skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ken sat near Jeff, Sanjay, and co while they were designing Spanner, and he regularly consults in an informal capacity on people's projects. I wasn't there, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if Ken's unique insight contributed to Spanner's design.
I'd be surprised if the fellowship terms didn't include something about irrevocably turning down the acceptance and officially leaving. (Which of course is not to say that they couldn't re-apply - I rather suspect they'll have a better shot the second time!)
I find this happening more and more often, quite often I'll have to pay as much as a $5 premium for the digital version.
On the other hand, you could parse it as inverse (square root). Inverse of x is 1/x.
Formal (math) notation has been around forever and it will probably stay that way. Using it to specify software is a recent application, but the meanings of symbols and their relationships are well established. Programming language syntax rules change, math does not. Also, math is more concise, more precise, and easier to analyze (prove that something is possible/impossible) than a programming language.

P.S. Check out Using Z (usingz.com). It is fantastic.
To replace the word cissexual with the word normal in that sentence would have changed the meaning of the sentence, so the two words are not synonymous in that context. Also, the author is a man who started out physically as a woman. He is not cissexual, and is aware of the terminology and uses it, and I don't think that using a wide vocabulary indicates some fear of other words.
I think the point is that utility patents - as opposed to the design patents which you seemed to refer to - apply to games as well, and also do damage there.
Makes sense to me. Link to the source when you can. "Give credit where it's due" and all that. People can go to Amazon or other distributors on their own if they so wish.
"Suggesting that more women would be welcomed at a conference because they would make it "more attractive" is saying that women are valued for how they look, not for what they do."

This is the author's own prejudices being unfairly grafted onto a perfectly innocent, if out-of-date comment about women making the audience 'more attractive'.

" potentially alienating to any non-heterosexual men who were present, as they reflected an assumption that he was speaking to an audience of people who found women, and only women, "attractive".

False, the potentially gay and male bisexual members were already being exposed to a number of members of the gender of their preference, and any lesbians or straight men in the audience were not. Hence, the comment was intended to address this specific portion of the audience.

You can go on and on overanalysing some person's comments intended to suggest methods of increasing female participation at hacker conferences. Shooting down their efforts with some sort of snarky 'tutorial' is not going to help this cause at all, unless you yourself are willing to help create a supposedly 'safer' environment for female participation.
Build a better product then advertise that. The problem is everyone is trying to build the iphone and they think that advertising is going to bring market share.
Value addressing. MVCC.
You can turn it off if you don't like it. I can't count how many times I've accidentally flipped the mute on or off on my iPhone just having it in my pocket.
Eventually, but two problems that could slow down the process (meaning, not necessarily "soon"):

(1) Apple has made lots of forward looking investments to get long-term lock ups on supplies even if the manufacturer is Samsung. So perhaps they've already bought the next 1 or 2 years of these displays that Samsung can produce. Samsung would then have to build more factories to supply the needs of other OEMs, where the OEMs did not help invest ahead of time to help build this capacity themselves.

(2) More significantly: the operating system and its software eco-system must actively support high-resolution displays. Since Windows 8 is more popular on the low end, there might not be much incentive for Microsoft or their software partners to actively change their software to support what would initially probably be a very niche market for them. Without the software, there isn't much motivation to produce the hardware. Apple doesn't really have this problem: they've sort of forced the issue by releasing the hardware first, they've upgraded their OS to deal, they've primed the market with a few enabled apps, and their users are fairly high end, will demand more apps, where the app developers will quickly oblige (Adobe came out with a HiDPI version of the Creative Studio tools recently).

Eventually we will all get high resolution displays, but it will probably take much longer for the PC ecosystem than the Mac ecosystem. If its successful enough on Mac, however, I would expect the process to speed up on PCs so they remain competitive.
Right. The error is in conflating "normal" with "good", or "proper".

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, sometimes there's no such thing.

In fairness, if you spend a lot of time thinking about these sorts of things, you do need a specific word for "normal in exactly the way I mean", and "non-transsexual" is a piece of work.

I was just having fun, and I know that's not really allowed.
Set OS X to use half-res and check your images again. They should be rendered at 2x (meaning they actually use all the pixels not a quarter of them) so they shouldn't look fuzzy at all.
Do you have a source for this upgraded SSD? Would love to purchase a higher capacity one.
Tired of rants about Windows 8
Stop ranting for a while. Then try it and once you're able to be multitasking well on it (example: learn to use desktop side-by-side with a windows app), then share your opinion.
If only there were an equivalent fast atan2.
I enjoyed the post about the future of education. Similar thoughts have crossed my mind (to the point where I have a small side-project going on).
Very cool! Too bad it's not possible to rewind though.
I get the humor of this library, but in reality wouldn't you just use HTTP 1.1 chunked transfer encoding instead? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol, that would even work with your IE 2 users.
I wonder how many of regular people know what Smart Stay, S-Beam, ShareShot (well this one kinda deducible),Group Cast, Smart Alert (how smart is it?), Tilt To Zoom (how do you tilt it, where?), Picture In Picture (where, what app, what for?) are.

Although I can understand that the same people can go for a bigger, longer list of features because of just that.
Yes. I know, and I agree.

I was just taking pleasure in the long definition couched in the opposite framing. I really do love language, and I think everyone should have their own.
iOS can seem vast. If you know Ruby, http://rubymotion-tutorial.com is a must see. I'm finding the ecosystem around Rubymotion to be more productive.
> It certainly can be and these days it's doing more harm than good but part of what was great about the news is that it took the burden of thinking away from people.

This is absurd.
It's pretty interesting: this was bound to happen since digital copies are no longer the cheap variant that costs nothing to reproduce, but are becoming the more convenient version for which people pay a premium....
I'm sorry but I don't see how this visualization provides any special insight into any of these things.
Very clever but replacing O(1) with O(log n) for updates is probably worse than the benefit gained by O(log n) range-sum instead of O(n) when the updates are happening constantly, in real-time - think Twitter Firehose. In practice, it would make a lot more sense to pre-define the buckets and update those when doing insert/update/delete. Even 1m buckets is just 1-4MB of data, depending on how many counts do you want (2^8 - 2^32). That would give you O(1) update and O(k) range-sum where k = number of buckets. You want k to be smaller than n otherwise you're back to the naive implementation.
Yes, but unfortunately, if the site has good numbers on the desktop, they aren't always good in other browsers.
The scales used on global measures of education are scored in a way that makes a few low scores a lot more influential than a few high scores (since the average score on the test is around 70%, it takes more than 3 100% scores to balance out one 0%). So countries which are more homogenous (so that their upper end's scores don't get capped at 100%) and don't have as big of a low class do well, such as Japan, Korea, and Finland.

If the tests were structured so that the average score was 10 out of 100, one genius who scored 100 would be worth 9 people who scored zero.

I think this is a more realistic way to score education; would you rather have the median of the population go from grade level 7 algebra, to grade level 7.1? or would you rather have 20% more utter geniuses in your society? Both have value, obviously, but breakthroughs are made at the edges, and only need to be made once.

All this is to say that we should focus on where the returns are greatest.
12Society
You are aware that gun deaths are on course to exceed auto deaths this year? While the gov. has spent billions over decades to prevent auto deaths, cancer deaths, etc., effectively $0 have been spent to study and prevent gun deaths; how is it irrational to be concerned about that?
Seems like there a general trend toward lower pricing transparency in online retail. Airlines have been doing this for years...sucks that it's spreading everywhere.
Also seeing $15.99 for the Kindle version.
Depends on how you work. Its very portable. While that means the screen is small, you typically have it plugged into an external monitor when you are at a desk.

The processing speed is quite good. Any disk intensive operations, like compiling, are fast because of the SSD speed. The raw cpu may not be as fast as the Pro, but in practice the Airs seem faster than the specs would suggest.
I actually did take the time to read your 852 word, eleven paragraph missive.

The part that you didn't capture, is that, by and large, listening to the "news" is not actionable, and mostly serves the purposes of indoctrination, and entertainment. There is also a difference between having a bias towards the truth, and just being biased. Saying "Man landed on the moon" is biased towards the truth. Saying "Science is a solution to many of our problems" is just bias. (albeit one that I have)

If something's really important, you'll hear about it (I would call that important subset of events the news, as opposed to the "news"). I fully support Joel's "Just turn it off and make better use of your time" position - you (and your community/country) will be better served.

Also - don't get me wrong, there is a difference between broadly educated, and well read (which I strongly, strongly support) - and being up to date on the "news" - which I see minimal value in.
Right. They know that, even if they haven't done much about it. They want to be able to make their page slick, and a good user experience. This post documents their problems and provides a path forward.

Kudos Facebook.
The Philadelphia regional rail system (SEPTA) worked similarly. When I used to commute on it when I was a broke student, I would pay the fair maybe once a week. I always had the money on me and was always willing to pay.. but the conductors rarely would make it to me.

Eventually I just started buying monthly passes since I got tired of carrying cash and wanted to use buses too.
We Believe the Story of Lance Armstrong (Not The Truth)
Always tricky to compare yourself to your competitors so directly. You go into almost under the assumption most people don't want your product. I don't think that's really true of Samsung's products anymore. In the wake of the Samsung/Apple trial, which got some mainstream coverage, it's probably even more of a mixed message to send.
This would be much more insightful perhaps if the author had any actual experience either developing an API or doing business development. He appears to have none.

Nonetheless, as others have said, APIs facilitate and accelerate true business development.
Google's online apps and services to drop support for Internet Explorer 8
This is mostly a WebKit problem. In IE10/Windows 8 you can and should listen for click when you want a click, not pointerup. Making click events fire slow was a major design mistake by WebKit. It is not an issue in Win8.
Google wants people writing web apps. They're the big player in web ads. They don't have a similar advantage in mobile ads, especially on iOS. If web development creates better products easier than native development does, Google benefits.
One thing that makes Apple in a very special situation is that they have $100 billion cash to fund various forms of competitive advantage. From the supply chain to the hardware design to the software to the retail delivery experience, Apple can invest an optimize every point in the whole process. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out.
What is "value addressing"? That's the first time I've seen that term and google doesn't bring anything relevant up.
You are discounting the possibility that he could have owned and upgraded his previous laptop when two 2GB memory sticks were more than $200. Yes, such modules are cheap today, but that is immaterial.
This is my favorite paper on money & happiness (actionable & grounded in science):

http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2012/09/1-s2.0-S1057740811000...

"Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don't."

I completely agree.
And now we're all starting to agree with each other... I don't know why there was such a rush to disagree with me when we've been in the area of the same page all along.

What you said plays exactly into my original point about being a good consumer of news. Having the ability to filter relevant information from noise is what important and not taking in news for the sake of news. I've been saying this the entire time.

I can get on board with not caring about what's going on right this minute too and I never argued that anyone should. That's just as bad as Joel's prescription for ignoring news completely. That said, you never know when something you read may become relevant to you at a later time. I would suggest making it a point to consume news that isn't relevant to you in the same way I wouldn't suggest ignoring all news but I also would say that if you have a minute, reading some random piece of news every now and then may prove useful. And if it doesn't, well then you've got something you might be able to talk intelligently about at some party. It doesn't hurt and hey, maybe it'll even get you laid.

At the end of the day Joel's post came off to me as totally anti-intellectual, naive, and self-helpish (in a bad way). Like I said before, I'm a big fan of his posts but this one did not sit right with me.
Hammer.JS - Low-fat JS lib for touch gestures
Another high-level event we need is scroll-end, or better, scroll-to-end. On scroll is very expensive on mobile and leads to lagginess.
Timestamp versioning is one of the oldest (1978) ideas in distributed systems: http://patricklogan.blogspot.ca/2007/09/naming-and-synchroni...
Noted. This is an alpha and we are just about to clean it up.
What's the deal with these posts? First the one from Facebook and now this one?

If it's too hard for you to differentiate between a scroll and a touch, there's about 210923423234 libraries out there that can make that differentiation for you.
It depends on what you run on it.

I develop for Django comfortably on an old Atom-based netbook. When I'm not on the road, I hook it to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Runs Emacs very well.

When I need to do stuff with Plone, the Atom is just too slow (Plone takes half a minute to start and buildouts take forever). For those jobs I have a Core i3 (which runs Django just fine too) that's far less portable, but much faster than the Atom (and fast enough for buildout).

A MacBook Air should be good enough for most uses, with its i5 and SSD. If it's not, you should rethink your choice of technologies rather than get a beefier computer.
X remote feature isn't about speed, it's about being able to use a window remotely AT ALL, and being able to mix it with other apps on other machines as though they were all local. This was invaluable in large Sun environment with shared home directories across all the networks in the 1980s and 1990s in particular. The modern trend shows a lot more group environments with linux boxes with no shared admin and few shared local resources (compared to every computer being a shared resource in many networks before), and much more reliance on long-haul networks to bridge sites, instead of just using X apps between local computers with multiple users. This is a change in the balance of use cases, and in no way changes the old use case, where VNC's screen-wide focus is a bit of a fail.

Throwing out having an actual graphics protocol and going bonkers on net-blit (as is a collection of a bunch of hard-to-predict tradeoffs: Is the app graphics-op heavy? (might support using net-blit) Is the window size large? (2560x1600 here sometimes - net-blit is usually a disaster at this size) Is responsiveness an issue? (jamming the net with video can impede getting events back) Is the user trying to access an app at home from work? (Uplink speed on many consumer-grade connections is crap) What if the remote server doesn't have a console? X deals with this really well, allowing full apps and virtual X servers to be run on a headless system and used remotely.

3D graphics operations are an even more interesting discussion.

To put it simply, I love X because of remote graphics ops, which fill in essential niches few graphics system even think about. Taking issue with the bandwidth and lag of the graphics ops stream between computer begs for more work to be done to improve it (ah, NeWS, how I miss you).

Simply: If I can't use graphics apps running on a headless server with no graphics card on my local, graphically-awesome workstation - then that failing window system just Doesn't Interest Me.

:-)

(That doesn't means X can't be improved... OMG... there is so much to improve, in particular being able to push x,y using events to a window without have to do it from the backwards full-screen paradigm... jeez)
I believe Amazon sets the price for the hardcover, whereas the Kindle version says "this price was set by the publisher".
You're right, this technique is useful when the ratio of reads to writes is just right!
There have been high-end Windows laptops for a while now that had higher resolutions than Apple was willing to go. For example, for several years, Sony has had a 1080p option on the Vaio Z's 13" screen. That's a lower PPI than the Retina screen, but it's a much higher resolution than the 1366 x 768 resolution of a MacBook Air.

Nowadays, I think 1080p screens are starting to creep into even smaller 10"-11" devices. And with the light Apple is shining on high resolution screens now, I expect this will accelerate, and we'll see more high resolution screens on laptops filtering down from specialty PC laptops to midrange ones, and extreme high resolution screens start to show up on the specialty ones.

This is a lot like how it worked in the iPhone vs. Android world of phone resolution. Android phones jumped up to 800x480, then the iPhone jumped all the way to 960x640. Android stayed at 800x480 at first, then 960x540 (qHD) screens became more common, and now a device doesn't count as a high end Android phone unless it has a 720p screen, a higher resolution than the iPhone (though usually at slightly fewer PPI because of the different screen size).
The honour system is used more or less everywhere in public transit in Germany, the only exception being long-distance routes. It makes for a much more comfortable experience.
Weekend startup: Custom printed Helvetica on American Apparel T-shirts
First thing, awesome job going out and launching, and trying things. It's not easy, so congrats on getting the experience under your belt :)

So a few other things. You keep on stating the reason for the service closing down was lack of funding / designer / focus / marketing money / etc. The real reason your service went down was lack of product / market fit.

Your products and pivots got stuck in a zombieland. You didn't hit some crazy traction that shows that you're onto something big. But you also didn't fail so hard that it is obvious that you need to kill it immediately.

You also got some misleading signals from business partners/advisors, and some early interest from investors. Funding events, getting partnerships with the NBA and soccer teams, advisors are all multipliers that help you if you have solid user engagement. So when you have a viral coefficient greater than 1.0, you'll actually get huge bumps by having all these user acquisition channels available to you when you have partners like the NBA etc. Inherently your product is social, and I'm surprised to hear that lack of marketing money is a reason you list for shutting down.

Measuring product / market fit used to seem arbitrary to me. One of the most helpful things I've heard is the "very disappointed" framework that Sean Ellis uses. The idea is that if 20% of some user group would be very disappointed if they couldn't use your service any more, then you've nailed it. You're onto the next phase of scaling out and reaching out to more people like that core user group. If you're not at 20%, then keep tweaking different pitches and user groups and refining your product until you do.
What do you mean? IMO, the article is the evidence. Nobody else is complaining about this stuff because everybody else realizes that phones are different than desktops. Apparently only FB didn't get the memo.

The phone manufacturers aren't deliberately making infinite scroll perform poorly just to piss off Facebook. The devices, at this time, are not powerful enough to support infinite scroll when using HTML and Javascript. FB could get over it and use something else, but they've decided to whine about it instead.

Also, "native apps can do it, therefore HTML should be able to do it" is almost hilarious. Native apps are faster than HTML/Javascript. That's not news - that's the way it's always been and probably always will be. Everybody else adjusts their designs to deal with it; Facebook is just whining about it.
Stopped by General Assembly while I was in NYC, had a good time. You should definitely visit this place :)
The academically adrift book was quite interesting, although I disagree with the conclusion. For the most part, I find the first two years of college are really more about filtering out those who are there to party and those who are there to learn and get a degree. If the same results were achieved on third or fourth year students (assuming most students are in for 5 years these days), then I would be concerned.
To be fair, I think you mis-understood me. There's no mention of FB. My example was a news site with 9 trackers. Plain vanilla newspaper - Independent is in London UK. The odd-couter-example might be x, y, or z. It might be google or it might be facebook. but why not just have opt in? The default inference is that [insert number here] would not find it worthwhile enough to bother. [1]

_______________

[1] Also, I did not mention, but on that topic you asked: FB data can be considered more sensitive. They start broadcasting and sharing stuff. Taking it "out of context", and sent to your network. Kind of ironic, but true. It begs the question: Why do you like this? or Why do your read that? Do I want to put footnotes on everything I do? To explain the "context" and the logic of my thoughts? Not really... =D.