skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To address your aside, if they're referring to their personal experience with an Android phone and they've also used an iPhone, they're more qualified in passing judgement over someone who hasn't touched both phones. Stop trying to glaze his comment with a brushstroke of snobbery - that is the most irritating quality I encounter in circles such as these.
No.

> Girouard noted the funding is different than a loan because there is no guarantee of repayment.
You Will Be Able to Think Outside the Box After This Article
This is changing the subject slightly, but to be fair, it's the same statistical bias that's used to say that men earn more than women.
Money Management and a “Good Defense”
Where is the compiler for this?
The DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities Transport Layer Security Protocol
> Since when did the consumers' sentiment become "track me please"?

You present a false dichotomy. In the absence of asking consumers what they actually want in regards to tracking (whatever that means), it is impossible to know what their sentiment is. There are three kinds of people: those who are aware of DNT and have opted in, those who are aware of DNT and have opted out, and those who are not aware of the option. Guess which group is the largest.

You could certainly say that advertisers are intentionally playing dumb here, and would like to continue to do so by forcing the opt-in decision for DNT to be buried in layers of settings dialogs rather than having an opt-out decision front-and-center when installing windows.

But that doesn't imply that anyone thinks most people want to be tracked. It just implies that in the absence of intent one way or the other, advertisers will continue to treat consumers as they always have.

It all comes down to intent. Which is why the whole DNT header is a silly idea in the first place. See qntm's comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355458.

"How, exactly, are they intending to detect the user's explicit consent via the medium of HTTP headers?"
Not my dog.
Sounds cool to me, since I have migrated to xfce as my DE of choice anyway...
Nice! This is good to know.
It's certainly not comprehensive, but here's the shortlist of stuff I make to try out a new language, in order of increasing complexity:

-- Sudoku verifier

-- library generator (scan all of the music files on your drive and compile a list of artists)

-- dictionary app (using Wordnik API)

-- flexible calculator that can detect postfix v. prefix

-- Sudoku solver

-- Hidato solver (which is essentially King's tour, but cooler)

-- tumblr API wrapper (or really any OAuth service)

-- n-gram language classifier
Does this mean that Android is the Symbian of this generation of phones?
Sounds like your CTO is lacking in social skills.
The people who first colonize it will probably spend decades building the atmosphere and heating it up (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming#Mars)
In the US, cards dominate
"NoSQL" projects have thrown out the relational baby with the bath water and instead implemented their own data model (mostly made-up).

The Relational Model is (hugely simplified) predicate logic and set theory combined with logical/physical data independence and integrity.

Relational algebra (selection, projection, union, etc.) are important but just a part (very important, of course, as it gives us a sound theoretical foundation to implement from) of the query language. The "Management System" part of the "DataBase Management System" are the constraints, logical/physical representation, data model, etc. - which IMHO represent the bulk of what a DBMS ought to do.

What sounds interesting about Nuodb is that they've kept the sound relational fundamentals and created something that is what the relational model has espoused from the beginning. Or so it reads.
Also btrfs has been recieving substantial upgrades every kernel revision. Already its worlds better then it was in the 2.6.x series of kernel and they are finally getting around to tuning everything for performance. The truth is some of those "factS" are true, but most of them are pointless.
India serious concern on technology
Please open up an API or provide a webpage to allow non-smartphone users the opportunity to use it. I'm not sure how the internals work with your app, and I hope they are not too coupled to iOS.

I have a very basic cell phone, since I prefer using a laptop to do my browsing/email/development. I like to disconnect at least half my day, and not be at the beck and call (excuse the pun) of a smartphone.
The problem with your conclusion that 'anyways' is a misspelling and you chose it because it is popular (high 'frequency') is that it displays a common misunderstanding purists have of a language's evolution.

As Jorge Luis Borges once said, all words were once neologisms.

For something to be standardized or make it into a dictionary, lexicographers look at its popularity. If we reduce language to the most simplest idea, it is exactly this: a set of popular phonetic sounds from which humans derive agreed similar meaning.

The phenomenon of adding an extra sound to the end of a word is called paragoge.

For anyone that is interested and is not familiar with it, linguistics has a lot to say on the addition and subtraction of sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of words. Here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplasm
As a full-time Ubuntu user who loves Unity and thinks it has a shot at becoming a third major desktop platform over the next decade, I think this kind of soul-searching is great for the Gnome project.

I selfishly hope this leads to better and closer collaboration between Unity and Gnome developers -- and maybe a 'partnership of equals' between Red Hat and Canonical, each playing to their respective strengths, on the further development and improvement of the Free desktop.
Where are these sports before the Olympics?
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” - attributed to Bill Gates.
You are onto something. I wasn't a huge fan of the redesign but I couldn't understand the high emotional tone. A lot of the feedback runs along the lines of 'how dare you change Wikipedia without going through the Wikipedia process', etc.
It's doing some text parsing on the "pretty text" returned by the Google Maps API instead of using the provided distance in meters, and it's probably failing due to some localisation issue. It strips "," from the text, maybe your locale uses "," as a decimal separator leading to the distance being parsed as 24 km?
Whoops, my mistake - thanks for the correction.

Still baffled by how answers.com expects to get $270M of financing to buy about.com. To anyone who has ever clicked a link to either of those domains from a Google query, the headline must seem Onion-like.
YC-Backed Grid Reinvents The Spreadsheet For The Tablet Age
There is only one thing stopping me from using Linux, hassle free hardware support. I want sleep/wake, video card, etc, etc, etc to simply work. And please don't pretend this is true already.
"Hey you piece of shit did you break the filtering?"
made me lol so I forgive him :P
Keep in mind that marketshare refers to sales not usage. So it's 68% of smartphones shipped in Q2 2012 were Android.
132-page internal memo shows how Samsung set out to copy the iPhone
There are countless very thorough professional reviews of the Galaxy S III available. There are countless very thorough reviews of Android proper. Many of them by people who have actually touched both platforms extensively, and many extensively compare the two. Personal, usually agenda-driven, subjective summaries are not useful as as reply to stories like this. They simply aren't.
> This is not a claim that Crystal makes.

They make several claims.

It's also a claim I've made based on personal experience with both "mineral salt crystals" (alum - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alum) and regular deodorant, and knowing the ingredients in both and how those ingredients affect bacteria.

> even if Crystal managed to kill all the bacteria under your arms, it would be back the next day.

One killed off all odor causing bacteria after a few weeks (I no longer have to use it, maybe once a week). The other just kept it masked even after YEARS of use. I'll let you guess which one that was.

> No one is sitting around twisting their mustache and creating deodorants and antiperspirants that specifically protect underarm bacteria.

No, they just don't put the same amount of alum in their products to make it effective. Their game is to mask the odor, and not to prevent it from happening again. LTV of customer is the #1 metric in business.

> a big iodine swab would do the job faster and even cheaper.

Never tried it. But if it works for you, use it.
because he made some tired meme jokes?
There's a fork of Gnome 2 http://mate-desktop.org/ works very well.
Upstart: Investing in Human Capital
Direct non-phoronix link http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=co...
As long as the claims he is making are true, I wouldn't consider it brogrammery at all (just a bit fun/Internetty).

It's when unsubstantiated claims are being taken as gospel does brogramming get in the way. HEROKU AND ORM ALL THE THINGS~!!!! WHAAAAAT
Granted that people can be emotional, but the aggregate tone of HN itself isn't completely stable, which it would be if it were entirely determined by generic facts about people.
Google Gets Eye-Tracking Unlock System Patent for Glass-Like Specs
Virtually all of the work that we do in the illumos community is on x86 -- and not merely keeping it functional, but actively advancing the state of the art. For example, we at Joyent ported KVM to illumos last year[1], and since that time we have deployed many thousands of virtual (x86) machines into production on (x86) hardware running SmartOS, our illumos derivative.[2]

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/459754/

[2] http://smartos.org/
Fair enough. It is a talking point that puts them on the "right" side of the privacy debate, though I find it hard to believe that people will move from Firefox/chrome because of this feature. Strategically its much more about breaking that which lets companies provide "free" web services, which is something that MS has trouble competing with.

Its interesting that google put out chrome to force all browsers to have substantially better performance, thus expediting the migration from local applications to the "cloud". It seems like Microsoft finally decided to use their position to push something else that people care about (privacy) to slow down that migration.

Its a long term loss for users if you believe that the loss of control & privacy is worth what you get for free services on the web. Not everybody does.
Next time you are caching a bit list with memcached and running out of space, you may replace that big list with a bloom filter.
Very true. I know that is the killer part, I used to work with a company which struggled to move from 1.1 framework to 2.0 framework when MSFT released 3.5.
Facebook Developer World HACK 2012
Despite some reports, apparently Starbucks will not be supporting the Square pay-by-name/geofencing features: http://www.splatf.com/2012/08/starbucks-square-payments/
Your API is not RESTful
I can confirm that Firefox is usable with upwards of 400+ tabs open (Windows XP, semi-recent but not bleeding-edge machine). And this was before it started lazily-loading tabs like it does today. There's a speed loss, certainly, but the tab accumulation happened so gradually that I didn't notice the difference until I performed a mass tab purge.
Imo this is a bigger cultural issue than solely deodorant, though it's quite possible deodorant marketing had a role in creating it. I've noticed Americans tend to be more worried about perspiration than others who live in similar climates, to the extent of entirely avoiding outdoor activity in hot climates during the work day, lest they return from lunch break sweaty. In Greece people aren't really similarly worried about walking 5 blocks to grab lunch, even if it's hot out.
There most certainly are people who have become celebrities off fostering the notion that true and abhorrent racism is everywhere. They make the news, they travel to picket, they write for newspapers, and in one case have actually been the subject of a South Park episode about creating racism out of nothing.

Likewise, there are religious figures who are making money off going on TV and shouting about how their religious freedoms are being trampled on and how it literally is an "us vs them" fight and if they lose it's game over for their deity.

Likewise, there are celebrities who get their paycheck in part or full from finding sexism in daily life. Ryan Singel just became one of them.

It's the power these people, few though they may be, hold over the discussions in society, the power to push political correctness and make people second-guess their words and actions to the point where it's impossible to keep up with what is polite to say and what will get you fired, beaten up, or cast out. There's money to be made in controversy, and that money isn't going uncollected.
Raspberry Pi: Gertboard I/O expansion board update
Hah. I know dude, I hate commutes. Well, they "say" they will eventually move to the latest framework. I have my doubts.
I think its a little misguided to focus on _media_ content creation, that market is locked up not by technical barriers but the industural attitude that if your not using photoshop your an amature. The big area where you can make headway is in the software/application content creation, but that doesn't require flashy new features that get you lots of good press. It requires you to make your enviroment faster and smaller.
> Engineers design materials, structures and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost.

That's where I begin to say that computing comes up short as 'engineering':

The problem is that too often in computing the "design" work, just the design work alone, before construction, cannot really tell what the "practicality, safety and cost" will be. So, too often in computing we have to build the system and then test it to know what its "practicality, safety and cost" are. That was often the situation in the construction of medieval cathedrals: Some examples stood; some fell down; some on the borderline got weaker over time. Apparently eventually the strong cathedrals were built mostly drawing from experience, that is, closely copying what had already worked before. That technique is trial and error and copying and not really the 'design' of engineering.

If bridge engineering were the same as software construction, then just to know how strong the bridge was we'd just have to build the bridge and then test it. For rocket engineering, to know if it could reach orbit we would have to build and launch it. Indeed, instead, in rocket engineering we can determine the rocket trajectory that will put the maximum payload into the desired orbit.

I explained further in

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4356303

in this thread.
About time someone rethought spreadsheets in modern technology. I[probably we] use them constantly but without an old fashioned interface, often needing massive scrolling & hot-keys, they are unmanageable after just a few columns and rows. I never even dare to use them on touch devices, would be amazing to actually have a portable functional style going forward.
My understanding (and while I've talked to people who are in the working group, I'm not in the working group or following the discussions closely) is that this was already (prior to the spec being modified) the common understanding of the people within the working group. It just hadn't previously been written in the spec, perhaps because it was thought to be obvious.

(And, given the context of what the group is trying to do -- build a do-not-track mechanism that advertisers are willing to honor -- I agree that it's obvious.)
I find the style that this is written in to be annoying, distracting, and a little arrogant. It's not funny at all.

Just write the facts and let them stand for themselves.
I think the self propagating ad campaigns are brilliant as well, but I also consider it a problem. Even if I don't care about anyone else, I'd personally rather not smell bad, as I have to be near myself all the time.
Yes, so if law enforcement (for example) were trying to find out the phone number for a Gmail account, they would then have to go to Burner or Twilio to get records for the Burner phone number account. I guess it depend on what level of anonymity or privacy you're going for.
"Yea" pronounced "yay" is a valid word with practically the same meaning as "yeah" (affirmative). Granted "yea" is archaic and most of the instances you are catching are just yeahs with the "h" dropped, but it would be nice to choose something that is definitively wrong. The anyway/anyways is a better choice and I hope that "anyways" does not become widely accepted because it is like Bieber to my ears.
But I heard it will interfere with my time cube and magnetic bodysuit.
I am currently working on factory automation software running on the 1.1 framework...in Windows 2000.
To steal terminology from git, I'd say that brtfs has a lot of similar plumbing as ZFS, but hardly any of the porcelain. I think the lack of striped raid is the killer for a lot of people, in spite of the hate RAID5 seems to have gained lately.

I went to a half-day Suse brunch event 2 months ago and got myself a eval copy of SLES v11sp2, just to check out brtfs. I tried to be mindful of the "it's not ZFS" attitude, and gave it a lot of leeway. Without going into the maturity of the code bse (I have no idea how stable it is), I found the capabilities and commands a bit cumbersome, counter-intuitive, and the FS as a whole just plain lacking. The article summed it up much more succinctly than I ever could.

I've been using ZFS on my primary workstation on a daily basis since the early beta days of FreeBSD 8.0 (Jun '09, I believe), and it has been a pure joy to use. ZFS v28 (the last released version from Sun/OpenSolaris, I think) found on FreeBSD 9.x is rock-solid and has reasonable performance (as compared to the speed and memory problems seen in in earlier releases).

I've put the filesystem through its paces, doing things that are rightfully called foolhardy, and I have never lost data. I've painted myself into a corner a few times (I curse the fact that you cannot remove hardware from the pool, as with Linux or AIX LVM), but never have I lost data when redundancy was in use. I have had bad sectors crop up on a single-disk zfs pool (single-copy of data, should have known better), and a "scrub" let me know exactly which files had incorrectable problems. Heck, I routinely flip the switch on my PSU when I'm too lazy to walk around my desk to do a proper shutdown, and it comes right back at next boot, no lengthy fsck, no data loss. I usually scrub monthly to check for errors, and otherwise I don't do much maintenance.

Right now, I have 6 2TB Seagate "green" drives in a raidz2 array (raid5-like with 2 parity disks). One disk has been removed due to errors, so I still have a spare disk to tide me over until I can afford a replacement. It runs very well.

I wish native ZFS crypto was available. Right now, each physical device is fully-encrypted with FreeBSD's "geli" (customer data, tax records, etc.), so ZFS doesn't even really have full domain over the physical devices, which makes it even more impressive that I've never lost data.

I will say that enabling compression and/or dedup will cause performance issues. I've got an 8-core AMD processor (XF-1850 -- hardware AES support, yay!) w/ 16GB of DDR3, and I get interactive desktop lag when heavy I/O is going against compressed and/or de-duped data. I don't know if this is a FreeBSD scheduling issue , or inherent with ZFS (any Solaris users want to comment?). Since it was mostly just to test (not like I need the space savings), I just do without.

In any case, I hope Linux's ZFS native kernel port stabilizes. brtfs just isn't there yet.
Probably not but it is a short term project (6+ months). I am skeptical if it would place a dent on my resume if I went to an older technology. It would be much harder convincing my next prospective employer. Wouldn't it?
Kudos to Josh and the rest of the team.

This is something that can change the market in a positive way and hopefully help take iPads from being almost solely a device for consumption to a device used to spur creation and innovation as well
Google Search To Integrate Gmail
Paperzoom is a scanning device (2011)
I definitely agree that ZFS is fantastic, the best thing since sliced bread and better than anything else ever to exist.

However, I can only run btrfs on Ubuntu natively. Therefore, to me, btrfs is better than ZFS.
I think one of the problems is that professional licensure of software engineering would require the codification and legalization of a set of knowledge and standard agreed upon. This set of knowledge would be used as a metric of what is expected from an 'reasonable' engineer, thus making any professional engineer liable toward society (and more specifically toward courts) to meet those standards.

The problem in this is that nobody agrees on this set of standard/knowledge (a Body Of Knowledge). For instance, if the document and the experts required to testify in court define that "a reasonable engineer has to use a waterfall methodology", then you could be liable for using an agile methodology (that's just an example). The domain being so young, there is not yet an agreed upon profile of what a 'reasonable software engineer' might be. The SWEBOK[1] attempt to define such a profile was initially supported by both IEEE and ACM, but - if I remember well - the ACM dropped their support in face of these concerns.

I think both organizations support the legalization of the "Software Engineering" field (and perhaps title), but also recognize that the field is not yet mature enough to be properly defined and regulated.

Disclaimer: I do not have sources for my claims on IEEE and ACM's positions on the matter; I merely read about it a few months ago. However, you can find interesting conversations on the subject by googling 'SWEBOK'.

[1]http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok
Httpster t-shirt
If it's Twilio, then numbers will only cost 50 cents in volume pricing so this could be a nice model. I'm skeptical about handling dead numbers though. Either the service hangs on to them which will cost them $.5/month in perpetuity or they release them to Twilio in which case other apps can use them.

I recommend checking out Plivo btw. They're cheaper in every way and I've heard the voice quality is better.

My company uses Twilio now and just made up my mind to switch to Plivo as soon as I have some free time.
Pull Request Testing For Everyone
School Doesn't Make Sense
Its interesting that google put out chrome to force all browsers to have substantially better performance, thus expediting the migration from local applications to the "cloud"

That is a great observation. I would also cynically add that Chrome was a response to the growing popularity of AdBlock in Firefox. The reason many were driven to block ads was because it slowed down their browsing (scripts, animated graphics, even the transfer time), so Google kicked up efforts to try to make advertisements less costly in almost every way.
Well, it would signal seriousness about a two-state solution (how is this http://news.antiwar.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/westbank.... ever supposed to be a country? It's been almost completely Balkanized) and stop the theft of Palestinian land (it's very hard to feel ...less than ambivalent about a neighbouring country who allows its citizens steal your livelihood).

Basically, to stop this kind of conflict takes dialogue. Lots and lots of dialogue, with people who are serious about it. And not stopping the expansion of the West Bank settlements as per the Oslo Accords signaled that the Israeli government was not serious about its commitments.

(Hi, I'm Irish, I have a small idea whereof I speak, though not much.)