skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I reject the idea that Nest and Dropbox were in similar positions as Facebook. The entire value proposition of Nest is simple (and simplicity). Same with Dropbox. It is harder to make a case for how Facebook could have had a "simple" value proposition 2 years ago.

You're making a case for why Dropbox didn't have to go through the time-to-market-driven experimentation Facebook did. That is indeed an advantage to being Dropbox. It isn't a very good indictment of Facebook's strategy.
Indeed... that was (and still is) a huge threat to facebook.
Performance doesn't mean this is the best way for MSNS
Really low end steel is usually heavy. On the high end though (Pegoretti, etc), they're plenty light and ride like a dream. The "common $700 fixie" - the Bianchi Pista - is steel. They all rust when abused though.
The "amino acids" language is from the blogger, not the opinion. Also, without trying to defend the decision--the judge who wrote the opinion (Alan Lourie) has a PhD in chemistry and worked as a chemist and scientist for Monsanto and Wyeth.
We're talking about patents not copyrights...
I like it. I think it gives a nice sense of layering of content and accentuates the photos.
The only problem with this is that since it's a static library you need to make sure it's bug free before using it in your project. I would imagine it would be difficult to debug in your project...
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Facebook started with a native client. They switched to HTML due to internal organizational politics. I'm not sure what you're arguing -- that somehow Facebook lacked the resources to invest in user experience and rapid mobile development from the beginning?

It's not as if mobile was unproven at the time they decided to switch away from their native mobile client.
Oh crud, sorry about that.

You can read it here (without images, sadly): http://feeds.feedburner.com/JamieWong

Or if you add that feed to Google Reader or some other RSS reader, you should be able to see it too.

Will look into fixing this.
Amazon To Hold Press Conference In Santa Monica On Sept. 6
Researchers Hack Blood cells into Stem Cells
I have this problem as well; it's my most frustrating experience with Mt. Lion so far.

Where is that? I tried Spotlight searching for "automatically" and "networks" and couldn't find it.
This actually makes a lot of sense. It hadn't dawned on me that I was looking in the wrong places.

It's funny, but I've been to programmer user group meetings where all I met was idea guys looking for programmers.

It's like a bunch of teenage boys thinking they are going to meet hot girls at a party, only to find out it's all boys at the party.

Thanks for making me think about my methods.
I think it still feels like a UIWebView but with a boosted scrolling acceleration factor to make the old stuff feel faster.

Some pages do load slightly quicker though, so good job on that. :)
But it's OK to write web pages that do?
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Wouldn't the chemical isolation of elements, as done in the 18th and 19th centuries, be a better analogy? Doing so required a human transformation, requiring skill, knowledge, and effort, yet would anyone patent an element? We are still creating new heavy elements in particle accelerators; are those patentable?

If the argument is that the gene is modified in its isolation by changing the terminating amino acids, we could extend the analogy to include changes to the electron shell of an element brought about by chemical processes.
just wanted to know - now it's clear
If it's so easy for Facebook to get a good mobile client out, why didn't they update the (much loathed) iOS client months and months ago? My suggested answer: it isn't in fact easy for them to do that. So time to market is an issue for them.
In my opinion, there isn't much point in decentralizing servers -- it's been tried and failed a number of times. What we need is decentralized clients, e.g. a true P2P social network. Essentially, imagine that your contacts app could exchange messages over the Internet directly with any -- or all, or any combination -- of the contacts stored within.
> How can you say you can drop support for IE8?

Simple, I don't live in a world where the target audience for every site I write is 100% of available web users. Some projects are directed at corporate users with IE8, some are directed at mobile browsers.
If you go into IOS Settings and then click Facebook > About you can see all of the open source components that they use (An enormous amount). It has everything from AQGridView to Boost to Chromium (what?) to PHP (again, huh?).
5 Steps to Finding the Perfect Cultural “Fit”
Headline bait, nothing more.
First, it helps to understand that even before moving to PSP/TSP, we were already in a process-heavy regulated Medical Device development environment, so it wasn't a big change. My understanding is that many teams starting with TSP didn't have much of a process to begin with.

The good: PSP encourages a high level of developer responsibility for quality. So you use a checklist to review your code before running the unit tests. You record every defect you find and if applicable, use that information to make a better checklist. Every team has a TSP-trained Coach to guide the process, answer questions, and keep the team on track. The metrics generated from the process are analyzed weekly to see if the team is on target, if quality is where the predictions say it should be and if there are any roadblocks.

The bad: it can be a major change to how you are used to working. The data collection, while as automated as possible, is annoying. The constant emphasis on tracking time on various stages of fixing a bug/adding a feature adds a noticeable amount of friction to your workflow. While it's not Waterfall, TSP is definitely not Agile. Its entire focus is on predictability of output. It's an attempt to take what works well for Manufacturing and apply some of that to software dev.

In short, TSP/PSP is a good idea at heart for those types of development where initial product quality is critical or where you may never have a chance to fix a defect. This is not the case for most instances of modern software projects.
StartX Wins $800K Grant From The Kauffman Foundation
I'd say different is anti-Apple when you're Microsoft and Apple is your primary competitor your goal is to gain customers, being the same doesn't make sense since it already exists.

A great quote I heard once (not sure who) to paraphrase: Trying to be as good as your competition just makes you equals. To be better you have to exceed beyond what is being done.
I submit that Carmack wasn't shaped by the same kind of industry culture that most of the working people on HN were - different time, different kind of software, different funding model. The way our industry incentivizes ego, posture and dishonesty (and punishes the lack thereof) means that young Carmacks either find a rare lagoon, change fields - or get squashed into a different shape. Smart people can still do good work, but the required output is mostly other than technical, and knowledge takes a back seat.

This is what we are spending our lives on!

Finding like-minded people is not impossible, but like-minded workplaces hardly seem to exist. If you are not a Carmack-scale God to create your own lagoon, you literally can't afford just to be straight up about everything. You will fail every interview. That is why this is so rare and refreshing - it is rare because the environment heavily discourages it. Only some people need an ego-oriented environment - but everyone has to eat.

There is actually a parallel in science. People who start out deeply interested in truth and their subject have to exist in an environment which really isn't about those things. They either leave or learn to self-promote, inflate the sizes of their grants and chase fashion rather than bearing down on a particular subject in a disciplined way.

If this culture won't change then we need more lagoons.

In Feynman's words: "So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom."
Creating web pages inside a Sharepoint website - part 8
Most interns cannot disclose implementation specifics and code like this. A lot of us work on larger business-facing projects. This type of blog post is pretty specific to the style of development he's doing (a bunch of small open-source web widgets and scripts).
Awesome release, excited to read more now. Does it sync offline at all? It appears to require a connection all the time.
Mobile Labs Build On-the-Spot Combat Solutions
> that you have to assume someone else at the Atlantic wrote this headline

In the newspaper industry, that's common practice. It takes a different skill set to sum up an article in a small amount of words and to write said article.
None, there is no equity.

In an acquihire situation it would be unlikely that you reached the liquidation preferences of the original investors, so common stock has no value.
I tried to put myself in the shoes of a product manager at FB, knowing that revenue from mobile sucks but everybody wants a mobile solution. How could I accomplish both? By not making a fuss when engineering builds what is obviously a substandard app.

What I forgot to take into account is that Facebook isn't really led by product management. Could FB's PMs force a change like that, after development has built it? I don't know.
For a nice analysis of the issues at stake (and the nuances are not trivial)...

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/17/the_myriad_g...
I still hear "did you reset your PRAM?" from people occasionally. Good times.
Ah, in that case it shows up in the About screen and that's about it, huh?
That's a catch 22, and none of it has to do with user experience.

- It's not easy because they have a historically web-centric organization.

- They have a web-centric organization because they had not invested in building a broader engineering team.

- They did not invest in building a broader engineering team because they have a web-centric organization, so they stuck with web technologies.

Their engineering management put appeasement of their existing web-centric engineering organization ahead of user-experience.
Design outcomes: "There are no dumb users, only dumb products."
These users were mostly random people in coffee shops, on the street, etc. I'm sure there's still a bias when someone is looking over their shoulder, but we could get a pretty good idea of whether average users 'get it' right away or floundered. We went through about 5 full redesigns of the walkthrough based on this testing before we arrived at the current version. Of course, we'll keep experimenting and improving in future versions.
Its not ragging when its constructive with a thoughtful argument.
I've got this too. And strange problems with the Finder/Dock. Stuff like clicking a folder or the trash can not opening it, not being able to empty the trash, and programs that are running not showing up in the cmd-tab switcher. No show stoppers like the WiFi bug, but it's still disappointing.
No, lawyers are not all felons.
Facebook, Find My iPhone
For my book (see profile) I developed the idea because my posts about cold calling for entrepreneurs became so popular.

After that, I just started collecting emails, asking the list members qualitative questions, and honing copy by testing.

If you started with an idea for a book and no audience demanding it, you should really execute the whole custdev process in one form or another to verify demand. Pre-sales is a great avenue for that.
A month to submit proposals for PyCon 2013
Try attaching multiple photos to a post and you will see why the photos overflow (plus what has also been mentioned re: emphasis on photos)
>I still don't get why Microsoft is pushing Metro SO HARD to bet everything on it when nobody really likes it that much.

I personally love Metro, and I'm not the only one in my circle of friends. I accept that not everyone likes it, but I really prefer a text driven design like Metro.
Apparently people take offense when you talk about things in general terms. Why is it out of place to say that people who are 60+ who do program are the exception? It was not really a career open to most people forty years ago, it was a rather exclusive field or one left to brave adventurers and hobbyists.

You've been a developer for some time. How many people in your age group do you know that have recently taken up that as a career path?

And no, you weren't programming before I was born.
I look forward to the opportunity to do this throughout my next internship in January.

Unfortunately, if I wrote such a post for the internship I just finished, I'd have to omit parts of it. Even though the company I worked for published a "Diary of a Summer Intern" series throughout the summer. :(
Because it's their app store.
Honda Doesn't Introduce Personal Asimo, Gives Us Lawn Mower Instead
I was part of a pretty non-standard "soft landing" aquihire this year. The company I was working for was out of money and couldn't find a serious outright buyer for numerous reasons, but worked out a deal with another company for that company to hire almost all of the previous company's employees and take over the building lease so we could continue working in the same building.

Virtually the whole company moved over -- a handful of people didn't get offers at the new place because their jobs didn't really make sense given the focus switch. However, everyone who was offered a job save for one moved over to the new place. The first sign of bad things to come was that nobody was offered a raise or any form of signing bonus, yet we still all accepted because the team was really great and we enjoyed working together. The layer of engineering management inserted above us turned out to be incredibly horrible (the company came from a media background, not software), committing to developing software for a lot of sketchy platforms (eg. Yahoo Widgets running on Vizio TVs) but demanding full-featured rich AppleTV/GoogleTV-style apps, making content deals that didn't mesh well with technology needs, badly mismanaging the entire development process, putting people in positions based on politics and nepotism, etc. Within ~5 months virtually the entire engineering (development and IT) staff from the old company, including me, had quit.

The story may yet have a happy ending, the CEO at the acquiring company (who was almost as new as our acquisition was) has since been cleaning house and trying to solve a lot of the problems that became glaringly obvious by all of the quitting and I wish him well because the product they are trying to build is a good one and I have friends who still work at the company.

tl;dr - this "aquihire" was terrible for me, but maybe indirectly helped the acquiring company realize how terrible it was before it was too late to fix it, so... partial success?
Yet college is more of a requirement now than it was then.
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I vaguely remember when Facebook previously had a nice native iOS app long ago and their main or only iOS dev ranted about the App store and refused to do any more iOS development.

Some time after a terrible webapp was released. Not quite sure why someone else there couldn't take over maintenance of it.
> Also, saying 'OS Ten' out loud just seems generic.

I've long wondered when Apple would bump "OS X" to something like "OS 11" or just make OS "Ex" the official pronunciation. I figured they would "pull a Solaris" and claim "OS 11" just meant "OS X 10.11.0". Now it seems like it will become "iOS" everywhere.
To me, this is comparing apples and oranges.
A lot of indirect costs are built into Glacier. With a local tape system you need to factor in: backup software, backup server, operators, power, off site pickups, fire suppression, cooling, security, etc.
Sure it might be cheaper in the long run, but it's a lot more to manage.
Give the particular track a listen, I didn't just load it into Audition and look. The vocals clip, it sounds very bad.
There aren't many 20 year olds, but there are even fewer 60 year olds. That's all I'm saying.
I think you're missing the point. How long does it take for that fix to be downloaded? Tons of users will never see it. Tons of users will continue to use the version with the vulnerability.

Here's a good talk on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MksKaRpWD-o
Since Facebook is a big PHP shop, it could be that they have some standard libraries where they prefer to use PHP's version as the canonical implementation. Then they port these to various languages. In some licensing interpretations, this would bind them to the license of the original code.
If it really is an engineering challenge it needs to be fixed. We're going on 2 years of Mobile Safari having JIT and UIWebView not having it. They can simply make an exception for UIWebViews without making an exception for the rest of the app. I don't know their codebase and it might be really really hard to fix, but I hope it isn't something they've given up on. It cannot continue in perpetuity, as the web cannot continue to evolve if the makers of one of the most popular browsers have given up on speed improvements.
Funny how you can never patent/copyright a recipe but you patent the recipe of a seed. BTW din't Monsanto actually come up their secret sauce by stealing indigenous plants from places like India, and then trying to develop genetically modified versions of them?
Just goes to show, there's not much point in identifying "inevitable" innovations. History quickly forgets the also-rans.
This is very strong evidence that when performance matters to your iOS app, you are better off going native and not HTML 5.

Who here thinks that Facebook should have stayed with HTML 5?
Profiles are still web-based, unlike the news feed.
25 Years Later, Microsoft Unveils A Revamped Corporate Logo
I think the Kahn academy has got good licensing terms, and dont generate lots of rows of data, or dont need to process lots of data. As a fairly static web app host GAE can't be beaten. If you do more with it I think you will face the same problems we had... http://www.moneytoolkit.com/2012/08/the-problem-with-google-...
I think officially, 4% of users still use IE 7. [Edit: Source: http://theie7countdown.com/] Back in the day, IE was the most popular browser on the Internet, and I'm sure there are a lot of corporate applications written specifically for its quirks that simply don't work in newer browsers. Heck, the University of Waterloo's Learning Management System (based on the open-source Angel LMS) was broken in Chrome for the longest time -- the solution was to migrate to a different (closed-source) product altogether.
I definitely agree with you about the Big Mac, that clarifies what you meant. Like everything at McDonald's it is mostly edible insofar as it is very hot. I think what is going on there is that freezing and steaming it makes it tasteless.

But I have never found a homemade burger to be tasteless, and I don't eat McDonald's any more for health reasons, so I wasn't sure what you meant.
This is V1. Any critiques would be appreciated.
Jamie Wong is amazing.
brilliant idea, specially with the update on the outcome of the treatment. hope this succeeds
No they can't: part of a process cannot create executable memory while another part cannot. They'd have to move WebKit completely out of process: a huge task as it already does most text drawing.
Much easier to optimize for three very similar phones versus hundreds (thousands?) of Android phones?
Do you really hate to sound cynical? Really?
This is a really interesting comparison to draw. What do you think of the 'movement' towards more transparent commenting systems like Disqus?
> This app has regained its throne as the model of iOS UX.

I wouldn't go this far. Sure, the CoreData backend and table view controller implementation is beautiful and awesome. However, the root level navigation could be improved. The pseudo-popovers for messages, notifications, and friend requests is inconsistent with the rest of iOS, even though it might be consistent with past versions of the application and the versions of Facebook on other platforms.
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This is a great analysis, thank you for sharing.

While the ruling does go out of its way to point out that this is about "...patent eligibility and not patentability" and intended to be of limited scope, I believe there is still some cause for concern.

After all, this ruling itself was based heavily on the precedent set in Chakrabarty. It's hardly a stretch to imagine this ruling in turn setting precedent for other rulings on gene patent eligibility [and, perhaps patentability] down the road.
Link to article? (I think it's the right one)

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

These T-cell derived iPSCs (“TiPS”) retain a normal karyotype and genetic identity to the donor. They share common characteristics with human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) with respect to morphology, pluripotency-associated marker expression and capacity to generate neurons, cardiomyocytes, and hematopoietic progenitor cells. Additionally, they retain their characteristic T-cell receptor (TCR) gene rearrangements, a property which could be exploited for iPSC clone tracking and T-cell development studies.
Interesting idea. Do you have any examples at the individual consumer level?
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Poor technology productized as DRM. Thanks for making my morning a little more sad, OP.
Well if something, it would make you fall back to check Facebook on its full browser version, forcing you to see ads, which would be a good move for them.
> do you use Accept-Language? Or IP sniffing? Or user prefs in cookies?

How do you think they picked which language to serve me in the first place? ;) What you're saying is true about eliminating ambiguity but parent commenter just linked to microsoft.com.

When I had to do this for a site, the waterfall I settled on was:

1. Did they just manually pick a language/is it in the URL? (serve that language, set cookie)
2. Do they have a cookie? (serve that language)
3. Do we support any of their Accept-Language prefs? (serve that language, set cookie)
4. Serve en-us (fallback)

My points being a) Microsoft.com is using langauge-accept (probably) and b) you can support URL picking & language-accept and not always have an ugly URL.

EDIT: oops, changing my language to ``es``, clearing cookies & revisiting microsoft.com didn't change the language. I guess they are just serving everyone at .com English :p
I might be up for it. Can you throw in a specific place and time ?
Agreed on the link bait title, pretty sure you misused "synecdochic". Synecdoche is like metaphor, but the former I've only seen used to explicitly refer to figures of speech, like a simile, while the latter is used interchangeably with "symbolic", so a thing could be metaphoric, but only written or oral communications could be synecdochic.
So, how exactly does this work? I'm trying to figure out where the media data is coming from; it looks like it's stored as a giant base64 string in a js file. Sort of a "maybe actually production useable" version of JSONVid (http://ajaxian.com/archives/jsonvid-pure-javascript-video-pl...)?

Anyway, there's no video element and no Flash, so none of those compatibility issues to worry about. If it can implement the full HTML5 media element API, I might actually use this one.
More likely they're just not easily categorizable.
Thank you bezaorj! We've all donated our time to build this, and its been a year in the making. We're excited to see how it goes!