skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those of you who are wondering, this is how a market evolves. When Apple built the iPad they took their best guess at what the 'right' size for the device was. Designers debate this stuff all the time, and I'm sure they looked at the iPod/iPhone screens vs MacBook screens etc. The 10" form factor was very successful for them.

Other folks have smaller form factor devices, the Dell 'Streak' [1] being an early example of an Android based device that started out at 5" and 'grew' to 7". 5" was not very successful and mocked as being an unwieldy phone, the larger size was better.

Laptops got 'huge' the 17" one being the pinnacle, and then 'small' again with the most popular models being 13 - 16"

Other tablets came out in 6, 7, 9, 10, 11" sizes at various levels of acceptance or not.

The Kindle was the first e-reader with a solid market foot print, it was 'small'. E-readers of 7" are common.

So dialing all of that together you end up with a bunch of different designers trying different ideas and some of them are successful and some aren't. The same designers look at the successful products and try to extract what aspects of the design were critical, which weren't? How did people use them, how did people think of them, what did people want that they didn't get.

So this market is evolving.

So the folks at Apple see these things and try to capture as much of the market as they can. They saw folks buying a bunch of Kindle fires and Nexus 7's and hey, they could do that.

I'm completely conflicted because I like the idea of an A6x iPad but I really like to 30 pin connector on my 3rd Gen iPad.

[1] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/mobile-streak-7/pd

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Streak
> they sell the entire range of DRM free TOR science fiction novels

Which are all not available outside the US. I could only find 4 books on that entire site that were actually available to be purchased outside the US.
PayPal Partners With MoneyGram
Show HN: Blu Graphing Calculator for Windows 8 - Intro Video
Wow, props to you Mike for actually curating all of your iPhone engineering knowledge and share it with rest of us.

A few questions for you.
- How hard was it for you to pick everything up and build the iPhone from scratch?
- What do you suggest we do to get access to the equipments in some of these articles? It's pretty out of most people's price range.

Thanks again! This is awesome.
AR Drone Helps Swarm of Self-Assembling Robots to Overcome Obstacles
> "No, for me the problem is much simpler. Its a shitty business run by very poor business minds."

Or maybe they were very shrewd business minds. After all, you have a business that was very much a fad - and any insider would be able to tell you that, but yet somehow you've convinced the wider world that this was a sustainable new trend, and to pour unimaginable amounts of money into your company.

So, tons of funding, and you can see the cliff at the end of the train tracks. What do you do?

Lavish offices? Lavish perks? Lavish accoutrements? Lavish trips?

Horrifically irresponsible and downright illegal? Perhaps. But in the circumstances, perhaps the best (selfish) move.
Now I need to learn design of PCB...
Dreaming Of Being An Investor? Learn From The Best In Silicon Valley
I've only heard about that at a few big name companies (i.e. EA, Zynga) who's working conditions are legendarily bad. What about some of the other big players? Nintendo? Microsoft? Rare? Square Enix? Valve?
We also use KeePass (Classic Edition) saved in a repository that we can then share. The nice thing about KeePass is that there are clients/ports/compatible programs on Windows, linux, iDevices, and Android.

The repository gives us versioning and a relatively crude but effective way of sharing as well as some additional access control.
remember kids: metric porn can be dangerous.

there's no guarantee that 'blog CTR' gave you people interested in the message. sometimes it may just be that they did not find what they wanted on the short page and clicked around, while losing their patience. know what you are measuring and why you are measuring. and do not forget that the metric is not the goal.

but nice documentation of the tests. and even i can't argue when you use signups as metrics :)
wat. Those are variables that shouldn't even be on the same axis.

What you can do is to code those variables as 'levels of involvement'. Then maybe you may have a zipf's law distribution.
And that's happened. Several times. One that comes to mind was a Microsoft product, though I know there've been others.

Does anyone know of an "orphaned DRM systems" list somewhere?

Another, from Yahoo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07...
Exactly. All they've said is "we promise we won't charge you for sending bits of h.264-encoded data across a wire". It's not clear that they legally could charge for that even if they wanted do!

And yet they've fooled vast numbers of people into thinking that h.264 is free-of-charge as a result. It's the most impressive piece of anti-FUD I've ever seen, sadly.
Some people think HN is a startup aggregator, and the actual tech and toolkit and non-startup news is unimportant.

There was a post some time ago and one comment went into some detail about HN's overall demographic and how the segments of that aren't entirely compatible (well, if you removed the personal opinion from it, anyway).
How did we get to the iPhone?
nice, could very useful for chinese knock off branch design
Facebook Demetricator:A browser extension that hides all the metrics on Facebook
Search in Start Menu was there since Windows Vista. After getting accustomed to that, the Start Menu of XP looked too awful!
PHP is coming to mobile -- and it's about damn time
empathy (noun): The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
Use an open format and learn to love the bomb?

Districts probably aren't going to care, as they are looking for a cheaper way to stay current. I recognize the prices are not as good as they should be, but realize the logistics are removed from the situation. The monster of having to manage all those books goes away with a keypress, but lands them squarely on a treadmill with the publishers controlling the dial.

Open school books? Maybe teachers will collaborate and make their own material? There's a lot of room in there...
iPhone was definitely a team effort, so fortunately I had access to the top engineers at Apple to guide my personal development. The difficulty wasn't really learning the material itself, but rather figuring out what was worth learning.
As for equipment, there's workplaces like Hacker Dojo that have community resources, and in a pinch you can rent equipment from places like MetricTest. Oscilloscopes are pretty reasonable, but it's mainly the RF equipment that gets into BMW price territory.
Wow, that looks more bulbous than I was thinking. I find that a very awkward and unattractive shape.
Somewhat importantly, no one else claims isolated protons (hydrogen nuclei, which are stable) undergo EC. It's an effect of unstable, radioactive nuclei with too many protons and excess energy. Not free protons. In fact, naively that violates mass conservation: a proton+electron combined weigh less than a neutron. With EC, there is excess mass in the unstable nucleus. Here they are claiming something entirely different: the excess energy comes in from other electrons, in a coherent quantum mechanical effect. (An "effective particle", a "heavy electron", takes the place of a physical electron). It's not the same.
It is worth noting that the theory of Special Relativity is confirmed by the Michelson–Morley experiment, which happened 25 years before Einstein came up with his explanation. In the interim period, Lorentz had managed to come up with all of the contractions in Einstein's theory based on experimental data, but had no explanation of why it was true.

Einstein's insight was to come up with a single coherent theory that explained everything which had been observed, all together.

Therefore there was no period before they managed to confirm it.

The general theory was produced in 1916, when people were preoccupied by WW I. Its first confirmation was the precession of Mercury's orbit, which had been known about since the 1800s. Most people only heard about it after the second confirmation in 1919 when Eddington measured gravitational lensing during an eclipse. The third confirmation was the measurement of gravitational redshift.

Therefore it too was considered confirmed by the time most heard about it.

I say "considered" because several decades later physicists realized that all three confirmations are explained by a wide variety of plausible theories that do not possess the nonlinear characteristics of general relativity. (Removing nonlinearity would be desirable because it would make it easier to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.) This drove the development of better confirmations.

Note that theories are usually developed to explain existing observation, so the presence of confirmation before explanatory theory is actually quite common.
...It's interesting how companies like bring their skeletons out on the days Apple makes their product announcements.

Sort of softens the blow of it; at least a lot attention is diverted to Cupertino.
For my kindle, I think I'm in the clear.

(Edit: It's never hooked up to the Internet, except when plugged into my computer, so I don't see how Amazon or anyone else is going to be able to touch it.)
Three decades and over $500B later, Apple still fights like an underdog
Here's How Mark Pincus Explained Zynga's Layoffs To Employees
It isn't just fullscreen video, it's fullscreen anything. Anything that doesn't exhibit that behavior is using a fullscreen "hack," i.e. the way they did it before Lion.
So, You Want to Be a Front-End Engineer?
Not enough information to go on here. Without having some idea of what the upside is to you, this seems to be far more risky than worthwhile.

Now, if they have an inferior product, but a hugely us period bank account and you think this is a due diligence precursor it might be worthwhile. But more then likely even in that case you would be better off doing a garden path demo TO them, have one of your employees walk them through the highlights, not give them a full app to play with.
My sense is, and it's just my sense, is that they priced it more with cannabalization or the larger iPad's in mind and less with the competition in mind. If they had come in around $249 to $279 they could have still sent all the right signals about this being superior to the competition. However, at that price point they would have really impacted their $499 iPad. I believe Apple left a big hole for competition to thrive in because of the fear of impacting the larger iPad. Two reasons: Apple admits that the main usage for a tablet is surfing the web and checking email. A Nexus 7 does that just fine. Secondly, Nexus 7 will improve significantly from the 1st gen it is - Apple's given them plenty of breathing room to bump the specs and sell a higher end device at $299 and even $329 price. Apple had a difficult job but I sense they acted like the large incumbent they are and worried about their own shorter term margins and less on snuffing out the competition.
I see your point but let me pose the following question.

What if the demand for smartphones wasn't as strong over the last few years and thus the technology didn't grow as fast... instead the demand for electric vehicles was as strong as it has been for new smartphones over the past few years and thus the technology had grown faster?
No, I haven't missed your point—I'm telling you that I haven't seen a single app that does this (I might have one or two, but I can't really tell because they're essentially all crappy looking on my N7).

If you can point to some, I'd appreciate it, because I am deeply unimpressed by Android apps in general, at least in the context of the N7.

There are a few that are better than others (TweetLanes is one), but not enough to keep me using the device as anything other than 100% video and data consumption.
Oops.

I will have to look for an opportunity to use it on purpose.
I love my Nexus 7. I have multiple Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices (and develop for all three), but for me, the shared, non-sandboxed file system on Android is the huge productivity win (despite the security risks). It's very easy to copy files in and out using SMB, ftp, Dropbox, etc. and then use them in apps. Intents for different data types are also mostly a win for Android compared to iOS URL schemes, though Windows 8 / Store 'contracts' are pretty well-designed.
I guess mousing over to the corner is not so easy when you're in a non-fullscreen remote desktop: the mouse doesn't stop at the corner.
Yeah a 10% price difference could be a sizable chunk of their margin.
Exactly! Plus it's helpful for remembering the decisions that led you down a particular path, and for coming up with documentation.

I used Yammer for this in the past--just posted quick blurbs about that I did as I did it so that the team stay informed and I could remember what I had done.
I forgot I'm living in a world where people equate jobs with prosperity.
Exactly, they should have done more of that.
Yep. This appears to be nothing more than FEC. Maybe they used LDPC or LDGM, which are superior to traditional Reed-Solomon codes.

I remember doing research on FEC codes back in 2003-2004 for developing a protocol for sending large files over satellite links to multicast recipients when I was working for SmartJog.
What's a bit surprising to me is that Chinese manufacturers already know how to do it. They're becoming excellent at manufacturing, while it's become a bit of a lost art over here in the USA. I was lucky that my Caltech college curriculum included so many hands-on projects -- I'm under the impression that many EE majors spend most of their time in IC design. Can any current EE college students confirm?
Digging Into Apple’s Fusion Drive Details
This is the internet at its most awesome.
What Americans don't know about H-1B visas could hurt us all
Perhaps this chap would be suitable?

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/tor/881177993.html
re: buggy vs horrible tools

A matter of degrees, I guess. They're certainly improving, but we run into bugs and missing core language features in all three major vendors. I work for a consulting company, and we switch simulators and coding styles from one gig to another, so that may amplify my perception of bugginess. But just as examples, in the last couple of years, my coworkers and I have discovered:

- a case where one simulator gets the xor of a two-state and a four-state logic vector wrong.

- a case where another simulator converts from 4-state to 2-state value with the wrong result.

- one of the simulators doesn't implement a single-precision floating point type

Those are pretty fundamental bugs - not the class of bug I expect to find in a tool that has been in the wild for 5 or 6 years and costs more than my car for a single one-year license. And we've found many, many more less-blatant ones.
That's a good point since most networking standards were developed under the IEEE which was always more industry oriented than the IETF, I think they're both mostly industry players at this point. But still, there is a rich history of free contributions by academia which I think is rarer today.
Unzipping the Mystery: How ZIP Files Work
Maybe not Mason, but it seems like a reasonable assessment of Lefkofsky.
This could be demo'd very easily by gluing together:

udpcast (http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/satellite.html)
-> Sends/receives files over UDP. Supports FEC.

netcat
-> Join file I/O (from udpcast) to local TCP/UDP sockets

openvpn / iptables userspace
-> Provide connection routing.

Seems like an evenings work.

Edit: udpcast might not be suitable for this. I am surprised noone has already built a simple UDP FEC tunnel program...
Because they have built a great business in traditional media monitoring for brands and they are adding social media to their mix on an old platform. In a sense, our product would be the perfect addition to their lineup but I don'y think we're ready to be seen as potential sellers, we don,t have enough traction for this yet.
Clearly he meant that you can pick it up with one hand, and use it with the other. Nobody thinks you can physically operate the ipad mini with a single hand.
haha, it's pronounced "Finished". I also built https://snipt.net so I stuck with a similar theme. "Snipped, Finished", etc.
I really like Express. Quick and simple to get up and running with a minimal amount of code.
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_8gb

appears to already be sold out now
It's almost as if people buy devices because of the emotional response they elicit when they use them, not because of hardware specifications. Apple's marketing simply aligned more with what consumers look for in a device.
This may be related to the fact that WhatsApp actually works.
The upside is that they would be natural potential buyers of our company, but we're far from being ready for that.
I used Beanstalkd for a few years and I can testify that it's an awesome piece of software.

That said, that was before Resque and Sidekiq existed. I now use Sidekiq for my new project since I'd rather not reinvent the wheel. I suspect most people think the same way.
Also available in Python's re module, with a syntax that's just different enough to be irritatingly incompatible.

>>> import re
>>> r = re.compile(r'(?P<month>\d{1,2})\/(?P<day>\d{1,2})\/(?P<year>\d{4})')
>>> r.search("Today's date is: 10/23/2012.").groupdict()
{'month': '10', 'day': '23', 'year': '2012'}
Neat tool.
Reminds me of Carlyle's classic quote on bankruptcy: http://lesswrong.com/lw/43w/rationality_quotes_february_2011...
When i worked for a company that was acquired by Lockheed Martin, immediately upon the announcement of acquisition, several employees resigned saying they could not knowing work for a war monger.

Their conviction was greater than the potential wealth and very commendable.

Your comment insinuates that these employees had no morals and were freed by the failure.

This is actually a fucked up position.

There are many factors that play into this, the most significant of which is the employees living paycheck to paycheck where they cannot actually leave on a high ground position due to their needing the money... and your point is that "well, at least the company failed freeing them of any moral risk of staying with the company should it have succeeded and trapped them with lucrative options!"

To this I say, fully and openly:

Fuck every single thing about Zynga and the attitudes and policies it may beget.

FUCK ZYNGA

and I have zero sympathy for any of its employees in any regard.

I have been openly decrying this company for years - and I still will - I can't stand such bullshit in any industry and Silicon Valley should SHUN them and be ashamed of every relation to this company.

We are trying to make a better world here, aren't we folks?

If not, then fuck you - because if your goal is only self-enrichment then I despise you.
AMD launches new set of 8-core processors for gamers
I hope not, I just purchased an AMD FX-8150 8 Core Processor, Gigabyte Motherboard and 16GB of RAM for $399. So far seems like a good machine. Performance is not as good as an i7, but it's quite a bit cheaper.
The factcheck.org references are neat, though I kind of wish there were more of them. Is this supposed to be crowdsourced?

----------

Scrolling the notes is a little difficult. I keep trying to do it, and sometimes it works. Sometimes nothing happens, or I just highlight text; that target's pretty small. (It's particularly annoying when it cuts off a comment I'd like to read.)

Tried to leave a reply, and then it said "Enter a username". Changed my mind, couldn't get back to the commentary without reloading the page.

Chrome / Windows 7
> I remember doing research on FEC codes back in 2003-2004 for developing a protocol for sending large files over satellite links to multicast recipients when I was working for SmartJog.

Interestingly, this tool looks like it is useful for the problem you describe:

http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/satellite.html
Microsoft Surface: Sleek Tablet, but Clumsy Software
Zuckerberg: The games ecosystem is growing
Well. In terms of technical difficulty CEcertification is not ridiculous. However it does require not-insignificant amounts of time (writing the documentation) and money (certification).
Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware. On the whole they've done better than the companies that weren't.

Perhaps you could elaborate? This text 'sample' does not appear to play nice with your comment.
So Linux doesn't run on specific hardware that require hand crafted drivers from the manufacturer. Off topic much? We were talking about consistency of window mangers.

Again, you've listed NOTHING about the Windows WM that you are "used to" or is "particularly consistent". Because, you and I both know what those things will be and that most Linux DEs have the exact same configuration.

You've yet to be specific about a single thing and spent most of this last post on a fool's errand about Linux drivers????
Questions Linger on Battery Prices in Electric Cars
What CISC legacy baggage? Most of the old and underused operations are emulated with microcode on modern x86 processors. Chip makers use profiling tools just like software makers, optimize the most common cases and your benchmarks improve. There are decades worth of engineering optimizations in Intel and AMD's chips. Intel has a massive engineering and R&D budget and competing with that is pretty damn hard.

It has nothing to do with evolutionary heritage and more to do with you repeating ancient myths that haven't been remotely close to the truth of a decade.
I've got further using that tonight than I got in about 2 weeks learning Eagle. Thank you! A great project.
That might be exactly what i was thinking about. I know i saw some diagram.
At the moment Intel owns the high end, but AMD is a pretty good value if you're not going to use your computer mostly for lightly threaded things like video games.

http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-rev...
On a couple big projects, I've generally liked it - since there's less boilerplate ("<>" and closing tags in particular) and the primary identifying bits (- or %ul or .class) are at the far left of each line, I can generally read things more quickly and more easily than e.g. straight HTML or ERB's <%= %>.

But that comes from rather extended use, I'm definitely not claiming it's the best. There are plenty of things I dislike about HAML, but it does mean I read less, and I spend quite a bit of time reading and writing view code.

Mind if I ask if you've done PHP programming? If you have, ERB's <% would seem to be a tax you've already paid.
We use passpack.com over here, but for server SSH logins we strictly use publickey authentication.
Can't you just have a regular todo list where you check off or cross out items when you're done with them? Doesn't every single todo list app/program/notepad already do this?
Windows 8 is so good
Microsoft Surface review
Or it's an interpretation that the motives of the creator are important.

In my mind, Zynga "games" are to games what crack dealers are to entrepreneurs. It may be a subset, but it's a subset about which I believe quite firmly that those that participate should be shunned. They are an unethical company that produce products that I can describe only as predatory.

(And, yes, World of Warcraft falls in the same bucket.)
The trouble with Twitter is that you can't go back and find tweets from the past to figure out, say, what did I do in the 2nd week of November last year or when did I send that notice out.