skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What's funny is the JVM is completely irrelevant on mobile compare to .NET/Mono"

I think you meant "on iOS", not "on mobile". Android has a huge share of the mobile market. And Android is pretty much Java (but maybe you don't consider the Dalvik VM to be a JVM running Java programs).

Also you make it sound like somehow .Net/Mono would be huge on iOS. Just to set things straight: most development on iOS is done in Objective-C.
Silicon Valley has shifted from hardware to software, this is the real story. New hardware matches our understanding of innovation significantly more than software.
There was a very interesting article last week about Josh Miele in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/nyregion/40-years-after-an...

Someone threw acid on his face as a child, and the story narrates how he eventually overcame these challenges to go on to do great things, like work on NASA software for Mars Observer.
I think the point of the comment you're replying to is that everyone is fighting over a global namespace now, but one that unnecessarily appends ".com" to everything in it.

That interpretation might be overly colored by my personal view of things.

However much I might be inclined to agree that we have a global namespace now, I can't agree that ".com" is 'one of the biggest usability failures in history'. The point has been made before, but seeing "facebook.com" immediately signifies a website to people, using fewer characters than "find us on the web at facebook" ever really could. I found it very interesting to see mainland chinese advertisements with web addresses - for example, renren.com might appear in an ad as "人人网". The two 人 would be written in pinyin as "ren", and directly represent the name of the site; the 网 is pronounced "wang" and means net (here, the internet), but actually represents the unpronounceable suffix ".com". Thus I argue that ".com" is not even a clear loss in usability; it's providing context that people want.
It's an anonymous letter. And does not look genuine to me either - to somebody who worked at EA it's hard to imagine there is anybody there who seriously believes in the external PR stuff. Could be a contractor though.

Nevertheless, a lot of people at EARS will be laid off. A portion of EA's bonus depends on the Metacritic score so a lot of management types right now are missing a significant part of money they already had plans to spend. The only remedy for this is a massive layoff that boosts stock prices and increases other portions of the bonus. For recent example see what happened to MOH and EALA last quarter.
To save the click through:

As the chance of collision is influenced by the number of objects in space, there is a critical density where the creation of new debris occurs faster than the various natural forces remove them. Beyond this point a runaway chain reaction may occur that pulverizes everything in orbit.

There was a fun idea for a while to use a powerful laser to shoot at the front end of space debris. The resulting ablation would turn the little nuts and bolts into tiny rockets using their own material as fuel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_ablation

See also: xkcd What If? on using laser ablation to propel the moon away from the Earth:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/13/
It's really impressive the speed at which censors are able to delete posts.

Great work, it's worth reading!
is the table of contents ordering out of whack for everyone? when I scroll down the page, the right hand table of contents jumps typography->grid system->code->tables, even though the menu is laid out as typography->code->grid system->tables...
> "The researchers said that seven species of bacteria were found in the frozen water in 2012. The DNA match to any known organisms never went past 86 percent, so it is considered to be an unknown form of life. Anything under 90 percent is considered enough to designate a new species."

Is that 90% figure standard convention? Where did it come from? I'm not too familiar with this field, so is that basic textbook stuff? It seems arbitrary.
When I read articles like this it's always centered around the bigger companies like Goldman and such, are there smaller companies who can handle taking an IPO public? I mean these guys are a business and need to make money, but feel like a smaller firm would be more transparent and willing to work with you and not for their other more well established clients.
Google 'youtube philip jeck' to see what is possible using 'crate dived' vinyl and a host of vintage record players.

I can remember my first CD - nearly damaging my hearing by turning up the volume as there was no hiss or crackle.

The album art I do miss...
"But these aren't free market aberrations brought on by regulations. They're the invisible hand of capitalism itself: reaching out for quick gains while avoiding as much downside risk as possible."

Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis.

Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point.

So you have this huge bunch of people over many decades making things just a little better than before. Another person comes along and, now that many different pieces are much more efficient than before, connects them in new and innovative ways.

You don't have a Wright Brothers without machine tools, bicycle parts, and so on -- each of which was a tiny bit better than the thing before it. You don't have a Facebook without an internet, cheap bandwidth, and ubiquitous computing. Facebook wasn't "looking for quick gains while avoiding as much downside..", it was a more efficient way to keep up to date on important social information.

Yeah, every now and then somebody does this one thing that we all think of as grand. But nine times out of ten? It's only possible because the rest of the world of mankind has evolved. This is why we see so many people discover the same thing at the same time. They're not necessarily copying, it's just that we're ready for that discovery to take place.

This is also what is wrong with VCs (and some government organizations) trying to select what sorts of technologies need more attention: it doesn't work. It's backwards. Sure, you can have a goal that you then reward enough that somebody will reach it. But you can't decide on a solution and then keep dumping money on your solution until it works. "Winning WWII" was a goal the allies had that they were prepared to spend billions on. Because of 1) their resource pool in both money and talent, 2) the desire to have a goal reached instead of a technology deployed, it worked. If they had decided to "build a ray gun" no matter how much money they dropped, it would never be enough.

I'm not crazy about the day-to-day work of innovation, the guys making the better widgets, the folks making gears turn with less friction, the folks making farts come out of your iPhone. These aren't very sexy and nobody likes writing news pieces about them. But taken altogether, it's a million of these things that lead to the next cognitive jump in mankind.

If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car.

If you keep thinking of the problem backwards, in terms of capitalism vs. research, not only will you not be able to solve it, you'll actively and continually destroy resources that could be used in solving it.
WHO: Small cancer risk after Fukushima accident
> Determined to see if vinyl truly is the superior format

I just stopped there. This is like the people who try to find out if a model T car is a better car than Civic. "Let's conduct a test and spend time and money setting it up". Well, ok, I don't have to conduct a test, I can tell you a Civic is better.

But, if you happen to own lots of records or own a shop in a hip part of town that sells records, by no means, load up on monster cables and vinyl records. For some reasons when it comes to audio, there is never a shortage of people willing to part with their money over dubious claims. I would want to be on the side selling them stuff.
DARPA is a very interesting agency. It's got a $3.2 billion budget, but less than 250 employees and more than half are technical people. They're structured to maximize the amount of money that goes to the actual engineering teams and minimize internal inertia. The program managers get $20 million or so to throw around each year, and have tremendous authority over their projects and not a lot of oversight. They're on the younger side for people with that kind of budget authority and usually have PhD's themselves. They're limited to 4-5 year stints, so it's not a position that attracts people looking to make a career in bureaucracy.
>>The page loads, and I get halfway through reading the first paragraph, the scroll point jumps around four times

Experienced the same problems here. I was pleading the gods to please strike down whomever gave birth to such an atrocity of a design.
My impression was that they were trying to go for a more "middle ground" approach to things that made it easy to convert old existing templates (written in less safe dialects like jQuery templates). Since the legacy code allows you to have inline URLs that you put things in you can't force the users to refactor things to generate all the URLs outside the templates.
They've taken that off the table.

If only patents worked that way.
with some sass knowledge you are better of starting off with a couple of mixins and building from bottom up as compared to loading a fat css file you probably won't use 80pc of its rules.

Normalize css[1] Bourbon[2] for utilities Neat[3] for the grid, Typeplate[4] for a nice type base.

If you still need bootstrap style elements, you can get individual mixins and styles from one the bootstrap-sass projects[5]

[1] https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/

[2] http://bourbon.io

[3] http://neat.bourbon.io

[4] http://typeplate.com

[5] https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass

edit: typo
For many many people github introduced them to GIT and many of them would still don't know about it if it wasn't for it.

Twitter is a more accessible version of RSS feed allowing way easier access to subjects of interest for non-tech-savvy people.
Not to mention that the system was propped up by organized violence and the corruption of the legal system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping#United_States). This isn't a bad post, but the sharecropper simile kinda stinks.
If you want to make a difference, quit trying to cash out as a 25 year old millionaire.

Get a PhD and do research. That's the real risk in life, that you might work your ass off for little pay, spend 30 years chasing a dream, and fail in the end.

But the people who succeed change the world.

Interestingly, most Nobel Prize winners donate a large percentage of their prize money to charity or research. They weren't interested in early retirement in the first place.
Agreed, no regrets on the time I spent experiencing vinyl or finding rare old records I would have otherwise never heard of.
Business model issues aside, It wouldn't be quite so bad if their standard clients didn't suck so much! So, what are we going to migrate to? Vine?
There are plenty of reasons to listen to vinyl and it's fine if you are doing it to be hip. I do it because of the sound quality. CDs were invented in the 1980s. The digital resolution is simply not very high. Remember what the first digital cameras looked like next to film? That's the CD next to vinyl. And MP3s and AACs are so much worse.

It's like comparing a compressed JPG to an Ansel Adams print on a gallery wall.

In theory newer digital audio formats should be able to get a lot closer to the sound quality of analog soundwaves perfectly preserved in wax and traced by a diamond needle. But I've not heard a digital format yet that quite captures it. Hopefully one day there will be. But we're not there yet, not to my ears.

Listening to digital formats is wonderfully convenient but you are simply hearing a pixelated approximation of your music. You're trading audible detail and richness for convenience. That's no crime.

But if you love music, I mean LOVE it, you owe it to yourself to give vinyl a try.
A ton of audiophiles with $5000 stereo systems still prefer the analog vinyl sound over digital if you read the magazines/forums.

It's not quite adventurous or hipster to make that statement.
Wait a minute. If its just adding escaping functions to the templates, who is actually running the templates?
> 192kHz@24bits

I know disk space is cheap, but why 192kHz? Why not encode at 48kHz and use the rest of it for more music, or heck, cat videos.
7 Reasons Why You Should Tackle Hard Problems Last
What you’re saying is fair enough, but in this specific case if you compare what the two are saying it is obvious these are not “separate angles” but one is the original composition and the other is a watered-down version of the exact same angle. And the result is perhaps not Courtney’s fault—when my peers say something interesting I love to quote them on it. Just here it seems to have been done without the credit.
Imagine a country where all decisions are made by the richest and most outspoken, where they can change the meaning of words on a whim.

Oh, wait, we don't have to.
Actually, what I was referring to is known as "domain kiting":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting#Domain_kiting

"Domain tasting should not be confused with domain kiting, which is the process of deleting a domain name during the five-day grace period and immediately re-registering it for another five-day period. This process is repeated any number of times with the end result of having the domain registered without having to pay for it."

Apparently, there was no cost to the squatters.
I've been arguing for a few years that this is a cyclical thing - just as before Facebook there was AOL, before AOL there was Compuserve and so on. Every so often technological advances make the wider net so much easier to use that the curated platform suddenly looks antiquated, then a few years later those advances facilitate the construction of a new platform.
Fwiw, I'm in the habit of sending thank you emails but I always change the subject from:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit

to

Re: Lorem ipsum dolor sit -- Thanks!

(On disqusish comment systems, I often upvote a reply to suggest I saw it rather than reply once more.)
Yeah, "this has to be a contractor" was my first impression.

Personally, since I work at a competitor, I hope that EA never gets it. But you should never, ever have "someone else continues to screw up" as part of your business strategy. :-)
ARPA itself was a direct response to the soviet's ability to allocate assets to state innovation like sputnik.
Seriously impressed.
Because I bought an expensive headphone amp and I like using it to its full ability. But 96khz is more than enough.
Edit: Seriously, I really want to know what people think about the question at the end. I worked with someone who works at cd2, and on a selfish note I'm just curious.

I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products. This seems to require two things: a) public investment in vague-but-cool-sounding-what-if projects, and b) easy ways to translate them into usable products.

For (a), someone should be funding things that might be valuable "platforms" for society: the human genome project, ARPANet, basic mathematics research (Fourier analysis, instrumental in many, many commercial products, was one such basic mathematical result for a long time). The value of these platforms may take a long time to pan out (if ever), so it makes sense to fund them as a society. Perhaps government per se isn't required - it could be done by some collection of nonprofits - but the funding won't come from many private firms. Further, if we want these platforms to be of use to many companies, perhaps they shouldn't come from private firms.

I think about it like I think about LAPACK. LAPACK is used by almost every scientific computing library for matrix multiplication. Now if Intel and AMD want to come along and make proprietary versions of it (e.g. Intel's Math Kernel Library), or if Matlab or Mathematica want to wrap them into an easy-to-use product, or someone needs it for a robot controller for a factory, that's awesome! The point is that there is some value in public research the market can draw on to make nice things (the ROI on LAPACK must be HUGE for whatever nominal cost + non-nominal man-hours it takes).

(b) is difficult, but there have been some efforts. One such is INVO[0], an effort at Northwestern that helps researchers develop their ideas without losing too much control in the process. They just founded cd2[1], the center for device development, that helps clinicians and engineers navigate the bureaucratic and regulatory hoops, and ultimately pitch. The key is that like YC, they have a strong network of people who understand this process, who to talk to, what you're really signing when you sign a piece of paper, etc. They pay you (for a year!) to work on your project.

My question (updated for clarity): What do potential founders of not-widget-startups want to be able to pursue the kind of innovation mentioned in the article? In particular, what would help translate academic proof-of-concept ideas into viable, fundable, products?

It would seem that asking VC's to fund cooler projects at the expense of profits is not the right way to go. Maybe a better strategy is to ease the link between cutting-edge research and consumer-facing products. What would help with that?

[0](http://invo.northwestern.edu/about)
[1](http://cd2.northwestern.edu/)
HackerShelf - A Community curated book collection for hackers
When you're spending billions/trillions of tax dollars, you're going to have successes here and there.

There's no question that the government has some successes to point to. I actually agree that government is decent at some basic research.

Then again, the private sector has had plenty of successes as well.

My main objection is that we don't really understand the opportunity cost of having the government spend the money vs letting the private economy do so itself - yet we let the government continue to make the decisions on what's fair.
Medium enterprisey project with a medium budget, I see people picking C#/CLR>

But really big enterprisey stuff with really big budget? It's all Oracle DB + Java on Unix there.

Just as all the really big infrastructures (Google, FedEx, Amazon, etc.) are all Unix.
I'm no kind of music fan, and even I can hear how crappy 48kHz sounds next to 192kHz; you can hear it even over a bad pair of earbuds.
I was saying that parsing HTML is harder than parsing XML, because of all the tricky corner cases with "malformed" stuff. Generating either of them is relatively easy to do. I don't undestand your point about placeholders though. Isn't the whole problem here that its hard to know how to escape the things you put into the placeholdes?
I'm one of those people. I code with 3/60 vision. Here's what I do.

I use an articulated arm for my monitor which holds it much closer to my face than any stand could while not forcing me to hunch over my desk to see.

I use larger font sizes, and spend a lot of time selecting the most comfortable available font, size, and syntax highlighting options possible. Personally, I have a lot of difficulty with contrast, so standard 'high contrast' schemes make me stabby. I tend toward darkish backgrounds with just off primary colours. This may not work for you. Be prepared to spend a lot of time experimenting. This can be frustrating, and you have my sympathy.

I use a backlit keyboard.

I probably format my code a bit differently to most people, I like to leave a lot of whitespace. Between lines, on the inside of brackets, between operators and operands, etc.

I generally have my monitor brightness set a bit lower than most people, and I also bias light.

For web browsing, I use browser plugins that allow me to zoom the text, currently zooWheel in Chrome since Firefox's kamikaze update schedule continually breaks my accessibility plugins. I used to use an FF plugin called greasemonkey to reformat frequently visited sites with custom CSS, but this turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.

I work with OS X a lot, but find it to be the most hostile environment for low - as opposed to zero - vision due to the complete lack of ability to change the colors of UI elements. There are third party hacks, but they are patchy and irritating. Apple's solution is to allow you to invert the color pallete. As the saying goes, now you have two problems. Also their cursor tends to get lost against dark backgrounds. I'm sporadically working on a software solution for this.

Linux obviously offers the ultimate in customisation, but will suck massive amounts of time if you allow it to.

You may have noticed that these are all pretty much the same kinds of things you'd do (or should do) and consider when setting up your working environment.

This is good news. As a coder, you are going to find that a lt of stuff that's severely challenging to many people with low vision is simply not a big obstacle for you. You are already well equipped to modify your tools and environment around your needs.

Hold on to that thought, because the most important thing is that much of the advice that anyone gives you, quite possibly including most of the above, simply won't be right for you. As an articulate, technically aware individual, you are in a position to try out solutions and decide what works for you. Reject anything which doesn't. Go custom where there are gaps.

Most importantly, be stubborn. You have some scary shit happening and it's going to present you with new challenges. Own them. Some days are going to be really frustrating, and you'll feel like you're losing. Go get some rest, come back, and just own the ass off them.
Since the site is crushed, here's a demo on youtube that seems to get some of the point across:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM
Agreed, that's why I said "a few bucks a month from a few million users". I can't imagine that more than a couple million of their hundreds of millions of users would pay to remove the ads from their feeds.
I don't see anything in the post claiming the purpose of the satellite, or if it was still operational.

So I would surmise the main point here is to highlight the increasing danger of space debris, and that the danger is going to be exponential, rather than linear in growth.
That being said, I remember some post here about an indie artist (Zoe Keating) looking at revenues from Spotify, Apple, Amazon, etc.

With Apple she made decent living wage ($80k for the year) while the revenue from all the other services, esp the subscription ones, was barely a blip on the radar.
MEET JEKYLL, THE STATIC SITE GENERATOR - PART 1
Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby that uses the Liquid template engine. In combination with git for version control and Jenkins for deployment, Jekyll is a powerful tool not just for blogging, but also for small to medium-sized websites. Give Jekyll a try, and you can blog like a hacker.
I think you're underselling twitter: its a completely new communication mechanism by which people can communicate short thoughts directly to their followers. It can be used as a better RSS, but that doesn't account for all the other ways it can be used, everything from celebrity gossip, to starting and managing violent revolutions.