skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is total sales volume good metric to compare the Ubuntu, Apple App store, Amazon app store, Facebook App Center, the Microsoft Metro app store, and Google Play with one another?

Is the consensus that Google Play has too many free apps and they need to move many more apps for the same $ volume? Should app stores be working to establish a more enterprise-y (Amazon and Microsoft) or sophisticated (Apple) culture so that customers expect to spend money?

How serious is the potential for one successful store to sell HTML/CSS/Javascript apps that start eating the other stores' lunches?

Is Facebook in good shape because others' apps won't run directly in its domain? Or is it more vulnerable because it has so many vendors working against it to make "sticky" apps that could pull them away from the Facebook experience altogether?
I know lots of really good programmers who wouldn't necessarily be able to describe the details of linked list algorithms or malloc. They're doing high level stuff with numpy/scipy, or working on web frameworks, and whether they know malloc or not is irrelevant.

You keep talking about "the subject matter" and "programming" like it's one topic. It's not, hence the "you're an ass" comment - you're just repeating your argument ad nauseam and ignoring everything everyone else has to say.

It's possible to be a good programmer without knowing how linked lists work in excruciating detail - get over it.
JVM beating the shit out of Node.js? I guess that's not even slightly surprising to anyone outside the Node.js bubble.
Yup, totally correct and really not that pedantic. I realized that about two hours later when I reviewed my own comment and promptly punched myself…
Should Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson be fired for falsifying his resume?
I have a friend that did this in a summer job about 12 or 13 years ago. Got some temp work doing data entry, did it for 2 days before realising it could be done better. He wrote something in VB and did 15x more than everyone else over the course of a day.

They (obviously) thought something was wrong so examined what he'd done. When he explained about the program, they told him if he left the temp firm he was employed through and knocked on their door in the morning, they'd give him a job and pay him £2 more an hour. This he (naively) did, and with him came his software.

They fired 10 of the other temps the day he 'started' and kept his piece of software when he went back to university after the summer. In this case, the scumbag was most definitely the employer. When he told me the story I wept into my pint glass at what could have been.
This team is aiming at the Sikorsky Human-Powered Helicopter Competition, discussed on HN before[0]. The head of the team, Neal Saiki, has human-powered helicopter experience[1]. They're competing with a quadcopter design from the University of Maryland[2].

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=808828

[1] http://www.ntsworks.com/Helicopters.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Maryland_Gamera_H...
MirageTable: Microsoft presents augmented reality device
We desperately need a high quality open-source Firebase/Simperium/Spire. A simple, robust, realtime data synchronization layer with libraries for major platforms. These projects all look great, but outsourcing this infrastructure is simply not feasible for lots of projects.
Lock-in is a function of the time and effort it takes to move to an alternative solution, not just the data but the entire system.

Think of beanstalk, think of the dependence on proprietary queuing systems. The more services you use, the more locked-in and the harder it is to decouple your systems from AWS.

The lock-in is not visible if you think of AWS as EC2, the lock-in is how hard it is to build your apps dependent on all the AWS services and try to move anywhere else.
In my humble opinion, the greatest problem with all of them is that there are so many. Most of them are rather fine I think, but it can just be a serious pain in the ass getting your head around all of them.
Works beautifully on my iPhone. I can see this being used for filtering "results per page" on ajax shopping websites Great work!
I thought the same thing at first, but then I read how he's got this whole thing tied together.

>We download PDF batches, not paper...

>I wrote the script from scratch. It is a combination of reading the screen for data, a screen font reader, mouse automation/keyboard automation.

>It's part C++ and part "Game Maker", I did it for prototyping but got lazy and never rewrote it.

>Plus the script is pretty frustrating to setup in the morning, so they would get frustrated figuring it out. :P (requires a certain monitor arrangement at certain resolutions, windows in the right place, etc.

Management would be furious if it was a simple script that you just hit "Go" and it does everything, but it sounds like it's finicky enough that management would be too confused to be angry.
That is not a floppy disk. It's a Save icon.

See the difference?
The journals would not vanish if the publisher went bankrupt. Their back issues would become accessible through Portico (http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/), which exists precisely for that purpose.

The endgame is ensuring that everyone has access to scientific research. Whether or not the publishers continue to be in business is not relevant, as long as we are able to wrest away the literature which they are holding hostage.
Its only correspondence with reality is the statement that everything wrong with Latin America is the US's fault. While this is true, everything else is a lie

Was this a...typo or something? Do you actually think that?
This almost seems unreal. What kind of latency would you be dealing with when your application(s) deal with many concurrent connections? For example, say a cross-platform multiplayer game with a persistent, shared world?
No, not really. You can happily run blocking and non-blocking code on the JVM without problems. The inability of JavaScript to do that created the need make everything asynchronous, not the other way around.
Don't forget about https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream which expects 0.3 to be dropped later this month. Very extensible.
Automating work is not evil. It is the reason we are not all subsistence farmers.
I meant that laziness leads to not testing. And the "bullshit' that arises from not testing are the bugs and regressions that happen after you role out anything new that isn't completely self contained.

"Once the code is well-written, I don't think that adding tests would significantly improve my productivity"

Yeah, if you never touch that code again then it would not, I agree. I don't have many modules or classes that never change though. I suppose there might be other types of programming where that's not the case.
The fact that they don't have anything more secure than unencrypted email gives reason to doubt that they know how to protect information like that.

An encrypted mail attachment would be a start -- if you use a second channel to deliver the secret key, e.g. call them up to tell them the password.
Negative. To publish in an Elsevier journal you must sign away your copyright. The authors do NOT hold copyright. And that's part of why the situation is so ridiculous and urgently needs to be fixed.
Very nice post, thanks!
"With Simperium, you own your data - that's important!"

Not to take away from some of the great projects featured on HN recently, but statements by Simperium like this make me much happier as a developer and business owner: "We believe the best apps have both a great user experience and unique backend services.".

From https://simperium.com/overview/:
It is not a backend-as-a-service. We believe the best apps have both a great user experience and unique backend services. Our focus is to provide a great data layer between your frontend and backend while integrating with other providers of tools, hosting, and services.
Part of leveling up from peon to not-quite-sure-but-definitely-not-peon was learning how to talk the part.

(Funny sidenote: About ten years to the day ago, I put in a proposal at a particular megacorp to script up something rather than spending $15,000 having the seasonal data entry clerks give themselves carpal tunnel syndrome doing it manually. It was not accepted, and my hands hurt like the dickens for most of the summer.)
I would like to hear an "explain it to me like I'm five" that explained what computer "files" and "folders" are and how they work without using the words or their associated metaphors.

I agree some of the actual system specific icons and metaphors are outdated and junk, but I guess I'm in the camp that thinks these basic metaphors are actually useful in the education of computer interface / mechanisms.
Plus, once a reference is established (like the floppy disk) it's idiotic to always replace it with the latest tech (we'd have zip drives in the nineties, usb drives in the '00s, the cloud today, etc etc..)
This trend is not going away, it's only going to increase. The ones with technical knowledge will continue to disproportionately receive money over those who don't.

I think this person would really enjoy reading Race Against the Machine, written by two MIT researchers and economists. I have a guest post going up tomorrow on VentureBeat about this, but it's interesting to see people call him a scumbag because he has a technological edge on them.

This is a pretty good example of people working against the machine instead of with it. Those people will probably soon be out of jobs, but there's nothing to stop them from learning a scripting language that would make them more productive in their work. They now know there's a script that can cause them to increase their productivity. The bonus pool is still up for grabs if they spent a few weekends trying to learn Ruby or Python.
Absolutely. Maybe office politics works differently in the states (where I presume he's from), but it sounds like he's keeping it quite so he can screw around at work.

If I made a script that deals with 98% of all of my work I could not imagine not sharing that with my bosses. To me (and I'm sure lots of people don't share this sentiment) it would feel morally wrong not to.
Here is an anecdote: A similar data-entry grunt creates a set of excel macros on his private time at home, then presents his work to his team at a meeting. He surely expected to be met with praise, for saving countless hours of mind-numbing work so that the man-hours could be used on more creative and challenging tasks.

His high hopes for his fellow coworkers and his own future would be dashed though. The employee was branded as a "hacker" (in the Hollywood movie sense), and was ostracized. He eventually developed clinical depression, and resigned from the company.

Where did this happen? The story is probably not unfamiliar to patio11, who lives in the country where this occurred: Japan.

P.S.: I wish I had been a Hacker News reader back when I lived in Nagoya from 2009-2010. It would have been nice to talk to you in person :).
His naive approach will lead to either him or his entire department getting replaced by a computer.
>Now that the transition is largely complete and many people are coming of age who have never known a world without computers, its time to move beyond anachronistic metaphors.

They might have been metaphors once, now they are idioms.

The people who "have never known a world without computers" have also never known a world where there weren't filesystem folders and files.
I would call it "node.js's largest implementation issue". It is not that JavaScript gives you another choice, while you make it sound like it was a principled decision.

Other platforms/languages have real concurrency constructs and don't suffer node's limitations.
Is this funding or working capital? Most watches come at cost through KS. They would need to seriously ramp up the supply chain to fulfill the orders in the promised timescale. And that would need expensive resources - some of which cannot be met via the $10mm (as most of it might get consumed in manufacturing). Though further traditional funding should be the least of their problems - bet the VCs are clamoring for a piece now.

Hope they can find a Foxconn to manufacture everything in time and they can ramp up their operations team. My best wishes to them - really hope they nail it. I bet next few months would see war scale efforts from them.
This strategy would be no worse than the status quo for those connections, you'd still end up using Cubic.

But if by good luck you were only crossing paths with Vegas, you would both get a smoother ride. And as the strategy spread, that would happen more often.
Full Show 5/8/12: Mitt Romney is a liar
Why do I have to still log-in to Facebook? Why can't I run Windows games on my iPad? Why can't I just talk to my computer like Star Trek?

Programmers know why, but users don't. Same goes for icons: designers know what they're doing & why...
محمود مختار 
محمود مختار

محمود, مختار

http://www.dlu3a.com/game/43.html
The difficult part about reading this thread was having to ask, after every point, "well, then what?"

Out computer verbs are based off of (admittedly, maybe outdated) similar verbs. Our electronic work mirrors our physical work solely because of the limitations of our language constructs. I have it on good authority that there is not a single language that has words that that specifically define what we do on a computer that would be better suited and more efficient than a physical-describing counterpart.

So, as mentioned earlier, the floppy metaphor: OK, I get it. But clipboards, bookmarks, Manila folders? How would you describe an object that lets you take information from one place to another in 32px? What physical object are you aware of that allows you to mark your place amidst a vast density of information? Don't even get me started on the folders.

It's coy to label them "old-people icons" -- it's clever, I dig it -- but if tomorrow we were to unveil a new set of nouns and verbs to describe computer objects, the reigning argument would be that they never made sense at all.

And have fun trying to explain to your grandfather/mother/nephew how to uses computer without having any real-world jargon to borrow from.
If Reed Elsevier went out of business (very unlikely because it doesn't just do academic publishing, it also does publishing in other small but lucrative niches), it would make room for some great open-access journals. The same people and institutions who write the current journals would still be involved, their libraries would work more efficiently at a fraction of the cost, and there would be at least one universally available public library indexing and archiving the open-access work.

The digital library wouldn't vanish even if Elsevier filed for bankruptcy. But even imagining some James Bond villain destroying all copies, the journals would be digitised again from library copies, possibly something like the Google Books initiative. The libraries wouldn't fall twice for a partnership with a cartel creating newly exclusive rights.
Nerf bars,running boards
It was theusual suspectsfrom my club, the Sierra Treasure Hunters: Steve ‘Medfly’ Medley and ‘Bronco’ Matt in Jeep Rubicons, Kevin Kidwell and Troy Holmes in Kevin’s custom YJ, and Will Corbett and his son Wade in a home-built Jeep CJ-7 with custom running boards andnerf bars.
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While I support the point behind this article, some of them are... not on point.

> Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool they've never used in their lives.

What have screwdrivers and wrenches been replaced with?
I love how there's a spool of camera film in the photo for the "voice mail" icon. Sounds like someone's too young for those flat cameras!
That sounds like a great idea but definitely not something I'd relish putting time into. Seeing my kids play games I've made for them is satisfying in a way curating apps could never be.
We should tell them we don't like it instead of just commenting in a HN thread.

Tweet them, or something.

Bitbucket looks great still.
UPDATE: (140 minutes later) They are now officially sold out on Kickstarter. Other reports of them selling out were premature.

This means that they sold out at 6:37 PM eastern time, 3:37 PM pacific, with 85,420 watches total. The last one sold was in the $125 tier.
Advanced TCP Analysis with Python
Boat accessories
Exactly, who cares if an icon is based on a dated object if it's understood. All things become dated eventually, especially in the tech world

What's the alternative, pick something abstract that confuses people. That didn't work out so well for the recent GMail redesign.
I wonder if the Egyptians had the same problem.
The github links on the samples page are broken (they have 'examples' instead of 'samples' in the path).
That's possible, but only if they're stupid. They'd be losing someone who can knows their business and could automate their next manual process.

I'd suggest he say this: "hey boss, I think I can automate this process, increasing accuracy and productivity. Would you give me salary X if I can do it?"

If the boss says "awesome, yes!", then he's got a better job.

If the boss says no or is lukewarm, he could keep doing what he's doing, but actually study programming in the time he's goofing off and start a job search.

Either way, he's on a path to getting to program, not having to hide it, and getting properly compensated.

The more difficult question is: what if they lay off his coworkers because of his innovation? How should he feel then?
I had the same reaction upon seeing that photo. My dominant hand has been in a cast for four months, so I've become left handed. The new dominant hand is rather picky about writing utensils, and this one looks like it fits the bill nicely.
This gave me something to think about.

When icons fail to be understood, they can fail hard. I spent a lot of time frustrated with the new gmail design until I changed the icons to text.
You realize that his "manager" is probably some kid just out of college, or another career grunt just clocking in the hours, right? This is data entry. There's no rewarding of initiative in that world: not at the bottom nor in the middle. You have to get to low level executives before you start seeing people with an interest in "changing" or "improving" the system.
I think you've got the wrong link there. You seem to have meant to add something of substance, but the link is to a post that appears to do little more than say "niggaz" a lot and throw mud in pretty much all directions.
I'd love to go to schools and get kids in groups like <15years or <10 years and ask them to design icons for these things and see what they come up with. They have a lot less cultural history and technological history. might be interesting.

Or maybe they've learned all these icons and while not getting what they did mean, they understand what they mean now, like letters of a new alphabet. Like how many Asian script characters are descendants of more obvious pictograms of actions. They still have meaning even if they've evolved a bit and even changed.
This will be great for small businesses!
The FCC's idea that 200kbps is "broadband" is bullshit. A hard drive fedexed across-country overnight is "broadband" by that definition, but the latency makes it pretty unpalatable, don't you think?
Well, it might be that the guy you save from prosecution is the same one that just broke into their next door neighbour's house. And hey, the neighbour might have thought it was his right, and you might agree. But that isn't the point.

The actual point is that rights and laws are supposed to be generated by consensus. Doing something just because you're able to isn't generating by consensus - it's happening because a sufficient number of jurors in a case decided they disagreed with something.
Who cares? A floppy disk nowadays is the thing that indicates "save", and that's it. You don't have to have seen a floppy disk to know that it's the save icon. If that were the case, company logos would be objects. A swoosh is Nike, and that's that.
Latency is good right now (low hundreds or less), but for launch we focused on data integrity and reliability.

That leaves room for improvement, including some low hanging fruit like eventually giving you the ability to disable versioning for certain kinds of data (like multiplayer updates).
the floppy disk icon for saving is a bit of an anachronism, but so is saving. there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of value in re-imagining the icon for an action that is mostly unnecessary in modern apps.
As much as I foam at the mouth around here against many law enforcement actions, both parties did the right thing here.

It's not like they showed up in the middle of the night and yanked their entire servers out of the office without a warrant and covered it up under "homeland security" or other nonsense.

They did it the proper way through the courts with a judge and public documentation of their actions, and asked for only a subset of the data (limited to a year and GA).

Kudos to SparkFun for responding with caution.

That said, I think the lead will be useless to them because the person could have bought it anywhere, even outside the USA and brought it into GA. Apparently there are also clones now of sparkfun boards complete with logo.
Marine electronics
Yet, it would be cool if I could explicitly tell Darcs about patch dependencies, maybe at `record` time. It's no guarantee (I could forget some), but it could help avoid screw-ups when cherry picking.
I could use this service, but I can't seem to find the pricing for image moderation. The blog post in the link says "clear pricing" but the products page is undefined for image moderation: http://crowdflower.com/products
Apache Releases TomEE 1.0 Java EE Web Profile Certified Stack
It seems to use Software Transactional Memory scheme. I hope that it will work better with hardware-aided transactional memory in Intel's next generation architecture Haswell.
Some of the most beautifully formatted API docs I've ever seen. It's really nice to have design care applied to developer pages.
The irony is that there's a concurrent and opposite reaction to the non-traditional new icons used on Github.

The simple reason the save icon still looks like a floppy disk is because everyone expects it to look like that.
You missed Amazon: Appstore

And Apple went after them for trademark infringement, so we already have our trademark troll.
Just stick to programming and other interesting sub-reddits. Avoid politics etc
Actually it's now Google Play
Building a Profitable Business Using Dropshippers « « ModelMFG ModelMFG
Funding Etsy’s Future
He keeps using this word "anti-pattern". I don't think it means what he thinks it means.

What the rant meant to say is "virtualenv can be confusing for beginners, we should stop suggesting it to them".

But does this even happen? I've personally never seen an article, post, manual etc that advocates virtualenv to Python beginners. To people that already know some Python and want to write a web app, yes, but I don't think I ever saw a "Starting out learning Python? Then use virtualenv" advice.

Perhaps one can find one or two texts on the net that do give it. I doubt one can find five.
Discussion of a much more negative take on Romer's "charter city" idea from two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850900
Is this from the future? We still save to disks... sure the media has changed, but we're doing the same task.

After reviewing the author, filed under: Comedy!
they should be furious with themselves because one of their employees had a great idea that could lower their costs?