skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point was the fallback should be more seamless (and shouldn't rely on 3rd party FOSS libraries, which it sometimes does).

Example 1: Fragments.

Introduced with Honeycomb. Android supports these via the "support" library back to 1.6, but the APIs you're using are slightly different (eg. getFragmentManager() vs getSupportFragmentManager()) and the classes you use live in different packages (eg. android.app.Fragment vs android.support.v4.app.Fragment). If the support library were more tightly integrated with the mainline SDK, you wouldn't have to worry about all these splits, but it isn't so you do. You have to decide up front if you want to code to the mainline SDK classes or the support versions and then this gets worse when you implement other classes which use Fragments in a library meant for other developers -- should your classes assume those developer's Fragments derive from android.support.v4.app.Fragment or android.app.Fragment? It gets really messy really fast.

Example 2: ActionBar

Not even supported via the regular support library, you have to go get ActionBarSherlock which itself extends the Android support library. Kudos to Jake Wharton on this great library, but why didn't Google just make their ActionBar backward compatible to earlier versions out of the gate? It is clearly possible to do this as ABS does it.

I'm sure there is some specific reason the Android devs could give for why the support lib and the main SDK are so increasingly fragmented and it may have a very good legacy reason for existing, but having them work this way is harmful in the long run, IMO. Maintaining this split makes things much harder for devs just trying to get into Android who are very confused by all the different decisions they have to make just to get basic app functionality working across a decent cross-section of Android devices.

Granted, I'm not saying any of this makes Android development impossible or akin to rocket science, but it does make it needlessly complex which is bad given that Android is already seen as a bit of a red-headed-stepchild to iOS development even despite the overall marketshare advantage Android has.
Thats quite a long list. Personally I just need the company VPN to break & then everything I need to do my job goes down the drain...

On an entirely unrelated note, guess how much work I got done today...
This is complete and utter nonsense.

Facebook and Instagram itself I imagine would care VERY much if data went missing as it would mean not just (a) user data going missing but (b) potentially huge inconsistencies in the social graph.

Unless you have some evidence that those companies do not care about data durability ?
I read this yesterday, got inspired, and memorized 50 digits of pi starting at 11 pm. Crazy! It's really not that hard!
Roche upbeat on Avastin in ovarian cancer
Daydreaming beyond the solar system with warp field mechanics
Anyone know which customer retention e-book RS is referring to?
They may know intuitively what a browser is, but they don't always know it as a "browser". When I did public-facing tech support, I found I encountered much less confusion when I told people to "pull up Google" or "go to Yahoo" versus "start your browser".

Doing tech support work interacting with the generally computer non-literate is like civil service for the tech world. It's not pleasant but it expands your perspective, and many HN readers would do well to go through it.
Thanks for the shout-out to Tarsnap... I think. :-)
Slight nit: Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene have both shown higher thermal conductivity than diamond.
ok, this is the second hit on google for "feciform" (third is "vomiting feciform matter" while first is "FECI form"). is this really a word? if not, what on earth did you mean?
U guys re kidding me. G+ is useful
TL;DR CS?

that said, I wish twitter was around when I was in school. using twitter has really taught me how to express something very concisely.
If you use anonymous functions a lot, it's amazing:

result = _.map object, (val, key) ->
foo(val)

is much cleaner than

var result = _.map(object, function(val, key) {
return foo(val)
});

I think.
Just a heads up: that JS-induced header flickering is distracting as hell. Use `position: fixed;` instead of a JavaScript hack that constantly flickers the header in and out of the window.
We don't do OCR, we have people who scan the documents if you snailmail them to us (or you can upload the scans directly to your account, email them in etc.) and then convert these images into queryable data with special emphasis on receipts (also invoices, bills, bank withdrawals, etc) and business cards.
It's a service that our customers are happy to pay for, so I think I'm not quite getting your point about why this model won't work.

Had it been any one the issues I've pointed out, I would be quite happy to work around them. I do that routinely with other pieces of technology that do 95% of what I want. However, the hits kept coming. At the same time, I was using Postgres on another project and the question was begging to be asked - if I am going to run extra services like Lucene and do extra work to achieve full text search, what am I getting in return? And I am sorry to say - case insensitive search is quite a basic feature.

As for the 1111 issue - I admit it can be fixed. But the fact still remains - there's no way I would face this problem with Postgres. So why not just switch?

Postgres is a really nicely thought out and well executed database. And don't get me wrong - I am not building a system designed to operate at stratospheric scale. That would be premature in my opinion.

Thanks for taking the trouble to comment.
If you have the engineering to handle the energy required to travel between stars, you can apply it to making weapons.
I guess so will the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay etc.

Must be amazing to know more about databases than all of the world's biggest companies put together.
New Software Makes Synthesizing DNA As Easy As ‘Drag and Drop’ With Icons
Advertising Law: FTC Disclosures are Required with Social-Media Testimonials
I meant "the project will be cancelled" in the same sense as "the heat death of the universe will occur." Basically, the problem will persist until either the end of time, or until such a time as that particular component is deemed completely obsolete and replaced wholesale.
They see a bigger risk in content theft I would assume
>In one fun case, we had a corporate client disable automatic updates for their entire research lab because one night Windows update decided it needed to automatically reboot every single system there. They were running overnight experiments and came in the next morning to find that all of the night's data was missing or corrupted, costing them a day on a tight schedule.

That is a small edge case on a consumer OS running on a billion PCs, maybe they should have had some half-competent people running the lab instead of having defaults that are meant for normal users?

WSUS lets them have full control over updates and restarts. Most decent enterprises and univertisies use it.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.as...

>Microsoft does software updates in a very, very wrong way

Pray, tell us the right way. What would you have wanted Microsoft to do if there was this vulnerability that came today and the lab was running the research experiment for the next 3 days?
The Smallest Way Forward
Over the last few years, some people have started to work on a problem that has been described as "pure exploration" in multi-armed bandits [1,2]. The objective in this problem is, roughly speaking, to maximize the rate at which you become certain about whether or not you've correctly identified the best bandit arm (or, more generally, the top n arms). This solves some of the more common complaints about classic MAB algorithms in that, when run for a finite number of trials, the resulting sampling of the arms produces a far more confident decision than either the regret-minimizing policies followed by standard MAB algorithms or the uniform allocation policies typically used in A/B testing.

The original article mentions problems in MAB algorithms dealing with delayed feedback. Such issues are largely ameliorated by the use of algorithms related to "Thompson sampling" [3], which induces stochastic trial allocation policies rather than the deterministic policies induced by UCB's selection process. It's definitely possible to develop Thompson-like methods for the exploration-oriented MAB problem, and such methods can rapidly distinguish the best among a rather large set of options, as might be required in applications like MVT (see note below).

Note: I'm currently doing academic research in this area and, if anyone's particularly interested, I could share some of the (simulated) empirical data and algorithmic details pertinent to what I said above.

[1]: Multi-Bandit Best Arm Identification, Gabillon et. al, NIPS 2011

[2]: PAC Subset Selection in Multi-Armed Bandits, Kalyanakrishnan and Stone, ICML 2012

[3]: An Empirical Evaluation of Thompson Sampling, Chappelle and Li, NIPS 2011
Paris looks more homogeneous than it is simply because they analyzed a bigger area, or at least an area with more pieces. For example if you analyzed the entirety of Istanbul, then for almost every piece you could probably find a very similar piece elsewhere.
Markets are zombies and dollars are brains.

That is beautiful. Like, "I may need to get that as a tatoo" beautiful. Is it yours?
Why Google Shouldn’t Have Censored The Anti-Islamic Video
>> Why are we paying so much for tablets in the US?

Because of few factors:

1. It's relatively hard to find a Chinese tablet that can you be sure it has good quality. That's what branding is for, but chinese tablets don't have good branding.

2. Marketing does help to sell products. Promotion is needed.
In multiple places on github, as a vim user, I occasionally instinctively hit escape. Github sometimes closes a comment box and I lose all the stuff I had been typing. It's an unfortunate UI issue for me (and probably others).
"readability is more important than writability for a programming language"

Couldn't agree with you more. Readability is measurable and considering that a lot of programmers come from C-type languages, I really don't see why people try to modify an existing formula (as badly implemented as that formula is in JS).

tl;dr: Let's face it, if you're using Coffeescript or similar because there are too many braces or parenthesis, perhaps you should quit development right now and take a class on basic algebra, quit that and save the world your horrific code. Seriously.
Or use vrome[1].
[1]:https://github.com/jinzhu/vrome
Something taking on the form of feces ;-)
Ask HN: What is your experience with cheaper s3 clones on the market excluding?
So basically i want something like s3, just cheaper. 2 companies that i know of are :<p>http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/pricing/<p>http://www.constant.com/cloud/storage/<p>
Exluding azure,google,hp,rackspace who all have nearly the same pricing.My usecase is for video and photo storage and serving.
Thanks
Netflix is a joke these days
How do you indent with spaces instead of tabs?
Congrats to Nik Software.

Google -- if you let Nik's "non-sexy" non-mobile plugins for Photoshop/Lightroom, etc die on the vine I will never forgive you. Either commit to them or sell them off to someone who will keep them maintained.
I hope you've thought about security. There should be a simple point-and-click way for agents to block call requests from a single end-user IP address or a range of IP addresses. Otherwise you'll get a DoS attack from the first bored teenager who decides that clicking "Call support" repeatedly on your client's website is more fun than making prank calls.

You should probably use SSL for something like this -- at least the business end that actually hosts the scripts and handles the DOM exchange -- but I'm sure you've already thought of that.
It doesn't go against the language's doctrine. The guy who invented it explicitly recommends pulling out anonymous objects and functions if they're not super trivial.
>> "I have 3 people reporting to me. Designing product. I have them cause this is how you grow...."

>> "Essentially I could design myself and be 10 times quicker."

The first claim here makes no sense in light of the second. If you could do the work 10 times quicker, then do it and keep all three salaries to yourself and use less time than you do right now. There is no "growth" going on if the three people working under you are ten times slower than you could - unless the work they're doing isn't really important to the growth of the company, in which case why are they there?

And then you say this:

"if a candidate does not challenge you in your authority, he or she is crap."

... which makes me thing that either (a) you have not hired good candidates at all, since they are ten times slower than you; or (b) you're leaving out the part of the design review where they show you that you're an idiot and challenge you by producing something you never would have thought of.

In general, though, the feeling I get is that you approach these design reviews knowing that they will be painful, and that all designs presented will be wrong. In which case, again, this seems like an exercise in utter futility.

So - yeah. I don't really understand your point. Maybe you're saying you wish your CEO or whomever had done a better job hiring the people that report to you?
chromebooks have hardware DRM. your arbitrary linux computer doesnt.
Are you trying to tell me that Stargate has been lying this whole time?
In space, not so much. It's basically what we're doing all the time - literally throwing projectiles around the solar system.
Nestlé runs GPS-fitted chocolate bars competition
Early Experience on a UK Incubator
Reminds me of the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas multiplayer mod from a few years back. A few fans in their spare time creating a multiplayer mod for a popular game that lacked it. It really makes you wonder, I understand some games don't have multiplayer due to the fact you not only need to find room in the budget to accommodate more development & testing time, you then also have to invest into the server infrastructure to support the game as well as implement some kind of anti-cheating functionality.

I think this modification is proof that even pointless multiplayer games that are essentially just deathmatch on a massive scale are popular and fun, longevity wise if this were a paid mod I'd expect many would get sick of the boring gameplay after a while.

Different game modes like; Racing mode, Team Deathmatch, Police and Bad Guys, Capture The Flag and good old fashioned single deathmatch. Will be interesting to see how they further improve this, I just went and bought the game because of this mod.
What's the risk? There's nothing on Netflix that isn't already on The Pirate Bay.

Wouldn't surprise me if it was a contractual obligation from Microsoft. In the past they were extremely aggressive in offering incentives and juicy licence terms for companies that would help push Silverlight.
One of the several reasons that I use Ctrl-[ or Ctrl-C. ;)
Can you guys recommend any AMIs that are ready to go with django?
ChromeOS supports certain DRM mechanisms through NaCl that are not available (or perhaps trustable?) on a standard Linux environment.
> most likely to have the technical skill to work around their DRM mechanisms.

Which would be a preposterous thing to worry about. Why worry about breaking the DRM on crappy Netflix streams when you can either record straight from TV (and thus distribute brand new shows 15 minutes after they air) or rip straight from DVD/Blu-ray (and thus have a considerable quality advantage over Netflix)? Apart from the very small amount of Netflix-exclusive content (which hasn't been very notable, which granted will change with Arrested Development), the Netflix DRM does absolutely nothing except make customers worry about what devices are compatible.
I haven't looked closely at the logo, but I've only seen it parked on the east (Denver) side of Sheridan.
the difference between JavaScript and CoffeeScript with respect to the "var" keyword is neither subtle nor obvious, given that CoffeeScript does not have a var keyword.

Great, then every variable in CoffeeScript must be global, because that's the semantics of a non-parameter not be declared a "var" in JavaScript. Except that this is not an accurate translation, as the entire post goes on to explain scoping in CoffeeScript.

The only possible source of literal misinterpretation would be to look at a CoffeeScript file and think that every variable that wan't a parameter was a global variable. This is extremely unlikely in practice.

Screwing up scoping is an extremely common JavaScript mistake. If you showed me JavaScript-like code and told me there was a bug, the first thing I would point out is that you declared everything globally. Oh, that isn't the case in CoffeeScript? Huh, I guess you're on your own then, because I didn't learn your goofy alternative JavaScript syntax. Maybe you think the junior kid who has a bug in his code is going to properly explain the subtlety of CoffeeScript scoping.

FIne with me, Chief, go your way in peace. But don't try to twist my example into support for a decision you have already made.

It's offensive of you to dismiss my criticism in this forum. I am not prejudiced against new things, and while CoffeeScript doesn't seem like a worthwhile idea to me, it's community is far more offensive. CoffeeScript's demagoguery of JavaScript might impress some folks, but outside ruby-like syntax, CoffeeScript doesn't solve any fundamental issues.

So, "go your way in peace", and leave me to my thoughts, please.
"Linux support manages to get them the sort of user who is least concerned with intellectual property laws"

How so? In my personal experience it's Windows users who pirate the most software by far. Linux users choose an OS with far fewer commercial desktop apps and generally make do with open-source applications. Linux users have also been shown to pay more for indie games and apps and have been vocal in wanting Steam on Linux so they can throw money at Valve. Given how easy it is to rile up many Linux users with accusations of GPL infringement, I'd say that they generally understand and care more about IP laws than the average Windows user.
Or that its vim bindings are TOO natural and thus call undue attention to the inevitable incompleteness of its vim "implementation"
Would love to see technical detail on this if anyone has a source.
Is commenting on YouTube an active G+ action?
Fascinating in multiple dimensions.

The growth in tools and analytic capability available to anthropologists over the past 4-5 decades is staggering, and discussed in detail.

Our understanding of the emergence and migrations of early and proto-humans through the world, similarly. Our species as a whole is roughly 2.5Ma, roughly 67,000 generations old -- that's 67,000 iterated games of development, divergence, and selection. With the primary homo sapiens African diaspora occuring 60,000 years ago, we're looking at 2000 generations. You might want to double those values as I'm using the contemporary "1 generation = 30 years" metric, but it's still an astoundingly brief period of time. History begins 6,000 years ago and takes off like fire spreading from Mesopotamia across Asia, Europe, and North Africa, and again in Central America.

The history of emergences, die-offs, re-breedings, and re-encounters is also telling. There's no reason to think that humans have ceased evolving (though we have no island populations to allow isolated development, I'm reminded of William Gibson's recent Wired interview on post-punk Internet-mediated social trends). Or that drastic environmental or resource changes couldn't have profound impacts on civilisation.
All the cool stuff is fully programmatic. I think right now it's just the onboarding screens that are still using interface builder - they're simple and mostly remain static.

One lesson though: do not use interface builder for table view cells, just don't. Cell reuse is tricky to get right as is and you should take the time upfront to make it all work programmatically.
I know for one of the games I work on, the chat-commands/command-line interface is one of the most popular user interface features for power users. And the main reason is what you suggest about navigating and clicking. Admittedly, in a game you might "/equip meat helmet" or "/use mmj" a lot more frequently than you will friend someone on github, but it's a similar concept.
DevBootCamp: Learn Ruby on Rails in 9 Weeks
> "To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet."

But isn't that an advertised feature of google+? That you could 'friend' people, but then toss them in a [siberia] circle to keep their noise from cluttering up your feed? And similarly keep posts about your drinking vacation from being 'blabbed' to all your professional contacts?

It seems entirely possible that swaths of the social graph may have cut themselves off by pruning their circles down to the point that they were sharing to people who weren't listening to them and listening to people who weren't sharing with them.

Consider: When that co-worker from three jobs ago asks "does anyone ever use google+?" Would you really say "dude, I'm on there all the time. I've just got you in [siberia]"? It seems to me that most people would downplay whether/how often they use it.
The UK equivalent of Netflix called "Lovefilm" also moved from working fine under Linux (via Flash) to requiring Silverlight and of course moonlight doesn't work.

Their reasoning was that Silverlight had better DRM so people couldn't rip the films. However they also offered a DVD rental service , so you could get any of the streamable films (plus a load more) delivered through the post at which point it would be trivial to rip them.

I haven't looked but I'm pretty sure all of the films they offered for streaming are available as torrents too and probably at much higher quality.
I think there ought to be a distinction between semantic flexibility and syntactic flexibility, though. They may be correlated but it's not always clear cut. Lisp is an example of a syntactically inflexible (s-expressions or walk) but semantically rich language (macros).

My own opinion is that syntactic flexibility does have value (e.g. Haskell). I think it's also vastly overrated relative to that value; syntax is incredibly easy to bikeshed. Semantics require you to know something about the languages at issue.

That said, my opinion is that this kind of syntactic flexibility offers dubious value if the trade-off includes not just obviously broken programs but also subtly broken ones with errors which are difficult to spot. Newbie errors are part of the learning curve, but these seem like mistakes even experienced people can make.
But even MS aren't interested in Silverlight anymore.

I don't know what juicy license terms would be , considering I can stick a flash or HTML5 video on my website without paying adobe or W3C a cent.
CoffeeScript has loops and comprehensions for your function-free programming needs. The issue here is what to do when you want to shadow a variable. I am open to correction, however I think in both JavaScript and CoffeeScript you need a function invocation to create a new lexical scope.
> How are you identifying clients? How are you pitching them?

To be honest, I just responded to some web-published offers for contract work I saw anywhere, and I didn't have any measurable progress at all. Most of them just didn't respond, but those who did told me that they weren't interested because I wasn't from US, so it disappointed me (after all, I'd spent non-trivial time writing a reply, not just blanket-bombed them with my resume) and hurt my confidence. For now I've got a regular job, but when I decide to move on, I will certainly try to do more and better prospects.

Thank you for the answer, Patrick, it means a lot to me.