skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once again it's worth clarifying the stats driving this article only reflect FREE apps. I really wish someone would print a more fact-driven, less-sensationalized article on the AppStore. I know I'm expecting WAYYY to much our of popular media, but I can still hope can't I? :)

I get the impression most companies trying to make a business around app's are actually in a "purgatory", experiencing enough success to keep them interested but not enough to write a letter home from a resort in Tahiti. I suspect 80% of the companies in this position will die off or become very small 'part time' gigs in the next 6-12 months, the existing 20% will benefit from a maturing product (a barrier to new competitors)... hopefully they'll see fiscal rewards for their time, energy, and risk as Apple fixes the AppStore economy. Lots of developer churn nonetheless...

I look at the Top 100 sales charts for iTunes religiously, it's saddening to see a lot of the crap that overshadows the premium apps. The 24hour volume-driven charts discourages educated and affluent shoppers who would pay $4.99-9.99 for a quality app, while attracting gum-stand development and crap novelty. And search sucks.

This has been stated time and time again yet Apple seems to not care — not because they aren't doing, but because they aren't responding to dev concerns. I imagine this type of application-churn is fiscally rewarding and so Apple currently lacks any real incentive to do otherwise.
>> Marshall: So, everyone wants to be an aggregator these days. All the young kids are like “mommy, I’m going to grow up to find recommended stories for an online news publisher.”

Shoot.
as long as its legal to lobby congress it'll never happen. The startup system can't get the help it needs from the government since they are more less powerless. The old GM on the other hand can invest a couple mil into buying congress, because they'll get that money back with the first bill that passes in their favor
I really wish the videos from lectures like this were widely available. They would be a great resource for self learners along with the course material.
Especially since he explicitly eschews "reductive" biological evidence.
Yes and No. Its not really a 'game changer'. Its neat technology yes but in the end its just an abstraction.
It's also a very informative flame war. A amazing breadth of interesting topics are brought up and by message 250, most of individuals agree that Clojure is a very serious and quite brilliant Lisp.
D now includes Mac OSX version!
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/changelog.html
http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd.1.040.zip

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/changelog.html
http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd.2.025.zip

Expect bugs. Thread local storage isn't working on OSX, neither are sockets and memory mapped files (for unknown reasons).
Google Hosted Domain email, NPR 5 Min Podcast, The Daily Beast Cheat Sheet, Google Reader, Hacker News
Ask HN: Pair programming for web development?
I realize, at the core, programming is programming is programming. But do you all actively use, or have thoughts on pair programming for web development? I have yet to find a company which uses it for web development and am wondering if there are some who use it.
I don't understand why you felt the need to take a shot at this.

What if one of the dropbox guys dropped in and told us how they were able to pull off the backend work?

Great discussions here on HN can stem from any kind of article, so I would hesitate to discourage discussion.
That doesn't follow - presumably the desirable men are also getting what they want, less desirable but more devoted women. After all, the idea of the linked article is that a woman who does marry a desirable man would be likely to get a less desirable mate if she were to compete directly with other women.
PyML: machine learning in Python
I know from my personal usage this to be true for most of my application. There are a couple I use repeatedly, (Units) I guess that's the one only one.

If it wasn't for extended bathroom breaks or my kids are using my phone when we go out to eat, my applications wouldn't get used at all. Less than a year ago there weren't any apps and the phone sold just fine and was just as useful.
I say it because I want there to be some users who really think about what's relevant and what's not. Of course, I'm a single user: my opinion is just an opinion here. It's just how I felt.

There was a conversation on IRC a few days ago where people were complaining that "favored" HN companies would get stories up to the top page when the stories were fairly bland. I saw this and thought of that. I'm a proud Dropbox user - it's one of my favorite products - but this doesn't seem like something to revolve conversation around.
THE IRON by Henry Rollins
That's a valid point to make - and somebody's argued it on this thread already.

I agree that ambiguity should be removed, but that's a conversation for another day. I don't feel this particular story warrants it.
Some of the techniques he discusses are for photos uploaded in Europe only.

Meaning that if you upload in the US you are a tiny bit safer.
I see your point: my feelings for Dropbox do affect my votes.
Let's see:

- the author does not define "grace"

- the author does not define "sports"

- the author does not define "schools"

Sure, the text is not ambiguous at all!

Maybe I am just being a pedantic academic, but in Math if you want to make a point using X, Y and Z, you usually start be defining X, Y, and Z. Human language is vague already, there's no need to make it even worse.
Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best
I think he just started with that assumption because that's what 538 did. His last analysis assumed one distribution, so my guess is he thought that might be more accurate. Although he didn't give data either way.
It's hard to see what Wall St types actually contribute to the economy.

It's really unfortunate that people see things this way.

Somehow, the fact that I can -- in seconds -- convert money I earned at my job into a stake in one of thousands of businesses, many of them operating in multiple countries and offering multiple product lines (and the fact that the cost of converting my dollars into this stake costs less than, well, a good steak) is incredible. It's jaw-dropping.

It's stunning that someone in Florida can live off of the profits of mines in Madagascar, fast-food restaurants in California, steel mills in South Korea, and insurance companies in Connecticut, all without spending more than half an hour a week reading brokerage statements.

It's astounding that an entrepreneur can take a business whose future profits can't be estimated to within an order of magnitude, and sell a portion of that business for a specific amount.

Finance is an incredibly valuable industry. Getting even some of this stuff slightly right creates a lot of wealth, and helps other industries create a lot more wealth. There have been excesses and there has been incompetence, but that doesn't change the fact that finance, in the aggregate, has been very beneficial.
I see FPS games as an opportunity to take my self-righteous bastard alter-ego for a walk. If I don't take him often enough through art I might actually be kinda confused in real-life situations.

Violent art has its purpose, deal with it.
Agreed. In addition, the link is broken for me. Brings me to a login page.
Buffer Overflows in a few of the prospective SHA-3 algorithms (including MD6).
It's nice that you question his personal experience because if it's something you haven't heard of, then it obviously must be both bullshit and a consequence of poor parenting.

A little digging on the internet (curiosity over blithe ignorance, oh no!) would return this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_allergy_syndrome

And guess what? Cooking produce probably does help him because it denatures the proteins present in the food. Your post is nothing besides internet tough guy posturing, which I do find entertaining, if a bit annoying.

The more you know!
I don't know if you can assume early bidders are more devoted.
Some lactose-intolerant people do better with cooked dairy products, like pizza. Biology isn't like computers; usually a small bug, like a protein the body can't process, is fine in trace amounts. Even a little strychnine is fine in trace amounts.
theres also the fact that when you navigate to the normal upgrade choices, the 100gb choice isn't listed. I also dislike the fact that the prices increase linearly. Would it not be reasonable to have them increase sublinearly to take advantage of the fact 1) the typical use of each storage tier will only use mildly more than the previous?
I think it's in Microsoft's best interests to build a browser at this level.

You just can't get the performance you need for some applications through the proxy of a browser. Sometimes you just need to touch the metal.
This argument is terribly fallacious.

"Managing" is extremely important to value creation. A fundamental principle of capitalism is that you can use existing wealth ("capital") to invest in ways to create more wealth. Capitalism relies on people's self-interest to ensure that each investor will invest in the opportunity that has the most value-creation potential with the lowest risk.

Investors, people "managing money", aren't just sitting on the sidelines cashing in on everyone else's good ideas. Their essential purpose is to move available capital to wherever it will produce the highest returns - i.e. wherever it will produce the most wealth.

The total wealth of a nation impacts the wealth of everyone in that nation. I don't like the way republicans use the idea of "trickle-down economics", but the fact is, if you create lots of value (by putting money in the right place at the right time), that value inevitably spreads to many other people in the economy.

Managing money is not "taking a left turn into the deep end". Creation will happen in hundreds of different forms. Picking the one that works best and giving it life is extremely valuable.
Playing with Haskell - HTTP server
It's really unfortunate that people see things this way.

It's also quite unfortunate that the wave of anti-banker populism seems quite lively on HN too. I thought we were better than that.
Linode problems this morning - Last night
Last time I had a debate with you, I forgot to tell you that you were crazy :D That's a good thing. I'm crazy too.

I can understand all that you have said

But still, if we look at macs as pieces of art, and get a 40 years old soviet radio, make it in to a pc box, stuff it with hardware, install OSX on it, that would still kick ass. Is that equal to taking the Mona Lisa, writing a graffiti tag on it, and hanging it upside down in your living room, using duck tape? Probably, but its still awesome! You see, chaos is sometimes also an art, not as good art as perfection, but still its pretty cool.

ps. http://www.kaldata.com/articles.php?action=show&showarti... It runs windows, but it's still super awesome.(Bulgarian language)
The post strikes me as a musing, a reflection based on the author's personal experience -- there is an idea which isn't fleshed out, but that's okay.

I used to be a runner. I often noted others' running styles and how fluid their mechanics were. I felt you could tell who was was a runner. They _float_. Other people might jog/run once a week -- which often isn't enough to teach your body to move without effort.

When racing, if someone made a move, I'd follow or if I moved, they followed me.

During the race, you wanted to make them pay. At the finish line, they made you better and you made them better, often the result of competition and you rarely end up in first. I can kind of see what he's hinting at.

It seems like an interesting topic to discuss...deconstructing a blog post less so.
Who's "we"? I'd like to collect stories of pair designing in action.
The author is actually indireclty referring to the stable marriage problem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem , don't bother reading the paper the slate writer links to, it has no substantive content), in which you have two sets of agents which we label the "men" and the "women". Each agent has a preference ordering of the members of the other gender. It is really easy to prove that you can then find an equilibrium arrangement by iterating the following procedure i = 1..n:

have each man propose to the i'th woman on his list (if he's not currently matched, otherwise he does nothing). the woman accepts if she's not matched yet or if the man ranks higher on her list than the previous guy she accepted.

if you think for a moment you can see (and prove) that this equilibria favors the men.

Also curiously enough, this exact algorithm is used to match med students with residency programs
Has anyone used this? Care to share your experience?
I wish we didn't seem to have a spcies wide blind spot when it comes to adopting risk. when people rail against successful money managers they are never looking at all the failed ones, thus ignoring the amount of personal risk involved. sure there are a few winners, but why do you want to penalize them for their success?
Windows had BSD code in their TCP stack for a couple releases of NT. There is still some BSD code in it and you can see the authorship notice if you do a strings on FTP.EXE;

I think Windows Vista got rid of the POSIX part by now. Embrace -> extend -> extinguish -> done.
send_file has been around since Rails 1.0.0

I'm sure it has. But so have components, and FastCGI, and webrick, and old-school Test::Unit [1], and fixtures, and the art of constructing CRUD routes one at a time by hand instead of using map.resources and RESTful routing. And a lot of other things which are extinct, deprecated, considered harmful, frowned upon, or generally ignored in favor of newer alternatives.

A blog post doesn't have to contain something new to be informative. Sometimes the fact that it doesn't contain anything new is informative: It suggests that the old solution is still considered the canonical solution. [2]

Thanks for the Guides recommendation, by the way. A very useful resource, indeed.

--

[1] That is: Test::Unit without Shoulda and/or Rspec enhancement, which seem to be all the rage these days.

[2] Of course, you have to be confident that the blogger you're reading has actually been paying attention.
Microsoft to laid off workers: you owe us severance
I check reddit, then check HN, then check reddit again, then realize I meant to check proggit.

At this point in time, i forget that I've visited HN, so I check HN again. But then maybe somebody posted something interesting that I missed, so I refresh HN and look at how it changed. I do this a few more times.

Then I ponder, trying to remember what other forums I regularly visit. Ahhh, the Cavern of COBOL. So I check that. And then I think of a few more places. To refresh my programming, I see what's on the Drudge Report. By this time, there might have been a new post on HN, so I go back to HN.

Then I go to work, and check HN and Proggit. Then I check HN throughout the day. Usually while compiling. The build process has gotten quicker lately, so maybe I should get a few more antivirus programs. Then I get home and do anything but get on the computer. God, what was I thinking? Then I get on the computer anyway and check HN and Proggit, and realize that proggit is too low-quality and go back to HN, but then realize that HN is getting really repetitive and it's full of people who are just full of themselves, which I don't like because it reminds me of myself. Then I try to rip myself from the screen and if successful go have a life or something.
Email, Wall Street Journal, HN, RSS Reader, Digg(once a week maybe), Work
Good argument and I agree with you, but by my point is more focused on recent actions in regard to the socialization of risk and privatization of reward. My comment aside, I definitely appreciate the value of honest financial gurus.

To your point re: the principles of capitalism, US is still very young and most institutional investments funds are not top performers longer than a few years. They are NOT the best for picking long-term winners, ultimately their criteria is governed by a 5-10 year exit. Let's not carelessly forget where capitalism can get it wrong — self-interest has done plenty of harm in man's time.

What concerns me is that many of these "managers" are now on the 'creation' end of the "solution".
I do actually define grace at the bottom: Helping others you are competing against without feeling conflicted about it.

My point was that unless you learn to do this, it's very difficult to achieve success as an athlete. So devoting yourself to sports sort of encourages a certain level of spiritual development.
I posted it for two reasons:

a) The 100gb choice isn't listed as a normal upgrade option. People here are likely to be users, and also potential paying users. Classify this as more "useful link" than "news story".

b) This is news.YCombinator. There's nothing wrong with YC companies gaining a large amount of attention here. On the flip side, if it isn't interesting/useful then don't vote it up.
It takes you to the page after you're logged in.
I am currently playing around with it. Decent support vector machine implementation. However, I have some problems with it. It is by far not as hugh as weka http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
It is in python (big plus) and seems to be easily hacked for online classification.
I like https://mlpy.fbk.eu/ a bit better, as it has also a decent integrated Nearest Neighbor (ok, ok this one is not hard to implement on your own) and FDA + DWT (awsome).
One serious problem of HN is that the amount of good stuff on here greatly exceeds my capacity for absorbing it all... Roughly one week goes by and I have at least another months worth of reading added to my list.
Is anything made in the U.S.A. anymore? You'd be surprised
Sure, I saw it coming too. Saved several of my friends/family from buying in 2007 by convincing them that the converting subprimes were going to kill housing values.

What I'm saying is that the doom 'n gloom echo chamber is not useful at this point. It would have been useful right after Glass-Steagall was repealed, but not now.
First of all, there's a supply/demand issue here. There are a gazillion kids looking to A) break into the music business and B) spin up their own consumer software startup. Guess what? As a result, you don't get to live really well unless you make it.

Making it obviously includes a liquidity even, but it can also include great success pre-revenue and/or pre-profit. How do you think senior management at Ning is doing, salary-wise? Howabout Twitter? Digg?

The serfdom remark is just wrong. It's not serfdom-- it's sharing risk. He's risking a pile of (admittedly someone else's) money. You're risking... absolutely nothing if you're getting paid close to market rates. The closer you get to a sure thing that everyone is going to get rich (or at least get all of their cash back), the more entitled you are a market rate salary.

No one is forcing you to accept his terms. You lose nothing by punting your own startup a few years into it and getting a job at any time-- except whatever you haven't vested.
It seems to me the average quality of startups is inversely proportional to the money (and the ease of getting it) sloshing around the system. Having another round of circle-jerking will do nothing for long-term revitalisation of the economy.
PySVM might have been a better name, since it looks like it only does SVM and kernel methods. I haven't used this package, but I'll recommend libsvm and liblinear because they're fast and have wrappers for just about every language you want, including Java, Ruby, Matlab, and Python http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/#python

If you're doing large scale linear classification, liblinear is especially awesome and fast. http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/liblinear/

EDIT: From the PyML documentation:

"By default the libsvm solver is used in training. To use the PyML SMO optimizer either set the optimizer attribute to ’mysmo’ or instantiate an svm instance as svm.SVM(optimizer = ’mysmo’). Note that for a non-vector dataset, the default libsvm optimizer cannot be used and the PyML native SMO implementation is automatically used instead (it is slower than libsvm so is not the default)"
He's not making an aggressive claim here. He's just saying, if they sold ads on the home page they would be profitable. That's a pretty straightforward calculation.
I was speaking of the propagation of gravity which defies C as a limit on mechanical interaction.

you also missed the point of the overcomingbias post, which wasn't that his uncle was wrong, but that he was right for the wrong reason. If an idiot tells you the sky is blue that doesn't make it false.
His uncle wasn't making a specific claim against the theory of gravitation, but using gravity as an example of the ignorance of scientists as evidence against listening to their claims in general. this kind of reasoning is common and dangerous.
Yes, great lib (totally forget about the python bindings). I was using it under matlab works like a charm
Gmail, HN, iGoogle (one huge page with all my RSS feeds), Reddit, BBC, CNN.
They could easily be profitable immediately if they put big ads on the homepage. But that would hurt the experience. As long as they don't need the money, they want to keep the user experience as good as possible. The hope is that they will develop a less intrusive, more targeted form of advertising that is still effective.
Early netbooks lagged in performance and battery life. For example, my Asus EEE 8G performed about the same as my 4+ year old, battery-doesn't-work Dell Inspiron (same or close 900mhz Celeron CPU).

The newer Atom CPUs apparently are slower than the Celeron CPU but they have better performance/watt (better battery life characteristics).

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-efficiency,20...

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/03/08/intel-atom-initial-...
These are important things for our society, but they were all done by retail bankers and brokers, not by investment bankers, hedge funds, PE firms, etc. Investment banks and PE firms actually help destroy value (most M&A deals lose money for shareholders).
I apologize for implying that you are an idiot. I was being facetious after taking the news of "denatured proteins" in a happy, light-hearted manner.

As for the allergies, shall I come to your home for a demonstration? You can watch my lips and tongue swell up while I scratch my chin and neck something fierce and spend a couple hours wheezing. It's pretty frightening to watch, and it gets worse over the years. I'm glad I've needed to be hauled to an emergency room only once. I do keep an Epipens on me.

Someday when you are prescribed Epipens by bona fide allergist MDs, you will be handed several brochures. Some of them will comfort you with the statement that many people out there, commonly your most immediate family members, won't believe you and think you're (consciously or subconsciously) making this all up. And some of them are designed for other people to read so that they will take you seriously.

To be honest, living with dangerous allergies--especially a large number of bizarre, dangerous allergies--is mind-blowingly tough, physically, nutritionally, logistically, emotionally, socially, and professionally.

Enough with the heavy stuff. I shall end on what I hope is a more pleasant note. I find it amusing that when I make an occasional trip to a health food store and people ask me about my grocery needs, about 3/4 of them recommend some naturopath or other for some loony muscle test, and the rest are firmly convinced there's no such thing as allergy at all to anything "natural."

We live in a strange world. :-)
My home page is iGoogle, but instead of reading the stories in the built-in RSS, I always click through to the various sites (Digg, TC, HN, CNN, BBC, etc). No idea why.
Sweet, thank you I'll give it a try :-)