skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't mind using the occasional proprietary app but what I and many others love about the Linux desktop is that that there is a nice FOSS app in almost every category.

There is no reason that these cannot exist on the Android platform. Unlike the Apple App Store, which demands developers place additional restrictions on their devices, the Play store has gone out of its way to keep both passive (BSD, MIT, CC) and active (GPL & APL) licenses viable. You can even have your APK deliver your sources.

The distribution methods are whatever you want them to be. Supporting the Play store is almost certainly a must, but there are multiple app marketplaces and you're free to mix and match those as you see fit.
You charge what the market will pay, not what the item is worth. You describe the product to maximise what people will pay.

I find it weird that so many people on HN don't seem able to understand that. We all know it's just a small kludgier SD-microSD adapater that fits flush with Mac cases, and is meant as a semi-permanent addition to storage. We all know that the materials and assembly cost is at most a few dollars.

This kickstarter should be praised and studied as an example of added value or finding a niche or whatever the hell it's called.
I think that putting it in the body actually reduces the amount of code and makes it more readable. Compare something like this (ignoring naming, formatting, made up language, etc. I want to show the structure only):

fin=open(fin_name)
fout=open(fout_name)
...
catch IOError e
if e.call == 'open'
if e.filename == fin_name
log_error "cannot open input ..."
elif e.filename == fout_name
log_error "cannot open output ..."
else
log_error "cannot open file, but filename unknown"
elif e.call == .....
.....

to something like this:

try
fin = open(fin_name)
catch IOError
log_error "can't open input ...."
return

try
fout = open(fout_name)
catch IOError
fin.close()
log_error "can't open output ...."
return

Both are ugly, but I really wouldn't like to be the person trying to match up the error handling from the first example to the exact places in the function body. I'm not even sure what would this look like if the exception was coming from somewhere deeper in the function. open() is easy because we know how it fails. More complex call chains would be a challenge to even match up to the place they happened.
One can only shake one's head at yet another individual fully brainwashed by western Pharmacies and mainstream doctors. Folks like you are always to point out any alternative medicine system as quackery while fully ignoring that mainstream medicine has had a very long tradition of copying and patenting any active ingredient that has been proven beneficial by their sister professions.

Ayurvedic research into herbal ingredients follow rigorous testing in labs, peer-reviewed research and case studies before it gets the govt of India stamp, quite similar to how mainstream medicine works, but of course you didn't care to educate yourself on that.
As a fellow doctor I agree with everything you say.
Right, but I have very little interest in that ecosystem. It's great for some people, but I think it's importance is overstated in the modern computing world.
I think the point of organic food it isn't to get more (good) stuff, it's to get less (bad) stuff.

The fact that they have lower amounts of pesticides, chemicals and antibiotic-resistant bacteria makes organic food healthier (as in doesn't make your health worst).
I have a simple setup for my pet projects:
1. Push code in github
2. Run fab deploy (fabric)

Fabric pull the code from github, puts it in the server and restarts the services (mongo, nginx) if needed.

I took some inspiration from newblur's fabfile.py: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/master/fabfile.p...
> The Linux desktop will never succeed as long as nobody can profit from it.

There is a strong case for someone paying developers to create a free alternative to Windows to commoditize desktop operating systems, thereby attacking Microsoft's revenue stream.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

The problem has been that it's been too difficult to produce something easy enough to transition away to from Windows and Windows apps for this to work.
I can confirm this. I wrote quite a bit of open-source software that has attracted thousands of users over the years and now my clients find me instead of the other way around.

You need to do more than just write the software though -- you need to be active in discussions where people are looking for software like yours, because that's often how people end up arriving at your software. Ideally the software you're building also supports some other software with a decent user base rather than trying to do something completely independent; that way you have a pre-established target user base who may already be looking for your solution.

Additionally, I started out doing contracted development work, and now I mostly do consulting. It's less stress and easier to predict how long it will take. And I get to spend my development time on my own projects.

A final note: if you contribute to other open-source projects, sometimes you can get in touch with the primary maintainer and have that person forward you work they don't have time to do.
So - what would you recommend for someone like me, who wants to add 128 GB of Storage to his MacBook Air, and maybe get another year's use out of it? This devices looks perfect - but I'm interested if you know of anybody else who makes a flush SSD card adapter.
Raspberry Pi stackable Arduino compatible board
There is essentially nothing that stands in the way of this except the will to do it and a device to motivate it, as evidenced by Samsung's recent offerings (which, presumably for expediency, is limited to their specially instrumented apps).

The fundamental models of Android does not preclude running multiple activities at once, assuming you can "focus" the back button to a specific pane.
To all those who hate it, I'm wondering if they could recommend an alternative flash SD card adapter at a lower price.
According to [1] we spend only 16% on drugs and devices. Maybe they didn't include meds you get at a hospital but still it seem that medical services take a big share of the cost.

Also, assuming technology can give better treatments , it can lower the drugs needed and their costs.

[1]http://www.examiner.com/article/health-care-reform-historica...
Silicon Valley’s Secret Sauce: It’s Made out of People
Does that matter? What matters is that it runs on a version of the Linux kernel that is converging with the current release.

It could run on a molecule of DNA, and that'd be super-cool, but it is Linux that is in desperate need of a good interface layer.
Typically you just leave off the sudo and recommend people to just run pip install mything. That's the only thing required, unless you have a Python that has its `site-packages` directory in a place that isn't user writable, for which people who are in this situation are generally aware of the proper solution (which I'll mention in a sec anyhow).

You should essentially never use sudo to install any package, since even besides any security issues, it can clobber things on your system that are necessary for your OS (by say, upgrading a package that your OS ships with).

I happen to not use my system's shipped Python at all, since I'm on OSX, but if you are using it, you want to use `pip install --user mything`, no sudo necessary.
Why the gratuitous, partisan threadcrapping? And with a debunked "quote" to boot?
Easy developer deployment? aur.archlinux.org
One of the most horrific aspects of PHP documentation is that it isn't versioned. In most cases, documenters are good enough to note which versions various parameters and return values correspond to, but it is not logged in a rigorous way and you have to be sure to check that whatever you are reading applies to whatever version you're running. Contrast this to Python, where you go to the docs for whatever version you're running (e.g., http://docs.python.org/release/2.6.7/) and you don't have to think about versions again.

In any case, this will probably be useful for those of us on 5.3, the version in the title just made me think and rant.
Show HN: Connect Trello cards to your Calendar by due date using Trello2iCal
If you've ever seen the results of someone banging a SD card at a bad angle while in the machine, then "form" has value.
You raise a good point. Why are most open source programs dynamically linked again?

Static linking is one of the nice things about the OSX ecosystem. If only Apple wouldn't unnecessarily break their runtime environment every few releases.
It's not about user friendlyness

it's about dev friendlyness.

in case your didn't know, your favorite appstore also has dependencies. the difference is that they bundle all libraries per OS version. Linux distros bundle per lib version (and thus per package).

but that's all up to the dev to fix, not to the user.
I have a question here.. No one doubts the genius of fabrice bellard.. Someone in the thread rightly commented him as a polymath.. Fabrice sticks to C and loves the language to the core.. I often hear the FP folks saying that ppl who are inclined towards math love to program in lisp/scheme/haskell/clojure.. Fabrice Bellard being a math genius has no project written in any of these languages.. Why so? I understand it is personal taste but there got to be deep reason also
It should be noted that the alarm timers and wake-locks were the big showstoppers, and the most recent kernel release[0] offered a more generic implementation which is a superset of Android's current functionality:

[0] http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.5#head-e04ea6fe9005ea057124...
some asshole will tell you that you didn't actually build your business.

I though the whole thing was very similar to Carl Sagan's comment - If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. - and I never thought that Carl Sagan was having a go at bakers.
I wrote this in my free time over the past month and I'm really anxious to see how the world reacts to it. I'd really love to get your feedback and answer any questions.
That's an extremely opinionated point and doesn't add to the discussion and comes off being on a witch hunt. MS couldn't stop Samsung, HTC, Lenovo etc. from shipping Android devices, nor all of them plus Acer, Dell, and hundred other OEMs etc. from shipping Android tablets. What about HP and WebOS? Dell still ships Ubuntu laptops. And almost all the big OEMs have a big Linux division beside their Windows server division on their server pages.
http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/linux-servers
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/byos/linuxservers...

Where are the lawsuits against System76? If there really was demand, you think a company wouldn't start up and offer Linux? In fact there have been OEMs shipping Linux, but stopped or hid their offerings after the high rate of returns from people buying and returning them. And the tech savvy people who are the real customers can buy ANY PC out there and throw Linux on it(or just get a Macbook Air). There's not much money in it for the OEMs except high support costs, return rates and a whole toolchain to get Linux images(hard on thin margins).

If there is real mass consumer demand, a company can ship Linux profitably, MS won't care about them till they start making hundreds of millions a quarter, at which point successfully fighting a lawsuit based on antitrust case precedent on PCs or paying a low amount per PC won't really hurt the manufacturer. So, stop painting MS as the bogeyman in this discussion, Windows' and Office dominance(due to Open/LibreOffice not being up to par due to various reasons including Office compatibility) is a well known reason.
Pharmaceuticals represent approximately 10% of total health care expenditures versus hospital, physician and clinical services representing approximately 51% of total health care expenditures (for the latest estimated year of spending, 2010) [1].

Within Medicare, prescription drugs account for 11% of total Medicare expenditures and are projected to be 13.5% of total expenditures by 2021 [1].

Further, the prescription drug benefit ("Part D") has cost about 30% less than estimated by the CBO when the Medicare Modernization Act was passed (2003) [2]. This is due to a variety of factors, but a huge one has been lower-than-expected growth rates in per capita spending on prescription drugs, estimated at 4% per year since 2006 [2], much lower than overall growth in health spending.

[1] http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Stat...

[2] http://www.kff.org/medicare/upload/8308.pdf
It takes two hands to hold a device and a stylus.
Chinese scientists unveil mind-controlled drone
I also might note it's trivial to hide the soft buttons bar at any time as of Ice Cream Sandwich. I'm not sure where you heard it's "getting harder" when there is an explicit API that everyone uses.

An explanation at Stack Overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8469112/hide-ics-back-hom...

A reference:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.htm...
clickable : http://www.heystartup.com
Just tried some googling... is this it?

http://www.moddb.com/mods/xen-warrior
Don't forget number 4 - sheer hubris on the part of people who think that just because they've been to a doctor that they know what a doctor does.
Why not start with the really awesome remote control - and move toward your final idea?
Bitcoin: Alive and here to stay? Or slowly fading away?
I don't know, it seems fitting to me. If you ignore the current political mess surrounding that (out of context) statement, it's still true.

If you reach any kind of success, you'll find people who will say it wasn't you. You got rich off of someone else's work. You had it all handed to you. Or the most common of all, you got lucky.

It doesn't matter that you worked hard, or studied, or failed 50 times before. You were in the right place at the right time, and that's why you're making so much money. It was only because of the cosmic lottery that they, sitting around and not doing much, didn't become the rich person.
What about all the stuff you have to work through that society doesn't want to pay you for* before you can create something that they do? Life isn't a binary "Will I get paid or will I indulge myself with this project?".

*I am extremely loathe to use no payment as a direct indicator of want or value.
Wow, you learn something new every day! My thinking was more akin to a real life driving license, a mandatory thing you would need before being allowed on a computer unsupervised etc. Thanks for enlightening me though!
I don't really consider the Linux desktop "dead". Besides Android, it just has a marginal market share because you mostly need to be tech oriented to use it or install it.

I think the risk for the future is that the idea that the traditional desktop is dying out. In some respects the touch capable tablet UI's are much more user friendly. On the other side, the lightweight web-only interfaces (Chrome OS) are becoming increasingly more powerful/useful.

Windows and Mac have already moved to hybrid designs.
And also importantly for most Apple users something that fits in with the design.
Kaiser is a rare gem in the u.s. healthcare system, and the reason is that they are integrated system: they integrate insurance with treatment.

Since Kaiser if payed a fixed sum and not a fee for service it has motivation to reduce costs, hence the expert system.

Patients at Kaiser also stay for the long haul(who wants to switch doctors?), so it makes sense for Kaiser to invest in prevention, and they do.

Finally, Kaiser is an NGO, which i'm sure helps to keep they're priorities straight.

Maybe Kaiser is a good target for startups ?
As an investor, Vinod Khosla's job is to make such bold statements. But his statement will never come true.

Even if you assuming that 'doctors' and 'humans' are old technolgy, whenever a disruptive technology has come to market the old technology has not gone away -- it is still used and is often a part of a growing market (this is partly why incumbents are often so slow to move).

Regardless, I think the right way of phrasing the above is that in the future 80% of medical needs will be met by technology. This statement is actually different from implying that 80% of doctors will loose their jobs, it is more that technology will help them do their jobs - either to service more people or to service more complex situations.
Misdiagnose your hypothyroidism for months, only testing you once you've done your own research and pointed it out to them, and then signing their name to a piece of paper and getting you to sign your name to a large check?

</bitter>
Well, how you create data structures might matter for performance - if you turn C# structs into JS typed arrays for example and do the proper conversions, that could be much faster than simple JS objects or even arrays.
Thank you. Hope Obama get re-elected so PPACA won't be reppealed.
What's your take on checklists?
It's a classic power vacuum. Congress has proven unable to deal with banking issues, partly because it is deadlocked politically and partly because of the golden handcuffs of Wall Street political contributions. The speculation and lack of oversight that led to the crash in 2008 continue unabated. The charter of the Fed is to maximize employment, minimize inflation and keep interest rates steady. The classical tool of the Fed is controlling the supply of money; simplistically, expanding the money supply through reduced interest rates and direct loans to stimulate the economy (and employment) and shrinking it when the resulting boom begins to cause inflation. But since 2008 the economy has not reacted to reduced interest rates and banks that are loan recipients have been reluctant to increase the availability of loans to the real economy, the part that produces goods and services, but eager to use the money to (further) speculate in financial instruments. Thus, the money supply is not reaching its intended targets and has little effect on real GDP or employment. In the absence of effective fiscal regulation from the Congress or executive with which it might work in concert, the Fed has sought to exercise more direct control of the banks. The alternative is to be powerless to carry out their mandate and join the legion of neutered financial regulators, who cross their fingers and hope against reason or precedent that the banks won't screw up again.
From an earlier pair of Hacker News comments about another submission from this publication:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247829

> The source of the submitted article, rt.com, is not known for careful journalism.

Understatement of the year.

Just now as I have been searching for other sources, I see that all the stories on this issue so far are based on a press release, in very similar language, with the New Scientist blog write-up

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/08/thought...

perhaps having the most caution of statement in relaying the press release. So far no independent journalist has done any reporting from the scene in China.
Hopefully ISPs will be smart enough to provide native ipv6 before they start doing NAT on their ipv4 addresses.
I'd estimate that the amount of bacteria on organic food is higher, not lower due to the lack of said pesticides and using dung as fertilizer.

See the 2011 E. Coli outbreak in Germany that killed 50 people, caused by organic sprout: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_ou...
I quit my job, and am building Tindie fulltime
Show HN: Simple analytics on cloud spend.
I have built a simple service to generates charts on usage and costs for a SaaS service. While companies have raised millions, I have given up a top paying consulting gig to build the service. I need testers to help me stabilize and scale the service. website : www.xervmon.com
He was, and it's perfectly clear if you listen to the whole clip.

But it was one of those statements that was trivial to use out of context and perfectly fit the Republican narrative about Obama's views.

I'm a Republican, and I've thought it was a pathetic tactic since I first heard it. But that's why I nearly stop listening to the news during political seasons.
Intelligence insulted. Next.

I have a MicroSDCard inside a SDCard adpater sitting flush in my smaller-than-iPad netbook. I got it for "free" with purchase of a cell phone, before the iPhone existed. I guess I need to get a MacBook to reproduce this unsightly protruding SDCard problem so I can then get a "niftyminidrive" to solve it? According to the title, it's a"hack". Would that make me a "hacker"?

This is almost as good as Microsoft's "ReadyBoost". Otherwise known as a USB slot.

It's a $5 USB stick used as a swap file. No, it's a "Windows Memory Expander". And the price is $49.95. Oh.
I don't really get the problem.

The desktop never really needed Linux, and Linux never really needed the desktop.

People seemed to like Ubuntu some years ago though.
Some data:

-1 developer (me)

-$646 transacted in July

-Over $1800 transacted last month

-Shipped to 20 countries & every continent except Antartica

-Avg 30k visitors a month the last 2 months
I'm going to take a guess that you don't know many non-IT people.

Because the majority of the general public care about how how something looks and works. Whether it's the car the drive, the clothes they wear, how their house looks etc. Most people care about form.
And I always thought the motivation behind eating organic food was it's less of a burden on nature. Is personal health really the only thing people are concerned about?
>There is a strong case for someone paying developers to create a free alternative to Windows to commoditize desktop operating systems, thereby attacking Microsoft's revenue stream.

See Ubuntu bug number 1. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
Mark Shuttleworth is that 'someone'.

>The problem has been that it's been too difficult to produce something easy enough to transition away to from Windows and Windows apps for this to work.

Everytime a Linux distro is made one bit "easier" or simpler, the power users find it "dumbified" and quit that distro and move on.
There are people out there who are convinced that everything is because of external forces.

They'll tell you your successful because you got lucky somehow (lottery of an idea, picked for a promotion, right place right time, etc). It wasn't because of something you did.

Likewise, their situation is usually because of external forces as well. Their boss doesn't like them, they didn't get hired for that good job because of X, they couldn't go to/finish/get good grades in school because of Y.

It's really kind of sad to see in person.
I've read my chart. It's full of the doctors' logic based on facts. Computers are good at that. Medicine isn't magic.
You don't have to go through doctors to improve the healthcare system. You can around them, to the health insurance companies that pay their checks.

Insurance companies are much more interested in statistics than doctors are, especially predictive models. If someone can find out how to use technology to make health insurance companies more money, the doctors will follow.
Would love any pointers on the anti-aliasing side. Most of my testing was in webkit on Mac, and still need to make a few optimisations. Would love to here more from you. You can grab me on Twitter @Typicons.
That is a lie. The "that" is business. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. I just looked up the speech.
> Why are most open source programs dynamically linked again?

Probably because dynamically-linked binaries are smaller, use less memory (by avoiding duplication), and can get fixes or security updates without rebuilding or re-deploying. When you're a distro it hardly makes sense to ship a copy of libc inside every single binary. Any fix/update to libc would require re-downloading basically the whole system!