skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why use old data? Use current data and argue a position from there.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-20121...

The Q3 data point is just before iOS and Android began to diverge dramatically.
I would like to know the reason why they used the "basecamp" brand for this instead of releasing it under the name of "breeze" alone, like any of their other products. I'm sure there is a very good one!
> "Future generations are going to find it impossible to register themselves on social networks with their actual birth names, because older generations have used them all."

Only if we presume:

1. Registering people with the same name is difficult-to-impossible.
-- And/Or --
2. Systems that future generations care about will have been invented at some problematic chunk of time before they attempt to register for them.

As to 1) I believe even Facebook can handle the multitude of "John Smith"s fairly painlessly. And 2) is borderline laughable.
"An inch is a thumb length"??

An inch is a thumb's width, not its length. Likely chosen over length because it is ergonomically easier than measuring along its length. Also: what part do you measure? First phalange? Both? Inside? Outside?
I want to hack on my system's source code
Hi HN,

I now feel I'm confident enough to modify the source code of the software I use everyday, so I'd like the ability to do so. Put simply, I want a daily-use desktop system (linux or BSD) on which I can instantaneously modify some source code to fix bugs or add new features if I want to. I need it to be stable --granted that my modifications might break something--, upgradable, and in general easy to use, with the exception that I'd need to compile stuff.

As I feel comfortable using Debian, there's the option of downloading the source package for that specific software I want to modify, which puts you in conflict with already installed packages. BSD ports and Gentoo's portage allow this. They allow you to build a system from scratch, you actually use upstream code with some patches to adapt it to your system, and it's easy to hack something, recompile it and make install.

Then there's the issue of source code clarity. Here's mkdir.c:

* Linux http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/mkdir.c

* OpenBSD http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/bin/mkdir/mkdir.c?rev=1.24;content-type=text%2Fx-cvsweb-markup

* Plan9base (just for fun) http://git.suckless.org/9base/tree/mkdir/mkdir.c

Up to this point, it seems that the only feasible choices are LFS (too complicated to install), Gentoo (GNU code is kind of bloated), and then the BSDs.

Of those, Open's documentation is excellent, and Net's code is simple and clear. Both would work. However, I read OpenBSD's documentation, and it states explicitly that "you probably want to use precompiled packages". I'm unsure if that is to discourage newbies or honest advice.

I want to be able to modify the desktop software I'm running, and I'd like some advice from fellow readers who might already have a setup like this one. My biggest fears are upgrades, new upstream versions with new patches on software I've modified, or new system releases. Is this unmaintainable on the long run?

Thanks!
http://www.legistorm.com/score_gao/show/id/25766.html

"However, Congress passed legislation in 1994 and 1995 that prohibited federal funding for converting highway signs, such as those for speed limits, to metric units."
Real World Code does not Suck
Renditions continue under Obama, despite due-process concerns
I announce all major updates on twitter: @fortaweso_me.
For once my org's third-world IT infrastructure (IE 7) comes in handy. Everything is gloriously degraded down and readable and with only slight layout breaks.
I had to log in just to reply to this because it very well could be me writing this post. I taught myself PHP in grade 7 (around fifteen years ago, it must have been near the v3 release) and sold websites in high school. I hand built everything on web servers I compiled from source.

Then I made the terrible mistake of taking a long break from professional programming through university (I worked as a tech writer instead, the money was good). When I came back two years ago I found that I had to learn a whole new set of tools. Javascript was now the norm instead of a disabled annoyance. Browsers supported incredible display features using stylesheets which made my table-and-images based designs obsolete. All the sites were built using some sort of CMS.

I spent a year learning front end design, WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and Drupal theme design. Then I went back to my old do-it-yourself ways and wrote my own CMS [0]. Suffice to say that it wasn't necessary. I learned a lot about back end programming and MVC related design patterns while creating it, but the most valuable piece of knowledge I gained was "Don't reinvent and try to sell the wheel when other people are offering it for free." It should have been obvious, but it seems I'm much smarter in hindsight than I was in planning.

I'm still learning today. Now it's the Ruby on Rails world and a whole plethora of new technologies come into play. I'm using Haml, SCSS and CoffeeScript on top of the RoR / PostgreSQL back end. My first web app will be ready for release soon. After that it's on to learning Haskell and RethinkDB.

The irony of all this is back when I stopped programming I thought I had a pretty good grasp on everything I needed to know. I figured I'd step right back into web development and continue on the way it had been when I left it. I wouldn't have let my skills atrophy if I had known how important it was to stay up to date. I think after two years I'm finally catching up, and I don't intend to let them get rusty again.

TL;DR:
Don't get cozy because you think you know everything now. Even if you do, the state of the art changes quickly.

[0] http://saintcms.com
It's an idiom for `.*` when you want `.` to mean any character, including newlines. `.` never matches a newline in JS regexes.
Yes, but those are absolute usage numbers. There is 1.43 times as much traffic coming from Android devices as there is from iOS. However, there are far more Android devices shipped than iOS devices, so they browse relatively less: http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/05/the-late-smartphone-adopter...

On top of that, the Statcounter numbers also include tablets, so smart phone only numbers would look very different. Android tablet usage is a fraction of iPad usage (source: stats of a European site with 100M+ monthly visitors). For smartphones, it's more like Android 35% iOS 57%.
Microsoft should have spent some of that money improving the quality control of their software.

To learn that changing the GUI of Windows 8 was not that good of an idea.

Microsoft should have used R&D to make products more affordable.
Are you saying that Montana is not known for much else other than having high speed limits?

There are two incredibly beautiful national parks there, Glacier and Yellowstone. Yellowstone is one of the best known parks in America.
In case you're not trolling, why is it that the business class cabin of most flights is full of iPhone users? Why is it that most artists, journalists, photographers, etc. seem to lean heavily towards iOS?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just asking what group you think it is that is highly busy/productive, on Android, and doesn't show up in web logs?
I applaud the effort that was taken to build this, but I would hope that none of my devs would approach me with wanting to implement inheritance in js. IMO the use case is very very small.

I saw a presentation on this and the performance increase was not even an advantage with prototypes because you would have to call a js function 10,000s of times to gain anything.
Austin, TX Chaotic Moon Studios http://www.chaoticmoon.com/apply/studios/
We're looking for solid mobile engineers. Specifically iOS, Android and Unity. Apply online or email me at elfred@chaoticmoon.com.
It lets me see the content even though I'm logged into Google, and I have G+ disabled on the domain level.
The U.S. auto-industry typically uses metric fasteners. In my experience, that's pretty much been the case since the early 1980's - though that experience is mainly with GM products.

Some of my older metric tools predate that. I owned a '64 Baja bug - thereby learning the art of static timing adjustment.

Changing tape measures isn't going to change US construction practice. Lumber has to change. Cold formed steel manufacturing standards have to change. Steel mills have to change.

All the engineering tables have to change. And insurance underwriters have to be willing to eat claims based on any confusion which this creates - it's kind of like the Hubble telescope without NASA redundancy, except that people will probably die.
Very clean. FYI, when saving I get a URL like undefined/api/jsonBlob/50e46e66e4b006ece99dff64.
A metric user would measure the same distance to "approximately 9 meters" by taking 9 large steps. This is a very common informal method of measuring distances.

It seems more practical (and certainly faster) than to measure the distance to "approximately 30 feet" by putting one foot just in front of the other 30 times.
The working of any given balance of liberties and social protections is a phenomenon observable only in time increments over centuries, or possibly millenia.

There are many examples of "liberal" and even "democratic" or "republican" governments / societies that lasted for centuries before failing into tyranny and / or to foreign domination. The US Constitution attempts to correct the failings of each of those examples. Saying it has worked so far is declaring the weather today, all day long, was great -- at 9:30am.

Saying the French or Germans have demonstrated their solutions, at that time scale, is just nuts.
Don't we have bigger problems than this right now?

Our schools are so badly mismanaged that we're not even graduating people who can use either standard.

We've got millions of people unemployed who would love to turn a wrench regardless of metric or standard.

(Not to cast aspersions at either party, they are both very nearly equally to blame)
If you have to go and look up the method again (even ifcached) because the callsite cache is invalid then you already lost. Constantly invalidating the callsites is the real problem with this pattern.
No arguments there. All this is is just chef recipes to do basically that.

This blog post is a good start but if you have an osx environment you can setup netboot and have a truly automatic install+setup with chef.

I'm a bigger fan of using chef/puppet/whatever over personal shell scripts as then you can test your automation out in a vm. I just build osx vm's and validate my osx automation with that.
I worked in oilfield and petrochemical construction and manufacturing for almost ten years, and I can say that we almost never used metric. I think in the ten years, I worked on two projects that required metric bolts and fittings, both of which were for Japanese companies. Retraining the workers to use metric for these projects was a battle in itself.

We built structures and equipment that went around the world... all using imperial.
I'm a touch confused --
http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/

Is this your site as well?
I would pay $10 yesterday to outsource this away from my org's IT if I felt I had a chance at actually getting said $10 request approved (to be fair, the fact that it's a third-party-run list for our internal ops would be the issue, not the $10).
Cannabis helps patients ‘feeling less pain in their mind’
Nice, an upgrade from http://json.parser.online.fr/ for quick looks at json.
Have you considered biking? If the terrain is somewhat flat I guess it would take about half the time, and you will get daily, light exercise as an added bonus.

Edit: Also, I would be interested to know how long it would take by bike if you happen to know :-)
I don't think their neutrality would have lasted very long had Hitler finished off the UK and USSR.

They also turned away plenty of Jewish refugees, as well as secreting gold stolen from concentration camp victims.

Their record during WWII is shameful.
It's amusing that the author's first reference to "Imperial" units is a reference to their use in "Joy of Cooking", which uses US Customary -- not Imperial -- units.

Of course, the two systems are very similar, sharing many units and sharing the names of other units. But that's actually part of the problem with the Imperial system and its relatives -- works rarely explicitly note which system they are using, so if something uses a system with unit names that look like Imperial units, you have to deduce from place of origin which system is actually in use (and since in many cases the Imperial and related systems have same-named units of the same dimension in the same system that are used by convention for different purposes, you have to deduce from context which unit is actually being used even when you know which system is being used.)

And that's why its better to use a system where there is never an ambiguity in which units are actually being used.
After some time agonising over those in the last year, I can assure you they're still used for Superbowls and years, as well as name ordinals and many other things :)
Actually, the info is already public, they just offer some sort of web service. They do have competitors: PwC, S&P, BBB, Moody's but they do not offer the 'registration' service alone, they want to rate the company which is somewhat expensive.
All rumors were pointing to TSMC. Apple might've involved Intel in the rumors for a while only because they wanted TSMC to lower prices, but Apple has no intention of going to Intel. If anything, they will start to use ARM chips in more of their products, and depend less and less on Intel.

Samsung should expand its own chip business, instead of just being a fab for Qualcomm. They have very competitive chips, but they are only keeping them for themselves, and aren't even using them in all of their phones.
how are you supposed to know the answers are worth it?

The preview.

And as others have said, if it's not on Google, how are you going to find the site in the first place? For a Q&A site that really needs to start turning a profit, this is not a trivial issue.

Quora is on Google, and ranks really well on Google for long tail keywords despite the everything but the first answer not being included in Google's index (blurred out). As a matter of fact, I've even gotten a client who came from Google after finding one of my answers.

I know HN loves Quora links, so: http://www.quora.com/How-is-Quoras-SEO-so-damn-good
Avis offers $500 million to acquire Zipcar; shareholders file suit
The scrolling difference is due to differences in how Android and iOS prioritize things. On iOS, putting your finger on the screen stops all processing on the page - no rendering, no animation, no Javascript, no downloading, nothing runs until you lift your finger off the screen. This lets the system devote 100% of its processing power to moving that rendered graphic around.

Android, by comparison, continues to perform its tasks while you scroll. This means that the scrolling can be jerkier if things are loading, but you continue to get a full interactive page while you're scrolling.

Speaking as a developer, iOS(/mobile Safari) gives me fits. It's the mobile generation's IE6.
It doesn't seem to be widely acknowledged amongst people promoting this particular style of DCI as a good way to write Rails app, so I'd say the point is valid, even if the title is overstated. There are also quite a few other very popular gems that make heavy use of #extend at runtime for non-DCI purposes, including Haml and Paperclip, so I don't think it's fair to say that this is common knowledge (at least in the Ruby community).
Ask HN: What is an ideal age for Kids to introduce them to coding?
My son will be turning 7 soon and he is showing keen interest in computers. Often he is asking me how one can create websites and web pages?

For starters I am planning to teach him HTML and introduce him to Scratch. Am I starting too soon? Is 7 is an ideal age for Kids to introduce them to coding? When did you start with your kids as far as Computer education is concerned?
Your numbers do not make sense.

If Android's 33% and iOS's 23% include tablets and we remove tablets, then Android's numbers will not decrease much. As you have said, there are fewer Android tablets than iOS tablets. So removing tablets would increase the relative market share of Android and not reduce it.

So if you remove tablets, you would not expect "Android 35% iOS 57%", but would instead expect something like Android 43% iOS 13% (numbers made up).

EDIT: Also following the trend, it is clear that more and more people are using Android for web browsing every week. This implies that the 40%+ more Android web usage will quickly increase.

EDIT2: The issue of tablets is irrelevant to statcounter's stats, as the iPad and other android tablets are not included. Leaving the comment above as it is still technically correct if the post above were to be correct...

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/07/whos-ahead-in-mobile-... (comment by StatCounterGS half way down the page)
It's not, but it uses that editor. The difference between the two is that with JSON Blob, you can collaboratively edit/share your JSON and use it programmatically via the JSON Blob API.
Uncle Bob on functional programming
NAT (Or more correctly PAT) was never a good idea and this is the main reason why the cheap network device suffer. It should not need any kind of intelligence. When some of us "Software" guys are up in arms over the slow IPv6 adoption it is because the current IPv4 state translates to thousands of extra code lines for little to no benefit.

We also need those cheap consumer devices to understand Active Queue Management, but that is another problem :)
Its a funny idea, but I'm not sure its all that useful. Would probably be better if users could customize their profile page as well.
> More like Microsoft wastes more money on R&D that doesn't convert in revolutionary products [...]

This sentence is weird to read here.

We have a big company spending money on science that is not tied to what they can sell. That is a good thing. I am disappointed that anyone on HN can say anything different.

Of course, we could have a discussion about the difficulties of running pure research alongside a commercial arm. But that's not what your comment is doing.
I think you might be a bit confused here. The point of a server (http, gopher, or otherwise) is to serve as many clients fully as possible as quickly as possible. What you are talking about appears to be making lots of outbound connections from a client side application, which I think most people know is bad.

Or are you suggesting you've been burned by putting servers behind consumer grade routing and switching equipment?
Nice!
I have to use things like this all the time when debugging writes to mongo, so this is really neat. I like the design, although being able to resize the windows would be nice. On my 17" Macbook, there's more unused space that I really need.

It's also really cool that you can save/restore - I could see this being used like jsFiddle.

GL!
Keep in mind Jason is very much talking about a VC-funded SaaS company rather than a bootstrapped SaaS company. A boostrapped company may take quite a lot longer than 24 months to hit $1M and no harm no foul. Many of the famous bootstraps took 24 mos to be big enough for 3 founders to quit their day jobs.

The difference is the $1M VC funded SaaS company will have been wildly unprofitable while the bootstrap will have been profitable every step. The VC world rightly regards SaaS as a landgrab and some of Jason's other posts approach it that way. Hence the companies are run unprofitably so they can be grown faster.

My impression from his posts is he doesn't have a lot of experience with the bootstrap world or doesn't think much of it. I frequently write counterpoints to his posts on my Smoothspan blog.
Yet another great example of the problem with Twitter and not having any policy/business-plan for dealing with squatter accounts.

They should, if account is unusued for 3 months, send an email saying "are you still using this" and just ask the person to login to verify they are. If that email (and multiple subsequent) aren't answered within 3 months, the person initiating the "claim unusued handle" request gets the handle.
Why Pinterest Uses The Cloud Instead Of Going Solo - To Be Or Not To Be
This is silly. Microsoft doesn't have the culture for any kind of innovation at this point.

-ex-microsoftie
Why Zipcar’s “Greedy VCs” Weren’t Quick Enough
Hi- I'm the author of the piece (on twitter at @aatishb) and am happy to field questions on the post. Do people accept that the video isn't faked? The data isn't perfect, but it was good enough to convince me that the video is real.

Here's a follow up question, that I haven't thought much about. Assume that Rugland launches the first ball at 64 degrees and at 14.4 m/s (about 32 mph). 1.5 seconds later, and 1.5 meters ahead, he kicks the second ball. (So far these are the numbers I get from the data). My question is, given the size of a football, how accurate does he need to be in the launch speed and angle of the second ball, in order to be able to strike the first ball?

You might need to assume a reasonable range for the launch speed to work this out.
Good. So that's the source of your confusion then.

I'm glad we got that cleared up. Since the Inch is specified as 25.4 mm you can convert any measurement in Inches into an exact equivalent in metric. But that does not make it a metric size.

Inches: 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1" etc and various measures in between (5/32nd for instance).

Metric: 1mm, 2mm, 3mm, 4mm, 5mm, 6mm, etc. and various measures in between (5.5 mm for instance).

So you buy your lumber in Imperial measures (apparently except for thickness), and the rest of the world buys theirs in meters (or mm). That's the difference between 'working in Imperial' and 'working in metric'.
Regarding the edit, I don't see what's ridiculous about the statement. Can you elaborate?

When he says arbitrary functions, I think he's basically comparing it to the limitations of SQL solutions that are traditionally used for data warehousing. SQL is abused beyond belief and also slow beyond belief for certain types of queries.

MapReduce provides a pretty good place to start from. Sure, it's awkward for certain things. But if you're going to rearchitect a distributed system from scratch for each computation you do, you're not going to make progress very quickly.

See this paper for the opposite viewpoint: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4520057

He provides solutions to common problems which can be expressed with MapReduce.

The lambda architecture is more powerful than what's being advocated in that article (plain mapreduce), although I'm not sure if it's really a thing people are using or just a subject of a book.
Of course you can have seven perpendicular lines. It's as easy as embedding a seven-dimensional graphic.
Andrew Sullivan parts with Daily Beast for online, subscriber-funded venture
Thanks for the feedback and you weren't the first to be confused. We are working on new design on front side to help clear it up. We thought about larger use-cases but the problem I'd been experiencing as a parent with young kids in sports was directly related to communication with the coach (and as the coach with the parents) so that's why we focused on sports teams up front. But, I have created a "team" for other purposes in our app including the development of the app itself.