skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should at least know if you will likely have any analytic use cases.
Have you ever used street view on mobile? I haven't. I don't think they're trying to compete with Google Maps in general. Just trying to give their developers a map API to use.
Which is to say: what's truly dead is the single-purpose electronic device.

Modulo reliability and/or battery life / power consumption. Power draw on single-purpose devices can be very, very, very low. It's going to be a while before you can power a tablet with a postage-stamp sized PV cell or thermocouple. But 1-800-YOU-WILL.
It doesn't require the ability to predict the future, just some familiarity with the tools. The OP's use case (small amounts of data, low traffic, lots of aggregation) is perfect for an RDBMS, and anyone with even casual familiarity with both SQL and NoSQL systems could easily prognosticate that.
I kind of doubt that users of low-end phones know what Android is or know what they're missing. It's not like they're downgrading from an iPhone, they're probably upgrading from a feature phone. And even the worst Android phone is much nicer than that.

Eventually they will upgrade to a nice Android phone, and will enjoy the enhanced user experience. But cost does matter to some people, and although browsing at 320x240 is hardly ideal, it's probably better than not being able to buy food for a week.

(I personally use very few apps aside from the default Google apps. I mostly want to receive text messages, make phone calls, and browse the web. Apps, to me, don't add much value when the app-maker already has a perfectly fine website.)
It's definitely the ability to parse expressions like "<file>:<lineno>" and open files at the right position, it essentially makes it integrated with many many unix tools without actually having to write any integration code.

The ease of piping the selection through an external program is a close second.

However I do not use it.

What's funny about acme is that it's a perfect metaphor for the entire plan9: it shows you how striving for a simple, beautiful design can create new, great solutions to old problems.

But at the same time it will also kill the adoption of the product completely: acme doesn't support any keybindings (doesn't fit the desing), no syntax highlighting (not the editor's job to parse code), nothing but bitmapped fonts (implementing externally defined standards is a chore), tags file support (doesn't fit the design), incremental search (doesn't fit the design), horizontal scrolling (makes it complicated to use the same editor control for the tags too), configuring the color scheme (no), weird non-standard behaviour of up and down keys (we just like it better this way)...

Bringing any of this up to a 9fan will also be a great metaphor for the friendliness of the community.
Well, the meaning of taps and swipes is part of the consistency issue. Interaction is more than just "what does swipe do?". It's also "how do I go back?", "how do I take an action on this item?", "how do I change context?".

I personally don't run into a ton of issues in iOS with determining what swipes vs long-presses vs long-taps do. Swipes in a list tend to invoke the "delete" context. Swipes up/down scroll. Tap to invoke. Long-tap for select in a text context. There's certainly not 100% consistency, but it seems fairly consistent to me with the apps I use. I can't speak to how consistent or inconsistent these are on Android, because I haven't used an Android device enough to really know.

Speaking to Catch and doubleTwist, these seem inconsistent to me. Visually, they're quite different, but there seem to be pretty significant functional differences. Many of the doubleTwist screens do not have the "up/out" chevron in the upper left (how is this not redundant with the global "back", anyway?). On the 4th screenshot in particular, there's no "up/out", but there is a settings cog that appears in none of the other screenshots. It appears that doubleTwist also uses a "slide to reveal" metaphor (invoked by the chevron on the main screen) that isn't in Catch or the other apps. In catch, despite there being an action bar at the top, virtually all of the actions you might want to take actually seem to be in the custom bar at the bottom. I don't see how these at all demonstrate consistency.
I believe the developer market is the hottest we have ever seen.

A friend is working as an RoR developer at $250/hr billable and all expenses paid. They are unable to get enough developer, which is expected to run for several years.

With the economy on the fritz, there are still always professional areas in demand. Because of the many economic forces of downsizing, both Enterprise and Startup are seeking the same resources as others are laid off.

Great thoughts, cheers
Islam is not a religion like any other, here's why.
I'm a bit more surprised by the lack of comments about openness. You would think, that being a site for hackers, being able to install whatever you want on your mobile hand held computer would be a big deal. I mean, most people here would likely not even think of buying a laptop or a desktop that restricted them in the ways that iOS does. Consistency and looks are good and important, but to me, secondary to control.

iOS is an appliance, Android is a computing platform. I want my phone to be a computing platform.
I wasn't implying that they're bad.

They're sub $200, made in China, and don't have brand names.
How to get designers to make your open source project awesome
With tools like SOLR or Elasticsearch, I keep wondering why people try to re-invent the full-text indexing wheel - these tools make it easy to focus your app/datastore on your functionality and leave search as an additional service, to be used whenever you need it.
Upvoted for?
But.. the web is very consistent. Sure, from page to page you might see completely different button graphics, header images, and colors. That's not what is important though. Think about the layout. The spacing. The background boxes behind your text. Contrasting font sizes for header text vs content text. Ancillary links at the bottom or top. The deltas between colors an individual page is expected to use (and the variety in colors an individual page is not to use).

The consistency of the web is very important. That consistency is exactly what lets us look at a new web page and immediately start making sense of it and websites that don't conform to this consistency are the websites that we immediately label "terrible" and "unusable".
You don't need to buy hardware with this; the quoted "OEM" price and part number are retail (compare with Amazon, for instance). It is locked to a single PC like traditional OEM products, however, and doesn't include media. The ordinary retail package is transferable, can be installed on two PCs at the same time, and includes a DVD.
Looks like great opportunities for folks to start hardware startups.

Anybody know how to pick up 2 or 3 of these for prototyping?

I'm also assuming you can somehow easily boot Linux on it.
I meant the big app developers. Its a throwaway comment for sure. I was just trying to encourage the original idea of the post while taking out its legs by pointing out how most of these don't look as good as they do on iOS.
Whatever Happened to… Bubble Memory?
"Amazon is also clearly way ahead on this model. At the Kindle launch event last week, Jeff Bezos highlighted that Amazon does not make money on the Kindle, it makes money on the content it sells on top of the Kindle."

And Nintendo has been aware of this since the 80s. Consoles have been closed platforms with razor thin to loss leader margins on hardware for over thirty years now. It's only that the development model itself has shifted with tablets and smartphones, they're a bit more open than they used to be.
Sadly, given Google's history, all of the extremely useful Nik plugins are now living on borrowed time.

This (acquihire? patent-grab?) is a gut-punch to photographers, if nothing else.
Lua has a function called os.execute() where you can call programs and utilities from the command line. Cross platform as well; I've got more than one Lua script where it's working in the command line and can handle being on Unix or on Windows.

A common example of this that I use quite often is "clear" or "cls". It makes the determination what OS it's using, then issues the appropriate command to clear the terminal window.
Also, it's interesting that he brags about his research in China without mentioning what this means in developing economies. China still has huge segments of the population that do not own tablets, not to mention India.

Meanwhile in the developed world, tablets could become as ubiquitous as signs.
To whom we pay
>I, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. I prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same.

I see a problem with that. It's that many(most?) apps have 1 or 2 developers with hardly any design experience, and no designers. So it's important for the default look and feel to be usable and stylish which iOS and Windows Phone do. This does not mean that they all look the same, because the developers with resources can do additional design work(perhaps by hiring a designer for the next version) on top of the default UI and UX to make the apps look more beautiful and with even better UX.

Having used a tablet with Gingerbread, both the OS and the apps were pretty much terrible(in some part because the OS many apps were designed for phones and not tablets). ICS improves the design in the OS quite a bit and some apps(like the ones featured in the article) have great design, but the vast majority of the rest of the ~500K apps in the Store don't look good still, because you can't expect free or 99c apps to hire expensive designers upfront or spend too much time on design because of a very real and common scenario that it won't make any revenue worth the design cost and time. Similar apps on iOS and WP may look the same as each other, but atleast the UX and the UI look decent if you stick to the defaults.
If writing good, maintainable code requires knowing/using a large number of rules and best practices that aren't part of the language (and whose absence are actually considered to be a virtue of the language), that seems like a flaw in the language itself.

Yes, you can write bad code in any language. That doesn't mean that languages don't have an impact on the ease of writing good and correct code.
The Income Inequality Debate
Which cities vote like yours? (If you're Dutch.) - Data Visualization in D3.js
YouTube Moves API QA to Stack Overflow
I don't consider this article bad at all, because it really makes some good points.

However a lot of criticism seems to come from the fact that the author is a Python programmer and therefor wants CoffeeScript to be more like Python. No, I am not saying something like the author not understanding it isn't meant to be Python, but for example the implicit vs explicit debate is certainly a more philosophical view. Ask people who prefer other programming languages and they will have a different view. Hey, after all that's why there are so many, even if Ruby, Perl, Python, Falcon, etc. have very similar use cases.

My opinion for example is that dynamic languages are very implicit in first place so saying you don't want that (at all) doesn't make too much sense. I also don't have problems reading CoffeeScript, but occasionally had problems with very explicit languages being too verbose which can make it harder to follow. So looks like my mind works slightly different here.

But back to the article. There are lots of valid points. I think coding guidelines, which one should have working in a team, no matter what language could solve some of them. Some points look a bit like mixing different styles on purpose and at least can't see how you could find something like that in the wild. Just because you can code ugly, it doesn't mean you have to, but again that is more of an opinion. Some people like usually verbose languages, because they say they are easier to read, others like ones with shortcuts or where you have multiple options to express things, making it easier to read (for some people). I for example always enjoyed the fact that Perl has unless and until in place of negated if/while.

But that's more what you prefer. But hey, CoffeeScript is all Javascript, so if your team doesn't like it it's (comparatively) easy to step by step switch back.
I've been using coffeescript for about two years - I thought it was the best way to keep the pleasant aesthetic of python, which was my favorite language, and have been happy working with it ever since.

I just want to throw out a positive experience with it and to say that I don't support the author's premise of "here's some misleading things you can do with CS, therefore CS is unreadable". This applies to all languages, and 'fanciful' features and syntax should be avoided almost always in every language for the sake of readability.

There are MANY reasons not to use coffeescript, but JS is all functions all the time, and -> is my best friend.
HNpod 9: How We Keep GitHub fast, Amazon Kindle Range and Human.io
Oh, cool. Thanks! My OS X is a bit rusty.
Care to elaborate?

As I see it, classes named after colors are based on unstable assumptions about presentation. When these assumptions change, you've saved yourself a headache if all you need to change is one line of CSS, instead of every instance of, say, class='button color green' in your markup.
App Art and Design Chat – #appdevchat Sept. 20th  10am PST
This week at #appdevchat we'll be discussing App Art and Design.

Join us on Thursday September 20th, 2012 @ 10am PST.
Another win is when these products become components themselves. Think robotics and other DIY projects that can have a huge amount of functionality out of the box thanks to an established platform tied to an excellent selection of sensors and communication options.
That's why I'm excited to see what I can do with a Kindle Paperwhite.
Can anyone explain why TechCrunch decided to delete this comment?
The post was in reference to the author not being impressed with many of the startups he was hearing about which he said was due to a lack of ambition.

I left a comment, but, to my surprise, I revisit the page to find that TC had deleted it.

Here was word for word the comment I left:

"But this article was 2/3's of the way written. I suppose I will finish it for you, since the subliminal reasoning for this, should you attempt to elucidate further yourself, may leave you at unease with your colleagues.

You've identified the real problem: the lack of ambition, but, you didn't diagnose why this came to be. Is it possible that this was an inadvertent result of the culture created through the consumption of tech media-- which is primarily click driven?

When the ecosystem is click driven we inevitably have a much greater frequency of startups being covered-- which means even if the startup is doing nothing new and/or the technology is rather unimpressive[1] they will still get coverage as long as the on-demand hype machine abides by the brands/names that are attached. It's become to easy and what we are witnessing is simply complacency.

The bills need to be paid, this is a reality that unfortunately you can't avert-- it's just unfortunate that when this done at such a frequency, potency is diluted and the inadvertent result is a greater the likelihood the companies that are doing more dynamic things fall through the cracks, creating a subpar standard to aspire to that isn't producing the optimal results of what the space is capable of.

I don't know man-- sometimes I just wish that monetary prevalence didn't always take precedence. Now I'm digressing to utopia..."

[1] edited- original post read impressive-- but was should have read unimpressive.

So, question is-- why was this comment deleted?
Two attributes that are not mutually exclusive.
> This has almost nothing to do with autoplay and the video tag and much more to do with a desire for a script-controllable animation.

Yes it does. Apple has disallowed you to play a video on iOS without user action. So it would not be possible for the video to autoplay (even with the scroll trigger). HTML5 supports preload and has the canplaythrough event which allows you to avoid buffering. They went through this rigamarole because they have previously decided developers should not be able to do this.
I don't know if there's a use case. I have never had one come up in my own projects. I do sometimes need to manage a large number of documents (unstructured data) but I have found the Unix file system sufficient for those, maybe augmented by metadata in the database.

I've worked on big applications with big databases where DB operations and aggregations started to get too slow but so far I or someone smarter on the team has always been able to figure out a solution without throwing the RDBMS out. One big advantage of working with RDBMSs is the roads are paved and well-mapped. By contrast you still need a machete and good luck in the NoSQL world, and even then you can get sick or lost in the jungle.

I haven't personally worked on a web app with the kinds of database scaling issues I've dealt with in logistics applications involving tens of millions of movements every day.

RDBMSs were invented to allow data malleability. Go back to the old textbooks and look at what preceded the relational model. Remember that data is more valuable and permanent than application code. When you have multiple applications accessing the same database, each with their own implementation of consistency rules and their own internal idea of the data schema, come back and explain how that is more fun than using an RDBMS and being able to sleep nights.
Came here to say exactly that. Markets are zombies and dollars are brains. But the title is less thrilling than "Ok everyone knows how to make a tablet now, that won't be a high margin business." In this case margin being the proxy for expertise in putting together a tablet.

But there actually is a story here which VentureBeat came so close too and missed, the cost of compute.

Even in the 80's when I went to work for Intel people 'in the know' thought it was insane that Intel could capture 33% of the value of a PC with just the CPU + chipset. They worked really hard to make that the case, using every gimmick at their disposal, from patents to copyrights to support contracts to outright strong-arm tactics. Even today that survives in the $300 you pay for the CPU on the motherboard. Mostly it was about the software base though, you really couldn't do anyhing about it unless you were willing to bite off on the problem of the software and tools. Apple did that, but nobody else did.

ARM is different, the ARM folks take their tax, but you can buy out their tax if you know you are going to sell enough chips, and the cost to make chips has gone down. Even though the cost to build chip factories has gone up (remarkably so). I'm not nearly as engaged with this problem as I once was but around the turn of the century the 'sunk' costs of doing a chip was on the order of 5 - 7 million dollars. A wafer start (with anywhere from 1 to 12 300mm wafers) is like $48K [1]. Less on the older processes, so may $1 base cost per tested good packaged die. So you if you price to cost + margin there was a huge amount of room below the Intel x86 artificial cost 'floor'. ARM software has gotten better and with Linux and then Android creating volume, additional players entered the market. And some, like All Winning have very modest margin targets on their CPUs, others like BroadCom/TI/QualComm have been playing in the smartphone market where these CPUs don't carry as much margin as general purpose compute devices do. You need look no further than the Raspberry Pi to see what that means in terms of consumer cost.

Anyone can become an ARM cpu vendor, its damn difficult to become an x86 compatible processor vendor. And that is the story we're seeing play out here. From the sidelines I'm watching to see what Intel does next, they are already scrambling (see the Cedar Trail stuff) and they have a lot of smart folks who can do great stuff with manufacturing and architecture. For the first time since the Motorola 68000, they have legitimate competition.

[1] http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20110912192619_TS...
while the points in the article make sense and I agree, if you keep your Coffeescript code consistent I really don't suffer a readability problem, especially relative to JS where there's like 5x more code to go through
Innovation is a dead horse at Apple
Crackdown on sale of UK spyware over fears of misuse by repressive regimes
Wait.

I am slightly confused and this may demonstrate my ignorance, but I was under the impression that A/B testing worked by allocating two different approach to the users and then scoring the response. This provides a sampling from the population of users as to how effective A or B is. You can then run some statistical test on the averages of the scores for each test to determine which one is the winner.

If what I said is true, these statistical tests almost always assume that the distribution that is being drawn from is stationary. So, the only way things work out is if you have an underlying stationary distribution. Otherwise, your statistical test might indicate the wrong thing.

I freely admit that many of your points are still valid, but I don't see how A/B is a more powerful algorithm that has less assumptions.
Could be. I think it's more that iOS has had a relatively consistent UI style since day 1, while Android's style has been changed more. Additionally, most Android apps have traditionally come after their equivalent iOS apps, and so have often been the victim of bad UI ports (as evidenced by the large number of Android apps that look distinctly iOS-esque).

I wonder if Window Phone will suffer from the same as it (hopefully) becomes popular. I assume the vastly different UI style will probably prevent some of this, though.
Asia and the West: Never the twain
I’d just like to say thanks for the AWESOME link out to CastingWords! (Though we are a little wary of making our strategy, and delivered turnarounds, quite this explicit :)) Regardless we do love happy customers - and this strategy delivers both in keeping us afloat, and keeping the customers happy.
Maybe the pro stuff can be divested to someone who cares.
How Facebook connections mirror old empires
Active probably means one active use of a Google+ umbrella property (e.g. hangouts, youtube, etc)
I really want to tell you all to read this.

The reality is (as it points out in the text) the overwhelming majority of you don't A/B test. If you don't A/B test already you should stop reading about A/B testing and start A/B testing. It will be the most important thing you do today. It will probably be the most important single thing you do in quite a while.

For the overwhelming majority of people A/B testing, this is similarly not really a priority for you today. You're fine doing what you're doing. (But... test more.)

But for the sliver of a sliver of people who really need to care about moving the state of the art in conversion optimization forward, this essay is very important. If I had an A/BatSignal I would be shining it on this.
Collaboration is Noisy
Everything you said is technically correct, and helpful to some people, but it doesn't change the fact that most users opt to simply disable automatic updates in one fashion or another. Manual updates, and "download-but-don't-install" are both different from the Chrome example, and in both cases, will cause IE to not be immediately patched for all of its users even once Microsoft pushes an update for it.

And, if I may push back just a little bit more: "install an SSD" should ideally never, ever be a serious solution to the problem of software updates. I'd like to think that I'd have the good grace to be completely embarrassed if I ran a software company that had advocates telling other people that my long update process could be "solved" by installing an SSD.

Not that you're technically wrong.