skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The number of units sold is capped by the market size. If someone else is selling $1 devices and you are selling $10 but the $1 device meets the need, you won't be selling much. Microsoft/Intel might bank on those markets being "distinct" - but that's getting more tenuous each year.

The markets compact over time and $1 devices will kill $10 devices.
I'm pretty sure with a community like GitHub, those advertisements would turn around and hurt their service, instead of help it.

Even if it was the best build service in the world, as a hacker I wouldn't personally use it.
When I was a kid I had exactly zero budget for software.
And I believe even the discounted version of Photoshop is on the order of hundred bucks.
Piracy is not a good opton in context of this discussion.

The feature set is an interesting question but an orthogonal to one we've been discussing, that is: preferring the current mainstream, business-adopted software even if it costs significantly more.
> I think you're missing firstly how dangerous the sentiment of your initial response was - it reeks of complete ignorance of what women face

Well, your thinking is incorrect. If you had bothered to actually read my initial post, you'd know that I clearly stated that "sexism is clearly an issue in the hacker community that needs to be tackled".

> is at points flat our victim blaming "she brought some of it upon herself".

Yes, she did bring it upon herself in the sense that she was inexperienced, something that had nothing to do with her gender. If a male had the same level of experience as her and tried to pull some of the shit that she did, he would have gotten his ass kicked out, no questions asked. Such incidents just never get attention, since they're a regular part of the tech industry - you're incompetent, you're out.

To reiterate, I am not suggesting that she should be blamed for the sexist comments she was faced with. That is a separate issue and one that clearly needs to be dealt with.

> No, they were pointing out that they were an organiser not a technical person.

Wrong again, bobwaycott repeatedly referred to her as a "founder". There's a big difference between an "organizer" of a loosely organized internet project and a "founder". And the organizer of a loosely organized internet project can't claim credit for having come up with the idea for it, as bobwaycott credited the author with in his post.

> The fact is that when one or two people do it and it isn't met with outright condemnation and vitriol from the other 99%, it feels like this sort of thing is accepted or event silently celebrated.

Blatant strawman. I never suggested that it should be accepted or "silently celebrated". Do you actually bother to even read what you've written before hitting the reply button?

All I'm saying is that for men, when we're at a conference with 1% of the attendees being women, we may never even see this harassment going on, since the harassers and the victims together may only make up 2% of the total attendees. How are we supposed to stop something that we don't even see happening?
Or, it could be inspiring them, as it obviously is if you read through many of the comments here. They can say, hey, he went from making basically nothing a few years ago and now it's making a lot of money. This is possible if I work at it.

I just recently had a very similar conversation with a younger friend who is in school. I showed him a detailed look at my business and what it takes (and importantly) what it doesn't necessarily take to make money. This is extraordinarily useful information to someone who hasn't tried going out on their own yet. People can and do make lots of money selling software. I think it's really awesome to know that someone is making 40k from Bingo Card software.
You say that success isn't relative but just two posts up you said 200k is in the top 3% of earners in the US. Why did you limit that to the US? The same logic that made it sensible to restrict your comparison to the US applies to tptacek's observation.
Sounds like a debate between opt-in and opt-out. Why not both? Do an AB test of a Bot vs. a Service. In some cases, opt-in is good (see: organ donors), in other cases it's bad (see: Internet Explorer).

What if there was a community-vote that turned a bot and a particular version of said bot from Opt-Out (app style) to Opt-In (bot style)?

I, for one, welcome our bot-coding overlords that clean up my code and optimize it on each commit. Might save me a lot of time and a lot of power and thought... if it's peer reviewed, like all open source software.
> But I'm not convinced that it's easier to use a stylus than a finger to tap buttons.

I have an stylus based ereader. It is great to get some document and make notes all over it. For example, it is great to put a circuit diagram in it, and then redraw lines, add parts, draw arrows, etc. It feels like paper, except that it's slower and easier to erase.

You don't get that with a keyboard.
I suspect that if one had a high quality stylus, pep low would do a lot more annotation of photographs. Right now, the poor stylus technology (either a poor stylus or a finger) limits what one can do with such programs.
I can recommend trying AppHarbor - we're striving to deliver a better .NET and Windows cloud platform. Feel free to shoot me an email (rs@appharbor.com) if there's anything I can help with.
What is the extent of this outage? There isn't much info on Twitter or elsewhere. The Azure service status dashboard shows an issue impacting "Storage [South Central US]". Is that service like S3 or EBS or something entirely different?
Seconding Planet Money (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/), in fact the whole Marketplace team is pretty stellar (http://www.marketplace.org/marketplace-podcasts)

TWIT is always pretty fun as well (http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech/)

Smithsonian puts out an interesting presentation every so often too (http://www.si.edu/podcasts/)

Granted these are all great podcasts, but they've been around and entertaining way before 2012.
Just type cache:http://example.com/ into Google.
Donate to The NetBSD Foundation
I don't like this suggestion of "best practice" without any numbers. Progressive JPEG uses more RAM (because you can stream normal JPEGs so you only have to buffer a row of JPEG blocks) and lots more CPU (up to 3x).

Most of the compression benefits can be obtained by setting the "optimized Huffman" flag on your compressor. e.g., a baseline JPEG will save 10-20% when "optimized" and progressive very rarely achieves a double-digit win after that.

MobileSafari eats cycles every time you inject a large image into the DOM, so (while I haven't benchmarked progressive), it seems like this new-found love of progressive JPEG is beating up one of the slower code paths in the mobile browsers. And to me, it doesn't look that good!
Great question and thanks for answering. I think that a lot of us have this dream where we work 20-30/hours a week and have the same results that you've achieved. Starting off, as with anything worthwhile, takes a lot of effort, hard work, and focus on what you want to accomplish. Thanks for the update, and please keep posting -- its keeps us motivated.
But companies are just made up of individuals. Individuals make the decisions. Therfore they should be held under the same scrutiny.

The difference is individuals have tons of direct consequences for their actions, but individuals inside (big) corporations who make bad decisions are masked and protected thanks to the legal system (corporate personhood), government policy and influence of money on both of those.

Acting maliciously results in bulk monetary settlements and rarely result in the individuals getting burned. Just look through the yearly pharma settlements, they pay a small percentage of their revenue and things continue on business as usual with zero market effects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_...
> Africans did their own enslaving and western slave traders merely bought the available goods.

There's no such thing as "merely buing the available goods". The very existence of a will to buy creates incentive to make the goods available. It is always a feedback loop, and you cannot shift blame around it. Both parties are equally responsible for participating.
Well, with Python it doesn't seem particularly fast. I put together a small test: http://svn.colorstudy.com/home/ianb/msgpack_json_comparison....

It uses some random JSON data I found. msgpack is more compact (87% of the JSON representation), though not dramatically so.

json encode: 5.54msec
simplejson encode: 8.27msec
msgpack encode: 11.4msec
json decode: 16.4msec
simplejson decode: 4.06msec
msgpack decode: 2.84msec

I'm confused about why json is faster at encoding and simplejson is faster at decoding. simplejson is fastest when you combine encoding and decoding.
Interesting to me are the generational service abandonment patterns.

The author mentions abandoning MySpace moving into highschool like the subject graduates past Tumblr.

It's symbolic of the maturing nature of the individual. In the future perhaps social networks will find a way to iterate their brand with each generation to prevent losing users to another new service.
You keep using this word, "strawmen". I don't think it means what you think it means.

It means you make up stuff about my position and respond to that, instead of responding to my actual position. And now you just Dunning-Kruger on and on about generalities in a shallow way, as if I didn't know all of that and more of what you post. WTF.

it's totally another thing to say "Hitler was evil"

No, it's a shorthand for saying "I disapprove of his actions". It's stupid enough to outright claim what I mean by that, but now that I told you OVER AND OVER, to simply ignore it and bang on about your strawman instead is just pathetic. Cut your losses dude.
Because most people are either closet Marxists or closet Fascists?
my little worry about scala is that it _keeps getting_ bigger and more complex.

2.9 manage to not change the language much, AFAIR, but now 2.10 gets macros[0], string interpolation, implicit classes, value classes, and a whole new concurrency framework.

All cool stuff, but the nonchalance in adding more and more things makes me uncomfortable.

[0] yes, I know, "experimental"
If this was quick and easy, I could see it becoming a major form of communication. Since everyone has a computer/camera/Internet communicator in their pocket, the reason people don't is probably because the interface leaves something to be desired.
I love this, it's refreshing. Every time something goes down, I see a flood of hate and a torrent of comments suggesting everyone move somewhere else. That, coupled with HN's hate of MSFT, makes this one of the most refreshing posts I've seen in some time. And sensible.

Respect to you, my friend :).
Vim, both in a terminal and in a GUI window. The learning was slow in the beginning but patience paid.
Hey Pan69,

Here is an excerpt from a recent article I read:

"Startup entrepreneurs themselves are feeling good about 2013. In the Kauffman/LegalZoom Startup Confidence Index survey, a whopping 83 percent of startup business owners are confident about their potential profits next year. Young entrepreneurs, ages 18 to 30, are even surer of themselves: 93 percent say they’re “confident” or “very confident” about 2013 sales projections."

Working for a startup myself, and keeping pretty close tabs on what it going on out there in the community, and it seems to me that there is a lot of optimism going into '13. VC money and wages are still going to be tough but not impossible, but that is part of the startup game.

@Simpson
Thanks for this insightful comment.

I have struggled to find the right ways to think about the phenomena underlying the shared memory abstractions. The limited visibility makes this harder than understanding other aspects of software. You can run instrumented simulations like cachegrind; you can query arcane CPU performance counters (Intel's Nehalem optimization guide was eye-opening regarding how much goes on inside vs. what you might learn in an undergrad CPU design class) -- but at the end of the day you have to be guided by experimentation and measurement. And so many times those leave us with no good theories to explain the observed behavior.

(War story, feel free to skip: One time we were trying to speed up a datafile parser by any means possible -- which was already split into a producer-consumer thread pair, one thread running the unfortunately complex grammar and producing a stream of mutation commands, the other thread consuming that and building up in-memory state. The engineer working on this found that adding NOPs could speed this up, and he measured and charted a range of # of NOPs and chose the best one. Our best guess was "something to do with memory layout?" The outcome of the story was that we tore out a bunch of abstraction layers and ended up with a simpler, single-threaded parser that didn't need such heroic and bizarre efforts, but it also left us feeling a bit of vertigo with regard to memory hierarchy behavior.)

Your pointing out that the shared memory abstraction is backed by message-passing between hardware components (which each represent concurrent processes) is really interesting - thanks!
What's your interest in email by the way? You seem to have some sophisticated views (or at least background) on the topic!
Sorry full article: http://www.openforum.com/articles/will-2013-be-the-year-of-t...
> An alternative would be to use a more powerful language

...can you show us an alternative?
> That's why steering wheels these days still have a lot of push back, even though they're electronic

I thought power steering was still hydraulic. Are you saying we have "fly by wire" cars?
That wasn't a very good example. But you never want to modify any test cases.
AppHarbor is fantastic. I can't stress this enough. I've deployed three MVC3 applications on there already and they work effortlessly.

My workflow is:

1. Write code on dev machine.

2. hg push to BitBucket.

3. AppHarbor hook reads new push from BitBucket and compiled on their service.

Simple quick and easy deployment!

Once thing I wish they would offer is free domains like Heroku does. Hopefully this is a feature they enable in the future.
The Toughest Scene I Wrote: William Nicholson on “Les Misérables”
I can agree with that being a problem.
"The CIA has a backdoor into Facebook's data anyway."

Don't forget the NSA!
How about we just kick the sweet tooth entirely instead of substituting it?
Excepting instances of extremely small storms, Category is in fact the second most important factor when determining the destructiveness of a storm.

First most important is geography - where the storm hits.

Size of the storm is the least important factor. A large but weak storm (such as Sandy) will always be less destructive than smaller but more intense storm - assuming that they make landfall at the same location.

Sandy killed only 131 individuals, despite making landfall in an extremely densely populated area. Within the US, far smaller - but more intense - storms have killed far more people in areas far less densely populated.
> We have strong protections (constitution) and recourse (elections) against the government. While not perfect by any stretch they are far better than what we have against Corporations.

Call me selfish, but there really isn't a "we" when it comes to having my privacy and rights violated. What consolation is it if 50.01% of society approves of my rights being violated? I have absolutely no recourse—voting is statistically not worth the trip to the ballot, and that's even if there was a candidate or issue that I genuinely approved of with a reasonable chance at winning the election. In fact, unless you derive utility from the act of following politics, rational ignorance is a perfectly valid excuse for not even researching the candidates or the issues. The odds of my vote affecting an election, even if I'm in the most hotly contested county in the most hotly contested state, is not worth the hour it takes me to read about the issues and travel to the voting booth.

> Government is much more transparent than corporation.

I can't conceive of a context in which that statement is true. Which corporations have massive clandestine paramilitary organizations with a long history of assassinating foreign politicians overthrowing democratically elected governments? Which corporations are visited by countless lobbyists intent on bribing leaders to change policies? Which corporations have massive police forces deployed country-wide with the express goal of violently preventing you from burning certain plants?

> For me, it is more insidious to be exploited for profit than to be spied on.

That's a fine opinion for you to have, and you're lucky that the one organization with the funding, equipment, and social license to commit heinous acts with little limit just so happens to do things that bother you the least.
Show HN: WhenEpisode.com (Simple weekend project)
Except that's exactly not what's going to happen - the shift is determinedly away from heavy desktop apps to lightweight clients and more work done on the server backend. That causes a dramatic split in processing needs: clients get thin (requirements flatline in procesing) and servers get fat (now all the work is server side). What used to be a "unified" market suddenly is not any more.
Nonsense, the problem with McDonalds and other fast food restaurants is that it barely qualifies as food -- it uses as few real ingredients as possible because real ingredients have a short shelf life.
Is it so much the individual maturing, and not just the platform itself losing relevance? The whole nature of these social platforms seems to be entirely ephemeral - they spread by word of mouth because others are using it. The problem comes in when you consider that a person isn't going to use more than 2 or 3 of these platforms. So as soon as a new platform is released, older platforms are guaranteed to lose users even if the new platform is worse, as it will take a number of weeks or months for a typical user to understand and then reject the new platform. During that time, the older platform isn't being used.

This exact issue seems to apply to online gaming as well, so this isn't some new discovery of human behavior. There are some 'big' games (warcraft, cod) that retain their users even after a decade - but they do this by reinventing themselves and recreating their products constantly. I think social media and gaming are similar enough for a lot of these behavior traits to apply to social media also - which means the correct approach is to redesign/improve core parts of your social platform at least once a year to keep it relevant.
The key is they want to chat while not wifi connected. Unlimited SMS vs unlimited data. This was something I figured the unlicensed whitespace spectrum might solve but nothing has emerged yet.
Census Bureau Projects U.S. Population of 315.1 Million on New Year’s Day
That's because nut and seed based oils don't taste nearly as good as animal fats.

Margarine on the other hand is an abomination that isn't fit for consumption.
>See also the people who passionately defend the right of two consenting adults to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom, but then object if I want to pay someone $2 an hour to clean the bedroom.

Maybe because the first case is a personal sexual affair, whereas the second is taking advantage of your position as someone with money that can offer employment to have impoverished people in need of a job working for a pittance.
I'm also a 15 years old teenager living in Argentina, but here things are somewhat different.

First, no one has a "real" smartphone, most are cheap Nokia phones with some applications for Facebook: People who have money usually buy BlackBerries, I have a Samsung Galaxy Ace (Being an Android fan) that I bought in Spain: but truth is smartphones are really expensive.

Facebook... everything is about Facebook here: Teenagers don't use any other IM service besides Facebook Messenger, they even use it in their phones.
I find it extremely painful to communicate because I need to keep a Facebook window tab opened if I want to chat with someone (Well, I use Pidgin now).

I don't even go into Facebook, the Facebook feed looks like browsing /r/funny New in Reddit, people don't post original content: Just memes copied from the internet and cristian stuff.

People tend to have a lot of friends in Facebook: I think I don't have more than 50 friends: Those who I really would like to talk with me and have access to my pictures.

What people really use here is ask.fm , I'm not sure if people in other countries use it: but the basic idea is that you create an account and people (Logged, or as Anonymous) post you questions and you answer: Then it gets posted in your Facebook.

I don't understand why would anyone want to use that service: The questions are dumb and nosense. Other questions are personal, and some people still answer that.
Nowadays most of my Facebook feed is 75% ask.fm links, it's really annoying.

Other services? Some people use Twitter, but not really; mostly teenagers following One Direction and Justin Bieber.

Blogging? Nah, no one reads blogs: they don't like reading anything larger than a couple lines of text (I think this: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... can be relevant).

Youtube... they like dumb vlogs and some people like gameplays, I find this kind of videos very annoying and dumb.

Oh, not even mention Mail: most of people can't remember their passwords, for me, Mail is vital.
Tumblr? No one knows what that is.
Ah, no one uses Instagram either, and I'm glad...

So resuming: Teenagers only use the internet for Facebook, and, sometimes, reading the Wikipedia (When they have to do something for school) and that's really bad: They have a wonderful tool that they don't want to use, although the language (Most of teenagers don't have a good level of English, or at least they refuse to read English) can be an impediment.

For me the internet is amazing: you can learn whatever you want, for free, thanks to tools like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity: But people refuse to, and the language is not the only issue. I think we should focus our knowledge into motivating the Teenagers to get interested into this, instead of developing more applications like Poke or a Facetime killer.
> “entrepreneur friends”

Instead of /nerds/ or some such is quite a nice touch.
When's the last time Facebook took 30% of your paycheck and used the money to kill children on the other side of the globe with remotely controlled airplanes? When's the last time Facebook broke down someone's door and shot them and/or their dog because they had reportedly been burning the wrong type of plant? When's the last time Facebook used its clandestine paramilitary force to overthrow a democratically elected government and install a puppet dictator? When's the last time Facebook targeted and killed tens if thousands of civilians with conventional or nuclear weapons?
Tesla And SpaceX Founder Musk Buys $17 Million Bel Air Mansion
How is paying $2/hr for the cleaning of the room harming no one? It is more complicated than direct and immediate harm, but (if you subscribe to modern economic models) it does indeed result in economic harm.
And makes clear that DRY is just a handy catchphrase for the design principle of normalization.
I've heard a lot of good things about AppHarbor. I still avoid .NET and Windows, but if I had to host .NET or Windows stuff somewhere, I'd go with App Harbor.
Which would make him a shareholder, ergo it is accountable to him.