skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're being paid professional programmer rates you should get the best machine, not the one where price-performance hits some sweet spot. If the cost of a developer who wants a Dell is $80,750 and a developer who wants an rMBP is $82,200 (year 1), that developer needs to be 2% more productive over a year to justify it.

Hard to measure these things for a lot of folks but I've definitely saved over 2% of my work time from switching from spinning disks to high-end SSD on unit tests alone. Never mind the reduced boot times, how fast 'brew install' is and the general responsiveness.

If you're buying it yourself, be cheap, if you're paying someone's massive wage bill, get them the best thing you can.
MBA Mondays: Accounting From The Archives
I read somewhere a bunch of people (teenagers / college students) saying that they could type at normal speed on iPad glass keyboards, so I did an experiment and with no practice could achieve over 40wpm (and I suck -- I get about 60wpm on a "proper" keyboard, which is fine since I don't compose prose or code faster than that).

I suspect that it's partially an acclimatization issue, and getting over the hump just requires time. (My "hump" for getting to be as productive with a trackpad as with a mouse, by comparison, was about 12 years...)
Are processors without integrated GPU cheaper or what?
On Learning Skills (A Response to Move Your Feet)
On these forums, that means an acqui-hire is a success.
I have criticized the argument that "Apple made a lot of money, so they must have been innovative."

Just as wrong is the argument that "Apple has made a lot of money, so they don't need IP protection." The alternate universe where Apple has no patent protection on its designs is a very different one from this one, and one in which competitors would have been outright duplicating a whole lot more.
First of all, the charge does not simply go away because you sign an affidavit... there is a little bit more process than that -- you may need to invest a couple of hours into it. At the end of that the charge will, in almost all cases, be reversed.

But that only makes ONE charge go away. The merchant can then submit another. And another. Every. Single. Month. Think of it as a DOS attack. Closing the card SHOULD (but apparently doesn't?) prevent that.
Lots of companies would like to stick to a tool that they already know how to use. Even keeping GrexIt out of the picture, the tips we suggested can really help. Do give this a try.
The problem isn't with laws dealing with a person's estate, it is with the TOS/EULA of the devices & stores that play & sell digital media. According to Amazon, simply giving someone my Kindle does give them the "right" to read the books contained in it. This is just too hard to enforce for the Amazons and Apples of the world to do anything about it (right now).

Are people only realizing now that the game has changed? This was obvious from day one: stores selling digital goods have it in their best interest to keep you buying the same thing over and over again, whether you buy the Playstation game you already own on PSN, or you have your buddy "buy" an album on iTunes because you can't let him borrow the CD.

Theoretically, this loss of convenience/utility should lower the price for the consumer. It is really up to the market to decide if they want to save a few bucks, or retain the right of first sale (or gift, in this case).
By the same token doing the conversion in the cloud and wrapping a nice UI around it would be totally viable.
A normal lens is much more efficient than a sphere. And a Fresnel lens is more economical as well as more efficient.

It's very pretty, and it may actually be intended as a work of art. But it's not efficient technology.

Here is an optical analysis of a sphere used as a lens -- the light doesn't converge to a single point, which is why spheres are more decorations than lenses:

http://i.imgur.com/4e4FX.png
Indeed. I wish I could downvote that comment for inaccurate info.
Even most successful startups don't really change the world.
It's true for music, which is now DRM free, but not so for E-books and digital video. Those are all DRM'd. (for both Amazon, Apple, and I'm going to guess for the Google Play store as well.
AntiSec Hackers Breach GlobalCerts, Post Data Online
Another point to consider: Let's say a CD weighs half an ounce, or, roughly 30 CDs per pound. 10,000 CDs would weigh over 330 lbs (feel free to correct me). Storing and transferring 330 lbs of CDs -and- keeping them in good condition, -and- justifying that if you've already ripped them to MP3 seems like a pain in the ass, especially over 20, 30, 40, or 50 years. And on the same note, ripping 10,000 CDs or even a portion of that would take weeks. And that's assuming CDs are still relevant in 20 years.

So if you're like my and consider CDs to be unreasonable, what other options do we have? If I have kids someday, I would certainly want to be able to pass down my music collection.

And, for the last point: What happens to our licenses if/when Amazon or Apple cease to exist?

(Side note: I'm comparing 10k CDs to 10k Books, because 10k Songs is vastly smaller than 10k Books.)
http://hekkernieuws.nl/ for the Dutchies :)
Pascal's Apology, or why computer science is complicated
This is already available in the form of music trackers and not only similar quality but often better.
I've got flag powers, but I've basically given up. People have decided to upvote things that aren't relevant to this site, and by the time I see them, it's too late.

And reading the 'new' feed is even more discouraging. I can't deal with the constant flood of garbage that obviously wasn't interesting or relevant, just to find a few tiny morsels.
This has the whiff of a law architected by the lobbyists. The politicians, as you put it, "don't really care as long as it's in their advantage."

The pre-meditation is particularly worrisome.
Ask HN: Apple Vs. Android, how bad will Google be sued?
With Apple's big win over Samsung, Android is next. Remember what Steve said...

"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong."
Can someone with a better understanding of the Java memory model comment on this, referring to StringBuffer:

"Say you had the code

// run in two threads
sb.append(key).append("=").append(value).append(", ");

Each append is thread safe, but the lock could be release at any point meaning you could get [1]

key1=value1, key2=value2,
key1=key2value1=, value2,
key1key2==value1value2, ,

What makes it worse is that the JIT and JVM will attempt to hold onto the lock between calls in the interests of efficiency.[2]"

[1] is weirdly worded, or even wrong (I don't think "the lock could be release at any point" is correct) but the sample result does make sense to me if there are multiple threads banging on it at once. StringBuffer's append methods are synchronized, but without external synchronization, multiple calls could be interleaved.

I don't recall ever having heard of [2] before, and my copy of Java Concurrency in Practice isn't immediately at hand.
This matches my view on the acqui-hire. A view that I didn't feel was reflected elsewhere, let alone by a top HN poster. This lack of validation of the view surprisingly mattered to me, it made me uncertain of the strength of my own opinion.

My current position is that last year I was just shy of a 6-figure salary, but also had a "lifestyle business" (read: number of websites) that are successful as projects (but exist as a stable and growing business).

Late year I made the decision to quit the comfort of the salaried position, to use the projects as the bread and butter and to build a technology based product and company.

I've now been approached with a serious offer from a large company in my sector, and a somewhat serious approach from a medium sized company in this area (sports related online communities).

During discussions it's become obvious that they're willing to somewhat inflate the offer for the community to acquire me fully too. That is they're not interested in an offer that doesn't include me and the offer is inflated to make that attractive.

Discussing this with non-startup friends, not one of them can fully comprehend why I wouldn't accept a swollen bank account and an envious salary.

For me, the thing that I deeply believe is that the technology startup hasn't even shown its' potential, and nor has it yet failed... in fact, I've barely started.

I quickly came to the conclusion that an acqui-hire is (right now) the worst possible thing that could happen. The end result would be the same as failure, and were I to have failed then not taking the money would be foolish. But right now it's so premature that I feel that to allow myself to be purchased is tantamount to seppuku.

It's really good to see that opinion shared. Most seem to celebrate the big earnings for founders and the cash-out for investors... but all I see is the wasted potential.
Show HN: Toutday for iPhone, simpler mood tracking
Toutday (pronounced "too-day" -- names are hard) is an iPhone app designed to make it easier to keep track of daily mood trends. The interface revolves around answering a simple question, "How was your day?", once a day.

More fine-grained data entry is available once an overall mood is selected, including qualitative weather reporting, socialization, and a daily journal.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, as this is my first app launch.

Product site:
http://toutday.com

App store link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toutday/id551481440?mt=8&ls=1
The number I've heard somewhere -- don't quote me on this! -- is that the Intel HD4000 GPU is roughly on par with a low-end ($150 to $200) discrete GPU from either ATI or nVidia. It's certainly nothing to write home about, but it's more than sufficient for most tasks, and even workable for some light gaming.
More simply, you're saying that this solves the updating issue but not the trust problem. This is true, but currently it's no better than what is being proposed.

Google places is good but I doubt Yelp does anything, for example, and a ton of other sites. And most people don't even know to trust google places more anyway, they'll just trust the top result on google.
Factory factories USED to be a problem in my Java programming, but they aren't anymore because I created a configurable builder class for generating my factory factories. I call it FactoryFactoryBuilder, and it completely eliminated the factory factory problem.
There are so many studies like this it is hard to say which one specifically he may be referring to. There is a mountain of literature on the topic; as usual, Wikipedia is a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
What is intellectually interesting about this is contemplating the ways in which these issues may interface with the politics surrounding inheritance in the United States. I suspect to see some strange bedfellows on both sides of these issues over the long term.
Apple's objections to the e-book price-fixing settlement are rotten to the core
Agreed! With the caveat that it should be both to and from (using some standard schema). Replied elsewhere to OP and addressed this as well.
Since I only have experience working with American broadcaster, my answer will come from that POV.

Realistically, neither of the two biggest reasons involves the protection of the dwindling home video market. Broadcasters make a lot of money off of their local affiliates (who pay them for the privilege of running their programming) and cable providers (who pay a subscriber fee for the ability to carry that network.) Each of these existing revenue pipelines brings in a lot of money - orders of magnitude more than any torrent site would. Now you may say "why would a torrent site disrupt their existing streams?" and the answer is that while it wouldn't, those existing streams are very protective of their domain, and would likely consider it an immediate breach of their exclusivity, and in the long term would use the existence of a "competing" product to lower their fees on renegotiation. So it's a lose/lose for any network or cable providers at the moment at least in the US.

That being said, it's their job to have their business model compete in the modern world - it's not the job of the modern world to adapt to their business model. Either they'll figure out a method to do so, or they'll die in 6-8 years and we'll build something better.
According to their most recent 10Q [1], IAC's "Search and Applications" segment (which I'm guessing is mostly Ask.com) had $74M in Operating Income on $350M in Revenue for April - June, 2012.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=891103...
Clickable links:

Product site: http://toutday.com

App store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toutday/id551481440?mt=8&...
Yeah, cost control is a perennial problem. I think it is so hard to solve because, it seems to me, that any solution must address interlocking technical, cultural, commercial, and policy & political concerns all together.
Rawson.js - an experimental camera raw previewer in javascript (FF/Chrome)
You don't own stuff you merely rent

This is the crux of the issue. I don't know if the general public doesn't understand this (because this "indefinite lease" is a relatively new business model), or if they think it is so laughable that when they paid $13 for a "book" on their Kindle, they only really bought a license to lease the book under Amazon's terms, they figured the law will work itself out somehow & "common sense" will prevail...

I'm not holding my breath...
If you didn't have to attend the classes in person, why did it matter that they were taught during the same 2 blocks of time?
> I didn't think of it as OSS financing, but rather as a way of making Armin's Friday beers-with-friends free for him.

And I am very grateful for that. I would never have expected the amount of support through gittip in the first place seeing where it started out. I am very happy with my job and I don't want to do my Open Source stuff as a living (at least for a while).

That however does not mean the concept could not evolve from where it is currently to something bigger.
You want to trust the businesses being reviewed instead? This also wouldn't stop these sites choosing which reviews to show. The best solution is to find a site you trust.
I think the last part of the post where he meets the ex pro runner is key. There's the old adage of "practice makes perfect" whereas in reality it's "perfect practice makes perfect". Learn how to run properly first (much harder than it looks) then start to add the miles / pace. Chi Running is a fantastic book for this (although it's incredibly verbose). A key thing I learned there is the value of a metronome to aid in cadence.
Cordelia Fine, in "A Mind of Its Own," makes a similar point:

Fine says, "that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets." So what to do? Begin with self-awareness, Fine says, then manage the distortions as best one can. We owe it to ourselves "to lessen the harmful effects of the brain’s various shams," she adds, while admitting that applying this lesson to others is easier than to oneself. Ironically, one category of persons shows that it is possible to view life through a clearer lens. "Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge," Fine asserts. "They are the clinically depressed."
He isn't quite (yet) the household name of those people that you mentioned, in addition to a host of others.
I think the next big innovation after EV (+ diesel for long haul, and maybe diesel/hybrid), will be self-driving cars. If you keep cars for 10 years, it's reasonable that a car bought today could be your last without a self-driving mode, even if that self driving mode only covers certain driving regimes (auto-park, which the Japanese prius did a few years ago; highway close-follow road-train mode, auto-braking (which we have now in some high end luxury cars), etc.
LG Announces Optimus Vu II...Doesn't Provide Much Detail
that's a really good question on which i have no answer. I will think about it.

PD: i hate when we have to complicate things because of bad human behaviours!!
Inside DARPA's 'Plan X' for cyberwar
Generally things tend to start strong in the community where the creator came from just because of connections. I remember github being much more Ruby focused than it is today when it started out :-)
I'm guessing that the weather balloon got high enough where it might experience some radiation. I'm curious if they experienced any watchdog timer resets during that test flight.
Reverse-DNS'ing the IP address gave me the URL they mentioned and censored in the article. I didn't want to post it here on HN because this isn't the place for that. I would think FireEye's blog would be that place. I'll have to get with my FireEye sales engineer to see why they censor there.
To make it short:

1. Keep a list of monthly expenses and receivables to know your burn or profit rate
2. Make sure you have enough money in the bank. Some receivables like adsense earnings are only cashed in 45-60 days
3. Use a professional accountant.

I would also suggest at the start of each month to review the above and adjust if there are any changes
I can't stress enough btw that I am more than happy with what I get out through gittip :-)
It's what's keeping me from joining the ebook revolution. I'd love to be able to impulse buy a book and have it 'delivered' instantly, but instead I'm stuck buying the physical version and waiting for it to be delivered.
Really? It's pretty specific, and I don't think anything like it exists right now. You would need a device made specifically to download videos from numerous sources onto an fixed internal drive. It would also need to be able to transfer the videos to an internal removable drive (not sure what this means, possibly SD card or removable HDD?) and play them back, edit them, and do additional processing to them.

It doesn't sound like any Blu-Ray play I've ever seen. It's more like an Internet DVR device that also lets you edit videos and play them back on your TV from the device. That sounds pretty non-trivial to me.
That sounds like a great idea. I bet you could even use some XML configuration files to make it even more extensible.
Because trying to bring in $0.05/week from all these new people will completely destroy their existing market.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
An extension of this is, will we see more wills with login credentials to different services? Is that even legal to pass down to someone after you die? For example you include your lastpass/1password account in your will.
Ask HN: What is the pain you wish someone would cure better/cheaper?
Virtual only please. Not interested in "real life", unless it directly coralates to a web service :)
Absolutely. I'm addressing the statement that money is used as an admissions standard. If the name rings a bell to the admissions counselor, I'm sure that helps, but the people who make decisions in a need-blind admissions process don't get to see your bank account balance.
s/which/that/g
Genes Now Tell Doctors Secrets They Can’t Utter
Actually HR acquisitions vary a lot. At one extreme they're indistinguishable from failure, but not at the other.

They're equivalent to failure if the acquirer doesn't give the the founders any more than they'd give equivalent people recruited through ordinary channels. But there are some HR acquisitions where the acquirer gives them much more. It's twisting the meaning of the word "fail" to call those failures. The startup may not have hit the the proverbial home run (yet) but they've done well enough to convince someone to give them a lot of money. While founders may have other goals for their startups, that's usually the economic goal. For some (to be honest, probably most) the economic goal is the main one. And if you achieve your main goal, that's not failure.
Many thanks for posting this! Only the other day I was evaluating Noir for a webapp and the lack of a capable user auth capability was the main blocker...
My problem with TDD is that I never know what I need to test, until I've at least started spec'ing the project, and I don't do that on paper. I do that in code.
Great idea! This is one of the most important ways the high income disparity that Colombia experiences will be reduced.
I really hate reading extremetech on an iPad. It loads up a mobile versio of the site, which is slow, unzoomable, and not back button friendly.
I don't know if that's the answer you're looking for, but a
call to append is synchronized:

public synchronized StringBuffer append(/* Something */);

... but chaining them doesn't mean that the chain is synchronized.

sb.append(key).append("=").append(value).append(", ");

is executed the same way as

sb.append(key);
sb.append("=");
sb.append(value);
sb.append(", ");

Two concurrent threads running this part of code might do this:

sb.append(key); // # 1
sb.append("="); // # 2
sb.append(value); // # 3
sb.append(", "); // # 4

// Thread 1 executes #1
// Thread 2 executes #1
// Thread 1 executes #2
// Thread 1 executes #3
// Thread 2 executes #2
// Thread 2 executes #3
// Thread 2 executes #4
// Thread 1 executes #4

This can be executed in many more different ways.

To ensure that only one thread executes those `append` at once, you would have to synchronize on the `StringBuffer` instance:

synchronize(sb){
sb.append(key).append("=").append(value).append(", ");
}

Then only one thread will do the appending at a time. But this introduce yet another lock in your code, and render the `synchronized` methods useless and redondant.
Just because the thing you want to consume isn't available in your market in the format that you want at the price you want to pay, it doesn't make it right or ethical to go and pirate it.
It frustrates me a little when people conflate cognitive dissonance with effects caused by dissonance reduction, like in this article. Cognitive dissonance is simply the uncomfortable experience of believing two conflicting things. Dissonance reduction is the class of biases that we use to reduce that discomfort.
The funny thing is that TDD is actually a great way to break paralysis analysis. State what you want your new feature to do, get it working, improve it, or don't... you've got your ass covered so you can always make it more "perfect" later on without worrying about breaking anything. Without the safety net there's a pressure to get it right first time as it might be too risky to change it later.
http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/
I confess that I'm puzzled by what seems to be an assumption that there's only going to be a single photo used in an obituary of one of the world's most historic figures. I agree that if I can only have a single photo in an obit, it should be a picture of the subject of the obit! I also think using a picture where one cannot see the subject's face would be tacky, regardless of who is behind the visor.

I might have some bias here as someone who reads primarily online media, but I haven't observed most venues limiting themselves to a single photo.