skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's how economists define "surplus" vs. "shortage".

There's a shortage of a good when the price is set lower than what the market is willing to pay. The economist's solution is to set the price higher (this may also encourage means of increasing supply, depending on price elasticity of supply).

There's an excess of a good when the price is set higher than what the market is willing to pay. The economist's solution is to set the price lower (which may also result in some producers exiting the market and/or reducing output).

There are problems in this theory where it intersects with social / political / physical production. Food, for example, is relatively price-inelastic: there's a certain amount of calories people require to survive on a daily basis, and all the price pressure you can apply isn't going to move mere calories by more than a relatively small amount up or down (people will either starve or become obese). Though you can manipulate food quality: meat (more resource-intensive than vegetarian diets), nutritional quality, freshness, organic vs. artificial / technologically intensive agricultural methods.
Apple Removes Green EPEAT Certification From All Products
I wish articles like these wouldn't use these cartoonish "70s sci fi" illustrations. It makes it seem like the real science is too abstract or shaky to demonstrate. I really think that people likely to read Space Industry News could swallow a few awkward nerdy visualizations. For those audiences, dodge-and-burned asteroids feel patronizing.
Absolutely. I recently started working on an Android port of an iOS app of mine and it's a big time saver letting the tools take care of these details. Not to mention how much more powerful refactoring tools can be when they don't have to worry about a preprocessor.
The importance of being prolific
iFixit evaluates for repairability, not for recyclability.

For example, on http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-with-Retina-Displ... they state "
To complicate matters further, the TrackPad cable lies underneath the battery. Attempting to pry the battery off the upper case could easily sever the fragile cable, which would be bad." That is of no concern when recycling the device.

So, is there a problem recycling these new devices? I would guess so, but I do not rule out that there is a simple process to separate these parts, e.g. by heating them to a certain temperature, putting them in a microwave just long enough, or by taking apart the battery before removing it from the glass. A dedicated recycler could use some specialist procedure for recycling these things. I do doubt that that would be economically feasible, though. The amount of glass involved is just too small.

Also, chances are that that will lead to lower degree of recycling, just as white glass can be recycled better than green or brown glass, and as car windshields, being layered with some plastic, can be recycled, but likely not into new car windshields.
Testing with users inexperienced in both UIs or testing with users who knew pre-ribbon Office well? A reference?

I find it takes a bit of time to find where functions have moved on Office 2010, and I seem to be taking a long time to internalise the 'logic' for finding less used functions. Probably all those years on Office old style.
> It's compiled, not interpreted. Even Java and C# are compiled into bytecode for a massive VM to interpret.

For Java you have interpreters, JIT and native compilers.

C# is always compiled (either JIT or AOT), and both Mono and Microsoft Research have native compilers available for CLR free binary distributions.
blocks and arc go a LONG way
I like being outside on nice days. On rainy days I enjoy coffee and coding. My winter productivity in Seattle is probably higher than it would be in Palo Alto.
Thanks for your comment.

If you are comfortable would you mind linking to your homepage or sending me your contact info? (You can find my email at dylanfield.com) I'd love to talk more with you sometime.
great point of view.
This article focuses more on potential employees graduating from UW, but Seattle is a great place to found a startup. In the Valley, everything is pretty crowded, and if you can find real estate, it's not going to be cheap.

In Seattle, it's a buyers market and you can grab some office space or a hacker house for a lot less.

There are more startup resources in the Valley (accelerators/angels/VCs), but that doesn't mean there is a good amount in the Emerald City. One of them, Madrona Venture Group (http://www.madrona.com/), just raised $300M to be invested in startups. There are also a few hacker spaces popping up, such as Surf Incubator (http://www.surfincubator.com).

If you want a good place to start your company with less competition and more rain, move to Seattle.
Its also surrounded by the two incredible cities of Vancouver and Portland (a few hours drive to either). Also, the region is home to some of the best beers in the world (if you're a fan of hoppy beer).
Similar, but much smaller and more familial. And way less under construction.
The Viola-Jones algorithm and Haar-like features are really only suitable for faces. Solving object detection/recognition for general classes of objects is one of the largest open problems in computer vision and thousands of researchers around the world are looking at how to solve it.

If you're interested, results on the Pascal VOC [1] and Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge [2] are considered to be the state-of-the-art in computer vision (and therefore most promising). If you look at actual performance of the best contenders, you'll find that reported accuracies are often in the teens or twenties. These numbers are likely over-optimistic. So for most practical purposes, general object recognition doesn't work. At all.

However, there are some domain-specific approaches that work to some degree. Faces is one example. Another is pedestrian detection, which is getting somewhat mature at this point. A third is plant recognition, as in my previous project Leafsnap [3].

My personal feeling is that there isn't going to be "one algorithm to rule them all", but rather a collection of dozens of algorithms to deal with the most common classes of objects (faces, people, cars, buildings, animals, text, etc.), and then a set of other algorithms for recognizing all other classes, depending on each class' characteristics (shape, material, configurations, variability, etc.)

Finally, a word of caution. Many young PhD students in vision start having dreams of building such a website/service, and they have all had their hopes crushed. Different classes often need to be dealt with quite differently, and it's not even clear what kind of API would cover all the different cases. So if you're actually serious about this, I would recommend limiting your focus to a few specific domains, and also by considering some actual use-cases so that you have something concrete to aim for (i.e., "build an API so that application X is possible").

[1] http://pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/

[2] http://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2010/index

[3] http://leafsnap.com/
When a company is acquired (I speak from experience) the first thing its people are told is, nothing is going to change for you, we bought you for what you do, and we want you to go on doing it, with the support of our sales organization, or words to that effect.

This isn't strictly a lie, because the person who says this genuinely believes it. But the problem comes from, he doesn't stick around to follow through. Maybe he gets promoted. Maybe he's the "acquisitions guy" and he's gone onto the next juicy startup to tell them the same thing.

The guy you actually end up working for doesn't care about your startup. To him, you're just employees of the firm who got hired a slightly different way than the Graduate Trainee Fast Track Programme he came in on, and it's not that he resents you as outsiders or anything, he just doesn't see why you shouldn't be treated and act the same as everyone else. And since you work for him now, you vote either way with your feet.
I was going to give a point-by-point on why this article is just plain wrong, but then I came across this gem:

> It’s a corner case. Corner cases exist, and if you’re in one, don’t use Core Data.

The problem here with Core Data is that it's not a piecemeal solution. You either use it or you don't, so when you run into something the Core Data doesn't do properly (like bulk delete, or bulk anything really), you're stuck.
Wireless power transmission seems like a great idea, but it can't be billed by usage, and kills everyone who has a pacemaker.
> But this idea (that is, that while lecturing others, you have some right to break those rules because you them inconvenient) is absurd.

Heh. Protip: When criticizing style as a point of argument, make sure you don't accidentally a word.

I'd actually recommend against criticizing style at all, unless someone's paying you to do it for them. It's hard to do in good faith. But thanks for the help, anyway.
Header files are a relic from the 70's, which was replaced by sane module systems in the 80's.

Only stone age languages insist in using header files.
Exactly, the article is ignoring any sort of cause and effect for why the numbers are the way they are. If the US changed tax policy to favor other types of income, how the rich divide their income would change to fit.
Loveopolis.com - The first truly "social" dating site. Would "love" feedback.
Loveopolis was created to help people meet and connect online. We found that there wasn't a way to truly give people an interactive and social experience when it came to finding love...so we decided to build one.
Can HN just ban gigaom articles? Have they ever written a single technically interesting or accurate article in their entire existence? It's all just spin.
Gezonde voeding en levenspatroon kunnen aambeien voorkomen | Leef Nu Gezonder
Loveopolis was created to help people meet and connect online. We found that there wasn't a way to truly give people an interactive and social experience when it came to finding love...so we decided to build one.
I don't buy the comparison. It's a lot easier to avoid breaking things when you're not compiling to native code, but compiling to native code is one of Objective-C's biggest advantages.
It sounds too public. What if I would prefer to date without everyone in the world knowing everything about me & my dating life???
I moved up to the Portland area a couple years ago from California, and I have considered going to U. of Washington for CS. I love the school, the campus is just beautiful and the city is really cool. But since moving up here, my productivity has taken a serious hit.

From the months of October well into June, I have a constant struggle to stay motivated with such dreary weather. I know Portland isn't Seattle, but I visit Seattle often and it's almost as "bad" as Portland when it comes to the weather. Many of my friends here don't mind the weather and actually love the rain. As someone that needs sunlight, I can't stay up here another year, I will be moving back down to the bay area this upcoming fall. It really is a shame because I do love Portland and Seattle very much.

If only the Northwest had just a little bit more sunlight, I would never consider moving down. But those few months in the Winter/Spring really take a toll on me.
Your list reminds me quite a bit of the effusive language used by Apple engineers at WWDC, but does not reflect the larger context and objectivity of the industry outside of Apple.

If we inspect your point about compilation vs interpretation, we ought to note that this is a technical decision, not an implementation constraint. Mono compiles C#/F# into native code when targeting iOS.

If we look at lldb, I think your assessment is overly generous. lldb is a new, buggy, but promising debugger. Most languages -- including C#, Java, Haskell, OCaml -- have a standard and viable debugger, and this does not particularly set Objective-C apart.

As for libdispatch, it simply a closure-based thread-pool executor / IO framework, like you'd find in any other language. It's better than pthreads and serves as a nice interface on top of kqueue, but it's certainly not so novel as to be the "best concurrency framework ever".

For example, compare against Microsoft's Reactive Extensions; Rx allows one to implement concurrency declaratively, rather than imperatively with chained closures as is done in with libdispatch.

http://rxwiki.wikidot.com/101samples#toc3

Lastly, I wish to address header files. Everything in a header file could be derived automatically from the original code. This is done on almost every other modern language platform, and there's no reason it shouldn't be done here.

Furthermore, headers do not elide the need for documentation; Objective-C type system is not nearly expressive enough to fully articulate the constraints and invariants of an API, and undocumented APIs are inescapably and destructively ambiguous APIs.

Apple even sets a good example here by providing complete documentation for every supported API in the system.
IMO, here is the salient part of the article:

"risk-averse"
What is there to explain? Why the heck would anyone want to remember all the details of their lives? Worse, have them around for anyone to see (e.g. Facebook and friends).

I am unable to imagine some motivation for people wanting this.
Welcome to the debased state of science journalism. Anyone with half a brain should feel completely insulted by this b.s.
Wouldn't Objective-C's "library management" be the same as C's? Wouldn't you include the source files in your project, add the header files to the proper path somewhere and be done with it? People developing software in C and C++ have been doing this for decades without much of a problem, I can't understand how all of a sudden this is a "dependency nightmare".

Recommending to roll your own solution for every new problem goes directly against the last 20 years of evolution in the software development industry. It's like the other conclusion some iOS developers seem to arrive to: "you should debug by logging because XCode's debugger sucks". Another 20 year regression.

I'm just confused. Is XCode singlehandedly messing up the minds of a whole generation of developers?

EDIT: removed profanity.
Brilliant, I have started to use celery a few months ago, now we a use it to back our video transcoding and automation platform, our search engine, and our mobile app backend.

Excellent job celery team !
Nowhere near the same. When Ruby was just becoming popular, any Rails developer could have said "This language is crap, I'm going to go write my web app in PHP/Perl/Java/Python".

Now try the same thing as Obj-C was just becoming popular: "This language is crap I'm going to go write my iOS app in..."

Well?
Good point!! A quick search brings some interesting statement - basically that is the only perceived way out of poverty for many people [1]. Also the risk seems really low, because it is "rooted" in your usual budget, like cigarettes, so you don't really see the real cost. Due to the media and the advertising, the perceived chance of gain may also be increased.

[1] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-07/cmu-wpa072408...
Is it still the case that you need straight As in math and physics to get into CS at UW? It's insane that they crank out psych and english majors by the thousands but keep a lid on CS.
I'm appalled by this article, as explained in my comment not two minutes ago. I wonder if this is just a terrible article of the mindset of a whole industry. I have first hand experience with iOS developers doing exactly what the article describes. Is XCode/Cocoa development the next PHP?
> if you are saving more than 3 objects to disk without linking to CoreData.framework, you’re doing it wrong.

That's a pretty broad stroke (that I'm, admittedly, unfairly singling out).

Core Data works great in apps where you're dealing with a limited number of entities and displaying them in table views full of repeated cells (NSFetchedResultsController FTW!).

Once your entity graph gets fairly complex, however, things start to fall apart rather quickly. Child contexts? In theory, they're awesome. But we've ran into a number of nasty cases where objects were getting over-released on cleanup of the context. Error messages are less than helpful, merging model changes is a nightmare, batch deletion sucks, splitting data into multiple stores is way too complex - the list goes on.

The biggest problem I have with Core Data is that there is just not enough "best practices"-type documentation out there. The WWDC videos and everything else from Apple do a good job of getting people to get in the pool. But then you have a pool full of people who don't know how to swim and are now drowning.

Two weeks ago, I rewrote a third party library, because it didn't account for the fact that the app itself might be using Core Data as well (shock!). Among many other things, it was grabbing any model files it could find in the whole app bundle instead of specifically searching for its own, causing migration issues.

The sooner Apple admits that Core Data is a mess and moves on, the better off the ecosystem will be.
Interest rate (ideally) = rate of inflation + the risk involved + cost of opportunity.
I think anyone who thinks that GC/Memory Management is a "solved" problem hasn't been paying attention!

Oh, and thanks for the links!
Typo: should be "Iain M Banks"

I also enjoy his culture novels. His non-culture "Against a Dark Background" is also excellent.
Well, you are right but you are looking in the wrong areas of the City. I'm clearly biased, being the founder of Shopify, but we are here to change everything you mentioned above and we have succeeded so far when everyone told us we couldn't. Feel like going for a coffee?
By your own provided links, and some third party information on the subject it should be considered that;

The second hand market for such a highly valued brand is a factor that improves real product life cycle. Also, access to said premium priced devices and user brand entanglement tend to slant device usage past its prime.

Pc's (mostly corporate windows machines) tend to be cycled at higher rates, and that has to do with finantial arrangements linked to fiscal incentives. This data will slant any analisys that doesn't account for this specific motivation.

I was just showing how the premise presented by the poster didn't hold up if only one single model per poster referenced brand showed positive.

So, machines that can be serviced and upgraded without the same restrictions, in comparison, will have expanded usage life cycle. This is parallel to your provided information but doesn't become mute by its introduction, it does however make good thinking points on the amount of waste we currently produce...
From a business perspective, it doesn't matter if Kaggle is flawed. What matters is whether they can convince customers to buy in to their ideas and fund their business.

In other words, more Snake Oil from the computer industry. In some (most?) cases, the salesmen may even believe that the Oil works. That is, they may not be acting fraudulently, but just foolishly (as are their clients who believe the hype).

Overconfidence in math and computers to solve problems that are not suited to be solved this way. In some ways this is partly responsible for the global financial mess. Reliance on models that quants and their bosses would defend vigorously, because they work to make money for the bosses (because clients believe the hype), but which are, overall, in the long run, not sound.
> What about the difficulty of finding out what users want (when your customers are all in the US)

That's absolutely not the issue. In fact, Canada's national past time is to psycho analyse Americans. If anything we understand them better then they themselves.

Also there is tons of money available. The issue is smart money. We raised all our money in New York City.
Context-Aware Image Resizing
Pirate Bay Founder Submits Emotional Plea for Pardon
> Although Stanford is considered the Hogwarts of techdom, U.W. has quietly established itself as the other West Coast nexus of the information economy.

Odd line given that Berkeley is also on the West Coast and is ranked as high as Stanford.
I think that Lithium (www.lithify.me) would be really great to mention under the 'popular frameworks' section.
I love the hacker community, problem sorted in hours.

You're great Udo!

Samrat, if you have a problem in a year, drop me a note and I will
help you out, taking over the baton in this relay race!

Per
Thanks for the suggestion. Feel free to send a pull request and I'll be happy to add it in!
That's a great question. No one can view your information unless you explicitly become friends with them. And only your "Inner Circle" has advanced access to see all of your information.

Also, we never post any of your information to any social network, we only consume it to make your experience the best one possible.
Straight, simple and to the point. Nice.

Missing test and QA tools though. Probably an oversight, since the author does suggest following Derick Rethans and Sebastian Bergmann.

And another one: read up on the SPL library before you start re-inventing that wheel.
Indeed, the parent did say that:

>While I think it's unrealistic to expect an OSS browser to provide ongoing support for that long
Something to consider mentioning - there are some in PHP these days that take this sort of stuff a bit too far. Drives me nuts to see people writing classes to encapsulate a 3 column database result. So much overhead and boilerplate.
> Is XCode singlehandedly [messing] up the minds of a whole generation of developers?

No. I think the situation is more that there are a LOT of people jumping into iOS development without a programming background (let alone a strong background in Objective-C).
Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques
Hole in one. From downtown. Have an upboat.
All good points. If you'd like to submit a pull request, I'll be happy to credit you with the additions and get them added to the site.
Barclays was not alone in what they were doing

yeah, I think I read on Taibbi's blog that the attention initially came to Barclays because they weren't "juicing the goose," they then were encouraged to do so to alleviate the disparity in the rates they were reporting relative to the other banks.

postscript- I reviewed the post before submitting( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/libor-ba... )

The scenario described above is as told by the recently resigned Barclays ceo, perhaps not an exemplar of honesty, but it seems plausible.
Java hasn't been bytecode interpreted in 10 years. The objc_msgsend function is not fast. Measure it and see.
Celery is one of those rare libraries where improvements to itself are improvements to my sanity and well being.

That said, I did run into an issue with periodic tasks (our bread and butter at Zapier). Detailed here: https://github.com/celery/celery/issues/844

Thanks a bunch Ask.
How's your retention rate? I'd bet your numbers are really bad and that's probably why you're not building any traffic.

Your content is just not consumable. I clicked one of your links, it's just a wall of text. I couldn't bring myself to read it. The first couple of sentences did not make me want to read the rest of it. I can't skim through and get an idea what you are talking about.

I will probably never be a returning visitor to your blog. That's because I have the attention span of a 5 year old when I browse the internet in discovery mode. Most people are like me.

Maybe you can work on making your writing more consumable. Use more pictures, bullet points, sub headings, shorter paragraphs...Maybe you can A/B test how you present your articles.

Just my 2 pence...