skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
neya stated "This is why you should never build a startup/app based on someone else's API especially when that someone else doesn't take money from you."

I think you misread. He/she stated 'someone 1' = 'facebook itself' and that 'someone' takes nothing from 'someone 2', where 'someone 2' = 'developer'. Nowhere in that equation does 'someone' refer to 'facebook user'. In your example 'someone 1' = 'platform' and 'someone 2' = 'user'. These aren't the same.
Not the browser extension, but when I check a Feedburner feed in Chrome I see, in order: MyYahoo, NewsGator, MyAOL, Bloglines, Netvibes, Google Reader, Pageflakes, and then a dropdown for other options.
Except AGW is massively well-supported by the evidence.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-globa...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Yeah, MS is oh so much more trustworthy. Like when they discontinued POP (and IMAP?) access on Hotmail accounts, before Gmail came about.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
For Facebook your question has merit, but what Google kingdom?

In this realm (no pun intended) Google has no kindgom at all. (The few that it had, like Google Reader, it has killed itself).

Except if you include mobile, in which is has Android. But Android is far from Google's kingdom too nowadays: Samsung is more heavily invested in it, and Amazon is doing Fire by sidestepping the Android higher level stuff altogether.
>Moreover it suggests that I have been snoring most of the time, while I

>definitely do not snore at all; I think the microphone on my phone is too

>sensitive, and since there is no way to change the threshold, next time I'll

>try moving the phone farther away from me.

Maybe the app could save a few sound clips when it thinks you're snoring so you can verify it.
Really? The "upper-class" people who use Uber (people who are using their expensive smart phones to order the cab, people like ourselves) are averse to tipping well when the service is great? That's disgraceful.
I like RSS and don't have social network accounts, but so what? Way before these companies die, others will have taken their place and do their job.
Less control of presentation == fewer ads.
I consider myself a very technical person, but I never saw a reason to use RSS feeds (or Reader for that matter).

There are not a lot of "content websites" that I follow (Fefes Blog, Beautiful Pixels, MacRumors...) but rather content aggregation websites like HackerNews or Reddit, which I use to get my daily dose of news (not just tech but all kinds of categories). And yes, I check those manually, often on my phone in the respective apps, and it does not at all feel like a hassle. I've tried using Google Reader and other feed managers like Feedly but never got used to them.

For personalized news I look at the two social sites I follow (App.net and Twitter).
So I must know a US zip code to even be able to see that page? Never seen that before, quite obnoxious regardless if you live in the US or not.
Google acquires an infrastructure startup Talaria. To help Google crush AWS?
Wonderland, a beautiful Jekyll based blogging template
Introducing Heet App - What's Trending Now?
Hi All,

We just launched Heet App (www.HeetApp.com) for iPhone and would appreciate your feedback.

Heet is a completely new way to discover, read, and search for news. Heet analyzes every news source out there and brings you the hottest trends right now. Trends are organized into categories: Top, Tech, News, Sports, and Entertainment trends. You can read instant stories about trends you find interesting, from all news sources. You can also search directly for news stories using Heet's smart news-only search engine, which prioritizes trends in search results.

Heet Appstore Link
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Looking forward to hear your thoughts! We would really appreciate it.
Apple has it's own products that depends on no one else to function - The iPhone, for example.

That is simply untrue. No internet = device is useless. No wireless calling = device is useless. No power = device doesn't turn on. Let's just pretend for a second that internet, power and wireless communication don't exist, but the ability to create the iPhone does exist. Would someone have created it?

They have no obligation to do you any favors

You've confused your own statement just like the other person did (see my comment to him/her). Facebook is incentivized to get as many eyeballs on their site as possible. Just as a power company is incentivized to generate power for your house. The difference is that one is a procurement process and the other is a distribution process.
New treasures from outer space as Hubble shoots up a storm [slides]
Ok, so Uber's drivers aren't being fairly compensated for the immense amount of value they provide to Uber, so they are not whining about it on the internet, they are getting off of their arses and trying to get Uber to fairly compensate them. I fail to see the entitlement here.

The flipside of entitlement is exploitation - Uber are exploiting the low-pay and restricted bargaining power of blue collar workers to their own ends. I think that is far more reprehensible.

As intelligent, fast-learning people in a market that allows for a greater deal of freedom than theirs, it is wrong to judge them. They are in a shittier situation than us, and are trying to change that. Surely we should be admiring them for taking the initiative and doing this?
True, but you can get bluetooth keyboards for tablets, and those keyboard-docking ASUS Transformer-esque tablets, which are likely to grow in popularity.

(Sadly iPad plus bluetooth keyboard is currently fairly terrible due to a lack of the most basic keyboard shortcuts).
Is it an American phenomenon? In Europe I expect a taxi driver to be quick to turn up, helpful and knowledgeable about the destination.
Granted, I don't expect water.
"When I took the wheel"
"At the intersection of three areas"
"Little traction at that stage"

These resignation letters are getting more clever.
> GCE is currently in the US only.

Not correct. They've had EU zones since November:

https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/faq#datacenters

https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/pricing#table
There should be a tomb for Google.cn
They abandoned probably more than 100 million users when they shut it down.
Google should grow up and learn to deal with complexities of the real world and do some real good instead of sticking to some vague motto.
As of systemd 197, the timer units now support calendar based events which makes it a pretty full replacement for cron: http://lwn.net/Articles/531850/
Unit tests are still useful sometimes. Everyone, when they first start out, goes overboard with how many tests they write, and can't tell the difference between what should and shouldn't be tested. The first couple of projects that are unit tested for a developer tend to have so many tests that are brittle that it slows the entire process down.

What I do now is, well, I'm going to actually test stuff while I'm coding anyway right? Regardless if I'm doing TDD or not. Well unit tests give me a useful harness where I can write those tests, instead of hundreds of Console.WriteLines. It's basically not much more effort than Console.WriteLine() style "testing", except you are left with some reusable artifacts at the end that may come in handy later on.
Great work and nice execution.

Although I would rather not see the list of API's be cluttered with items like "Icons", "Logic", "Physics", etc. They are just general concepts and besides they have no actual contents beside a wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha link.
the real test is to see how many [predictions] make you stop and say, "wait, they didn't already have that back then?"

This is a better test because puts the onus on the original author writing honestly about what exists at the time of writing, rather than on making really good predictions.
> What I learned: It’s not always hard to make interesting changes to large projects.

Should be, it's not always hard to make interesting changes to very well-designed and well-architected projects
You know, I keep seeing this "proprietary NaCl" statement around, and having played with it myself, I have a bit of a soapbox. There's nothing proprietary about NaCl: all the specs are open, and Google actively wants Mozilla and others to support them.

To be charitable, though, I guess what most people mean by "NaCl is not open like Javascript" is that it's low-level--compiled binaries instead of readily-accessible script. And that's true; it exposes less to the user--and although it would be perfectly possible for every NaCl module to be debuggable through the browser with embedded symbols, just like Javascript is, it hasn't happened yet.

But you know, NaCl isn't for that, as far as I can tell. It's not a thing to write the business-domain logic of your web app in. It's far too clunky to develop with, if that were the intent.

Instead, what NaCl seems perfectly suited as, to me, is an architecture for writing pluggable scripting-language virtual machines. In other words, to give freedom of choice to use a backend other than V8 to write your web app against. Java-in-the-browser, Ruby-in-the-browser, Erlang-in-the-browser; any of those would be possible, and just as transparent+useful as Javascript-in-the-browser (in fact, V8 itself could be lifted out to being just another NaCl module.) And since the site would deliver the "runtime" for the scripts itself[1], any compatible browser could pull it down and execute it, instead of waiting for IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. to all adopt the new language before anyone can start using it (a Sisyphean wait.)

There's already one perfect example of how this all would work: Adobe Flash. Flash is, in Chrome at least, an NaCl (PPAPI) module. Now, Flash isn't a shining example of openness--but using a custom interpreter is not where it goes wrong.[2] You can easily imagine Flash without that problem: a world where you can have <script type="text/actionscript"> and the Flash runtime will reach in and execute that code, just like the Javascript runtime reaches in and executes your JS.

---

[1] This doesn't necessarily have to be true, though. The browser can come with default language runtime modules, and then the webapp can suggest a site-specific runtime module, but the browser doesn't have to take that suggestion. Which is exactly the way a thing that is considered "open" on the web works: fonts! Think of an NaCl module as being no more or less than a custom @font-face rule for the execution of a script.

[2] Flash goes wrong by embedding its programs into proprietary binary asset packages [SWFs]; goes wrong again by drawing everything onto a single canvas, not allowing for anything like DOM manipulation; and then goes wrong a third time by having only one de-facto implementation with no open standard.
Panicked porn troll Prenda Law now dismissing pending lawsuits
4) Low population density. Low population density. LOW POPULATION DENSITY!!!

Americans kvetch plenty online about their loss of privacy. /r/politics and other fora are easy indications, even Facebook statuses show it.

You don't get mass protests because the settlement pattern of America is well-designed for incapacitating mass action. Mass action of any kind requires physical togetherness, which requires density, on several different levels.
Always love a good heist story.
The past 60 or so years have been pretty good for those fighting for civil liberties, though recently we seem to have reached a tipping point.

It does not look like the tipping point has been reached yet in developing countries.
And it's from a guy in Tehran according to the meta info.

I'm pointing to this, because, even in tech forums I follow, some people believe Iranians are evil and they should be nuked or something.

Don't confuse what your local media say for each country (and how they choose to present it) with what the country actually is.

Don't even judge by the government of the other country (would Americans like to be judged by Bush or Nixon? Maybe Kissinger and Rove?).

And don't judge by your pre-determined cultural notions either. As a European, I abhor the death penalty, the practice of executing 15 year old children and protestant bible thumpers. Still I find the people of Texas mighty fine, including those that agree with those things, and not just the SXSW crowd. So I can also understand people in Iran (or whatever) having their own culture, religious etc and being backwards (to my view) in some regards.

Unless a country has done specific, unprovoked and tangible harm to another country, there is no reason to hate it at all. As for what happens INSIDE the country, it's mostly their thing to deal with.
True, however the solution is ok since passing the test is the only quality you need.

If not, write a new test, make it pass. The naive implementation can be substituted with a different one easily since the tests guarantee correctness.

Generally though, since the "third leg" of TDD is refactoring, this ensures that the proper structures are going to be used in place as soon as they are actually needed.
I love how the closure of Reader reveals something about the tech journalists and "celebrities".

They throw tantrums. They throws hissy fits. They scream bloody murder. They divine doom and gloom for Google about how severely this will affect it in much more important markets like Android and Chrome.

And yet the world is not ending, and not every Facebook wall has this petition [1] plastered all over. Even GOOG stock underwent as a much as a correction, still hovering comfortably above $800.

What did happen, though, is that self-important "opinion leaders" had their illusions of power dispelled. No wonder they are furious.

[1] https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-r...
My favorite thing about "individualism versus collectivism" dichotomies is their utter failure to take into account how the ostensible "individualists" act when placed among a social group to which they actually feel the slightest tinge of loyalty or belonging.

Everyone is a collectivist for the groups they like, and an individualist for the ones they don't. These are not really deep personality features or full-scale philosophies at all.
What is Capsella Bursa Pastoris, Shepherd’s Purse?
PG tried a friend's Tesla Model S...
So they article is assuming or speculating that someone basically tapped into the video feeds for the casino surveillance?

I would have assumed the camera feeds would be wired, but I guess maybe for ease of maintenance they're wireless feeds?

If they're just using run of the mill Wi-Fi cameras, then I suppose they get what they deserve..
The major complaint I hear about Uber from Chicago taxi drivers (I like to chat when in a cab) is that Uber only pays them after 10 days. They have to pay weekly rent on their cab, though, which means they can only use Uber when they already have enough money to pay the rent.
>Maybe rename my daughter Susan.

Or just have another daughter...or son?
This doesn't gel with reality. Civil war worked out ok with even less density. The truth is no one knows their neigbor. There's no sense of community here with those around us.
The point here is that your facebook has been filled. In other words, there may only be a few upset people, but they're people that other folks (like you) listen to.
Global Warming is BS
Google Shopping is becoming a commercial site
Uber's history is filled with so many scandals and I urge everyone to boycott them.
A Google Experiment Hides the Navigation Bar
What do you mean by specs are open? Published fully or developed communally?

Fully published is obviously better than not, but is rarely enough. Openness is not a binary choice.
the majority of those service is defunct.
Cyprus savers lose 10% of money after shock bailout
I've seen a handful of people say that they would have been willing to pay for Reader. But overall, I imagine that the complaining would have been just as loud had they started charging users for something that was previously free. And what if it was still unprofitable? They'd need to go through all the complaints a second time if they decided to close it down anyway.
Developed communally, as part of the Chromium project. Not as a vendor-neutral working group or anything of the sort yet, mind you. But there's no reason it wouldn't move to become that if any other vendor was actually interested in coordinating on it--they're not hiding their cards inside Google's walled garden or anything.
It would be damn annoying for me to check fefe several times, find the last link I read and start above it. And that's for his somewhat low-update blog. Stuff like techdirt is way worse with ~50 or so posts per day.
NaCl (in particular PNaCl) is merely a different approach. I would call asm.js crazy, but that's just me.

Something similar could be said about Dart, but there the language itself is not so interesting (merely not insane). The VM is potentially the language-independent bytecode and stdlib in a browser we've all been waiting for.

While Google have been behavin evil-ly lately, in particular related to Google+, NaCl and Dart are not examples of this.
Not going to happen. Clashes with one of the few things that are part of human nature - and the nature of any other known "intelligent" algorithm.

If a human -or any of the various intelligent algorithms- doesn't HAVE to do something, it won't do anything at all. It may take a while, but it will happen.

The weird part is, I've seen this process in action. I mean in code it's easy to see it in action. It's very sad to see it in action on a real person. But in university this is what happens to a few mates of me who are rich, but not extremely rich. They were rejected for academic positions, but they really wanted to. One was accepted for a while before he got rejected. They didn't have to work, and still wanted to do research - not the same research the institution was doing, they were working on their own ideas. They started, and they hit problems, as everyone does, really. But nothing was forcing them to advance, and they simply slowed down and dug into a few problems, not really considering narrowing scope or changing direction. And they slowed down until they did nothing -absolutely nothing- anymore. I mean literally wake, eat, watch some tv, take a long nap, some more tv, go to bed, months on end.

That's what drives me to this prediction : if we ever get to the point where most humans aren't forced to do work, we will die - the entire species - in a few decades.
GEMA is a relic, a dinosaur, designed to distribute license fees to the top mainstream artists. Many know this, but as long as artists sign up with them, it won't stop.
And there's also this saying: "the better you get, the better you'd better get."
Facebook bypassing the Play Store shows how useful “walled gardens” really are
The DNS resolver doesn't need to spoof anything. If you're on network example.net and there's a server on that network called "google" then typing "google" into your address bar will resolve to google.example.net in a completely legitimate way, with no DNS spoofing.
Don't you think that the idea that science explains everything is at the very core of atheism ? Do you think my interpretation of Godel as directly contradicting this thesis is wrong ?
I thought they worked it out with a pencil as they saying goes.
There's Zoho, but it's big enough to where it probably won't accept an acquisition.
On the other hand, problems are to be solved, not suffered through.
How Beer Gave Us Civilization
This is about learning a very specific skill that requires a lot of practice and building a "muscle memory". To some extent this applies to students and some top sportsman, too. For the rest of us, however, most of the work related problems are not about us not being skillful enough, but about the amount of (fairly simple) things that need to be done. That's what's eating time for most of us: easy tasks, but lots of them, day after day...
The whole reason casinos stay in business is because the house "skims" money from the players ... or in games where the player plays against the house, the house has more favorable odds.

The head-line says "steals", but the reality is that he was simply cheating. One is a crime but I'm not sure about the other. If I'm accomplished at counting cards, I can still beat the house because I've changed the odds. The casino may ban me (and I might forfeit the earnings for the day) but they can't charge me with a crime.
> Google started their proprietary ... Dart project because they claimed you couldn't make JavaScript any faster than it currently is

No, they didn't. Google started Dart because they had a bunch of Java programmers who were having good success building JavaScript web apps such as Gmail with Google Web Toolkit. They thought to formalize it with Dart instead of using a hacked up Java dev environment. I have a client who needed a web app fast, so I took a chance on Dart and did it in half the time. The client doesn't even know I'm doing it in Dart. I'm shipping the minified js file which works on all modern browsers because the Dart team set out to bring jQuery up to a higher level. There's a bright side to all the dislike and misinformation about Dart though, because it gives me a competitive edge.
I think we all tend to assume that our computer habits are shared by millions of nameless other people. Presumably, Google have data on how many people visit igoogle, and it doesn't seem worth keeping.

My nameless millions and I no longer have a 'homepage' - the browser just starts with the tabs I had open last time.
I also disagree with this article. I think the point of TDD is not to blindly mash at the keyboard to make tests to pass and TDD encourages you to go back and refactor code and tests after you get it passing. TDD gives you confidence that the functionality you developed yesterday doesn't break when you add more functionality today.

TDD isn't a be all and end all, its just one more tool in a developers toolbox that allows us to be better at your job. If you solely rely on TDD or [Insert newest popular development technique] you are going to have a bad time.

One place that I've found TDD to be insanely helpful is exposing the interaction between pieces of the system before building it out in code. I tend to write my tests from the bottom up, i write the assertion first, and then build up the stuff i need to test that assertion. This makes it easier to see whats needed to test the functionality and whether or not the test looks good or not.

Gary Bernhardt does a really good job at explaining his philosophy on TDD, which I really agree with, http://destroyallsoftware.com
This doesn't sound very brain or productivity healthy.
You're incorrect, that's not how NaCl or Dart were developed. They were developed in secret years before released. They're alpha versions had all of the fundamentals established when finally presented to the public.