skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the average price for an average connection in the US ?

Here in France, I get Internet + TV + free phone to 50+ countries for about 40$/mo.

I don't think there is anything above 60-80£/mo here (that would include all of the above + mobile + paid TV channels), so 120$/mo seems really kind of expensive to me!
While I do not disagree with what you have to say with regards to Google getting to claim credit for skimming the cream off of their advertisers' own brand equity (and then selling that cream to them at impressive prices), that's sort of orthogonal to the point I was making. Specific to, say, AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have enough development capability to ship software products and b) also know AdWords well enough to get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as hen's teeth. Because many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly and generate millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who is capable of applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords operation (+) can be very, very useful to have around.

There's approximately four people in the world that can do that. Two of them like their jobs, one just got funded, and the fourth one can charge whatever he darn pleases. (This is an exaggeration, but not much of one.)

+ You might naively assume I'm talking about the AdWords API, but there are so many things a developer could do to wring extra money out of an AdWords campaign that it is virtually cheating. A consulting client once bragged to me that they had a lot of landing pages, and they asked me how many I had. It turns out that they had 11 and I had, at the time, only 900-something. There are a lot of marketing departments which think that developing 900 landing pages would take a team of 20 people the better part of a year. A properly motivated intermediate Rails developer could bang that out on any given Monday. (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, consider banging this out.)
I've had nothing but positive experiences on JetBlue
Why is grep being modified at all? It is clearly not broken.
If that was all Instagram was, then Hipstamatic would be the $1 billion business.
The only thing free here is low-tier internet if you pay for the installation. This isn't about ads, this is about installation.
But up until now there have been no clear alternatives when citizens try to fight those sanctioned monopolies.

If Google is offering 100x the speed in another city, Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T etc. will have a hard time explaining why they should retain their monopoly unless they offered something competitive.
But his kid didn't do anything to have deserved a childhood knowing their father committed suicide.

But nobody deserves anything in life, neither good nor bad. What is good? What is bad? We have no promises for anything. Why things happen? For some reason unbeknownst to anyone, he and his closest people chose to participate in such a tragedy. It wasn't him choosing to commit suicide alone nor it wasn't his closest family members choosing to live through an event of suicide but that they all shared a bond that invited them to such a course of life where one of them takes his own life. Nobody knows why but nobody's in it for nothing. There are lessons to be learned and facts to be faced. People have to deal with things and that's why they're living their lives--to deal with things (that are uncomfortable). Some of the people might not make it, some might rise above. There's a course of life for everyone but it depends on how they take it, not what happened.
Hang on, did you just claim that marketing requires cutting edge techniques which change year by year, but software development doesn't?

Is it even possible to work as a programmer if you are using 1980s tech? What about if you know nothing created after 2001, how limited would your carrer prospects be?

I think you have things backwards.
Fair enough.

I have had the experience of shaming a company with a little essay that, over the years, garnered a few responses from other customers, a few employees, a particularly irate investor. And eventually watched the firm file for bankruptcy liquidation.

Fun, that.
Damn, when I saw the title I was hoping somebody had implemented the Couchbase API in Go and scaled it to 5000 nodes :)
If you're considering moving for a fast internet connection, why did you not previously move to any of the East Asian or Scandinavian countries?
So does it cut your Internet and your TV when your Google account gets suspended ?
Not unreasonable. The bubble in this case is pretty big though: it's anyone who works out of an office. Not necessarily 'tech savvy' by any means: I'm talking about Excel/Word/Powerpoint jockeys, HR managers, sales reps, designers, producers etc. These people's primary tool is the computer they sit in front of all day so there's at least a little familiarity there. The computer turns their thoughts into bits: letters, spreadsheets, presentations, emails. They work mainly in the ephemeral, acting as links in a chain of information, passing it from one person to the next and maybe massaging it a bit in between. They are used to flipping concepts around their heads and are fluent in the 'language' of information. This means they don't suffer much cognitive dissonance when dealing with multi-layered folder hierarchies.

Your blue collar kinsfolk have different tools: hands, for the most part, boosted by some array of domain-specific instruments. Those tools turn their thoughts into furniture, or repaired cars, or pipework, or cabling; I'd widen the group from traditional blue collar to include people like surgeons, too. They work in the arena of the tangible, so - and here I speculate - obviously tortured metaphors like nested folders grate on them and are much harder to adopt.

As to your numbers of waiters vs. office rats: there is probably some data from the Bureau of Labor/ONS. Work calls though :)
First, even if you "installed an application to your dropbox", it would still be running from your local machine - that's just how Dropbox works.

Second, even if it were running the application from Dropbox's server(s) (it seems like that's what you mean?), it would still have to read from their servers - you can't magically eliminate a bottleneck just by moving it to a different physical computer; data still has to be read from disk.
If we're all asking, I might as well add maac.iin.saam@gmail.com... with a "please".
> Maybe we need app/media store neutrality as well, by requiring OS vendors to allow side-loading. Maybe we need OS neutrality as well, by demanding HW vendors to offer their machienes "rooted".

Maybe? There's no question. Manufacturers are already abusing these holes.
I would expect they're looking for two things.

First, they're hoping many of these users convert to gigabit after a short time ("Just flip the switch, and you get 200x faster internet!"), which will cover the loss from the free users.

Second, straight market penetration. The more people that use the service (even the free one), the more visibility Google gets as an ISP, which has other benefits.
You will be on a phone one way or another when the internet is down.
Verbs are key for getting people to do stuff. Compare "Use this form." to "Talk to me." Also, read the previous sentence; it's just easier to convince people to do stuff if you give them verbs to work from.
Web giants to form powerful lobby in US
People have purchased enough touch devices to _replace_ mice? Is using a mouse a weird thing to do nowadays?
Google Handwrite
for those looking for an alternative app store for mac, look at http://appbodega.com/ I think it is great. It looks good. It is easy to interface with and they appear to be quite responsive.
Is Mythology Like Facebook?
Flock math department here. Robots are software-limited, and Flock has more overlap with robotics on the software side than people might think. At Bump we have been writing software to exchange bits of stuff between computers that 50% of the population has attached to their bodies. Flock is actively making decisions for the human based on situational awareness. The machine learning and statistical techniques we are using are the same ones that are being using in robotics for e.g. situational awareness and path/task planning.

If anyone out there is interested in being a developer in my group and is handy with algorithms and fast data stores e.g. Redis, ideally in production, email me.
Is LOC still a worthwhile metric to estimate developer productivity?
So GHC is fast as long as it's only compared to slower languages?

> Granted, functional languages are never going to be as fast as low-level languages like C, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily slow either.

That's the point.
6.001, the introductory CS course at MIT that used SICP, is no longer offered--it's been replaced with 6.01, a survey of EECS that uses Python.

However, UCBerkeley has replaced its Scheme-based SICP class with a Python-based SICP class, CS61A, taught by John Denero: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/61a-python/con...
Canon’s First Mirror less Interchangeable Lens Camera.
Um... I've called google tech support numerous times (for google apps, and google adwords) and had great experiences. I'd be ecstatic if my ISP gave me the same level of support.
I don't mind being intentionally vague because you don't know what the problem is. What bugs me is when companies that make money off of your data, and provide open-source APIs so other people can also make money off of your data, don't post a public root cause analysis.

The RCA you show everyone else doesn't have to be as detailed as the RCA you maintain for your own records. However, you should let people know what went wrong and how your organization is learning from it. It helps your organization grow; it maintains a philosophy of openness, and it provides closure for all the poor people traumatized from being unable to tweet.
People will stop doing it when it stops being rewarding to do so.
I hope they still provide a regular remote of some sort. I don't want to have to unlock a tablet and go to an app to change the channel.
I believe Panic with Coda has said the non-MAS version will be getting features that are impossible on the MAS version
It's neat, but it is just for phones. Most people on smartphones are already connected to a network of some sort, meaning that they most likely won't ask for your wifi password.
If you released (say) an image editor for Windows and Mac you are competing with Photoshop as well as countless other programs, whereas if you release for Linux you may have less potential users (although there are still an estimated 30 million) but you are competing with The Gimp.

And Krita: http://www.krita.org/
I don't live in KC, but I'm very excited to see what kind of splash this will make in the industry. A lot of neat things might come from this.
No thanks. Google already harvests enough data on me that I don't need to pipe my entire internet & TV connection through them.
What $1,000 worth of equipment? The "free" tier only comes with a network box, and it has a $300 "construction fee". $300 should pretty easily pay for what looks like a wireless router.
> All pixels are square these days, yes?

I honestly don't know, but I had presumed that since displays had different pixel densities yet were otherwise the same size, and particularly given how multicolor LCD displays are implemented, we still have silliness with rectangular pixels. Am I wrong?
This is a very well written, entertaining, and relatable article. I enjoyed it.
So I write compilers for a living now.
Alcatel-Lucent to cut 5,000 jobs after reporting loss
Google+ Circles and The Rise of BrinRank
Wonderful. So two people who work for Parse decide to post the same thing using two different links and both make this out to be something it's not?

I'm going to just say what I said in the other submission [1] here because I feel it deserves repeating if someone reads this one instead of the other.

Anypic: an example of what you can build with Parse.

This isn't an Instagram clone.

1) The site doesn't mention that you have to sign in with your Facebook account to even use it.

2) One of the big reasons Instagram was "cool" or "fun" was because of the photo transformations. These aren't there either.

It's a photo sharing app. I wouldn't compare it to Instagram and I certainly wouldn't declare it as a "clone" of it.

I agree with another user commenting that the cool part about this is the tutorial [2] available to show how to make it. Why not just emphasize that instead of making this out to be something it's not?

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4297283

[2] - https://parse.com/tutorials/anypic
Though to be honest - how good is ComCraptic at service? At least when Google has bugs they're solved quickly.
Unless you have ADSL...
One of these gigabit subscriptions is enough for a few houses / apartment floor. :-)
AT&T wants you to pay them $20/month on top of what it costs me to obtain their femtocell and keep it online. For the privilege of "unlimited" use of the femtocell. I'm surprised they don't ask me to pay them every time I use Skype on my phone.
More willing compared to what? On what did you base the opinion that Linux users were opposed to paying for stuff?
Pissing RIM OFF, Whatever it Takes
My Field Trip to the RIM HQ, Hustle, and the search for a co-founder.
> "Airlines?"

Heh. Flying is a terrible experience because what most people pay for is the transportation equivalent of a Wal-Mart jar of pickles.

The price of flying, especially as a proportion of income, has tanked since the golden age we all yearn for. There's a reason airlines no longer serve meals, give out free pillows, and are still going bankrupt every few years - the margins are razor thin and the competition is extreme.

It's the same reason why they no longer hand out hotel rooms like candy, or why there are more cascading delays (hint: keeping spare planes and crews on standby is really, really expensive).

If you paid as much now as you did for the same flight in the 70s, you'd still get the very same service.
Everything after Windows XP had security at its core.

Blame the users who are clueless, that are emailing viruses to all their contacts, download Trojans and warez with backdoors, etc.

I also blame MS for having insecure configurations by default. It's possible to secure a NT system quite well but there were a lot of compromises made in the defaults for convenience.
I am not an expert in functional languages, but I reason about it (that is, the question "Are FP languages inherently slow?", not the article) in the following way. I am curious to know if this reasoning is, well, reasonable.

- CPUs are inherently not functional. They are imperative, as they are Turing machines. They don't speak high-level math.

- Therefore, programs written in a functional language must always be translated into imperative code for execution. Compare this with an imperative language where the compiler need not perform super-fancy translation.

- If the problem can be mapped efficiently to machine code by the compiler, the functional program is fast; otherwise, it may be slow. Either way, it may be very hard to know what is going on behind the scenes.

- This is not always a lose; sometimes the compiler can perform extensive optimizations because it speaks math, and the functional language will win handily.

- Writing in an imperative language, you always know how your program will behave; however, you lose the opportunity to have the compiler deduce a better way (assuming there is a better way) by writing in a functional language.

- But if there is no better way, you have the opportunity to make the execution very fast by modeling the imperative solution around the constraints of the hardware.

Of course, there are other dimensions to performance, among them programmer productivity and number of defects.
That only seems to apply to dumping as an action by international firms, intended to damage domestic companies, and the rights domestic companies have to address it. It's not strictly applicable between two local firms competing for customers.
aww i wish they were around philly
Parse continues to impress with awesome tutorials. I wish all platform documentation was as well done! I'm not a Parse customer (yet) but tutorials like this are making me consider it if appropriate in upcoming projects.
Still? It never was.
Disagree. No reason to dismiss multiple intelligent lifeforms on one planet as not 'from scratch'.

The operative word is 'intelligent'. Probability of life is unknown; but that's not the issue presented.
Vayable (YC S12) adds worldwide payments and concierge service
Database Functionality Tutorials [Infographic]
The Humble Music Bundle
Kansas, KS and Kansas, MO - what's with the Kansas fixation Google?

This sounds good but if they are going to take more than a few years just to move out of Kansas I am not sure if it would even relevant in the grand scheme of things.
What would be interesting is to create an interactive lecture that uses the content and examples from the old Sussman lectures but presents it in a cleaner (text based/vector graphics) way with an interpreter built right into the lecture page.
Database Performance Benchmarks [Infographic]
I think the following set-up avoids that problem: app is always the same price to download and has a few basic features unlocked. App has an upgrade view or screen where users can unlock additional features via in-app-purchase.

It works like this: developer releases the app for, say, $10. People buy it and use the basic features for a while. So far there's no upgrades available. Developer codes up a premium feature and updates the app in the store. Existing users can use the app as-is with the basic features that came with the $10 price tag. Existing users can also make an in-app-purchase for, say, $5 that unlocks the premium feature. When new users download the app for $10 they just get the basic features. Since another "version" of the app is available the new users can just buy the premium features if they so choose.

Fast forward to version 5 of the app. Now there's 4 upgrades available via in-app-purchase. However users are only prompted to purchase the next version based on their in-app-purchase history.

I don't think there's a problem for new users who purchase the updated app.
This confirms Google can't win the TV race without owning internet access
Pretty important point. Thanks for the correction.
>do you realize how asinine that is and how dumb you sound?

That was unnecessary and did not add to the conversation.

And I'm not sure that I understand your point. Parent comment is saying that apps can follow the WoW model to create a consistent revenue stream without paid version number upgrades. As you mention, "for any real application that does work or major game that requires constant updates you cant expect support and update for 10$ that's completely unfeasible."
Google has a private working relationship with the NSA - so its anyone's guess but it is conceivable that Google is receiving money from them to subsidize this cost.

http://rt.com/usa/news/court-nsa-google-agency-053/
You know, I've never had trouble with Google customer support. I've contacted them twice: once for a Google Maps issue and again because I couldn't access my account. No problems for me. I find these kinds of complaints strange. Most of the time I hear this complaint the person doing the complaining hadn't ever even tried to contact Google; they just read that it was a problem somewhere. Oh, I will admit they don't make finding the contact information easy but with the number of users barely able to order a happy meal without calling 911 when their fries aren't right who would want to make it easy?
We Canadians need this so badly it's not even funny. I would honestly pay for a 5 year long contract as long if that's what it takes.
"The only thing I don't love about it is the vendor lock-in, but in reality this is a smaller problem for many applications than it seems."

I hate to suggest this, but write that statement down and put it somewhere you will find it when you're, say, 40. I've known a number of Microsoft-dedicated (and Apple-dedicated, for that matter) developers over the years, and I can't think of any right off-hand that are still programming.
It's funny , for years Apple were all like "Macs can't get viruses!" now they're saying "we need app store lock in too prevent malware!".

I guess there's a distinction to be made between actual malware and software that co-installs crap (Ask toolbar etc) but often end users do not see that difference.

Besides, if something has passed app store verification then surely Apple are happy that it is not malware? Therefor they can be somewhat more lenient with sandboxing restrictions?
Exclusive franchises, building permits, neighborhood associations, etc. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T have been playing this game for a long time. It'll take fighting through tons of telco/cableco-paid for local laws for Google to get in anywhere; just because they've made it in one city won't make the next any easier (in fact, probably harder). I hope Google (or someone else) pulls it off, but it's not going to be easy by any means.
Anyone got any more wheels they need reinventing today?
Nope, you can get around that. Store the version of the app that is first run. Those that have the new version as the first run get the new additions.
Work on a social Android app with 5m+ installs. Join Heyzap (YC 09)
you guys might be interested at this; https://github.com/azer/relative-date
> But none of the examples you mention, to my knowledge, provide multi-key ACID transactions

If you see it that way, you are right. The guaranty is just for one key/document pair (the key can be a key vector though). There is no way to have a commit over several key/document pairs with these databases.

If FoundationDB can do that, it is a big plus. If it can do it in a cluster, your product will have a great future.
TelCo call centers are universally useless. Google could have a phone number you call and a robot on the other end that informs you of service disruptions and tells you to turn it off and turn it on again, and they would have better service than most ISPs.
I think "issues" gain weasel points when combined with "may". It comes across as distancing yourself from whatever is going on.

The statement "Users may be having issues accessing Twitter" says to me that there may not be an issue, and if there is, it may be someone else's fault.

Speaking factually is the better course, IMO. "Some users are reporting problems accessing Twitter. Our engineering team is investigating the issue." No implications there.

People are used to hearing nonsense and discount everything you say once you start using it. I worked in a building where the building management tried to dress up a small fire as a drill by repeatedly declaring that all was well, even as a half dozen ladder trucks pulled up. Now a smoldering cigarette in a stairwell triggers building evacuations.
Twitter doesn't owe me anything. They don't owe me uptime, they don't owe me an explanation of downtime, and they don't owe me apologies.

Obviously, the site is down. They needn't say more than that.
Thx.

Some others you have to pay for, but worth it IMHO:

http://www.musimathics.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Music-Probability-David-Temperley/dp/0...

also Prof Cope from UCSC:

http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm