skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> The language is so permissive that it allows newbs to write bad code but still obtain results

How is this different than any other language? You can write bad code in any language. Perl might allow for more obfuscated code which really makes it harder to read - but that again reflects on the programmer - not the language. Take a look at a code in PHP, Python, C, or any language written by "newbs" and you will see poor practices used everywhere.
I'm not hoping for MS to die. I'd love to have some competition on the market and I'd love them to show some amazing products that inspire everyone.

That being said the writing was on the wall. Microsoft is blindsided by two cash cows and they're not willing to reinvent themselves.

Microsoft has Windows and Office that make them money. Everything else is secondary and helped them control that market. It's a Napoleonic approach to business (read Bill Gates' biography to understand that).

How Microsoft made its initial money was by undercutting everyone and selling a licence for their first OS to IBM so Big Blue had to spend less money per machine sold. It worked so well that MS became the richest and most powerful high tech company.

Now the open source community releases powerful office suites for free, Apple releases an amazing office suite for 1/5th of the price of MS Office and Google releases something essentially free that works online!

When everyone else is moving ahead... it's hard to have anything to say that is positive about the stubborn MS.
Guerilla Tactics on Finding A Decision Maker
Wroc_love.rb 2013 call for papers
> E.g. imagine that Germany say that HN needs to have pictures or, at very least, thumbnails. ;)

This is a weak slippery slope argument. Germany is not making arbitrary requests on web sites. Rather it is protecting the right of its citizens to anonymity, according to pre-existing laws.
Okay, I guess that's more a tablet (iPad, Galaxy Tab) than a phone usage but it still is a valid answer here.
I don't admit that the public has a direct interest in setting fiscal policy. That is what our republican representatives do. Except, in California, they are prevented from doing anything useful by a) term limits and b) the constraints placed on governing by the imbecilic initiative process.

I would vote on the initiatives that set the ground rules for governance -- things like redistricting. But the idea that modifying the state constitution as cheaply and easily as it can be modified would lead to better government, well … no.
If you take a picture of me and upload it on instagram, I have not agreed to their tos and have not voluntarily given them anything.

So no, this does not exactly compare with facebook.
Where is freedom of speech? why is it ok to have a movie that insults the messenger of God while it is not ok to have a revolutionary group against the terrorist Bashar Al Asad express it self?
Then don't buy it.

I've been using a Droid Incredible for 2 years. It was released 1.5 years before that. It handles all of my mobile computing needs just fine, CM7.2 is sturdy as hell (just passed 30 days uptime) and I haven't spent money on mobile hardware for 2 years.

I've gone wifi-only since buying this phone. I have wifi everywhere I need it except grocery store checkout lines. The phone lasts 2 days on a charge in perpetual airplane mode too.
Question, with these new rules, can you still sell your pictures?

Unless you live under a rock, you know that many "Instagram girls" sell their posts to clothing stores to promote them, it's actually hugely successful!
They are for sure an indication of initial interest. And given Facebook's retention and engagement rates, I think it's fairly obvious that most people like the service. That's not to say they like the company Facebook, but they obviously like keeping in touch with their friends and family using Facebook's service.
Mahout, There It Is Open Source Algorithms Remake Overstock.com
Smartphones are really trending towards becoming full blown computers. As of today our current crop of Smartphones is riddled with various 90's era limitations like restrictions on multitasking, inability to elegantly drive a big external display, lack of richer integration between apps (Android has it to a great degree but still it only gets better with more RAM and faster CPUs) etc. Plus we rely on web applications performing at near native speeds more and more - HTML5 is not free - CPU and GPU play great part in making the browser realize the near native performance and features.(JS/WebGL etc.)

So in so much as we can do more faster with our phones I think it is not a bad thing to add computational power into our phones. One day we will all have one handheld to rule it all - phone, tablet, desktop with external display, gaming console etc.
I find my old Desire HD to be strapped for RAM when running Chrome on 4.2, and it comes with 512MiB. And given the low price and space impact, I'm happy to see them stuff as much of it in there as they can justify.

You also have to remember that these clock numbers don't really mean anything. The processors are designed for low power consumption, and frankly, it shows.
Noom raises $2.6M to get iOS right
Axiom 5: Company X's only chance of monetization is
by IPO or acquisition by Company Y.

If Company X is acquired by Company Y,
goto Axiom 1 through 5 for Company Y.

Independence is also important, when it comes to privacy.

I don't know how Tumblr is doing - it seems like it's under some pressure to do a better job of monetization - but there's been this idea of a bubble in social media for years, and it we are beginning realize that in some way we were right. It's just that we didn't consider that companies would pursue the sinister solutions to their fiscal quandaries.

Makes you wonder how this makes the investors look.
I don't see why Ouya's internals would necessarily remain static like the XBox 360. It can receive frequent spec bumps while retaining software compatibility. Owners of older hardware will play the same games, just at lower frame rates or graphics detail.

It's like Apple TV 2 vs Apple TV 3. You're hard pressed to notice the difference. Both are the same platform, but the newer one can display 1080p.
They might force FB to do this. But having seen what happens here with Google or all the other cases, I really doubt their "power" or will to do much more, than symbolic policy.
Show HN: Giraffe - dashboard for graphite
Big applaud for Twitter @JbhatALnusra account is still active
The top 20 HTML5 sites of 2012
I agree with you but I also believe that it goes further than current Christmas culture.
ooh, cool, I didn't know that was there.

My more active interest in perl was pre-git :)
Hmmm ... I have found the same feeling with every language I've mastered. I never did master Perl but even if I had, I would have set it aside like most of the other languages that I have mastered when a compelling new language/tool/system came out. I try not to form an emotional relationship with my tools as it might adversely limit my adaptability.
I've been living under a rock, then. Although, it's fairly ingenious.
Not just phones though is it?

This thing will sit in tablets, nettops, maybe even consoles.

I know the steambox is likely to be x86, but with the power on offer here you could certainly make a living room media-box and games-machine in one.
The same reason why you need more than 640K of RAM. Unlimited wants vs limited resources. Put in what you can and what is possible because wants are unlimited.
I think that my $25 will keep Flickr/Yahoo from pulling the same shenanigans Instagram currently is (I've been using Flickr since 2006, just went Pro today). And for that $25 I get a hell of a lot more features than Instagram ever provided (privacy, API, full size photos, etc). All my photos are stored on my phone or hard drive, Flickr is just for sharing. Seriously.
This is hearsay but what I understood is that there is no suitable large scale alternative for MS Active Directory and that it doesn't play well with Linux setups as it does with Windows. I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I would, maybe someone with more experience in this kind of management can chime in.
Interestingly, the waterfall model, as described by its inventor was iterative.

See _Leprechauns of Software Development_
> Attach to any running process and analyze away.

Interesting. It never occurred to me to want this. What sort of use case is this for? It seems Perl is capable of something similar:

use Enbugger::OnError 'USR1';

Then 'kill -USR1 pid' and your process will jump into the debugger.

learn more here: https://metacpan.org/module/JJORE/Enbugger-2.013/lib/Enbugge...
My only concern is not that they are making them more powerful for the same power consumption as before (instead of making them more efficient - use Cortex A7-only devices, if you want that), but that they are making them more powerful just a little more than they should, with each generation, to stay ahead of the other guy, and therefore compromise on energy efficiency, and make it a little worse than before. And before we know it, the phone is running on 2 or 4 W under maximum load, instead of 1W, as initially.

However this also may be because when they make the chip twice as fast - for the same content as before - and using the same energy, that means that once content catches up with the chip, and is 2x more bloated/advanced, then the chip will consume twice as much energy processing it. I'm making it sound a lot more simplistic than it probably happens, though.
To bring up the affordance angle again, that doorway is extremely unsubtle about being a doorway, and gets high marks for usability, while the Le Corbusier building looks like a military pillbox with no way to enter or leave. All that ornamentation serves to guide the eye and give you a visual shorthand for what you're looking at, whereas the sharp textureless lines of modern objects and UIs makes me think it's all aspiring to be dazzle camouflage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_West_Mahomet_(ID-3681)...

Besides, in the real world flat surfaces carry a gradient from their lightsource, truly uniformly lit, flat-texture surfaces are extremely rare and hard to orient visually.
Like forcing to make nice, durable, useable stuff?
Google+ has a significantly larger audience than Instagram. G+ is more than photos though and has a different audience.
My understanding of Simple is that the services they provide are simply provided by their partner bank, http://www.thebancorp.com/, which is a regulated financial institute. I'm not sure how the issue of API access is relevant but this may be my lack of understanding more than anything.
As I recall, Apple was the weak link in that identity theft, although Amazon was not blameless.
Things You Didn't Know Ruby Could do
It's a problem worth addressing but it seems to be overly engineered, expensive and out of touch.

As noted in the comments, composting toilets have already solved the problem and are much cheaper and more reliable.
Right down my alley :) That's a long overdue reading for me. Thanks!
The pizza maker made $26 minus whatever it costs to produce the pizza in time and materials. If the pizza cost $7 to make then the pizza maker makes $14 in profit versus $7. Also they lost a buck on that $6 pizza.

Further complexities: maybe it's a slow day and those employees were idle, and the raw materials were going to go bad without being used anyway - so if the $6 customer is buying it as cost the pizza maker may still be winning. Especially if they sold some fountain drinks to that customer, which are almost pure profit.

If you want a sustainable business, you need to cover your materials cost. Arguably paying less than the materials/shipping cost for something is morally wrong, especially if you know damn well this thing costs more than that to make and ship.
|If you don't like services that require your full name, don't use them.

Similarly, if you don't like to provide pseudonyms, don't do business in Germany. Power always does what it wants, this time it is the German government with the upper hand.
Big design up front!

In my experience you never really understand a problem until you've implemented it. You can describe a problem and a solution in excruciating detail, but you'll never find every corner case. Sometimes (often?) those corner cases are really big deals.

Better to prototype and iterate. Software should be the spec.
This submission seems to have all the HN discussion of this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4929061

Here are some of the other submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4930071

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4933274

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4933324

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4933501

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4934413
It sounds crazy, but what if they let you pay for your use of Instagram? You pay them money, they give you a service and no one has to argue over IP.
First off, your understanding of WebGL security is wrong. Drivers are primarily blacklisted for stability reasons, not security. The security around WebGL implementations is in restricting what's exposed to a safe subset of GL, and transforming the supplied GL commands to ensure validity and prevent the site from directly supplying raw GL to drivers or the user-space stack.

As for the font issue, it simply doesn't work the way you think. You can't just patch IE because the bug would still allow arbitrary execution of kernel code (privilege escalation) from any application, including from inside IE's sandbox. And you can't drop AddFontMemResourceEx from the OS or alter the behavior of font file loading without rewriting pretty much every application that handles fonts.

So, what MS did here is entirely correct. They fixed the handling code so that it doesn't accept these malformed fonts anymore. It's a shame that some content creations tools generated the broken fonts at all, but they were never legal according to the spec and shouldn't have been rendered in the firsts place.
I see.

However, about speech recognition for instance, it is for now done "in the cloud": your recorded voice is sent to a server which does the intensive computations and sends the corresponding text back to your phone. Why would that change? It even allows Google or Apple to train their speech recognition system so I think they will want to keep it that way.

More generally, more and more computation are done in the cloud, even on the desktop (Chrome OS).

That said, I agree about high-res gaming and augmented reality, etc.
This doesn't seem to have any advantages over a simple composting toilet which is pretty standard technology. Surely this article is missing something out?. Otherwise this is a massively overcomplicated solution to a problem which could be solved with local skills and a bit of training rather than a computer controlled nanotech which needs to be shipped half way round the world.
The celebrity angle is an interesting one, because based on previous contracts a celebrity may not be able to grant Instagram the rights it outlines in its TOS - they may already be granted to another entity.
There are now more than 200M monthly active Twitter users
> Why? How so? And - why do we care? If users want to choose their name, how is it relevant if it's frustrating for _other_ people to be unable to locate them?

Well, because that's the way Facebook works. They made a decision early on to require real names because most of the value of Facebook hinged upon the ease of finding friends and family. Imagine if the white pages allowed people to use pseudonyms. It wouldn't be worth much, would it?

> How many people are searching the ex-gf/-bf by name to stalk and see what they're up to?

Dunno, lots? Who cares?

> And - frankly: I know more people on FB with 'fake' names than with 'real' ones. Family, friends, random acquaintances, 70% don't use their real name. The range is from fantasy names (like, obviously invalid/~random~), to play on words/phrases (localized variants of 'Some Dude' or similar) to the braindead exercise of writing your name backwards (you'd be there as "Kram Rettun").

This is purely anecdotal but I would put the rate of actual names used among my friends at around 99%. Now, granted, that may because I haven't found the acquaintances from my past who do use fake names, but that only bolsters my point. If most people used fake names then a large part of the appeal of Facebook would dissipate.

> Isn't it very frustrating as well if people got married and - whoa - just give Facebook their _current_ 'real name'. You wouldn't be able to find them. Maybe the service should require you to list the maiden name, blocking you for failing to do so?

Facebook has a solution for the maiden name problem, btw, (by allowing users to enter an "alternate name")[https://www.facebook.com/help/131728300237162/], and again, this is purely anecdotal, but I see a very high percentage of people in my network taking advantage of this feature. I would wager it's because most people want to be found by their friends and family.

> Against the TOS? Yeah, sure. Impossible to enforce for localized jokes or seemingly valid names anyway. And quite frankly, if it's 'frustrating' for people that want to search for old contacts is really, really not interesting _for those users_.

I don't personally have a problem with people circumventing Facebook's TOS and I'd gather that Facebook probably doesn't care all that much either. What I do have a problem with is a government arbitrarily setting a TOS for a website that people can choose whether or not to use.
Rise Above The Noise: Ways to Build your Brand using Online Marketing
People still wondering that someone not just paying the bills, but making money in the first place, and that all these "free" services are about making money by aggregating and selling user-generated content, logs and statistics?

There is no other working model, btw.
>Yes, this backlash from users is exactly what's happening. You can't simultaneously try to dissuade the backlash from happening and depend on it to prevent the undesirable events from taking place.

No, but I CAN and AM expecting people participating in the backlash:

a) NOT to behave like it's the first time they are seeing this

b) NOT to behave like this move was intended as perceived, and

c) NOT to behave like this wont be reverted pronto.

And I expect this especially from internet savvy people like Wheaton, who have seen this play out tens of times on the nets with similar licence changes...

Had Wheaton written something like "I'm sure this is another one of countless examples of ill-thought and quickly reverted license changes" I would be totally OK.

The way it is now, it's like someone writing "Oh, my god, Charlie Brown was tricked again by Lucy, I don't believe it!!!!" for paragraph after paragraph.

Not to mention that I also presented several other reasons besides the backlash why this is a non-story (for one, it's inconceivable as a business move, when a competitor, Twitter, just turned on "kill mode", second it doesn't make sense as a monetization tactic, it's not like hipster filtered photos are a stock photo favorite, or stock photography itself is a large market).
Folks who upload 1,000 photos from a single session get offset by the folks who upload their one favourite, carefully chosen shot for the month.

Even the most prolific folks on my feed curate their 1,000 photo sessions into a hundred or so. I suspect you're something of an edge case.
because this is the future: http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

the definition of "enough" will change in 2013
Title is a little misleading, but the target article is very inspiring for all indie developers, nice.
If you think you can write a better wrapper than jQuery, you are most likely wrong.
Swedish teens riot over Instragram sex rumours
You can turn the same thing around, no one is forcing Facebook to do business in Germany. If they want to do business in Germany they have to follow German regulations.
What on earth makes the Germans think that they can decide what facebook must do?
Because 64 KB of RAM should be enough for everybody, right? Common, just because phones seem fast enough for everything right now, there's always the next killer app lurking around the corner waiting for a little increase in performance to happen. What about really good AR? You think that's gonna be cheap on the hardware? Or driving external monitors, using as phone as laptop replacement, with a full blown OS? HN of all places should understand this!
I think this is a natural progression for many programmers. First learn one language. Then in switching between different ones they learn there are patterns in common. Eventually they can read any language and consciously or unconsciously ignore the "noise" and focus on the ideas. Finally they can become proficient with a new language very quickly.
Because he's very active in the digital rights arena (and especially video games).
most likely they screwed up the phrasing but meant something extremely more limited

Then they should probably fire their lawyers. It's kind of what they're supposed to do for a living.
I think the problem with HTML5 is that Android and iOS treat it like a second class citizen. For all its faults, the one thing Windows 8 got right was that it allows developers to build native apps using HTML5.
I'd love to check out lobste.rs too if you wouldn't mind inviting me
thanks very much, this really helped
No Fighting in the War Room
This is dubious at best. He doesn't use it, he's not a lawyer, and his grasp on what they are doing is plain wrong. I'm not saying that privacy concerns are moot. I'm saying Wil Wheaton is your typical self-proclaimed geek these days. He shoots from the hip at anything that might trounce his sense of entitlement.
Depends on your application. Ideally you want to change your code so as much computation as possible can happen in pure-C code and pure-C data types (using Cython). If you have a big class tree with many callbacks and work spread over hundreds of method, that can be difficult.

Before you go that far, I'd recommend making sure you know all the Python gotchas (for example, maybe you have some inner loop that does for x in range(100000) all the time), that you algorithms are in order. Sometimes even silly microoptimization can make a difference if a small function is a significant amount of your runtime. Using multiple processes with e.g. the multiprocessing module can be an option too.

Depending on what data types you operate on, numpy (and now this new thing) can do some amazing things.

PS: check things like http://packages.python.org/line_profiler/ beyond the ordinary profiling.
"excellent"?

It's an article from the Mormon church (the one that believes god lives on a planet and that you will get one too when you die) and is 80% made of bible quotes.

No thanks.
Amazon Is Undermining the E-Reader Market It Created
ROBERT SCOBLE JUST COMPARED US TO INSTAGRAM AND WHY IT MATTERS…
The problem here is not that "DRM in general is impossible" and I fail to see how DRM could solve the issue with Instagram, even if DRM wasn't totally broken. Facebook can access your phone contacts and Instagram can access your photos only with your consent. You're willingly giving them that data.

The far bigger issue here is that services like Instagram can take and use your data without your consent indirectly. If I give your photo or your phone number or your location to some service and that action brings you harm, who's to blame and whom can you sue?

I'm not a lawyer, but I bet it's not going to be Instagram or Facebook or the other offenders out there ;-) And DRM here is meaningless.