skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He profiled both programs and made exactly one optimisation to the Haskell program (removing the call to isLetter). Profiling didn't reveal any obvious C optimisations. So he went with what he had. It all seems pretty reasonable to me.

C fans (I am one, by the way) shouldn't get too upset by this. You still aren't going to write an operating system kernel in Haskell.
It is a fun read on Godel no doubt - but I think when it comes to startups things can be phrased in a more straight forward manner.

> What is that magic wellspring of value that year after year creates these huge opportunities out of nowhere?

Complexity is unidirectional. People move on, rationale is lost, and increasingly the bulk of institutional knowledge grows to be dogma. We do it this way because we've always done it this way.

Additionally, head counts don't naturally go down, people don't automate themselves out of a job and neither do they take kindly to being automated. Change becomes bad.

> Lets imagine, for a second, a time traveler from the future appears in front of Bill Gates in 1999 and utters something like: “I’m from the future! You should sell keywords to match search queries!”"

I am sure there were people within Microsoft who said that very thing around 1999. Also, Google employees lobbied for a social networking product to Larry & Sergey in 2003 and the result was Orkut.

The reason Microsoft didn't rise up to the occasion and grow to dominate search and Google did not seize the social opportunity the first go around is not because these things were unknowable to them under the formalized systems that governed their businesses at the time as the author suggests.

It is not a lack of information. It is more Kafkaesque. Employees had the knowledge and couldn't freely execute on it -- organizational complexity kills joy.

The advantages of working for a large corporation evaporate when you want to work on a risky new idea outside of the company wheelhouse. If anything, they becomes disadvantages.

You are just as likely to succeed independently, have more fun doing it, and keep much more of the windfall. So why not jump ship?
Every time I see these referenced I think of Ready Player One and the start of OASIS
He didn't harm anyone in his violation of the website's terms.

Should the user of adblock be facing multiple criminal charges if they visit a website whose terms disallow its use? It's absolutely ridiculous to allow these terms to be used for criminal prosecution.

Civil disobedience is a valid form of protest, and such a minor act of disobedience is ridiculous to throw dozens of frivolous charges on.

The democratic process for change in the US is long dead. Aaron had powerful enemies in Washington.
Once you go stock Android, you never go back. I love my Nexus 7 and the frequent, direct OTA updates from Google. My AT&T Samsung Galaxy S2 got an update in the last month that turned it into a freezing, battery-draining, glitchy machine with no patch to fix it in site. I will never buy a non-stock Android phone again.
Thoughts on Lance Armstrong [video]
Beastmode, enjoy the NFL playoffs
Not really. Plenty of other Android phones that you could have ordered.
Its debatable whether Google or LG are losing out on anything. We just don't know enough. For example, what if Google is selling the Nexus 4 at a loss? Selling more means losing more money.

Whatever is the cause for the limited supply, there has been plenty of time to address the problems, if the parties were truly motivated. At this point, I can't help feeling that the supply constraints were intended.
Hmm, the cost of doing it myself (at the same place that did it for me) with coins, plus the cost of detergent, worked out to about the same price as having them do all of it. I assumed that cost of full-service and cost of machine-time and detergent would more or less scale together.
No other Android phones would come with a virtual guarantee of timely Android updates. iPhone5 is guaranteed to get timely iOS updates.

Also, other Android phones would come with the OS modified by the carrier.
Founder vesting - foe or friend?
Our political system was built such that the venal interests of politicians would motivate them to check a) over-reaches of the other branches of government and b) the excesses of the other party.

It would be nice if progressives were up-in-arms about overreach in the Justice Department of a Democratic president, but it's not to be expected. Even if it's just republican point scoring, it's still someone holding the Justice department to account.
>For example, what if Google is selling the Nexus 4 at a loss?

An interesting question would be whether Google or LG is (potentially) selling the phone at a loss.
I still remember the controversy when Vista changed the power button on the start menu to sleep by default.
How to get a job at a startup without any experience
He did not want any Android phone, he said he wanted an Nexus 4. For 300$ and those specs is quite a catch.
Thanks. I feel strongly that people should be able to take their health data wherever they like, so integrating with other services makes great sense.
Many people get CS degrees and never get a CS job so they move on with their lives.
I guess I am presently living in a fantasy then. Let me pinch my wife & kids to check if they are real or just figments of my imagination.
Skeumorphism is a continuum. On the one end, you have the "tape deck." On the other end, you have subtle shadows, bevels, indentations, and so on.

Sorry, but I think turning everything into solid colored rectangles is throwing the baby out with the bath water, and largely misses the point. When you design an app you have to choose for different pieces where on the continuum they should lie. The only way to know where the limit is is to try it, and Apple obviously in certain cases found the limit. Just like with the brushed metal stuff they pushed up to the edge to discover where it was. This reactionary type of design of having no gradients, no textures, no shadows, etc, is less about understanding what makes good design for users and more about blind differentiation.
Google it :D

Lori Gunter
787 Program Communications Manager
425-266-6256
loretta.m.gunter@boeing.com

Larry Loftis
787 General Manager
(I don't have his confirmed information)
I definitely bookmarked this. This is going to be a fun diversion in my spare time.
O'Reilly donating ebook "Open Government" as a tribute to Aaron Swartz
CS isn't any harder than most other programs. GP could have found a challenge in arguing philosophy, designing fashion, or learning theater.
This is exactly why the "you can buy another great Android device" argument falls face first into the ground for me.

How long can I expect my (at the time) top of the line phone to continue getting the latest OS updates? Additionally, how many (if any) phones get thoroughly tested for OS compatibility and performance for new Android updates? Do I really want to take an unnecessary roll of the dice?
Five Second Homepage
425... I miss Redmond...
This is simply a massive failure on the part of Google's product managers, or whoever conducts market research at Google. If a demand for a product is within some percent of the estimate, that's normal. If it is an entire order of magnitude greater, someone somewhere fucked up big time, costing Google a lot of money in orders that cannot be fulfilled.
Really? You have a problem with LiIon batteries and you get help from the best electric car company in the world? It's called consulting. It happens all the time. I don't see the public giving a shit.
There's a theory. Produce an awesome, unobtainable android phone. Hope people will give up on the phone but not android and buy a different model that is profitable.
Well, they did just have the Nexus Q just 6 months earlier...
It seems like you're just assuming that everyone has a very simple, AM radio view of their government.

Which of the ancestors to that comment could have led anyone to believe that?
While domains are unique, how does it help Prada, Tiffany's, etc? It makes no difference whether the copy-cats are selling rip-offs marked "tiffanys.com" out of a cart. There is also more to trademark that just protecting marks. Trademark protects many aspects of the brand (see: trade dress, dilution, tarnishment, etc).

Companies spend a lot of money advertising because brands are valuable, and trademark basically protects brands. Branding makes goods less fungible, and is really the only reason companies like Prada or Ralph Lauren can sustain such high margins in what would otherwise be total commodity markets. When brands cease to have meaning to consumers, you end up with what you see in the PC industry: a race to the bottom that eats up all your margins.

Why does advertising support so much of the internet? It's a $500 billion industry world-wide, that's why. Without branding, protected by trademark, I think it would be a fraction of the size. And I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing.
Perhaps not back, but maybe sideways.

My first Android phone was an HTC Hero. It was vastly improved when I replaced the moribund HTC-customised OS with Cyanogenmod. That's why, when I needed to replace it, I went with a stock Android phone: a Nexus S.

However, whilst my Nexus S still works fine, Google have effectively abandoned it - it won't get any more updates - so one of my projects for this weekend is to root it and try out Cyanogenmod on it.
He does acknowledge that; emphasis on phony. Further down:

> On retina displays, as with high quality print output, these techniques are revealed for what they truly are: an assortment of parlor tricks that fool our eyes [...]
I use a safari/firefox mix, all that's in that db for me is a short list of things I don't care about...
> Also, Google employees lobbied for a social networking product to Larry & Sergey in 2003 and the result was Orkut.

i think its good example of not "good enough" formalization. Afaik Orkut had a lot of operational freedom to do what he wanted with Orkut. it just nobody (the whole pool being semi-dead friendster at that point) had the answers what is actually important to build a socnet. Today we have 20/20 hindsight its absolutely terrible to have runaway adoption in 3rd world country that doesn't speak english... yet thats one of the axioms we learned "the hard way". And obviously that increased formalization (whats working, whats not) was helping Mark a lot when doing next iteration.
So. People are giving Tesla cash and they are counting that as cash flow. When they build a new plant they don't take that money off the books because it hasn't made any saleable cars yet.
That would be quite tricky, since both the camera (attached to your head) and your hands could be moving in different directions at the same time.

A stationary, secondary observer (like a Kinect) would be several orders of magnitude more reliable. All that's left is for someone to make a game that actually utilizes that idea.
Another monthly claim of XXX is faster than C. Please improve your C experience first.
This seems like a very good idea (and no need for the either the model, or even the common platform, to be limited to CS; specialization by discipline or area of interest would be provided by the REs.)
Others have said it, and they're right. Skeuomorphism has become dated and Apple is now playing catch-up with Android and Windows. Apple has been playing catch-up with Android in terms of features for quite some time now, so this is not new.

This is, however, so new to Gruber that he is apparently still in denial. While it's far too early to say, one has to wonder if Apple is headed for a period of uninspired decline, similar to what they experienced in the 90's. Could Gruber end up like the mac-zealots of the 90's who proclaimed the superiority of OS9 when, in fact, it was inferior in every way to its competitors?
Reading list-ed. Interesting.
I ordered my dev kit a while back and I CANNOT wait to play Doom 3 BFG. I'm not sure if I'll even be brave enough to make it through the whole game. :)
Gameboo
Like It Or Not, 3D Printing Will Probably Be Legislated
You need to under promise and over deliver with your new startup. Everyone loves a good comeback story, use this to your advantage. After you've started to over deliver for your clients, ask if they would write about their experience in exchange for xyz.

After a few have done that, write a post titled "How my failed startup helped me succeed" or similar. In this post be very transparent about why your first startup failed to deliver, but don't ever put blame on anyone but yourself. Take responsibility for the failure. Talk about what you learned and how those lessons are helping you deliver for your current clients. In your post link to the articles your current clients wrote and briefly mention why they're happy.

Afterwards, promote the shit out of your post.

What this accomplishes:

1. It takes away any power a person would have in bringing up your past failure because you've spun it in a positive way. This will give you the confidence to talk about ideas moving forward. You will always be able to take negative criticism of your past failure and spin it to talk about how it lead to your current success.

2. You've given people a good story. People like good stories, and they love good story tellers.

3. Using your current clients endorsement you prove that you can deliver.

Just some rough thoughts. Sorry for the bad grammer. I just don't care enough to correct them. Hope this helps.
Yes, first two times, it took me a little to remember that people were saying logout first. However, one of the top apps is Pokki that has shutdown in the place where you expect.

Whole app store thing helps a great deal. You install apps way faster and easier then ever before, like it is on a mac.

I would compare it when Apple changed scrolling, it took some time to get used to it (or flip the setting).
Would be quite effective as a Chrome Extension: no server to host and no sign-up required. Just put the quotes up on a CDN.
What It's Like to Get Sued by Lance Armstrong and Livestrong
This sounds like exactly the sort of optimization that I'm always hearing a sufficiently smart compiler will make for me.
Even simpler hypothesis: Mongo's performance slows down once dataset size is greater than RAM because disk is slower than RAM.
> Net neutrality, for example, is decidedly an anti-capitalist stance.

I don't see how. If customers of ISPs value neutrality, then there is profit motive for ISPs to offer it. Obviously, it's a balance between how many potential customers care about neutrality and how much they're willing to pay for it. Net neutrality legislation, along with any regulations or subsidies on privately-owned infrastructure, is definitely anti-capitalist, just like legislation that says McDonald's must always offer the McRib.
I've heard plenty of "Yava" for Java in Germany and the Netherlands, too. Java still seems to be holding its head above the water, nonetheless.
> too many other ambitious Dems who'd have field day with this

If they don't at first, the internet will make sure they do.
This is a very cool app, simply because it eliminates most of the browser chrome. Taking out browser chrome is a very important step for making web apps first class citizens. It might be a minor visual difference, but it's a huge psychological one.

On another note, it sounds like Opera was forced to use UIWebViews due to Apple's restrictions. I'm curious to know if anyone has ever hacked up another rendering engine (even WebKit) to run on iOS. Obviously it wouldn't be able to make it on the app store, but it would be cool to play around with on a development device!
Maybe instead of having to register have a feature like:

http://www.fivesecondhomepage.com/www.reddit.com

Which shows the quote, then gets me to reddit or whatever
I think if you avoid passing in "data-amount" it will not show that text.

Keep in mind that this checkout dialog does not charge the customer anything, so the amount is purely cosmetic.
He's recommended so many over the years...probably the most memorable were the Hornblower series (great if you like ships), and G.A. Henty. then the Three Musketeers when I was a bit older. He's also always wanted me to read Dostoyevsky's the Idiot, his favorite, but I haven't gotten around to that...
Didn't notice this link, but after seeing another [1] HN link about it I couldn't believe it got missed. And yet, here it is. Take my upvote.

It’s no coincidence that Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yelp sound like toddler gibberish from the Teletubbies.

Whenever I hear these silly corporate names invoked with sanctimonious awe, I imagine Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po, and Tinky-Winky singing their hit single “Teletubbies say ‘Eh-oh’ ” as they shake the change out of some two-year-old’s pocket.

My god this is pure gold!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5081822
The smallest one is the legit download. May still contain toolbars though.
It is refreshing, at least, for people on HN to assume I'm a partisan of the Democratic party instead of the other one. :)
now I need to go set it up - on it now!
The issue is that you don't get the full benefits of encryption.

If you upload the map to the rayiner family treasure that only you have seen you're good. No one else will be able to read it.

But if you upload the latest episode of Modern Family and Disney gets ahold of the same rip you used they (if they can get a government to help them out) can see what you did and charge you with copyright infringement (or whatever the appropriate crime would be).
You guess? The linked report says 0.5 FTE for "management and administration."

I think it's pretty unrealistic to think that managing 7 people alone wouldn't require even a half-time job. Yes, not to mention fundraising, as well as interacting with the advisory board, the volunteer moderators, outreach to users and policymakers.

It's also unrealistic to think that running an article management system that has 6000-8000 submissions per month from users all over the world of varying technical ability couldn't occupy three full time user support staff.
Well, hacks can be social too. I know quite a few social engineers, in fact I've had them speak at my security conference[1]. However, it seems that overcoming a significant hurdle (which isn't something to be sniffed at) isn't really a hack in the grand scheme of things. To put things into perspective, you've faced a pretty big challenge, but that's what it is - a challenge, not a hack. In fact I'd say to call it a hack is to undersell what you've overcome. I think some might underestimate how hard it is to get into CES. I understand that. I also think you calling getting in a hack demeans the concept of hacking not because it wasn't 'good enough' to qualify, but because your situation was so displaced from what would normally qualify as a hack. It doesn't mean you haven't made an effort - clearly a herculean effort was made, but does that constitute a hack? I'm not convinced.

I do think, "How I shipped a product from the far far FAR east of the (indus, not silicon) valley to CES for a demo" would've been a better title, but that's a job for marketing people IMHO. Hack, it is not, it underplays the effort you put in. Effort, it certainly is, for that you've given in spades and more.

[1] - http://www.44con.com/
Carmen Ortiz' husband tweets criticism of Aaron Swartz's family, deletes account
This is what happens when defending or attacking people based on allegiance to political parties. All rational arguments in place get lost in favor of ad hominem platitudes.
I fully expect the future of video to be 4D camera orbs that record a 360 degree view and let viewers look around inside the recording as it plays, using head-mounted displays. Just imagine revisiting your last holiday and seeing stuff you didn't even see when you were there the first time, being able to explore the living surroundings again and again.
Not just the Mac App Store, by the way. CDs or any other way of getting the file on the Mac except downloading are, too.

That all makes perfect sense. It doesn’t provide perfect protection, but it does provide sensible protection.
Oh, I don't know. I recall a good half an hour of gleeful Schadenfreude in the office when we all tried out Color for the first (and last) time.

I'm not saying that a fleeting moment of entertainment in the lives of a few jaded technology folk was a good return on that investment, mind!
The premise of your article is that startups live beyond the areas where existing enterprises have applicable knowledge - That is an equalizer. But as you say, they still have to search and try very hard, they prevail because they try harder (and get lucky eventually) not because they are the only ones with the good sense to try.

What I'm trying to say is that Orkut was less passonate about it and had his creativity and motivation stifled compared to Mark.

Mark obsessed over his project and had everything to gain. Orkut on the other hand - What advantage was there for him in building his project from within Google? None. And not much to gain, just a promotion.

If he really had his heart in it why not go it alone? He didn't, so he did not.
Netflix is probably the most well-known large user currently.
I think what the OP is trying to point out is that this would be seen as an "oh shit we don't know what went wrong" consulting job rather than a "we knew we weren't good at this from the start, so we contracted out to another company who was" job. They've already implicitly asserted that they knew what they were doing by putting the batteries into a certified plane, so this would likely be construed as an emergency cry for help.

Also, most of the time the use of consultants isn't publicized - taking help from Elon Musk would no doubt be broadcast heavily by the media, and most likely not in a positive light.
I'm curious about the economic justification behind this statement:

> Without market inefficiencies, capital would be unable to capture any more than its own reproduction cost in any branch of industry. The elimination of competition is central to the logic of capitalism. Without unfair advantages, a capitalist class of owners could not accumulate wealth and there could be no capitalism.

I'm well aware that market inefficiencies are real and inevitable, but why is all net value increase attributable to them? In the most obvious case, I can certainly buy a shovel and recover way more value by digging and finding gold. Net wealth can and does increase over time, due both to the harvesting of natural resources and the cumulative advantages of human knowledge and technology.

Perhaps the whole statement hinges on the definitions of "unfair advantages." If the speaker considers exclusive ownership of capital to be unfair, then the claim is a tautology.
IAmA CEO of a company that was on Shark Tank and is funded by Mark Cuban
There is a secondary problem with using mmap. You don't know if an access will take a page fault. When thrashing starts happening MongoDB doesn't throttle new queries. New queries coming in then add fuel to the fire making existing queries take longer and longer. This causes a huge and rapid performance dropoff.

Of course not all new queries will cause paging so they could be left unthrottled. There is a system call mincore that will tell you if pages will take faults but it doesn't support scatter/gather and has race conditions especially when there is lots of paging!

I did report this at the beginning of 2010 - currently marked as major priority, planned but not scheduled: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-574

That said MongoDB is still my first database of choice. Nothing beats arbitrary JSON in, the same JSON back out.
What does requiring (as miked points out, essentially unprecedented) habeas rights for prisoners of war have to do with being a "friend to hackers"?

You should probably respond to his point that if Cornyn's position were so radical, surely President Obama would have acted in opposition. Otherwise, you can call the position deeply immoral, but surely it's bipartisan by now.
Red October espionage platform unplugged hours after its discovery