skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As others have said, this article was remarkably sensationalist and cherry picked many of their facts.

However there is a grain of truth in here - while Europe had MUCH higher internet / phone / cable costs 10 years ago, from what I've learned from my friends over there the price has dropped dramatically. While 'regular' plans are comparable to US plans, the budget operators are incredibly cheap.

It's been a similar situation in Australia. We had incredibly high costs, and for many years the value of our internet went BACKWARDS - as the price went up, our data was also heavily restricted. However that trend finally reversed and it's much better value now. When I left Australia I had a 200gb 100mbit internet plan with a home line for $78 a month (and that included a cable modem).

I have to say I was pretty shocked at how poor the choice and value is in the US after moving here, particularly in Silicon Valley. Fast internet (> 30mbit) is incredibly unaffordable, and there is huge pressure to have to bundle with cable TV (which I don't want or need).

And what's up with the phone plans here?! The only reason I'm not absolutely screaming about it is I'm on a shared plan with my wife - if I were trying to get a phone just for myself the costs would be insane.

The biggest kicker is trying to find a good prepaid with data SIM - in Australia you can walk into any 7-11 and buy a SIM card for $2 and then get on a $2/day unlimited phone/data prepaid plan (i.e. you just charge up and then every day you use it another $2 is taken off your tab). There is NOTHING like that here.

I'm not sure if it's because of a lack of competition or what - in Australia all networks are now (roughly) compatible with each other, so if you buy a phone on one network it'll work on another. Then you have many many resellers who buy the network access wholesale from the big providers and then resell it. Same for the internet market. That's the only thing I can think of - the US needs to get this happening ASAP.
Twitter DMs from your friends can lead to Facebook video malware attack
In Defense of Apple's Maps
That distortion you're hearing is because of sharp changes in your signal's amplitude. To get rid of it, you should apply a little bit of smoothing to the attack and release of individual notes.
熱気あふれるベンタイン市場 / Cho Ben Thanh Market , filled with excitement.
read comments. it changed because of feedback :)
Two minor things: (1) that survey prompt keeps popping up even though I've already filled it out, and (2) the survey should open in a new window so I don't need to click the back button multiple times just to get back to your site.

Other than those minor nitpicks I like what I see so far.
emacs for haskell , nothing beats the way it can replace characters with mathematical notation, dynamic compilation and syntax highlighting.
intellij for java , unmatched IMO
eclipse pydev for python
Develop First for Mobile - Especially for Passes
Also don't miss "The Secret History of Silicon Valley", now playing at a YouTube near you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
To be fair, you can get similar costs in the US, but most people opt for subsidized phones (and the associated contracts).

I have a prepaid mostly-data SIM for $30/month via T-Mobile prepaid (http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/).

Maybe we'll see more consumers move that way around Google's (rumored) November 5th phone launch.
Please stop with the video tutorials
Seriously - to all you budding video stars out there with the video tutorials on how to use your product:

- I can read faster than you can talk.

- I need information, not personality.

By the time you've finished introducing yourself, I'm already frustrated. The online video medium may be great for bloggers, but when I'm seeking information, everything else is a distraction.

The use of text to provide information has two main advantages (that I can think of right away):

1. It's silent - no extraneous noise to disturb others.

2. It's repeatable - no need to scrub back and forth to absorb something that may not have been clear the first time.

The first time I can remember being subjected to a video tutorial was for Rails documentation, which apparently decided to eschew text for some over-produced video introduction. I'm probably not the typical user, but that one omission has pretty much put me off of Rails since the beginning.

The most recent offender is Apple, with some demo video on setting up an iTunes account (w/o credit card) which guarantees I have to give up 4-10 minutes of my life that I will never get back, without any guarantee of getting the information I need.

While I point out two examples, there are many, many more out there where video/animation/flashiness is the primary or only method of documentation. A tutorial video should always be a secondary method of providing information, never the first.

Really, it looks great: nice titles, expensive animation, very creative. Now, what are you trying to hide?

Remember: I can read faster than you can talk.
I expect you will find strong support for this position:

"In short, I agree with you that cartels and regulatory capture can get to the point where civil disobedience is warranted, but I don't agree that laws designed to limit short term rentals fall under this category."

That companies like AirBnb get us talking about them and re-evaluating the current legality is a Good Thing. As a person who bought a house when I had no kids and I and my wife were bring in two engineering salaries I recognized that folks with kids already were at a disadvantage, especially if one of the parents was at home full time.

A number of economists have argued that rent control hurts new families by unbalancing the market in favor of tenants thus reducing the supply of new rentals.
Explaining architectural tiers in Drupal | Rob Knight
Javascript's NaN
PyMongo, for instance, can do this for most operations by passing safe=True.
All I'm getting from this conversation is that there is a heavy prevalence of Stockholm Syndrome among MongoDB users.
NewSQL ? Seriously ? Do we really need another low-quality buzzword for people to re-use everywhere ?
Right now, it's manual. We're itching for machine learned solutions...perhaps the first step is to do it manually and use that labelled data later. But you're right, it's a huge challenge, and we're not sure how to do it.
It's back up. Was down for ~30 min.
Hope to see this expand to other campuses.
This wasn't the occasional write though, this was every write after 2GB. That should set off alarm bells somewhere.
If Americans value, say, TV more, than economics would predict that Americans would therefore pay more for it

And in a free market, the price signal that creates would incentivize other suppliers to start offering more, which would push the price down until it was roughly equal to the French rate. Why doesn't that step happen?
As a mentor though you can tune your interaction with a company to not slow them down with meetings right? Get them to execute on an idea and build up momentum with that execution and THEN if necessary pivot and iterate.

Or is your point that accelerator programs are aimed at companies in a particular stage and consumer apps don't need help through that stage. Surely the programs aren't that long and the next big thing could easily benefit from many of the benefits like networking and exposure?
Tesla Model S Review
Reminds me a lot of http://www.crapimissedit.com/ which is unfortunately shuttered now.
Thanks - did not know that.
That's a pretty extreme example and really more of a Google vs carrier battle than a Google vs Asus battle. Aliyun was trying to establish a Play competitor and lock Google out--you can't expect Google to play along. Since Honeycomb Google's been pretty strong relative to manufacturers. The biggest pre-Honeycomb threat was Motorola that was thrashing to cut Google out and get back in control (Skyhook, BlurOS) and... well you can see how the constellations happened to align there. What Google was threatening to yank wasn't access to Android, but access to the Platform Development Kit and possibly unannounced Nexus projects--i.e. access to the pre-Open Source drops. Someone like Amazon can pull that off because they don't care, but certainly Asus doesn't have the muscle. Asus was free to choose Aliyun or Google, it's not Asus's fault that Aliyun isn't as valuable.
If you use Firefox, you can set plugins.click_to_play to true in about:config. Of course it won't help for HTML5 content which starts playing automatically, but it can improve performance with making Flash playable only on demand.
The people over at MongoDB who wrote the tutorial? http://api.mongodb.org/wiki/current/Ruby%20Tutorial.html#Rub...
"The article doesn't really answer why the services cost so much."

The video ends with the author explaining that it is due to a cartel of 5 or 6 companies getting together to fix prices with "non-compete" agreements. Where is the government? In bed with them. There is your answer.
The most popular password is "1234", which constitutes roughly 11% of the 3.4 million passwords from the study.
Yep, same experience. Horses on cobblestones at 4am.
Mypy needs some extra syntax not provided by standard Python annotations (e.g. local variable annotations, casts), so it makes sense to have the syntax related to static typing clearly different from Python to avoid confusion. C-style annotation syntax also has the benefit of being familiar to a very large programmer population. There will also be a converter from mypy syntax to Python syntax.
Facebook et al. can reveal aspects of one's political views. "Oh $NAME went to a pro-legal-abortion march? We don't want those sort of people here...."
I don't believe Go's GC suite of compilers use glibc at all, for the record.
RIM deathwatch: BlackBerry subscriptions in “downward spiral”
>The argument "nobody uses them without Play and Maps" is invalid, though.

Why? CM is legally prohibited from bundling Play Store, Google apps like Mail, Youtube, Maps, Currents, Now etc. etc.

In fact, Google sent them a C&D for doing so.

http://phandroid.com/2009/09/25/cyanogen-gets-cd-from-google...

If users cannot obtain them from (sometimes shady) filesharing sites, how many using CM currently would have installed it?
In Seattle we have a startup called Spectrum Networks which offers 100mbps fiber and microwave internet to a small set of condos and apartments. Last I checked, it was a 9 person operation. I don't see why more startups like this haven't cropped up in other towns.
Because the whole "Free Cities" thing is part of the old Libertarian wet dream of establishing instant Utopias on whatever scrap of "unclaimed" land they salvage from somewhere (some rock or coral reef somewhere... or in this case, lands belonging to an indigenous group seen as too weak to defend itself). Where the world will finally see how efficient and truly egalitarian we can all live once the bane of Coercion has been abolished once and for all. And the sun will never stop shining, etc. You know, John Galt and his valley in Colorado, etc.

In any case, the current generation's de-facto "John Galt" (Peter Thiel) is one of the key backers of the Honduran project, so (despite the abuse of posting guidelinbes) that makes it very much a Libertarian topic.
What's the difference between "Androidium" and AOSP?
It sounds like you may have read it, but you would probably enjoy this essay by William Deresiewicz:

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-...
Teachers can have a very big impact on someone's life. "Oh I see you want to go to this college, wouldn't it be an awful shame if that B turned into a C...."
Most of the "low cost" cell carriers in the US actually lease bandwidth from the larger carriers or are subsidiary of the larger carrier, for example Boost and Virgin Mobile are wholly owned subsidiaries of Sprint.

Point being there's not as many carriers as you think their are.
I'm just happy that "100% Flash" sites seem to be on the decline.
First, your friends with MongoDB are fsync and safe. These are both documented and discussed in more than a few places: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/1052759609/mongodb-safe-and-...

So, assuming you are writing an ecommerce application, here's where I think these flags come in.

- Session data: fsync = true. Wait for a response, and ensure it's written to disk

- Internal web analytics: safe = false. Who cares if it's written, I've got an application to serve!

- Orders: fsync = true. I know, RDBMS, transactions, blah blah blah.

People tend to look at NoSQL and wonder why it doesn't function like MySQL, then they loudly complain how bad the software is. Nobody is writing articles about how Memcached doesn't function like MySQL.
what are you talking about? everybody admits it but it's not an easy problem, otherwise it'd be solved by now. multiprocessing module helps a bit in scenarios where it makes sense to use multiple processes instead of threads for cpu-bound stuff; io-bound problems don't suffer from GIL that much.
Show HN: kids fun timer
For those who have trouble getting their kids ready for school in the morning.
Basic Latin American history, guys. Do a bit of reading.
The mypy FAQ now answers this question:

We don't believe that it is practical to adapt the CPython VM incrementally for running parallel workloads efficiently. Instead, we are going to get rid of the GIL by having a new VM for running mypy code. The VM will be based on the Alore VM, but it will use compiled native code from the start (the Alore VM uses a bytecode interpeter). It will use a garbage collector instead of reference counting (CPython primarily uses reference counting), and it will also support a modified C Python extension API that will support proper multithreading without a GIL.

The CPython VM will still be used to run Python code and modules, and it will still be limited to running a single thread at a time (most of the time). Objects passed between the VMs will have to be copied or accessed using proxy objects, so there will be some performance overhead compared to native mypy modules. We plan to port commonly used, performance-sensitive Python modules to mypy and the modified C API to minimize performance bottlenecks.
Competition programmers at work. One year history of working with top coders
Free Markets don't work like that. If you charge 100$ for a bottle of water and most people charge 2$ than you end up selling far fewer bottles of water. Only the fact that we don't have a free market for high speed internet has kept prices so high and service so low.
I agree with what you said about Google doing these things for the good of the Android ecosystem, but the problem is with calling Android "open". There are a lot of caveats to that statement which almost always go unmentioned by the person calling it open.
This is a pretty cool solution; although I am getting a LOT of false positives. Could that have something to do with my hand-tagged MP3s?

(shameless plug)
I made a new album notification tool for Last.FM focused on easily excluding non-important artists a while back: http://releasification.frapp.it
> indicative of a trend that, in hindsight, will have begun just around 2011/12

I think the very beginnings of it were earlier. The moment Apple jumped the shark was when they banned apps not originally written in C/ObjC from the app store. In that moment they made it virtually impossible to be a geek with any credibility and not be at least a little embarrassed to be an Apple fan. They reversed their decision but it was too late - geeks flooded into Android and the Android market increased its app count by about 400% in the ensuing months. Ever since then I've noticed that my geek friends who carry iPhones have been defensive about it - they say things to rationalize why they aren't carrying a real geek phone.
Silicon Valley is moving to the Midwest in a big way.
One thing that is not mentioned is that in some European countries (like in France where I live), there is no limit to the amount of data transfer you can use in a month -- that is, on the home optic fiber lines, not on the mobile ones.

I have a $30 100Mbps plan, and if I want to download 10 TB in a month, there is no additional charge for that.
Mobile plans cost around $20-25 and are tipically capped at 3GB per month.

But don't worry, we're still complaining very much, that the lines are too slow and expensive.
And to retire SHA-1, they can put it on the back of a 747 to fly it past major cities and national landmarks on a farewell tour.
The problem with your code not caring if the odd record gets lost is that it probably also doesn't care if all records start getting lost.
It has some flaws but I've really started enjoying xcode. I am forced to use it for iOS but its getting better.
"there's a LOT of amazing things you can do with the UI that are much harder in Objective C"

I don't really agree with this. Can you provide an example?

Because there are a million things you can do in objective c with the ui that are basically impossible to do with html5, and many many ui elements you can configure 100x faster in obj-c(they also run 100x faster). Hell even having a reasonable 2 column lay out is surprisingly difficult in html/css.

With obj c/native if you are unhappy with some functionality of the ui you can very easily break into open gl and do pretty much anything you can imagine if you have the talent.

As far as I can tell the only real advantages of using html5 is that you can hit many platforms poorly with one code base, and that maybe you don't really know how to program or understand object oriented programming.

I would not say speed of making a ui is a plus for html unless you are trying to hit a bunch of platforms poorly or do not know the native languages well.
Gary Taubes is not just a journalist. He is a science journalist with a background in physics. This is an important distinction because he has the necessary training to correctly interpret scientific studies. That's what his book is about: it's a huge meta-study that explores the history and the current state of nutrition science. And his ultimate finding is that mainstream nutrition science is wrong and it's carbs that should be avoided, not fats.
Using artificial intelligence to chart the universe
I hate video tutorials. I don't even have audio at work so if there's a video, I'm gone.

But even when I do have audio, I feel like I'm spending 6 minutes to get 30 seconds of information, which drives me nuts. The worst part is that if I need to reference something minor from the video later, I can't ctrl-f, I have to waste time seeking back and forth.

So yeah, people who make video tutorials I think should probably have their own special circle of hell.
Meteor 0.4.1: Sending email and Node 0.8
Ha! I'm a web developer and I always learn. Every day.
well does it though ? Data channels seems to use SCTP over DTLS over UDP which would create a sudo "TCP" layer on top of the UDP layer as I understood it :(.
While I agree with the sentiment you're expressing here on some levels (people don't like it when you insult things they like, as they feel they need to defend their choice or themselves because of it), I don't think that quite applies here.

This is a case where, although the ultimate complaint of the author is the behavior of the product (which is documented, but un-intuitive in nature unless you've read up on the issue), it's the way in which he chose to frame the problem that is getting people upset.

This is a known issue, even if it seems like a completely poor design decision. The issue I think most people here are taking is that because the author did almost no research on the topic, he got himself into a problem, and is trying to blame it on Mongo.
So you're also against all the little "hacks" that startups are encouraged to do to gain traction? For example making a hundred fake accounts and creating fake "activity", or a one-person startup trying to make themselves seem more established than they are through various tricks? These are all variations on the same theme.
Often when one sees criticism of $COMPANY, it usually follows with derogatory comment and vilification of $COMPANY's users. I made an assumption and it made an ass of me and for that I apologies.
I don't know, I think it's helpful. It changes the conversation from being about the access language to being focused on how a technology processes data at scale. Well, almost...

Notice that even with the shift from "NoSQL" to "NewSQL", mentions of joins continues to be conspicuously absent from many of these discussions. So, it's worth noting that many of these NewSQL things are "almost but not quite SQL", hence the value of a new word.
It's stated plainly and prominently in http://www.mongodb.org/downloads that 32-bit version is limited to 2GB. It's mentioned elsewhere in the documentation, but the OP didn't bother to read them. "A gem and two lines" and it worked, so he expected it to work forever. That's not how engineers usually work. Most of the time, they over-engineer, not the other way around! They research the hell out of any new technology they want to use. I'm definitely less talented than OP and others on HN, but even I know a hell of a lot about Redis, MongoDB and CouchB, and I haven't even started to write a line of code.

And anyone who has read more than an introduction to mongo knows that you SHOULD use getLastError to be safe. If you do that, no data will be dropped.
> In theory, a 3 year developer and a 20 year developer are now pretty equal when we're talking about a technology that's been around 2-3 years.

Hopefully the 20 year dev can recognize the new thing as new and possibly immature, can identify some areas of weakness when compared to tools with a successful history.

> Attacks on these new technologies are perceived as an assault on this new world order, and those who have walked into being one of the "newb elite" respond emotionally to what they see as a battle for the return to the old guard. Am I totally off base here?

Totally agree.
All good points. Another thing that amazes me is how Facebook has quietly reinvented the AOL keyword and Microsoft Passport. Many, many web sites essentially outsource their login and account creation to Facebook. And advertisers often mention their Facebook url instead of their web site.
My experience with titanium was really poor. Lots of silent fails with no real error output. Also I found it very limited, more limited than just opening a webview and using html5 really and hooking into it with code for the native functionality.
I'd be very interested to hear about your experiences--what kind of net connection you have, static or dynamic IP, what software you're running, etc.
Surely "getLastError" is an extremely questionable concept in the asynchronous world? How do I know the 'last' error is the one relating to the operation my code just executed?
FameTube is YouTube Without the Junk
Hand-tagged MP3s are a problem, but it looks like I have some bugs in my scanning logic that are creating more false positives than I'd like. I've been collecting library.xml files to try and track it down - if you want to help out, send yours to luke@creaturecreative.com.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535417
That's sorta true, but it's overly simplified. You're not considering price elasticity.

It would seem that the French are more sensitive to price changes than Americans. That is, as price increases in France, it's hitting a sharper decline in quantity demanded than would be observed in the American market.

I don't know what the actual numbers here are, just that this is micro-economic theory as I understand it.

But in any case, I disbelieve (at least in part) that telephone rates (I don't know about other services) are higher in the USA. I base this on my experience of having just bought two years of domestic service for well under $10/month, and with international calls being cheap to the point of negligible. Moreover, with skype and other services being free, the bottom falls out of any comparison.