skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm unsure I agree with it also.
Android has Google's wallet to fall back on. That could be one reason why it's successful.

Mobile devices fill a different "comfort", I think. Desktop OS's out there try to fill a broad spectrum of wants (and needs). I think Linus has been quoted as saying something like, "Desktop is a hard problem to solve", and that the Linux world hasn't even come close to solving it (yet).

I know a lot of people who would otherwise be lost on a Windows machine be completely comfortable with iPhone or Android devices simply because it fills that niche. Computer illiterate people seem to gravitate to, not desktop, but mobile devices.

So maybe Android is the new "desktop" for those types of users. Power users are now left to fill their own comforts. Maybe Linux powered desktops will eventually be the winner in the future. We'll see.

Open source codec race is, as far as I'm concerned, not over yet. Opus shows a ton of potential for audio related streaming/recording. Webm is supported by most browsers (except for Safari and IE). It's not a bad container, too. Compared to mp4, it's not that great, but I really can't tell the difference when watching something online anymore.

So, the wars aren't over. Android with Google's backing will be, and is, a force to be reckoned with. However, I wouldn't cancel out the possibility of another open source and free alternative coming around the corner to change that. Perhaps Firefox OS, who knows?
Canary is ahead of Dev, so sometimes there are exciting new things, but mainly it's a mixture of either more or less buggy.
Sure there's better places on the net for finding specific information, I follow threads about subjects I'm interested in which tends to keep me in the loop without too much effort or information overload.
This works even better if you know what the deals are ahead of time, either from searching online or by knowing someone that works there.
I think having those posts are important for SEO reasons (I often times look for comparisons by typing in Product X vs Product Y in Google - there's probably nobody )

The problem is just how they're framed, as there's a number more of them vs. general marketing and usability posts. If they hid them away a little better in the back (kind of how RingCentral does here - http://compare.ringcentral.com/) it wouldn't be as much of a problem.
Hm, are you sure you don't have 4g disabled? What provider/phone do you have? I have a Galaxy Nexus on Verizon and I get 4g almost everywhere that I'm willing to call a city.
I didn't even notice the headphone jack on my Galaxy Nexus was in a different position (on the bottom) than it was on my previous phone (on the top) until someone pointed it out months after I switched phones. I make plenty of use of headphones but the jack position is apparently not something I consciously think about while plugging them in.
How about deep-cycle 12 volt batteries? You can buy a single battery for ~$130. This battery produces 55Ah and contains 660 watthours of energy. you'll need about 22 of these batteries, and it will cost about $3000

So for a 3-day supply, you would need $9k in batteries? Not bad...
What Apple does well: Take a nascent but exploding market and create a fantastically superior experience via vertical integration. Get way out of in front of the competition and own the consumer mindshare: PC/iPod/iPhone (almost Newton)

What Apple doesn't do well: Own the mass market. The one place they have - music players - has really collapsed as a stand alone market and merged in with smart phones. (ie no one in the right mind today would launch a stand alone music/video player)

Why Apple is in trouble: 47% of all revenue comes from the iPhone and it's clear that that market has moved past their sweet spot.

What Apple needs to do: Understand that (to them) this market is mature. It's not about fighting Android. It's about finding the next PC/Music Player/Phone where the potential is huge and the vertical integration of hardware and software will blow away the competition for 3 - 5 years. What is that? I don't know or I'd be running the place! My fear is Steve would have known but Tim does not seem like he would.
True. Reproduced below for convenience. http://disq.us/8bqidj

Dear Song, this is milton, CEO of VSee. I actually agree with you - we suck at marketing - and I am personally to blame for this. I did my PhD at Stanford on human factors of virtual team work via video. I never did any company before - and I have struggled a lot over the years learning how to do it - and to not disappoint my team (who works long hours). from my psychology background - almost the entire company is focused on making a great product - we have a lot of designers and great engineers and this is our singular focus (as you will see from using vsee).

For marketing - I am a complete dummy here - and I wish I know the secrets to do it well. I asked Anne, our writer, to write the vsee vs. competitor X articles since I get asked how is vsee different from X about 10 times a day. I was tired of repeating myself - and doing a bad job at it. So I asked Anne to write it down for our users. I was also pleasantly surprised that it is actually working for inbound marketing - we are now the top page for many of our competitors - they spent money on marketing - we ride their coattail :)

We actually love competition, why we are the ONLY company who lists all our competitors on our home page (see the bottom link). From my PhD days working on vsee by myself - I love competition since it pushes me to make a better product - and everybody wins.

One decision I do regret is not spending more time learning about marketing over the last few years. I spent quite a bit of time traveling and working in refugee camps - from Syria on the Iraq border to Africa to South East Asia. We got pulled into these projects since vsee requires less than half the bandwidth of Skype and has fast screen share - so refugees is now one of our biggest user segments. I have been to Africa 5 times and MidEast 6 times in the last few years - and when not going there - I spent most of my weekends working with developing countries from Egypt to Nepal to Gabon to use vsee for their telemedicine to virtual team work. If I didn't go to these refugee camps - I would have more time to learn about marketing - and vsee would be in a better shape. And I can always go work w/ refugees After vsee is successful.

Thanks for the thoughtful critique, with warmest regards,

Milton
CEO
VSee
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I'll say that you have a bunch of wrappers in your page's source.
If you were the only one in possession of oxygen I would buy it from you, but that would not imply that I had no problems with the idea of buying oxygen.

Also, the difference between GPL2 and GPL3 is large enough for many BSD backers to be of concern (the anti-Tivoisation clauses mean that one cannot close down firmware compiled with a GPL3'd version of gcc if it contains even the tiniest part of libc. Possibly, even using some of its macros in your code would be enough to require you to make your software GPL3. We won't know until this has been to court, but why take the risk?
"Now, did iFone choose their name based on the positive connotations associated with Apple? I doubt it."

I see no reason to doubt it. There are exceptions but "i" prefix anything generally is trying to cash in on the association. Whether Apple deserves to be the only company that can use "i" prefix is another matter (I would say no).

This is simply another case where Apple will end up writing a big check. They did it for iPad in China, iPhone from Cisco, the swiss clock thing a couple months ago, etc. Again the difference is Apple users aren't crying about how broken the world is because they have to write a check for walking all over some other companies IP.
International Obfuscated Ruby Code Contest 2012
I don't see email disappearing. It is one of the classes of communication, from least disruptive to most disruptive:

Messaging - email, fb, linkedin, etc

Broadcasting - twitter, fb wall, rss, etc

Instant Messaging - skype, irc, etc

Calling - skype, phone, etc

In Person

That people are doing more messaging through fb, linkedin etc doesn't change that what they are doing is essentially email.
You're absolutely right. Everyone harps on pie charts for being awful for element-to-element comparisons. This mainly stems from Tufte's work and experiments from Cleveland and McGill.

However, in part-to-whole relationship tasks, pie charts can outperform bar charts, since in bar charts there is no true "whole".

(In addition to Few's post, Kosara has more on this: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/in-defense-of-pie-charts)
"Daniel P. Friedman and William E. Byrd demonstrate miniKanren, a simplified version of KANREN - a declarative logic programming system with relations embedded in a pure functional subset of Scheme."
CiiNow Looking for Cloud Gaming Engineers
CiiNOW is a small well funded start-up looking for low level C/C++ developers in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are looking for anyone who is passionate about programming, algorithms, and just getting things done. Experience in H264 encode/decode, networking, android, or Set-Top-Boxes is a plus. We have implemented a generic, low latency, virtualized, real-time gaming environment in the cloud. If you are interested or want more information, send an email to jobs@ciinow.com
this library: missing the point. use templating libraries instead of this please.
The title is misleading. It should read :

"Android now powers 75% of all smartphones sold <b> in 3rd quarter of 2012 </b>"
it does have some fragmentation with the new screen size, but supporting iOS versions is a dream compared to android. 85% of my users are on iOS 6 already and 98.5% are on 5 or greater. You can easily drop support for 4.xx and below, and it wouldn't hurt too badly to drop support for 5. Try doing that on android.
Somebody posted a news aggregator on here a few months back that I keep an eye on...

http://hackurls.com/
Different toilets are accommodating for different physical differences. It's not racism if someone is selling suntan lotion on the beach and only approaching light skinned people.

In the case of poverty, this is not a genetic difference - it's the product of culture. Poverty has no color, anyone can be affected by it. Why then, when the problem is not of skin color but of poverty, are we talking about skin color at all? The way I see it is that there are people who need a hand up because they lack the resources to get up - I don't see a whole race as being disadvantaged because that is extremely presumptuous and inaccurate - there are plenty of rich black people. The simple solution to this is to make things like education free if you earn below a certain amount. This resolves the issue that affirmative action tries to tackle without siding with a particular race. It's just common sense.
I meant on par in overall user experience, not that they are equivalent in every feature. iPhone has shitty maps, no NFC, worse CPU/GPU (I think), no expandable notifications, etc.
I feel like one point that is missing in this conversation is that sometimes when you don't talk to people about your ideas you miss out on a lot!

I frequent a lot of technical mixers in the region and I talk to a lot of people about their ideas (and sometimes about my ideas). Not to mention validation (how many people get excited about your idea), but there are a lot of helpful criticism or leads to be found by telling people your idea.

There were a ton of folks that, after having heard what they were doing, I was able to point them to similar entries in the field ("your idea sounds really similar to this existing site, but they're different because of X") or to tools that could help them ("hey, have you heard of twilio/stripe/etc, because that could help you bootstrapped quickly", or "hey, you should talk to X, he's actually working on related topic and could give you some insight").

If you're some huge company (Apple, Facebook, Google) you already have a huge pool of internal brains to pick. If you're one lone entrepreneur on a mission, I'd say you benefit a lot more from telling good people about your idea than it is to stay mum about it.
I think the key for effective use of C++ is to know what to do and what to use to do it. It's certain that relying on multiple inheritance for example is probably a bad idea.

After working with Ruby for some time, I realized that many co-developers don't have a slightest of a clue what they're doing with the language yet they do just about right with it - with C++ similar (careless) mindset and skill level would very soon end up in a terminated project.

In the end it's the domain which matters more than the languages - as I implied in my earlier comment, I outright require as much control over the hardware as possible - there are no alternatives for me. Rust comes close(and it's nice, I like it thus far!), but let's see in a few years.
thanks for the feedback, thats a great answer and addresses most of the concerns that I had.

By hacky I meant that RESTful with VB.NET isn't the default way of doing things.
Open source has won the enterprise. (Servers and platforms)
The Android codebase may not be killable, but Android as a platform certainly is. Google is the only thing holding Android together; if they pull out or a major OEM or carrier grows balls, they'll fork and the ecosystem will shatter. Remember Android is mainly [edit: Apache] licensed so there's no requirement for forkers to stay open; I have serious doubts OEMs and carriers are interested in helping their competitors.
This is exactly what pg calls "Blub programmer" syndrome:

Programs that write programs? When would you ever want to do that? Not very often, if you think in Cobol. All the time, if you think in Lisp. It would be convenient here if I could give an example of a powerful macro, and say there! how about that? But if I did, it would just look like gibberish to someone who didn't know Lisp; there isn't room here to explain everything you'd need to know to understand what it meant.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Hopefully though, people who are open to new ways to do things can achieve harder things.
Apple has designed its business model to cede the mass market. It focuses on capturing the majority of industry profits, not sales. It should surprise no one that more phones ship with Android than iOS.

As a platform company, this strategy exposes a vulnerable flank since historically the platform company with the most market share attracts the best software and the most end users.

The greatest difference between mobile devices and PCs? There is no IBM, which essentially standardized a powerful alternative to the Apple PC within a year or two. Android is not a single alternative but more an umbrella term encompassing several alternatives. There is still too much fragmentation today in the Android ecosystem, and its structure fosters fragmentation -- not standardization. The device manufacturers saw how commoditization destroyed the PC manufacturers, and they are intent to avoid the same fate. Unless something changes, Android devices from one manufacturer will continue to vary from other Android devices in terms of size and functionality.

For developers, the right way to segment operating systems is not Android vs iOS vs Windows 8, but by code reach. In other words, how many devices can be reached with the same code base? My hunch is iOS will have an impressive lead in this metric, but I'm happy to be proven wrong if someone has contradicting data.

Apple is content to yield marginally profitable customers to "Android," provided Android remains as fragmented as it is today. If Android were to unite, or some other OS emerges, allowing devs to target 75% of the market with (fundamentally) the same code base, the threat to Apple becomes far more dangerous.
That's the idea I have at this point. There are parts of software I enjoy - why the hell else would I stay in a degree program with a ~20% retention rate? - but it's not something I find quite inspiring at this point. But another thing the post and the other comments made me realize is that my 20's as a whole can be an experimentation ground, and I have plenty of time left in that block.
Another root cause:

"I started to compare my life to others, hating people based off of their status. All it brought me was anger and a lower self-confidence. Almost immediately after deleting it, I felt better. I'm mostly ok with how I live my life and I don't need to compare my life to that of others."

via http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/11wm5w/to_those_w...
Yes, that need a bigger disclaimer. A huge one in fact.

As well as the extreme importance of having a 'generator interlock' - something that physically disconnects your house from the power grid, so you aren't electrifying external power lines (lines that people expect to not be electrified when the power is turned off).
Do you know what I like about HNs compared to other sites (e.g. Reddit, /., etc)?

It is constructive. There are a bunch of people who are interested in self improvement, trying things, failing, and then picking themselves up and trying again.

That's rare. You don't find that in many communities. Most of the time it is just negativity and "you can't," "you shouldn't," "here are all the flaws," etc.

Hopefully this grouping of people and ideas will help all of us in some way, they do say that it is the people you surround yourself with...
Why Pinterest has NO PUBLIC APIs till now? Afraid?
Just a thought, let's discuss a bit.
I'm a fan of AppFog's pricing model. They charge more in the vicinity of $25/GB.
CiiNOW is a small well funded start-up looking for low level C/C++ developers in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are looking for anyone who is passionate about programming, algorithms, and just getting things done. Experience in H264 encode/decode, networking, android, or Set-Top-Boxes is a plus. We have implemented a generic, low latency, virtualized, real-time gaming environment in the cloud. If you are interested or want more information, send an email to jobs@ciinow.com
I was getting nag emails from facebook on a test account. I did a password recovery and then went to the delete page listed here: http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674

When I try to login or do account recovery with the email address linked to the account it, I get

No Accounts Found
The email you entered does not belong to any account.

The account didn't have any "friends" so I'm not sure if the account vanished or is just not usable now. This was in September 2012.
Perhaps not all of those specific ones, at least not without modification. But you're being hyperbolic; there's absolutely no reason you couldn't have multiple implementations of the VM standard. In fact, there should be - in the grandparent I pointed out that single-owner standards like Java are a no-go in my opinion.

My only thought here is that having a bytecode standard to work from might give a little more flexibility and power to folks who want to experiment with alternative client-side languages.
Romney Contribution Page uses jQuery flipCounter with Hardcoded Values 
https://www.mittromney.com/donate/seven-in-seven
I am guessing the original poster is referring to GNU/Linux beating Solaris to win the server market.

EDIT: Regarding the desktop, just saw this: "Ubuntu will account for roughly 9% of all global PC shipments by 2014" http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/11/ubuntu-pc-sales-skyrocket...
Regrettably rhetorical question: And this is not a useful filtering function for most of the executives you'd want to hire?

A company must be able to fire people (I've been in ones that went down the drain because the founders were too nice to do this, or at least do it soon enough), but this sure sounds like Lord Acton's "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
that commercial is a terrible piece of advertising. I would have gotten a samsung for testing because its the best android phone (as far as i can tell as an iphone user) but i won't anymore. Telling your potential customers that they are idiots isn't a good strategy. I'll buy a nexus, htc, or motorola instead.
I think he's over-estimated the cost of batteries. I'm pretty sure you could get 55Ah 12V lead acid batteries for about 1/2 that. This is relatively common for people running off of solar power.
Apple Lost ‘iPhone’ Trademark Against iFone In Mexico
Exactly. The country experiences multiple such natural disasters each year, although most are much more localized.

Where it the/a reasonable policy for dealing with them?

Surely, this is an area where a little application of oft vaunted "best practices" might actually be appropriate?

(Local crews and crew management should be able to at least approximately validate the legitimacy of such claimed circumstances.)
Rama: Dead-Simple CoffeeScript/TCP Terminal Proxy
Best Sports Video Game Character: Techmo Bo vs. Video Mike
> We're developers right? We need to find the market with the most potential.

Are you optimizing for making money, or for making impact? There's no right or wrong platform (iOS or Android), it just depends on what your goals are.
You've got to ask, why is async programming used at all? The reason is twofold: first, the C10K problem, where too many threads kill performance, and second, sometimes you want to have multiple tasks run in parallel.

There are fairly simple syntactical solutions to both problems.

result = doSomeAsyncTask()
result.yield() // drops the thread, picks it up on response
// do stuff with result here

This magic yield() doesn't exist (to my knowledge), but if it did, it would preserve linear code and also solve the C10K problem.

You could have similar code to solve the multiple task problem:

result0 = doSomeAsyncTask0();
result1 = doSomeAsyncTask1();

while (result = getNextCompletedTask(result0, result1)) {
// do something to result
}

A Future in Java does something like this, but it doesn't drop threads.
My point is that implicit in your statement is the claim that programmers are superior to designers. I think this belief is both more commonly held and voiced on HN and itself worse than the stereotype that women are more likely to be designers; one is a statement of superiority of a group of people and the other is (without the first assumption) a nonjudgemental statistically reasonable assumption.

Is it really a negative stereotype that women and men are equally capable but that a woman is more likely to be interested in an equally respectable artistic career over a technical one?

It seems that people on HN hold this developer superiority belief so strongly that if someone asks "are you a designer?" they think that is actually an offensive statement. How dare you think I am a plebe designer and not a developer god that I am?
Does anyone else remember the "Blotto Box"?

http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/ANARCHY/COOKBOOK/BLOTBOX.HTM
OR permanent resident.
Pretty much every open source project that has succeeded has been the result of fat wallet corporate backing. I'm sure someone will offer a counterexample, but for the most part, hackers have to eat, and I haven't seen the "donate" model really work out. However, this is cool: it shows that open source isn't anti-commercial, it's pro-freedom.
I really liked his comment, and didn't consider it dismissive. Reminded me of Ray Bradbury in fact.
@milton: it's a phony excuse for being "bad at marketing" (which you claim and then cite your excellent SEO results) and kind of shoehorned in here to CYA, but your work with refuges sounds awesome and commendable. It's a great use of your product and talking about that more on your blog would be fantastic to read.