skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote a very full-featured MVC client-side web framework for mobile browsers called Blossom[0]. It uses Canvas and hardware-accelerated CSS transforms, and has great performance, very similar to native iOS.

Recently, I began splitting Blossom up into two threads:

- a UI thread, which does all of the drawing, animation, and event handling, and

- an application thread, which runs in a web Worker, which has all of the business logic, model layer, and is also responsible for talking to the server.

Anyway, long story short, one unexpected fallout of this separation is that nearly all of the application logic is in a JavaScript thread/context that has, really, nothing to do with a web browser. It talks to our server over a WebSocket, and it talks to the UI with postMessage() calls on a message channel. There's no reason the other end of the postMessage() calls has to be a browser.

What we're looking into now is actually having native implementations of the UI thread. So on iOS, that "thread" would be written in Objective-C, and we'd have a separate, background thread with a JavaScript context (JavaScriptCore-based) that ran our application logic.

On Android, the equivalent UI thread would be written in Java, and the background thread running the application logic would use the v8 JavaScript library.

A similar approach would also be possible in Windows 8.

We'd still do a mobile web app as well, since many users will only interact with our app occasionally, and thus won't have it installed. Having the business logic in JavaScript makes it really easy.

I guess that's my point: what I love about mobile web development, and web development in general, is the easy with which you can share business logic between platforms. With the latest work we're doing in Blossom, we'll even be able to do that while still having a fully-capable, platform-native UI.

That's pretty cool. :)

[0] https://github.com/erichocean/blossom
Web Fonts Performance: Making Pretty, Fast
Both. Apple has a restriction on 'executing' downloaded code yourself (javascript).
Yes, the magical dimension is short way forward along the 't' axis. There are a whole bunch of big NFC programmes being lined up in various countries, many backed by multiple mobile networks. In the US Isis is looking interesting and in the UK there is Project Oscar. France has Cityzi.

NFC is set to permeate many aspects of our lives, including payments, access control, transportation ticketing. It also enables some neat new marketing possibilities.

Right now the industry is solving the much talked about 'chicken and egg' situation by getting NFC handsets out there. High end phones shipping without NFC are now a rarity (which is why I'm disappointed tonight) and things are getting into position for the technology being revealed with a splash and folks finding that their existing handsets already have the right hardware that allows them to be part of the big new thing.

In short, you should be looking for NFC in your next handset not because it will be useful today or tomorrow, but because you'll be wanting it during the 18-24 month lifetime of the phone.
An alternative to confirmation email links
The photo illustrations are outrageously misleading, making the iPhone 5 dwarf the 4S. In reality, the iPhone 5 is only .37 (less than 3/8) of an inch taller than the 4S, and .05 (less than 1/16) of an inch wider.
You can easily unpack any extension you've downloaded, and install them manually (Check Developer mode > Load unpacked extension).
Android was originally a Blackberry competitor.
> people for some reason buy into it

It's not just "some" reason. They have one of the best marketing departments in the world who do an excellent job.

> I don't understand why so many people blame Apple for this.

I'm blaming Apple for doing a damn good job of marketing their products.
My wife, who has tiny hands and zero hand-eye coordination, operates the S3 without a problem.

I think confirmation bias may be affecting your anecdotal evidence.
An excellent point and indeed I see my experiences with depression as a strength I can pass onto my children by teaching them to recognize and handle dysfunctional thought patterns in themselves and others.
Indeed, but I can't think of any way to calibrate the thing other than looking up your location and pulling down weather data, or simply forcing the user to put in an altimeter setting.
Why the hell do "we" have to do anything? How about withdrawing all troops, aid, and support - since it's clear that when we meddle in their shit, it gets worse?
It can't be assumed you'll always have a data connection to grab aGPS data, or that your particular nearby WAPs and cell towers are properly mapped out. Having extra data poins is rarely a bad thing.
The product backlog? The engineers don't control the product backlog.

This strategy falls flat when the PM committed to a stakeholder that they'd get a feature done without defining it well or resolving dependencies, so now we have to sit for 15 minutes hammering it out.

Note that I'm not totally disagreeing, but textbook scrum and what-happens-when-people-spend-a-lot-of-money-to-develop-something scrum often diverge greatly.

The ultimate business purpose of scrum is to manage expectations. What's going to be done, when's it going to be done, if something's stuck who is responsible, etc. If the PM starts making wild promises and setting crazy expectations -- which PMs are wont to do -- all the methodology in the world isn't going to save you.
Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't you construct rainbow tables for any hash function which takes a single input (including salted SHA, if the salt is the same for all passwords)?

Of course, you'd need a seriously large set of passwords on your hands for it to be worth the effort, but it could be done right?

(Possibly worth mentioning, possibly not, that if your salts are extremely weak then the combined hash might show up in regular rainbow tables, whether your salts are unique or not - it seems unlikely this would ever happen in practice though)
Mapping is a growing part of the iOS SDK, I can understand Apple not wanting to be dependent on Google for that, particularly after Google started demanding significantly increased fees for Google Maps API usage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/technology/many-sites-char...

Google walked back some of the worst effects of the changes:

http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.ca/2012/06/lower-pricing...

but by then the damage had been done in terms of Apple's (and developers') perception of the Google API.
yes, i noticed it several weeks ago
I agree, but you can blame the users that then click on the spammy posts and install the promoted apps. They are the reason this is an "effective" technique for viral growth.
Just about every single component was changed or upgraded. So that's pretty big. In previous generations of iPhones they only focused on one or two parts. 3G/cellular improvement, 4/screen & design, 4S/speed & camera, 5/LTE cellular improvement, screen, design, cameras, dock connector. Definitely the biggest iPhone upgrade they've ever done.

I don't know if wireless charging has improved since the Palm Pre days or not but it wasn't really setting the world on fire back then. NFC is pretty neat but my guess is Apple is looking at their own system they can control and profit from. If NFC becomes a big deal before they do their own system it may turn out to be a bad gamble.
Viewpoint [Fake Steve Jobs]: Apple's iPhone launches no longer excite
Yeah, some kind of trustworthy computing would be around a 4-5 on the scale. Maybe 6.
TOR maybe.
Come on please !
it's a blog owned by teenagers !
Good post too, but this is only a ~21% reduction in the total (2.75 vs 3.5). You're still looking at ~80% of the cost base. The neutral decision point is only @ 25% increase in exit/success neede to make the switch to metro (80 to 100).
One use case is to create lists of web pages, similar to a category listing in a directory.
Another thing I want to do is process the images for color information and see if I find something interesting.
As an additional practical tip I'd like to add that as with drugs, you might have to try more than one therapist before you find one that works for you. The first therapist I saw, when I had my most severe problems with depression, completely blew me off. (Like you, I went to my university's mental health clinic, but I don't think the guy I spoke to was very into his job.) I didn't try therapy again until ten years later, when my girlfriend dragged me into couple's therapy and I realized I could really benefit from individual therapy with the right person.
There are actually two different kinds of A-GPS as best I understand it.

One is the bad kind where GPS only works when you have a cell signal. It offloads a lot of the processing to the cell tower. This is used by cheap phones to comply with FCC requirements for location reporting for 911 calls, and isn't found much elsewhere.

The other is the good kind where it grabs the almanac off the network when possible for faster cold start times. This kind still works fine when you have no connection, it just takes longer to figure out your location when you turn it on, because it has to download the almanac the slow way.

They're basically unrelated except for the name, which is confusing.
The Lean startup just started reading and finish the power of habits.
To be fair, I was recently a little north of Atlanta and Google Maps had no idea about the bus system there. It knew the metro one, but not the one I needed to use to get to the metro one. Had to ask people advice to find a spot and then hang out half an hour because I hadn't known the schedule like I would with good maps support. So some people will have equal service.
Except that my years-old TomTom can figure out my location as fast as it can download the almanac. Clearly the equation-solving part is not a limiting factor there.
As I understand it, other apps will be able to register with the maps service and add data to maps, like transit directions. In theory sounds great, it'll take a while to see how it shakes out which is a setback no matter how you slice it.
I don't follow this stuff closely, but isn't that what they said when they announced the 3gs and the 4s ? There isn't anything really new in the phone they announced today, so it's more like a 4ss than a 5.

Unless they're going the linux kernel route and changing their version numbering ;)
Ask HN: how many internal sysadmins does your startup have?
Hello,

I am currently trying to estimate how many internal system administrators our startup needs as we scale up. I know this depends on a ton of factors, but I would like to see some comparison numbers.

Our specs:

- 240 people, ca. 30% engineers, 30% artists, rest misc

- On average 12 people starting per month

- 60% iMac and MacBooks, 30% Thinkpads, 10% desktops

- Internal IT tasks: onboard new hires, keep existing computers running, internal office networking, some general maintenance (coffee machines). No servers in the office, no devops etc., purely office infrastructure.

We currently have one experienced admin, one junior admin and one handyman (half-time).

It would be great if you could share your "specs"!
That kind of thinking would have said that the WWW was just a slight improvement over gopher back in the 90's.
I don't think it matters. By the argument I gave in my last post, they probably aren't worth anything like $40B. If the market cap figures everyone's quoting don't take some of the shares into account and the real number would be $57B, that just makes the valuation even more implausible.
"I’m very disappointed to find that users can’t install userscripts directly from the UserScripts.org – first they need to save the JS file locally and then drag the file onto the Extensions page (chrome://chrome/extensions/)."

Bit of a misleading headline then?
My habits with iDoneThis are a little inverted compared to this. The last thing I do each day is reply to my "what did you do today?" email (seriously the last thing - I get into bed, reply to that email, and then sleep). I find the thought of wanting to have something worth putting in that email drives me to do more throughout the day, it's a great motivational tool.

The other big advantage I have is that at the end of the week if I'm feeling like I haven't really achieved anything, I can look back through my calendar and get a nice overview of what I did - it's a good pick-me-up for the perceived-lack-of-productivity blues.
Hell, I'm a techie and even I've caught myself only a few moments before accidentally installing a random extension that for all I know would steal everything including the pots and pans. I can understand why Chrome team is doing this because if I've been close, I shudder to think of what non-tech people have done.
So, to summarize our disagreement, you're going to stand there and tell me, with a straight face, that these images all depict different social phenomena.

http://uttaps.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/roses-for-stalin.j...

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_X26VXpGwnBw/S6pwAl5nymI/AAAAAAAAAq...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3407/3537439067_e44977f56b.jp...

http://www.cells-church.com/wp-content/uploads/post-mega-chu...

Cherry picking is one thing, but when cherries fall from the sky, at some point you have to wonder if you've stumbled into a cherry orchard.
Respectfully, I think that an established startup with 100 people is a bit of an oxymoron.

I know that no company ever wants to think of itself as "big and established", in fact my previous company had been around for 13 years, had hundreds of millions in revenue and almost 1k employees and they still liked to pretend they were a disruptive startup.
I definitely fumble my Galaxy Nexus on a regular basis. I can't quite accept I am unable to reach the top of the phone from my normal bottom grip so I stretch and stretch and try to balance it on my palm.
How about I modify my statement:

Owning a weapon whose expressed reason for creation is the ability to use deadly force against those that you believe might harm you is the reason you own said weapon. Hence you want the ability to kill, injure or maim someone if you feel threatened.
Let's have a Xiki.
GoDaddy Gives Downed Websites A Free Month Of Hosting
Read modified statement above.
How Evernote automates their server installs
[disclosure: i'm the author of the above] opinions differ, I know, on the performance (e.g. https://twitter.com/derekcollison/status/245530906067095553), but ultimately you're correct that Go represents a compromise. it won't offer the performance of the lower level languages, nor the flexibility of the dynamic alternatives, but the adoption we're seeing is generally people who are willing to live with those compromises in return for a mix of the aspects to low level and high level languages they like.
They are both excellent programs. I definitely wouldn't be disappointed if I got accepted in YC or AngelPad. If you get a confirmed yes from AngelPad, ONLY then re-evaluate your choice. Remember that YC graduates have a convertible note from StartFund as well.
One problem with the 4S was the rumors of an iPhone 5 with a tapered design. (If you Googled for iPhone it would autocomplete "iPhone 5" — I guess bad rumors are now self-reinforcing.) At least this time the rumors were accurate and people can't complain that they were expecting more.
but I like my bash/zsh/c shell just the way I have put 7,000 hours into customising it.

sorry dude, people are not abandoning their shit.
Built to Flip
increasingly becoming trailing indicators of where the mobile industry is going

They are however very good implementations of where the industry currently is.
WriteRoom is nice—it's also one of the first distraction-free writing app—but i prefer to use Byword. I like to combine paragraph focus with full screen for distraction free mode. Also it support markdown syntax, that for me is a must have for a writing app.

http://bywordapp.com
no, because it clearly does help to articulate my point.
You are a wise...whatever you are. You may be a dog. I don't know. I don't care. You are wise.
I wasn't doing it to be an ass. Even if you are allowed to manipulate the class function you're dealing with (and so spare new classes), most java code does look like the example I gave: lots of verbiage, having to create special classes (including [verb]-er classes). Very, very unpleasant to read, and not big on beauty either.
Phil Schiller said that it’s not clear that NFC is the solution to any current problem, Passbook does the kinds of things customers need today.

“As for wireless charging, Schiller notes that the wireless charging systems still have to be plugged into the wall, so it’s not clear how much convenience they add."

http://dthin.gs/SFngTb
You should make it possible to sign up without credit card. It's a big barrier to cross, as the potential customer not only has to leave his comfortable chair or sofa to find his cc details, but also has to remember to unsubscribe if the service is uninteresting. I personally pass on trying out any service that has this requirement (unless it looks extremely interesting right off the bat, which is quite seldom).
Care to embellish? What are you using, and where are you located geographically?
Given that TermKit's last commit was nine months ago, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. TermKit was a good, thought-provoking design prototype but I don't think it really nailed the next-gen-terminal sweet spot.
really hope our branding is more "intuitive artists" than "the hippies"... but yeah, that's probably directionally correct.

i prefer band geeks vs. chess nerds, as stated in the piece.
It's more like adding a safety that actually works (unlike clickthrough warnings). If you know what you're doing, you can do a search and learn how to drag and drop. Anyone who needs handholding for this shouldn't be doing it.
without compliance with open standards this kind of tool won't go any further expect than experiment. It supposed to be integrated learning management systems easily with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Referen...
What is better about the iPhone's turn-by-turn? I've never used it, but I am really happy with Google's Navigation on my Galaxy Nexus. It's always been accurate and responsive, it starts up much quicker than the standalone GPS units I've seen (small sample size), and the voice sounds much more natural.
no, that wasn't it at all.
I'm in California, and typing "ord" (not even uppercase ORD, mind you) in the (Android) Maps search bar brings up Chicago O'Hare International Airport-Ord, Chicago, IL as the second suggestion. I'm going to say it's probably not (Google data)
SF != SV
my only concern is it looks messy. output is all over the place
Python 101: Exception Handling
What-is-it-like-to-work-at-ebay
If those are switch-mode power supplies most of the that current will be drawn out of phase (ie. imaginary power); not important to the domestic customer, as the meter probably won't read it, but important to the supplier, who will come and make you fit power correction equipment to your supply :-)
Hyperbole doesn't help anyone. Sure, America is a lot more violent than Western Europe, but both America and Western Europe are so much less violent than a veritable warzone like Afghanistan that even trying to claim otherwise doesn't achieve anything productive.
Hmm, the idea of reaching out to women-oriented groups sounds promising. Our Chief Architect has made it very clear he wants to interview (and hopefully hire) more women. As for minorities, we probably need more white people, if anything! (Not uncommon in software development / data science, I'd guess - I'm a minority.)

There's a local hackerspace that has women groups, I think. I'll start there. Thanks for the advice!
MMM's multiple children family in a colorado suburb lives very nicely on an annual budget of ~$25k annually in a place where houses are around $100-300k vs $800k-3million. According to his math, the safe indefinite withdrawal rate for retirement is around %4, which works out to around $500k. How does he keep a $25k budget? By not spending his money foolishly and 'shopping' for the most optimal deal. He goes into great detail about this in his blog.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/29/how-much-do-i-need...
VS 2012 Express available
The point of rainbow tables is that you can pre-calculate them. I wrote some myself for fun, and it does take a while to build stuff up.

Even if someone was dumb enough to use the same salt everywhere, once you know that you would just start brute-forcing, not building a rainbow table for the joy of searching it. (Unless you are into that like me.)
Yes, for the same reason that a company selling Macs necessarily uses propaganda against PCs.

Stalin didn't want to get rid of religion. He wanted to get rid of competition.
Ok... lets rehash...

The iPhone was a 10X improvement over what was out there, if you upgraded your whole phone experience got better.

Retina was a 4X improvement (4X as many pixels) after looking at retina the 3GS looked ugly, if you upgraded your entire phone experience got better.

Now lets take a look at what happens if you get an NFC phone, you still have to take your wallet, and then you have to ask everyone whether their payment system supports NFC. 95% of the time you're going to be taking out your wallet. It's not a 10X improvement therefore adoption will be slow.

And it still doesn't work when the power is out unlike cash. I'm actually starting to go away from any payment system that isn't cash, because cash is universally accepted, even the Olympics takes cash.

If NFC was on par with the aforementioned features it would be in the new phone.
I'm really looking forward to Google rolling out their own already-announced maps app on iOS for this reason (although I have to imagine your city has dedicated apps that do public transit already, as mine does).
And as far as I know the maps app already used Apple's locations database, which was noticeably worse than Google's. I keep hoping that Apple will simply realize that location is not their strength, but so far this seems unlikely.
It's like Emacs... only not. ;-)
A list of barely perceptible (and some unproven) differences won't help Apple as the market share steadily trends away from them.

I like to keep it simple. Larger screen, faster processor, expandable storage, Flash, Google Navigation, freedom to from Apple's draconian grip...take my money Samsung!

It's no wonder Apple is suing. They know they're playing catch-up.
Do you have a source for Google's promise of a new iOS maps app? I can't find anything.

That said, even if they do submit one immediately, I'm afraid Apple will tie it up in review for a month or two to allow their version to gain a userbase. I know if a Google version were available upon upgrade to iOS 6, I'd download it immediately. Transit directions are a must-have feature for me.
I would be interested in reading your thoughts on that topic.
there's no misfortune if we have black swans. and we probably already did find one with 9GAG last summer.

the point i was making was about whether that's the focus, or simply a result.
Remember, they can add NFC and wireless charging to the 5S.
I programmed MPI about 15 years ago, during a summer at the MIT AI Lab.

I implemented neural network feature creation for a backgammon agent ("Automated feature selection to maximize learning in artificial intelligence").

Nowadays, I mainly do parallel machine learning on machines with higher network latency. I haven't used MPI since.
This is interesting for me also. I'm an Italian citizen and I would like to apply and relocate to the Bay Area. But I need to figure out the entire visa thing, and how to make it work for starting company.
Hmm, someone is reinventing Emacs.
No - because you're not the business owner and don't decide what order things go in the backlog.

A better way is to just give a sufficiently large estimate: "That's 100 points* due to risk and uncertainty." If they want a more detailed estimate, then they have to give a more detailed story.

* - whatever will give you 6 +/- 3 months