skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rail scales up, not down. You can put two trains on a track and it costs marginally more than one train. If you put one empty train on the track, the cost is the same as a full train.

Having less money can actually help the economics of a rail line - if people are poorer (e.g. Europe), they can't afford a car and are stuck taking the train. The limiting case of this is India where low speed rail is extremely popular.
Similar to self, iolanguage would be a strong place to start for getting cheap liveness.
So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy.

Half of them have 'popups' that try to banner at the bottom of the screen, but end up flailing wilding and either taking up the entire screen, or just helpfully sitting exactly over the middle of the page. A lot of them try repeatedly to direct me to a specific page, or a native app when ever I flick between pages.

The links are tiny and impossible to click on without zooming in.

It's just a terrible, terrible experience.

How do we get from this broken UX experience story of right now, into the magical compelling 'mobile web app' future that OP talks about?

I just don't see a roadmap for it. :(
Exactly! I think the .NET or Java approach is the good one. Low level bytecode, multiple languages.
Today I learned government is about compromising your ideals.
Frustratingly, the Samsung Chromebook is $249 in US, but £229 in UK. ($249 is £158).

The Acer chromebook is $199 in US, but £199 in UK. ($199 is £126)

The UK prices do include our sales taxes (VAT at 20%), but still.
When companies auto-post the same message to twitter and facebook, I don't find it very genuine. This allows you to type out a post once, tab into the next network (your cursor stays in the same place!) and modify as necessary.

You can move your boxes around and they'll still be sitting in the same spot next time you come back. I have a bunch of features in the pipeline. Being able to group certain social networks together, for one.

Google Plus is on the top of the list feature wise. Although, it's not quite as straightforward as facebook or twitter.
You know what, they don't seem to have aroused much interest; send me an email to the address in my profile and I'll transfer them to you :)
Sorry, I'm conflating my own crash experiences. :) You're totally right, a JVM and a JSVM can crash in horrendous ways, but 99% of the time you'll get a nice stack trace.
Fully working DalvikVM on Xubuntu 12.04
The font for contacts' names looks terrible on Chrome+Win 7: http://i.imgur.com/OxR9JdX.png
I am shocked! Honestly, I am. I am not catholic, in fact, I am hardly religious, but the Pope abdicating (a pope doesn't resign, he abdicates!)? That's... insane.

Last time that happened was in 1415 when Gregory XII was forced to abdicate because of the Schmism.

Honestly, I am disappointed in these people are supposed to serve as relics of our old institutions (such as monarchies), when they cannot stand up to the basic requirement of a title that last till they die.

What's the point, if they can abdicate on a wimp? One should only abdicate if a war for the throne has been won by a pretender!
best java ide ever
There is an enormous market inefficiency in that gap. The question is how to exploit it.

Finance guy here (hobbist programmer). The more I think about this, the more I realize the way to exploit this is through well designed and _specialized_ software which doesn't have to evolve around spreadsheet at all. You have to look at the work flow of the professionals using (abusin) Excel.

I give you an example: audit. Now, the final product of an audit review is what? An MS Word report, that's what they sell the client. How efficient is this? Barely efficient, consider that:

1. There is no version control.
2. Tables and pictures look horrible and are a pain in the ass to format (oh latex)
3. The doc is edited by various people: people paste in the report the wrong stuff --> client gets crappy drafted doc --> bad image
4. The document "links" to different workpapers (Excel sheets with the calculations) that you have to go and pick up, you can't click and get the doc like it was 2013, you need to search it like in the 80's
5. The senior has to review it all, guess how easy it is to do this navigating tons of MS docs and spreadsheets

Then you get to the spreadsheets... it's another mess:

1. No audit trail
2. No workflow of how you go from the original data to the calculation. This is very important, you need to tie to the original source of data ALWAYS
3. You use crappy templates 10 years old with things nobody knows anymore
4. You can't read well .txt files and you can't process big amounts of data (what if you want to test for frauds in petty cash in a 20 billion multinational? For example)

I mean, there are tons of inefficiencies, the points are 2:

1. How you sell your shiny new perfect product to people used to abuse data in this way?
2. How do you build such a product from a programmer background? And here I have my rant about ideas not being useful, they are if they come with lots of market insight focus.

And that's about it. I think, coming to your point: yes, there are inefficiencies, no, you will not get there if you don't have insight into the specific profession you are trying to provide tools to.
Would be very interesting to get a summary of what you guys talk about. Business model discussion from those deeply involved in the business -- an example of domain exploration vs actual execution with real financial numbers.
G+ integration is not really possible just yet due to the lack of a write API. Hootsuite do have priority access to such an API, though it is limited to Pages and not personal profiles.
Android itself isn't, but the ecosystem that they're building is. The market is controlled by Google and the apps will only run on Android phones. Not the OS is important, the ecosystem is. That's why Apple and Google and everyone are trying to keep everyone inside.
And we all love receiving the attention of someone who actively listens, which requires a learnable skill that most people neglect to learn.

Having a respectful audience carries significant emotional and psychological value to the speaker, so Sivers likely also had that much to offer to Wozniak.
I don't use IDEA but Jetbrains does make amazing tools. I couldn't survive without Resharper.
The reason for the similarity in their chips was that Intrinsity did most of the custom design for Samsung's chip, Apple also worked with Intrisity and subsequently acquired them.
"How about we work on platforms that support more that one language as first class citizens. Is that really such a crazy idea in 2013?"

That was the nice things about the BBC Micro computer, you could code in Assembly and BASIC right out of the box. Since then the trend has been towards ever higher layers of abstraction. Even in python you sometimes still get indecipherable OS level error messages, but most of the time the tools work well.

It would be nice to have other languages in the browser, but at this point it seems as likely as python built into the processor. At least something compiled to JavaScript is unlikely to be any less secure than JavaScript on its own.
How Steve’s Devices Curtailed Innovation In Smart Devices
Lack of automatic 2-way data binding?
Am I missing something? Angular contains its own "jQuery Lite", and appears to be about 30kb gzipped.

Still, it's neat that no additional JS is required.
FYI blocking google analytics with ghostery seems to break the "enter once and copy to all boxes" javascript. I didn't really understand this until I went to the about page.
Workspaces - Simplifying Your Find and Fix Workflow With The Chrome DevTools
This looks awesome. Could anybody tell me how to render a angularjs-ui calendar using the jade rendering engine? I am a noob with node but I would like to know how I can use these components in a basic node app.
I guess this has something to do with being self-critical. Especially, when you're a stranger introducing yourself to someone accomplished with a 'problem' that you're currently facing. I didn't inadvertently want to cross the line in excitement or fear, but right as you said my fears were almost certainly unwarranted.
Jolt was such a big phenomenon in the '90s. Do developers consume less caffeine now or maybe Red Bull cut their lunch? (It's a bit hard to gauge the trend from outside the US, as Jolt is particularly US-focused afaict.)

Anyway, IDEA is always putting developer experience first, so it's well-deserved.
I think that this decision can stop Apple from sell iphones here in Brazil. We pay an huge amount of money for apple products because of government taxes (an iPhone 5 costs the equivalent of U$1.300) and I don't think Apple sells a lot of iphones here to compensate buy the trademark. Sometimes it's cheaper to take a plane and buy it in another country. I understand that Gradiente has the right to fight for the name, after all they registered it first. But they don't have an real competidor and are just use the name to fight with Apple for money (patent troll?). That's wrong and everybody loses.
JavaScript is the standard bytecode.
Thank you - I have just joined the group.

I agree - Persona is an awesome project - and I like anything that is going to take the pain of managing passwords away from me.

I am most interested in python / wsgi integration - if any of your collegues are working on this I will be very happy to contribute.
I find the absurdity slightly amusing, if a bit misplaced.
>Debugging a Java or a C crash in infinitely worse, since instead of comparatively pretty symbols and a verifiably correct stack trace, you have a vector of bytes where your stack is supposed to be, and any number of threads running third party libs that could have written all over your frame pointers

My experience of crashes in C is that the OS typically provides a decent backtrace including function names, not just a 'vector of bytes'. Your millage may vary, I expect it depends what kind of C you are writing on what platform, if you strip symbols etc. Sure your memory could get totally trashed beyond recognition but that has not been very common in my experience. I'd like to point out that I was not advocating writing C. I've not used Java but I always assumed it gave you decent stack traces.

>instead of semi-structured code you have a few thousand flattened basic blocks, devoid of any type information, absolutely swamped in gotos and boilerplate prologues/epilogues.

I've honestly no idea what you are talking about here. Java code swamped in gotos?

>I for one would much rather debug an exception in JS than the mental math required in statically analysing the stack operations done by a chunk of assembly.

If I'm writing Python I want a Python exception. If I'm writing Ruby I want a Ruby exception. Not an exception from JS code that I did not write. I have no idea what 'mental math' has got to do with this.
I was recently out travelling, and I couldn't help wonder why I of all people was called to the side by a security officer of some sort at the airport, after we had landed and were heading for a cab.

It only took a few seconds, but I would love to know what made me stand out from the crowd.
You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy.

It has "stickiness" and "retention" that all of those sites cannot dream of.

Good User Experience beats terrible. Good user experience makes money - trust us, the market will win.
The Firefox OS app market is controlled by Mozilla and the apps will only run on Firefox OS (for now, at least).

Everyone is free to implement the Android app API, as Blackberry have, just like they are free to implement the Firefox OS phone APIs.

The difference is very small. Firefox is more likely to have portable apps, Android offers a much higher quality API for building apps.
Eric Schmidt to sell 42% of stake in Google
> That's a centripetal force

It's also centrifugal force, if you are working in the rotating reference frame of the ball, which in the case of calculating the internal pressure, is probably a bit easier to do.

> it can only confuse the student.

I'm not confused.
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I don't think he means liable in the literal sense but in a figurative way: that permanent employee might lose out on a bonus, raise or future greenfield projects if they screw up. A consultant or contractor might not get their contract renewed or told to sod off, depending on the severity.

But you're right about the financial liability: I've never heard it happen; but what with Murphy's Law I'm still retaining a Liability insurance just in case it should ever happen to me.
Yeah, Smalltalk and stdin/stdout don't usually go together, unfortunately. Smalltalk is just not designed to be a part of the UNIX ecosystem, since it's a big environment and not a small purpose-built program.

And I'd also recommend Pharo over Squeak at this point, since they have been aggressively improving the Squeak project and creating their own clean modern Smalltalk.

If you want to use Smalltalk for UNIX-style scripting, I'd suggest GNU Smalltalk.
Or do we tear down the monoliths that browsers are in small Unix-style components?

That last one might not be a bad idea. The first browser I used ran 'xv' to display images.
That's not a particularly bad example, only O(n) vs O(n logn).
> I'm admittedly not very good at this sort of thing, so please try to be patient, kind, and considerate.

No one, except grieving professionals, really is.

Seriously, thank you for writing this piece the way you did, it is a good one. You are right: I never heard of him. You made sure that I read your words about the loss to the end and got to know what he did a little.
What a great article! The author brings to bear his depth of experience on a hitherto-unnoticed issue, attacking it with verve and originality.
Don't know if you guys heard, but there's buzz around here in the Philippines that the next Pope might be Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Antonio_Tagle), or at least the faithfuls believe he has a good chance. The mere thought of it scares me though. The Church has a very strong influence in State affairs, and I can only imagine this being a really bad thing for my country.
Actually jqLite has 2.36kB when minified / gzipped, check this for more details: https://plus.google.com/104744871076396904202/posts/EgjErc6N...

This is over 13x less as compared to full jQuery (1.9.x):
http://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery-size

so at the end of the day this might be a substantial difference.
Excel and Word do have a lot of these "paper trail" functionalities you talk about; in fact, Excel has amazing database support thanks to ODBC as well -- you can easily separate your business logic from your data by using Access and Excel together.

So how come users still manually set the font size for their headings instead of using styles; how come they ignore Track Changes; why do they copy spreadsheets instead of enable the Share Worksheets functionality -- and so on -- well, it's simple: they don't know about them. Most Excel/Word users are self taught or are given a very rudimentary training course by their peers or one of those cash-generating "Certificate Farms" you pay out the nose for.

I definitely agree that to solve the Excel woes you're going to have to write domain-specific software; Excel's already the Swiss army knife.
YC’s Screenhero Gives WebEx And Screen Sharing Apps A Run For Their Money
>Let's define 'kissing ass' as doing someone with the power to help you a favor you wouldn't otherwise do (hence the ass kiss), to get favorable treatment. This would fall under that definition, but then so would all kinds of things like tipping a waiter or buying your date a rose.

What? People don't tip the waiter as "kissing ass". The waiter is not in power, and at the time of the tip he has served your meal already. If anything, they do it as charity.

And people certainly don't buy roses to their girlfriend as "kissing ass", they do it because they want to. Except if you have this notion that males don't like romantic gestures.

>Calling people who show initiative and motivation to open up their options 'ass kissers' is crab mentality.

No, it's not. The article on Wikipedia describes the meaning of the phrase well, and this is not it.

You can "show initiative and motivation" without buying anyone in power a pizza. Millions of people have done it.
Would you care to elaborate, to some degree at least?
"You're cherry-picking, like most people who invoke the founding fathers to win an argument."

I suppose I could retort "People who reject anything based on pointing to the founding fathers are pretty much trying to ignore actual history and substitute some glorified version."

but...

No, just stating a bit of fact about the origins of the system. Something that is good practice in analyzing why a system is as it is. Checks and balances were much more important than efficiency. In fact the executive branch's quest for more "efficiency" with national programs started in the 1920's and continuing through today have done great harm to the checks and balances enjoyed by the people and the states.

It wasn't exactly a bed of roses with all parties in agreement at the start. The election of 1800 would be a pretty good example of how divisive this country has always been. There has never been the civility that modern politicians believe existed before today.
Well deserved. I've been using IntelliJ IDEA (Java) for the past four years. Before that, I used Emacs coding C++. I was pretty amazed at how much more productive I became using an IDE (just for the mechanics of coding, like auto-completion, jump to suource etc - not counting any differences between C++ and Java). I still like Emacs a lot, but using a good IDE just took coding to the next level. More details: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/17/programmer-productivity-em...
And now the end is near. [1] On the positive side, the only really hard prediction on that list is, that the next pope is "Petrus Romanus." So we can nicely test the reliability of Malachy's prophecy.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes
>You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy.

Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell. You have never experienced the expired link error? Or the 'site not available' error? HN is one of the most broken websites I frequently visit.

Also you ignored the part about tiny links. HN is full of tiny links: have you used the site on a phone and tried to upvote a post?
When people get nervous they sometimes touch there nose. Security officers are trained to notice these things. So maybe you touched your nose or did some other simple thing that got noticed.

But there are also just random checks to make it very difficult to predict when or when not you are checked.
Technologies serve a specific purpose. The key is to understand the purpose, then you can understand why the technology was created, if you need to understand it, and if it is any good.

I suggest you find a "stack" (for want of a better word) and become comfortable with that and why it exists. Maybe this is the traditional RDBMS - Webserver - JS. But be surte you understand it, can deploy it from scratch, know where and how packages interact.

Then start extending that stack - maybe email integration.

You will get a feel for why technologies exist when you hit the limitations of the old ones - and the best way to do that is to package up the old ones in your head and suddenly you will get a new idea for improving it. THere is almost certainly a project on github for that but no matter - now you know you are at the edge of the art and can keep expanding.
This is a long-running Chrome+Windows issue. Nearly all webfonts suffer from it.
Poe's Law is in play.
If either of you know of a fix, I'd be happy to implement it.
Oh yeah please, leave me trash all these old PHP forums!
Good project!
5 Apps to Help You Launch your Startup
Morris.js:  Working with Donut charts was never easier
Yes, my post was a slightly cheeky way of pointing out that the answer is in the page linked to by the very post that poses the question :)

As for weakening free competition, that's plausible, though I think it more likely that the chap was hired on the basis of his work than as a strategic move. Mathematica seems pretty entrenched and comprehensive (though I do admit that it's not something I've used a great deal), and probably as impervious to attack from open source equivalents as is Excel.

(While MS seems currently troubled, and I bet they're finding it harder and harder to persuade people to upgrade to Office each year, Excel's position looks pretty unassailable.)
Creating immutable tree data structures in Ruby
That comment only refers to the core. These SOC designs include a considerable amount of other components and it's the selection of which of these components to include, how to arrange them and how to optimise the overall system constitutes the design, which was done by the team at Apple (including many engineers that used to work for Intrinsity, no doubt).

e.g in the next paragraph after your quote from the same Wikipedia article:

"RAM is connected to the processor using ARM's 64-bit-wide AMBA 3 AXI bus. This is twice the width of the RAM data bus used in previous ARM 11 and ARM 9 based Apple devices"

The cores are the same - ARM cores are widely reused and licensed in different SOC designs - but they are just one part of the overall SOC which also includes graphics cores, DSPs, I/O controllers, sensors such as gyroscopes and inertial sensors, radio circuitry, etc.
Your head is a remarkable steady tool. Check out some off road bike movies made with helmet cams: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC9f7Ab6_Ss
I think the main issue has always been that "The Business" -- that nebulous, supposedly all-knowing corporate entity -- never wanted their employees to rely on a spreadsheets stuck on somebody's shared network drive. The issue has never been "formalisation" -- we already have tools for that, though they could surely do with improvement -- but the ad hoc nature that is, over time, festooned with more and more features or blessed as the Official way of doing something -- and when that happens, it's not going anywhere; it's too late to change.
Show HN: Sentiment analysis of Programming communities on IRC
>The $295 barrier to entry is way too high.

People spend that much in dog food.

This is a tool with years of work by a huge team behind it, with hard-core scientific innovations built in, and which you are supposed to use for years professionally.

Imagine if dentists said: "I will use a hammer to take out your teath. I cannot justify $10,000 for this proprietary machine for company X".
No. Intrinsity worked with Samsung to develop a low-power variant of the Cortex-A8, that part of the two chips are identical, not similar. And the rest of the chip is similar because it's built from a Samsung reference design with a few bits left out that Apple didn't want. It's like saying "hold the mustard" makes you a master hot-dog crafstman.
I run ghostery, but have analytics allowed. I'm not sure what's causing this, but I'll look into it. Thanks for the heads up.
And you cannot take anyone out for a ride, unless you buy a car.
Windows 8 app samples (C++, C#, VB.NET, JavaScript)
What is more annoying is that using an Android device, which doesn't have this bug, you suddenly can't zoom either. Now that this is fixed in iOS, it will take a long while for sites to re-enable it. It's very unfortunate that web developers needed to disable features on all platforms to work around a bug in one.