skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My problem with the level of vitriol is that it doesn't leave much room for when things are truly bad - this has caused an inconvenience and lost time to him personally, but it's not like he's really suffered, like so many people do on a daily basis around the world. I'd love to see this passion directed at (for example) issues of social justice.
10 worst tech screwups of 2012 (so far)
The bmorg completely disenfranchised large parts of the community with a "ticket lottery".

Earlier this year, we were seeing theme camps with something like 10% "success" rate in the lottery, and a lot of the major camps weren't going to be able to go.

It was only through a last-ditch effort, cancelling a second lottery and giving the tickets to "established" camps that they were able to get some of the major theme camps to go.

The lottery played heavily in the favor of scalpers, who very obviously exploited it to their own gain, and this was something that the community had been screaming up and down about since the lottery was announced last year.
Zoom would be helpful.
Has Twitter forgotten AIM and the 3rd-Party Clients?
Right, they could just make innovative products that users would add themselves instead of just adding them in by default.
Last year Burning Man sold out for the first time. In an attempt to alleviate the shortages, this year they had a lottery where people could request up to four tickets per person. The obvious strategy was to request more than you needed, in order to hedge your risk of losing the lottery (essentially a prisoner's dilemma situation). The utterly predictable outcome was worse shortages. They added an aftermarket to "fix" the problem, but (like Louis C.K.) they capped the price at ticket face value. Since the market price is higher, this guarantees shortages.
Apparently he's wrong about the LaserWriter. Wikipedia says HP had a laser printer for the PC in May 1984. The LaserWriter was announced in Jan 1985.
The other nicety that goes hand in hand with this is crazy simple cross compiling. My current project uses cgo and pcap so I don't get to use it now [1], but my last and next project allow me to hit a single command and have nice statically compiled binaries for FreeBSD, OS X, Linux and Windows in a very small amount of time with almost no setup effort.

I still need to get it wired up to the GitHub API for downloads and life will be perfect. I can push to master and upload a build for download all in one fell swoop.

([1], cross compiling is not [currently?] supported with cgo)
But if the customers are willing to pay the scalpers price, that means the demand exists.

You say 'flip them for profit' as if thats a bad thing, but as long as people buy those tickets, its just smoothing out the market.
Not exactly. It does encourage a manager to increase the 'beta' of his team. That is, adjust hiring standards to take more risks and filter out the subsequent higher flow of poor performers in exchange for finding (but not necessarily retaining) exceptional performers.
The aerodynamic drag – type inference analogy
Hey thanks! I fed the inverse fizzbuzz regex to Rex and it came up with an automaton with 81 states!
http://www.jasq.org/uploads/1/0/5/6/10564637/6329774.png?694

My original automaton only has 8 states. ( http://www.jasq.org/uploads/1/0/5/6/10564637/977128_orig.png ) I guess that's the price you pay for cycles. ( Mine is a cyclic graph, but Rex produces a directed acyclic graph. Since they both must capture the same regex, one of them would be much larger than the other )
A Walk Through of Gust.com
"Google Now's" Bone-Chilling Insights Into Its Users
It would be nice if time were represented graphically. (Imagine this animated Hans Rosling style.)

The graphic shows a kind of downward flow from ALGOL (which is fair enough) but you can almost see modern programming languages as lying in an overlapping confluence of ideas from ALGOL and Lisp (and Simula, itself derived from ALGOL a close third), but Lisp is at the bottom-left.
Anonymous Rattles A Chinese Web Giant
This is a poor and misunderstood version of what Obamacare will actually do. Having worked in healthcare tech for two years and healthcare investment banking, the analysis this person put forward is rudimentary understanding of how our healthcare system works.

Here are a few highlights
- 50% of all regulations are behind schedule, bundled payments, payment sunshine, are just a few highlights

- "The decision over whether or not your claim is approved is still in the hands of your insurer. However, now there's an appeals process so if your claim gets turned down, you can challenge that. And the government watches that appeals process to make sure it's not being unfair to customers." => there already is an appeal process. The real nugget is "unfair". What the crap is unfair? How do you regulate unfair? Notice, there is no mention of AMA's power of setting CPT codes and reimbursement schedules.

- "The PPACA actually very specifically says you can keep the insurance you have if you want." => First, everyone's insurance has already changed with the implementation of MLR rules. Second, how can the government fulfill this promise. It cannot. Premiums increase between 10% to 20% a year. Think people. It is an empty promise to make you feel good inside.

- "The PPACA very specifically says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services (who is in charge of much of the bill), is absolutely not to promote any regulation that hinders a patient's ability to get health care, to speak with their doctor, or have access to a full range of treatment options." => no way to fulfill this promise. If you are giving access to 20 million people, there are still only 600,000 practicing physicians. Supply is basically fixed (with a 20 yr cycle). Unless you failed economics, there is no possible way the government can actually deliver on this.

- "Additionally, the bill cuts some stuff from Medicare that's not really working, and generally tries to make everything work more efficiently" - HAHA! $500 billion in imaginary savings. Not to mention the author forgets that the DocFix is not included in the bill. How do they reach $500 billion? Cutting doctors payments by 32%.

- "Also, the increased focus on preventative care (making sure people don't get sick in the first place), should help to save money the government already spends on emergency care for these same people. Basically, by catching illnesses early, we're not spending as much on emergency room visits." Preventive care INCREASES utilization. ER visits are "falsely" expensive because the "costs" are typically based upon gross charges. ER visits are super expensive but it is a scape goat for preventive medicine or the individual mandate. The free-rider problem does not exist.

- "They had been reading it over and over for a half a year. This thing was being tossed around in debates for ages." - Not true. I know the people on the hill who wrote the bill. It was put together over a month.
"Purely digital."

There is no such thing. That's like saying "purely hologram". Pixels have no inherent materiality. There is nothing about the Metro UI that couldn't be recreated on a piece of paper.

The goal is visual communication and delight. Sterile for the sake of sterile isn't virtuous.
Apple granted patent for Google Glass-like device
Why the Android Platform is Failing
It's no secret that malware & other problems plague android phones. What happened and why?
I'm more interested in the HN comments here. Personally, I felt it was an inconsistent, and pretty tame take on an iconic brand (I'm not a fan of the new Windows logo either).

Check out his HTC 1 concept.. a bit dated but still interesting
Introducing an entirely new API with Windows 8 is incredibly risky.
Direct link to DailyToaster - http://dailytoaster.com

More info on my blog - http://kurtvarner.com
"We are helping people figure out the skills they need for a new role, connecting them to disparate content via our partnerships and then in the backend integrating with those content providers to track your informal learning in one place so you can use it to apply for jobs."

Hmm, I think that means...

"We are helping people train for a new role..."

"We are helping people train for a new role with high-quality tutorials..."

"We are helping people train for a new role with high-quality tutorials and tracking their learning so they can use it to apply for jobs."

Ohhhhh, in other words... You help people train for a new job and give them something to put on their resume? Awesome! Why didn't you just say so? =)

I suppose people are more likely to say, "Oh.. oh. Hmm. Sounds impressive," if you say it the other way, though.
bartonfink - We currently only work with companies hiring for full time positions. But, we do have a way to help you make some extra cash, if you know someone else who is looking for a job and we can place them.
I think the new logo has a very interesting effect, that is according to me though. It's asymmetric yet simple. Where Apple's logo and most logo's can be perfectly centered this one doesn't. I think that's mainly because it looks "italic".

I also wonder if this logo follows on certain points the golden ratio, but than again it's soo simple it shouldn't.

Lastly, if you'd place this logo on varia devices they would even kind of look "unbranded" which some people, including myself, really like. I can't really explain what I mean, but compare a logitech keyboard to an Apple one, the Apple-keyboard doesn't has a logo to advertise their brand, yet it's "one of a kind".

A phone without any brands explicitly written or displayed on it looks more sleek and modern to me.

But don't take my opinion to serious, I'm just a developer.
Battery life is average... it is the only thing I would want to improve (and probably will with a higher capacity battery). With everything on (syncing, auto-brightness, wi-fi, GPS) I get a day's worth of use (9am-11pm and about 2.45 hours of screen-on time). With my crappy old HTC Snap (Windows mobile 6.5) phone without any syncing features I could go 2 days without charging and I kind of miss that.. especially when travelling. But I'm sure I could turn off all the syncing on the GNex and achieve at least a day and a half if I really wanted to (but then what's the point)

Pentile HD is gorgeous despite all the negative you might've heard. I thought I'd be really picky too and was even considering the HTC One X due to it's superior display... but as I squint closely at the details on the Nexus' screen, it almost looks like my home screen is printed on high quality photo-paper. The only time you might notice the pentile arrangement is if some app prominently featured single-pixel white lines all over the place. I've also heard somewhere that solid white colours aren't represented correctly and appear a little yellowish or something, but so far I haven't noticed or it just hasn't bothered me. What I did notice, however, is how rich and dark the colour black appears. I was watching Kung Fu Panda 2 on Netflix the other day with my nephew and I noticed that in certain dark scenes I couldn't tell where the screen ends and where the bevel begins.

These impressions might all be tinted with my sub-standard experience with the HTC Snap before this so take it with a grain of salt (Although I did use an iPad 2 for several weeks and also have experience with my brother's iPhone 4 and with both I felt very limited in what I could do and at certain points felt downright annoyed)
> Even though Google is a major corporation, I doubt they can afford to spend the time fixing issues in a browser that gets lower single digit uses.

You're joking, I hope? Of course Google has the resources. It's one of the biggest companies in tech.

Not only does Google have the money to do it, but it really looks bad by not supporting Opera and telling people to use Chrome. Just to prevent that bad publicity it would be worth the money to just support Opera.

Furthermore, yes, Opera has low market share - a few percent globally. But it has very high market share in a few countries in Europe. Not supporting Opera is basically saying they don't support that country. Again, wouldn't it be worth the very small cost (in Google terms) to just support Opera?
Caching Your Mobile App's Stored Data, Online or Offline
Cool. Thanks for organizing this. I'd be interesting in presenting what we do with Redis at Craigslist if you're interested.
What you can infer from such testing is that the server is not writing any response for a while, and then quickly writing all the response. There could be two reasons - the server may be busy doing some blocking activity, or the server or some intermediary is buffering all the response in memory and emitting it when the complete response is available. Experience tells me that it is usually the former. I'm the author of this post.
Here's the actual story containing the video: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/10016887...

According to the telegraph: "Cern say that this is one of several videos they have made, one for each of the possible outcomes...".
Mobile hacker - 1st employee - for start-up journey  (YC S2012)
As an unannounced YC S12 company we are looking for our employee #1 who is fun and up for a full-time startup experience.

You will have a key role in the company and you will work hand in hand with the two founders (designer + coder). You have a significant impact on how the product and company will be shaped.

If you are hungry for some cool challenges & you have some experience in iOS development, then we'd love to hear from you.

Simply drop us an email with some links to projects you have worked on. Email: mobilehackeryc2012@gmail.com
> Gates was a programmer and actively participated in tech reviews in his heyday.

If you need proof of Gates' technical genius, I recommend Joel Spolsky's "My First BillG Review"

> Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done...

In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates...

Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before...

He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]

... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Multitasking splits the brain
There is always a better way Don't forget that.
Angola's Chinese-built Ghost Town
It's not the scalpers who are to blame. It's bmorg (and the broader Burner community) that's at fault for ignoring basic economics and human behavior. Everyone with a rudimentary understanding of game theory saw the whole mess coming a mile away.
No kidding. It's like marketers don't realize QR codes are mainly going to be scanned on phones.

Well... I'm making an assumption here: surely very few people are going to scan QR codes with their laptop's webcam or something. I wonder what fraction of QR code scans are done on an iPad, though, as opposed to something with a pocket-sized screen. I bet that it's well over 90% smartphones, maybe over 98%. But I haven't found any published, quantitative proof of that, so I don't really know.

(Anyone with a QR-code analytics startup reading this? There's a great linkbait blog post idea for you ;-)

Regardless, there's one situation where not having a mobile-friendly destination can make sense:

http://mobilewebup.com/blog/qr-code-always-mobile-landing-pa...
Show HN: HackerFilter  - a little bit better search engine for Hackers
So lets say you have your phone in your bag, not looking at it. Then you enable the voice command and say "Call Foo Burgers"

Your phone understands this as "Call Bar Burgers" and shows on the screen "Calling Bar Burgers". The phone makes a "beep" sound and then proceeds to show a progress bar which you don't see because your phone is in your pocket.

Then the phone connects and you learn of your mistake as the person at the other end answers with "This is Bar burgers, Mr. Foobar speaking".

The only way around this is to enable the voice command, take the phone out of your pocket and then check what it says above the progress bar.

With siri, if you say "Call Foo Burgers", Siri would respond (in audio over your headphones) with "Calling Bar Burgers", giving you a chance to cancel before you annoy the person at the other end and without forcing you to take the phone out of your pocket to check (which is the point of voice commands)
That forward slant is a very well known design paradigm. Take a look at Deutsche Bank's logo - for example: https://www.db.com/index_e.htm
I like the effect of the monochrome images inlaid in the "slate", though they could just do that with the new Windows 8 logo anyway. I don't think the slate shape does anything to fix his criticism that the new Windows logo looks "visually uncomfortable" when applied to devices however, his looks just as akimbo applied to the Surface, if not more so.
Saying that something has a "Soviet" design aesthetic isn't a slur against Russia or Russians. Maybe it's an unfair characterization, but goods from the USSR era have a reputation for being utilitarian, and even "severe" in their design. In contrast with many contemporary consumer products, for example, which often stress form over function.
When I run the second example on play.golang.org, the output I get is:

This program will get 10 IDs from the id channel, print them and terminate

0a90333b6c0f5519b6e5f7ea2d541fb1793b957d
58 bytes written
af2f87580bb3562b58f2ad076e25f76ebf8fec75
0 bytes written
4491029b704d192be5a31eb0c35dfe516274d173
58 bytes written
d97a9080d01e9a8a11d0152d3df34f1c90f5cf16
0 bytes written
130c9fda35c98c7e8922d6ea24bb873838cfdcbd
58 bytes written
0e385bcc65efb6bac8ced67639c32b374d31ae57
0 bytes written
550413e7244dd40cf3df52634bb341dc166708b2
58 bytes written
49cfddab6ff9123ad237f03176927329349e186b
0 bytes written
12abf2ab19e52065b3f7367a57f6f8ecd4968b44
58 bytes written
0755254307f5f9b90829381fa797b5f26081cd5f
0 bytes written

Why does the count alternate between 58 and 0?
You're talking like an Apple Sales-man, except that we know for sure you aren't getting paid.
Apple is providing the warranty mandated by EU law, it's just that nobody in the EU seems to understand their own laws.

EU law mandates a two year warranty for only those defects present at time of sale. Within the first 6 months of sale, the burden of proof is on Apple to prove that the defect wasn't there at sale. After those 6 months are up, the burden of proof switches to the consumer to prove that it was there at sale.

Apple complies with this law.

Apple also provides a 1 year warranty from time of purchase for defects that develop after the time of sale. This, too, is perfectly in the law, and Applecare extends this post-sale defect coverage to two years.

tl;dr EU law involves two different kinds of warranties (covering present-at-sale and post-sale defects). You've confused them.
His reason for using space as a theme is probably deriving from his thesis that Microsoft should brand itself as a bringer of future tech. What seems more futuristic than space? It also appears mystically and naturally beautiful as well as allowing for a lot of breathtaking, pure looking pictures.

Windows being a window into the future, seeing space through the slate projects the image this artist had in mind.
I love Opera; it's incredibly fast (until the past few years Opera was king of the JavaScript speed) and very standards compliant. I hope this doesn't become a trend.
Thanks, I did realize that, but thought to leave it, as I think it makes a point.

I just added a bypass in the G+ post, however.
That's actually a really good analogy. And the GP is right. There should definitely be some laws to prohibit these kinds of things that Facebook is attempting (doing), now that electronic mail/communication is becoming standard.
As a counterpoint, my company was featured on TC this morning and we're boot-strapped and neither of us are even close to being rock stars. I realize we may be an exception to the rule, but it is possible for a young company (We started March 29th) to get noticed and picked up. It did take a lot of persistence and effort, but was definitely worth it.

If you're interested, here's the article: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/appthwack-takes-on-android-...
Is it just me, or looking at that list does one get the feeling that the golden age of web 2.0 is behind us? I'll grant you that there were quite a few weak companies back in the day, but there was always something exciting that you'd run across in the pages of TechCrunch: And looking at that list not only don't I see the next Facebook, I'm not even sure that I see the next bit.ly. Am I just jaded or am I missing something?
It was only at one site that the generators failed, but it was two generators in that site:

In the single datacenter that did not successfully transfer to the generator backup, all servers continued to operate normally on Uninterruptable Power Supply (“UPS”) power. As onsite personnel worked to stabilize the primary and backup power generators, the UPS systems were depleting and servers began losing power at 8:04pm PDT. Ten minutes later, the backup generator power was stabilized, the UPSs were restarted, and power started to be restored by 8:14pm PDT. At 8:24pm PDT, the full facility had power to all racks.

It sounds like they were too optimistic about their generator startup times.
The page is working.
Didn't Google give up on IE6 for some of their services when it had less than 20% market share? Opera has 1-2% market share. Granted, it should be a lot easier to tweak their code for Opera, but the difference in market share is pretty big, too.
People can't do math, and what that means for ecommerce
DropZap and DropZap 2 are free for a limited time.
DropZap:
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DropZap 2:
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This is the artist himself saying that he'd rather have true fans in the seats at a reasonable price, rather than have the tickets snapped up by the asshole with the biggest wallet (not sorry for editorializing, that's the politest version of my view of scalpers).

The add-on effect he's looking for is fan retention over time. If 500 people bought from a scalper at some much higher price, there's a small chance that they will become disgruntled and stop being fans. In the long term, he could lose that business.

But if he himself levels out the market, the fans have less to lose. Sure, the artist takes a hit, but that's on him. He can always do something different next time if he's dissatisfied with his revenue.

Remember that this is a guy who made so much money the last time, that he was somewhat nervous. I don't think he's thinking about it the same way you are.

As for "not doing anyone any favors": way I see it, he's doing his fans a favor by keeping the ticket prices affordable.
How is there artificial demand? The scalpers aren't buying tickets for fun - there has to be someone to flip them TO. These people are fans and they create the demand, as stated in the grandparent.

Edit: a common "rebuttal" in this thread (see diek, potch, drivingmenuts) seems to be that there is an assumption of correct market price being the aim. That isn't the assumption or the point. The point is that excess demand creates the problem. There are several approaches to this (first come first served, lottery, aftermarket) but getting rid of scalpers doesn't solve the fundamental problem. The only thing they (may) be doing wrong is going against the wishes of the artist (if they prefer to use another method). It's not clear that e.g lottery is better than finding the true price (or vice versa).
The scalpers are the market-makers. If there were an official market, the scalpers would be out of business overnight.
Something like this would've been possible through Hangouts if Google bought Hulu, but that didn't happen.