skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried all 3 (Google, Facebook and LinkedIn). For my circumstances, Facebook won by a mile. Google did ok. LinkedIn was a complete disaster.

http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/04/01/sell-your-google-stock-li... (the blog post shows early numbers, the real numbers, after longer experimentation, show the exact same results)
People belittle Ballmer because:

(1) they were the big villain for a long time and there's still a lot of unspent schadenfreude with their name on it.

(2) they've always been juxtaposed with Apple which is in meteoric rise like nothing we've really ever seen.

(3) because monkey boy

Their stock price is flat only if you don't include the dividends they've paid out.
Will London be the Greenest Olympic Games Ever?
Design as a Process
That's like saying, "Well, the retirement calculator said I could earn 6% on my portfolio, so it can't possibly turn out any other way."

Both sorts of calculators are based on broad averages and simplifying assumptions. It's not like the people at about.com went out and carefully measured intake, metabolism, and weight loss for 10,000 people, making sure to have enough data to get statistical resolution between a 300-pound builder and a 300-pound couch potato.
This has no meaning if they see what they are looking for right in front of them.
Sure, that seems to be the default for most things, but I guess what I really meant to ask was more about specific sites that do their own ads, outside of Adwords. I'm guessing industry vertical sites are good for B2B, but I'd love to hear about other folk's experience in that regard.
I suspect the actual meaning is that 10 extra pounds on the 200 pound guy takes more to maintain than 10 extra pounds on the 300 pound guy.

In other words, it's not a linear relationship.

That seems to make a lot of sense, actually.
a lot of this seems to be anti-DRM protests which hits close to home after that time my internet was down and i wanted to play Assassin's Creed 2
I was pretty excited about SocialCam when they first launched, and sad when I saw "OMG SEE THIS" type videos spreading via their app on FB.

Why can't we have an instagram of video? It sucks to see my friends tricked into clicking on racy videos on FB and sharing them accidentally, a group of folks as awesome as the SocialCam team shouldn't have to resort to this type of trickery.
MySQL is a good example of distributed teams working in the real world
Iris Couch's first blog post was about how to leave them for other providers http://www.iriscouch.com/blog/2011/05/how-to-bail-out-on-iri...
Dear Facebook, Please Stop Acqui-hiring Everything.
So, we all know about the Facebook acquisition of Instagram. When that happened, I went out and searched for a replacement. I had just started using Instagram (when it came out for android) so it was a bit of a 'meh' moment. Eventually, I settled on the LightBox Photo app. A decent little app for wasting time by messing with photo filters.

Now, it appears Facebook has bought them and they are closing down. :(

Am I the only one who's put off by the massive acqui-hiring that Facebook is doing? To me, it speaks of a lack of internal innovation.
Ah, but it would be so interesting if it actually had all been manufactured! I think this opinion comes from my love of movies where, in the end, the entire plot turns out to have been elaborately planned by the clever hero all along. I'm thinking of The Thomas Crown Affair (Pierce Brosnan verison) among others.
If I remembered correctly, Facebook uses this method to deliver their 1GB PHP-converted-to-C++-then-compiled binary to their server farms because that's the only way they can update without crashing some central servers.
Review of a pretty cool startup website
Me too, for the most part I'm almost totally oblivious to them. I don't even bother with an ad blocker. I suppose it's the result of being bombarded with ads all my life, I'm immune to their charms.
It's used for distributing large data sets as well, though I suppose whether that's a widespread use is arguable.
"I would love to see the Redis datatypes built into it and Postgres might then become the strongest choice when selecting tools for my next app."

Have you considered writing an extension to do that? It may be easier than you think; postgresql has a powerful extension mechanism (you can even do specialized indexing!).

As far as I can tell, JSON only made it into core because there are expected to be many users very quickly. But that doesn't scale -- it's better for users to look at pgxn.org and developers to use the extension mechanism. Once that becomes a matter of course, we'll see an explosion of specialized extensions.
>It makes it sound like we could just cut food production across the board and prevent obesity.

that would actually work.

anyway, let's continue with your automobile parable. I think you're actually spot on with the quality argument. it was necessary to increase safety in passenger vehicles by state intervention (Euro NCAP), and alike the state, in my opinion, needs to chip in if consumers can't control their eating behaviour (just like there always will be irresponsible drivers out there). I'm actually a die hard libertarian, but it is hard to argue that imposing some sort of "fat tax" wouldn't actually reduce obesity (especially since obesity is higher in low income households)

heck - we got the smokers to feel terrible about themselves, I bet we can do the same to fat people... /rant
you just made their case against bittorrent easier!

Ubuntu have a bittorrent client, and everyone knows that's only used to pirate movies and music! so it's a facilitator.
It also appears that Swiffy, the SWF-to-HTML converter (http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/) was used for helping to generate some of those animations.
Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived
Ask HN: Startups in Wichita, Kansas?
Hi, I was just wondering: are there any startups based in Wichita? If so, which ones?
I second that. In April I tried an experiment: home-cooked meals at least twice a day, and nothing with a human-boosted glycemic load. E.g., nothing with added sugar, no refined carbs, no fruit juice.

Portion control was much, much easier. I still ate until I felt full; I just felt full a lot sooner, and experienced a big drop in between-meal cravings.
Media Queries Can't Be Used for Resolution Negotiation (responsive images)
It is possible to get a digital only copy directly from Blizzard.
Same with me I cannot reach it either.
Doesn't Google Storage for developers also have the same protocol as AWS S3?

And I heard there are ope-source S3 clones as well, e.g. http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/pWalrus/index.shtml#hdfs
Was just about to post this up myself. Awesome stuff, TweenLite was a great library for using with ActionScript so to have that ease of programming and performance of animations come to JS is exciting! The performance seems to be very impressive judging by the examples. Can't wait to have a proper play around!
I can't stand Social[Cam|Reader] style apps. I've always found it to be rather annoying to click on an article or video shared on Facebook, only to be told I need to grant permissions to an app. It just motivates me to hide all posts from those apps.
Or FB's IPO is some kind of threat to GM's stock price/marketcap/etc and they want to do something to try to take the wind out of the IPO.
Visual Reboot of Firefox Mobile for Android
re 3: there are covers to allow you to put the book cover on your kindle
I assume the figure is for all their brands, not just the GM page?
Not always. Most employers will likely realize the differences in cost of living and try to get you relative to your local market. One of the benefits of remote employees for an employer is around being more cost effective.

I've also been in the situation working for a remote employee who tried to pay comparable CA wages (wasn't in the Bay Area), but didn't understand the true cost of living differences. Also been on the flip side, in office in SF and looking for people in cheaper markets.
Fork-join is not a collection (or any data structure for that matter). It is a parallel computation process meant to make good use of all available processors. You can use fork-join to process a collection like an array or a tree in parallel, and you can use it to factor a single integer in parallel.
Stay Close to Sales
Which is old news, they don't work. You may get lots of placed ads, but very few clicks and few actual leads. But we're B2B, so not best fit as is.
I fear that it does not scale to anything that can be used to develop actual software with.

The level of 'equal' is not convincing.
The thing being argued here isn't whether Jeff or Zed is right, the thing being argued is that Zed Shaw grossly misinterpreted what Jeff was saying, which he did.
How Not to teach a kid to program
So if the users have their data and the app is open-sourced, what prevents someone from starting the app up again (besides the friction to users)?
Opera does has built-in torrent support
Don't write too much code before you have a customer
Critical questions for bug data
Stop stopping him from stopping them from telling you to code or not to code.
I'd be completely comfortable with calling that malware.
Probably not even within an order of magnitude or two. There are a lot of URLs, including the 'dark web' that doesn't get crawled.
This is the first post that I would down vote if I could. Learning might not be binary, but the industrial revolution was built on the division of labor, and all Jeff was saying is that not everyone needs to learn how to code. If computer scientists/programmers/coders do their job properly, people with absolutely no understanding of the workings of their computers will be able to drive effectively, just as people can drive without understanding how a car works. Some level of encapsulation is a good thing, and while learning how certain things work is generally a good idea, it comes with an opportunity cost, which is especially high when we are talking about the mayor of NYC. Should Obama be learning how to code? Absolutely not. I agree with most of Zed's argument, however he does not respond to Jeff at all.
Giant Paperclips Turn Any Slab of Wood Into a Sturdy Table
> For what it's worth, I don't think it's strictly fair to call all plugins that inject ads onto pages "malware."

Quite a bit of malware runs with user "consent", and purports to provide some value to the user. However, "malware" does often has the connotation of something that exploited a security vulnerability to end up on the system, hence terms like "adware" to cover software that introduces advertisements and often gets installed along with some other software package the user actually wanted. And given the extensive tracking associated with most advertising, pretty much any adware will also qualify as spyware, though not to the same degree as software like keyloggers and similar.

Some people have also introduced broader terms like "badware" to encompass many different categories (https://stopbadware.org/), but that term hasn't caught on nearly as much as "malware", "spyware", and "adware".

If a user truly did intentionally install a piece of software that explicitly said it would add advertising to arbitrary websites, and the software installed with the full knowledge and consent of the user, then by all means let the user annoy themselves. But for every user somehow simultaneously knowledgeable enough to figure that out and yet not knowledgeable enough to avoid it, there exist several million users with unwanted adware, spyware, and malware on their systems.

(And in many cases, such a "choice" affects more than just that one user; most spam comes from infected systems, for instance, since that has a lot more "value" than just spamming the user of the infected system.)
The Calxeda solution offers very much better power density for certain compute workloads.
Add to that the fact that every device has a different processor model, gpu, and most of the software on the device is locked.
You're confusing branding with direct call to action advertising. Two complete different things and priced differently. Big brands aren't going for the people about to buy a car, they are working way before that. By making you see the brand day after day it becomes ingrained so that when you are ready to buy a car you think GM.
About 80% of users are on iOS 5.0+, so, 20% are < 5.0. But the 20% that are < 5.0 are not the ones that will be downloading and installing fancy new apps. If they were big app consumers, they would update the OS.
Why all PaaS providers (Heroku, CF, OpenShift) building their CLI tools using Ruby?
Are they copying Heroku?
Maybe because Python used for OS itself?
What dotCloud uses?
Twitter also: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/murder-fast-datacente...
What do tools buy me?
Have you even tried to get out of the defense contracting world and work at one of the non-shitty jobs that commenters here keep futilely trying to tell you exist?
people are too busy discussing whether others should or shouldn't learn coding.

i should say that i really liked the design. it is simple and elegant.

i have a suggestion though. since you let me create tasks without signing up or signing in, why don't you keep them in local storage so when i close and reopen the app some other time, during the day, my list greets me?
Not too detailed, but a nice overview that I think succeeds in having some information while being engaging.

The only thing that particularly confused me was this line:

> We also custom-build all of our servers so they are 93% efficient.

How do you measure overall efficiency of a server as a percentage, rather than some kind of compute-per-watt metric? I assume it's not 93% of the theoretically optimal electron->computron conversion factor. ;-) The only thing I can guess is that it's the average efficiency of the power supplies?
I think the fact that the two of you knew each other previously makes this whole thing even weirder. After all, it would have been bad enough to do this and the subsequent reaction to a stranger but it to a friend makes even less sense.
Is it just me or are the highs in developer salaries kind of low? I know people who make $250k+/year at Google and other companies. If I took full salary as a mobile developer (rather than leaving it in our company's reserves) I would make about $300k/year.
But they should rebuild every 3 or 4 years, if they find a better technology, yes? That was one of his points that he lists at the bottom:

"Rewrite mercilessly (Our core search system is now on its 5th generation.)"
Yes, there is a "you" who went to the facility and then went home. There is also a "you" who went to the facility and subsequently blacked out only to wake up later somewhere else. An outside observer sees you walk in, a scan made, and you walk out. From the perspective of the post-original, you walked in, scanned, then walked out. From the perspective of the copy, you walked in, blacked out, and then woke up later.

I guess my point is just that when you refer to yourself pre-cloning, you have to realize that you're speaking (and thinking) for the copy as well. It's fun to think about. Makes for great sci-fi.
IP-Address Can’t Even Identify a State, BitTorrent Judge Rules
BitTorrent is a great technical advancement. It's a fantastic, brilliant, genius new invention that makes it much much easier to share data. It, paradoxically, gets faster the more people who want to download! It's a brilliant technical solution to a big, pressing, expensive problem.

I am annoyed when such a marvelous technical solution is seen as nothing more than a shady, illegal software. ☹
You should also read a book about selling and try to practice it in some way - I've learned that's much harder compared with the programming thing. "Everyone can create a copy of Facebook - but everyone can't get the users!"
Damian Conway provides some excellent insight/advice on underscores vs hyphens:

Personally, I'd prefer to see the English conventions carried over to
the use of general use of hyphen and underscore in identifiers in
the core (and everywhere else).

By that, I mean that, in English, the hyphen is notionally a
"higher precedence" word-separator than the space
(or than its intra-identifier stand-in: the underscore).

For example: there's an important difference between:

initiate_main-sequence_detonator_phase()

and:

initiate_main_sequence-detonator_phase()

The former initiates the detonator phase for the main sequence;
the latter initiates the main phase of the sequence detonator.

More simply, there's a difference between:

$obj1.set_difference($obj2);

and:

$obj1.set-difference($obj2);

The first is setting a difference; the second is computing a difference-of-sets.

The rule I intend to use and recommend when employing this new
identifier character in multiword names is that you should place an
underscore between "ordinary unrelated" words, and a hyphen only
between a word and some modifier that applies specifically to that word.

Which, if applied to Temporal, would lead to:

my $now = DateTime.from_epoch(time);

The C<day> method also has the synonym C<day-of-month>.

(These are also available through the methods C<week-year> and
C<week-number>, respectively.)

There's a C<day-of-week> method,

The C<weekday-of-month> method returns a number 1..5

The C<day-of-quarter> method returns the day of the quarter.

The C<day-of-year> method returns the day of the year,

The method C<whole-second> returns the second truncated to an integer.

The C<time-zone> method returns the C<DateTime::TimeZone> object

(i.e. only C<.from_epoch()> actually uses underscore).

Oh, and the optional C<:timezone> argument to C<.new()> should probably
become C<:time-zone> for consistency with the C<.time-zone()> method
(or, preferably, we should jut bite the bullet and go with C<timezone>
throughout).

Damian

From Perl6 mailing list: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.language/2010/04/m...
The problem is that a lot of people, even very smart people, talk like idiots. One of the best things about reading is that all the uhms, ahs and verbal ticks have been removed. There's no scenario in which I can see myself taking writing advice from someone who pens three consecutive single-sentence "paragraphs" and passes off fragments such as "Mouth open." or "Goosebumps." as sentences. The writing of this post was so grating that it interfered with the content and stopped me from getting to the end. Of course it's his blog and he's free to write how he pleases, but this is not the guy to be teaching the world how to write.

Physician, heal thyself.
It is a great way to distribute content. It more or less scales the delivery network in step with the number of content consumers.

There's also an interesting economic to torrents...the crappier the content, the fewer people seed. The fewer people that seed, the harder it is to get and the longer it takes. On the flip side, really great content gets seeded like crazy, and everyone can enjoy it quickly.
Paul Buchheit wrote a good essay on identity called "I am nothing" which is closely related to "don't become anything": http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.ca/2011/08/i-am-nothing.html

I think that's the best part of this article. The criticism of Jeff Atwood's post is off the mark. Atwood wasn't being elitist, he was pointing out flaws in the theory that everybody ought to "learn to code" at a superficial level by putting in a few hours learning Javascript. For many people, more abstract problem solving skills would be more useful and the technical details will change or be forgotten.

The criticism of K&R C and so on also rubbed me the wrong way. That is a great, concise book that is still relevant in a lot of ways. If you're really good with high-level languages like Javascript or Ruby you might be able to do some good work but, all else being equal, you're more limited than somebody who also understands a wider array of programming concepts and more fundamental aspects of how computers work.
Sharing my Demo Video Stats - Any tips or comparisons?
Well I had a moment of astonishment today when I looked at our page analytics for the set of 9 demo videos our company serves up for prospects.

I was surprised that the videos actually had great stats according to GA. I expected the average time on page to be much lower than the video time suggesting that users bug out before the video finished. Looking at the past year the average time on page was the same or more than the video length.

Are our prospects actually watching these things in their entirety? Wow, especially since they are very instructional and plain but maybe that is what our prospects want to see for our industry.

Does anyone place a lot of emphasis on demo videos and their stats? Any comparisons?
The AK-47 is capable of getting out more rounds in less time than a traditional hunting rifle. So you'd be able to shoot the crap out of something a bit easier. So if that was your plan then the AK-47 is ideal. Otherwise... not so much. That was all.
..?

I don't see a personal attack in my message. Your original post suggested that android fragmentation is not a problem if I just think of it differently. A logical extension of that is that it's my fault for seeing it as a problem as I'm dealing with it incorrectly.

That doesn't make my users any happier. It doesn't make their bug reports go away. That doesn't make their phones all mount to the same mountpoint. It doesn't make me sleep better at night.

That's not an attack. Neither is claiming your viewpoint is one of a non-developer because pragmatically speaking a developer deals with these problems daily so "thinking of it differently" really makes no difference to the size of the problem.

Please don't accuse me of a logical fallacy here, thank you.
How to Assert Copyright Over Your Work When It's Been Plagiarized
Diablo 3's Launch Day: An Example of Gaming Companies that don't Understand Ops
A protocol is a set of questions and answers - so is just as copyright-able as an API, or a play.

Shall I compare thee to a JPEG header, thou are more fair and ...
What about hardware registers such as the layout for memory-mapped I/O? You know, "write value X to byte offset Y to switch the device into state Z."

If that's copyrightable, the Linux kernel is basically one big copyright violation, because I'm sure a lot of the device driver writers weren't given a license...
Wow - on Hacker News, you're going to dismiss people who start up and bootstrap successful technology companies as just "giving themselves a job"?

On Hacker News.

I mean, Mark Zuckerberg's only ever had one job, which he gave to himself. So we can pretty much ignore anything he has to say, too. How many jobs has Paul Graham had? Two, maybe? How many of them were "given to him by himself"? I think... two?
Also, that figure is probably not entirely marketing as they also maintain a customer service presence.
Facebook has a problem
And the title of the response says "Please don't become anything." I think it's better to focus on the content, not the title.
IIRC The last version of Sun's 'ls' command used every upper and lower case character as an option flag.

Oracle now owns Sun and so has copyright on every upper and lower case letter ( at least when used as an option flag)
Chrome 19 Launches, Now Features Built-In Tab Syncing
Does valve publish it's bittorrent support anywhere?

besides hiring the guy? i mean, one would think responsible news outlets (are there any?) would request valves comment everytime they publish the RIAA side, since valve profits buckets from it.
Because lots of people only can BitTorrent. If you stop BT, then lots of your customers who are using bandwidth will give up and get their pirated files elsewhere. A dedicated advanced minority will not.

The purpose of blocking isn't to block all pirating (which it fails at), but to significantly reduce bandwidth (which it does).
I don't follow you. Are you agreeing or disagreeing that this move looks like the outcome of a failed behind-the-scenes negotiation or even an extortion attempt on GM's part?
Vert.x: Why the JVM May Put Node.js on the Ropes