skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Other than games, when I see apps available on both and that were ported from the iOS version it is very apparent they are not "proper" Android apps. Big clues are having menu and back buttons. Others are using builtin 3rd party integration (eg fb, twitter, dropbox) instead of the system.

A well structured Android application is like a mashup of different screens, processing (services), event handlers (broadcast receivers), data (content providers), user accounts etc. And it works with other components on the system, not its own little island as on iOS.

You haven't stated what your app is so this issue may not apply. A good example of a bad app is "Beat The Traffic" which is terrible on Android being an iOS port.
Given how young Rails is: A senior dev in another language plus as many years of rails experience as is possible (6?).
I wouldn't call if facetious because today, the only reason any AV exists is because other software failed to sanitize itself against rogue agents. Viruses aren't some mystery or magic, you have to actively engage with a server that sends one to you (be it by actively engaging with the server, or having a vulnerable point of entry and a bad firewall), and either through vulnerabilities in the applications interacting over IP stacks, or through user ignorance in explicitly running a virus manually (and with enough escalated system privilege to do damage).

It is easier to whitelist than blacklist. It is stupidly easy to embed a cipher in a binary, encrypt the actual payload, and have the execution context decode it back into its viral form. If you do that, you can tweak a knob, get an entirely different looking binary, and keep shipping out the same virus over and over.
Errors on individual transactions and reporting being unavailable is not the same as transactions simply not happening at all.

Stuff happens to banks and then people switch to other banks, especially when you're a new player.

If my bank did this to me I'd be gone instantly, I almost did just over their inability to keep telebanking working through a denial of service attack, and then blaming it on the hackers. All my cards (credit, debit across several companies and private accounts) link back to the same bank. If that bank does not do its job I can't do mine.

ATM and pos worked fine during that period, if it had not I'd be gone for sure.
I think all the people blaming TNW or their tools or the lack of publishing platforms are all just missing the point as, despite market share, Android fails by many of the app and content dollar metrics. The point being missed is that Google might simply not have enough credit cards. Despite being one of the most valuable and trusted brands in the world, Google is not a brand people have trusted with their credit card for very long. Apple and Amazon have been doing it since 2003 and 1994 and have pretty good reputations for customer service. Google is still building that and until they do they may continue to under-perform their market share in some of these measures.
Chosen... will keep trying a few things though. So gradual A/B.
I highly doubt Simple's invite-only early-adopters are dependent on their Simple card as their only way to buy beer and/or (your downthread example) gas for the drive home. (And I hope they're not using their card for both on the same night.) #firstWorldProblems
>The round trip to the red planet, in particular, could take as long as three years.

That "up to" is technically correct, but seems pretty misleading. I don't think anybody would seriously propose such a trip.

Per wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_mission_to_Mars#Windows)

>However, typical Mars mission plans have round-trip flight times of 400 to 450 days.[14] A fast Mars mission of 245 days round trip could be possible with on-orbit staging.

And of course if you are only interested in a one-way ticket (obviously with a drastically changed life expectancy when you arrive) then you are only looking at a trip in space of a few short months. (I think in theory you can get down to 88 days to Mars with the Aldrin Cycler, for example).

No part of going to Mars isn't going to likely kill you, either nearly instantaneously or slowly. Mars missions are going to create a lot of bodies. I'd love to be proved wrong there, but that just seems to be the reality of anything we can do in the foreseeable future. This risk is understood though, nobody who has seriously considered going for it is unaware. You may as well write articles on the dangers of BASE jumping.
Ease of sales. It's easier to sell an app than a subscription through a Web paywall. This is also why more developers sell Mac apps through the App Store than direct now. Psychology, discoverability, and ease of making impulse purchases all comes into play.
On windows I have been recommending people to use Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free. I understand Microsoft cannot bundle MSE because of that being a monopoly but I really wish they could, With MSE being pre-installed as opposed to Norton and McAfee trials being pre-installed and asking for money after 3 months.
This is the right stance I believe. Sadly there seems to be a more and more failures creeping up in banking and payment processing areas, and people seem to get used to it. I had two different banks fail on me (operations not actually aknowledged when the interface was showing otherwise, error on payments because of misreadings of the state of the accounts, two factor authentication down under peak load) the last month.

It feels a bit like when the general public got used to see computer fails, and "the computer is never wrong" mental image became a "it crashes from times to times, you just have to reboot" one.
Reddit's visitors skyrocket in 2012 with 37 billion page views
I could see that for something like NYT, but TNW doesn't offer subscriptions.

Do people discover web sites through an app store?

I wonder if there's an opportunity there?
What do they do? What benefits they offer over traditional banks or credit cards?
Guess what?

https://twitter.com/Skroob/status/285932353765908480

https://twitter.com/mrlanphear/status/285916924599205889
I don't have nearly enough data to give you any confidence in that answer -- all my enterprise sales are essentially one-offs, still.
You really should have a look at how Simple bills itself. They bill themselves expressly as a replacement for your bank. The whole idea is that you absolutely rely on simple to do their thing or you might as well not use them.

http://simple.com/

If Simple is used the way they intend you to use them those scenarios are playing out right now. You really can't shift the blame for that onto those that believed the Simple proposition and acted as though simple was going to deliver.

Ordinary everyday people do not do single-point-of-failure analysis on their wallet, they simply expect it to work.
It isn't really news that people basically "wrote all the low level code they needed" and moved on from there. There was a market for C++ in the 90's because the hardware demanded it and because there was no foundation to build the myriad of technologies we have today off of. Now we have those technologies and as long as the going rate for a programmer is so high, their time is more valuable than the efficiency of native code.

I prefer C++, and I'm 21. It is the kitchen sink, but that is what I want in a bare native language. If I write something higher level and need efficiency, I can switch into C++ gear and expect the language to be complete enough to quickly implement whatever is missing and inter-opt the functionality.

If my time is more valuable, I'll just jump at Python. If it needs a web presence, I'd sub python for Javascript. If my time isn't the most valuable thing, C++ (maybe one day D) becomes comes to the front of the pack. But that is the way I tackle the problem.

I still wonder about a different perspective. If I am going to write something that is going to see millions of hours of execution on machines, as opposed to the hundreds a normal script will or the thousands a business app might, I'd not want to imagine the amount of electricity and processor power being wasted on interpreters and JIT compilers. I wonder how bad it is for Android phones running most of the non-system software on Dalvik.

Oh, and I'm unemployed, so lf work in C/C++/Java/C#/Python/Javascript (woohoo shameless plug. It is why I read this story after all, even if it is about the job market 9 months ago...)
They provide a much better UX for debit cards.
This is a perfect example of buzzword driven technology recruiting. Imagine this person writing this essay in early 2008, objective-C has all these negatives against it -- ranked about 50 in the popular language index, funky syntax that people can't wrap their heads around, manual memory management, can only write Mac applications (< 5% of devices). Even iPhone is moving to the Web. All Objective-C programmers should give up and move to web technologies. However, about four years later Objective-C is in the top three technologies to learn.

I don't think there is a single C++ programmer (sitting under a rock) that doesn't know that C++ is not cool. It hasn't been cool for over a decade. This "essay" has some sort of anti-lesson in learning about technologies that have peaked. I can understand someone writing this essay in 2005; but if you have been writing C++ all this time, now is probably the best time (relatively speaking). Resource constrained devices are going to be norm in this decade (smart phone, smart sensors etc.). C++ will be one language that will be supported across all these. At the high end, servers will move from python/Java to C++ to squeeze even more operational savings.

Also, becoming a sysadmin (RHCE) in addition to learning about python and RoR and Objective-C. I mean, it doesn't even make sense ...
The Valve Company Handbook for New Employees
But I thought my self worth was measured in internet points. Did Reddit lie to me? 😰
Mike,

Build something yourself.

Sincerely,

The people who are not bored.
Books whose titles contain elements of the set "secret", "ninja", "rock star", "days", "master", "dummies", or ones that have a number in the title (2012, 24, etc) really put me off. I know I shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but these titles are really hard for me to take seriously.
A github repos aggregator
I'm genuinely curious - what is Simple doing that is disrupting the banking industry (excluding, of course, the current literal disruption of banking for their customers)?

My current setup is a cash-back credit card, with the bills for it paid from a high-yield savings account. I net close to 2% cash back on the card, and around .8% APR on the savings account, and pay exactly $0 in fees. Based on the language on Simple's site, I'm guessing the APR on their savings is closer to .25% or so, and they definitely don't offer cash back on the use of their card.

Sure, the tools they offer are nice, but my credit card provider also has pretty nice spending analysis tools (that don't require an iOS device), and lots of other providers are adding or improving spending tools as well.

What am I missing?
I think it was legitimized by having it happen in pretty much every big company ever. It is the "I made this company (or weaseled by way onto the board / highest layer of management), I'm boss, I don't want to hear from anyone else how I do things because its mine, I have the power, obey me. It comes off as very 3 year old immaturity.
Quick fiddle I wrote to draw this, http://jsfiddle.net/ECYBq/1/
I think consumer robotics is a massive market that needs a breakout in. I can easily see people throwing away life savings, a double mortgage, and their cars to get a personal butler droid that cooked, cleaned, did dishes, mowed lans, etc. Maybe even more importantly, the wealthy elite class would throw millions away to replace servant crews. It doesn't need to be one machine, it doesn't need to look human, you could probably control it with your phone rather than finicky voice recognition. I think the technology is already there, nobody just took the initiative.
Code generators.
Ought to be easy to serve the code from a script that compiles on demand. I assume you'd want a cache, but a simple modification date check will ensure that it's always up to date. Of course, having to build this is worse than not having to.
sure why not.. if you haven't already ran out :)
There have been a lot of comments blaming stingy Android users and poor ports for poor sales on Android compared to iOS. I think there's a third factor: exposure & marketing. I'm an Android user, I know that I've read articles from thenextweb before, but I did not know that they actually had an application/magazine for sale.
Happy pre-subscriber of the ebook version for years now.

Congrats on finishing it. Book writing is hard.
> the HHS is moving to open up clinical patient data

Don't want to sound too cynical here, but give me a break. The health care industry has resisted technology for 2 decades persistently, and any radical revolution in medicine will have so many public hurdles beyond what has already been dealt I don't see anything changing for Average Joes for decades just because of inertia, the powers that be, and special interests.

I mean I still can't get medical care at all without cleaning out my bank account because I'm uninsured. It is personal bias, but I'd rather see that fixed first. $500 - $1000 a month in healthcare is obscene.
I was going to write a few things, but then I saw this is from a recruiter, so it is actually very good :)
I'm curious to hear from recruiters about the job market for things like Node.js and CoffeeScript, because those are my favorite technologies at the moment.
Most of these cheap tablets have unlocked bootloaders or easily broken into ones. No reason to keep all the unnecessary Android clutter on top of the hardware if you are trying to use it as an imbedded microcontroller. Maybe keep surfaceflinger as the display server, or maybe just run X or Wayland.
IIRC the original innovations of Simple were (1) usable UI (including mobile) and (2) a single account that's debit and credit. #1 has been mostly caught up by traditional banks and #2 mostly benefits financially irresponsible people (of which there are many, but perhaps not many around here).
I think a generation may soon overdose on 'recency'.

You can sprinkle it into all sorts of informational interfaces to create an extra (but often false) sense of excitement. Social feeds and decaying-rank news sites (like HN) offer recency bingeing, but it's often just 'the new' crowding out 'the best'.

This thread over at Edward Tufte's site solicits ideas for mitigating the recency bias of internet forums... but it seems an open (and perhaps eternal) problem:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
- On Android's fragmentation: From my experience, any developer or publisher who makes a big deal out of Android's fragmentation are just lazy people making excuses. There's ALWAYS a way to make the same iOS app on Android, and if any devices can't run your Android app, then that device just sucks too much. If it doesn't, either you do, or in this case, your publishing software.

- "You make a beautiful magazine for the iPad, and then you dumb it down for Android." Probably because your developer who told you this has no experience developing any real apps for Android and is forcing iOS's UI elements into it? Or maybe you're bombarding your magazine with too much content in the first place (you mentioned embedded music--seriously, isn't that information pollution?). I've seen beautiful apps on iOS that offer the same, consistent experience in Android, e.g., Evernote. What is your excuse for not pulling this off?

- "For every Android user that downloads an Android magazine we have 80 iOS downloads." But what about the Android users who read your content via your mobile website? Or, for many Android tablets from Samsung, via Pulse? Exactly what is your value proposition to these users why they should download your app when they can get most of your content for free? The way I see it, Android users are just being smart because they find ways to bypass having to pay for free content.

- "...with the current state of technology and the way the market is divided we can’t afford to invest in it anymore." Your target market is fragmented, DEAL WITH IT. If you want to make money, see it as an untapped opportunity and seize it. It's really TNW's call, but to me, their reasons for not developing for Android are just like fat people's excuses for not going to the gym.
We The People petition: Star Wars
It was the censorship that drove me away from the few subreddits I used to browse.

Time and time again, users who posted very well-reasoned and insightful, but somewhat unorthodox, comments were banned. I looked forward to reading their comments, since they were at least thought-provoking, even if I didn't necessarily agree with what was said. But then power-hungry moderators would come along and permanently boot such users, often without any explanation or without any way to appeal such a ban. So I stopped visiting.
Let's Give Up On The Constitution
> I was more surprised by the rise of Google (and Android/Linux) in a world dominated by Microsoft.

Microsoft dominated the mobile phone space? Ubuntu is doing ok, but I don't think it is taking the productivity market by storm. I am more impressed Apple kept their propaganda campaign for OSX going so strong that it became its own self perpetuating must-have device trend for no other reason than shiny and street cred for 99% of buyers. I'm 21. When I was still in middle school RIM was in its prime.

> IMO, that was the earthquake which stymied true attempts innovation.

Tech investment has barely slowed down since then. A lot of us are still out of work because society hasn't adapted to the still continuing trend of "productivity is high enough not everyone needs to work 40 hours a week to prosper" but the tech sector is still there. The real reason for the innovation slowdown is extreme patent trolling and abuse in the US. The IP laws here, especially software patents, are ruining potentially revolutionary tech with this systemic abuse.
Simple has earned such goodwill with me for their amazing customer service, zero fees (even for overdrafts), and overall customer experience that I'm happy to give them a pass on this.

The fact that they're being proactive about their status updates, and transparently honest, helps a lot, too.

A relationship with a bank is a lot like a relationship with a doctor: bedside manner is sometimes the most important element to patient (customer) satisfaction - sometimes even surpassing outcomes, as long as it's not too serious.
It sort of depends on what you think Snapchat does. If you think it's temporary photo sharing, who knows. If you think it's expiring content sharing, there's been imageboards and textboards forever. Given that Twitter "expires" content off your stream and off your own profile after 3200 tweets, Twitter could be considered that sort of model. You can probably imagine how you could make a custom Twitter client that works like Snapchat but uses Twitter as its platform. You might wonder if there'd be a market for that.

But all of these over-simplify and over-generalize what Snapchat does. The correct answer is #4, the one you couldn't envision.

If you were surprised, it means you don't understand why people use it, which means you're not thinking of it in terms of the problem it solves for them, but only as an idea with an arbitrary, coincidental implementation.

Snapchat solves a problem for a segment of users and solves it very well. It is both a solution and has a well-executed design. You need both, and then you also need marketing and network effects and traction and luck.

To better understand why Snapchat is the current communications darling, you might look into danah boyd's research into how teens use social networks, or this recent anecdotal exploration of one US 10th grader: https://medium.com/product-design/d8d4f2300cf3

Don't start with an idea, start with a problem that you have evidence exists, then develop a solution.
Unfortunately this just confirms that recruiters are terrible at finding decent people. The trick is to look for companies that do not look at buzz words and pigonhole candidates based on tools they have used. Those developers might be one trick ponies and are generally not a very good hire.
Run nginx or lighttpd as a reverse proxy in front of net/http.
This. You invest in a project and find out with your first merge the maintainers are assholes and toss out fine commits. I've seen that happen a bunch. It is why there are so many freaking forks, and a lot of them end up atrophying because one person can't recreate an ecosystem.
Another way to think about this problem is to turn it on its head and assume that hard drives will fail and make it a strength and not a weakness. Something like OpenStack Storage[1] is built around the idea that hard drives are transient and replacing them should be painless. In fact, the more drives you have the less problems you have.

Basically, you keep multiple copies of the same data across different clusters of hardware. If a drive or two (or ten) go bad, just replace them, there is no rebuild time. Sure, it costs some disk space to keep n copies of data, but drives are just getting cheaper and there are de-duplication schemes being developed to help with this. Its not like RAID-6 is super efficient either.

Just my two cents...

[1] http://www.openstack.org/software/openstack-storage/
I got interested in lisp because of hn and pg, actually. Now I am writing toy one and reading through the kernel paper (because why shouldn't macros be first-class language objecs?). It's a sickness.
I'm a C/C++ programmer with 15+ years experience. I recently was looking in the job market, and I didn't feel any problems trying to find a C++ job. Most jobs weren't C++, but there were still jobs that I could have applied for that would have interested me. But I chose instead to go with a job doing PHP (having no practical experience in PHP), because of the opportunities presented by the company, not because I felt PHP was superior in any way.

C++ opportunities are definitely decreasing, but there is still a lot of life left in it for performance-critical applications. And most kids these days coming out of school don't really learn C++ as much as they used to. I find most of the kids that I interview have experience in Java and Python, so it means that those old dinosaurs like me that have significant C++ experience still have a decent shot, unlike the COBOL programmers of Y2K.
I guess those people won't be downloading the G+ book then.
I'd also like to know which reg..

Jay [at> jaytaylor dot com
Unless you're an exceptionally large bank :).
Oh gosh - PLEASE don't purchase or recommend anything to do with Robert Kiyosaki!
That's an interesting point, but it's also pretty obvious that my valuables are going to be in my pockets.
Newbie questions (I have searched the Internet a bit, did not find information to answer these):

I understand that anti-viruses (AVs) maintain signatures of viruses (which as I understand are byte patterns present in that virus not present in non-infected software code). They also look for executables modifying others.

Questions:

1. If AVs have to match byte patterns for a very large number of known viruses (millions??), would this not make scanning each executable very slow? This seems to be O[e*v] operation where e is the number of executables and v is the number of viruses. Since it does not seen as slow intuitively, what is going on?

2. I presume AVs would also track check-sums of known executables so that these can be safe guarded against new viruses for which signatures are not yet available. Is this right?
Even if you don't, you should still study and improve your theoretical understanding as though you do.