skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't this a classic issue in software developement, where you have to require or assume some minimum OS version? Remember all those labels: "Windows 95 or higher required."

And especially with web developement, where you'd have to test your site on a various number of combinations of OS, browser, and resolution.
Not on the iPad :(
Republican and Democratic Party Platforms in XML
thanks for the mention of infocaptor
I've found audiobooks work really well - there's no screen glow to keep you up and most players let you set up a shutdown timer.

The Audible edition of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" has worked really well for me: it's a fascinating panorama of history, but very episodic so you don't miss out on plot points if you actually fall asleep; the writing style is clear, elegant, and often funny; and the narrator has a calming voice and a smooth even tone throughout all 1300+ years of history so you won't be jarred awake by changes in volume.
>They are widely read, however, and the strategy is exploitable by someone who knows you're playing it.

So true. I've had some great success exploiting people who play Omaha to the letter of one of the more popular books.

>I would say, in my anecdotal experience, you don't encounter the same number of addicts in poker as you do in other games.

My anecdotal experience says that the worst addicts "play" the stock market. I think it works well with your observation about adrenaline moments as every tick makes for one.
From the artist's page.

A Pixel-style print of the German Secretary of the Interior Hans-Peter Friedrich

So it's a bit of inside joke as well
It's not that hard to settle out of court and the threat of selling your patent to a patent troll enables you to leverage the threat just as well as the big guys. As to defending yourself, if you don't have the resources to mount a reasonable defense your not worth the cost of a lawsuit.
Has anyone told this guy about reddit?
You can, but most people will see little boxes all over the place.
> There's a single API for Android; there are also different versions of the API, but there's a same issue in iOS.

Not really, no. http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/03/06/why-do-developers-pre...
SPARC is pretty much a lost cause for us. I believe that we have had better performance with the system memcpy over anything we've written.

Linux GCC was all over the place, depending on the Red Hat Enterprise version. IIRC, RHEL 4 and above, our internal code worked better, but with 5 and 6, the included memcpy is generally better.

If you're writing code that has serious performance requirements, experimentation is key. There's absolutely no guarantee that the system call will be better than a hand rolled call.
The way Android layouts work and the backporting Google has done relieves a lot of this pain and you can now support only 2.3 and up and still get the majority of users.

If you want to get the kind of pixel-perfect layouts people have come to expect on the iPhone then yes that's a hassle. But I suspect the trend is away from that kind of design towards more flexible, information-centric designs just as it's been on the web.
Will Science Survive?
wow, actually some pretty sweet startups here!
Let me introduce you to my mom:

http://000fff.org/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-at-com...

Or what about when RRW accidentially rated higher than facebook on google

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...

Most users will do most by automation. I.e. they learn how to do through repetition not through understanding.

So what will happen is that a lot of users will basically get confused and they won't ignore they will leave.
Only 30% of Firefox Users Can Access Browser Hardware Acceleration
I've been thinking about this from the perspective of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Charging a one-time fee based on historic CLV data, IMO, has three advantages: 1. Customers perceive the indefinite nature of recurring payments more expensive than a one-time fixed fee, 2. I'll have more cash upfront, and 3. I'll make more from customers that might have unsigned up long before the average CLV point.
Hey thanks for the suggestions. One thing that I found is that testing both strings for null actually performs faster because you may have parameters of different lengths and bailing on the null character of the shortest is ideal. And actually testing for an ampersand would probably bail even earlier in cases of duplicate params.

And maybe you can shed some light on this. I am a fan of the while loop too, but I found the for loop to be more performant. Is it possible that there are optimizations for variables touched in the for(;;) definition that do not exist for the while() definition?
My workflow (which has never led to conflicts):

- Never run pip outside of a virtualenv. I prefer to use virtualenv directly so that I have everything contained in my working directory, but virtualenvwrapper is fine too.

- Never install system-wide Python packages directly. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but I don't think I've ever needed a system-wide Python package as anything more than a dependency - and in the rare case when I have, the AUR (in my case) makes it easy to wrap a setup.py file inside a 'system' package.

The only problem with this workflow is that I still haven't figured out how to change the IPython module path, so when I run IPython inside a working directory with a virtualenv activated, I access the system packages, not the locally-installed ones. I could pip install IPython, but that'd add a completely unnecessary dependency to every project. Does anybody know an easy way to switch the path for IPython via command line switch, etc.?
What about squeezing the device as a user input method, squeezing the sides could unlock it.
"feelzr connects you with all the people around the world born on the same day as you."

How is this a Top Startup? This seems like a very novel idea to me. Some of these companies sound interesting but I think this list needs a little editing.
At Mozilla's PDF.js, we looked at several build alternatives in 2011. The main problem was that they all required a learning curve (they all looked like a domain-specific language), and sometimes they were too limited for our needs.

Since we already did everything through Makefiles, what we wanted was a shell script/Make that worked out of the box in all platforms (Windows included). So we wrote ShellJS for Node.js:

https://github.com/arturadib/shelljs

It is now battle-tested in several Mozilla projects (PDF.js, Firefox OS, Butter.js, etc). Check it out, happy to answer questions/comments at @arturadib.
I expect this will lead to some price fixing. The article mentioned Newegg and BestBuy jumping up their price briefly by $100 or so. To me that sounds like signaling. They are signaling that they are willing to raise prices by sending up a flag.

If others find that agreeable, then they raise their price too. The desire to be in the "buy box" drives prices down, but this kind of maneuver would act as a reset mechanism.

As a counterpoint, the sheer number of competitors will help mitigate this.
The biggest issue with fragmentation is the extra hardware and the screen size.

The company I work for does Android development for the gov't, and we have had a lot of issues with difference in camera support for example. Yes, there is one API, but for each camera in a phone it behaves slightly differently.

The worst still is the different screen sizes. It will look and work perfectly on one or two devices, and then you try it on a third and all of the elements are laid out differently or are rendered wrong and we have to add a work-around for that specific device.

The other issue we have found is the different versions of the libraries that various different versions of Android ship with. For example BouncyCastle is extremely outdated, or sqlite versions differ enough that it works on one device but doesn't work on the other.

We've also had issues with the phone switching between the cellular network and then wifi whereby sometimes our app will get sent up to 50 notifications in rapid fire saying it is switching between the two, which causes our app to tear down/restart the connection process. We ended up putting a timer in that waits a couple seconds and uses the last notification that came in ...

That's not to say that iOS development also doesn't have its issues. I had one app that if you used the switch on the iPad for screen orientation lock that it wouldn't output sound due to the switch not being recognised correctly. A bug that still exists in the latest version of iOS, and still hasn't been fixed (here is hoping for iOS 6 (which I have not yet installed on this device), my radar got closed as duplicate). But iOS has less of an issue with fragmentation due to the fact that most of the hardware is the same, and people with iOS devices tend to upgrade en masse to the latest version when it is released so it becomes less of an issue to have an app require a new version of iOS and no longer function on older versions of iOS (although, I am still targeting iOS 4 for now when doing consulting/client work).
I think this is a valid point. I usually try to rely on the optimizations that are already done for me. I think in this case the strcmp function may be doing some extra work based on locale/collation that I don't need to consider in my code which is making my code faster. But point well taken.
For the best, maybe "reading people" is just how you described it -- that "weird sort of secret autistic like aptitude that no one really understands." This is like that famous (to poker players anyway) first scene of the movie Rounders where Matt Daemon's character goes around and tells you to some sick level of accuracy the hand range of his opponents.

But in my experience, not being that, I can describe it better:

For me, reading people is about giving them as much negative stimuli as possible and watching closely at their reactions. I'm really only passably good at this in a 1-on-1 setting. I avoid big money in multi-player pots if i can even though they provide a chance for much richer implied odds (eg the ability to earn 2, 3 x my money).

What that means is this -- I play what's known as a "tight aggressive" game. I only play about 5-10% of the hands dealt to me. And I play them hard. I raise a lot. Not usually huge raises, instead I like to have more, smaller raises. A good Pot Limit game is great for that. The idea here is simple: I want to make you make more decisions. If I think you're a worse player than I am, then my odds increase the more decisions I make you make. And I would much rather be in a position where I re-raise and she comes back with a huge re-raise and I fold than a position where I have less signal about her hand, and more noise, and think I have the best of it all the way down and lose a big pot.

YMMV, but that's what "reading players" means to me.

Edit:

Also, build a poker bot. For fun. Not profit. You probably won't profit. But I loved it. There are great "engines" you can build off of. I used WinHoldem but this was circa 2005 so certainly there are better options. It's great. You get computer vision, machine learning, etc, it's loads of fun.
Chrome doesn't let pages capture shortcuts like ctrl+w and ctrl+t.
http://jsfiddle.net/talmand/pXkNz/

Although it is interesting to tap on random buttons to see what the results are. Some of them produce a key code but no character (SHIFT and RETURN as examples) while others produce a different character than what I tapped.

Just tossed it together rather quickly so there's probably a better way to do it.
From my experiments 1 is definitely false. Customers often are willing to pay $50/month for several years when they wouldn't pay a $500 one-time fee.

This goes back to the concept of reducing risk. Customers are very risk-averse, so things like charging a lower monthly fee or offering a money-back guarantee will often give you a significant increase in sales.
I totally agree. Writing stuff down is good, but coming up with a solution to a problem in bed or actually while you're asleep is even better.

At least in my personal case, I've solved the hardest problems while being asleep.
> Time for Billing Provider Redundancy

This is nothing new. In higher risk industries, spreading risk over multiple billing providers is a fact of life. Like any system, if you rely on a single point of failure, then you are electing to take that risk. It's part of the price you pay for not having to deal with all the various requirements of PCI Compliance, as well as actually managing all the billing. The freedom to move from one biller to another biller seamlessly comes at a cost.

It's not an easy problem to solve, regardless. Not from a technical standpoint, mind you.
1. Customers perceive the indefinite nature of recurring payments more expensive than a one-time fixed fee

This is, for better or worse, exactly the opposite of how customers actually think.
This is absolutely standard for financial products in the UK. The direct price is often more than double the one you get via a price comparison.

For example, I just paid about £410 for one year's comprehensive car insurance with Aviva, via a broker, via moneysupermarket.com. When I went to Aviva direct they quoted me £950.

This makes some economic sense, but as a consumer I just hate it. It makes apparently simple purchases really hard work. (In a similar vein, in the UK it's often possible to save 50%+ on a long-distance train journey by buying a number of tickets covering various parts of the journey, even if you're staying on the same train throughout).
I basically cloned the Bingo Card Creator idea in that I sell access to a PDF generating machine. I though long and hard about a recurring fee model, but decided that my customers are price sensitive, and to be fair, I'd have to charge $5/month rather than a one time fee of $30. Sure some people would sign up and continue to pay, but most would cancel after one month and I'd only get $5. I know this because 90% of my customers never log in again after one week.

Additionally, I think a recurring fee would scare customers off in this market, and I go out of my way to tell them it's a one time fee and that they get access forever. If you're wondering, "Do some of them feel a sense of entitlement for essentially... forever?" Oh boy yes, they do!!! But that's OK, I treat them real nicely anyhow.
Opscotch.com is launching this week. Check us out if you have a chance. We are a new kind of online debate platform.
Are you speculating or speaking from personal experience?
> but getting something like Django set up took me hours. Perhaps I just suck with Linux, who knows?

That's a Django thing; I remember its setup/configuration to be a bit wonky compared to most Python packages.

Just learn how to use virtualenv + pip, and that's most of the setup you should need for Python development on Ubuntu. The added plus about using virtualenv from the start (I don't think it was around when I was learning Python) is that you get a very clear understanding of what the project structure and dependencies are... it took me a while to figure that out when I first started.

Also:

> Perhaps I just suck with Linux, who knows?

Nah, that's just the process of migrating for the first time from a completely different OS. You'll get the hang of it the more you use it.
The primary tagline is really confusing since App Creation implies some sort of PhoneGap competitor. The secondary tagline, on the other hand, really communicates the essence of what you're providing to the consumer:

"Discover the best apps, curated just for you"

I was ready to "bounce" from the page until I read the secondary tagline and clicked on one of the (poorly written and not at all descriptive) buttons like "Geeks are Sexy" to figure out where that button led me to.

My recommendation is to continue building the app but also test copy heavily.
My favorite part of the description:

"Believe it or not it’s hundreds, and they all live around the planet in different timezones."

Its actually 20m.

~Also, to the person who made this app, I may install it for fun, so I'm not bashing the idea, just the funny math. Its another way to build a more random network.
> We actually think our ads can be as helpful as the search results in some cases.

As someone who works managing PPC adverts I have been referred to as "Google meat based matching algorithm"
Not sure what you mean.

I have no idea about what data and how much have been collected about me.
Nokia's new phones look fantastic. But their last ones looked fantastic, too.

PureView camera? Awesome. But all my friends share photos through Instagram. No Instagram on WP8 = me not being able to share photos with my friends. So right now, this former WP7 user is sticking with Android.

I really, really want to like Windows Phone- the UI is better than anything else out there. But it needs more support from third parties, and fast.
I agree, but that's not what I'm saying!

The law is not enforced in the UK at all. Accordingly those who do comply are being penalised unjustly.

The ICO (body responsible for enforcing) have themselves said they probably won't prosecute people for using analytics, because even though that's against the law it's not really all that bad. That's just one example of how vague the law has become.

So we're left in a mess where no-one knows what to do, and those doing the least possible profit. Hence our stance.

Hope that makes sense!
It has exposed a lot of people to BSD Unix, which I think helped some.

But outside of developers and hackers, most people have so little exposure to the Unix side of MacOS X (and practically none on iOS) that it wasn't as big an impact as some of us (unrealistically?) hoped.
> If you don't want to be tracked. TURN. COOKIES. OFF.

...except that's not going to be enough to make you untrackable[1]. As far as I know, short of some extreme Tor practices (new Tor connection for every session, no simultaneous sessions), there's no way to make yourself truly untrackable.

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php
that's indirection and psychological warefare on the part of Google.

in the big picture you give them data and they process it as they wish; "nofollow" is just a suggestion. for instance, they can compute metrics of it such as the ratio of follow/nofollow links pointing to a site and feed it into their scoring system

good links do get passed around in comments (this is the blog post you really should read about this) that shouldn't be nofollowed, while other webmasters are stingy and nofollow everything they link. so who knows what Google or bing does with this.

What is clear is that if you play it safe and give no link, Google won't give them any credit.
Only just saw this. I'm not sure specifically of any countries that are democratic by my definition. An issue that needs to be fixed, if they want to claim to be democratic, is to have proportional representation - so outcomes don't favour larger political groups; In Canada for example, there are many people who would vote for Green party don't, they vote Liberal say the Conservatives don't get more power. People don't feel safe voting for who'd they vote for because their vote won't count. See http://www.fairvote.ca/ ...
The Web Index - measuring the web's global impact
Breaking Into the OS X Keychain
Introduction to JSP (Java Server Pages)
The only problem with that is it doesn't give politicians much to do except tackle real problems.

WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE POLITICIANS?!
Here in Austria, we already have some special "online only" deals by major car manufacturers. I'd assume that it's becoming popular elsewhere as well (example: http://www.hyundai-shop.at/) and that car dealers aren't particularly happy about it. Perhaps the huge discount (around 25%) is the usual dealer's cut ...
Somebody who was "never especially good" at programming but spent a lot of time try to be could make the exact same post.

Programming doesn't have a rake.

Regarding math, there are about a half-dozen or dozen situations that you should memorize the approximate odds to, and be able to divide those odds by how much is in the pot (minus your bet/call). It's not that sophisticated, you're not deriving probability theory from first principles here.

Poker's fun, don't get me wrong, but nobody should regard it the way we regard programming.
Do you understand the difference between proportional representation voting vs. non-PR voting?

"Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. " - Wikipedia

A republic isn't by default a democracy. Non-PR voting doesn't allow all citizens to have an equal say because their vote doesn't count if they vote for smaller political parties; At minimum it's not taking away seats from other parties, and not showing the genuine support for smaller parties -- and the bigger political parties know this and is why they want to keep the system this way.
i think they rejected sendgrid, but not 100% sure.
This is probably not a lot of data (billing information, 20M users * 2k ~ 40GB) and should have been stored in immutable snapshots down @ the 5 or 1 minute mark with those encrypted snapshots being checksummed and replicated to different systems. Each new entry to go into a distributed replicated log. Double entry book keeping (immutable data structure with checksums) has been around from what, the 1300s?

They should have been using chaos monkey, http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in...

The name just got cutesy with people's money, when they shoulda been getting cutesy with good design, stuff fails. But systems shouldn't fail that handle money. There _will_ be breakage of customer accounts, there will be no getting around that. Look on the bright side, people finally have a chance to not-reup services they don't need.
Of course not. Just as no system is truly secure. But let's not dive off into hypotheticals, let's talk practically. With cookies off you are practically untrackable.

I just tried your link. Here are my results: "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 2,399,190 tested so far."

I'm one in roughly 2.4 million. That's untraceable enough for me :p
I always tried to do this.
> The relatively few websites which genuinely might be jeopardising user's privacy - Facebook, Google, Amazon etc - tend to be large, ubiquitous and mostly ad networks. The average 10 page company website is not technically sophisticated enough to subvert a user's privacy nor do they have the visitors to do so.

What this law should have required is a way to opt out of the tracking systems themselves. I should be able to opt out Adsense tracking wholesale if I want to (although, tbh, I think I might prefer targeted ads over generic random BS appearing in the sidebars of every site I visit).

Having to opt out on every different European site that embeds Adsense is thoroughly retarded, especially when you consider that many sites don't even give you an option to opt out -- they just tell you to leave if you don't consent to being tracked!
How can you say that Facebook genuinely might be jeopardizing users' privacy, but you aren't, then say that you embed Like buttons in your site?
If you browse around jwz's site, you really get a sense of what a hypertext site can be. I like it a lot. :-)

I've had an idea for an 'autolink' took for a while - it'll go through your HTML-base and generate links to other pages based on a statistical likelihood that your word is related to the other page(s).
The vast majority of early Atari games where 'ugly' as where a lot of 3rd party NES games. However, retro gaming tends to ignore that and focus on gameplay even if it's bad gameplay which can add a beauty all their own.
If the experience of WP7 is anything to go by, you're going to be exchanging a nightmare between the carriers and Google with a nightmare between the carriers and Microsoft.

AT&T flat out refused to release an update for my phone, I had to do the WP equivalent of rooting it and manually patching myself.