skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Android users are not using their devices the same as iOS users:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/real-time-research-ios-domi...
I can confirm that is a small cash-cow (calf?). I used to charge $100 per car and did about 1-3 a week. Not bad, but had to stop due to time constraints.
> How can you make your HTML5 code as fast as native?

https://developers.google.com/native-client/
Sebastian Thrun: Udacity Statistics 101 will be majorly updated
Sounds like an ARG. Reminds me of that "this is my milwaukee" thing.
Spooky as shit but nonetheless true. Fact is, by definition, most code is written by average/below average coders with no vested interest in it.
Here is a list, I feel like it's fairly representative, of conditions that will generate an "automatic decline" for a regional health insurer. I chose it because it was the first on the Google SERP; I can be more rigorous if I need to be:

http://echealthinsurance.com/health-insurance-advisor/wp-con...

The fun stuff starts on age 18.

A huge number of Americans have conditions with a "D" in the right-hand column, which is "automatic decline coverage". Many of those people cannot get insurance on the private market at any cost.

Why do you have a hard time believing that our health care system needlessly bankrupts people?

Is it something along the lines of, "there is a savvy way to negotiate this system without having health insurance"? I'm prepared to concede that someone knows someone who's mom paid pennies on the dollar for care by playing hardball with providers. I just don't think that's a viable solution to the problem overall; providers will more often than not just send the bills to collections.
Would you any more go to a 3rd-world country without appropriate immunizations than you browse the public Internet without appropriate flash-blocking plugins?
Intel reinvents the PC for the age of ‘perceptual computing’
I see a lot of comments lamenting the downfall of HN recently and they almost always focus on poor comments. In my opinion the troublesome trend on HN has been stories like this (or yesterday's bash redirection cheat sheet) making it to the front page. This is Hacker News not Un*x For Dummies.
Amazon's main strategy is to broker transactions between its users and the vendors that supply those users. Amazon is aiming to be everyone's primary retail store for everything.

Facebook's strategy is to own everyone's on-line "sharing". Google's strategy is to own everyone's "search" (broadly defined). Amazon wants to own everyone's retail experiences.

Amazon would love it if slick devices were cheap enough to just give away -- they'd know instantly how to make huge money off that. Google and Facebook? Not so much.
Just curious--how or where did you hear about Braintree coming to Australia? And do you know if it's available publicly? It's something I'd love to look at (even with the Westpac account requirement) I can't seem to find anything on it.
You think finding good engineers with people skills is hard? Try finding mechanics who can talk to people. Good luck. Whitney is one in a million. Plus, a lot of mechanics out there will go ahead and ask the ladies out with no regard to marital status (either of them).
But it's not really true, at least if you want a truly fluid UI... although I think it's possible to make UI written in HTML5 feel native, I have yet to use a single complex webapp that truly accomplishes it, unless it's hidden in a UIWebView in some app I use. (Gmail might come close if it didn't apparently use onclick instead of ontouchstart, and custom scrolling instead of -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch, for no discernible reason.)

It's not just that JavaScript is slow, although that doesn't help - having to worry about the performance implications of using libraries rather than directly using browser APIs, or being forced to use native scrolling because JavaScript scrolling just can't avoid lag, is a waste of time. It's also that where native UI frameworks are designed for performance from the start - every single UITableView is drawn lazily (implementing "immediate-mode" infinite scrolling on top of the deferred mode DOM is awful), you can fluidly move between low-level and high-level drawing APIs (Canvas is a very sharp boundary), animation feels built in rather than a recent hack (and I hope you're not targeting anything other than WebKit) - in HTML you have to fight against an absurd layout system to do anything and, in some sense, work around it to do anything fast; there are usually many ways to do it but most of them are slow.

And it doesn't help that where native frameworks have built-in controls to do a lot of things - and those controls look and feel native simply because they have the home field advantage of being what everything else has to mimic - HTML5 is left with a bunch of shitty webapp frameworks and the option of reimplementing everything yourself. The creators of those frameworks seem to assume things like if the animation looks vaguely like the original, there's no need to actually get the details right to avoid uncanny valley, or make it performant at all, so you probably want to make it yourself. I hope you know what you're doing.

As much as I love HTML5, you have to fight every step of the way to make something that works right. Getting a prototype out is easier with HTML5 than native, but for a moderately complex app, making it actually work right is vastly harder.
The last part of your statement isn't true.

Q3 2012, Apple iPad revenue: $9.171B on 17M units
Q2 2012 (different calendar system), Google revenue: $12.2B.
Definitely looked at a few virtualization options (we use Citrix XenServer at work), but my rationale for LXC was making the most use of limited hardware (rather than being forced to commit, say, 2GB for VM A, 2 for VM B, and so on, instead having up to the full server resources available - this isn't strictly the "best practice" for a mock production environment but will suffice).

"vim elite" may not have been the best phrasing - my intent wasn't to imply superiority and condescension, merely "text editor power user".

Divvy is a nice tool, which I do use, and does make life a little easier, and if my preference deep down is that of a largely maximized world and Windows, so be it.

I do really want to investigate Vagrant, and will check out your links, cheers!
Ughh, these moments suck. Every startup goes through them but it is just painful to watch founders getting forced out of the companies they started.
"The pattern, which consists of approximately 88 bytes of data..."

Actually seems like more than enough room to be encrypted. They probably just didn't think of it.
We do regressions with rb-gsl.

require 'gsl'
x = GSL::Vector.alloc(array_of_x_values)
y = GSL::Vector.alloc(array_of_y_values)
c0, c1, cov00, cov01, cov11, chisq, status = GSL::Fit::linear(x, y)

It's not nearly as much work, and it's much faster than doing it in pure Ruby. :)

(It also does weighted regressions and exponential fitting, among a host of other things. That wheel's gone done been invented already.)
Inspired by our discussion:

see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4508273
Boiling water holds no culpability. Soldiers shouldn't get blamed for being shot, drag queen's aren't asking for harassment, police officers shouldn't be blamed for getting killed in the line of duty. Victim blaming puts the onus on someone who didn't make the decision to act in the entirely inappropriate manner.

We can even condemn behavior without justifying or excusing extra-judicial violence. We just have to do it not in the context of discussing the violence they later suffered. We can discuss the injustice of an invasion, but the funeral of a fallen soldier isn't the place for it.
Yet another satisfied customer here, and to me, one of the huge advantages of YM is that the mechanic comes to you... no more worrying about how to get your vehicle to a shop, whether you will make it there by closing to pick it back up, which of your friends to bug to give you a ride, etc.
It's counter based, not time.
So then how do you schedule them if they don't compete? Is this more of a "fill your spare capacity" setup or do they work certain shifts? Also, what is your average response time? Same day or scheduled in advance?
I don't really mean to reveal all your secret sauce, but since I dealt with this stuff for a couple months I'm curious. The mechanic I worked with wanted to go big time but my partner and I decided he wasn't a good fit to run an operation at that scale.
My only issue with "needing Windows or OSX" is that we do a lot of collaboration, which I can't argue out of GoToMeeting (which doesn't run on Linux), and I don't want to have to maintain a separate VM to mimic my development environment merely for these times (I realize, too, that I'm optimizing for a highly specific set of circumstances, here!) - were it just Office, or one or two tools, I'd be happy with Linux, and an XP VM.
In other words, a collection of mobile apps that could find a good home on Android.
Nudity in gaming shouldn’t be a bigger taboo than violence
> These contraptions are illegal to use in public

Citation needed.

> It is impossible to provide effective braking on a skateboard.

I don't skateboard, so I don't know, but it seems like a lot of people are pretty effective at transporting themselves via skateboard. Besides, how does this contraption exacerbate the problem? If it's accelerating you to higher top speeds than a self-powered skateboard, then sure, but if the speeds are the same I don't see how this board could do anything other than improve braking.
By the way have you heard about the Linux on Android project on Sourceforge? It enables you to run a linux distro on your Android phone via a chroot hack. Seems to be working very well, but I have not tried yet.

If you miss your N900, you can check what is happening with the Open Pandora device, and use your phone to theter your internet connection to it :)
Amazon makes money from selling digital and physical media content as well as physical goods. Google makes money primarily from search-based advertising — YouTube which is digital content is around the order of 1B revenue whereas total revenue is in the range of 30B.

Amazon makes money whenever you buy their content. Google not so much.

When you have a strong platform player that have decisive power over how they locate information — in the case of Apple, (1) control over the default search engine in Mobile Safari, (2) control over what web browsers are approved for their App store (3) has their own maps app backed by their own services and partners, which doesn't include Google (4) demonstrated capability and intent to build alternate ways to access information such as Siri (5) demonstrated animosity — I'd say Google doesn't feel like they win if you buy an iPad.

So correction, it should be "Google makes money when you use their services".
There are very real economic reasons to build out rather than up, when you have suitable land nearby. Especially in areas like Colorado where land is cheap and regulation is light, building nice big cheap (in terms of construction costs) single family homes sounds pretty good, vs. building expensive (per square foot of usable space) high-rise condos. Construction costs are lower, and you end up with a bunch more living space, a garage, etc, etc. And from a buyer's perspective, you have a lot more control over a single family home.

And yeah; you can have public transit in the 'burbs? but it's not going to be popular. Because you have so much more living space than a city dweller, you are likely to get more utility out of the hauling capacity of a car. And having that extra living space also dramatically lowers the cost of owning the car; You don't have to pay for parking, and you can do basic work in the garage. (you can save a giant wad of cash doing basic stuff like swapping rotors yourself.)

Personally, I think the economic realities of the suburbs mean that only the poorest of the poor are going to not own personal vehicles; because of this, public transit is built for and associated with the poor in all but the most built-up parts of America. "Domestic help" is not fashionable here, either, so for the middle class, there isn't a lot of upside to letting poor people into their neighbourhoods. (I'm wondering if this is going to change with the rise of in-home elder-care. There certainly are plenty of Americans willing to do that sort of work for wages the middle-class could pay.)
Given that homebrew tends to occupy /usr/local, I've grown comfortable with making my own ~/local folder with src, bin and app/server folders. I tend to use it for just about everything one might want in a /usr/local directory.
No doubt, yet iPhone still generates more mobile web traffic than Android.
> your app doesn't make heavy use of hardware

Bingo. Would be surprised if it lagged on hardware from 10 years ago.
What Publishers Want: Tips for Getting Your Game Funded
Yup, all day.
I hope this company don't end up have to pay for Custom Support for XP!
Jumping into the water before learning how to swim

The trouble with your argument is that many highly successful founders did just that.

Much of what people learn inside existing companies is toxic.
They won't present their patents until there's a big haul of cash to be extracted.

Algorithms are already implemented and software which uses them is distributed broadly. Where are their court cases? Until those patent trolls (trolls as in spreading FUD) actually show what those patents are, they can't say that anything is encumbered. And they themselves have no idea about what they are. So whatever lies they spread now, even if it comes from Jobs, is simply irrelevant.
As a late 40s father of two who has never ridden a skateboard, I started researching how hard it would be to learn and whether I should get a conventional longboard skateboard to learn on while I wait. I think the website could use some FAQs targeted at non-skateboarders.

This is a VERY compelling product, the price point is just fine. But I do want to know if I could, practically, learn to ride it from scratch in a few hours.
How did you confirm they were fraud?
Harvard’s ‘wise men’ tell Silicon Valley
Your going the wrong direction. Bluetooth and iPhones are highly advanced hardware systems. It would be like teaching someone who knows nothing about programming by dropping them in the middle of a complex software API and hope they can figure things out from there.

Start with a microcontroller AND a FPGA or it's simpler CPLD cousin of some type. Learn how to use both of them and understand what your doing with both of them. Look up the Altair! You know, the world's first PC. Find stuff that was popular in the beginning of the computer age. See how hardware Pong was made. Try and see if you can recreate it on that microcontroller. After that, see if you can recreate it on the CPLD. It will you some idea about what your about to embark on.

From there, try taking on a communication protocol. Ask around for something simple you can learn in a month.

By this time you will hopefully have enough knowledge to give Bluetooth a shot and then see exactly how big a divide there is between the hardware and software world and how much stuff was "hidden" from your view.

Good Luck
Yeah, I'm definitely going to go with ARG. I would be beyond shocked if actual intelligence information were being transmitted over an unencrypted channel like this.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, I'll bite.

Who is this "obvious" to? Clearly not you, since you think it's a horrible idea. Electronic skateboards have been around for quite awhile, and until now, they've been very heavy and mostly impractical. Yet, they are a viable product in the market and popular enough that people are making money selling them. One of the reasons this product is a leap forward is because it's lightweight enough to be used as a normal skateboard without electric power.

Simply stating that there is no place for this product on the sidewalk doesn't make it true, and I personally disagree with you. Stating that it is a "danger to everybody on the roadway" is absolutely absurd and simply untrue. Any vehicle that is under the control of a competent and observent operator will not be a danger to others in the least.

Here's the real problem: The contrarian, negative, hostile commenters on HN are the vocal majority in a lot of cases. Personally, I'm really, really tired of this even being accepted by the community.
Norms may change ;-)
Thanks for the heads up - I'm comfortable in the CLI, I like Sublime admittedly, as I do PyCharm (but I understand the nuances of being able to become self-sufficient outside an IDE), had never really considered a tiling WM, but watching Tyler's intro was enlightening - I might have to try it out - I've used Divvy, and it seemed to solve part of my problem.
Food price increase!= Starvation or Hunger.

You see riots, demonstrations in western countries when prices for petrol or commodities rise, but that does not mean that the situation is necessarily unbearable.

By the way, price food increase has also a lot to do with the US government debt and the weakness of the US dollar (inflation) leading to increasing $ needed to buy the same amount of food over time. And poorer countries are directly impacted by this.
Apple charges Google for being the default search engine.
http://paulgraham.com/hubs.html

Location matters, that's why people want to be in the US/Canada.
Botox: Reclaim Your Skin
Game engine Torque 3D will soon be free, open source
mechanic set their own time. response time really depends on how busy they are. we don't promise a response time yet. our mechanics use our mobile app to do all their scheduling. it is really fill your spare capacity model (work on weekends, evenings, free days during week) etc.
>Yeah 8 million Nexus 7s sold is what I heard somewhere

Not really. Some analyst expects 8 million shipments Nexus 7 by the end of 2012. The guesstimate was based on LCD screen shipments.
And BSD users have been doing this forever. I know I've read about why Linux is divergent, but I forget why.
What type of battery does this use? LiPo?
Very interesting. I wonder if they tried running MongoDB on SSD. I would think that might mitigate having to have their working set in memory and potentially make the cold start problem a bit better. It'd certainly seem easier than migrating datastores.
Netflix's worst nightmare comes true
Incremental Simple Linear Regression in Ruby
What is an ARG?
I'm interested to see what happens with Apple's upcoming releases. A large (albeit not the only) component of Bezos' message is that the Kindle Fire provides an iPad-quality experience at a lower upfront price because Amazon intends to get most of its long-term customer value through media sales; that idea could suddenly become a lot more interesting if a hypothetical iPad Mini / Air is released at the same price point as the Fire. Amazon would still be very well-positioned (as Gruber puts it, "heads we win, tails you lose"), but it would certainly make the hardware sales race more interesting.
Sam - please email me at art@yourmechanic.com and please let me know what type of car it is. I will check with our mechanics to see which one can drive up there.
Native Client apps are no more HTML5 than Flash is HTML5.
Makes me wonder if a two wheeled longboard -- a Segway with no handlebar you ride like a longboard -- might not give us the best of both worlds.
I am pretty excited about this field. I have been working with some folks who are developing controllers for off grid systems. My personal vision is to develop small systems that can be added modularly. First a few panels to run a DC pool pump, then a few more to run a DC Air conditioner. As always, the hardest part is to consistently put in the time in between all the other things in life.
I've gotten over 25 million unique visitors to my site, WreckedExotics.com since I launched it 10 years ago.

Here's a screenshot of the google analytics:
http://i.imgur.com/gz9hJ.jpg

It's missing 3 years worth of data - and those were some of the highest traffic years, so essentially, the site has done over 1 billion pageviews. Best month was 1 million visitors. I run the site by myself.

I also created http://www.exoticspotter.com which attracts over 1 million visits per year and am working on a 3rd site that attracts about 500,000 visits per year.

I was just lucky to get the traffic - basically started a site that was naturally viral. I don't know how to program, I just know how to code HTML/CSS, so I've been running it as a completely static site this entire time. It needs an update badly.

The traffic took off almost immediately, I had it on a hosted server that crashed and I got a bill for almost $1,000 for overages. Moved it to a dedicated server and the rest is history.
Everyone's different, but I have a "Kindle with special offers" from last year, and the sleep screen's ads are actually a feature. They're unobtrusive, informative and have actually saved me money.

If the Kindle Fire implementation is similar, I wouldn't hesitate on that count. (There may very well be other reasons not to get one... We'll see when they come out!)
Time for the business people to take over.
How Amazon really declared war on Apple
These are some interesting points.

You're absolutely right that the anonymous and distributed nature of 4chan means that the "/b/" entity can react to perceived slights (trolling, mockery) in a radically disproportionate way.

If the individual provoker annoys /b/ with "strength" 1, and (e.g.) 10 000 /b/ denizens are each sufficiently annoyed to push back at the provoker with equal "strength" 1, that means that the reaction to the individual is profoundly out of proportion to the original attack. By a factor of thousands.

It's like burning someone's house down with their family inside because they dented your bumper without leaving a note. But as you point out, few individuals were all that nasty - the culpability is distributed across a large, anonymous mob, with a few critical nodes, such as those persons who leaked the individual's contact information, or made prank phone calls to her work place.

The crowd / mob dynamics gives massive strength to the anonymous group that is absolutely unmatched by the individual. Mob dynamics in physical space are understood well enough, and police have had various means of dealing with large groups of disorganized people in town squares and so forth. This is not the case for internet-distributed mobs, which are still relatively new.

The process is like leaderless, decentralized, crowdsourcing of cruelty (cf. "Anonymous: because none of us is as cruel as all of us"). And of course, the greater the crowd, the greater the possibility of someone recognizing the individual victim - which is exactly what happened in this case. Once this happens, with a name and identifying characteristics, the positive feedback loop and mob excitement can escalate and boil over.

You may already have seen this video about a thought experiment about the potential power of distributed, internet-powered mobs and the way things could go wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMdOT8YJgY
Apologies.

I was thinking of iPhones. Q3 2012, Apple iPhone revenue $22B
Put a pseudoinverse in there :)
...and at the end he shows you how to do the same thing with two lines of R.

It's very useful to code basic statistical algorithms yourself so you understand how they work, but for any serious analysis you'll get more reliable and performant results with a library.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
(I didn't know either.)