skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's exactly what he's accused of doing, although it's an anti-trust case, not collusion. This e-mail came out as evidence in a lawsuit where former employees allege that major tech companies agreed not to cold call each others employees, to the detriment of those employees. A Department of Justice investigation into the practice was settled a few years ago with the companies agreeing to discontinue the practice.

Since it's the company that's liable, not Jobs personally, it doesn't matter that he isn't the CEO anymore.
Announcing Adafruit Gemma – Miniature wearable electronic platform
for me, the main issue with ads as a business model: they make the product crappy

facebook, twitter, yelp, blogs/content - the more you monetize, the more annoyed your users are

there's an inherent tension between the success of the product and the success of the business, which is problematic especially as you scale

the only significant exception is google
"This post has a very naive understanding of online advertising"

Not really. The post talks specifically about "just putting ads on", which means we're talking about something like AdSense and not the more lucrative options you mentioned which involve a sales team.

The fact is, you'll need a really high amount of visitors to make any decent amount of money through AdSense - especially if you have several employees and investors who need to get their share.

The post is right on the money. No doubt there are certain forms of advertising that are effective - but the point made by the post is that slapping AdSense on your startup's pages isn't going to cut it.
> Basically, the main reason why an app store or marketplace is important, is because the web suffers from a discoverability problem.

Isn't it the other way around? There's no effective way of publicising you app or helping people to find it in an app store short of hoping that the Apple/Google overlords will decide to stick it on the front page. It's remarkably hard to find apps that you're looking for unless you know the name of it (and it isn't a common name, etc), and there's no way of working around it.

In contrast, on the web, if one site doesn't work very well, you go to another one. If one discovery tool isn't working very well (e.g. Digg), you use a different one (e.g. Hacker News).

The web is very discoverable. It just doesn't force a particular discovery mechanism on people like app stores tend to do.

That said, this is a large part of why FirefoxOS is so promising.
(1) Supercapacitors are commercialized, see: http://www.mouser.com/Power/Supercapacitors/_/N-6uivw

(2) Today's supercapacitors have very poor energy density even compared to batteries. What they do have is good power density, meaning they can deliver their limited energy very fast.

(3) Boosting the energy density of supercapacitors will happen but requires many years of great strides in nanotech. Research like this, involving 3D nanostructures with enormous surface area: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-sponge-like-graphene-supercapac...
In the UK, Ofcom provide quite a good overview of spectrum allocation here: http://spectruminfo.ofcom.org.uk/

This rather psychedelic PDF is linked from the above page: http://www.roke.co.uk/resources/datasheets/uk-frequency-allo...

It doesn't say which allocations are good or bad - just what each slice of spectrum is used for. People like the mobile operators are only really interested in spectrum above the 800MHz area. This is where the competition for spectrum and billion-pound licence auctions come into play.

Cellular companies are interested in line-of-sight frequencies in the UHF and SHF bands, where range is smaller but robustness of coverage is high. Then, they just blanket their desired area with cellular towers. VHF travels further, at the expense of robustness - it's ideal for broadcasting, but not for two-way data services. If you cleared FM and transplanted the existing 3G service onto, say, 100MHz, you'd find all sorts of interference issues.

87.5-108MHz, for instance, is used for FM broadcasting all over the world (except Japan where it's down in the 70s). The receivers will be available for the foreseeable future - certainly for my lifetime. If the band was vacated and all radio migrated to digital, the pirates would simply use it. It is of such little value - so it may as well be kept, rather than switching to digital for its own sake.
Managing Rails Complexity
They do work* in IE6/7/8 with one more hack (linked later in the article):

http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-shiv/

*) for DOM/styling purposes. The fancy new outline algorithm isn't implemented anywhere yet :(
This would scale very badly, correct? If you have to hijack the connection for each client and then spend awhile doing a task (waiting for a task to complete, etc), then your whole webserver thread is going to be sitting there waiting.
how can i get the django book published by hackers
Google. It's been that way since I stopped using Yahoo! and Ask. Because of the almost guaranteed uptime of Google, it's the most trusted source, plus it's quick and easy to type.
HN newbie here, a friend suggested that I post my new app here for critiques/comments.

It's an audio book player, focusing on being simple and intuitive instead of feature-rich and customizable, for less technologically adept users. It remembers the last played location for each album, and also allows the user to create bookmarks for any location in an album.

Thanks!
His lawyers probably told him he might as well not bother if it's for piracy - arguing that they don't (not can't) save the key in this URL doesn't sound like much of a defense if Mega's targeting illicit file sharing again.

https://mega.co.nz/#!jFlzGQiZ!CL2dMi5IAYLUp3ZQ5JS7nmW0sYtudf...
Rolexes Pawned in Macau Signal Further Gains for Casinos
Reminds me of the time when it was declared that there was a physical barrier to sending more than 44kbps through a phone line.
Eloquence is overrated; what is very hard to do is clear, concise communication. Steve Jobs was a master of that, and also a master of persuasion--not a coincidence.

Colligan's email was typical business-speak; about twice as long as it needed to be and full of useless fluff.

It's much harder to write like Hemingway than George R. R. Martin. Most people have to revise and rewrite several times to get their word count down and deliver a focused, clear message.
Mr-sparkle: Rack server with fast automatic code reloading
How to implement JAVA code for making a mind game (Sudoku)
I did the same and removed all my likes out of fear of showing up in ads. Whether the ads were misleading is irrelevant; I don't want my friends to associate me with ads.
As it was pointed out to me a day ago, here are a few more versions of the story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090807 (venturebeat.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092088 (telegraph.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092123 (bloomberg.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092327 (guardian.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092447 (latimes.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092764 (lohud.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092889 (bbc.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093489 (cnn.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094529 (wsj.com)
Copyright trolls invent single-party lawsuit
That's a very pessimistic view. There is plenty of on-going research in improving graphene batteries, molecular energy storage, and technology that is not that far from coming to market like Li-Si, Air-Lithium or solid hydrogen storage.

Tesla now makes cars with a very useful range using standard Li-ion batteries and good thermal management, I wonder the author thinks of the Model S.

http://gigaom.com/2013/01/14/13-battery-startups-to-watch-in...
How it scales is an interesting question.

Could it, for example, replace a COMET server that is maintaining 100 connections (all doing long polling)? 1000? 10000?

Could it also be hacked into doing Websockets upgrade (and subsequently maintaining a large number of concurrent websockets conns)?
Got an inferiority complex? Excellent.
If it's a forum style thing then discussion systems with a high number of pageviews per unique visitor (vbulletin/reddit/etc) will generally have very poor advertising revenue.

Maybe you need to look at a different model though ? Sort of like reddit gold, premium memberships, or some other services that may somehow add value to your site ? It's often surprising how many people are willing to pay $2-$10 per month for something!

If you really mean 4-5m million visits (and not pageviews) I'd love to take a look and see if I can help you figure out some sort of solution. Send me an email (addrress is on my profile).
The Million Dollar Club
Rackspace Email. It's $2/mailbox/month, with a 100% uptime SLA, 24/7/365 phone/email/chat support, and automatic backups.

http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/

If you're not attached to the Gmail interface (I prefer desktop/mobile clients), Rackspace has the best e-mail hosting offering I know of. Google's customer support record doesn't even put them in the running if e-mail is important to your business.
CBS says Dish concealed ad-skipping feature during contract talks
Well, this is cool, but it would be cooler if they wrote an open source cell tower for GSM phones running on Raspberry Pi.
We do mostly Ruby on Rails as well as C#/Unity 3D. Send me an email at jason@beyondthestory.com .
One thing to consider is if you ever want to live abroad.

At 19, I found myself in a somewhat similar position to yourself. I was employed as a software engineer at a fairly large agency. Soon after I found myself holding a senior engineer position at another well-respected company. This was before I had any degree, and by and large, my career trajectory would probably be fairly successful either way.

One thing I had not considered though was living and working abroad. Foreign countries often care about whether or not you have a degree when deciding whether to grant you a residence permit or work visa. This might sound stupid, but it is definitely the case. Even stupider is that it generally doesn't matter what your degree is in, but rather just the level of education.

Living in Sweden and working as a software engineer at a great place now, I sure am glad that I finished my BA in Political Science.
I agree. There's a very fine line there.
It amazes me that the DNC and RNC don't have tech projects going all the time in order to prepare for the mid-term elections in two years. It's awesome what these people accomplished in the short time frame they had, but if it's so important (as it seems to be) then why wait until there's a candidate to start building stuff?

It also seems somewhat wasteful to let these people now scatter onto other projects, although I assume if they were to continue they'd have to be paid market rates now.
Starting Your Journey Is The Most Important Thing
> "People, once upon a time, would use 'Atari' in place of the term video games,"

I'm a little young for Atari, but a decade or so later, when I was a kid, we would use "Nintendo" or "Mario" as synonyms for "video games".

"Hey want to play Mario?" "Sure, what game?" "Double Dragon/Zelda/Excite Bike/etc" Was a common conversation among my friends circa 1988 or so.
Very helpful indeed. Thanks
> If Facebook had auto-liked a post on your behalf would you be annoyed? If so why?

Yes, I would be annoyed because it's an action on my behalf that I did not do.

> If Facebook creates the appearance that this has happened are you annoyed? If not why not?

As someone who gets what they are doing, I realize it's just an appearance so it doesn't bother me. I'm a UI/UX designer for a living, so I see a lot of ways things that are done differently and/or badly. I see what they are trying to do, and while it's a poor job, I get it. And because I get it, it doesn't bother me.

> Suppose the latter was intentional. Does that affect your annoyance?

I don't think there is really a way to prove if it was intentional or not, but I get your overall point. I personally don't believe it was intentional, but that is just me.
Learning any one of these, if they have a strong type system and an emphasis on immutable data are going to prepare you for the literature.

Comparative language evaluations are fine, but don't tell me that you made that clear that that was what you were after in your original comment.
bugseverywhere
My question is if we all get 1.5 billion heart beats. What if I run long distance and do alot of cardio and get my resting heartbeat down to 45 beats a minute. Will I on average out live someone who has a resting pulse of 70?
Oh, nice! Here is situation: I have a pretty old car with FM receiver and single CD player, with no line input. Problem: I want to listen to the music from my iPhone, hopefully with a distraction free interface. For that I need a horrible contraption from car power splitter, USB cable to the iPhone that usually doubles as GPS on the dashboard, audio cable back to FM transmitter down there plugged into power outlet.

But now I can have a raspberry pi hidden somewhere, translating audio to FM and possibly recognizing my voice commands while at it like "play We Are the Void by Dark Tranquillity"
This works for plants. Plants have a very (very) stable environment.
Spraffl Launches As An Anonymous, Location-Based ‘Social Experiment’
Wasn't there? How much faster did modems over POTS really get? IIRC, even 56kbps only worked downstream, and only if you had a modern digital connection back to your telephone system.
Twin City sidewalks: Lessons from the 2013 Minneapolis Bicycle Crash Report
When was the last time you donated to someone for videos?

Run an 12 week course teaching people to code like bloc.io with leads generated from your free content.
I am sure I was using anchor tags with 'display: block' long before HTML5. Did browsers support this despite it not being in HTML4?
Thanks for the feedback!

I love stackexchange. They are fantastic at responding to one-off questions. My style is to build small, functional applications from launching visual studio to debug without cutting the video.

I feel you on not making every hobby a business. I also brew beer and have now given up on "starting a micro brewery" and, instead, focused on brewing really great beers that my friends and I like. Ever since doing that, I have been winning more awards and have tuned my brews to my tastes.

Given the current amount of questions that are emailed to me, maybe a model could be a private screen-sharing session where I can correct their mistakes on their computer. I would like that.
The History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics & Data Visualization
Do you hold stock in Facebook?
Perhaps it's better to suggest that plants which grow into their own foundations eventually reach a limit whereby it's hard for the plant to continue getting the nutrients it needs without being essentially blocked by its prior scaffolding? Bigger plants are the ones that reach this limit later, e.g. have evolved ways of using prior root systems/trunks to their benefit overtime.

Plants can essentially live forever through cloning, where the plant lays new roots and isn't stuck on its former shell.

On the other hand stressed plants go to seed (a good evolutionary move) and statistically no plant lives forever in the wild, with fires and etc, so perhaps this data is more of a testament to how fragile a plant is... e.g. how easily it's killed. It makes sense that smaller = more fragile, more easily burnt/frozen to death, etc.
Great read. I often think people sell themselves too short, so it's always good to reinforce not settling and know what your product/software is worth.
The Data of Death - A Visualization
[hangout/ustream] Grant Cardone: Saving Money
Not when the raging forest fire comes :)
"If you encounter a framework that wasn’t extracted from a product, run away screaming, no matter how extensible it claims to be."

You mean Ruby on Rails? :)
That depends on the application server's concurrency model. If you have enough threads then it won't be a problem. While threads don't have the "web scale to 100,000 users!!!" reputation, you can still get very far with them on most workloads.

On evented application servers, you can integrate with the event loop API.

And, I'm not 100% sure whether the spec allows this, but it would appear that on application servers that are not evented, you can even offload the socket to a thread running an event loop. For example Phusion Passenger's implementation allows this.
Good point. I can't remember ever paying for a specific video (or even considering donating, other than clicking an ad). I wasn't familiar with bloc.io, but that is really cool! That road is the all-in approach if I go it solo. I have some designers at my disposal: maybe one of them would help me.
Print-to-Order Service Helps 3-D Designer Revive Forgotten Figurines
Here's an example of something I've done (I actually use this my personal budgeting): http://pocketloot.com

While I don't participate in other people's projects much I have a BUNCH of projects I've done for myself on github. https://github.com/jcbozonier
Good suggestion. I love the koans.
7 Things You Need to Do About Big Data in 2013
Surface Pro at $1,018 is priced just right?
25,000-LED light show coming to San Francisco Bay Bridge in March
I believe his point is that in HTML5 block elements inside the a element is valid.
The offering is a different perspective.
There's no email address on your profile :)

The site is http://pr0gramm.com/ (NSFW) - mostly german visitors and yes, it's 4-5m visits, not pageviews. It's kinda impossible to define what a "pageview" is on that site anyway.
> Unless you're an assembly line worker

You've never worked on an assembly line or talked to anyone who has, have you? Assembly line workers come up with ideas for improved efficiencies on the line all the time. They aren't generally welcome to share them, however; it's usually better for their job security to keep them to themsleves in fact. In that respect, much like many office jobs.
I don't think you're being too hard, but your instrument may be too blunt. If you basing a large part of your hiring decision off this one test then you may be eliminating people unnecessarily and occasionally including someone who doesn't belong. For example I'm pretty rusty as a programmer, having graduated to management many years ago (and a linux admin before that) and I could pass this test, but you wouldn't want me as a senior programmer.

The point I'm getting at, is that like any science experiment you need to control for the variables. Just like an economics experiment might control for wealth, or education, you have to control for people who get nervous during interviews, people who have a blind spot for this particular problem, etc.

An easy addition to your methodology would be to have three different problems and let them choose. I would see how that affects their performance.

In my company I give potential hires a test for them to complete at home, before even interviewing them. The average time to complete the test is 6 hours, but we've never had anyone outright refuse to attempt it, and it gives us a giant steaming pile of data. So if my experience is any guide (and it might not be) I would think you could make your test more intensive, and potentially end up with more and better candidates.
Statistical Significance & Other A/B Pitfalls
Quite probably. I suck at making up "good" examples without taking them from code - couldn't think of anything suitable to borrow from last night.

I think my thought process was reading a CSV from stdin with two fields, using String#split instead of the CSV library and ending up with an array with two elements. That would've complicated it even more though. :-)
Leaving the merits of advertising itself aside for a bit, this post brings up a bigger topic that I think anyone running a startup needs to think about:

When you're getting involved in a startup, it is incredibly important that you be honest with yourselves and your partners about what the goal really is (this is to the point made the other day about self-awareness) and what you're really building.

A Feature: A piece of a piece of a puzzle. "It's like Facebook's News Feed, but instead you get audio updates instead of text updates!". Hackers can be guilty of this often - focused obsession on improving the world (or a piece of it) by tackling even the smallest problems. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a guarantee of success.

A Product: Instagram is a product. It's full-featured, it's beloved (or was ;), it's free-standing, it works, and people use it. But do people pay for it? Would they? Would they make money by themselves or only in the context of a bigger company (like Facebook). Twitter is also a product, along these lines.

A Business: 37signals is a business. People pay them to use their products. They are free-standing, they are profitable, and they don't _need_ outside investors (need vs. want is different, btw - sometimes it makes sense to take strategic investment).

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of the above paths, btw. But you need to understand which path you're on, because you'll do a better job of it that way. If you decide to be on the feature/product path and hope to get acquired/acqui-hired, that's fine - it's a legitimate approach (that works, at least for now) and folks have made $billions doing it (see: Instagram & everyone else).

But it's a different path than starting a business. Goals are different, operations are different, and outcome is different.

The point, in the end, is that often the response - "well, I guess we'll sell ads" is what people who are starting features or products often say to convince themselves or others that they're on a worthwhile _business_ endeavor. And that's often dishonest (intentional or not).

Understand the path you're on and I'm willing to bet success will be more likely.
Haha. No, not at all. I just wanted to bring some light to the issue to explain what was actually going on.
Strictly speaking, it's a slash not a solidus.

Unicode actually gets it wrong, the character / SOLIDUS is not a solidus at all, it is a (forward) slash. A solidus has a much more shallow angle and was used as a separator in old British currency, and is still used in Mathematics. Ironically the Unicode character for an actual solidus is ⁄ FRACTION SLASH.

Further reading: http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Solidus...
Ask HN: How to operate on encrypted files in a locally restricted sandbox
I need to operate on encrypted files in a local sandbox. This means I want to limit local access to the key and unencrypted file. I want a script to ping a webserver to securely pull the key in a JS environment, use this key to unencrypt files, operate on them, and send information to the webserver without the local user having access to any outputs or intermediates. Is it possible to locally sandbox in a submitted script so that it runs locally but what it is operating on is completely unaccessible to the local machine after submission? (only accepts inputs - outputs, intermediates in memory unaccessible)
Client Side Applications with Ember.js
use a Nokia N900 with built in FM Transmitter
How to create a Notepad for Android Devices
Radius raises $12.4M from American Express And Others
Colligan: 3 pages

Jobs: 1

Sounds about right.
FXXK ads. Ads will give no money to you!!! Nowadays, a 3 years old child knows how to use Adblock to block ads. People do not care about how beautiful your ads are, they just want a free website without ads. If your website or application could not sell itself, just give it up. Ads really do not help.
Hyde - A Python Static Website Generator
The possibilities are interesting, what will you use it for?
Absolutely! I remember the date because I was living in London and I wondered how to get a digital camera, which was still quite expensive and of course also crappy. It was also the time of GeoCities.

Once I had my first digital camera I immediately amassed thousands of photos, and I didn't have a Mac.