I got there.
Is that why more people are learning FP? I think it's a different trend: recognition that programming is no longer about writing tight loops. Those have mostly been written. Instead, practical programming these days is dominated by orchestrating different people's code. Functional languages move more quickly here because functional code is, in some sense, more reusable by default.
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That manifesto sounded really bitter. Nobody's judging you for having no passion for programming. But the thing is programming is a craft many people are passionate about and those people are an order of magnitude more productive than you. Sure, if you are willing to work for what an average "just a job" pays, welcome aboard. Otherwise I'm better off hiring someone who gives a damn.

But the comments here perpetuating the fallacy that giving a damn somehow means putting in crazy hours offend me even more than the manifesto. Sure, it's common among the best programmers to live at work because they love their job, but it actually makes them less productive, not more. There's nothing wrong with working nine to five. It's not a manifestation of lack of passion. In fact it's the most rational thing to do and it's in your and your employer's best interest.
Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, and Pandora all come to mind off the top of my head.

I'm using your definition of app in that the app can be hooked up to a very large social network and thus employ network effects.
Somewhere other than the place that has the incentive for the contractor to hire large numbers of marginal employees in order to increase the contract's profit.

[Edit: total profit, not margin.]
I think it just means that the concept of book has separated from it's transfer medium. So "book" refers more to the content than the physical (or digital) representation. Compare to movie vs dvd.
> I hope you don't really view the world in a black & white narrative pitting the evil bloated government against sprightly nimble innovative companies.

You read a WHOLE lot in there.

Look at the point that I actually made, and JUST that point:

In Government, headcount is a (political, organization, etc.) benefit.

In industry it is a cost.
Delivering Cloud Printing to More Places
Does the S-1 and other stuff relating to the IPO state how much cash Facebook has / had?
To be fair, most people with cancer don't die of it. It all depends on the kind of cancer, but these are the general statistics http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2009_pops09/browse_csr.php?s...
It is definitely still a problem. If we discard the programming-centric judgement metric, we are left with essentially no common ground on which to form opinions, so that's clearly a non-starter as well.

I don't have an answer for all of this, on either side. It seems to be rift-causing issue from both directions. I think that rift is something of a false dichotomy, which is my main problem with this issue. The people in this debate are all actually on the same side - they care enough to debate it. What they care about may differ, but that hardly seems to matter in my eyes, as long as they do care.

(I dislike all the downvotes you've received out of disagreement - it was a thought-provoking comment that has continued the discussion. I upvoted, for what it's worth. Playing devil's advocate seems to have gotten you singed a bit. :) )
I had to do some work on an S3-backed project while out at sea on a cruise ship a few months ago (let's save the discussion about working on vacation for the 501 developer thread).

Thanks to git I was able to spool up my commits and then push when I pulled into port and had cellular access, but I wasn't really able to do everything I wanted with the paperclip-backed models without reliable/cheap network access.

An offline emulation mode for S3 sounds pretty nice, thanks for this!
Not if they paid most with FB stock valued at around $100 billion. Some caveats apply I'm sure, but I have a feeling FB will trade around $100 billion. Whether it's a good investment at $100 b or not it's a different matter, and people can disagree
I think it was pretty clear - "less money than they spent on Instagram"

"money".

Facebook didn't spend that in cash or most likely anywhere near that. Now if Space-x had invested 1% of their market and done this, the comparison would be fair.
North Korean Gov't uses ThemeForest
What would be better, in my opinion, is if some large tech company had a defensive publication similar to IBM's Technical Disclosure Bulletin and allowed private parties to publish to it.
I disagree.

An important part of investor due diligence is to try to figure out if there's a market for a product. A sizable Kickstarter campaign proves that in a way no due diligence ever could. Kickstarter campaigns also have an "with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" property. So failure rates could be lower.

Even if Kickstarter failure rates are higher than VC failure rates, Kickstarter still may be a good thing. First, Kickstarter can fund projects that are too small for VCs to bother with; there's a lot of value in the long tail. Second, they can fund projects that will be "merely" a 2-3x return. Third, this is making more capital available; if Kickstarter didn't exist it's not like the money would end up at Sequoia. Fourth and most important, Kickstarter campaigns will put less capital at risk. Most VCs can't afford to invest in less than $1m lumps, but Kickstarter campaigns can be 100x smaller.
Interesting in yesterdays Daily Telgraph there was a comment on Googles share price drop and how Wall Street wasn't keen on companies with multiple share classes.
Plus, I'm more likely to just hand over my old Kindle to a family member or friend than try to get money out of it. An old iPad might be worth a few hundred bucks - an old Kindle? It doesn't seem like it'd be worth the effort to put on Craigslist.
Originally I planned to name it ellarum - means "everybody" in Malayalam. But then I changed it to Family Matters to attract the target users when they search.
> "Demand is not completely inelastic at 0."

No. But wages and prices are sticky. And they've been noted as such since before there was unemployment or any employment policies of note. So it seems silly to further some notion that they may be the factors behind the stickiness and thus the failing demand.
You're right - I'd say the phone improved by life by more than $599. I was coming from a typical crappy phone with a joke of a web browser. The iPhone is the first phone I really used to access the web.
Algebra Touch
you still don't seem to understand how the site works. the tweets aren't the content. they just link to the content.

example: http://richtweets.com/2ri9c
They don't have to, they sell access to it. Why would they sell it when they can basically rent out time to access it?
Nikjju Mass injection campaign target more than 2 Millions Urls
Fashion shamballa necklace
Please don't do that. I'm a tech blogger, and it drives me insane that things like healthcare or education apps don't get the attention from readers that they deserve.

Do things that matter. Please. I will continue to write about them, even if nobody reads it.
Thanks. For now it is available only for the iPhone. Will soon release the Android version.
How Does The Coachella Tupac 'Hologram' Work?
Nice write-up, but Let’s not waste your time with suspense. The experiment’s result is Sears Doesn’t Have Shit.... CONCLUSION: PARTS UNAVAILABLE – STICK WITH E-BAY.
As best I can tell, this article looks at resale data on e-readers and attempts to extrapolate that to use of e-readers. I doubt this extrapolation is appropriate. If, for instance, e-reader use was a constant proportion in all the cities, and the proportion of users who resell their e-reader was a constant proportion, but the proportion of users who resell their TVs was higher in the non "cultured" cities, using the authors' logic you would incorrectly reach the conclusion that the non "cultured" cities have greater e-reader adoption.
Interesting but how does "Space Tourist" give one additional credibility other than as one who's written a large check?
Venture Capital is a game shooting for the 10x. To get the 500mm valuation, Instagram had to convince its investors that a $5B exit was a possibility.

So a lot of smart people were able to justify a higher valuation than what they just got.
Merging is pretty simple, and could probably use a little more TLC. The way we do it is that when we get a new document in the system, if the similarity score is above some threshold for documents in two different clusters we will consider merging those clusters. We then make the yes/no decision by comparing random documents from both clusters and averaging the scores, but the threshold we use here is a bit lower than the non-merging decisions (since we have the additional information of this new document doing a good job of linking the clusters).
Yes, this is true. I'll mention this in an update. When working in dev I've always just used regular HTTP. I'll mention how to configure Rails to use SSL.
The innovation here is using the type system to determine whether code should be executed on the client or the server. Contrast this with writing code manually for node and the browser. In this case, though it's all javascript, the programmer must explicitly divide the code for the server and the client. Or contrast with Meteor. Here there is a bit more code sharing, but the programmer still needs to think about client vs server (by checking `Meteor.is_client` and `Meteor.is_server` where appropriate).

In Opa (as I understand it--I haven't used it), the programmer can be explicit about where code execution should occur, but the compiler can also infer where it should occur, determine the best place to put the "data boundary", and warn the programmer if code is executed in an unsafe context.

For "traditional" next-gen web apps, it's a tough call that this is enough of a win to warrant learning a new language. Further, because this style of server-client programming is pretty immature, programmers may want to have tight control over where code is run.

However, I think this is very important work for the future of distributed computing. In particular, consider if we are ever to move from the web's dominant server-client architecture to a more fluid peer-to-peer model, with code moving from client to client where appropriate (i.e. mobile agents). For example, say my phone needs to grab some data from my laptop, but rather than have the laptop send all the raw data to my phone and have my phone process it, the system figures out that it would be more efficient for my phone to send code to my laptop, have the laptop process the data locally, then send the processed data back to my phone.

To be able to make inferences like in that example, I think we will need to use approaches like Opa.
Viaweb, in which PG et al take over the e-commerce market with the power of Lisp.
do keep us in the loop :)
Square's Next Round Could Swipe a $4 Billion Valuation
Unless I'm totally mis-understanding their data gathering, this post seems completely wrongheaded (or at the least, willfully ignorant and self-serving.)

They're indexing the popularity of e-readers in different MSAs by looking at how many are for sale on secondary markets, as a % of what's for sale on the secondary markets in that city. This seems like a really poor proxy for how popular e-readers are in those locations.

There are several things they're not correcting for:

* The more someone uses their e-reader, the less likely it is to end up on a secondary market - either because you're using it, or you still intend to use it, or you broke it. (This is what happened to my last Kindle - I used it heavily, but eventually something in my bag rammed into the screen and broke it to a point it was unsaleable.)

* Some cities may have a larger volume of items per-capita on a secondary market because people have more to sell. E.g. if you have a larger house with a garage, you probably have more items to potentially resell than someone with a tiny apartment.

* Cities with a lower proportion of smartphone / tablet users might buy more kindles. That doesn't mean they're consuming fewer ebooks.
Ideally, yes. But that isn't necessarily going to be the case when you're dealing with a massive shift from government agencies to private corporations (regardless of how they operate). The politics and the business may change.

If you want an accelerated view of what I was imagining, consider this: say SpaceX is wildly successful. Ten years from now, they have not only fulfilled all of their existing NASA contracts but they've also made huge advancements towards bringing all sorts of payloads to and from the ISS and maybe the moon, whatever. They could offer their services to any highest bidder, or, as a US company, could continue to cut deals with the government that they pay taxes to and bias all of their business in its favor. Their profits will not suffer because there will likely be similar ventures in other countries, and all in all it will be very similar to space exploration at the height of its frenzy, before everyone got all chummy with common goals for humanity and whatnot. I wish I could type this faster and more clearly but I've got to run– I hope you get my point though (even if you disagree).
Sure. I'm not saying that solving the hard problem of learning a black-box system is either impossible, or even necessarily un-fun.

I'm just saying that there is no such problem when it comes to learning, say, PHP. Or any other "townie" language.

So is the imposition of this arcane body of knowledge, "PL theory," whose DNA obviously originates not just in the academy but in the freakin' math department, and which has no relationship to any other body of knowledge commonly held or needed by the working programmer however 31337, essential to HOT-FP? Or could it be in some way dispensed with? If so, that would sure help out the mules on the way home, so to speak...
The killer app, when it comes, will probably be for parallelism.

If that's the case, then FP's got a problem in the form of OOP having already done it first and famously with projects like Hadoop.

I think that too much hay is made of the tradition of minimizing mutable state in functional programming. It's not something that's exclusive to FP. And I'd even go a step further and suggest that excessive use of mutable state isn't a hallmark of imperative programming so much as a hallmark of bad imperative programming. Though I'm sure there's also plenty of room for argument there.

Regardless, the fact remains that when functional programming proselytizers suggest that imperative programmers need FP to escape from the bugaboos of excessive mutability, it comes across as somewhat naive. While many functional languages make mutability less convenient, this is not the same as making immutability more convenient. Which I mention by way of pointing out that really the only thing people working in imperative languages need to do to cut back on their use of mutable state is cut back on their use of mutable state.

Now, if the current fad for FP made more noise about something that distinguishes functional languages much more tangibly, it might be more impressive. Take higher-order programming, something most functional languages do very well and most imperative languages do poorly (if at all). Imagine doing something like node.js in a non-functional language.

Or this couple minutes from a lecture on F#, where the presenter converts sequential code to asynchronous parallel code in just a few keystrokes. Sure, managing state properly is an important precondition to being able to do that, but the real magic is in the async workflow (a type of monad). http://youtu.be/HQ887aOZITY?t=53m
GDP is a first principles thing. It's designed to measure how much money is spent on consumption.

When the maid gets married, money is no longer spent on consuming her services, and that's the end of the story. Everything else is just accounting. In this example, the 25k of spending in the first case is counted one time extra because it passes through the maid on the way to some other saving or spending.
It's great that you've been able to upgrade from Leopard - released in 2007. Comparing that to upgrading XP is disingenuous, as Windows XP was released in 2001, which puts it in the vintage of OS X Puma.

I had a Dual G5 Power Mac from 2006. Consequently, I have not been able to upgrade that machine past Leopard. That's new hardware that had all of a single year of OS upgrades.

It's been demonstrated that you can run Windows 7 on Windows XP hardware. I know that when I upgraded from XP to 7 on a several-years-old machine when Win7 first came out, it was notably faster. I had installed the free beta, just to see, and was so surprised at how much better it was, I pre-ordered an operating system for the first time in my life.

What version of OSX can you run on a Mac from 2001?
The labels fought digital distribution, but musicians embraced it. Now that it's ubiquitous, the musicians are arguably worse off than before.
Airports aren't really conducive to good mood happy times in the first place!
Yep! http://www.hackersandfounders.com/events/60972502/?a=ea1_grp...