skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Summary: TCP throughput drops dramatically when packet loss is present. This technique uses forward error correction to compensate for packet loss, resulting in higher effective throughput over lossy links. Many WiFi and cellular connections are lossy, so this would be helpful in those cases.

They haven't improved the underlying link rate at all. In fact, the FEC overhead is going to reduce the effective link rate. However, in some edge-case high packet loss scenarios, the reduced packet loss will more than make up for the reduced effective link rate.
See the original discussion & better article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4686743
> Which isn't exactly bad for manufacturers since it means people will want to upgrade.

Just like people clamoured for 3D, right?

You can't force consumers to appreciate a feature by just insisting it's better. Touch screens won't move laptops just like they don't move all-in-one desktops right now.

Nobody wants to manipulate an upright screen with an outstretched arm. It's a completely unnatural thing to do, and the complete opposite of everything we've learned about the UX. Your hands need to resting when you're operating, or else all you're thinking about is when you'll be able to rest your hands.
Wonderful to read on -- unless you're reading kindle books that involve mathematical symbols. In which case, forget about it.

I wonder how well PDFs render on it.
I see your point, but I would argue that a tablet and PC have more common use cases and would benefit from using the same OS.
This is one of those posts where the comments on the site are better than the article submitted.

It also means less power consumption on mobile phones. There will be no need to increase signal power to get better speed or voice quality.
My favorite example annecdote: when signing up to pay for Dropbox, I got pretty far along the tunnel. I think after giving Credit Card details, but I'm not sure. At that point, I was presented with a choice: "Pay monthly ($10 per month)" or "Pay Yearly ($8 per month, paid in advance".

Being faced with this question, I decided to think about it, then left the page and didn't sign up. I did end up signing up a while later, so maybe this doesn't mean anything, but I could definitely imagine not remembering and ending up never signing up.

And all they had to do to was add another option: "Sign up for monthly billing ($10) per month. Don't worry, you can later convert to a year and start saving from that point".
> I don’t mind the lack of a Retina screen in the first version. As we can see from the iPad 3 and 4, lighting and driving a 2048x1536 screen just can’t be done well in a small, thin, light, inexpensive device yet. Maybe next fall, or maybe the year after that.

This is being presented as though the only two choices were "retina" or 1024x768, which is obviously not true. I understand Apple's rationale for using the previous generation's resolution, but it means they shipped a device which is inferior to the competition in at least one measurable way. I'm not a spec-driven purchaser. I don't care that the iPad mini has less RAM or fewer cores than the Nexus 7 (disclosure: I own this). But a tablet's display is a critical part of the experience and I find Apple's decision here to be a let down.
Could you enlighten us about how apple products aren't expensive?
Selling the companion ticket falls outside of my definition of "reasonable use".

The article I read said they were annoyed that some of these guys would actually use the tickets to, you know, fly places, all the time. As if they had unlimited access.

Did they really expect to sell a $400k item so somebody and for the buyer to fly three times a year?
Great, thanks for the replies before I got scrolled away!
With respect to digital textbooks, as someone who had to haul many American sized (read: Oversized) textbooks from class to class, from school to home, every day for 6 years during Junior High and High School, carrying around 1 iPad would have relieved my spine of great gravitational burden.

For this reason alone, I truly hope that digital textbooks become viable.
That makes sense. Just wanted to clarify that you weren't able to measure your organic app store pageview -> install conversion. I thought I had missed some hidden feature in iTunes connect, which is definitely possible.
They still did that every night until last night. There's cut-down version of last night's episode at the bottom of this article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20032882
I agree that's likely - the only reason I didn't say it is we don't yet know the full layout of Tesla's charger network.
People might not remember this but Amazon was lambasted as an unsustainable company for many many years. People also said that Facebook would never make money.
'tis a fine product but $190 for an extra 48Gb of storage? Can we not kill this practice already? I was pretty pissed that Google pulled the same stunt with the Nexus 7. It's 2012. Flash storage is cheap and widely available but Google and Apple (and probably Microsoft) don't want us to have it. It's very irritating behaviour.
>What does that even mean?

it is saying you are too cheap to buy an bigger iPad, so you should buy this instead.
doesn't LinkedIn make a bunch of money on their premium service?
Introducing the New Entertainment Experience from Xbox (SmartGlass)
Apple are exploiting one obvious flaw of the current "accepted wisdom" - that 16:9 movie-oriented wide-screens are to be foisted on all devices in sight.

Personally, I'm grateful someone is sticking to the 4:3 aspect ratio. If that made a comeback on laptops and monitors, so much better.
Well, there's no way your data will be complete until you get your mom to do an in-depth review of Borderlands 2.
That's a rather off-colour reply, it has to be said, sir. First you resort to an absurd comparison in a poor attempt at snark, then you claim that Mark Pincus and Andrew Mason are severely pained by their lacklustre performance on the public markets, without providing any evidence of that. This deserves downvotes in my opinion.
Or not if you are a woman or child, the likely majority of users for such a device.
Great design and love your jobs page. Very well written and quite refreshing. Not qualified for this personally but may be some day.
HTTP Requests and Other Awesome Cloud Code Enhancements
Firefox To Get OS-dependent Support for H.264 Codec
Of course DPI has an effect. An icon is a certain number of pixels in size, and DPI determines how that translates into physical size.
Mark Zuckerberg Crushed Zynga On Facebook's Earnings Call
> iPod + iPhone.. as far as I can tell are identical apart from the iPod cannot make calls.

Neither does the iPod have a data modem. It's not an always-connected communicator like the iPhone. There's a big difference in utility between always-online and mostly-online.
joenathan, what are the third and eight applications pinned on your taskbar in the linked image : http://i.minus.com/i4uIsZYCj4oek.jpg?
Pentametron: Tweets in iambic pentameter
Baseline Grids on the Web
That says absolutely nothing about h.264 decoder or encoder implementations, such as the decoders needed in web browsers to handle h.264 in <video> tags; that just says MPEG-LA won't charge people distributing h.264 video files.
I don't see your point. They're returning as columnists, not full-time writers neither managers. If they state clearly their investments and don't talk about them in TC, I don't see why wouldn't that be OK (independently of your opinions about their writing). Their opinion and thinking can be valuable for other topics.
It's not even just the Hackernews publication. It may have started here, but it spread to all kinds of other news outlets like Wired. Hell, I was even pissed off enough to tweet some shame at Amazon about it, and if I did that, lord knows how many other people did too. This was big news. I would have been surprised if they HADN'T done anything about it.

Although, them reversing the wipe purely to save their publish image is equally despicable in my opinion.
Short home page vs long home page
I think the Nexus 7 is also a better travel tablet because it has GPS and google maps.
Don't over think it. They used the resolution of the original iPad and iPad 2 so no applications need to be modified.

Only low end devices engage in a nerdspec race. Personal status devices are marketed as experiences and life accessories. Who gives a flip what's inside if it makes you happy?
I liked the design and just bought a warrior script+audio. I will give it a try and send you the review.
The 13" Pro can't be the perfect choice without discrete graphics. The Intel HD 4000 may be the best Intel graphics to date but a 4 megapixel display is going to bring that chip to its knees.
In hindsight, calling Freeloader and Support.com "pump-and-dump schemes" was not entirely fair of me, because both companies had real products and customers. If I could edit my comment, I would refer to them as "overhyped startups ultimately doomed to failure in which the founders cashed out before the collapse." That seems more fair.
There is a company called Dragon Innovation who do just this: http://www.wired.com/design/2012/06/dragon-innovations-manuf...

There is also an interesting podcast on the process: http://theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-113-sudden-sinoamerican-s...
The German system, called "Teletext" is still alive and kicking. See for example http://ardtext.de/ and http://zdftext.de/ of the first and second TV channel in Germany. Even in times of the Web it's often faster to get the latest sports results through teletext (if you just want the results and no clutter).
You triggered something: I have been wondering why Apple does not have iPads support multiple user accounts that are easy to switch between? With iCloud, it would seem reasonable for a family to have a min, a standard iPad, and perhaps a future "iPad whopper" (with perhaps a 14 inch screen). They could be left laying around the house and anyone could just pick up the appropriate device as-needed.

I can answer my own question: Apple doesn't want people to share these devices: fewer sales.
It is perhaps a difference in thread creation semantics, or something like that. But, Solaris threading has been rock solid for many, many years.
No True Scotsman fallacy

It is, at least for me, more just transparent snobbery than the No True Scotsman fallacy. The same way some video game journalists don't like to cover Minecraft, as it's "not a real video game".
> not adding a retina display allowed the iPad mini to be less than half the weight

do the pixels weigh more? Seriously, would faster graphics weigh more? Or are you saying juicing the graphics would eat more battery, and therefore, it would weight more?
The third is Google Chrome and the eight is Media Player Classic. I'm using icons from this pack here http://dakirby309.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d4n4w3q

I created a couple of the icons myself for FreeCell and Spider Solitaire(spider&crown).
It's the same in Sweden (at least for public service broadcasting SVT). There is an Android app that I use regularly that gives the same user interface as the television screen. Text-TV as it is called here is still very fast in breaking news, as well for relevant though brief news headlines. It is one of the best medium for news still.

For example, the news that Sweden was on its way to turn around from 0-4 to 4-4 against Germany in WC qualifiers reached me by the means of Text-TV (the start page said so at 3-4), so I could tune it in and see the 4-4 goal.

http://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html
I realize this isn't exactly what you asked for, but my personal opinion in terms of straight up window management is a solid tiling window manager like dwm or xmonad.

The Windows WM adds a bit to much shine to windows (for me) and doesn't have the efficiency that I love with tiling window managers. Mostly the ability to have everything I want viewable at once, along with keyboard commands to manage everything, is what makes tiling window managers so awesome for me.

Having said that, I do recognize that it's only this way for me. For many people, the default Windows WM provides plenty of power and flexibility to be awesome.
My biggest gripe would be with the abomination of a language we have for functional design and verification, SystemVerilog.

- It has been developed without public discussion, now that the IEEE has shut down their mailing lists to non-paying entities and persons

- The steering committee are bright, well-meaning individuals... who don't appear to have any language design experience between them, and whose knowledge of programming languages appear to be limited to Verilog, Java and a daring dash of Tcl. They have never seen a feature they didn't think was worth adding as new syntax.

- It retains backward compatibility with Verilog, which was a cool hack in 1983.

- It basically looks like Java with a whole bunch of additional (inconsistent) syntax for stuff that should probably be in a standard library, but...

- It doesn't have a standard library

- Oh, and by Java, I mean Java as it was in 1995. Or at least, it will have sort of the same feature set, once they add interface inheritance - later this year. Yup, 2012.

- Its metaprogramming facilities are weaker than ANSI C, which is why most large ASIC shops end up brewing their own metalanguage syntax, usually by having embedded snippets of Perl or Tcl.

- And this inexpressive, crippled language somehow has a spawling mess of a spec that runs a whopping 1200+ pages.

The entire thing is a train-wreck.
I was a little surprised when then said that the electron combines with the proton to form a neutron, but apparently it is called "electron capture" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture). In case anyone else was wondering...
A contract does not provide for what is reasonable. It stipulates the relationship between two parties. if you say unlimited personal use, with no right of resale, then I can fly all day every day without worry. I don't see how flying a lot on an unlimited lifetime ticket can be legitimately called abusive.

If I buy a lifetime, fly anytime ticket, and use it all the time, you don't get to call that abuse. If I use the maximum physical quantity of something, for which I have purchased an unlimited supply, that is not abuse. If I am in breach of contract, then I am in breach of contract, but that's not abuse. Abuse implies that you don;t like what I'm doing but I'm not in breach of contract.

Calling something abuse generally means that I've found a use of the service that you didn't forecast for and despite being contractually acceptable, it means you aren't getting the advantage you thought you would from the contract. Expecting me to not use the service to my full advantage is naive at best.
"Fusion Drive might be the most interesting announcement
today for our day-to-day computing. Similar SSD-as-cache
arrangements have been kicking around in the Windows PC
market for a while, and the Seagate Momentus XT brought a
large cache to laptop drives a few years ago, but these
have only brought mixed success and mediocre improvements so far.

With tight OS integration, larger performance gains are
possible."

As someone that has used Momentus XTs in a few different systems, they make a very significant day to day difference when compared to a non-cached standard HDD of similar RPM. The improvement clearly isn't the same as a true SSD, but is is very noteworthy, especially given the price per GB of these drives versus true SSDs.

Also, I don't see how having "tight OS integration" will improve this sort of drive. The drive already knows which sectors you are accessing the most and can optimize the cache for that, how is involving the OS supposed to make a significant difference here?
Right, it's akin to a wire service for news organizations, and it's priced similarly not surprisingly.
Oh yes, I remember.

How did that ever pan out? Were employees forced to renounce their prior options grants, or did the pressure change management's mind on this?

Otherwise, yes, Zynga's present situation's been a long time coming, pity it's the bastards who made off like bandits.
For a phone I want the exact opposite. Give me an iPod Nano sized phone and I would be extremely happy.
Pincus and Mason may still be running them, but they both already cashed out big time.
The OS knows about entire applications / resource bundles / documents and can run stronger heuristics against your usage than a blind block-level controller.
I use GWT for front end and PHP on the back end. Since I was more comfortable in Java, GWT came out to be a natural choice.
The tap targets on a 10" iPad are quite big, there was some room to shrink the screen without it hurting usability. Besides, the 7.9" screen size wasn't randomly picked:

The tap targets on an iPad mini are exactly the same size as they are on an iPhone or iPod touch (which also confirms that Apple is using the same equipment to produce the iPad mini screen panels as they used for the iPhone 3GS — they're just cutting the panels in a different size).

“I think there’s a method to Apple’s madness in recommending 44-point-or-larger tap targets for all iOS apps, both on the iPhone and iPad, despite the fact that on the iPad-as-we-know-it, each point is physically larger than a point on the iPhone or iPod Touch. (1 point maps directly to 1 pixel on iPad 1/2 and older iPhones; 1 point maps to a 4-pixel square on the iPad 3 and iPhone 4/4S.) A 44-point tap target on the rumored iPad Mini would be exactly the same physical size as a 44-point tap target on the iPhone.”

http://daringfireball.net/2012/07/this_ipad_mini_thing
Yet Another Post about Startup School Notes
OS X handles multiple monitors well enough, or did you mean Gnome? Windows UI is polished and has some good conventions, except that I keep trying to do things in terminal that aren't there...
I approximately "invented" this after reading tons of productivity blogs and stuff.

I keep an org-mode file with 3 headings:

* week range

** day-in-week

*** major topic

And then I log what I did in the day. It is unbelievable how much you actually do some days when you feel like you did nothing but yammer and poke small problems.

edit: I've done this for about 47 weeks now. I keep a single file, synced out to a backedup location periodically. Anything worth writing about goes in here. My hope is that any professional conversation and act is captured here, ready for later searching and review.

I also keep a high-level TODO list at the top of the file when I'm pondering priorities and direction.
sudo vim /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com
I, for one, see your point. How about this part:

"At the time, Nasa couldn't guarantee a spacecraft for more than a few months of operational life, and so the outer planets were considered out of reach.

"That was until a 25-year-old mathematics graduate called Michael Minovitch came along in 1961."

Which is followed by,

"To reach Neptune [Voyager 1 and 2] would have to last for over a decade in space, operating in the darkest reaches of the Solar System billions of km from the Sun."

Solving a limited three-body problem and inventing the gravitational slingshot is way cool. Throwing in a mess of red herrings and yellow journalism detracts from the point of the article.

Oh, and anyone know why the Bbc doesn't want to capitalize 'NASA'?
>"Mark Pincus and Andrew Mason are both still running these companies."

Because, at least in Pincus' case, he can't be removed. It would be pretty hard to argue that he wouldn't have been canned under different circumstances.

"Pump and dump" may be a bit much. But I'm glad that it's coming to light that business shadiness doesn't start and stop with the financial industry; it occurs everywhere there are substantial amounts of money changing hands. The Valley has some pretty serious scum-baggery going on. I hope we hold the people who promoted this stuff accountable in the court of public opinion.
Anonymous going to lauch wikileaks like project called TYLER
Python vs. Node vs. Pypy
Is it? I've never head any other than some very old people which doesn't know what a tablet or a computer is calling a random tablet an 'iPad'.
I never read anything that talked about this as part of the problem. It was always "We didn't expect them to use it so much."

That's an awful lot of strangers to make transatlantic flights with at 200 bucks a pop, and it would take quite a long time to recoup the multi-hundred-thousand dollar investment in the companion ticket. Hardly seems worth the time for somebody who can afford half a million for a couple of lifetime passes.
I tried the final Windows8 (64bit) from DreamSpark in the latest VirtualBox again today (after giving the RC a shot).
There were improvements, but it was slow as hell and finally crashed hard when I tried starting the Maps application. And it was gone as fast as it was installed.
Perhaps it is usable after SP1, but it certainly isn't usable (for me) now.
gstreamer itself will use libavcodec
I've heard this 20 times (Don't Build a Startup, Build a Business), I agree, but this article is like nodding your head at what you should do, but doesn't give you any indication to how to actually do it. I agree, lets build businesses, but how? Exactly how?

These articles should start like this to be of value:

"If you have a startup and you want to turn your business profitable this year than this is the most important article you will ever read."

"I am going to show you a "special measure of success system" that you can implement right now to start turning profits this month."

Then you go on to show them
- how to setup kissmetrics to make cohorts and funnels.
- A formula to calculate your cost per user.
- How to make a projections spreadsheet.
- Give them a madlib script to use and cold call until they get 10 people who they think would pay for them service to to prepay before building anything.

Then you have a summary sheet with a rubic where you ask them questions where they fill simple answers based on cohorts, cost per user, projections and the success of the cold calling. That score of the rubic should make it night and day whether or not there startup will be profitable or not this year.

Thats of use. Make that the article.
Gladly, thank you!
The problem is these guys themselves think they are awesome. They are not. Case in point: they came back to TechCrunch because they were failures without it.

These guys are really bad for the startup ecosystem because they are not intellectual and move the focus from the story/startup to themselves.
Anyone else familiar with "Arbitrary Free Protection"? 'cause it's only turning up one search result for me.
Also I didn't mention the updates that require reboots are only released once a month.

From here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/14/minimizing-res...

"WU will consolidate all the restarts in a month, synchronizing with the monthly security release. This means that your PC will only restart when security updates are installed and require a restart. With this improvement, it does not matter when updates that require restarts are released in a month, since these restarts will wait till the security release. Since security updates are released in a single batch on the second Tuesday of every month, you are then getting essentially one restart a month."
Maybe this should be addressed elsewhere, but I wonder what you see as the benefit of multiple desktops. I've dabbled with them on occasion, and could never really see the point. Maybe my workstyle just doesn't fit well with it, and maybe I need to be more organized and/or disciplined. Obviously many, many people do like the capability, and I wonder what I'm missing.