skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Almost all third-party software products ever created rely on some other third-party APIs

This is evidence for an unfortunate confusion about the usage of the term "API". There is a world of difference between a third-party library and a third-party service, each of which can be said to have an API. There are plenty of pieces of software which rely on one kind of API but not the other.

It is entirely possible to write software that doesn't rely on a third-party service. If that's the point you're trying to make then great! You see the thing is about relying on third-party services is that a great amount of trust must exist between the application and the service. It's a good way to go, but when there's no actual money moving between the app and the service, everyone has reason to be a little concerned.
I don't see these options as mutually exclusive. How is consumption of information canceling out sharing information? Especially with the ability to email tweets now. This seems to run contrary to what Dalton is writing about.

My favorite twitter comment is that you don't have to tweet to use twitter. You can contribute to the news, and you can consume it, Twitter isn't pushing for people to use just pursue one.
I miss the days when email was plain text.

I've started to filter off any email that has the word 'unsubscribe' in the body to my spam folder.
If our Patent laws allow for Patents (of any variety) that are this painfully and blisteringly obvious and come with 1,000+ years of prior art, then the law is more broken than I thought.
Well, for retailers specifically, the only one I actually read is Newegg. That's because, not infrequently, I've gotten a really good deal on one of their limited-time "Shellshockers". Just got a 180GB Intel 330 SSD for $100, for instance.

Why would I bother reading an email, and thus engaging your brand when _you_ want me to, if you're not going to offer me something I can't get by visiting your website when _I_ want to?

I bet the most successful retailer email campaigns are those that actually throw a bone, even if it's a little one like my new SSD, to their customers every once in a while.
OP here. Thanks for the comments.

For readability's sake we did not present the statistical side of the results, but they were unambiguous for everything we mentioned in the post. Perhaps in the future we should present those results in footnotes to assure inquiring minds that we addressed valid concerns like yours (e.g., overfitting).

Love the examples of valid reasons folks don't like trees. Almost any of them seem like viable hypotheses to explore for why folks fall in the 3% (though obviously we'd need very different data from that which we have handy).

To address the specific comment about trees per neighborhood: unfortunately we didn't have granular enough data about the locations of respondents to analyze that; agreed that there's likely something there.

Thanks again for the comments.

Late followup edit: Thanks to your suggestions, we added some clarifying footnotes to the post.

. Phone survey results were same as written survey results, so the issue isn't measurement error.

. All findings were backed by statistical testing, the p-values for which were almost always below 0.0001.

. Tests were replicated year over year; didn't add an additional note about overfitting but doesn't seem like a big concern with 300 datapoints and just a few variables of particular interest.

It wasn't that hard to stick this into the post as footnotes; in the future we'll do better with that. Thanks for the help.
I haven't worked with enough programmers to either agree or disagree, but I personally try to become really fluent in the languages that I use. For example, participating in the ruby-core mailing list has really increased my knowledge of Ruby methods and internals.

It also really pays to know a language when you're using something that compiles into it. You're going to have a bad time with Coffeescript if you're not already fluent in Javascript, and you need to be able to understand the patterns and conventions in the compiled code.
Very few companies are going to turn down revenue, regardless of the shape it takes, so if customers are unwilling to pre-pay for a year, it's easy to figure out a way to make it work.

That being said, the startups we've spoken with who have switched to annual pricing are able to get paid in advance 60-70% of the time. This helps a lot.

Some companies prefer this as well as it can reduce their own AP and record-keeping burden.
https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin
The New & Improved Tindie
The Street View cars have LIDAR which which gives them distance data. They must be constructing a 3D model from this data.
druids vs droids.
Question: What is your revenue model? What is your motivation not to go the way of the article we were all just reading, reminding us never to trust a platform because it will shut down and leave us with our thumbs up our asses?
Much appreciated but the "ramping up" refers to the need to add more content when stuff gets removed per page in this case.
>Look, his post may be insightful and interesting

>I think what app.net is doing is interesting and great, just not these types of blog posts.

Nice contradiction. And perspective from someone who knows what he's talking about as a result of building a competitor is invaluable insight and quite interesting to me.

I don't get why you think Dalton is doing this solely for promotional purposes, but hey, you're entitled to your opinion.

Oh, and in response to your previous post: plenty of people are "carrying the water" and are calling Twitter out on their bullshit.
Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see where the author defines what he thinks it means to "really know any computer language."
If developers are prohibited to develop apps with Twitter APIs, so why they build the API?
Just like there are more musicians than people who understand music theory, formalism is not required for software development. This is neither surprising nor bad.
DuckDuckGo publicly blogs about what they feel are the shortcomings of Google. I've seen similar feedback in the comments of the DDG articles.
People do tend to forget that the "evil" enemy is also human, and just as imperfect and frail as themselves.
We don't have any real data to support it, but I'm a fan of the hypothesis that at least some people are answering this question with the survey's ultimate use in mind. Anyone know of any good research around that kind of validity issue?

Add'l note about the data: folks who wanted fewer trees were spread fairly evenly across the city; they were slightly more likely to come from the Southeast, but it wasn't a big effect, and within any given district all the other relationships were still true.
To compete with MongoDB for Node crowd, you need an ORM similar to Mongoose. It seems that Node users now default to MongoDB in their stack, much like MySQL in LAMP.

For Golang, mgo http://labix.org/mgo is a quality implementation driver for MongoDB. Hopefully there is something similar for RethinkDB.
I don't play tons of mobile games but OpenFeint has been one of the most annoying things to deal with in a lot of the games I play. It slows everything down constantly bothers me with integration popup and adds absolutely nothing to my experience. It sucks for a lot of games and probably a lot of (less casual) gamers but I'm glad I won't be dealing with it in games anymore.
It depends on the circumstances. This service is brilliant for people outside of the US who are interested in books published in the US. You can send books directly from Amazon,com or from one of the used sellers. Therefore you only pay regular postage and find most of the time used versions of a book (which not always ship international).

When I was in Europe, I would have paid $15 for the only available used version of a book on the local Amazon, with 1dollarscan I payed $1 book + $3 shipping + $2 for the scan.
Increasing the letter-spacing CSS property by 1px in Chrome made everything a lot easier for me to read.
Timeline/Roadmap? That is, when will it approach being production ready?
Yeah, it was city data.

Thanks for the clarification about the rudeness, though I took no offense at the time. Cheers!
What is transactional? And how is it different from enterprise?
I think what you're looking at is something more like, if someone employs this tactic, they can't identify that addresses X, Y, and Z belong to the same person, whether or not they know who that person is.

Linking together abstract pieces like that can be one of the first steps to figuring out a very anonymous network.
That's a simplistic interpretation (as is mine). Without studying the numbers, the compensation of executives at various levels, the terms of employees, etc. it's impossible to say this business couldn't have continued to run and honored old contracts and satisfied new demands.

It's true that there's often a disconnect in how much unions demand and how much the rest of the labor market demands, and it can lead to businesses preferring to hire in non-union areas (making areas with strong unions suffer economically). I'm not entirely convinced that's the best outcome for everyone (everyone in the city, state, country, world), since it leads to employers holding a disproportionate amount of the power (the corporation becomes the only organized, powerful, force in the negotiation), and employee compensation consistently being pushed downward, while executive compensation often skyrockets. I'm pretty libertarian, so I like market forces, but I think we're seeing evidence that not having some kind of force that opposes corporations having disproportionate power leads to stagnant wages (not keeping pace with inflation), more reliance on government services (when an employer doesn't pay for any benefits, the employees end up relying on various government services for those necessities like healthcare), and a bigger disparity in power. Corporations and states end up having all the power, while individuals (those not lucky enough to have money and influence) end up getting pushed around.

If executives are receiving massive pay increases (which is what happened at Hostess; 300% pay raise, apparently), while the ship is sinking, I'd say there's a lot more than mere market forces at work. I think greed plays a role, too. In a company with some folks making millions, while others are asking for a $1/hour raise, I'm not sure I'm willing to call it merely market forces at work.
It has become more of a challenge and more expensive with having to promote your posts in order to get more of your fan base to see your updates.
Agreed. Sorry we didn't act on this sooner.
Can you have a filter to rank by points? Would love to sort based on that to see the best "Show HN". :)
> Jim Messina signed off on hiring Reed, he told him, "Welcome to the team. Don't fuck it up."

Jim Messina is a complete boss and I highly recommend that fellow hners read into him to get a good understanding about how things operate in DC. My favourite Jim line is the one he uses when he meets new political people. As he shakes their hands, the first thing out of his mouth is:

> How are you fucking me?

Silicon valley entrepreneurs should take note.
Oh, I agree. It's mismanagement across many years. Of course, those bad managers have received millions in compensation, which I find more than a little distasteful. And, I'll find it even more distasteful, if they pick up the reins at the new company when Twinkies and Ho Hos go back into production.
Reed's point is, I assume, that Amazon is paying/will pay approximately $1B to license content for prime streaming, not ppv content.

Is the availability of prime streaming a factor in you choosing Amazon PPV vs, say, Apple?
well, he implies you need to have written a compiler front end for one.

and i'm glad i can answer this question as i kinda stopped at that point...
A case for clarity in feedback
Recursion depth limit is really a memory limit, so you just need someone to come and install more RAM when you run out in order to obtain de facto infinite memory, hence infinite recursion depth.
Somehow I think the resources of INTERPOL are not aligned with taking down individual seeders and leechers.
Yes, oh god, yes, this. It looks perfect in Helvetica Neue.
slava@rethink here. RethinkDB is new software and still has bugs (see: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues) We're working very hard to iron out all reported and known issues, and improve the testing infrastructure to find new ones. There is nothing critical that's wrong with the server that we know of, but I still prefer to wait until the test infrastructure is much more comprehensive before I can comfortably recommend people to put it in production. I suspect this process will take about three months.

That being said, if you choose to build analytics on top of RethinkDB, we'll support you all the way.
Hospitals actually do sell their patient data to drug companies[1]. Not for advertising, but for medical research and drug trials.

[1]: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/drugmakers-mine-data-fo...
Not just turn a profit for the controller, but incur a cost for the victim. I measured my computer the other day; when I start mining, my power draw jumps 160 watts, and I have a fairly efficient machine.
Yeah, most webmasters don't really know anything about web servers. /snark
CTRL+G in Windows.
Amazon providing Netflix with infrastructure does not figure in. The estimate (which I agree is suspect) has to do with the cost of acquiring content rights. If Amazon is spending more money on content rights than they pull in from users consuming that content, then they're running their streaming service at a loss. Netflix running on their hardware doesn't factor in.
Not just that: if you're using a Windows 8 tablet like the Surface (I appreciate I might be the only person doing so - it feels like that sometimes!) the Twitter web client is a terrible experience.

Because Twitter provides native clients for Android and iOS tablets their web site is simply not optimised for touch. It's crappy on Windows 8, plain and simple.
We're working on improving the API spec so people can write clients easily (we'll publish an RFC soon).

As far as ORMs go, we do plan to do that, but it will take a little bit of time. It shouldn't be very difficult, so we hope to get to it soon.
That's explained really well in this ebook:

http://chaotic-flow.com/saas-sales-model-and-organization-st...

But, briefly, the transactional model is one in which you require some customer communication in order to close the deal and is typically closed via inside sales reps. Enterprise deals are larger, cost more and typically require on the ground reps and a lot more customer facetime in order to close deals.
It helps alert the user to how the data they are being shown is changing.

There are lots of non-skeuomorphic animations that could serve this purpose... cross-dissolves, flashes, slide-ins, etc. This just happens to be a reasonably nice one, that fits with the "this-is-a-book" metaphor of iBooks.

Even the name of iBooks is "skeuomorphic". It would be more accurately called "iMedium-to-long-static-documents-available-for-purchase" but that's a fucking awful title. Everybody has an idea of what a book is, so calling it iBooks means users know that there are book-ish-things contained within.

An app called iBooks where the next page trickled down like the title sequence from The Matrix would be tacky as hell and users would ask themselves why their "book thing" was doing this non-book thing.
Exactly. We trust USD to be accepted as legal tender for debts.
Ok, so overlooking the horrible mobile-hostile design of this site, the logic here is delusional. An unsubscribe==better value to the business because at the end of the day you have a mailing list of customers interests in your messaging, and these are the people likely to be buying anyways. Plus, that's one less e-mail you have to pay for distribution on. wtf?!?
And yes, design patents are so abuse-proof that there's absolutely no chance that Apple would sue competitors for using remotely similar animation.
He was looking at used cars, not new. It's a different game. For new cars, I agree with you.
Five Questions about Language Design (2001)
The SDN Gold Rush To The Northbound API
Why should a company criticising competition be viewed as a negative thing? Content quality trumps everything else. When something smart is being said, why does it matter who said it?
Online Backup – Peace of Mind for Your Photos, Videos, and Documents
Good find. That makes a lot of sense. Added a note about this at the bottom of the blog post.
Announcing new .NET and Windows Phone SDKs for SkyDrive
Communicating Science and Technology in the 21st Century: Steven Pinker [video]
slava@rethink here. I'm hesitant to give a timeline - we won't say the product is production ready until we know it is, and since complex software systems can have bugs lurking under the surface, it's difficult to predict how long it will take.

That being said, the way we're approaching this issue is by overhauling the test infrastructure to stress the server in as many ways as we possibly can. I suspect it will take about three months for us to feel satisfied with how extensive the test infrastructure is. Once that's in place, we'll be able to recommend rethink for production. Of course if the test infrastructure exposes hard-to-kill bugs, it will take a little longer.
It's novel only if the book is fiction. :]
Google open sourced something related to books and Apple patented something ridiculous related to books. Not a direct comparison as both companies have patents, but Google does share with the community a ton more than Apple.
Nice document. It shows well the way of thinking of our governments.

Yea, it sure does reveal how silly the FBI is. I mean, why would the organization tasked with domestic security & stability analyze the potential threats of Bitcoin? Bitcoin is made of lollipops and rainbows; it could never be used maliciously.

Seriously, analyzing it critically doesn't mean they are afraid of it. It just means it is an unknown that they want to understand.
I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing...

And yes, those links are basically all you can use in an anonymous network to deanonymize actions. So how is linking things better than not?
This article gets lost in matters of measurement, drifts off, and in the end fails to say anything worthwhile. Hopefully some of you will read the discussion first and skip the article.
The Startup Murders
I love my Samsung ARM Chromebook. I've already used it while creating materials for a talk on Javascript. I am able to use the browser to test Javascript code, and I already use Google docs for the slides so it was a natural fit. It doesn't replace my MacBook Air - I carry both. So no I don't need it but I enjoy the idea of it.
Nitpick: the trailing 'l' has always seems superfluous to me - my alias is 'sub'
The Benefits of Performing a Cohort Analysis in Determining Engagement Over Time
Hmm: sounds like you're basically looking for SMS integration? Send me an email (my email is in my profile): we might be able to wrap something around Twilio's interface that could help you. The caveat there is that SMS has explicit per-message costs attached: we'd basically let you put in your Twilio account details but you'd have to pay them yourselves.
When the popularity of your business has been built on the back of third party services and additions (hashtags? Retweets?) there's a certain level of expectation you're not going to turn around and stab them in the back.
If you want to sell services to large companies--even low cost ones--you need to offer invoice payment. At a big company, the corporate credit card is for meals and travel, not for paying vendors.
Nexus 4 Teardown
Abusive, the regulations haven't adopted with the times, but it's apple to oranges in that situation.
EBay sued over will-not-recruit agreement with Intuit
Now I think I'm just confused by the way you're describing things. I'll hope someone else is better able to understand.
Continuuity gets $10M to free Hadoop from itself
"why does it hurt when the brain is wired in a specific way?"

Because organisms that evolved to avoid that thing we call pain survived long enough to pass on their genes, whereas those that didn't got burned up, crushed or in other ways extinguished?

In other words an aversion to that thing called pain gave an evolutionary leg up. And it seems that this aversion is fundamental to life since every creature has a tendency toward self preservation.

There are many examples of people who enjoy physical pain and perform cutting even down to bone, and sometimes including amputation. Clearly this is an example of brain wiring which is not beneficial to the individual and, in extreme cases will self-filter out of the gene pool.
If reading individual applications take so long then why don't yc implement a good text to speech app on the back end of HN that reads it for them? Problem solved!
I had no idea who he is, and that he is competing with Twitter. I would have welcomed a disclaimer about his conflict of interests somewhere in the post.
This is true even for medium sized companies.
By now it's pretty established that this is just wrong. Here's two maps that Dennis Ross published in his book 'The Missing Piece' that illustrate the issue:

http://cl.ly/image/10350b3Q052P
But the predations of the Facebook/Twitter business model are both the founding impetus and sustaining animus of App.net. They're always on topic for Caldwell, and especially when new information advancing and refining the critique comes up.

And the analogy of 'spending' posts isn't quite right. There is no budget constraint on internet writing to advance your cause: in many cases more is better as long as you're not repeating the exact same points. (And as I mentioned: I see both new news and analysis in this post, even though it advances a familiar theme/viewpoint.)
Yes it's a mess. But it does make some sense as standards bodies may have members without patents that want to minimise the price and others who want to get high prices.

I'm not a lawyer but I wonder if there is room to require patent holders to declare a cap on the price of each patent before it is included in the patent and the standards group could decide to accept or reject the patent at that point.
Plugging Edtech into Schools
Ten Universities to Form Semester Online Consortium
And jack all low end torque, something very important to car applications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Variation-couple-uf.svg
You Just Have To Do Something
Not really sure where the article is going but I will throw out two things:

* "Never memorize something that you can look up in a book."

* We may know about 10k-40k words depending on the study, person, etc, but can generally communicate any idea with those that we do. There's a ton of overlap and specialization that can be worked around with smaller, simpler pieces (Guy Steele's recently linked '98 OOPSLA talk on growing a language comes to mind...).

The second point is pretty familiar when it comes to programming. Maybe you don't know the most efficient algorithm, the most maintainable strategy, the whizbang idiomatic language construct, etc. but that doesn't mean you can't "communicate" useful work to/through the code you do "know".
cool they responded appropriately tho
This hasn't been working for me for some reason on OSX, the posted alternative however did work so I'm quite excited!
So, Google Reader with poorer infrastructure?
I'm curious, is there any kind of ranking being done on the candidates for an imprecise address? Any kind of image analysis to determine which ones are the more 'interesting'?

Asking because it seemed to me that when the address is imprecise, it's mostly more prominent locations that are being shown.

[later edit] It's probably just using GMaps' suggest feature I guess?