skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hey did this same thing with Aquantive (sp?), and shareholders didn't do jack. That acquisition had to be the biggest $6B wasted EVER.

Sadly, nothing you expect/want to happen will.
Make Creative and Attractive Facebook Profile
Google+ loses key partners as PopCap, Wooga pull games
I wouldn't get too excited...it's been in development hell pretty much since the book was published. God knows how many writers have actually had a go at it, but I'm willing to bet a dozen or so (usually when a director gets attached they re-write the script with their preferred screenwriter).

You end up with this situation where the studio has to release something, because they've spent so much money buying the options, paying for ump-teen rewrites, etc. Studios don't account this as a 'loss', since in theory they will make the money back when the film is released. There comes a point in development hell where you have to release something, because either a) your losses on the film are at a point where you can't keep rolling them over, or b) your options are going to expire - and if you're the studio executive who decides not to make the film and commit that loss to paper you can bet you won't be with the studio for much longer.

The best case is you end up with something like Watchmen (which had been in development for about 20 years and had half a dozen big name directors attached, like Gilliam and Aronofsky). The final result is a reasonable film, although one that doesn't really compare to the source material and is fairly quickly forgotten. The worst case is the film doesn't get made (although if you're passionate about the source material you might argue this was the best case all along).

This is a big simplification - in true Hollywood style, it's a lot more complex (Snow Crash actually bounced from Paramount to Disney and back again - the fact Disney was unable to do anything with it isn't really a good sign). What you can pretty much guarantee is that at the end of it you end up with a film that's average at best. It's a vicious cycle: say Joe Cornish writes a great script, but Paramount insist on some rewrites. Joe Cornish then has to drop out, because the rewrites cause the schedule to clash with another project. Another director comes on, and he insists on new rewrites to accomodate his style. Etc, etc etc.
Ah, yeah I think you've got it right. I thought you meant polling as in it checked every X milliseconds for changes.
Off the top of my head: you no longer need to sample to obtain your statistics, and you can obtain good statistics on virtually everything and every sub-component of the economy, sliced every which way, as many times as you like -- which is much harder in the real world. You can't just go out and gather information on sales of all red, oblong widgets in shops owned by couples aged 50-60 with one dog and one cat -- but you can in a game economy.

Basically it's a huge data laboratory where you are able to record every transaction in the world, and work from there. That's massively useful to economists, because they can now test a far wider range of hypotheses and, furthermore, eliminate them much more quickly.
find . -depth 1 -type 'f' -size +1M
Pulled from the market != killed.

They've pulled many apps for various reasons, so far they haven't reached into user devices and removed/disabled apps.
That idea and even the scenario you describe has actually been used numerous times in action movies (though admittedly usually using a different principle like fingerprint reading), including the James Bond franchise. For example, in License To Kill Q invents a gun with a palm reader that can only be fired by the person programmed in. It has green lights on the grip.
There are still plenty of places in the US without an Apple store, but there are Best Buys everywhere.

Even if Apple didn't sell laptops, you know they would want their own little corner for the iPad. The last time I was in my local BB, the Apple section looked like a little Apple store (as always). The other tablets were lined up shoulder to shoulder and locked into plastic cases bolted to the shelves. Some were setup so you could actually pick them up. Quite a few were dead (probably uncharged). Other than a basic grouping by screen size, it was a "Here's a bunch of tablets, good luck" situation. It's no surprise they don't sell too well.

I'd imagine BB loves the Apple stores. It gives them something that no one else has... a little Apple store. Even if they have to kowtow to all of Apple's demands, it must be a good deal. When an Apple laptop sells (lets say at an average of $1200), how much do you think Best Buy gets of that? $50? $100?

When a $400 or $800 PC laptop sells, how much do you think Best Buy gets? $15? $25? Even if BB gets the same percentage for all laptops, or even a lower percentage for Apple... I'm guessing the higher average sales prices makes up for it.

Apple's margins are famous, and if I was Best Buy I'd want in any way I could.

It's actually a pretty good deal for Apple too. Some beautiful Apple computers, fun to play with, and well setup. Just 10 feet away there is a sea of identical PCs, often with cheap plastic and poor screens. There are some good ones in there (and maybe promoted on isle caps), but still.
This is anecdotal, and I haven't worked there for close to 5 years, but back when I was at a mall Apple store, our store was clocking more revenue per square foot than any other store in the (upscale) mall. If I remember correctly, it was by a factor of 2 or more. Granted, it was only a 30 foot store, and the items are pretty big ticket anyway, rent there is more expensive etc etc, but all that being said, Apple stores are REALLY good at selling Apple products.
Looks like an iStockPhoto stock photography shoot gone bad to me. I would definitely not purchase that photo if it were for sale, that's for sure.
As an anecdotal data point, when I hit "edit" in my phone favorites list on the iPhone, I always saw the "drag handle" as a little list, which I understood as a clumsy stand-in for "reorder this list." The "drag handle", as a representation of a little surface designed for friction so you can put a finger on it and drag it, never occurred to me as a possibility, though I understood it in other contexts. Apparently users can creatively make sense whatever they see even if the intended analogy falls flat.

I think the popularity of retina displays will result in a clarifying divergence of these homographs into different representations. A few years from now we will see the collision of these different meanings as an artifact of low-resolution graphics intended for low-resolution displays. But a few years beyond that, I think we will tire of subtle distinctions and decide that homographs are not any more difficult to deal with than subtle visual distinctions. This collision has not resulted in significant user confusion; in fact, it has taken an unusually observant person to point it out to the rest of us, who were happily using these interfaces without difficulty.
Yeah, it's a tossup if this works out or not.

I'm guessing this came about because Cornish had a movie that did quite well with the geek critics, if not the box office. So he probably got some meetings off that and they asked him what he wanted to do next. He said Snow Crash, they figured why not, it's just sitting there, and here we are. This is all conjecture on my part, but it seems likely.

Still, it's good to see it's floating to the surface again.

Now, if Neuromancer would ever actually happen...

EDIT: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura signed on to produce Neuromancer last month. That's a big deal, it might really get made. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-pict...
Three things means "many". In this case three lines means "many lines".

In view as list, the files are displayed as each file on a line. In justify the text goes from being snippets of various sizes to being a bunch of full lines. In drag to reorder the many lines make you think of ribbed texture of that thing you can drag against. In settings when you tap on many lines, you arrive at a screen that has many lines of settings.
You'll likely appreciate one of my favorite books, called "My Dearest Friend". It's a collection of letters between John and Abigail Adams and it's truly enlightening. Link: http://www.amazon.com/My-Dearest-Friend-Letters-Abigail/dp/0...
The term for this incidentally is "target fixation." It's a problem for hang-glider pilots too.
The tech is funny and most failed at this - we all know small batches or private twitters isn't that hard to do - they won with hustle and sales (and good tech probably).
The Complexity of Songs [pdf]
After reading the article I still am not sure exactly why Apple sets the screens at some specific angle at store opening. To entice people to touch them doesn't quite sound right since the angles will all be adjusted rather quickly. And do reps keep re-setting them throughout the day? The author doesn't say. The author also fails to mention one major reason why shoppers feel compelled to touch Apple products and develop a like for them while at the Apple store: Apple makes very touchable and likable products!
Thanks for the feedback.

The apple keys are part of the design so sadly wont change.

Shift should work for selecting multiple items, so thats a bug. We admittedly haven't done much testing on other platforms.

Grouping and making elements should definitely be in the right click menu. There are some (probably esoteric) icons on the inspector/property panel for these functions.

We'll look into the chrometouch extension and see how we can make it work with the app. I didnt know it was capturing the middle mouse button. Will fix.

Thanks again for the feedback.
Among virtual economies, EVE Online's economy is the real deal. The EVE game economy is I dare say more developed and complex than nearly any other games' - it has many kinds of input factors and stages of production, and many of the production facilities/resources are player-controlled and their fate determines on political maneuvering, war and sabotage between player corporations (guilds). The price of most items in EVE (ships, weapons, components, structures) is determined by the state of production and speculation in the economy, so CCP has to consider the economic impact of nearly every single change they make to the game world. (They hired their in-house economist in 2008 IIRC.)

If any of you folks are interested in reading about a truly fascinating, active digital economy, you have to read the EVE economic reports and other investigations of EVE. It's like reading about mining, manufacturing and stock markets - against a background of eternal war between corporations - in far-future space.

EVE Quarterly Economic News, by CCP's economist Eyjólfur Guðmundsson (link courtesy of xb95):
http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/QEN/QEN_Q3-2010.pdf

edit: links to additional content -----
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/eve-online/855380p1.html

>>> EVE Online was developed to have a very dynamic economy from the very beginning. It was decided that "time" would be treated as a valuable player resource: for that reason, raw materials were spread all over the galaxy map, which takes hours to traverse. This created regional pricing. Interestingly, there were no trade hubs built into the core game design -- players gradually settled into certain areas and made their own pockets of population where trade thrived.

>>> Gudmundsson had some fun examples of how intelligent virtual economies can be. He showed a graph displaying the prices of a mineral in the game known as Zydrine. Zydrine is hard to find in the EVE universe, but players had discovered that killing a certain class of drone often leaves behind Zydrine in the wreckage. This hole in the market led to lots of drone-farming, and subsequently the price started to drop. Drastically.

The developers decided to tweak the drop rate and this change rolled out onto the test server, unannounced, and mixed in with all sorts of other tweaks. Still, clever players noticed the change. Word got out. And suddenly, even though nothing had yet been done on the live server, prices for Zydrine spiked dramatically. Markets make for great predictors of future events!

----

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/06/21/real-economist-tak....

>>> One of his team’s first big findings is somewhat sensitive. Confirming decades of gender research by economists, sociologists and anthropologists, Mr. Turpeinen’s group found that the same biases that have historically favored men in the real world exist in a virtual economy. Their research demonstrates that both women subscribers and female avatar characters operated by male subscribers in EVE are biased toward a slightly lower chance of success in competition with their male counterparts.
Yes, that's a very impressive display of all the math you must surely know, but its completely misses the point. The rules of elementary algebra really are special, and it has to do with their correspondance to real things in real life. There's a reason mathematicians don't just enumerate all possible algebras and study them one by one.
"clever" photo shoots happened a lot to me.

I remember one where they started with having me eat ("delicious," get it?) and then sitting next to a coworker ("social") and then finally PR shut down the shoot when they told me to feed the coworker.

The picture they used? The one where I'm sitting funny and frowning into the sun: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_33/b3997010....
Java doesn't have pattern matching or nice tuple syntax but it does have Algebraic Data Types. Abstract classes are sum types (the dervived classes are the variants) while interfaces are (awkward) product types.
Apple has been partnering with Best Buy for a few years, and I imagine they do the same thing around the world.

It's not a condition though. My local Microcenter sells Apple laptops (always have) and have a little section for them, but it's not run by Apple. It looks like the rest of the store, and isn't laid out like an Apple store.
Is that an autostereogram?
Feel the awesomeness.

Mi-cro-soft. Oh yeah.

Linux used to be "cancer" but now it's OK. Check out "Azure". You want VM's? Linux VM's? Sure, we got that. Whatever you want, we got it.

Trust us, we know what we're doing. We're the good guys. Just tell us what you want. Where do you want to go today?

You want Skype? No problem. We have made Skype better. Just for you!
Does anyone know why they decided to turn off the cameras?
The biggest problem with Apple stores at this point is that they are always busy. I remember when the first Apple store opened in my area a few years ago, there were always people there but only a decent number.

Now, it doesn't seem to matter when I go to the Apple stores around me, they're buzzing with tons of activity.
What I actually found most interesting reading back over the book lately was the very 90's take on ethnic balkanization. I don't think that ever really came to pass in the way it was always assumed it was happening at the time, and I think a primary reason for that is the kind of rapidly-changing tech economythat was the backdrop for the story.

I'd be really curious to see how a present day retelling if the story would handle this disconnect.
Watch Rock of Ages
The Watch Rock of Ages Online screenplay is by Justin Theroux, Chris D'Arienzo, as well as Allan Loeb which is narrated by Russell Brand. Camerawork is by Bojan Bazelli and edited by Emma E. Hickox. This film is distributed by Warner Bros. under New Line Cinema, Material Pictures, as well as Offspring Entertainment studio which is expected to be shown in movie houses on the 15th of June, 2012.
Congress' 2011 Personal Financial Records Released
It's not really solving the "real" problem... If I'm just mashing two audio files together, that's going to be different than someone talking in the middle of a train platform and there will likely be algorithmicly-determinable difference from the artificially generated words and the naturally generated noise.

All of this aside, removing background noise is not a huge issue anymore. We have pretty decent noise-cancellation technology. Speech recognition - the other big component - has advanced a lot in recent times and is actually pretty good, although not for every company/product.

Even if it would be helpful, you'd have to record an incredible amount of noise in the first place, seeing as you're getting millions of hits a day and if you have a small sample set, the attackers will just figure out the solutions to that sample set and be done.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's probably not worth it at this point. Captchas (in their traditional forms) don't make sense as a long-term strategy anyways.
Mobile Seo an Emerging Technology
Mobile SEO is a new terminology for the search marketers all over the world. It seems that the phenomenon of mobile seo has become a new landmark in the Search Industry now. By the time, the overwhelming success of mobile internet and increasing number of smart phone devices it is now inevitable that mobile SEO has also become the crucial part of the existing Search Industry.
Looks like that hyphenated aside swallowed the verb.
Maybe it's getting late, but I think i could really use an upvoted tdlr for this...
Aside from Apple, every laptop maker is competing on price. 4G radios add $50 or more to the cost of the device. The only way they would include one is with incentives from a network that would include some offer with the laptop. None of the networks are offering laptop manufacturers such incentive right now, so they don't build them.

Why are cell companies not offering incentives to produce laptops with cell radios? Because they are just barely keeping up with current demand. Only major metro areas have 4G coverage, and each tower can only handle a couple dozen active data connections before saturating its uplink. Older 3G towers that haven't been upgraded can still have only 50MBPS links, which means they're very limited in how many clients they can serve at once. Retrofitting the old equipment and building new towers takes time; they have to manage demand so that it doesn't outstrip supply, which is why we've seen lower data caps and higher prices as LTE is rolled out, instead of higher caps and lower prices.
I laughed when I read an article about a company ditching email to embrace Yammer. After taking a couple more looks at how it worked, I convinced my company to try it out - it's been fantastic about removing a littering of articles from our emails and putting them into Yammer where people can quickly ignore the noise and discuss the important stuff.

We've also found it a great way to let everyone know that you'll be out of the office, working from home, etc.

We probably aren't perfect in our execution, but it's been a fantastic tool so far.
Attack the Block was pretty cool!

Although spoilerwhen they talk about the phenome of the alien creatures, from a logical perspective it seems rather backwardsspoiler
Regarding Australia, our GST is a flat 10%, and the AUD is near parity with the USD (and has been above parity for most of the last 12 months). The price discrepancy is far greater than it should be if those were the only factors.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, an independant regulatory body in Australia that oversees the Trade Practices Act (among other things), is in the process of inquiring into the so-called "Australia Tax" to find out why companies like Apple and Valve charge far more for software sold in Australia than in other countries despite the low true cost difference.
Interesting. I have some questions. (If you don't mind answering.)

> Everything that is tangible now will become software and intangible in the future.

When you say this what exactly do you have in mind? Virtual reality? Living substances made through bio-hacking?

> or it there's always some level of abstraction that's remains out of reach.

What sort of abstraction do you feel would be prohibitive in this environment?

> That means the virtual economy is set to eclipse the current one.

In what capacity? Like bitcoin, or like for the win[0]?

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_win

Thanks in advance.
Why Apple Is Going “Containment” Not “Thermonuclear” Against Google In iOS 6
Show HN: A lightweight library for dense matrix manipulation.
"Nobody relies on Apple software or hardware to power their business."

This is simply not true. You are the one living in the reality distortion field, not Apple.
$1b is a steal for Yammer. I'm surprised Yammer would take that right now considering it's current valuation and how bright its prospects are. It has one of the most efficient B2B customer acquisition schemes. Even with the culture mis-match, I suspect this will be a good acquisition for MSFT.
> If the string is readable over only some background colors, then it's written on a transparent-backed image, so the whole background-changing script can be ignored. Just OCR the image with the transparent background.

The CAPTCHA image contains false values for misdirection, hence the requirement of running the background changing script.

Here is a list of claims made on the example CAPTCHA page:

BG Ability
color to
generation solve (as defined by the author)
---------- ---------
mouse cursor hovering difficult
previous state impossible
input
shared secret

I have no way to know precisely what the author means by those words since the given example does not demonstrate any of them. I cannot match the left and right columns.

For example, if I claimed that a CAPTCHA based off a "shared secret" only a trusted user has is impossible to solve, then one might ask the question, "Why is a CAPTCHA needed for a trusted user?". Is this what the author of the CAPTCHA example meant? I do not know.

My only purpose of posting in this thread was to show that the OP's premise that "this is the best example of how not to implement it." is flawed because no such example was given in the first place.
I agree. Let's be honest - it's kind of weird that we rely on a program that is really designed for editing photographs as our main tool for designing web sites. I'm all for exploring this further at least as a tool for doing layouts and design that CSS can handle. For everything else (e.g. designing icons), there are more appropriate tools.
Great stuff, thanks for the tips.
For the people who "thought it was a joke" have you (or will you) put this data point into your data bank so as to improve your future thinking?
I never knew Nebraska was considered the midwest...
I once heard that the rent was $6,000 a month for a cart in one of the prime areas at our upscale mall. Usually these sell bamboo plants or cell phone accessories.

I wonder if your store was average for the AAPL universe.
You're being too sensitive, and a bit sanctimonious too. Kids learn to communicate from their parents, so Jeff's kids, should they ever read this, will know he is being hyperbolic.
Why use Scala
I guess you aren't aware that Google Go has their own compilers based on Plan 9 C compiler called "6g" or "8g" (depends on what architecture). These compilers produce much less efficient code than gcc does.

Yes, gcc now also compiles the language, but they still pimp their own compilers... iirc the "go" tool uses them by default (or maybe exclusively). Why create a new compiler? Why a project management tool that does everything except work with other build systems? Why isolate the language by making it difficult to use with others? I feel those are good questions to ask.
In other words, the government is subsidizing the loan just like in the US.