skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting numbers...

However those numbers are not everything. What counts is whether customers buy products or not. There are plenty of examples of successful mass products that were sold too cheap. For instance Microsoft's X-Box, they sold it much under price. You might list that under marketing costs. Their strategy however paied off, now they are a big player in the game device market.

Of course Google spend lots of money into Android, we don't want to imagine what all this patent crap and marketing costs. Android is however the predominant mobile platform and HTC its biggest vendor. (With reference devices I mean the actual devices that were supposed to be used by developers.)

Samsung is without question in a nice position but they are replacable, they are a big brand and they have a lot to loose. HTC appeared out of nowhere and is now one of the biggest players in the smartphone market. Just ask yourself who the real profit makers are.

Samsung is doing short-term profit. You know why? Because people don't by Samsung devices, they buy Android devices. It's not Apple vs Samsung vs HTC, it's iOS vs Android.

Going back to the actual topic: who cares what processor is inside an Android? Only the CPU manufacturers. The customers and the assemblers just care about software support and performance.
IPv4 is almost gone (in Europe anyway)
One should no more expect to be able to run Linux on their laptop than OSX.
Seems like these "missing foundations" can easily be remedied by reading a couple of algorithm books.
Self-taught developer here, I think the foundation is incredibly important if you desire to advance in your career as a developer.

That being said, you don't need to know all that to get started. I probably would have hated a CS program if I had tried it in college. Now, however, I am completely fascinated by things that would have terrified me before.

There is a lot to be said for Just in Time learning as opposed to front-loading your knowledge Just in case you need it down the road.
I'm not really surprised. What I really don't understand however, is why they decided to make a new proprietary format instead of using micro USB like everybody else.

So far I could excuse the 30 pin connector, back when they made it everybody used their own formats and they probably didn't want to break backward compatibility with all the existing iPod peripherals.

But now they decided to finally change it... for an other proprietary format? And the only advantage it has from what I've seen is that you can plug it both ways. Maybe it's apple way of saying "we're not the average smartphone, we're an iPhone!".

I also wonder what will happen with all the iPhone docks out there. The lightning port seems very small, can it really hold the weight of the phone without breaking easily?
Diffing code by program structure (not by text)
This is pretty cool! Anyone knows if there is support for PDF annotations?
Do people find that surprising?

I don't, but I went to Caltech so am used to the idea of take home exams. At Caltech, essentially all exams, including finals, are take home. If a professor wants to give an in-class exam, he has to get special permission to do so.

I think MIT now also has take home exams, but I'm not sure. Any MIT people here who can clarify?
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What's up with the onscreen keyboard to type your username?
Do you mean that in europe we get the mini-usb adaptor in the box for free? That's not what I understood.
The three components to "I works" (or iWork, as it's more commonly known) are now sold individually through the App Store. And they vary in quality from poor to excellent.

Keynote is probably the best presentation software available on any platform, in my experience.

Pages is the word processor and page layout tool. It's just OK for light word processing but pretty good at page layout.

I haven't used Numbers much, but apparently it doesn't provide the advanced functionality offered by Excel. But I certainly prefer it to the Google's web-based spreadsheet tool.
The DNC thing never actually happened:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/09/05/michelle_...

There's always a delay between the end of a livestream and the point where you can watch the prerecorded video. In this case, YouTube merely displayed the wrong error message during that delay.
In "The Design & Evolution of C++" (http://www.stroustrup.com/dne.html), Stroustrup talks about termination versus resumption semantics for exceptions. Resumption was considered for C++, but rejected based on experience in the Cedar/Mesa system. There's a quote from that part of the book on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_handling#Exception_ha...

Note that I'm not arguing that termination semantics are better - I've never programmed with resumption semantics, so I can't say. But that's why it's not in C++.
UFC-151: Torn MCL or 'Step Aside' Money? You Decide - Dan Hendo's Debacle
It's discontinuous. To make this work, stretch the months (add/subtract days) so the tropics only have July August and poles only have Jan/Feb. Adjust holidays appropriately.
Pretty nice work, thanks for sharing. Markdown is the best.
That is NOT a relevant comparison. Foxconn employees live in dormitories on-site while US factory workers don't, so you'd essentially be trying to compare ALL the suicides of Foxconn employees to SOME of the suicides of other workers. (Though I'm not sure they'd fail even THAT comparison.)

If I recall correctly, even the rate at which Americans are murdered on the job is higher than the rate at which Foxconn employees commit suicide there. So if you want to keep claiming there's something uniquely bad about Foxcon in this regard, let's hear some actual numbers from you. What specific numbers are you looking at that lead you to believe Foxconn is unusually bad?
Explaining the CRIME weakness in SPDY and SSL
I'd like to see an automated machine take a look at two papers and conclude that because of a single space in a number that two papers are related.
Not a better camera - it uses exactly the same camera as the 4S. You get panorama mode, though.

A better cable, that has essentially obsoleted millions of peripherals. "Use the adapter", not so much - I for one have an in-dash GPS / deck with Pandora and the like that I can't use with the iPhone, even with the adapter, because it doesn't support iPod out. Thanks, Apple.
Weekly #Cloud Recap 9/10: Big Data Cost, Netflix Cloud Shift, Open Cloud Leaders
It appears your code will find the value _twice_. That is less than ideal and not equivalent at all.
I am 100% in agreement with you. This law is ridiculous and should be struck down as soon as possible. However he seems guilty of infringing this insane law - just because the law is wrong doesn't mean the person is not guilty of the crime it covers.

Did he do anything wrong? In my opinion, no. Did he do anything wrong according to the Hadopi law? Yes.

My statement was purely semantic.
Wow, they found an even messier substrate than water!

... - transitors - vacuum-tubes - water - crabs - ...
> talking about how hard something's going to be.

The planning meeting isn't the right place to review the implementation approach of every story. That's best left to another discussion among the technical team, probably in a design review.[1]

Discussion isn't necessary for estimation purposes when the team agrees on effort. It's only necessary when the team can't agree where to rank the story's effort in relation to other stories, both completed and upcoming. (You need completed stories in there to "anchor" the story points, otherwise the meaning of a point will drift from iteration to iteration.) Once the team has ranked most stories, the team can return to those that they can't rank, and discuss them a little further until they can fit them into the rankings.

[1] It could be that the team isn't communicating enough, and that the planning meeting is the only time they're forced to communicate.
Bootstrap is great but I'm worried that it's style is getting overused and tired like a pop song on FM radio.
I'm Speaking at Your Business Is Now Conference Hamilton
It's a way of getting context-specific (but not error-specific) behavior, and when dealing with functions producing a polymorphic monadic value it threads very nicely. That said, the approach in Haskell of fail always taking a string (which doesn't necessarily get stored/used anywhere) has a bit less to recommend it. It's also slightly confused conceptually to put "fail" in the Monad typeclass but that mostly bugs the theorists. The biggest downside, though, is that it can often make the source of errors harder to find - cf. hunting NaNs in floating point arithmetic.
No numbers on the HN stories read, comments posted, etc? Lame ;)
Beyond Exception Handling: Lisp's Conditions and Restarts
wow thats really useful!
Validating Email Addresses In PHP (The Right Way)
There exist purely DOM-based template engines, such as Batman's one: http://batmanjs.com (The approach has its advantages but unfortunately speed is not one of them.)
SockJS works basically everywhere.
The iPhone 5 isn’t the world’s thinnest smartphone, as Apple claims it to be
I believe the license for the film was revoked. Which means it can't be distributed. So I am not sure this was all Google's idea.

Regardless I find the erosion of free speech to be sad. We must never say or do anything to upset the Muslims...please...
The UK has an entire IPv4 /8 that it isn't using
I would love to see some code to illustrate this article, as someone who hasn't written anything in Go I still don't know what these mechanisms look like in practice.
This is not surprising. The culture of varsity sports on campus is a relic of an institution that has optimized its admissions process for corporate job placement over academic integrity and originality of thought. This makes sense--if you can swell your endowment by letting in athletes who are a-ok with taking easy classes and then using their one-track brains to 'flip decks' at Goldman, why not? It's good for them (Goldman pays) and it's good for your own job security as a university administrator. The culture produces student-athletes who are some of the most tenacious, personable, and loyal people you can find. They make great leaders of companies that consist of giant pyramids of people doing menial tasks.

This culture, however, does not optimize for original thought.

Regarding the exam structure: (humanities + short answer questions + take-home) = increased likelihood of similar answers, given internet search.

The professor here was lazy, too--these problems could have been avoided with a comprehensive 20-page paper instead of a more-easily-graded short-answer final exam.
Review Of ClickDesk
Very interesting article, thanks for sharing.

I just submitted it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4521675
I find it interesting that they express result and error as a product rather than a sum.
I tell my prospective clients that if their contractors/employees are still programming in js then they are stealing from them.

Coffee Script is clearer, more concise, more maintainable. It has made me 5x more efficient in writing code (just the reduction in scrolling is a massive time savings) and I've seen similar results with my developers.

It takes about 2 days to learn and has a significant long term benefit. Switch.
What's your method for pushing database changes from development to production?
I just started using (and loving) git, for keeping track of changes that I'm making, being able to work on different features simultaneously with separate branches and merging to master only when I've finished a specific feature or change and then pushing changes easily from a development
environment to the live environment.

I'd like to be able to do the same thing for a mysql database, is there the equivalent of git for database schema and data management? Afterall a database is really just made up files is it not?

Any help would be greatly appreciated
https will hopefully be added ;)
Introducing Lil Brother: Open Source Client-Side Event Tracking
these are programming amateurs and they're doing amazing things, really fast!

It's also important to remember that much of what we focus on as professional programmers is less important to artists for whom cost of implementation is far more important than reuse.

These are two things I did not touch on in my comment at all, but you are of course correct and I feel its important enough to mention again. The fact is that people without programming backgrounds are doing amazing things and that they seem to be finding it much easier than with textual languages. The fact is that graphical languages are very successful both in audio (Max/MSP, Reaktor, Synthmaker etc) and graphics (voreen and blender embed a visual language) where they are used successfully by a lot of non-technical people. I've also seen them used in game engines, both for shading/effects/materials and for scripting of game logic[1]. As you mentioned, however, the goals and priorities of these people are generally not the same as those of professional programmers, so often writing once - but quick - is much more important to them than re-usability and modularity and that's perfectly ok if that's what makes sense for them.

boxes and lines make really great glue code for putting together inputs, outputs, and a set of algorithms into a single work

Graphical languages make for fantastic glue code/dependency injection. XML has been traditionally used to externally glue components together and IMHO is often more complex than doing it in the code itself and not really all that much more flexible at the end of the day. Graphical languages are IMHO ideal for this as they show at-a-glance, at a high level, how components in the system are connected, yet still allowing the lower level nitty-gritty algorithms to be managed in a textual language, which may be more optimized for those tasks.

[1] http://www.unrealengine.com/features/kismet/
Amazing pictures. But not really sure what I'm looking at here. Are those red spheres meant to be the nuclei of atoms? Are the bright hexagonal lines meant to be the path of electrons? If so, isn't the nucleus much too large in relation to the size of the whole atom? Isn't the proportion of the size of the nucleus to the whole atom akin to the size of a fly in a cathedral?
I'm actually quite curious about Treehouse. I'll probably be finished with the AI for Ambition later this month and I'd like to release an attractive, marketable version before the end of 2012. I've worked on mostly back-end software my whole life, but I need to learn front-end development, and preferably reasonably quickly (because I work full-time, and I don't mean to trivialize FE development because I know it takes a long time to become great at it; I'm just looking for an efficient path to reasonably good). Is Treehouse a good place to learn how to do this kind of thing? (Sorry to thread-jack with my personal interests, but I'd imagine a lot of people have similar objectives.)
I'm imagining a scenario where Meg Whitman is driving in circles in a parking lot, while Leo Apotheker drives the wrong way down the interstate, and you chime in to say, "At least Leo is driving somewhere." Doesn't make a lot of sense.
Point of information: he's reviewed several Android phones in the past, and he's talked about them on the podcasts he's on. He does in fact try other devices.
hehe, the next time, i promise!
Yeah it was sweet and easy if you just want to get some text up there.
IPhone 5 Twitter analysis shows "thin" is better than "LTE," and more
Amazon Web Services 101: an introduction to hosting your site on AWS
They say the pictures were taken with a variant of Atomic Force Microscopy, so what you're seeing is most likely a false-colored representation (that is, they just chose some gradient of colors to use instead of grayscale) of the strength of the electrostatic forces acting on the probe tip at each location. So the whole thing is essentially just an image of the electron clouds.
Cool, any way to float images?
This is another attempt to solve the glory cloud os? another browser-based OS? stop making the whole world dancing. It's a lame concept.
CAP and Cloud Data Management
Look great, this is actually something I've been looking for.
Task assignment is a team anti-pattern
That's pretty shocking, given Stroustrup's propensity to just dump everything into C++. It's also a bit of a shame it didn't get a chance to see the wider audience C++ would've brought.
Thinking about this some more and here's me clarifying things for myself...

There's basically 4 strategies:

1. Give the client a full html page

2. Give the client pre-rendered html snippets

3. Give the client javascript that can render html and replace values without having to do much computation

4. Make the client do the template rendering probably using a library such as mustache.

So...

1. Should be the default and the fallback for dumb devices such as spiders and old browsers

2. Is ideal if the page doesn't change much - typical content heavy sites. You have to have proper urls and history management though.

3. is optimal for "it's an app not a website"

4. is only OK if you know your clients have plenty of CPU to spare. So not mobile basically...
If the law does say that you are responsible for what happens over your connection to the Internet then he is not innocent. Normally this would result in an abetting charge of some sort but in this case the law seems to say it's as if you committed the act yourself.

I totally disagree with that idea because it's basically telling everyone that you should be doing your illegal downloading over someone else's connection since they'll at least share the blame with you, or at worst take the brunt of the blame. This will eventually result in all those nice businesses shutting off their free wifi. Heck, if I ran a business there I wouldn't offer wifi at all since there's the obvious liability.

But I did notice that the result is a somewhat reasonable fine as opposed to an outrageous gouging of money that will potentially ruin a person's life that serves as RIAA justice here in the U.S.
I think he may be a bit more alarmist than I can agree with but I will definitely attest to the fact that Apple is having some serious UX growing pains as they try to accomodate the largest and most international user base they have had to date.

Possibly the best one-liner comes from one of the comments: "I have been developing my own theory that Apple products are the technological equivalent to junk food, psychologically fattening an already physically obese populace. Like the Sun newspaper their products are encouraging us to be lazy and dumb down our intellectual capacities."
Tough luck. Not all software works for all situations. That's how it is.
A VC is after money, not ideas. Their choices are to maximize their returns. Their investment decisions are purely driven by that. And the best in the industry are doing reasonably well.
It boggles my mind that iTunes is as bad as it is. As the main interface between users' desktops and Apples' iOS devices (their cash cows), it should be extremely refined, polished, and usable. Yet it remains bloated, unintuitive, and slow (and I'm on a Mac. I've heard it's much worse on Windows).

They keep trying to push the Album Cover view, yet flipping through hundreds of album covers is an idiotic way to navigate a large music collection. Ping seemed like a half-baked idea destined to fail, and its iTunes integration was so poor. At least they're cutting their losses and yanking that.

I'm not aware of a better alternative though. What program to play, organize, and upload music to your devices do you recommend?
Raise “hell”: Better Programming Through Error Messages
It's about being able to get accessory makers to pay licensing fees and sue the ones who don't for patent infringement.
Please edit the link as Validating Email Addresses The Wrong Way

The right way is

filter_var('bob@example.com', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

Same for validating the domain.
And also : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4486108
This entire book is a really good into to CL.
Why Developing Apps for Android is Fun
Apache Tika. Works on many filetypes and languages.
Point taken, but when I want to remove a GPS-using app because the GPS indicator is still on, I need to go there and kill it. Usually I do this for recently-used apps because I no longer need them. Granny wouldn't have a clue, even though she's now "stopped" the app. And I do try to make sure all apps know to not run in the background, but even that's extra admin.
This site is about IE8. This one is about IE9 on Win7: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/gg491740%28v=vs.8...

The optimal sizes are the same as the author's but 24x24 px. is missing in the recommended size list.

The site links to a blog entry about Pinned Sites in Win8. You can re-use the 144x144 px. PNG for a pinned site.
Take home final exams are everywhere and they can easily be some of the most challenging. I like this story of one of Tyler Cowen's final exams[1]:

"Tyler [Cowen] once walked into class the day of the final exam and said, “Here is the exam. Write your own questions. Write your own answers. Harder questions and better answers get more points.” Then he walked out. The funniest thing was when a student came in late and I had to explain to him what the exam was and he didn’t believe me!"

[1] http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/08/09/tyler-cowens-unusual-...
The WikiLeaks Spinoff That Wasn’t: This Machine Kills Secrets
This disturbs me on the grounds of "bad habit" precedent alone. Getting accustomed to self-censorship is almost as bad as having it mandated.
The primary question to answer when choosing between using error codes or exceptions for signalling errors is this: do you want the error propagation code to be written by one or more humans, or do you want the compiler to generate invisible but consistent error propagation code?
Violence should never be allowed to become a useful weapon against free speech.

When a company has built tools for self-expression that are widely used, they have a responsibility to commit to broad principles under difficult circumstances. Free speech principles aren't as widely protected across the globe as they are in the US, but that doesn't mean they are not very important to the advancement of society.
JTR is a bit of a special case though.. she willfully and knowingly infringed copyrights (and this has been affirmed through at least 4 appeals that I know of).

The MafiAA knows they'll never get that judgement.. it's just to make a point. Besides that, any decent court will allow you to work out a payment plan. (I say this as someone who has been sued for absurd amounts of money before!)

It's annoying, unethical, disgusting, and a lot of other mean things, but hardly life ruining.