skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my mind, there's never been any question that this was the purpose of Android; aside from the goal of spreading low-cost mobile computing, the business purpose was to avoid a market in which one company (known for their control freak tendencies) had utter control over the mobile OS market, in a much more locked-down manner than was the case with Windows on desktop. This would be a disaster for Google (and arguably, the consumer), as they'd have no market power (and the switching cost for a search engine is much lower than the switching cost for a smartphone). The introduction of Android was simply to ensure more competition in the market (in fact, back when Android phones had a hardware search button, you could find many phones that mapped it to Bing). Android was less about making money off the product directly than about shaping the environment of the mobile industry in a manner that was less unfavorable to Google.
As another example of this strategy, see Chrome: Performance of the dominant browsers was hindering what Google could do with their products...until an alternative was launched and both Firefox and IE magically decided that performance gains were possible, and now the state of the browser market is in much better shape than it was.

It's more than a little shocking that so few people seem to understand these concepts. You still see articles (whether from Wall St or the online tech community) about how Android makes X dollars in revenue, as measured in AdMob revenue from Android phones and Google Play revenue. This is then directly compared to the estimated cost Google has put into developing it and judged to be a failure, from a business perspective.
"Excel is like a user-friendly nuclear power plant. An amateur operator might be able to keep it running most of the time, and most of his mistakes won't be serious. But the wrong mistake can blow up your business."

Yeah, running huge Excel sheets is a risk. Running huge Excel sheets with VBA is a risk and a pain. Powering Excel with python is a step in definitely a step in the right direction and would save me personally a lot of pain and boost my productivity right now.

Unfortunately it is a step I can not take. Excel is supported by Microsoft and Excel Bloomberg plugin is supported by Bloomberg. DataNitro is supported by a company founded last year that doesn't have single person's name in their About Us or Contact Us pages. If I was to build a sheet depending on their technology, would a wrong misstep two years down the line blow up my business?
You raise prices, in this industry, by not lowering them as hardware/bandwidth prices fall, so it's pretty reasonable to think that prices are not going up.
My former houesemate works at Linode. Based on how he ran the servers in the house, this is about what I'd expect! :)
Isn't this what you want? http://www.openoffice.org/product/calc.html
I think someone who had learned Koine would be able to have a decent go at Plato at least, the grammar is not so different. The biggest difference I can see is that the word order in the NT is a lot more regular - classical authors (in Latin as well as Greek) played around with word order a lot more than ordinary joes speaking the languages day to day, whereas the NT is a lot closer to how people would actually have spoken.
Excel is a pretty amazing piece of software. Previous place i worked at -- a medium-size insurance company -- did all of their monthly expense calculations in uber-complicated spreadsheets and then exported the results to AS/400. Part of their issue was that training staff became an increasingly complex task because of the structure of the data in the sheets some of which had to be imported from a 3rd party source. I have never seen Excel used to this extent until i was brought in to convert these sheets to a web app. We ended up building a custom DSL based on mathematical expressions, an in-browser IDE for accountants to configure formulas in the system and a full-blown custom report builder. It was by far the most complex project I've ever designed and it had an immense impact on how i look at advanced Excel users today.
To incent you to upgrade to the paid version?
I really believe you should lighten up a little. I can see where you're coming from and I don't disagree with everything you say, but from the way you put things in your comments in this topic, I get the impression you're drawing the line too far from where it really matters. Distasteful use of imagery containing scarcely clad women usually doesn't imply sexism.

I agree with the unrealistic anorexic photoshopped models you see on ads and magazine covers, but I'm not sure whether I can even attribute that to 'sexism', as it appears to be the fashion ideal for many women, for whatever reason. None of my male friends even like that kind of look, and yet it's somehow the norm in fashion and lifestyle targeted at women. Is that sexist? Why do women think men find anorexic women attractive? Could there be other reasons things are the way they are, that are unrelated to sexism?
It's an illustration of a majoritarian government power grab. I certainly do not object to condemnations of Japanese internment camps! They were one of the biggest mistakes our country ever made. I object to the root cause analysis you've performed on it, and because this is a thread that is almost entirely about that root cause analysis (and not Japanese internment), I think that's a germane criticism.
My pick is that the customer is a moderate sized radiology department using FileMaker as a RIS, and they have asked the engineer to make it talk to a PACS, booking system, distribution system, CT, MRI, PET, x-ray, US etc (all made by different manufacturers), and the engineer is at his wits end. Maybe I see things through work-tinted-glasses.
Google Pays Apple $1Bn/Year To Be Default Search Engine on iOS
With Django 1.5 (final just about to be released, hopefully within a week) supporting Python 3, you're not tied to Python 2.

There are other good options, too. Here's one, also conveniently Python 3 compatible:

(3) Pyramid with (a) SQLAlchemy; (b) ZODB; (c) something else—whatever you want!

I'm actually working on a Pyramid + traversal + ZODB project just at present. It's very instructive when once you have become used to URL routing and pattern matching (I've worked with Django hitherto).
I'd imagine most people here (myself included) have a much better impression of DDG than they do of Bing, but I doubt that the average user would. If anything, they'd probably be _more_ turned off by DDG than Bing ("At least I've heard of Bing").
Do not contemplate the whims of the Hackertariat. A curious pinpoint of darkness soon grows closer, eventually enveloping you in its yawning black, chilling the marrow and ensnaring the wits. Artifacts and whispers float by but become dust in your grasp, slipping out and past your knuckles, carried away by the soft, silent wind.

It was ever thus and shall never not be.
Basing the examples on standard String class seems dangerous.

As soon as you get a corpus of any reasonable size (and you'll have to use large corpora for any meaningful, non-toy results), the various Haskell String-like classes and laziness-control options are mandatory, but tricky/ugly when starting to use them.
Google Pays Apple $1 Billion A Year To Be Default Search Provider On iOS
Can someone explain why Excel disallows cycles (recursion) in formulas?
very doubtful. the company is planning an ipo in less than a year.
An outgoing payment need not be human-present. It can be automated on a randomized schedule.

You can split it into a million micropayments whilst you're at it; it still doesn't stop the information leak.

The same argument could be made against cash's anonymity.

Can you explain this in a bit more detail? I'm not sure I understand.
Google's Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car: How Google Wins
On Design Approval and Intentional Flaws
...you know that there's a significant group of, uhm... "programmers", that are really afraid of SQL and do everything to wrap it in things like ORMs and hope they'll never have to write it or think about it, right? As a programmer, I only started to like and "understand" SQL after learning more about the underlying relational algebra and seeing its beauty, but it was just a stream of WTFs for me before that... and some kids that I recognize as "thinking the way I do" can learn programming in Python starting from 0 in less than week but look at SQL with a complete "wtf" face ...I guess different people really think differently ...sometimes it's scary how differently
>Whereas in low-end VPS services, the labour cost for Great, Responsive Service will quickly begin to approach your capital outlay.

begin to approach? You need... dramatic scale to spend more money on hardware than on support, even when you have pretty minimal support. I spend rather more on labour than on hardware.
Use Stock Photo of a 2-Year Old
What's wrong with that if every service is using the right tool for the job and provides a sane API? Maybe maintenance?
It's just capacity planning - they can migrate me around as needed, though obviously they'd like to minimize the number of times that happens. Maybe there are periods where I spin up but don't get the full memory - that's OK, I'm only paying for what I use.

We have all of this virtualization technology but I still have to make hard decisions about size ahead of time. There are lots of providers that will let me burst CPU, I'd like to burst RAM. For people building small apps that get occasional usage, having more flexibility on memory would be a huge boon.
Agreed. It just takes time to explain how any computer system works (at least at a high level). One of my friends asked me once "what is code?" after I came home from work - I spent two hours talking with him, and at the end he had a rudimentary understanding of how source code, compilers, operating systems, and graphical user interfaces work. He made a reference to compilers months later that showed he remembered and understood.

Also, sometimes tech people are pretty ignorant too - I had to explain what a hash table was to my project manager once.
Amazon Cloud Drive (available for Mac, Windows, Android)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...
As someone else also mentioned it in the thread, my experience was that you could upload folders/files but when it comes to download back, I could not download the folders. I gave up the moment I saw that limitation.

Dropbox doesn't have such restrictions, nor do any other such service I have experienced in the free tier.
Ask HN: Apps to discover experimental treatment studies (cancer)
Hi, HN. My future brother-in-law has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer (it metastasized from another place: he's not a tobacco user). I wanted to ask if there are any apps that might help us discover treatment studies. Since he has a small chance of living it's not much of a cost to try any experimental treatment. Are there any apps to discover these?
Also, how are you measuring speed? HTTP Download? Where are your servers located?
As I read the article, I don't think that's what Fowler was talking about. I think he noticed a trend in things like Less, Sass, Haml, CoffeeScript, etc. The relationship between, say, Haml and HTML is qualitatively different than the relationship between Clojure and Java (or JVM bytecode).

So, it feels like something new is happening and this essay was an attempt to more precisely define an otherwise qualitative feeling. In my reading, here's how he did it.

We say a compiler from language X to language Y is transparent when two things are true:

1. The compiler produces a clear and human-understandable mapping between the syntax of X and Y. That is, given code in language X, a human could predict the compiler's output in Y.

2. (1) is not merely a happy accident, but a stated design goal of the compiler or underlying language X. That is, it's not whether (1) is the case, it's whether we're guaranteed that (1) is the case.

It's (2) that separates ClojureScript and CoffeeScript. Lots of compilers satisfy (1), e.g., a really naïve C compiler, but it's not by design. There's no intention, no promise to the developer, that the mapping from X -> Y has property (1).

For example, ClojureScript's priority is not about producing a clean mapping between Clojure and JavaScript, it's about bringing the expressiveness and power of Clojure to client-side development. If you look at the ClojureScript example page you see lots of "Here's how you do X in ClojureScript, but there's not native way to do X in JavaScript."

If we had two ClojureScript compilers A and B, and A produced 10x faster JavaScript than B at the cost of lots of crazy optimizations, we might very well choose A.

It'd be a much harder call for CoffeeScript, because part of the pitch CoffeeScript makes to developers is that it's "like JavaScript without all the bad parts."

I don't necessarily agree with the above, but that's my understanding of Fowler's argument.
The key failure of this post is that it uses the wrong analogy. You may want your client to think of you as a doctor, but right now they think of you as a magician.
The Naked Truth About Subscription Startups: The Good, The Bad & The Scams
Take a look at Coursera, the NLP course by Jurafsky/Manning (authors of recommendable books) was ok; and right now there's another course starting by Collins, another state-of-art researcher in NLP.
If you can't convince them, confuse them eh?
>> Meanwhile, in psychology, virtually all ideas are excuses for debates between differing factions.

> I'm not aware of any serious debates against cognitive psychology.

That's not what I said -- read it again. I said that factions within psychology differ about which of them is real, is scientific. For example, clinical psychology and psychiatry famously doubt the validity of the other. But neither of them have scientific evidence to support their claims, which is why that debate goes on and on.

Before you make a predictable objection, remember that in real science, fields are united by theory, not divided. Genetics doesn't only guide the activities of geneticists, it unites all of biology. SO does evolution, in exactly the same way -- any evidence that either supports or casts doubt on evolution changes the entire field of biology at once. This pattern is true of all legitimate sciences -- all of them are simultaneously defined and united by their theories. It is not true of psychology, which has factions that pursue similar subjects but come to diametrically opposite conclusions, with no on noticing or caring. The reason? Everyone tries to describe, but no one tries to explain.

> Psychology is an intrinsically much more difficult field than physics. Comparing other fields to it is what is disingenious.

1. Unless you're planning to invent a new word, do look up the word "disingenuous".

2. There is precisely one kind of science. Science is not an ice cream store with dozens of flavors -- science has one flavor. Any scientific field can be compared to any other scientific field as to methods and results. When this comparison is made with psychology, psychology fails the comparison, as the more candid commentators within the field freely acknowledge (see below).

> Cognitive psychology is the future of psychology.

Yes which partly explains why psychology is being replaced by neuroscience.

> It is perfectly scientific ...

Scientific fields craft and then test falsifiable scientific theories, explanations. Cognitive psychology can only describe, a failing freely acknowledged by its practitioners.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/science-psychology.html

A quote: "Despite having a scientific methodology worked out (we think), there are further problems and arguments which throw doubt onto psychology ever really being a science."

I could produce any number of quotes like the above, included in the papers of psychology's honest advocates and supporters, but I don't think it will make any difference -- your mind is made up and you refuse to be confused by the facts.
When I had Amazon Prime, the free shipping + lack of sales tax made almost always made Amazon the best choice, financially.
It made me feel slightly dizzy, and the image stretch was off putting as well.
If they are talking about installation/building on personal machines, not university machines (dgacmu's explanation seems fairly plausible there), they may be calling those things difficult when comparing them to using an installation wizard to install some IDE and clicking on menus to build.

My assessment of hassle between the two would be the opposite, but I suspect it varies greatly.
Seriously?

I have severe doubts that that makes as much difference as... well anything.

It's like whisky drunk vs. beer drunk, they're different because of the speed you take them in, their concentration absorption speeds and a variety of subjective feelings.

Now I know it's a little more complicated than the ethanol picture, with a variety of active compounds in different quantities, but I am very skeptical that a different strain of the plant can make the change from 'stumbling through life apathetically' to 'deep psychedelic self-realisation'.

Not that I'm convinced deep psychedelic self-realisation is much other than brainfart either.
User-Centric Development Revisited
When I first learned Newtonian mechanics, I found it much easier to solve certain problems thinking in terms of centrifugal force, rather than centripetal force, and thinking so did me none the worse, as long as I kept in mind the caveats required for this approach.

E.g., the classic problem of determining at what point you will fall off when skiing straight down a giant frictionless spherical snow ball. For me this is much easier to analyze by asking yourself at what point the centrifugal force pushing you off of the snowball will counteract the vector of gravity that is pushing you onto the snowball's tangent.

The so-called "right" way of thinking about this problem is at what point the centripetal vector of gravity is no longer sufficient to constrain your movement to a circle. That's much harder to visualize for me. And would be even more so for non-spherical shapes.

The real right way to think about this, is to think about it both ways and then to convince yourself that they are equivalent. Not to pretend that there is no such thing as centrifugal force.
It is not the firmware that was corrupted. It is the EEPROM that was incorrectly programmed.

The EEPROM is typically 4kB on the 82754. When it is reprogrammed either by the end-user (eg. via ethtool(1)) or by the manufacturer, the programming procedure recomputes a checksum on the first 128 bytes IIRC (when reprogramming via ethtool, the kernel driver e1000e is responisble for automatically updating the checksum.

So all in all, no, the packet of death issue was not caused by bitrot.
> and is visually much cleaner than python

I must respectfully disagree. Python is required to be visually clean by making indentation part of the syntax.
PG, our startup is in phase 1 but on my application I am going to be pitching phase 3. My question is when you see the demo site it will only have part of the functionality that I am pitching. Is that going to look bad? Should I just do a video or ppt about phase 3?
:) I would have let it go, but a lot of young people read HN and I didn't want them to think the expression really was "Here! Here!" Once these things get started ...
Let me preface this by saying that your epic trouble-shooting effort was really cool. That's what inspires me to pay so much attention to this.

If you'll excuse my ignorance, could you identify which points made on the linked page correspond to your suggestions? I can see how signature checking, if there is in fact such a mechanism on the controller, can help ensure that an EEPROM image is a member of a particular favored set of such images, but you'll admit that that's a less general approach than "in-hardware sane behavior". I don't know anything about µC design, but it would surprise me if the mistake here were as simple as setting a "die when you see this particular byte sequence" bit. It seems more likely that the behavior is an emergent property based on a combination of flags and coded behavior. I still don't think it would be possible for the controller to prevent that result in general. It is possible to test for bad behavior, as your customers proved. It's also possible for drivers to correctly handle the bad behavior of their hardware, and I'm sure appropriate patches are welcome.

Did your board vendor inform you of Intel's findings back in October? If so, could your original article have been a bit more explicit about the fact that Intel wasn't responsible for this? If not, are you looking for another board vendor?
Now, try an experiment next you do that. Explain by a completely inapplicable analogy, one that is logically coherent but does not apply to the problem at hand.

You win if your listener calls BS. I win if they don't.

You're probably not explaining anywhere near as much as you think. You're just making soothing noises until they are no longer willing to pursue the matter. You might as well be honest about that fact with both yourself and the client, as suggested in the blog post.
How to Flip a Company For $1 Billion Dollars in Less Then 2 Years
This is part of a planned series. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112670 for the initial plan. This is probably the most important in the series, since it addresses a very practical and common problem. That plan likely will change - I've received a few random additional ideas, and I really think that at some point I should address the question of how much I've been giving up with the simplification of only looking at conversions. (Short version: depends on conversion rates. If absolute conversion rates are low, then not much. If conversion rates are high, then a more complex analysis is significantly better. But most websites have pretty low conversion rates so I haven't given up much.)

However I would not recommend holding your breath too eagerly for the next one. According to a back of the envelope calculation, the opportunity cost on each article has been about $4k for me. I think I know what I want to write, then I begin adding things, removing things, play around with extra simulations, decide to change subtle details, etc. I think I know what I want to write for the next one as well, but I said that the last two times. Therefore I should assume that the same thing will happen the next time.

I want to do this series. So it will happen eventually. But I can't afford to pump them out quickly.
Are you really arguing, that we should wait for the President to issue secret orders and then sit together around the camp fire in order to discuss them? Is this your understanding of a democratic process?

Afaik only some leaked drafts have been circulating around and speculations have been going wild. After the PIPA/SOPA backslash are you honestly expecting "good intentions" when the a president is trying to get a very similar subject "solved" by circumventing public discourse?
I don't think you want to lay the blame for the country's weight problem at the feet of decisions made by exasperated non-parents caught flat-footed in an office environment with a five-year-old spun up to "eleven".
In the original historical presentation, perhaps. I've seen this argument on IRC and I assure you it was not taken to be about that.
It's a useful metaphor when talking to people too. I find I'm a lot calmer once I've considered how something must look from behind their eyes - it's not enough to just "put yourself in their shoes", you have to remember that things that seem true to them may not to you (and vice versa).