skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noticed you answered my question by asking another question. You bring up an interesting point and I'll answer it; however, I'd appreciate it if you returned the favor and gave me a straight-forward answer to my question.

Q: And how much was it that suppliers were being pushed by Apple into being 'innovative'? Would anyone be producing laptop size retina panels if not for Apple's demand? How long would we have waited for retina laptops if we had to rely on HP, Dell, etc.?
A: I have no facts on this and probably only LG and Apple insiders really know. If I had to guess I'd say: LG has been in the display business for decades and have had a long R&D program to research how to make better displays. They (and other companies) figured out how to make very high-res displays at a cheaper price (i.e. they innovated). LG then shopped the technology to several suppliers. HP, Dell, etc. were interested but knew that such a product wasn't a good fit for their product mix and would be too expensive for their typical customer. Apple saw the opportunity (kudos to them) and are able to command a premium price from consumers so they locked up a deal with LG.

Did Apple innovate? Personally, I'd just say they saw a market opportunity and ran with it.

I guess the real point of difference here is how far we can/need/should stretch the word innovate.

To put a twist on your metahphor: Your boss comes to you and says "hey if you can make X go 10 times faster for 50% less, they'll sell like crazy" You then spend a couple weeks figuring out how to achieve that goal. Does that mean he innovated by seeing a market need and setting a goal? No, he saw a market need and deserves a pat on the back for that. You innovated a solution and deserve a pat on the back for that.
Ask HN: What are the karma milestones on HN?
It seems if you've got less than 100 karma you cannot delete your posts/comments. I think I read that if you have more than 500 karma you can downvote. Are there other karma milestones and corresponding privileges?
He worked too hard. Wikipedia already has this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leapsecond.ut1-utc.svg
I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I think the points are complimentary. I also wrote a post prior to this one, in which I argue that a team of good developers that can work together is far better than a team with one technically superior developer who can't work with others. If you can find the developer who is both technically great, and can communicate effectively in a team, you've found a very special person indeed.
The successful speculations are predicated on artificially low interest rates and subsidized leverage.
These are fine points. Apologies if it came off sounding self-congratulatory.
I don't think hiring great developers is something everyone must do. After all, there are not enough of them to go around. Instead I'd say that the ability to hire great developers is a key advantage to being a smaller company.

Also, I'd say that the notions of "10x" or "20x" greater productivity from the best developers are set on the wrong footing entirely. Such ideas presuppose that development is just production work, when in reality it is highly creative. The advantage of good developers isn't just that they do what others would do but more efficiently, the advantage is that they do much more. Often times they expand your business. Quite often the genesis of a multi-million dollar product or services offering doesn't come from the top-down, conceived in management and merely implemented by the rank and file, but instead comes from the bottom-up, from a wacky idea that a developer has and rolls into a tech demo. Without great developers that's the sort of thing you miss out on.
Average rents up to £712 a month
Would you agree that being a great communicator, and growing as a person to be less nervous are aspects in the makeup of a great developer? (I'm not saying they are, just curious what you think).
I'm also the founder of an enterprise focused startup[1]. We should start a club or something, looks like there are a few of us here. :-)

[1]: Fogbeam Labs, the up-and-coming Open Source collaboration / knowledge-management company that's bringing the Semantic Web + Social Web to the Enterprise. http://www.fogbeam.com Go there now and sign up for our newsletter.
You won't be able to publish any research involving humans unless you have met the ethics requirements of an institutional review board. Good luck doing that without university (or at least large, well-funded lab) association.
I'm imagining a setup now where we host their staging environment as it would effectively just be disk space, and when they want to publish changes it could render using this and publish to wherever the static files are hosted (S3, their own service, provide them as a zipped download, etc.).
I suspect you're right, though I'd rather they share the non trade secret advice that they have in a more public fashion, such as a blog or stackoverflow.
County fireworks ban in effect
Since i dont use Any of those my life is fine.
A few points from my experience building a startup for the enterprise (these examples are based entirely on my experience in the financial services industry, although from what I understand they should be easy to extrapolate across other fields):

The sales cycle can be/is excruciatingly long. Certain companies that signed on took 1-2 years to get on board after initial engagement.

You need to partner up/find someone who has the deep contacts/relationships in the big cos that would be your clients.

You need to prove to them that it will be cheaper (including the cost of switching, training, etc...), Reduce Risk, and allow them to "reallocate resources."

Inertia is very strong at large organizations. Building a product that directly competes with an entrenched competitor sounds like a very risky endeavor.
Android 4.1 'Liveness Check' stop Face Unlock from being fooled by photos
And at the same time there's a story on HN[1] about SSDs being half their price. Enjoy the record profits while they last, the world is moving to SSDs and this will only speed up that migration.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182944
"There are lots of companies and people earning lots of money writing bad codes. There are lots of money to be made fixing those bad codes."
The 10x/20x thing doesn't refer to productivity at all. It refers to ability. So I think we're in fact saying the same thing here.
Sigh, I blame auto correct. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinix
This is true to some extent; unfortunately in many cases the focus is on career advancement before contribution to human knowledge.
If an outage in one zone causes a brownout in the other zones, then the aren't independent "availability" zones in any logical sense. They may as well be on the same power supply.
Extract MP3s into Albums/Genre from iTunes Playlist.
DNS based failover in practice will not give you 6 second failover, unlike BGP. Too much of DNS is broken and out of your control.

(The trend for regular ISPs is probably improving, except that mobile/carrier DNS is often particularly broken. It would be interesting to do monthly surveys of this.)
I agree that it operates on that assumption, and that the full-stack developer assumption is a good one. Have a read of this blog post for the mindset:

http://codercake.com/benefits-of-becoming-a-full-stack-devel...
http://bit.ly/N1kZvS
https://twitter.com/redditstatus/status/219244389044731904
Shaping entire industries might be a little hyperbole, but I'll happily concede they have shaped entire product markets (e.g. mp3 players isn't really an industry; consumer electronics is an industry which they helped to shape).

So we agree they shape markets, but that doesn't mean that the innovate. They are two different things.

What's your source for your definition of innovate? I was intrigued by it, but a quick google search only turned up someone's blog for their homemade artisan bags: (http://www.jaxonbags.com/jaxon-bags/innovate-invt-make-chang...). If this is your source, then that's good for a chuckle. :)

P.S. I don't mean to be a jerk in my response. Just engaging in friendly banter.
Could this mess result in a class action lawsuit against Facebook ?
POSTMORTEM fix for CPU eating softirqd threads without rebooting:

stop ntpd, run ntpdate or sntp, start ntpd

/etc/init.d/ntp stop; sntp -s <ntpserver>; /etc/init.d/ntp start

Unfortunately sntp / ntpdate wrapper is not shipped with squeeze for example. I've used the binary from SuSE 11.4 just fine on squeeze.
Very lame. Steve Jobs wasn't even there to present Siri.
Really? You're quantifying ability? What is a unit of programmer ability? You can track LOC or bugs or maybe even revenue generated, but none of those are exact measures of ability.
Anything to the right of the divide on the dock is considered a stack, which is just a pinned folder.

Once the user accidentally drags it off the dock, it poofs away and they are lost.
You should rebut Greenspun's arguments, not slander him by words in quotes and pretending they paraphrase what he wrote.

How is this paternalistic or uninviting to women?

> A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?
If I understand that article correctly the headline and lead paragraph must have been written by someone who did not really understand the article and who had a distinctly different opinion than the author of the article.

First, the article body portrays the 62% success rate in a generally positive or neutral light, headline and lead paragraph portray the 38% failure rate in a completely negative light.

Second, the comparison was with normal Google search it seems, i.e. without any voice recognition, something the lead paragraph gets wrong.

So this seems to be the data for Siri:

- Siri understands 89% of all queries in quiet environments

- Siri understands 83% of all queries in noisy environments

- Siri answers accurately 68% of all queries in quiet environments

- Siri answers accurately 62% of all queries in noisy environments

That’s Siri. Now on to Google:

- Google understands 100% of all queries (since they are entered manually with a keyboard)

- Google answers accurately 86% of all queries

This test pitted Siri against Google, asking the question how good of a Google replacement Siri can be.

Fortune’s article is much clearer: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/29/minneapolis-street-te...

The whole method, however, seems iffy to me. I would like to know much more about which questions were asked and how they were selected in the first place. And even if you can find a good sample of questions I’m not sure how helpful this comparison is.
Jimmy Carr: My terrible error
You have it slightly wrong. You make it sound like there are only 9 focus points. When in fact it can post process focus at any point. It just needs to bundle the pixels (rays) that coincide with a synthetic lens that is focused at that point. The math is easy ... but it is still very important to think of the rays through a thin lens.

It might be helpful to watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H7yx31yslM

You might also want to read about the heterodyning camera. It does the same thing as a plenoptic camera but with a large aperture and a cosine filter.
Musk seems like a great guy, but a comparable bet for the journalist would have been closer to $50. $1 million is just not that much to a man worth $20 billion.
For smoothness, I presume, to avoid a sudden change in the rate of time passage at the start and end of the day.
I find this post on the topic to be interesting:
http://www.julesmaltz.com/post/3376586698/if-you-like-saas-t...

I think if you don't have the sales rolodex to sell traditional enterprise software going freemium or low cost SaaS is the way to go. Or to team up with some one who can sell into enterprises. You may be able to learn the ropes as you go but that is unlikely. If you look at the background of a lot of the top enterprise software entrepreneurs, you will see that they have worked at other enterprise software companies previously.

Like anything, it is difficult to give a sweeping answer. There are a lot of great opportunities in enterprise software that are worth pursuing. The "hassle" of selling can be reduced by have more consumerized enterprise software but selling will be a big issue. Plus it'll be more tricky as you attempt to sell to larger organizations.
I'll give you one example from the electronics industry: Solid State Drives.

Of course, this technology was built on the shoulders of the IC industry and decades of hard-core research by individuals and companies.

My friend's MacBook Pro has a SSD. She really likes the MacBook Pro because it boots fast (awesome!). Apple didn't invent the SSD, they weren't the first ones to put it in a product, but they were the first ones to put the product in my friend's hand. To her, Apple is a incredible innovator.

So they didn't innovate the SSD, they just did a great job of integrated and selling. This illustrates my original points that Apple is "incredible at business; excellent at marketing; great at product design; mediocre at innovation;...great design and system integration"
Keep in mind that not all DNS caches—particularly those at large ISP's—respect sub-3600s TTL's.

(they do this in an effort to reduce load; whether it is truly effective on today's hardware is arguable)
The part about "Facebook sneaking through contacts and adding friends' numbers" isn't correct: the Facebook app has always had a pretty clear description about what would happen if contact sync (an optional feature) is enabled.

For example, on iOS, it looked like this almost two years back: http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/iPhoneNumber.png (as seen on this page from October 2010: http://www.marismith.com/facebook-phonebook-how-safe-your-ce...) I don't have any old screenshots of the Android version, but the current app is similar to the iOS screenshots above.
Samsung Galaxy S Plus I9001 Price in India & Pakistan-Review | RaviMobiles.com
South Carolina passes bill restricting municipal broadband
Free Apple's New iPad Raffle
Thanks for the link to your blog, and this post. The irony of this post is that I have never worked anywhere where the developers did not think the codebase was a pile of crap. That's pretty much what a codebase is. See also, http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

That's not male or female developers, that's all developers. However, I am interested in the "Fire and Forget" meme applied to software management. I'm going to noodle on that some more.
in closing, he said; "I close by asking this: If Apple products are so innovative, why doesn't Apple compete rather than litigate?"

I believe (and I'm not a lawyer) that you need to actively enforce your design patents or they expire.

That said, I think patents in their current form are stupid, and patent reform is necessary.

In the general sense, I believe Apple does innovate. Having their magsafe power adapter has safed my laptop countless times. They didn't invent magnetic power cables, but they are the first (and only that I know of) to do it in laptops.

Where
Not only are prices up, the Major Hard drive manufactures (Seagate, Western Digital) have cut back a lot of their warrantees to only one year. Evidence suggests that the spinning disk manufacturing companies are reluctant to invest in aggressively building supply/plants because of the transition to SSDs - the market demands for Hard Drives will be met - but nobody is expecting explosive growth will continue to grow.

SSDs are finally within about a factor of 3x where they need to be before their usage in Laptops hockey sticks, and a factor of 4x before they make major inroads into desktops. In about 18-24 months, we'll start to see a natural reduction in Hard Drive shipments as people just start buying fewer of them, and a _huge_ leap in SSDs and other flash based storage.
Using websites for sustainable consumption
I've been thinking recently about how best to leverage the unique characteristics of the internet to promote the sustainable consumption of clothing. I’ve come up with an idea for a website that allows people to share new clothes and accessories.

The business model is this: The website provides a way for people to come together to share the cost of a new dress (i.e. for a $100 dress, person A pays $60 and person B pays $40) but person B uses and keeps the dress after person A has finished with it. Both get the dress at a fraction of the full cost.

The site will allow for proximity-based sharing (in real time) and have some social functionality (i.e. user profiles etc). Still thinking about what to use to build it...

What do you think of the idea?
Surprised I am the only who found the title amusing.

The reason you got your site online before Instagram and others is because they have a lot of infrastructure and moving pieces as a result of being extremely popular. Obviously Fitocracy doesn't share those characteristics.

That said it is unacceptable for ANY site to go down simply because you lose power in a data center.
If I am reading this right, then you can get efficiency gains by attaching methods to an object's prototype rather than defining them directly in a constructor. This way, the method is only created once, and is just reference by all instances of whatever object.

If I am correct about all that, my point of confusion is simply that this seems like a very awkward way to design things. Isn't it easier to read a program if all of an object's properties and methods are defined together in it's constructor, rather than spread out later as attachments to a prototype?
Pretty much true of dental, optical, and veterinary care in the USA, too (which are often paid directly out of pocket; dental and vision insurance is just a taxable vs. untaxable thing, but doesn't really spread risk like insurance).

Rather than focusing on the "meaningful use" EHR stuff, I wish the government would demand machine-readable and easily accessed pricing (list, prevailing, medicare, and all negotiated insurance, as well as actual collection rates) for services, at least from any doctor who accepts medicare or medicaid. Publish this, let people build awesome tools.
If You Need These Jeans, You Have an iPhone Problem
We are making assessments of code made public, and combining it with how active people are in places like stackexchange. You can argue that code evaluated from github is not necessarily indicative of a good developer, but it's a good place to start rather than shotgun LinkedIn spam from recruiters.
Tempest and QBert are excellent.

Try to find an actual historic arcade. The games make more sense in context. In particular, Tempest has been redone in a dozen forms, but without the original spinner controller it's just not the same.

(QBert, on the other hand, is just fine in emulation.)

In the Northeast you can go to Funspot:

http://www.classicarcademuseum.org/

It's got the flavor of the real thing. Takes me back to the old days.
Wow. Thanks for posting that. It's definitely not the topic I was raising here, but it's an important one all on its own. I recently read this blog post (and its comments): http://makemeasammich.org/2012/06/28/a-brief-history-the-bad...

This discussion becomes one of predator and prey, and can women ever be safe in a world or a profession where men have enough power for the predators to proceed unfettered.

To my original point, it is certainly possible that by virtue of the dynamic that the profession is already dominated by men, women stay out of it purely for concern of their own safety, and the rise of 'brogrammer' culture certainly reinforces this ( see http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/07/tech/web/brogrammers/index.htm... ), but I'm not persuaded that's actually the necessary-and-sufficient condition. I think the brogrammer culture is overstated, and women have taken down many male-dominated fields, opening them (and public opinion) to a better way.

Personally, I hope progamming is next in that queue, because I, for one, am tired of working with all white (and indian, and chinese) guys.
This could perhaps be improved. It seems to employ a very primitive negative/positive, large/small dichotomy. I presidct that simply putting the words huge and new will give this comment a positive sentiment....
Agree with your views fully. The article is nothing more than fanboyism at it's best.
Just a note, consumer-grade drives had their warranty cut.

HDD manufacturers have consolidated...What exists now is a duopoly. There was no reason for Seagate to cut warranties if their facilities were not affected by the natural disaster. They are never going to lift the warranty back to 3 years like before.
It is a trade off and something you may want to consider depending on how you want your app/website to behave. Is that extra 300ms load a problem if it happens every five minutes? The answer will probably be no in many cases but in some it might just make the cut.

The thing you can do is reduce the amount of dns requests in total like using high TTL for a cdn and have everything else served off your main site. Or if you have the option use a little bit less aggressive TTL is 1 hour downtime for an hour TTL a problem or not? Are you really going to need that instant switch of a DNS record and if you are maybe you should be looking at other ways to provide reliability.
A cross-platform multimedia platform that renders (relatively?) consistently across most browsers. Thank god we got rid of that!

Can't wait to tweak my HTML5 for all permutations of OS and browser! Hooray!
Interview with PacMan Game Designer Toru Iwatani
Yes. But I believe it's licensed for non-commercial use, from what I can tell from http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/keypoints/
Not that I'm aware of. There are EC2-alikes, methinks that's what Eucalyptus is about. I might start looking there, to build upon their open source.

Let me know what you find, I'm interested in this space.
> Just set the clock to today (or any day with a leap second), and watch what happens.

That won't work. The bug is only triggered when an upstream NTP server reports that a leap second was scheduled. Since leap seconds aren't predictable (and aren't even scheduled very far in advance), just setting the time back to the date of a previous leap second won't do anything.
For sure, we can only evaluate what we can get access to. We're trying to scour as many sources as possible, but if you're exceedingly quiet, you wouldn't be in our system.
I don't think it's quantifiable. The numbers are imprecise opinions.
Fear the Unix 32-bit time-becomes-negative bugs, in 2037.

We have 25 years to get ready. I still think we'll be patching at the last minute.

(Yeah, lots of systems will be 64-bit by then, but there will still be a lot of embedded crackerbox systems running 32-bit timestamps. It's all the embedded stuff I'm worried about).
Eventually we're planning to do just that.
Sherlock Holmes & the Bomb Party: hope functions in offbeat statistics
Less of an article more of a recruitment drive? (indicated from "/jobs" sub-directory.

Anyways I am interested in knowing why would you do that ? What kind of problems need 10,000 cores to solve ? Could be easily partitioned with Big Data or Hadoop instead of building 1 giant skynet ?
Where'd you get $20 Billion?