skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they developed iteratively and failed to do "premature optimization."

You're just throwing out buzzwords. People who write game servers understand the basics of scaling and memory management, or they don't. Unless you're Notch Persson, you can't release shit multiplayer and expect people to play your game (and Minecraft still had the singleplayer experience during that time).
Wow - I didn't even think of trying that, because for some reason I figured that the original game could only scroll using the mouse. So much for presumptions...
Well, modifying a distinct method is much easier than modifying something in a middle of 20-page scroll of code.

There are simply fewer thing that can go wrong.
I don't understand why you are here, on a site run by pg, insulting him and yc.
I was thinking about this a while ago when I started hearing about the Super WiFi / Regional Area Network and meshing networks like the equipment they were testing for the Occupy protests.

This is useful for if you wanted to recolonize urban blight areas, such as Detroit, and you could not get enough capital to pull wire (or don't know whether the wired infrastructure rotted).

I doubt this will let a lot of people consume streaming video, but it would let people pass around 3D printable files, Open Source Ecology documents, and stream bits of Wikipedia.
That's because App Store search is extremely lame and in need of as major overhaul.

you have to use the direct link

https://itunes.apple.com/app/gmail/id422689480

obviously a search for gmail should work, but as you discovered, it doesn't, unless Apple have fixed it by now.
For The Last Time, Tablets Didn't Catch AMD or Intel "flat-footed"
You don't know, so why create something so low? I've got 4, I'm sure theres people with 5+, so why not give the ability to have 200? It was a serious question, not a dig. Is there some iOS API restriction on the amount of "pollers" per app you can have some something?
Analyst: Just 25 Developers Grabbed 50% Of App Revenues On App Store Last Month
Globalization sure sets some dubious standards.

Although I do speak more English than Dutch in the workplace, I would never expect it - rather, I am grateful for the allowances made for me.
The lack of server-side search when using a Gmail account with iOS mail is a huge problem for me.
A little while ago I was explaining this to someone.

A single core of my i7 does something like 6 or 7x the work a single P4 core does, at half the mhz.

Cores are getting faster, but we're also putting more on. Why not? We can afford to do so.

>he power of a single CPU core has plateaued and won't ever get faster.

Sigh.
He also billed it off as a vacation, so it's not really a loss.
Architecture improvements continue, but if you look at the single-core performance curve, it has been much flatter since 2004.

The "won't ever get faster" part should be qualified, though, with "at least not on silicon". There is still the possibility of a breakthrough using some other semiconductor -- silicon germanium, buckytubes, or something. Any such thing is years away, admittedly.
5) They don't want to arrive at their destination all sweaty.

Maybe it's only a problem for me (and I do tend to sweat a lot) but biking a hundred blocks to work without being able to take a shower after is not a viable option.
Just got it updated from the App Store app on iPad, it shows up in search results again too so I think thing have stabilized now.
Experimental student-run VC fund gets its start with Firefly
Boston Ruby (bostonrb.org) has a monthly project night open to all levels to learn and hack together, and a monthly meeting with great talks - and that is just for Ruby. Pythonistas are active, and have their own things happening, the Java User Group also has similar events - and those are off the top of my head.

On the weekend we did this workshop, there was a Start-up Weekend event up the street at the Microsoft NERD center, and directly above us at MIT Stata center was Music Hack Day. My problem is choosing what events to go to, not finding one.
Good job Waterloo.
Water Water Water - Loo Loo Loo!
If the update hasn't propagated your way still and you're getting an error try deleting it then reinstall using this link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/gmail/id422689480?mt=8
Do you verify the backed up data is intact when you receive it and a giant magnet at the mail carrier didn't destroy data?
What the CA Privacy Act requires:

1) type of information gathered by your website/app

2) if and how the information may be shared with third parties

3) the process by which a user can review and make changes to their stored information

4) your privacy policy's effective date

5) a description of the changes made to your privacy policy since it first became effective (i.e., a bullet point list)

#4 and #5 are very easy.

#1 should also be easy. If you are collecting any information from the user's phone (i.e. contacts), from other apps (i.e., fitness apps), from websites (i.e., facebook/twitter), or from the user directly (i.e., a form), you list it here. The law requires only a general description, but good guys will be specific about the type of information they are requesting. (General means, "your contact information, birthday, friends list." Simply saying "your personal information" is too general.)

#2 should be easy: are you using 3rd party APIs or services (AWS, Dropbox, Facebook). If so, what customer information is being shared with them? This includes information shared for technical reasons, i.e., to retrieve a customer's facebook friends using the email address he entered into your app.

#3 does not actually require you to have a process for the user to review the data you have collected. However, since you already have collected the information, it is trivially easy to show the user what you have collected.
Hybrid. You can select UI text everywhere from the message chrome to the settings page, so there's definitely HTML 5. But other parts are definitely native, like the label and account lists.
Or even to understand how they are working and to check if they are really working correctly?

I really don't like this attitude of ignoring inner workings of things just because they seem to work. Sometimes we really are working under constraints that make digging through the code impractical, but in my experience these constraints tend to be in the code itself - namely, someone wrote it as a 'black box' with tons of kludges and `if False:` style comments.

I don't want to exaggerate and say that every programmer should know his every tool down to it's last bit, but taking black boxes apart is what makes one a hacker, and what allows one to improve one's skills.
Growth rate of what? Revenue? Gross Profit? Profit Margin? Users? Active users? Length of user session? etc...

Focusing on growing one of those metrics can result in the minimization of others -
I had the same problem. I found it by searching for this string exactly: "Gmail email from Google"
I also deeply agree with your post - and love the "tyranny of their own desires" quote. However ...

I have two kids and worry constantly that their dad will let them down in some slightly vague and unspecified manner that I won't notice till they are 16. I can cover the usual stuff of shelter, clothing, food, love, attention, bit of discipline etc. But there always seems to be one more thing that psychologists, parenting magazines or schools are aware of that I am not doing. Or doing wrong.

I am coming round to the view however that evolution long ago decided that leaving the future of the human race in the hands of parents was far too risky - and kids are likely to grow up to be who they will be. And only extreme action will sway them.

My actions now, will I hope, have some positive improvements on my childs happiness and life outcomes. But in the main who they are is a genetic gift. Mother Nature, as mothers are wont to do, decided that Dads are likely to be wrong too often to rely on.

So I can relax and focus on trying to raise happy inquisitive kids - I shall try and focus on the big things - happiness, inquisitiveness, healthy lifestyle, not as bad with money as dad, marry a happy person. I think of it as like laying down railway tracks that slowly open up to become roads, then prairies with rules that trammell them becoming advice about exploring.

And find out with them, just who they are going to grow up to be.
Typo in the first sentence: "now one physicists" -- which also undercuts the title since this is the opinion of one professor, and that his point is that assuming the universe works like a computer may limit your perspective when trying to model/understand it.

Terrible title for an interesting article.
I haven't had to migrate to a new machine. I'm sure I'll need to update iTunes when I do, I'm not that hard-headed about it.
I hate to knee-jerk this one, but my first reaction to this is that it's probably propaganda. In the States a few years ago, there was an effort to create a self-contained ecosystem and it failed no matter how hard the engineers behind it tried. That China can suddenly say "Yo guys, we got it to work" out of the blue is suspicious at best.

Not to say they haven't got something half-functional. I'm just very skeptical that it's as great as they say it is.
Finally, an API to convert your documents to PDF
Wow, I hope you're not in charge of the Earth's innovation budget. Replace "all" with "some" or at most, "many", for starters. But who anointed you the chief decider of what people should try to invent. And how do any of your proclamations apply to this bicycle? You do realize that there are billions of people who use bicycles different from you and me. I really, really don't like this reply.
search and labels for me
Humans don't have enough protons and electrons to generate magnetic fields of that many microTeslas...
It's an entirely reasonable question, and I'm sad that people are downvoting you. That somebody is a respected X doesn't mean they are in perfect health or couldn't use help.

There is a relationship between bipolar disorder and creativity; Jameson's Touched with Fire is a good exploration of that. Steve Blank of Lean Startup fame suggests that many founders come from dysfunctional families, because a chaotic home environment makes people comfortable operating in chaos later on:

http://steveblank.com/2009/05/18/founders-and-dysfunctional-...

Living in San Francisco and having just spent the weekend mentoring 100 would-be founders at Lean Startup Machine, it's my firm opinion that entrepreneurs are universally odd ducks. They are my people and I love them, but if they were particularly normal they would have found a lower-risk way of making a living. I think it's especially useful for entrepreneurial types to pay attention to mental health; some kinds of crazy are useful and to be honored, but some are just slowing you down.
Failure as part of the hustle is not a learning process in the same way as a failed startup is. Sure, you can learn something, but if you aren't getting rejected often in sales, you're simply not trying hard enough.
Easy, escalate to a boss who's only focus is making sure you both get your work done. I'm also sure trades and bribes and a informal form of corporate currency changes hands

"I'll purposefully and intentionally reduce my focus from 100% to 99.999% this year by helping you out IF in exchange you'll do something that improves my efficiency in my remaining 99.999% of the time by around a factor of one ten-thousandth"

Its a market driven approach. Plenty of game theory behind it, too.
If you're at the stage of your company's lifecyle where you're in YC, then all metrics of users. Users, users, users.
It may interest you to note that in 2012 China has a manned space program, while the U.S. does not.
Hey, I was joking! I even indicated this with an emoticon! Why the downvote?
Free Mobile UI Kits and Website Wireframes Templates
Here's a design suggestion you're not likely to see in any modern American toy: http://vasi.net/uploads/podbor/sovetskyi_konstruktor/thumbs/...
I imagine my advisor or another faculty I worked close with may have mentioned it. This sort of news gets around surprisingly fast in academic circles.
Removals St Paul's EC4
Ask HN: Help me on licence pricing of my android app.
One of the chinese android oem manufacturers wants to license my app and they have asked me about my business model for app licensing. The problem is i have no idea how app licensing works and what would be the proper pricing for license of my app. I would be glad if you can give some insights about it.

PS: They have asked business model for both pro and lite version.

Here is the app in question.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lyrebirdstudio.colorme
My favorite parallelizing compiler is Pig.

Pig can turn a combination of relational operators into a series of Map and Reduce operations that can be done on a Hadoop cluster. This is all stuff I can code up by hand, but most the things I might do with a shell script or SQL statements I can parallelize in a way that's scalable in both directions. Because I can write parallel code easily and quickly, I can use it to do little jobs. As for big my home cluster handles terabytes and I can rent any level of power from AWS.
Huh? Gmail has an app - you're commenting on a thread about its 2.0 release.
> A single core of my i7 does something like 6 or 7x the work a single P4 core does, at half the mhz.

Do you have a reference for this? I'd be surprised if it's more than 2x for general-purpose code. (It might be more for specialized stuff like video decoding, which I guess has improved hardware support these days.)
But the beauty of things like Meccano is that if you lose bolts and nuts... you can just go down to the hardware store and pick up some replacements!

Although nowadays, it's trivial to order replacement Lego pieces online.
The biggest thing which trips me up is perspective and space. I'm uncomfortable in unfamiliar spaces and rooms, and unfamiliar perspectives within a room. This reduces my ability to perform, interact, and speak to people I don't know.

I'd suggest finding an empty stage somewhere and standing on it for 5 minutes. Just get comfortable. Get bored on stage. Try this a few times in different places with different lighting and furniture.

When you get to the conference, try to sneak onstage for 5 seconds, or even just peek through the curtain. Then visualize the space and try to become comfortable with it.

And try to channel your nervous energy into positive thinking.
That's your objection? The $20 version is a fixie. What's your next objection?
You may find this presentation[1] interesting, written by Tim Sweeny of Epic Games (engine that powers a lot of games).

In the section on concurrency, he notes the hardest part is updating the game logic (tens of thousands of interacting objects) and notes that synchronizing it is hopeless. Instead, STM:

"~2-4X STM performance overhead is acceptable: if it enables our state-intensive code to scale to many threads, it’s still a win. Claim: Transactions are the only plausible solution to concurrent mutable state"

It's also a neat presentation as it's from the perspective of someone running a real large scale, commercial, time-sensitive, _real world_ software project. Yet he talks about the most common types of bugs, and how FP and other advanced concepts would help (like dependent typing).

1: http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-...
Yes, I know I can do it since I've done it before.

I'm just saying I find it much more involved than changing a simple BIOS setting.
Depends on the game, really. Take a look at minecraft and dwarffortress - they are both cpu-bound due to

1. Simulating a large world using complex entities and voxels

2. Being single-threaded with no clear way to make them multi-threaded

Minecraft in particular is a pretty interesting problem since it only simulates the part of the world that's within a radius of a player, it would make sense to have each player's machine simulate their own part of the world and the server to somehow merge those together.
I think this is impossible to do if the audio is being played via java/flash/etc as the plugin bypasses the browser completely. Here's a comment from the google chrome team from a while back:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gdyun/iama_we_are_thre...

It should however be possible for webpages that use browser APIs to play audio (e.g. via HTML5).
> This allows me to identify problems with the vision (aka narrative), and adjust.

This iteration (or small "pivot" if you will) seem identical to the "lean" idea.
This is probably going to sound old fashioned but I would suggest looking up and attending the next meeting of your local Toastmasters (http://reports.toastmasters.org/findaclub/). They have a 10 speech series that will take you from terrified speaker to "competent communicator" in a well-structured non-threatening environment (and yes, I am a Toastmaster).
Let's say it costs $15 to make using third world labor. Is that your objection?
One liners including 'jokes' aren't really appreciated on HN. HN is not reddit, and has a different ethos. Some people do manage this occasionally, but in general if you make smart aleck one liner comments, usually you'll be downvoted into oblivion.

And yes, don't complain about being downvoted. From the HN guidelines, http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. "
The approach I usually go with is to initially create a full set of notes/slides that contain everything I'll want to cover, and then use a copy of that as the basis for my slides, which I then aggressively strip stuff out of. Then I've got the original notes still to refer to if needed while giving the talk, and to distribute.

Slides for during a presentation and slides/notes for reference without hearing the talk at the same time have two completely different needs to fill, and I don't think there's a one-piece solution to both. Especially since I feel the same way that, outside of a conference setting, referring to an audio/video recording of a presentation is much less efficient than a proper set of notes.
Cartoon about Education Reform
Don't be a jackass.

1. You never know who has actually organized a conference, 2. That's not a relevant counter argument.
Waterloo was a MSFT poaching ground when I was an undergrad in 1992... well before RIM was even on the scene. Macleans magazine has consistently ranked it the best engineering school in Canada. They've been winning ACM programming contests since the math building had the dinosaur pit (http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/cs/redroom/).

As for campus being ugly... hey, you can't have everything.
as a Waterloo grad this year, gratz!
Aside from barring users who are legitimately sharing a connection (and not even pirating your app)...

How does this actually solve the problem? Pirates are really unlikely to be colocated with the person who let them have an illegal copy of your app.
Is Hacker school in some way affiliated/linked to YC ? The homepage design looks very close to ycombinator's.
PIMCO granted a patent on "generating a financial index" using computers
Considering that autistics and empaths tend to have remarkably rich gestural languages for communicating a wide array of non-verbal units of meaning, or even propositions, and further that allocentric language may present scoped indexicals (and not to mention Ame. Sign Language), we may have an opportunity to develop interestingly rich gestural/touch APIs from the mechanics of neurologically rooted gestures which describe or underpin norms of highly complex, spontaneously emergent non-verbal communication.

For instance, would finger-flipping or self-stimulation be considered "noise" to such a system, or would the system be configurable or adaptive or "fuzzy" enough to make successful interpretations of various deviant forms of model human behaviors? (I'm wondering the intersection between these types of interfaces and the training (or, say, auto-designing) of them via neural networks.)
I don't know about San Francisco, since that's a bit of an extreme case, but when I moved from Minneapolis to Seattle, I made sure to account for the cost of living increase when evaluating the offer I got.
I believe they are a YC alumni (batch 2010?)
I wonder if he could give them some equity in return for the domain, or just the right to use the domain as long as the company is in business.
I'm actually the opposite: I tend to avoid being paid to speak (one time I was actually paid, but I didn't cash the check), but if you want to record a video of me speaking for your usage on your website, then I consider that something you really need to be saying up front and which you should probably be paying for (and thereby which I often just won't do, as I usually avoid being paid; my standpoint on avoiding being paid will probably change over time, though).

The first issue is that it isn't really "publicity" for me (to respond to your linked point #3 about wanting publicity), it is free and valuable content for the event: to the extent to which I obtain publicity, I get it from the people at the event that I am addressing with my talk, not from the people who run the event; the second one is that recording the video to go with the slides doesn't mean that the content will now be understandable, as I feel truly awesome content is often somewhat interactive (I try to break the ice quickly to allow questions to interrupt me); and, finally, it has a severe cost on the talk... when you are speaking with a smaller circle, you can tailor your talk to directly meet their needs (I make it a point to meet as many people as I can before I give a talk to ask why they are attending the conference, what they wanted to get out of it, what company the work for, etc. and I then retarget my talk to directly serve those interests, use language appropriate to the audience, and sometimes can come up with specific and more useful examples), but when you know that thousands of random people are going to be watching this recorded later you suddenly have to talk to a general audience and have to be more guarded about stories and predictions (as you will certainly be called on them years later in drastically different contexts)... it really just ruins the experience.

(edit:) In essence, it is actually a different medium from a "live" talk: a talk that is being recorded is to a different audience (undermining the goal of having a conference tailored to specific topics and interests) and has different constraints (difficult interactivity with either the audience or the slides, a tradeoff on movement on stage vs. framing of the camera), in the same way that a slidedeck without an associated talk is a different medium from a talk; you aren't really giving a talk to a conference anymore: you are giving an address to the world.
"I just don't think that program[ming] and earn[ing] money [for] said work [is] immoral[.]"

This is a straw-man (unintentional, I presume). Even rms sold copies of Emacs once upon a time. No one objects to earning money for programming; they object to some of the restrictions we put in place in an attempt to make it easier to do that. If you don't agree that those restrictions are harmful, or think they are sufficiently outweighed by other factors, fine; but saying proprietary software is clearly fine simply because you don't object to programmers being paid is incomplete, confused, or dishonest.
To me it wasn't just the cost, it was jumping on a plane instantly when there was no particular advantage to it.

Salespeople who are too aggressive frighten prospects, and his target is a billionaire who hears from all sorts of people who want something from him. If he were sincerely after the Zap name, I think he would have been much better off pursuing it consistently over 6 months, rather than in a dramatic, unprepared rush. Especially since this particular name is a nice-to-have.