skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The feature no doubt is helpful but is there a reason to not expose this feature via something like Google Desktop and to store the index locally?
Valve is trying to take on Microsoft head on? I hope this doesn't end up as vaporware (pun intended)
I would love to see some company that handle videos.
Oh strange. I gotta poll my friends about this.
I had the impression that Apple didn't allow "launcher", "springboard" or "app store" like apps on iOS... how is this going to fly?
We've been happy all around with Twilio -- specifically to this point on the quality of the numbers, but also the general ease of use and the responsiveness of their team.
Unfortunately NSLs make this very difficult:(
In general it's a fine balance of what makes a v1. It's a huge challenge to identify those features that are must have vs those that are good to have. A poor v1 experience will chase your early adopters away and I doubt many people give a second try at all. But a delayed product and late or no feedback from users would result in building a product that is tangential to what the user actually wants. No amount of user studies would fill in that gap.
In this particular case, however, if I'm listing down all my expenses, I definitely would also want to sum it up and expect that sum to automatically update too. If I and those who think so are in the minority, well and good. For an app so elegant, no one would want or hope it to fail. But if you are releasing the app and not expecting or ready for honest feedback, I can't see a point in releasing it in the first place.
>Welcome to my hosts file

Would you mind sharing your hosts file, or some sanitized subset of it?
This seems to be the issue in question: https://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/track/issues/4

Here's the working group: http://www.w3.org/2000/09/dbwg/details?group=49311&publi...

I don't know enough to determine what % of companies represented on the panel are ad-supported; per a comment on the Microsoft blog:

> thank you for not folding to the corrupt w3c standards
> body that is setting the standards with a full deck of ad
> supported companies on the panel

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...
Spoilers? Still in the theaters..
But that's because this is an internal memo about improvements, not "how well does Samsung stack up against Apple"?
"Valve seems like the biggest proponent for general purpose, open computing these days (open in the sense of being able to do what you want with your computer)."

I would have never seen that coming from a company who's most important product is more or less fancy DRM system..., but I surprise myself by finding myself agreeing with you.

I'm not quite sure what that means. Maybe the DRM is more incidental that I thought, maybe they just have their heart in the right place, or maybe the state of things is just that bad.
Top reasons to delete your social media account
Firstly, nice effort.

Secondly, some features you could add:

1. Constrained optimization - including budget constraints, sector selection constraints etc. A tough one would be cardinal constraints e.g. I am limited to 4 stocks etc.

2. Return attribution - whether the returns your portfolio earned were due to stock selection or asset allocation or both (Brinson Model: http://www.mscibarra.com/research/articles/2002/PerfBrinson....).

3. Performance and compression - how would this deal with huge covariance matrices? 10000 x 10000? Matrix operarions on these wouldn't be trivial. In-memory serialization/deserialization issues also come to mind. (edit: then again, Excel can't do 10k x 10k :) )

4. I'm not conversant with SciPy - does this use BFGS/similar for optimization?

5. Compute as a service? Host a grid? Let calculation requests come to you via Excel? (Nobody would want a 10000 asset timeseries to be processed on their CPU for two hours).
Right. We attempted to put a self-sufficient colony in the American Southwest and still failed.

Surely it's fair to extrapolate our inability to succeed there into an inability to succeed in a far more harsh and remote locale.

Keep in mind that this isn't to say we could never succeed. Just that this is a very, very difficult problem that we don't even talk about seriously today, let alone study and pursue. Yet everyone just assumes it's somehow trivial and automatic once we decide to try.
TechCrunch is Clueless - Oracle's SVP.
re: Kickstarter stats, when 59% is remaining and that remaining percentage is over $250,000 I don't think there are any Kickstarter projects that have ever come back from that position. Very few have ever had $500k targets...
It made me wonder if you were referring to Twitter somehow. :)
Actually, a lot of people use Excel just as a table to list things in a semi-structured way. They don't even know how to do a sum in Excel. Grid looks like a huge improvement for them.

This is way slicker than the first versions of most products.
Images with firmware included are available from http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-inc...
(1) His points were not one sided.

(2) There are plenty of professional reviews that made the same points he made.

(3) Many professional reviewers also grade on a curve because it favors their business model.

"Personal ... summaries are not useful "

Is accusing random people's anecdotes of being "fictitious" and "agenda driven" useful and constructive behavior in your opinion?
I care. It's a poor choice of wording, and it's apparently a redefinition of the term spreadsheet.

I believe that they are alienating users who might read "spreadsheet" and think "a bunch of formulas that I don't know how to use" rather than "easy to use layout/calendaring/organizational tool." Furthermore, those of us who read "spreadsheet" and think "oh, awesome, tablet optimized spreadsheets!" are sorely disappointed.
Here is a listing of the categories that might be offered..

http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/15/3161651/valve-steam-softwa...
now it's just called "Panorama picture of Mars"
So what's the business model? Are there enough developers willing to pay real money for access to an API? It seems hard enough to get developers to actually buy a license for Sublime or TextMate (or even pay $0.99 for a song on iTunes.)

I could see some potential in the enterprise space to license out the API for companies to then build their own information services atop of.. but that seems to get away from the "power to the people" idea this project seems to be capitalizing on.

>App.net focuses on the API and let's the developers build the robust applications.

Robust applications that do what? I'm not sure what the value of the API is, isn't the point of a Twitter-like API to allow people to use Twitter data. The API side of the equation isn't that hard to do.. it's the content accessed with the API that would be useful. I can see and appreciate the tech in this project, but I'm not sure why a developer would build an application to consume an API without much data..

I'm confused. I don't mean any disrespect to the folks involved or their supporters, but I'm not sure what this project will accomplish -- is it a technology platform or a content platform? And is the technology that "hard" -- it seems to me that getting the content would be the hard part.
The economics behind the app.net idea are way beyond mediocre. Charging users for a platform capable of hosting a wide range of apps and compensating developers with revenue share based on usage aligns everyone's interests with the users. The platform provides the best infrastructure and the app developers are incentivised to create lasting value for users, since they keep getting paid for as long as people keep using their apps.

Besides, if it's such a mediocre idea why are some of the smartest folks in tech backing it already? Check out the gallery of community members on the signup page.
New fossils confirm taxonomic diversity in early Homo sapiens
nice! what happened with it?
I find too many web pages go the other way and use a light gray for the text. The text looks washed out. Too little contrast is as bad as too much.
Grid is redefining what a spreadsheet can do on a tablet. When building something new, might as well build and experiment with the new features first to see if people really want them. Demand for calculations is a given.

Nobody would care if they released a "new" spreadsheet app that did calculations, but with innovative features still on the to do list.

Grid is taking the right approach and personally I think it looks sexy as hell.
I'm really hoping for a steam redesign. I find the UI to be slow and unresponsive. Hopefully something native (on Windows, Mac, AND now Linux) comes out in the near future.
If it only takes 5 minutes to fix battery life they should have done it at the factory.
I like how you think--that name was the thing that stood out to me, too; and you saved me a quick web search =]
Let robots do what they're good at. Get to Mars, build a base, and begin mining. Then let humans do what they are good at: live.
Hi Scott,

Actually if you sign up for a full Chute API account here:
http://bit.ly/chute-signup

You can customize your credentials immediately!

Greg
You're quite right. But in the past pioneers didn't expect me to pay for their adventures through taxation. I'm all for colonizing mars when we have the technology to do so, but we don't and we won't for hundreds of years. There's no reason to send people there now.
The Browser Wars’ Biggest Challenge: Mobile
I do not propose forbidding robots from doing anything.

I say let humans do what they are good at... and what they desire to do. If they want robots to help them or precede them, wonderful.
It would be mediocre if it was simply an "open api" twitter/facebook but, given the chatter on the Alpha site and the look of the API on git (https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec), I think there is something bigger going on here.
They'll probably start with basic cross-platform office software (e.g. OpenOffice) and tools that would be useful to game modders (graphics, sound and 3D packages).
Did I read this right? Did Steam just announce that it was becoming a cross-platform application store? Easy installing / automatic updating sounds nice, given my past experience with Steam games, while a personal Steam cloud sounds very much like an iCloud/Dropbox/Google Drive competitor.

I'm a bit apprehensive about having to decide between Yet Another Storage Provider, but I'm (naively?) hopeful that the open-minded folks at Steam will consider something like Dropbox / Google Drive integration. Valve seems like an incredibly appropriate company to do so.

I hate to play the extrapolation game, but this could potentially encourage cross-platform apps, much like Valve is doing for gaming on Mac/Linux, especially if Valve releases dev tools to help support the process. (Hopefully it doesn't turn into a GTK/Swing nightmare.)

All in all, interesting times should be ahead. It'll be interesting to see how a "gaming" company like Valve adapts to a new field.
Your argument is illogical. From "exploration is desirable" you conclude "humans should explore"; but this doesn't refute "humans should explore using robots as sensory extensions" like you imply in your first paragraph.
I really like this approach. Is there a plan in place to implement this on a server and client? A simple node server with a hacked up moz might be a good start for a prototype.
Fedora have a bunch of people giving out CDs throughout the developing world, and according to the discussions that flare up periodically on the Fedora devel list when this topic comes up, the CD size is useful for them. It's more to do with the time taken to download the CD when you have really poor network backwidth, rather than availability of CD/DVD drives. Which makes sense because Fedora almost certainly doesn't run on CD-only era PCs.
You're Doing it Wrong: 5 Factors That Affect Database Performance
Good lord. There really are some strange angry people out there.
There is a simple way to guarantee that an Illumos distro works, and that's to use Intel for everything: chip, motherboard, nics, you name it.

Other setups can work, but you need to be very aware of this: http://illumos.org/hcl/
It's hard to envision this being an extinction event for Steam. Microsoft has just never been able to get people onboard in the way that Valve has with PC game distribution platforms. GFWL was/is a disaster that ended up being more trouble than it was worth. I could see Steam having to back out of software distribution, but I can't imagine Steam dying in the foreseeable future. Not with tens of millions of users voluntarily and enthusiastically locked into the platform.
>And you know what's the biggest thing holding them back? The fear that people will make fun of the first thing they launch.

Good.

The software world is absolutely flooded with half baked crap backed by expensive marketing. As a software user it's a waste of my time when somebody releases "A Simply Remarkable Spreadsheet" that allows you to "organize and work with them in a whole new intuitive way" and it lacks the basic features I expect from a spreadsheet (I suppose that is indeed remarkable). Worse, it leads to a situation where customers don't trust software developers to provide the things they say they are providing.

What would you have us do? Not criticize massively hyped app releases that are backed by millions of dollars of VC money because we might hurt somebodies feelings? If you are going to make a big fanfare about your new 'spreadsheet' app, then you have to be prepared for the (predictable) negative reaction when it turns out it isn't actually a spreadsheet at all. Don't get pissed off when it gets criticism after you flood all the tech news sites with press releases and submit your site to all the aggregators and email dozens of bloggers.

The people doing this are savvy and know what they are doing, which is basically conning users with false promises. They know it will earn them criticism from people who are paying attention, they don't care, they are in it for the money. Your portrayal of the innocent, uncertain, timid startup CEO is pretty laughable. These are business graduates that decided to go into software startups because they think there is more money in it than investment banking at the moment, many have never written any software themselves.

You can whine all you want but customers are always going to complain when the product does not meet the description. It's really quite simple to avoid this though: stop lying in your marketing.

Edit: I didn't mean to make it sound like I think the Grid folks themselves are actually upset about this criticism, I'm sure they are not. They must have had many meetings trying to decide if they should call it a spreadsheet even though it isn't, and they obviously decided to do it because they feel they will get more attention as a 'mobile spreadsheet' rather than some vaguely defined data organiser. It was a calculated move that seems to be paying off at the initial launch at least, since the app is getting far more attention than most.
I think it works for this sort of audience. We're skeptics. I was skeptical that their Kickstarter would be successful. This has convinced me otherwise.

I'm still not convinced that the project itself will be successful, but time will tell.
This looks fantastic. The lack of computation is a surprising but very novel take on the idea.
I hate when my phone rings.
Corny metaphor incoming: It would be like a director who has studied about 1920's history for years, having never experienced it, and a director having breathed and lived it. Who would you prefer to direct a movie, all other things being equal, about the 20's?

I've seen this type of ad hominem a lot and I'm not sure why so many people fall for it. I would take the historian every time. Aside from the well-studied facts showing that memory and eye-witness testimony are hugely inaccurate, in a movie about the 20s we would expect to see the 20s. We would want the period represented accurately as a whole, not one person's perspective. In a movie about Ray Charles, we would certainly like Ray Charles' input, but that is only because the movie is about Ray Charles' perspective.

To put it another way, if you're suffering an illness, does that make you an expert on the illness? Does it make you qualified to treat the illness? Clearly no, on both counts. Being a victim of racism isn't immune to anecdotal bias more than any other phenomenon. The cultural phenomenon of racism or sexism is not well-represented by a single person's experiences and it certainly doesn't give them any more license than an expert to attempt to proscribe a treatment.
Asking genuinely... What benefit does yet another marketplace have to offer?

I can see that by being a cross platform marketplace, If I buy something from them on my iPad, I can also use that same software on my PC (assuming both the platforms allow this) But the big question is will they?
I think you (and me as well) want BSD. Now the problem with the popular BSDs is the package managers suck by comparison to most Linux distros.
To be accurate it is published by The Pragmatic Programmers, not written by them as the title kind of imples.

Maik Schmidt is the author of this book.

> Maik Schmidt has worked as a software developer for nearly 20 years and makes a living creating complex solutions for large enterprises. Outside his day job, he writes book reviews and articles for computer science magazines. He is the author of Arduino: A Quick-Start Guide, Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails, and Enterprise Integration with Ruby for Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Have you tried Ubuntu Certified hardware and encountered problems? Everything works fine on my Ubuntu Certified hardware: a ThinkPad and an OptiPlex desktop that both have Intel GPUs.
As an outsider to the vitriol between ZFS and the Linux Filesystem community, why is there so much aggression here? People don't seem to be screaming up and down about NTFS. If you are operating at a scale where this management of data matters, aren't you doing you own analysis and proving?
> 1) Cutting all the connections to the exchange wouldn't be so easy.

Is "the exchange" in the same building as the trading floor?

I don't know either way, but would be surprised if the exchange and the trading floor were in the same building.

I'd be surprised because the trading floor must be in Manhattan for social reasons (because people go there) while the exhange can be "anywhere". Given the price of space in Manhattan....
It's also extremely buggy on the Mac, at least. I can't count the number of times dropdown menus have shown up behind everything else.
I've found that, with my last two laptops anyhow, most of the hardware problems only came up at install time. After I got the right packages (drivers and stuff), things worked well enough. Getting that set up was tricky, sure, but after it was configured correctly it worked.

So the simplest solution is not to install Linux yourself! You can buy a computer that has Linux on it already. I guess you could also get a friend to install it for you :P. The advantage with getting preinstalled Linux is that not only won't you have to figure everything out yourself, but you also will have hardware chosen explicitly for Linux.
Selling eBooks vs. Selling Print Books
I only saw a small snippet of one of those in action and was wondering why there was a small car on the field. I thought a clown was going to pop out!
Which is what black is: You can't see it, since it returns no light.
You don't become #1 by playing catch-up.
This kind of got me thinking: What would it take for me to try my hand at developing a desktop app today?

I am a developer. For the most part I've been doing web applications (with a bit of mobile). This is mostly because I feel there isn't any money to be made in desktop apps. Piracy, distribution, etc. Lots of headaches.

Could this change things? Possibly. Just like Java which was download once, run everywhere (haha kidding) we could have apps that are "uniplatform" (yeah I just made up a new word). I buy the app and it is good for desktop, mobile, web. It might give slightly different experiences but my data is still all the same in the back.

One of the closest apps I can think of like this is Google Chat/Talk. I can start a conversation in a web browser window, reply using Pidgin, and finish off a conversation on my Android. It is relatively seamless.
Assuming you're talking about Biosphere 2, do you know why it didn't succeed?

What problem did it have that is unsolvable?
I suppose the implication was that the greedy counter parties would refuse to write-off the trades and the corrupt brokerages and regulators would let them stand.

Still, when you put it like that it sounds funny.
Because if it were true this would be the issue that sullies America's reputation internationally.

Honestly, why would it matter whether it was or wasn't americans?
I know csoghoian personally. I found the rebuttal article from Wired to be absolutely abhorrent.

I do not speak for him, but I think you can safely assume that the vitriol reserved for Chris is somehow co-incident with his preference towards working with the WSJ to bring cogent computer security reporting to a wide audience. My impression is that Wired sees this as a US vs. THEM kind of thing.

Delivering secure solutions to an audience that is unaware of the risks is always a dodgy proposition. Better informed customers would improve the market for those solutions and keep vulnerable persons from over-trusting a flawed product. We all benefit when this happens.

Chris is asking for better reporting, not male reporters. A very big difference indeed.
Thanks! :)

Unfortunately I can't publicly tell that part of the story yet. But ping me at steli@elasticsales.com if you really wanna know ;)
Hasn't software mixing been in ALSA for ages, with the dmix plugin? I don't think Pulseaudio is necessary for everything.

I do see the Networkmanager is a necessary evil, but why does it have to be so awful? It's great if it works, but if it doesn't then solving the problem is extremely hard because of the bloated, uncommunicative nature of the program.
I asked a straightforward question about whether an app that can't be used to create a spreadsheet should be considered a spreadsheet app, and because of that I "represent one of the worst forces at work in the world." I neither ridiculed nor made fun of Grid, as you claim I did; however, you seem to take pleasure in ridiculing and making fun of me. I'm sorry that I didn't heap the app with praise -- from the video I saw, it does look like an impressive beginning. Perhaps if I had, my question would have been met with an answer without such disrespect.
I hope to implement server support on WordPress.com if browser hackers are interested. Our image serving architecture is mostly in PHP and has access to originals, so this should not be terribly hard.
The fact you had to hide under a pseudonym to air your views should tell you that EVEN YOU are not comfortable with your views especially how you have stated them.

Think about it.
because documentation is good.

"hey, I changed your design and here's why XYZ" is far better than "merge me please".

Also, he got to have fun writing it, and the bitly people got to have fun reading it, so it provides a PR bonus. :-)
It has to do with the way Valve has approached it. From day one it wasn't, "How do we stop people from pirating?" It was, "How do we make a more convenient service than the pirates?" And that's where they won. In the early days, people pushed back. But then the brand of Valve as people won out over the brand of Valve as the makers of Half-Life. If you make a good product that has convenience over the alternative (piracy) and charge a reasonable amount, people will pay when they used to pirate. The DRM is incidental to the experience. Valve realized it first, and now you're seeing it replicated in things like Netflix and Hulu.