skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read magazines (The Economist, New Yorker) on my iPad. I read most books on my Kindle and yet I decided to buy this one programming book recently as a physical book. I've done so because it's a book that I know I will be reading at home, on my laptop to experiment and play around with code as I read. The conveniences of a real book are not met by any reading device.

Tablets:
Good for books with lots of visuals. I need to see the images, figures, colours etc... of the articles I read on the two magazine subscriptions I have. I sometimes forget the magazine at home when I want to read it (on the bus, waiting, etc...). Audio readings are a great feature on some magazines.

Kindle:
I use it for reading most of my books now. Cheap, instant and very light to carry. The problem? The touch interaction is nowhere as convenient as a book. It's hard to navigate the book and I usually like to go back to previous sections. I avoid that all-together on the Kindle. I also bought a book on design (Design for Hackers by David Kadavy), and I wasn't able to see a single image. For the few that showed up, they weren't coloured which made no sense. Most of the books I use though have no images, and so navigation is the biggest issue.

Physical Books:
I buy a physical book when I know I will only read at home. Books are almost always going to be the most convenient, easiest to use. Unless Kindle comes up with something better. The only issue is carrying the book around, having to store it (an issue if you move around a lot like me), and eBooks are cheaper. I also go to college in a town with not a single decent bookstore around me. They all sell college textbooks only. eBooks are instant while books typically take a week to deliver to me.
>That's not a default, it's a new loan.

A new loan that can never be repaid, and its only purpose is to prevent an immediate default, it just as good as a default in my books.

Maybe not from the point of view of the creditors (they will get some of their money back), but still having very similar consequences to the debtors: difficulty in loaning new money, financial destruction, a take-over-of-control by the creditors' intermediaries and the liquifying any valuable state assets.

It already started with indiscriminately stealing 6% from the bank account holders and can only go downhill.

>That is, what percentage isn't going to be paid at all?

Lots of it. Following the same process as with Greece et al, there is definitely going to be a "haircut".
Phone/tablet gaming with no external input device sucks for anything except puzzle and strategy games (just try it, it's impossible to move a character with any accuracy).

And if you require an input device, it's no longer portable so you might as well also have a bigger screen.
I need some thoughts/feedback on my startup's landing page
"Cops today still don't generally go after routine criminals with a full SWAT team and getup"

http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-p...
Font used to refer to a typeface in a single size. 9pt Helvetica Light used to be a different font than 12pt Helvetica Light – while Helvetica Light (in any size) and Helvetica Bold (in any size) are different typefaces.

That distinction used to make sense as those different fonts with different sizes used to be physically different things.

With the advent of digital typography, that distinction doesn’t make any more sense. Typefaces can be seamlessly scaled up and down, there really is no longer even a need for an extra word for a typeface of a certain size. You don’t need the 12pt Helvetica Light file or the 9pt Helvetica Light file. Font and typeface became synonymous.

Now, given this history it makes sense to see typeface as referring to the abstract notion of the shapes of the letters and font to the technical implementation of the same, however, that distinction is hardly ever made and there is even factually no wide gulf between the two meanings. It’s one and the same and if you think it’s not, you are confused.
900Mhz radio for iPad w/OSS ground station for DIYDrones (funding drive)
The previous one was almost 3 years back. A few of us wouldn't discovered this post without the double submission having occurred...Am thankful cos it is a pretty neat illustration.
Agreed. If an open standard was relying entirely on a company not to 'kill' it, it was already dead as an open standard.
In investing you SPEND your money.

If you're conservative in your investment you'll get them back. If you're lucky, you will get more than you put in. If you are unlucky, you might lose it all.
Just curious. This sort of describes a PhD in sciences. What would a PhD in philosophy, literature would described.
Pardon me if I'm being too cynical or if I'm missing the point, but all I see is a CEO saying that young employees should work more for lower wages, with some naturalistic, late XIX century imagery of bravery — fighting in a war, the most desperate people, bringing out the beast, horses running wild.
Nacl is not merely a different approach, it's a wholly backwards incompatible approach based on techniques that tried and failed in the 80s (try searching for ANDF).
I don't find the article stereotyping. Failing to address the point that yes, sometimes research can be broad rather than specific, isn't stereotyping it's just that he's writing a blog post and not a book.
This guide has some great information. A dropship commerce store can be a great complement to a software company if you are able to integrate a company's products in with your software.

My wife and I develop a cattle management software called CattleMax and began operating two dropship e-commerce stores several years ago. Our stores help us offer customers a full solution (identification + weighing/measuring + management software) and also provide a nice supplement to our SaaS revenues.

Our first store, The Cattle Tags Store (CattleTags.com), sells cattle identification supplies including visual ear tags and RFID tags & readers. Our software is useless of the rancher hasn't identified his or her cattle, so good identification is important.

Our second store, The Cattle Scales Store (CattleScales.com), sells digital weigh scales designed for weighing livestock. It is a natural fit since our software can import weights from the scales and these scales also integrate with the RFID readers we sell at The Cattle Tags Store.

In the beginning, we were hesitant to create the stores but got through that hesitation by saying "OK we will try it out for a few months".
Directly writing? Almost none. Indirectly? A lot.

Queueing theory turns out to be a big part of the system I'm working on, as do graph traversals. I'm not proving anything new, but I am certainly transforming known solutions to be present implicitly in the way data flows through the device (a network gateway).

I've also done work on numerical solutions, implementing various formulae the researchers have come up with, and dealing with various optimization (in the mathematical sense) problems.

Lately there has been a lot of talk on "new classic" things, applying machine learning algorithms to data sets, and finding relevant classifiers and adjustments to the ML algorithms that provide better results. Hopefully I'll get into implementing and doing real work on that soon.

I do work in academia though, in a department focused on implementing research in ways that industry can actually use it.
I don't understand the need for this. Hosting 10 GB costs $1 per month on Rackspace Cloud Files and even less on Amazon S3.

Secondly, if you use a paid service you don't need to run your files through scripts to upload them, and you don't risk the files being taken down by the image host admins.

Also, while hosting non-image files on image file hosts technically might not be illegal, it still essentially is abusing a free service. Do you really want to be that guy?
Kickstart this book What I learned about crowdsourced publishing
"What research falls outside of this stereotype? Synthesis. Theorising deeper foundations that connect disparate bits of knowledge and gives a deeper understanding of them."

That reminds me of a quote attributed to Stefan Banach[1]:

Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems ;
great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Banach
Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense
Fair enough. Seems easy to put an on/off switch on the side, though, like laptops have for wireless. Then you can just turn the phone off during your tough gaming moments.
I have know these guys for a few years. I met them as part of a UAV challenge DARPA was putting on. They already have a working prototype and are in the official Apple accessory program! The radio is going for $99 bucks as part of the fundraising campaign on Indiegogo.

We will be hacking on the ground station at the NSMeetup hack-o-thon March 30th at Sincerely in SF. http://www.nsmeetup.com/events/103975442/
How much of my time is spent on algorithmic problems? Not as nearly as much as I would like!

I once wanted to stay away from web development because I knew a lot of it would be boring stuff like learning to work around browser bugs (which change with every generation of browsers, rendering your previous learning useless), rather than the mathematical/algorithmic mind puzzles which I really enjoy. I gave in because there's so much work available (and I found some clients who pay really well).

I think having experience working on both low-level embedded software and algorithmically intensive software (natural language processing, etc) gives me some advantage as a web developer. When the need to devise an algorithm or do something else hard-core comes up (which it does from time to time), I take it on with pleasure rather than shrinking back in fear. Or if I find a bug in my platform, I can drop down into the C source, figure it out, and submit a fix to the maintainers, rather than waiting for someone else to help.
How can I motivate coworkers to write unit tests?
Great movement mechanic, don't think I've ever seen that in a rl before.
How To Update Android 4.2.2 On Nexus 4 Manually.
Wont it cause an error for being an invalid image? Have you tested this?
My cats hate the vacuum but one of them absolutely loves to be swept on his back with the broom. He's old school like that.
Interesting, but I noticed you write about your project, singular. Have you had any other projects?
List of Must-Have SEO Tools for Beginners
That's $6 profit... He got $12000 for 4000 books, which is 50% of the profit, his cut. For a physical book, with distribution costs, and the likes of amazon are probably getting about a 20-30% cut.. so that's really more like $9 profit off a $15 book.. 3 for the author, 3 for the publisher and 2-3 for Amazon. bringing the cost of the book's printing to $6 or so... not bad.

Also, the "best seller" was only for the one week, and 4000 books, of which most were probably during that one week isn't so bad.. the tail probably sucked though.

Now, self-publishing as an e-Book on amazon, would have given him potentially a bit more.. say Amazon takes $4, that gives him $11, and if only 1/2 bought it (available in digital only), would gross him $22k, even with a price drop to say $10 for digital (amazon getting $3) would be $14k ... That's some food for thought. If you can write a book every two months, and sell 2K copies for a $10 digital version.. that's not a bad living.

Bonus, if you become a little well known, people will order more of your back catalog.
> A new loan that can never be repaid, and its only purpose is to prevent an immediate default, it just as good as a default in my books.

That's quite a stretch of the term "default". A default is when a debtor declares that he can't pay and therefore he won't pay. Getting into a new loan doesn't qualify as default.

> Maybe not from the point of view of the creditors (they will get some of their money back), but still having very similar consequences to the debtors: difficulty in loaning new money, financial destruction, a take-over-of-control by the creditors' intermediaries and the liquifying any valuable state assets.

With a real default, there would be less financial destruction. At least the bleed of paying the loans would stop.

> It already started with indiscriminately stealing 6% from the bank account holders and can only go downhill.

Agreed.

> > That is, what percentage isn't going to be paid at all?

> Lots of it. Following the same process as with Greece et al, there is definitely going to be a "haircut".

Then it will be a (partial) default on the new loans, but it isn't yet.
The Xperia play probably failed due to relatively weak games available compared to a 3DS. So you have a phone pretending to be a games console, you might do better by adding phone functionality to an already strong gaming system.
Directly interpreted, much slower than C.
Some optimizations are made, but not many.
It is actually slower than Python. I'm just one guy and my name is not Guido unfortunately.
Able to use JVM functionality, but not compiled to JVM bytecode.
This. I'm kind of dumbfounded by the number of tech "pundits" claiming that app X is a good replacement.

* I use Newsbeuter myself but even then it syncs with Reader. I use the web view, I use GUIs.

* I aggregate business client feeds using reader. I pull them into both third party shared workspace services and my various RSS capable applications. State syncs so I know what I've reviewed on my phone vs desktop. SUCH a timesaver.

* I aggregate systems alerts using Reader. I then review them on my phone and my desktop via a GUI notifier pulling in that feed. Read state per item syncs.

* I sync my podcast app so that I can bring up the web view in Reader of any given feed and fresh content is there, read/listen state synchronized with my mobile client.

Sync. Decent web view. Good enough sorting options. Aggregated views based on folders & subfolders. All unique enough that this shutdown will seriously impact my daily workflow, and no "app X" is going to replace it. For now.
Under what circumstances are you going to decrypt those and hand them over to federal officers/LEO that ask for them?
I hate to be that guy, but who is Nathan Marz?
Ask HN: Can anyone help a starving programmer?
Hi guys,

I'm a programmer from London who's working on a Startup with my cofounder. We have been covered by a few big tech blogs and you've probably heard of us. We're in the process of getting funding but, I am about to become homeless and need somewhere to stay.

I am willing to give you 5% of the company as well as £100 per month for you to let me crash on your couch/spare room whilst I write code for our web app. Don't worry, we are not another photo sharing app. We are building a real business that deals with a real world need, will be profitable from day one and we've landed a big brand you've heard of to our list of clients. We've have a large waiting list of emails and all that is left to do is for us to launch publicly and I'm almost finished on the backend.

Anyone who wants to know more email me at: hackerhelp123@gmail.com

This company will be a success; my life depends on it. I don't see this as charity as I honestly believe that the 5% will be worthwhile in the near future.

Thanks in advance
They're not at all surprised, can I ask where they said that? I'd love to see how a company that makes billions by knowing as much as possible about their user base words the idea they're surprised by a quantity of users on a product of theirs.
Why would that diagram be any different?
I quit a fairly toxic job last summer. For about six months, I worked by myself on my own projects. However, I felt my productivity begin to slip, and frankly, not being around people began to weird me out. I'm now in the current batch of hackerschool.com, and it's great. I'm still pretty much working solo on my own project, but it really helps to be in a space surrounded by fellow, productive nerds.
Supposedly it's too tightly integrated into their internal infrastructure to spin it off.
One one hand, I totally agree with what Kelman has to say. Perks are poisonous and can seriously undermine our culture. On the other hand, what about the power-law-driven disparity between what the CEO stands to gain if the company becomes successful vs. employee #5? Or #100?

These perks reflect the fact that employee #5s are beginning to understand their real worth, just as players have in professional sports world. I guess even employee #1s are wanting perks as well, feeling the gap between themselves and their wise and well-moneyed investors.

We can decry the loss of innocence -- or the loss of some kind of better work ethic from yesteryear -- all we want, but it won't bring the good times back. Let's just move the industry forward and make the best of our latest batch of talented brats.
I was surprised to see the phrase "Uber Drivers". As I thought I understood it: Uber has no drivers and drivers haver their own companies, simply using Uber as a source of leads for customers. It's like OpenTable for cars, right?
That just plain isn't true. Even if it were, Twitter is singularly unsuited to that kind of information consumption.

I don't need everyone to find RSS as useful as I do and I'm fine with the fact that others have different usage patterns and preferences. But I wish everyone saying "meh, what's the big deal" would realize that others find RSS to be the best fit for them and are well-justified in worrying about its decline.
> I am starting to see Google move toward the dark side

Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn!
At launch, the Xbox 360 sold about 1.2 million units in November-December 2005 http://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_yoy.php?reg=Global&star...

At launch, the PS3 sold about 1.2 million units in November-December 2006 http://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_yoy.php?reg=Global&star...

At launch, the WiiU sold about 2.3 million units in November-December 2012 http://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_yoy.php?reg=Global&star...

That doesn't look bad at all for the WiiU. Of course, it wasn't as successful as the Wii, which sold at launch about 2.9 million units in November-December 2006 http://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_yoy.php?reg=Global&star... but I'd say it was still pretty good.

Furthermore, we are still waiting for most of the interesting games announced for the WiiU to be released (Lego City Undercover, The Wonderful 101, Bayonetta 2), so I think it is far to early to say that the WiiU is a failure. If I remember correctly, many critics also were saying some time ago that the 3DS was a failure!
I guess that depends on which "classical" algorithmic problems he is referring to. The field of "algorithms" is like an infinite sea which will never be fully explored; there will always be more algorithmic problems for which no library is available.

For example, last year I worked on a software package which was intended to match clothing automatically to form outfits. The client was a fashion consultant; the software had to duplicate what he did in his day-to-day work, algorithmically. You won't find that one in "The Art of Computer Programming"! (Or in any library, for that matter.)
Apart from maybe the last one, none of them are classical algo problems.

They're basic math problems.

Query takes N milliseconds which is too long, mainly consisting of z & c when I run my profiler. It does x * y = z of these things and a * b = c of these things.

As z is the biggest number, can I reduce x or y?

Basic maths.

And even the last one you're better off actually trying out the technologies to trying to armchair theorize which tech is a better fit as without reading all their code you can't really see what they're really doing compared to what they say they do. Heroku being a pertinent case in point.
One of the more commercially successful figures in the Clojure world. Early employee of a YC company (Backtype) with a successful exit to Twitter.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype

[2] https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm
I think the method behind s2png is converting binary data to RGB(A) pixel data, so the result should be a perfectly valid (albeit weird-looking) image. As a bonus, you automatically gain Zlib compression of your data through this method.
FTA: Algorithms must be understood before being modified...

I would add to this that algorithms must be understood before being tested, something with which I suspect most TDD proponents would agree, and which would dispense with the need for the rest of the article.
This would be cool with an alt.rss-feed.DOMAIN-COM translator... could even be used as a backend for an up and coming web-rss platform.
"We have been covered by a few big tech blogs and you've probably heard of us. "

...so why the cloak-and-dagger routine?
I use cascalog and storm everyday at my startup http://truelens.com and they are great contributions to software and big data systems. I'm looking forward to what Nathan is cooking up next.
You are not alone in wondering.
Another issue that is never addressed when discussing whether Nintendo should become a software only company and develop for mobile is whether their most successful products are even all that suitable for mobile devices. Would the user experience of playing Nintendo games actually improve on a touch screen smart phone?
Well for me It would mean I used Play! The fact that its built on netty (non-blocking io) and is by default async that and its Iteratee and Enumerator makes it real nice for api dev.
The security you describe doesn't match current home automation standards let alone high end commercial practices. Casinos live and die by their monitoring systems to prevent in house theft - it's pretty much guaranteed that stuff is traveling on secured wired networks.
Sure. At one time I was working to support my wife and myself through our Ph.D. programs. The work was in applied math and computing on mostly US Navy problems. At one time, there was an urgent request: Evaluate the survivability of the US SSBN fleet under a controversial scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea.

Point: A claim is that if find an SSBN, then can kill it with a nuke -- likely true. Another claim is that can't find an SSBN -- not really true but close to true since a promising effort to find the SSBNs would be 'provocative' and raise alarms. Also, if find and sink one, then that's the start of nuclear war, and the other SSBNs will be free to fire. So, what is tough is to find all the SSBNs at one time and sink them all at once. But if in the special scenario, then could find and sink the SSBNs one at a time. Then how long would they last?

The Navy wanted their answer quickly, in two weeks. That was about right, since my wife already had us scheduled for a vacation cabin in Shenandoah starting the day after the due date!

So, I derived some math, wrote some software, and both the Navy and my wife got what they wanted on time!

My understanding is that my work was later sold to another group interested in US national security. I could tell you what that group was, but then I'd have to ...!

There have been other projects!
Yes, that's such an unusual phenomenon at HN. Microsoft is the first company to bring out vocal supporters in this place.
With the production lines that these manufacturers run, yes it is more expensive for them to pull a subset of computers and not load their bloatware windows image. That just isn't a situation they are setup for. You can argue about whether or not it should be this way, but that is the reality of the computer manufacturing process. Sure, it's more accurate to say they won't do it, but in all likelihood, they can't do it and keep their profit margin.

Now if they were to stay that they were contractually obligated to install windows on every machine, then they'd have a problem.