skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If so it hasn't translated into any sort of "halo effect" for android tablets to date. I'm not sure why that concern would be expected to suddenly manifest after Apple releases a device.

No-one really seemed interested in Android tablets regardless, until Amazon dipped their toes in with a tablet that didn't make a strong 'keep your apps' case [1]. Google got some recent interest with a tablet offering potential cross-device support that's relevant to many more people, but absent sales figures it'd be a stretch to project either of those as evidence of an android halo.

Particularly given Android's particularly strong penetration overseas and Amazon/Google's notably US-centric introductions.

Beyond that, you're assuming Android users have lots of paid apps and notable numbers of those paid apps have tablet versions or still make sense on a tablet [2]. I'm pretty certain most Android users don't have such large libraries of paid apps that they'd present any meaningful consideration when choosing a tablet.

Particularly these days when every app outside of games and multimedia editing apps is just a front end to a web service that offers both iOS and Android clients.

[1] An offering where you could probably get some existing android apps to run, but not through methods non-tinkers are likely to suffer. (Installing a second store? Sideloading?)

[2] e.g. if we're still talking kindle fire/nexus 7, there's no cell data. GPS info is limited compared to a phone. Camera apps may not be worth it with lesser sensors. etc.

Even on iOS I would be surprised if many people used the exact same apps on their phone and their tablet. Aside from some 'universal' games -- things tend to make sense or not largely based on form factor. And the outliers people do use on both, anecdotally at least, are overwhelmingly 'consuming web service' types of apps. (instapaper, facebook, etc)
Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8
True, but you're missing the main thrust of the "I could never do that, I don't have time!" comment.

It's an excuse for not trying. If you don't have time to try, you can't fail.
Powerful Command Line Tools For Developers
> This contains a major oversight – as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Visa is an investor in Square. It is not motivated to back the competition.

Sure it is. Microsoft invested in Apple while still competing with them.
At risk of being callous, why should they? If an employee already dislikes a company to the point that a recruitment letter angers them, why should the company go out the way to accommodate them? The amount of effort it would take to throughly research every recruitment letter recipent seems like it would be a largely pointless endeavor with minimal returns. Most people aren't going react negatively to an email feeler and the ones that do are already a lost cause.
I feel like I unintentionally stirred things up with my commentary on empathy, so I'll skip responding to that part for now except to say that yeah, I know they're just my opinions, and they were formed from a position of relative safety.

Obviously, autonomous cars are in their infancy, but I think that to trivialize them at this point because of that is to ignore their farther reaching steps. When the light bulb was invented, it would have been easy to categorize as a more expensive candle for the rich, but it clearly brought about much more and changed conditions for the world at large.

Autonomous cars have the potential to completely reshape the commute, traffic, how and where cities are formed and function and travel. It's a bigger project than just throwing a GPS and LIDAR onto a Prius.
In about 10 years http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Launching Text Reject
I think you chose an exceptionally poor reason to downvote him. You downvoted him because you disagree with his views ("view things through very narrow lenses"), which is different from downvoting him because you disagree with him only in phrasing.

Downvotes should be for comments that do not add to the discussion. Considering that most of the comments here are in response to him, his comment clearly added to the discussion.
Turn an Old Lamp Into a Flexible Smartphone Stand
What I need from a WindowManager/Desktop
A list of conditions that I personally expect from a good windowmanager / desktop.
The fact of the matter is, of the 250+ games I have in my steam library <50 of them work with mac. This ties me to windows.

When I run windows 8, I can run steam and all my games, they dont magically stop working. While windows 8 RT isnt an open platform, the windows i will be running on my laptops and my desktops will be.

I'm very disappointed in valves wording, and it shows how poorly their responding to their first real competition.
This reminds me of an older article from the WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113236377590902105.html

Note that Monta Vista doesn't have an entrance exam - parents of students that work hard want to be around students that work at the same level.

"The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian."

"'This may not sound good,' she confides, 'but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class.'"

The difference is that the NYT article emphasizes the students' working class background. In Cupertino, the families tend to be upper middle class.
I would love to see a modularize Javascript app recorded in this manner that uses the DOM. Maybe a mini 4x4 minecraft game. As someone trying to teach himself , watching the order in which the developer writes would be really enlightening. Regardless, this is a great site.
Nice use of the :target pseudoclass. I was not aware that CSS could do this.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#target-pseudo
I do find, however, that we create increasingly complex "frameworks" in the aim of flexibility. We then say how "simple" they are after we learn all the complexity, and use "design patterns" and other heuristics to try to hide just how verbose and complex the frameworks are. Modern GUIs and Web Frameworks (and not just the Java ones that folks like to take potshots at) are great examples of this behavior.

I worry that the moment we come up with a simple approach to something (like HTML), we continually add features in the name of "flexibility" until we have an unwieldy mess requiring HTML, CSS, Javascript, a framework, and various middleware pieces to make a site. We make a new library to abstract away the complexity, but the cycle repeats and that library is too complex, so a new library is created on top of it to simplify.

I've been programming for years, and I still find pieces hard. And it's almost always the dressing: the fundamental algorithm and approach can be solved, and you think you are done... but having to deal with all the "frameworks" just to make a site or an app becomes an exercise in pain. And those were supposed to be the easy parts, right?

I have to admit, I do long for the days of Pilot where I could tell Turtle to just turn left and go, and it would just do it. No windows, no nested frames, no viewports, just describing what I wanted done and the machine does it.

(Yes, I know that modern apps, the machine-learning bayesian-based twitter sentiment analyzer that mashes weather forecasts, stock movements and movie ratings, parallelized and built with enterprise-grade user rights management is a far way from drawing a rotating box... but for sake of argument, wouldn't it be nice to just say "do it" every once in a while?)
I futilely attempted to get reassigned to something close to field D (really, B, C, E, or F would have been just peachy) and that seemingly got me flagged as trouble internally.

"Meets Expectations" ranges from 3.0 to 3.4, and employees in this range have no idea where in that interval they landed, even the career effects of the numbers are dramatically different. 3.4 is above average, while 3.0 is fatal to transfer and promotion, even years later, but unlikely to get someone actually fired. There are several managers who've been caught using 3.0-3.1 to keep people captive but unaware of the fact that they've been internally blacklisted. It's disgusting but it happens.

Whoever came up with the "innovation" of making review history part of a transfer packet (and that has nothing to do with Google; it pre-dates it) is a domestic terrorist and should get the same treatment that all the other terrorists get. It's a horrible system that eats companies from the inside. Enron's cultural decline (leading in macroscopic ethical lapses and bankruptcy) has been established to be a direct result of its globally-visible, mobility-destroying review system.

Google's Perf is a play-for-play copy of Enron's PRC, but Google probably won't go the way of Enron for extrinsic reasons. A lot of Enron employees had nowhere to go (for geographical and specialty reasons) and had to make ethical compromises to beat PRC, whereas a lot Googlers leave for greener pastures when that happens.
Quit worrying about it. All cheaters get is a grade, or certification or diploma. Worry about teaching people. Worry about people learning. Quit measuring people.

People will cheat, and maybe they are great scam artists and will be able to cheat through the rest of their life. Those few and the others who screw themselves by not learning aren't worth being concerned with. Spend (all) your effort on those who want to learn.
I use this as a bookmarklet, it will remove this form of redirect from most links
http://pastie.org/5132859

(I should have used a gist. I'm hungry and now I want a pasty)
Is it just me, or can't you just leave the ", false" part away?

And to the people that use "return false;" in their JS to prevent default actions from happening, i.e. a click on a link or submitting a form, don't, stop using it, e.preventDefault(); is the way to go, as posted by timothya.
It's only talking about mortgage interest.

That's a pity. I'd like to read a well-written piece about how interest deduction for business works out. It seems designed to make it easier for businesses to invest, but I wonder how the costs of leveraged buyouts etc compare.
Great work, Pat!
So when will Steam let me add third party repositories for software?

This is all FUD being spun up by Valve because they don't like competition for their app store.
"Amazon and Google smell blood in the water."

Apple made itself vulnerable to this sort of attack by basing building so much of their recent advertising campaigns upon display specifications - i.e. retina.

By focusing on something which is easily (and perhaps misleadinly) reduced to numbers, pixels, they have opened the way to the sort of simple value proposition Amazon's page suggests.
Hi, can anyone pls post a mirror? I am unable to access this from work. Thanks in advance.
In chrome hovering shows "hover test" in popup and the frameloss.org link in status bar.
It reads like the parent got brought in as an expert in D, not Q, and then got told to work on Q, which wasn't their expectation. You'd be unhappy at that happening to you, right?
Ever use the app store?
This was a random audience question during the Q+A at the end of the talk, jokingly asked before a real question
I started programming pretty young. AppleSoft BASIC at age 9 or 10. Initially just transcribing programs from hobbyist magazines, but then writing my own programs and branching out into lower and higher-level languages (assembly and HyperTalk). While it definitely had a magnetic attraction to me, I found it difficult to learn (my first internet connection was a few years away, the web even further) and I was always learning by rote.

I still remember a distinct moment when I was 20 or so that everything magically clicked into place in my mind. Suddenly I grokked the nature of abstraction and what it meant to translate a mental model into a computer program irrespective of the underlying language. Trying to put it into words always sounds trite, and it's not as if I was magically a better programmer—more like the beginning of a journey, but it was a clear point where I feel like I crossed the steep part of the learning curve, and it was all downhill (at least on the first derivative) from there. I'm not sure if anyone else has ever experienced it this way, I suspect this type of (seemingly) grand epiphany is more likely to happen when you're younger and the brain is more plastic, or maybe I just took too much LSD. In any case, I'm convinced programming belongs to a class of skills (perhaps music is another) that require some higher level foundational concepts that do not occur naturally in most common human experience.
I agree, my apologies. I do realize it was a bit harsh, but his comment was very biased and I just couldn't stand it. I will follow your approach next time. Thanks.
I get loads of "opportunities", by HR people from employment agencies that never even had contact with the company they'll be presenting me to. By comparison, companies doing the same thing isn't that bad.
"it's not your employer's job" It's in their best interest however to do so, as replacing him costs money.
Collaborative Sciene Platform. Why not?
I've been wondering. Why there is not a platform where scientist from all over the world work together on a problem?

As a student of Math, I know that when you work in a group of people and everybody contribute ideas it flows better. It's like a brainstorming, and when you are stuck in a proof, that's amazing.

So, why there is not some kind of forum where, for example, mathematicians from all over the world are working in a problem? It could be a famous problem.

I know there is this issue of "Who would be the author", but it could be all of them! If this is serious, to have an user you could prove your identity. Also, if you check that thread, it will be logged, so if you publish it by yourself, there is a proof you could have steal some ideas from there.

I don't know, but I see this exciting. There would be minds all over the world discusing problems and proofs, trying to solve something really great.
Wondering if the $512 reward had anything to do with being geek.
Intel's 335 Series SSD has 20-nm NAND
Please don't propagate the myth that Google asks prospective programmers questions like, "How many golf balls could you fit on a bus?" Google interviewers list the questions they asked when they write up their conclusions, and anyone who asked a question like that for an engineering interview would be immediately contacted by the hiring commitee and told not to do it again.
Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZIAA_ur...
What prevented you from moving to a different field? Is Google not the dynamic, chaotic mass of teams that I've been led to believe?
Back in the day, a lot of those games made a lot of assumptions about the hardware that it directly accessed. Even going from ARM 2 to ARM 3 to StrongARM caused a lot of problems for games.
Yeah, that's a pretty nasty problem actually.
It's sad to see the amazing work that gets submitted in hopes of obtaining a percentage of what they could make with a proper client.

I'm curious as to how many other graphic designers are outsourcing their work there...
I think your attitude is amazing, and I wish more people had it. Keep at it!

But here is a fair warning: this stuff is hard because it's genuinely tricky. Computers are unforgiving in a way the human mind can never be. So be warned: there are other walls like the one you just vaulted over, and the other side of them is worth reaching. But, it will feel like what you just experienced all over again.

One famous wall that my college used to weed out upper and lower division students at UCSB was pointers. Recursion also really shocks some people. Some people get really distracted by the high level modeling that gets used to build systems. Some people have a really hard time learning how to incorporate how the computer actually works into their programming model.

I don't mean to discourage you! I mean to say that you are not alone. Many people find this stuff hard and work diligently to learn it throughout their careers. It's a fact often lost due to the culture of dominance and bravado that the computer science world has grown.
> The fact of the matter is, of the 250+ games I have in my steam library <50 of them work with mac. This ties me to windows.

And what has Valve done to promote gaming on OS X exactly? Sure, they had a short Portal promotion and have added games since, but they haven't exactly pushed the platform.

And besides, Macs are not good gaming machines. Desktop Macs (iMacs and Mac Pros) are much more difficult to upgrade than Linux/Windows desktops, and you get less powerful hardware for your money.

You can't install OS X on a non-Apple desktop (not without a lot of hassle, anyway), and very few people have done that. OTOH, you can easily install Linux on a Windows desktop, which is what most gamers have at the moment. A lot of the people on HN have spent a lot of time in the Bay Area and have forgotten that 90% of the population doesn't own a Mac, so let me remind you of that fact. Unlike with OS X, gamers can move to Linux without purchasing any new hardware.

Therefore, using the lack of success of OS X as a gaming platform since Steam added support for it to say that Linux won't succeed either is faulty logic.

> When I run windows 8, I can run steam and all my games, they dont magically stop working.

Well, there are many of us who already run Linux and only keep around a Windows install to play games. The vast majority of my time is spent playing Source-based games. If I were given the option of playing Source-based games in Linux, I would spend very little time in Windows.

> I'm very disappointed in valves wording, and it shows how poorly their responding to their first real competition.

I think they're responding the best they can. They're going up against Microsoft, which is well known for its anticompetitive behavior. The Windows 8 app store will be installed by default and given prime real estate (baked into the UI) in Windows 8. Valve needs to do something quickly before Microsoft starts abusing this power, and the best way to do that is to get gamers onto a platform no one controls - Linux.
Chromium OS doesn't seem like a particularly good fit for the form factor and Android already runs Chrome, so I'm not sure I understand the effort, but I guess it's a neat hack.
I may be making the problem worse but both this post and the comments section are some of the worst I've seen on HN -- from linkbaity title to incorrect possessive pronouns (I barely speak English and caught it while skimming), and then the deep analysis of anonymity on G+ completely based on one or two anecdotes with no relation to G+, anonymity, or even the Internet.

Why is this submission at 80 upvotes? What value am I missing that others are seeing?
10 years ago is very late in the RISC OS lifecycle, so I'm curious -- how did you come to discover it then?
Development of a Sudoku solver in APL.
Track Hurricane Sandy on iPhone/iPad Using these Apps and Online Resources
>Europe's ridiculous labor regulations do more to strangle startups in the crib than almost anything else.

That's your opinion. A different opinion might be that Europe simply lacks a good "startup hub" like PG talks about.

The fact is, it depends on where you're talking about. In Switzerland and the UK you can certainly fire people if you want/need to. You just have to give them notice of a few weeks (or months in Switzerland). This isn't "ridiculous" and the employee is held to the same standard.

Unlike the US where the power difference between employer and employee is clearly seen with the expected two week notice of employees and 0-minute notice expected of employers.
I didn't mean to imply that they don't have the right to anonymity, just that I don't think that Google is any less right for refusing to provide it. It is their platform, and those who feel they require anonymity are free to choose another platform (like Livejournal, Twitter, Identi.ca, etc.) to voice their opinions from.

Whether or not the benefit of real names matters, Google has decided that they think it does. I happen to agree, but even though I (obviously) disagree with the idea that Twitter allows pseudonyms, I don't feel justified in complaining that they don't require real names. That's their decision just as much as this one was Google's.

And while I realize that what I'm writing comes off as a slightly less sensitive version of "If you don't like it, then leave," type of comment, and I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I really don't understand why people who disagree with Google's real names policy can't just up and go elsewhere. This isn't remotely as serious (in my humble opinion) as mandatory arbitration clauses in contracts that we're seeing so much of lately.

Again though, that's just from my perspective, and may very well be a result of a white privilege.
Ouch - This surely can't be good for the LIFX - Kickstarter project.
I'm totally with the author here, I just wish we could also include some of the other large companies like Facebook.
I totally need to get a gaming-capable computer to run Linux on, and install Steam on it! (Currently my Linux laptop just has old Intel graphics which is ... rather underpowered. Also need to wait for Steam-for-Linux to become public, obviously.)
How do you stop offline students from cheating then?

You can't have exams for everything - for example creating or extending a big project is best examined by labs and/or a bigger project. If you have the same lab series for everyone students can simply copy the solution from other students or ask someone for "help" where the help consists of explaining exactly what to do. I know I've been guilty of helping my friends a bit too much.

Organize groups? Some students may coast on the skills of others. We had a programming project assignment where I wrote 95-100% of all code. In the beginning we split it around 50/50 but it ended up with me writing it all anyways. In another course we wrote a game in Java where my friend rougly wrote 1-2 classes or something. I know it's unfair, but I didn't really care - I like to code and I didn't really have to put in any effort anyways.

Cheating may be easier in online courses, but trying die hard to stop all kinds of cheating is bound to fail, cause it's impossible.
>> And the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers right now work quite well in my experience. There are a few bugs, but nothing that can't be ironed out with a little time.

The proprietary NVIDIA drivers for Linux are built directly from the same source base as the Windows drivers, the only difference being the interface layer between the kernel and the driver. Feature set and performance are identical to the Windows drivers.

I'm not aware of any known critical bugs in the kernel parts. Usually when stuff breaks in the NVidia drivers, it's because of a combination of a kernel update and sloppy package management by the distribution. None of this should be an issue if Valve decides to release some kind of Linux based 'Steam loader' that boots directly to the game itself, or make their own Linux distro with tight control over the kernel and GPU drivers.

I'm not sure how good the ATI linux drivers are these days though.
Those companies argue differential pricing schemes are vital to their success, and should be enforced by US courts

I find this sort of reasoning very frustrating. It's not the job of the courts to ensure that anyone's business model can continue to be followed profitably. There may be sound legal reasons to overturn precedent in this case, but "companies are losing money" is not one.
A good solution in c is to use calloc, which is malloc + zero'ing out the memory.

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdlib/calloc/

Also, in a standards-compliant compiler, statically declared variables are automatically initialized to zero unless stated otherwise.