skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I based my assessment on Facebook's public statements regarding their choice of technologies, rather than assuming some sort of deep conspiracy.

It's basic organizational politics. Any organization will have difficulty adapting to a completely different platform, and management will attempt to reframe the problem to fit within the bounds of their existing organization.

In this case, a traditionally web-focused organization attempted to co-opt mobile development into their existing organizational hierarchy by reframing the problem. It wasn't until persistent external pressure was applied (user complaint, blatant failure obvious to external management) that they were forced to accede ground.
I was part of an acquihire within the last year, so I'll try to explain a few things. Some of these comments are accurate but I wanted to clear things up.

Not all acquihires are the same, so my experience is surely different from others, but there could be a number of reasons why founders would decide to be acquihired. Job security, higher pay, you get to solve the same problem you're passionate about but on a much larger scale, you have more resources to do what you need to do, you get to build a larger team than you would have been able to previously, you get to work with some amazing people and learn from them, you get an exit under your belt which looks good if you decide to do another startup in the future.

As far as why a company would want to acquihire a team? The team dynamic is more valuable than building a team from scratch. The team has proven they can design, build, and deliver a product. I'm willing to bet that 100% of the founders that get acquihired have domain knowledge of the product they work on, and that can be valuable to a large company that is trying to build a new business unit and may not know that industry as well. Corporations need to move fast to please investors, so often times it's easier for them to acquire a team that knows an industry rather than launch a new business unit and learn as they go.

I've seen so many people on HN complain when a company gets acqihired...but I bet that the majority of you would take the same deal given the opportunity. Sure it can be seen as selfish, but sometimes you have to do what's best for yourself, your career, and your family.
It is also important to understand and investigate whether free users are helping your business or not. Not all business have network affect like Dropbox and can benefit from free users.

Sometimes, free users are actually hurting (they will write bad reviews, send hate email and write hate posts saying that "I don't want to pay", etc.)

For example, 37signals Basecamp does not have free tier any more. It would be great to hear from them why they decided to remove it and data behind their decision.
Your 161-character minimum is an interesting idea. It reminds me of Randall Munroe's IRC moderator bot that only allows novel lines that have never been typed before to show up in the room. He also has an interesting discussion of different techniques to improve conversational SNR:

http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...
> Have you heard of Jerry Seinfeld's "Red X" productivity trick[1]?

Yes. I'm trying to get to the point where I program every day without fail. That's a good suggestion. I'm going to put that on the app website.
>>ADA compliant bathrooms and wheelchair ramps? Not part of a reasonable MVP

>I could NOT disagree with this more strongly. It is simply NOT acceptable to discriminate against people or exclude them

If that was the law, then Edinburgh Hacklab[1] wouldn't be able to exist, at least on its present premises. This would not help any wheelchair users, but it would harm non-wheelchair users. if a law helps no-one and harms plenty, it's a bad law.

Come to think of it, it would also be necessary to demolish and rebuild most of Edinburgh Old Town to comply with an everywhere-wheelchair-accessible policy. I do not regard this as practical.

1: http://edinburghhacklab.com/
I really like his blog. I started a fan jar for him, on Propster
User spend their time using the application, not waiting for an update.

Sacrificing their user experience for rapid updates is putting a sense of engineering efficiency ahead of user experience.
How exactly is this hacking instagram? Isn't this just republishing instagram photos?

I presume the facebook licensing allows third parties to republish content uploaded to their servers.

I hate to sound cynical, but does the world really need more ways to share the plethora of crappy photos that is instagram?
I recall comparing several units in a listening environment. A Philips deck, plugged into the same amp and speakers, was noticeably better than the competitors we were trying. Suddenly, I could hear the scrape of the cellist's bow against the strings at the start and stop of strokes.

It wasn't an absurdly high end Philips deck, but it was into the range where they spent to put in good analogue circuitry -- what happens to the signal after the D/A converter gets done with it.

The CD format didn't obviate the need to take care of and spend on the rest of the delivery mechanism. And not on the associated marketing hype, but on good and well-matched components.

CD's were a revelation -- in the right production hands. But then they became coasters played in $50 boom boxes.

And they never outright obviated high quality analogue recordings and playback. They presented an interesting addition and counter-point to audio reproduction.

I doubt that scrape survives very well at 192 Kbps.
I had a 3 minute walk to work at my last job.. Even though the walk was great to get out and get sun and fresh air, there's still the downside of having to prepare, and be in the office. I hope never again to have to work in a situation where I don't work from home. Working from home is orders of magnitude better as far as my happiness goes, and I find that I am literally 3x more productive in getting my own work done (as opposed to being in the office and spending 3 hrs on my own work, and 5 hrs on everyone else's problems). I can actually see years being added to my life by working from home. Having to go in the office really turned me into a shadow of a person, and I actually saw myself aging.
Odesk, but with a few must-do approaches:

Hourly only, with work tracking.

Limit the hours authorized to just long enough to figure out if they're worth their rate (2-3 is what I use), then up them only when you like a candidate

If a task is important, hire the best 3 candidates to do the first two hours' worth. Usually 1 will totally flake somehow, 1 will almost do ok, 1 will be good.

Weigh heavily on iterative solving (inspect their work daily (archived attachments are a must), interact, and don't give them too long of a to-do list)

Avoid skype and off-oDesk emails; it's always good to keep things in writing to maintain perspective

Recognize that they have other projects going on and that you can't occupy the lowest-bidder and highest-priority spaces at the same time (though one or the other isn't too much to expect)

*Don't be afraid to walk away and stop throwing good money after bad if performance suffers (usually that means they get unresponsive or slow to return work)
China Besieged by Glut of Unsold Goods
If I understand correctly, it's a pre-existing gene that is modified by its removal / isolation. It appears to be an incredibly subtle change that in no way alters the fundamental characteristics of the gene itself.

So yes, by extension they would hold no copyright over the genes in a given person's body, but it might extend to cover any tests or work that is done with those genes in the body - such as cancer screening tests.
Real-world example of Command Pattern atop ActiveModel in a Rails app
according to the actual report
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl302015v
Two-dimensional (2D) materials, such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), have been shown to exhibit excellent electrical and optical properties.

While I have no specialization in the area, I gather that the scientist are suggesting it may be useful as a sort of screen technology, from the article

"For example, MoS2 could be applied to glass, producing displays built into a pair of eyeglasses or the window of a house or office."

Very exciting stuff.
Then I did not get my point across well: I have never seen a poster in any approximation of the form the author presented. Hence, I find it reasonable that he did not mention them, because he likely has also never seen them.
There's a monthly HackerNews thread for people seeking freelancers and freelancers looking to get hired. The thread is usually titled "Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (month year)"

I think that might be worth checking out. The rates will probably be higher than the ones on odesk.com, though.
Swype boasts rates of 50+ WPM on a smartphone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swype
Am I the only one surprised by the fact that KA is hosted on Google App Engine?
While that is certainly true, I, personally, would never do that because it would put me in a situation that the combination of biology (real hunger) and emotion (haven't eaten in a day!) would put me in an extremely dangerous place. Instead, I go for routine: regular, small meals; don't ever get really hungry; etc. Couple that with eating high quality food that you actually want to eat, and it has served me well.

You are in a different boat. You physically can abstain forever, but your career doesn't allow you to. I could see how abstaining would be a very helpful option there.
Yes -- but my book isn't a traditional, mass-printed book like that under discussion. When someone orders a copy of my book, one copy gets printed and shipped. Unlike in traditional publishing, there are no piles of my book in a warehouse, awaiting sale.

And I have to tell you, this new publishing model is going to wipe out the old model (so-called "dead-tree publishing"). And pretty soon, even that model will fall before the e-book model, where no "book" is printed at all, ever.

But as a writer I've dealt with various aspects of the old-style publishing business over a period of decades, not all with respect to books.
Finally! Huge improvement.
Object Algebras
The title should say

OS X 10.8.1
Are you on Mountain Lion? I couldn't use Mail.app on Lion as it was incredibly slow. The I realized it wasn't Mail.app's fault, but GPGMail's, and now that GPGMail has stopped working in ML my Mail.app feels as snappy as ever.
In-depth useful comments are key. The best analogy is Amazon product reviews- the high-star rating serves as an initial screener, but the real test comes with the reviews. Positive but empty reviews are ignored, the useful ones talk about specifics of the product. Finally a quick glance at the negative reviews to see if they are about something substantial, or are just about a bad shipping experience or something.
no issues here with 13" 2009 MBP.

7" - maybe you should invest in an ethernet cable...
Let us rephrase the issue for clarity.

Should naturally occurring chemical compounds or slight alterations thereof be patentable?

For me the answer is a vehement no. But there is an entire industry with many supporters which already disagrees. I suppose there is some merit to such a viewpoint - I arrived at that phrasing while struggling to find some way this judgement could not be considered an exemplary display of stupidity.

There is the problem though that arguments from costs, difficulty of process and analysis will probably only be valid for a short time. At current improvement rates, toddlers will soon be isolating, sequencing and printing novel sequences with their companion pads. Maybe a bit of a silly phrasing but meant to emphasize how while this ruling may currently possibly be considered not utterly insane, it will become rapidly more utterly insane.

I apologize for being unable to completely separate my biases from this post. I really tried.
It's only 'paradoxical' when the details of the games are sufficiently obscured.

If you word it as "a combination of losing strategies becomes a winning strategy" many people will be surprised and ask you to explain.

If you word it as "losing in A adds to the prize in B, so playing both beats the house" people aren't going to be impressed. note: used a simpler A/B mechanic than the blog post for illustration purposes
Not sure why these companies release there apps for iOS first when Android has the market share. It makes absolutely no business sense.
It would be awesome if YC recorded this data, and made it available on the site. At least for the start-ups that they fund.
Another concrete example is to define BL and BW as any point at which a game B has a negative or positive expectation. A real-life example of using the A, BL, BW strategy were the MIT blackjack teams of the 80's and 90's.

They had a spotter at each table that would count cards and wait until the odds were in the player's favor before calling in the big money player. Assuming that the bets placed by the spotter are negligible, the the big money player could choose from the following games:

A : Do nothing. E[x] = 0 (break-even)
BL: Play blackjack when the deck favors the casino, E[x] < 0
BW: Play blackjack when the deck favors the player, E[x] > 0

Obviously playing blackjack has negative expectation in the long run, and we could choose another casino game with very-close-to even odds for game A (like Baccarat), rather than doing nothing.
Rich Hickey talk: reducers
That's intentional?!? I thought I just had a non-standard resolution or something. It really looks like crap.
That it might be useful for displays at all is mere speculation at this point. Meaningful conjecture on the characteristics of those displays is beyond the scientists doing the research themselves; don't get your hopes up for the reporters doing any better.
Changes In Web Infrastructure In The Backend as a Service World
Dust: An Elysian Tail: One animator’s 3.5 year quest to create his dream game
Microsoft unveils a boxy new Windows-inspired logo
I didn't make it out to be simple or complicated. They simply valued their sense of efficiency over user experience.

There's not much room for "simply" when you're talking about a service that has to work across dozens of OS/browser variants, is practically a utility to its (hundreds of millions of) users, and receives multiple daily updates. This isn't an upstart web service that can optimize around a platform that might be only a fraction of their potential user base either.
That's not Facebook's fault its Apple's. iOS's UIWebView uses an older version of webkit and a much older version of there javascript engine. Apple doesn't want you building web apps they can't monetize.
As much as I just loathe saying "I told you so," I direct your attention to this prediction 55 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4174622
Why do you find this surprising?

It's definitely had its ups and downs, but it managed to stay pretty stable when our traffic about doubled when CS launched.
I think the parent is making a comment about the news.yc iOS app, not HN itself?
Lightweight Javascript Constructors with Inheritance
A 13-line function that provides some nice syntactic sugar for creating object constructors with inheritance.
Yeah I know, I thought so too. Look at the picture in their official blog post though, they're showing it off like they're proud of it.

http://newsroom.fb.com/ImageLibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetails...
114 Entrepreneurs On 1 Train For 8 Hours Pitching Ideas
Equivalently in a very introspective language, running old code through new unit tests is eye-opening...
Just surround yourself with people who aren't like you? Easier said than done I guess...
No, but now I see that the AVG logo has always been the windows icon, but with the colors flipped around.
At least you've got Saudi Canada out in Alberta that can help pay for some of it.
> There really isn't. Food safety laws vary from state to state, and from country to country. The only real common ground is that refrigeration of food is required.

There isn't consensus in the language of the law, but there is consensus in the principles. Your example that refrigeration is required is an illustration of that point. Rather than focus on the details of the law, we can recognize that all food safety laws make some requirement related to the maintenance of temperature. Taken further, this is based on the principle that the available science is aware that food pathogens grow more rapidly at certain temperature ranges. There are many principles similar to this, upon which food safety laws are based, and these principles are the consensus.

The principle is what matters to this discussion, because that is what the laws will be based upon. I would expect that "software safety" laws will follow a similar tact. Even if I were to take the most cynical view possible, it doesn't seem plausible that legislators would attempt to write software safety laws for Java, C, C#.NET, Python, Ruby, Closure, etc, etc. Rather, they would attempt to establish principles, upon which process would be built.
How would adaptive keyboard layouts fair? I wrote a simple prototype that tries to minimize (mouse) movement for highly functional people who cannot speak and are fully paralyzed:

http://davidjarvis.ca/keyboard/

The centre key is the next most likely letter that will be pressed, based on digraph lexical analysis.
I tend to agree. This has the potential to make the current software patent debacle look like a walk in the park.
This app is phenomenal. Other readers (e.g. Flipboard) make too many sacrifices at the altar of design. I enjoy playing with them at first but the information density just isn't high enough for me. Prismatic gets the density right without being overly utilitarian.

I only started using the web version this week so I can't speak to the intelligence component yet.
log(new Anyone('Robert', 'Fripp')); // => 'Robert Fripp'

Best sample code ever.
Does anyone know if this fixes stability issues waking from sleep? My 09 MBP crashes when I wake it around 50% of the time
No it's not a question of whether it works for everybody. The world is filled with successful companies with ugly logos.

The purpose of the logo is not to look pretty but to identify.
+1 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404568
I'm asking what was his compensation, if any, as part of the acquihire - what happened to his equity?
I have to admit that I didn't think about this much myself -- most of the videos are on YouTube, and I hadn't thought about how the rest of the site was run. For all I knew, it was RoR or static webpages or something.
I have a few twitter accounts - most of which are tech based and rapidly becoming uninteresting to me.

But my football (soccer) account - in which I live-tweet updates during the game has thousands of followers and is a really interesting mix of people. (Also the username matches the club name as the club was late to Twitter - so I think I pick up followers who are searching for the official account).

I've not done any formal analysis but I always take a quick look at people when I follow back and I read the feed most days, even when there isn't a match.

And I would say that about 70 or 80% of followers don't tweet regularly and follow lots of "famous" names without many followers themselves (this percentage has increased a lot in the last 18 months).

Of those that do tweet, only about 20% are tech-savvy and there are several "cliques" - probably groups of friends who know each other in real life - who tweet amongst themselves a lot. These groups tend to have about 5 or 10 regular members. This makes up the vast majority of the feed.

And most of the rest of the tweets I see are publicists of various types; journalists, SEOs, bloggers and the footballers themselves.

EDIT: corrected some bad grammar.
Did they added monetization strategies into this app (ads, sponsored stories, etc)? I'm not an iOS user, but after their harsh stock decline I would've expected to see aggressive monetization on the mobile app/web.
Install some WebKit nighlies, I've heard they help a lot: http://www.webkit.org
Liquid UI
KPMG Report Claims Self-Driving Cars In 2019
haha! This has got to be trolling. It obviously doesn't make sense to carry both a 3330 and a 710, so I am guessing this is fabricated to make some English textile artisan's point.

Burn them looms!
Is this a YC vs Techstar philosophical difference?
Static analysis is essential for anything that lives solely in the domain of syntax and style. Detecting bad smells (including duplication and excessive complexity) from when you got tired or interrupted is perfect for it, and is a great heuristic way to find areas that need more attention. In Python and I assume Ruby, anything that bears on function is more reliably detected with unit tests.
Amazing and completely topsy-turvey ruling!

As far as I know, no where else in the world would you be able to patent a natural thing or arrangement yet be unable to patent a test you designed yourself for it...
Despite more uniques coming from Android, maybe iOS user show more engagement.
> Near-field monitors are expensive

Something like this would serve you well: http://www.thomann.de/gb/adam_a7x.htm?sid=65707ea4b4bf3f43af...

I paid 900 euros (second-hand) for my pair of studio monitors - back in 2004..

They're the best investment of my life, by far, as they've provided me with countless hours of music listening joy, and I'm using the same speakers even now.

1000 euros is nothing weighed against the value you get.

> entirely inappropriate for most applications

The "application" here would be: "maximizing your enjoyment of music, and listening to it the way it's meant to be heard". That's something you want to do.
Give me a freaking break, please. Tell me where the Android 100% native app is? Oh, it doesn't exist yet? In my book, not existing is the worst kind of user experience. There are concessions to be made when going full native just like they are when going hybrid. In this case, it's speed of development.
6 Top Reasons to Visit your Library (Folder)
I tried the new app on the iPad 1 and personally I still prefer the web page - it still feels smoother for scrolling. Another thing I don't like in the app is the chat list on the right that is always visible even if I'm offline. Is it better on the newer iPads?
Here's the payload for those not wanting to hunt for it in the paper:

"We find a highly significant 12% increase in performance
from home-working, of which 8% is from working more minutes of their shift period (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 3% from higher performance per minute. We find no negative spillovers onto workers left in the office. Home workers also reported substantially higher work satisfaction and psychological attitude scores, and their job attrition rates fell by over 50%."
A Canadian Inuit Village, Too Remote for Cars, Gets Google Street View
Congratulations! What was the hardest and/or most rewarding part?

I am assuming you abandoned most of stock UIKit and built custom implementations.
It seems strange that they'd use a font size of 11px on that page.
I really wanted to read this blog but in IE7, the navigation section overlaps the content :(.
If I'm correct, this is about patenting isolated genes, right?

If so, holy crap. I don't know, but this triggers so many ill feelings in me. This is such a blatantly obvious violation of basic human morals.
Yes, I'm aware that they need to take shit loudspeakers into account when mixing music. But that doesn't mean they can't make it sound good with proper speakers too.
I'm a big fan of this snapping, page down scroll style. It moves as fast as I can scan yet never halts in position that renders one (or two) entries unintelligible. Should I want to get to a totally different set of stories I can swipe left.
Just tried, very good! A big step forward.
I hope they'll go the extra mile and release a full featured desktop client as well, starting with osx possibly.
What if the update is a bug fix?