skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly, no one has a "real" smartphone in Argentina due to president Cristina Kirchner's import restrictions, not due to lack of income.

I live in Uruguay, right across the border, same median income basically, and a lot of people have smartphones: there's a chinese smartphone with Android made by ZTE for Movistar that is given away for free, and Samsung Galaxy Mini is also free with 15 dollar contracts. Huawei also has a very cheap smartphone.

I have a Samsung Galaxy Ace as well, which is the most popular smartphone as it is among the cheapest handed out by the state telephone company (Antel).

Another very popular smartphone is the very old Galaxy 3 with Android 2.1 or 2.2 (NOT SIII - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_3 )

I can second the fact that Facebook is king here, I have 3 teenager cousins and 2 nephews about dysoco's age, and they use Facebook a lot. Twitter only to follow Justin Bieber and One Direction as well :) .

I also see a lot of ask.fm links, no idea why.
Any language that allows null should also provide a non-nullable type. Kind of the opposites of C#'s ?-operator that turns non-nullable types into nullable. In an SQL table it's very natural to choose whether an item is allowed to be null or not, so why not in a programming language?

It still baffles me why C# and Java does not have this.

At least in C# you can use code contracts to constrain functions to not accept "possibly" null values. I haven't used this myself but the demos I've seen look impressive. Anyone got hand on experience of this or similar?
Groovy Examples of Vintange Retro Typography
I remember using KHTML back before Safari was out, and it was wayyy behind Firefox. I'd bet that KHTML was mostly just a sane starting point that needed a significant amount of work to complete with IE/Firefox.
You should read part 2 of the post.
It's been around a while, has an easy to follow syntax and has excellent libraries for science (SciPy, NumPy, matplotlib, etc).
I think this sums it up nicely: http://codepad.org/H7quTJlE
You Can't See It, But You'll Be A Different Person In 10 Years
Was referring to news we read about the iPhone 5 like this coverage : http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/apple-using-custom-arm-... which discussed changes Apple made to the architecture of their ARM SoC to achieve their goals. These are not changes they could have made to an Intel SoC. They could have asked for them, but if they got them then so would everyone else.
Understanding SBT's (Scala) Incremental Recompilation
The Galaxy Nexus does have LTE. The Nexus 4 does not.
Apple fails at social-interaction. They have no feedback loops, no community involvement. Compare to google where the community-feedback loop is almost a part of the product culture.

Waze has social integration (facebook), realtime community reporting (speed), realtime community hazard reports (object on road), community map editing (tweak routes, add roads).

I can't believe that Apple is so good at making "beautiful" things but so bad at community engagement (gamecenter, ping, maps, *.mac, etc).
>They invented all sorts of urban legends around it, but modern eyes on the cold code can prove it's just a fluke.

Yes.

The legend as passed to me on my first hearing of this code in 1988 or so was that Justin Bailey had been a game tester/developer.
Checkout HipChat. Like IRC and has a desktop and web client. They also have API which you can use to post messages to channels from external sources. We have our Capistrano/Ant scripts post their status to our "Deployment" channel. Currently working on a bot that hooks into Jenkins so we can build via our "development" channel.
It's not Merica and you guys don't have NASCAR.
I hate to say it, but this kind of bad analysis is just endemic in the Android modding world. There's no technical leadership at the top (the AOSP people are, for the most part, silent except occasionally in bug reports like this), so people just throw whatever hack they want onto forums filled with even-less-clueful folks and things go viral.

If you tried this on a "real" Linux project you'd be laughed at. Where's the test showing latency improvement? Hell, there isn't even any identifaction of any code at all that reads from /dev/random (and of course it appears there is none).

It seems a little unfair, but frankly I blame Google for this mess. They refuse to run AOSP as a "project", which leaves the AOSP-derived projects a big soup of developers with no clear meritocracy. Some bits (Cyanogenmod) are really quite good. But the stuff on XDA is probably 60% useless junk.
It seems to have more caffeine than most other sodas, at least.
It ranks among the highest among soda.
> And to continue the parallel, it would have probably been better for apple and everyone else if apple had just used the gecko engine for their browser.

In what way?

WebKit seems to have enjoyed some success since then... since Chrome toppled both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Everyone should be aware of http://webplatform.org. Most of the stuff from MDN is being imported to webplatform (I contributed to a doc sprint for this very purpose), and soon that will hopefully be the go-to resource guide for web developers.
I have to go against the grain of my colleagues here. Our company uses IRC, and I hate it. Our small group, on the other hand, uses primairly Skype, and it works well for us.

IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start & restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed company.

Second, I have to set up special configs just to be alerted when my name is brought up. I can't keep up with IRC and actually get any work done, so I have to figure out my current program's implementation of an address book/macros/whatever in order to just be alerted when someone's trying to get my attention. It's also another venue I have to go into and manually mark myself as AFK (something most modern communication programs handle automatically).

Third, its interface is arcane. I never got into IRC when I was younger (and it was in its heyday), and so I don't have the plethora of commands at my fingertips when I want to get something done. Opme? Couldn't tell you how to do that, sorry. I'm sure I could learn, but for something so niche (even within our company), it's not worth the time.

Finally, there are just better programs out there for communicating amongst small (and not so small) groups, that don't require you to idle in a chatroom to ensure you don't loose anything.

[EDIT] As an addendum, there's a lot of mention of IRCs utility in open source. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded software and joined an open source chat with dozens of people in it, just to find out that everyone's idling, and the chances of getting a (useful) response before I could look through the code myself are tiny.
Once they saw my Anaconda v1, why switch to a more mature Python 3?
> looks incredibly retarded when someone holds it up to their ear

I care more about my phone's abilities than I do about what people think of me when I'm holding it up to my ear. (Which only happens maybe once a week for me, anyway.)
Here are some pointers about writing code that works well with SBT incremental compiler: http://www.scala-sbt.org/release/docs/Detailed-Topics/Unders...

Following that advice will drastically speed up your compile time while working (obviously, a clean compile will take as long as ever).
Let's Make 2013 a Year of Innovation - The Industry
Good idea but need to be polished. Many false match, see http://appetite.io/a/daf97fec

Besides the features mentioned by nmcfarl, it would be great to enable a direct upload from iPhone after taking the snapshot, e.g., send via email.
Could easily be rewritten to say "will Scientists avoid moving to Python3
Apple does not have a web bases store right? You still have to use itunes and download the app to the computer? Android install can be done via the web store from what I understand
> Yes interesting areas exist. They always have.

Okay. So now search for start-ups involved around those interesting areas. Don't just down-vote generally on an article like this which borders on flame-bait.

On the other hand, I also accept your down-vote (it is your karma ultimately, not mine) but that doesn't change a thing. According to me it's just plain stupid to claim that innovation has stalled because one is unable to figure out 5 awesome start-ups from a crowd of 50,000 wannabes. Period.
Timbuk2 Founder Develops Bluetooth Earbuds
Can you provide more info?

I have 2 scala programs in production, one of which also has one java file (merssenetwister inlined) and I deploy incrementally built jars without any problems so far.

What scala+sbt versions (or whatever) do you use?

(editted formatting)
You left out SPARC and PA-RISC. NeXTSTEP was probably the most cross-platform desktop OS ever sold.
I'm slightly surprised they didn't use a "Trashcan" model where the data is moved elsewhere before being deleted, so in the event that a critical service is brought down by the deletion of a piece of data no one realized it needed, it can be restored.

Maybe they just assume any good service worth its salt must have proper (out-of-band) backups for that kind of event, since Janitor Monkey deletion is basically equivalent to any other kind of data loss.
I think once the web framework holdouts like Django and Flask move to Python 3 we will begin to see a broader adoption of Python 3 in the startup community. I don't expect to see a lot of apps being ported to 3.x, but I would think most new apps would probably be 3.x-based.
After reading this thread I can't get them out. Thanks.
A perfect size doesn't exist for every human being. But the average thumb travel for adult males is 4 inches. For adult women it is 3.8. The width directly impacts usability for over 50% of the human population. Get over 3.5 inches and you're having to fidget with the phone to go side to side while holding the phone.

There are actual limits to width that have to be take into consideration. Just because you might have a hand large enough for a nexus, does not mean every human, or even adult male for that matter shares that trait. And you're guaranteed less women share that trait.
Not likely to be fixed any time soon. Does incremental compile not help?
This guy is great! Thanks for sharing. Re: color, his story about buying a car made me laugh. "Heather mist? What? Nothing else in the world is 'heather mist.'"
DMCA Nonsense: Your Default Login Page Is A Ripoff Of Our Default Login Page
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/entropy-seed-generator... and here is what xda news has to say...
You have it backwards. The Pareto principle is based on a Pareto distribution with specific coefficients. The Pareto distribution is a power law distribution. Ergo the Pareto principle is based on a power law distribution. There is nothing stepwise about a Pareto distribution.

Maybe VC returns follow 80/20 and maybe they don't. It isn't exactly a public dataset that we can readily get our hands on. The point I was trying to make in my original comment was that although power law distributions seem to be a popular topic of conversation for the past few years, they aren't exactly a new discovery. Given that wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution, perhaps it isn't that surprising that VC returns do too.
I did, but it seems to be catching on and I can't find a better phrase for the concept.
I'm a very casual podcast listener. I pull up the stock iOS podcast app, hit the podcast I want to listen to, and it streams (plays) while downloading. On non-wifi it takes maybe 4 seconds to start.

Is this unusual? Do other apps make you wait for the whole 'cast to download? Is it a per-podcast thing?
You still have to worry about calling a method on a released object or a method it doesn't respond to. Making sure you set an object to null when you release it is good practice for that reason.
Interesting start, but not much to talk about when this is just a setup for a "To be continued" blog post.

"To be continued" is, IMO, a pretty terrible thing to do on blog posts... Why not just hold off on publishing until it is, you know, continued?
Anyone know what the pains in the gut were about?
Eh, I feel like hating on W3Schools is the cool thing to do. I can't speak for their other language refs, but their HTML5 refs are pretty solid. Just today I was searching for a way to force a form to autocomplete.

Now, imagine you are a beginner, which of these two pages do you find more useful for teaching you how to use the autocomplete attribute?

[MDN]
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/form

[W3S]
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/att_form_autocomplete.asp

As with most things in life, pick what works best for you and shun dogma.
I have been using Thumbr.it for a while now and I have to say that we are impressed with the speed and great support!

We'd love to see on the fly retina display processing added to it too ;)
Cmon man, why the hell would you split something like this up???
This sort of thing is relatively common in Britain.

After the riots in 2011, several people were arrested and jailed, some for fairly lengthy periods (years) for posting that they were going to start rioting in various towns.

Most didn't actually get involved in the physical confrontation or violence, or even leave their houses, but were charged with "incitement."

There have been similar cases since for less serious matters, particularly when it comes to messages posted on Twitter. I don't recall all the details, but someone was arrested for "threatening" an Olympic diver on the site a few weeks ago.

It's sad that this news story doesn't even shock me. It's so common here now. (Mind you, this lad looks like he'd be safer off the roads.)
Actually, the IntelliJ team does not use Zinc. Their compilation subsystem is basically an equivalent re-implementation of Zinc.

The reason they built their own is because they need more data about the compilation process than Zinc provides.
I agree that it's a bad idea to have a null check on req & req.getHeaders(). One might think that this kind of thing makes your code more resilient, but instead it just makes it harder to track down the inevitable bugs like forgetting to initialize Request#headers.
Quibble: Apple has been collecting realtime traffic data from Apple Maps users since year one or two of iOS.
Why do language designers continue to insist on semi-colon terminated lines?
I started off writing the whole story as a single post, georgemcbay, but it ended up being far longer than I expected.
Part 2 is coming up soon.
Regarding your addendum, I too have joined a channel to find everyone idling. Turns out, they get an alert when someone writes something, and all you have to do is ask your question. Almost invariably someone will pipe up.

Think of them as being "on call."
My only worry about having my phone be my entire computing infrastructure is it getting stolen. Not sure I'm up for that future possibility just yet.
Algorithms are patented, not copyrighted.
I don't see email attribute in the Place Details https://developers.google.com/places/documentation/details
Don, would you be willing to share a bit in future posts about how you grew the team, how you organised yourselves and how that changed over the course of the project? Also, what thought process did you go through in the decision of how much to include in V1.0 vs leave to later releases? As a team lead/product manager I'm always interested in hearing other people's experiences, and your experience and writing style put you in a better place than many to do that. It is the thought processes and the dynamics of interacting with others in an organisation that make software development stories interesting.
Watch Out New Video Law Lets Netflix Share What You're Viewing
Patient to the eye doctor: "Whenever I drink coffee, I have this sharp, excruciating pain."
"Try to remember to remove the spoon from the cup before drinking."
Another thing to consider: on my main Debian Linux box at home, this script finds roughly 20k man pages, which would take more than fifty years to read them all if you are reading one a day. Granted, I have tons of stuff installed, you could read more than one a day, reading a random one will lead to/make you aware of what's available on your system, etc, etc. Perhaps I should write up a blog post about this whole experience . . .
It seems like a device that has a radio antenna inside it has no excuse for ever running out of entropy.
Since the type system in Scala is popularly touted as Turing complete, I think you are mistaken in this wager. I remember in one of the exercises for the course, I did something where compilation never terminated. Changed the type of a single function, and compilation took less than a second.
You have to factor in the serving sizes.

Cup of coffee = 8oz

Can of Soft Drink = 12oz

Bottle = 16oz
A Suggestion to Phase Out All-Male Tech Conferences
The inclusion of Akka Actors and Futures is _huge_. It really puts Scala in a great place to do massively concurrent programs. I still think I will be pulling in Akka to use their clustering, but of programs that don't require some of the remoting capabilities I can scratch a few lines of my SBT config.
> A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history.

Your shared history vanishes when you're off the network though. Skype has channels, and preserves history, syncing your "rooms" when you log back in.

If it were as easy to pipe machine data (syslog, notices, tweets?) into Skype as it is to pipe it into IRC, it'd be perfect.
Agreed, especially after any real use. My ex- complained bitterly about iOS 5 on her 3GS being horrific, even after the updates claimed to alleviate performance issues.
OCaml doesn't have Haskell's type-classes or Scala's implicits. Scala's subtyping is also nominative (versus structural) and it's basically impossible to do type-inference for nominative subtyping. Whether this is good or bad, the fact remains that Scala runs on top of the JVM while Ocaml doesn't. If you ever work with Ocaml you'll notice that the type-inference system breaks down when you're working with OOP and in Ocaml you're really dealing with 2 type-systems shoved in the same language.

What Ocaml does really well, compared to both Haskell and Scala is type-inference, but it's kind of a weak language IMHO as far as functional programming is concerned.

I also don't get all this complaining, because in practice Scala compilation speed is not a problem. After working with Scala in production for a couple of months now, I'm beginning to suspect that all this is just hyperbole perpetuated by people that never worked with Scala a single day in their lives.
So here is the logic in terms of the employer (company owner). Generally speaking, employers want their employees to be healthier so they use less pto, less health care, and to be more productive.

I think there are already some other apps where users can self report their fitness and get rewards through their respective company.

So the ultimate goal of the app is to get people to eat healthier. There are obviously many angles to this such as portion control, fiber intake, and meat, vegetables, and fruits ratio.

As to what constitutes 'healthy', it is pretty controversial, where if you ask 2 doctors, you'll get pretty much 3 answers.

Generally speaking our behavior goals for the user is to add more fruits, vegetables, and fiber specifically. When speaking with UCLA's head of oncology she pointed out that academic literature points out to most people lacking this in their diet and that consuming those items would lead to improved health.

Now as a previous commenter about overeating, at the very least the apple contains 12% fiber and 10% of vitamin C you need daily.
>ActivityManager.isUserAMonkey()
>>Log.WTF()
I use IRC every day, its basically one of the most useful communication mediums for me. IRC will never die, but people will always try to change it and fail; Its best as a simple communications medium.
Definitely read the "Mythical Man Month" book.
We need some kind of Darwin Awards for privacy suicide.
This is the same company that runs Chaos Monkey on their production setup.
> no LTE

He was talking about the Galaxy Nexus, which does have LTE.

> battery life

That's a function of the functionality - I'd rather be able to synchronize my reading lists in the background and forgo a bit of the battery life. I rarely use more than half of my Galaxy Nexus's battery on a given day, so that's fine for me.

> screen quality

No idea where you're getting this from. Both screens are fine, but the Galaxy Nexus's screen size is the major difference.
It's always encouraging to see others find similar solutions. I've been working on a asset management tool that dealt with thumbnail generation. Only I've done it in PHP.

First, I came across timthumb[1], but it was a little too heavy for my liking. Instead I whipped up a thumbnail-on-demand script with caching options in about 3 hours and 80 lines of code.

Now the best part -- I don't have to use a work-queue on the server side to offload thumbnailing. The browser will do that on first request, and results are cache from then on.

[1] - https://code.google.com/p/timthumb/
BlackBerry phones do use BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) as opposed to standard TCP/IP via an APN. This means that a secure link is made between your phone and RIM's servers (or directly to a company's servers — that why many enterprises still use BlackBerry). And it's also compressed — good thing when using slow connections or roaming.

It goes a bit further, because the "network stack" made by RIM is quite comprehensive, including some tweaks to the way they push information to devices, using operator infrastructure (I believe, I might be wrong here) resulting in a very battery-efficient system.

Because of this, RIM is responsible of negotiating with carriers across different countries, and this result, somehow, in the ability to sign up for sub-100$ / month roaming plans (in fact, it's 55$/month on roaming, pro rata, for me in Spain with a major carrier). Of course, it depends on your home carrier, some want you to keep paying an expensive price per megabyte —around 14$/MB when travelling outside the EU— and then some others let you use roaming as long as you're on BIS (so, no tethering), for a variable amount, or even included in the price for large enterprise plans. It varies depending on each operator and country. On the UK for example, MVNO giffgaff includes a small amount of complimentary roaming data, even for PAYG users.

On a side note, that also means you can tether to a BlackBerry PlayBook while roaming, which is fantastic. I have found roaming to be a bit slow-ish (around the speeds of EDGE even under HSPA), but for email and some random browsing, like reading the news while waiting for a flight on some random country, it is definitely worth it.

(And yes, the PlayBook sucks, someone thought it was a brilliant idea to just release and sell a device with a half-finished operating system — but it does the job.)
Yeah, users' reports of its effectiveness seem to vary wildly.

My suspicion is that it depends heavily on the CPU governor [1] a device uses. Some will see that process running once a second, and keep the CPU at or near max frequency 100% of the time. Others will back down more quickly and you won't see much of a benefit, and still others were probably running at max frequency even before the change, so it wouldn't have much of an effect on them either.

[1]: http://androidforums.com/xperia-mini-all-things-root/513426-...
was waiting to see if someone asked for it :)

take a screenshot of a home screen[1], go to photos and send it to post@appetite.io

thanks for the feedback

[1]press home + lock at the same time. we currently support some 45000+ apps and all models of iphones.