skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Platform choice and fragmentation is a pain in the ass.

I develop and maintain a bunch of sites.
Majority of visitors are on Windows (Many using IE/WinXP).

Servers run Linux and I can never seem to get an accurate dev environment under Windows (some libraries don't seem to behave differently there).

Also a bunch of the front-end tools that I would like to use only run on Mac.

I don't really want to keep 3 uptodate computers.
Ultimately there are going to have to be shifts in what skills people learn. There will be high unemployment during the adjustment period, but as long as demand for low-skill jobs shrinks, people will adjust and learn new skills. You don't have to go back to school to learn how to be a programmer :)
Well analyzed and stated.

I avoid nearly all "startup" events now I everyone you talk with is working on something that's not doing anything useful but trying skim money.

Even some of the best out there are just trying to ride trends of social, mobile, etc. hoping for a big score. But to what end? Your first point rings very true with me.

A well known VC friend of mine told me that most of his college friends went to Goldman Sachs saying that all of them said they'd make a fortune and then change the world - they did and then they didn't.
I don't think that Apple is playing dirty tricks in this regard. I'm not particularly sympathetic to many kinds of patents that are being enforced these days, but Samsung is clearly trying to make slavish copies of Apple products, and Apple certainly is entitled to defend themselves against this.

I might not have been so sympathetic to Apple in this regard if I hadn't been fooled by Samsung products myself. E.g., a few months back I was in a Costco and saw a new iPad on display. I found this surprising, as I wasn't aware that there was a new iPad. I picked up the iPad and fiddled with it for a minute. I found it confusing, because it was so much like the iPad I had at home, except that some things were different in a way that I didn't expect. After a minute, I finally realized that this wasn't an iPad at all, but rather a Samsung tablet that had been designed to mimic the iPad in many important details.

I also recall seeing a TV show in which someone was speaking on an iPhone, only it wasn't any model of iPhone that I had seen before. I figured that it must have been a prop iPhone as perhaps Apple hadn't wanted to pay for the product placement in this episode. I vaguely recalled Apple suing Samsung over design patents and so I Googled for a minute. Sure enough, the "prop iPhone" was a real Samsung phone!

You can't knock-off a Chanel handbag. Why should you be able to knock-off an iPad or an iPhone?

Anyone who claims that Samsung isn't intentionally stealing Apple's design for their own profit is being disingenuous. And anyone who claims that Samsung couldn't easily differentiate their design from Apple's design is also be disingenuous. Other Android phones and tablets are not such slavish copies, and this is why Apple is going after Samsung, rather than other phone and tablet manufacturers.
Business as usual.

In the mold of great businesses we admire, our goal is
to efficiently use our outside investment to improve the
lives of millions of users
(6 months ago)
The author misses at least a couple things that drive the success of Android, and may have been critical in the early stages of success:

1. Android was open enough that every chip maker for mobile devices and interactive embedded systems saw it as a huge step forward: no more crappy UI stacks licensed from proprietary technology providers.

2. Being based on Linux, having a liberal open source license, and having most of the code created by Google under this open source license, except for a suite of proprietary applications that are not a critical part of the OS.

3. Using Java and a familiar toolchain

On top of which, though this is a subjective measure, Android is elegant. Android was a novel solution made by very capable people with a background that gave them good taste and good judgement. When I first saw Android, the first Macintosh immediately came to mind. Just like Macintosh, Android did things differently in pursuit of doing more, with less, in a mass market device.
Just like Facebook? I suppose the stroke of brilliance was constraining it to pictures, but still.

(It's really, really hard not to have disdain for this sort of thing, incidentally.)
All that means is that advertisers now have a new venue to sell into right? Isn't that what all of this is about? I don't see why we should care.

It's not making the market more efficient as nothing but a close to duplicate graph is being created along with pictures that have slightly more value than Facebook pictures, or any other.

Why should we care?
You are so full of shit [1]. Tens of millions of people do not share data about their day to day lives. If they did, it would not even be a valuable process. Small groups of friends and family share data about their day to day lives, in a slightly more convenient and slightly less thoughtful/personal way than they did with photo albums, postcards and phone calls 50 years ago.

This is not innovation, it is a small convenience that does not better us in any real way.

[1] Yes, the expletive was entirely necessary.
I hear this argument all the time, but I don't get it. Besides software that 3rd parties choose not to write for OSX, what functionality is possible on Windows but impossible on OSX?
Makes me think of... http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
Reducing your slavery footprint
In all fairness, I never took "freshman calculus" either; that said, most undergraduate math degrees require either real or complex analysis, and at the graduate programs with which I am familiar you would have a very difficult time passing the qualifying exams if you weren't comfortable working with Taylor series.
OS X has several problems:

* I can't multitask as efficiently as in Linux or Windows (it has several reasons).

* Most windows can't be maximized (perhaps there's an app for this).

* Select text to copy and paste with middle click doesn't work.

* Full font hinting can't be set. Linux has better font rendering than OS X / Windows (if configured properly).

* The whole system feels too closed and constrained. In Linux, I know that if there's something I don't like, I can usually fix it.
Error Code 451: an HTTP error for censorship
I loved Spool. Why didn't Facebook decide to integrate and continue to offer Spool to users?
I must have missed it the first time around on HN, sorry for the repost. Hope new people find it this time around.
Requiring email confirmation almost always decreases conversion and frequently in a major way. You should have a very good reason for confirming an email address (for example, PayPal tying payments to email addresses) or don't do it (or do it passively; ie, if someone happens to click on a link in an email you send them, mark the email address as confirmed).
Perhaps a way to prevent the reaction from a change in category is to discontinue and rebrand the product.

If the Red Cross had shut down the donut stations and then came back some time later with comfort food in a modified form, the soldiers would see the new stations independent of their anchor to the previously free stations.
Any project with good people will make improvements that are worth adopting. However, since this is true in general - then the argument still goes back to what we choose to work on.

However, I'd say that trying to solve a hard problem, not photo sharing, has a higher likelihood of producing these improvements. Look at how competition in space, military, chips, etc. did this.
The following usage is actually fairly common:

Natural numbers: strictly positive integers
Whole numbers: non-negative integers
This is not very surprising, actually. Financial contracts & instruments are complex enough - and written in natural languages, often - that it would almost be surprising if you could not construct Boolean circuits or other building blocks of Turing-complete functions. (Have we learned nothing from Wang tiles or Fractran or Turing-complete return-from-libc or the entire area of esoteric languages?) It was already shown that NP problems could be encoded into contracts, so this extension is logical.
Not so much two-party adversarial politics so much as big business and the 0.01% funding and controlling the two viable parties. The center-right party and the right party used to compromise. The system wasn't always this dysfunctional but one party has been hijacked by fringe groups who refuse to compromise.
I was a bit shocked by that. Not sure I would want Fracking to be the engine driving my economic growth — you're trading a financial crisis for a potentially massive environmental catastrophe.
It's funny you should mention that, because the language in the blog post was Forth. And you can run Forth directly on a chip, unlike C. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what GreenArrays is doing[1]. Starting this fall, I think I'll be working on something similar as well.

[1]: http://www.greenarraychips.com/

Or what about lisp? While these were well before my time, my understanding is that they could run Lisp directly in hardware.

And, of course, there have been OSes mostly written in higher level languages than C or C++. The one that springs to mind immediately is the Singularity OS[2] project from Microsoft that is mostly implemented in C#. I think there is still some assembly, C and C++, but the kernel and drivers are in C#.

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
I can (actually between P(N) and [0,1), but it is equivalent)). Not sure if I should post it here though. Just email me if you want my answer (email is in my profile).
How To Kill Your Day Job And Travel The World
Ask HN: why do recruiters omit the name of the company they're hiring for?
Presumably there is a class of people who would reject the job if they knew the name of the company at first, but would accept if they knew more about the job before finding out the name of the company.<p>I just find it odd. If any of you are recruiters, have you tested response rates when you include the company name vs. not including it?
"what he says is that there are no advantages from a weight loss point"

A diet is much more than counting calories. It's about managing to maintain a set amount of food for your objective.

Here's an experiment you can do. Replace all your food (lunch/dinner) with chicken fillets (for the daily need of protein), top up calories with sweet potatoes and olive oil for fat needs.

See how long you can keep up with this diet. This is a nutritionally sound diet (except for micronutrients), and if you calculate your daily needs you will maintain your weight (or you can adjust for weight loss or gain)

But a regular person will probably lose weight because (s)he will get sick of it fast and eat less!

The calories matter, but two things can have an equal number of calories and one may make people feel hungry after 1h and the other may make people feel full for the whole day. Guess who's more likely to lose weight?!
Direct link to the RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tbray-http-legally-restric...
Providing we agree the goal is innovation, it doesn't work as currently practised. A patent is supposed to be an innovation so unique (non-obvious etc) that others are unlikely to come up with the same thing for quite a period of time that the innovator is given a 20 year monopoly (and ability to seek rent) as a reward for telling the world about the innovation details early. This is supposed to accelerate innovation.

The problem with software patents is that software doesn't work in isolation - things are built on other things, so nothing is really standalone. The other problem is that the patents that are accepted are not actually innovative. If they were then there wouldn't be all these other companies to sue for violating them! (It is standard legal advice to software engineers to never read patents.)

The value of patents is not in innovation - it is in providing grounds to sue others and collect rents from them. This has the net effect of slowing down innovation because it is safer to avoid newer things than be in the court room. It also means that competition is limited because others can't "fairly" compete in the same product space. It is ultimately a tax on doing business with the proceeds going to lawyers and others.
At least they're upfront about their biases. More than you can say for much other "journalism".
Bitcoin Nordic brings Bitcoin to 300M people in the Middle East and North Africa
I've gone and checked. They were mentioned, effectively with "when you need them they will be pretty much obvious" - and they were. They never formed a topic in their own right, they just "fell out" of the actual material.

This was in Australia in the early 80s, and to this day I think of TSs as sort of obvious. But I did Pure Maths, and I think TSs are more emphasised in applied where you use them for approximations, etc.
Most people, and especially on HN, accept the cultural defaults of success.

This is not always wise.
Especially since it seems they have the mobile space better figured out that practically anyone (Facebook, Google, etc.).
Not that it really matters for Spool, but a request to everyone that has a product or company blog: please make it easy for me to get to your main site. A simple link would work.

Edit: woops, looks like spool's primary domain redirects to the blog anyway. Perhaps the lack of a link is intentional.
> There is nothing wrong with pursuing "small ideas" for the sake of personal profit.

Correct. But it sure makes for boring people, because they're too busy trying to please the mainstream.
Note that there is no need to port every single program. You can still run a 64 bit userspace (or a 32 bit one for that matter), but for the apps where there is a major benefit use x32. This also means you don't have to port every library etc.
ReadWriteWeb’s dimly backlit Retina flamebait
Shameless plug: we're working on a product focused solely on opinions called Cheerboo (http://www.cheerboo.com/).

It's part search/discovery part social, and is trying to solve the problem that all the opinions shared in places like Twitter/Facebook aren't preserved, aggregated or made useful outside of the social graph.

We organize opinions around topics, make people weigh in on topics with a binary rating system (cheer or boo) and use the cheers/boos to give each topic a "RottenTomatoes-style" score. Let us know your thoughts - we love feedback.
Recent HN discussion about this (and all things Elon Musk):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238984
Feynman had some similar advice to not read too much. He'd get just the basic idea, stop reading, and try to solve the problem himself. There's a similar anecdote about Turing. You don't have to be a genius to profit from this approach, though of course it affects how far you can take it.
Two faulty assumptions:

1) That for every low-skill job lost, a high-skill job replaces it. That's not the case. When robotic arms replace 100k factory workers, the robotic arm companies do not need 100k new programmers, nor are the factory owners going to use the reduced labor costs to turn into software shops. It's not like the industrial revolution all over again; computers and robotics are producing such enormous productivty gains that eventually there will be fewer people required by the labor force than the working-age population.

2) That people whose skills are no longer in-demand will somehow acquire other skills. Some will, but large swaths of the unemployed won't, especially among people 50+. That's why so many millions, especially 50+ women, have now been unemployed for years. It's not such an easy transition as you make it out to be -- people won't simply adjust, no, a large portion will essentially drop from middle-class to poverty and stay that way until they die. It's not they who will take the new jobs, it's the younger next generation that never had the obsolete skills.

A 55 year old with only a HS diploma for whom a computer has never been more than a magical toaster that delivers e-mail, only existing in the past few years of his/her life, is simply not going to become a professional programmer even if he/she wanted to.
5 Running Tips for Beginners
I don't think you need to be embarrassed about it, and I get the sense that avoiding smartphones (or at least, being able to not become welded to them) is at a higher rate among techies than in their peers in the population at large these days. (Note: "peers" in this case means people of similar age, say 20-50, and similar socioeconomic position.) I think it's a combination of dealing with tech tools all day at work (and needing time off) and understanding the risks to security and privacy.

I still don't have a smartphone. I'm thinking I might get one the next time my contract's up, but I'm very much thinking I won't hook my email up to it....
It wasn't the annoyance I was commenting on, but rather the privacy implications of combining the two bars when what you would type in one of them is typically sent off to some search engine somewhere in real time.
Ask HN: If there was no internet, what business would you have started?
Apart from companies to try and create the internet, what offline businesses would you have started and why?
Isn't that the tradeoff? You either join the circle of people selling each other insurance, or you get a real job.
It's hard to argue with hundreds of billions of dollars and oil-addict America becoming a net exporter.
The NSA will have some really novel and new ting we don't know about. They might be one of a handful of places where you really do have some Silent Experts. However as to your second example google

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

This is really common I can pull you up multiple research papers from them on everything from database design to ranking alogrithems. Same thing for Facebook, Twitter, IBM, Cisco, and the numerous computer science research institutions.

For the most part what you see as "Advanced" is just a better implementation of the same idea. Thats not to say that the people making the proprietary software aren't intelligent and aren't building better products because they are, but its just silly to assume that there is this world of computer engineering talent we don't hear from that's doing groundbreaking things in the shadows.
You seem overly fixated with defending the status quo as if it's somehow the way things 'should' be.

Where's the imagination? Can you see that this is a deep cultural problem: namely the fixation on maximizing one's personal profit at the expense of ignoring bigger needs. Unfortunately, we as a society deify money to the extent that if anyone even suggests that this isn't a sustainable practice, everyone gets all pissy. I don't know what a society would look like, but I'd love to change attitudes towards money such that we stop squandering minds on the latest social mobile local app.

That would be a true disruption.
Is there anything considered wrong or no longed suited to the current requirements in the present design?
Interesting how these super-resolution approaches are slowly inching onto AI/machine learning territory.
www.memrise.com
Yeah, but doesn't that work by polling the APs then sending the poll results to Google over 3G/4G? If data is off how could this work?
"Empower" how? Subsidies? If you enact subsidies, then you create an environment in which somebody has the incentive to aggregate the subsidy - in a large business. That's agricultural policy in the US for the last hundred years in a nutshell.
Nothing says "buff and reinvented" like red, white and blue nipple tassels.
Iran might really need it these days.
IBM, Microsoft, and Google -- None of them have been overthrown.

The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years.

Facebook will be around long after you and I are dead.

It's not another myspace or friendster. It's a firmly ingrained institution that people probably value more than their wallet at any given time.
I would assume they're heading in that direction given that they decided not to renew their contract with Google which used to let Google display real-time search results from Twitter.
This is a huge issue for me presently.

I want to work on big/hard problems that affect people's lives. Things that require imperfect solutions, or require a lot of research. Is there any way to find these? I tend toward more of a research bent, personally, but it's hard to hear about them in the HN bubble. I'm not looking to make a gazillion dollars, but rather to find something that is intellectually challenging enough to last me quite awhile. Anyone have any ideas?
Pretty product - how long has it been around? I didn't see anything on crunchbase about it.
The theory says that workers with low marginal productivity can move up the productivity scale. And largely, that's what's seen, but it's far from perfect.
Is this an alternate universe where it's 2012 but we have a different set of technologies or is this in a previous period on this timeline? I tend to think that geeks go where the action is: For example if this was the 70s most of the folks here would be working the PC. I started my first company in 1989 and while the internet was around there was no easy way to use it, so we launched a dial-up BBS. We weren't able to monazite that so we focused on technologies like HyperCard and CD-ROMs.
Facebook’s Latest Acqui-Hire: Spool, The “Instapaper On Steroids”
Why is it assumed that there are big minds behind these companies? (question, not trolling)
I never said you did attempt to write about your company.

> You need to have your company name created first before anyone can write about you.

No you don't. If you're logged in and you go to a blank page, you can just start writing something there, unless the page has been specifically blocked from page creation because someone keeps putting spam there.

I would say that the combination of not knowing how Wikipedia works, asking other people to do something for you, and on top of that, trying to get an article written about yourself, your company, your band, or anything else you are intimately involved with is a perfect way to get yourself ignored and discredited.
Since HN is full of smart people, I feel like asking - do you guys realize you're smart? Having never made anything worth talking about, I can't imagine someone who makes some great web property going on and saying "oh it was nothing, 5 million users or some number is insignificant" or "my page to the Kernel runs trillions of times a day on a billion devices worldwide, but that doesn't mean much".
You really find IO more interesting than problem solving?
Hackers Spill 453,000 Yahoo Credentials on the Internet
It's because recruiters take a large cut of your pay. If you know the name of the company why do you need the recruiter?
Of course we're the ones with the power.

However, I think more often than not people lack the ability to see how their small action can add up to something big. The vote with your wallet analogy being the greatest of all.

If the hive-mind would focus their energy tidal waves would erupt.
What WORA can tell us about the future of the cloud
It's a bit of a dishonest headline. He is taking issue with all three of the HTTP/2.0 candidates. The only one he really cuts any slack for is the one where he participated in the draft specification.

For you to post a link to the article and call out SPDY specifically points out your personal bias. While you are obviously entitled to your own bias, trying to use something like this to spin negative publicity for SPDY is just annoying.

Much better to let people formulate their own opinions on the matter.