skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The niche services that have been killed were (by definition) used by small groups, groups which tend to be over-represented here and on other tech-oriented outlets. Even a service like Reader was something that only a small number of people used (compared to e.g. gMail).

One way to look at it is that these services are now validated (if small) market needs that smaller entrepreneurs can pursue. In the past, entrepreneurs lived in fear that Google would muscle in on their specialty; now it looks like they not only won't do that, but are in fact disengaging from things that do not have mass market appeal.
Here's the author's Wikipedia page http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal
So i've made this stool rocks file available for free. (Creative Commons - non-commercial) http://fabsie.com/store/this-stool-rocks/
So far a school in alberta, canada are making it and a guy in Sweden as they sent photos. Will add more files to free download for laser cutting smaller models.

Depending on designer preferences, when someone sends me a design, I will ask what license they prefer suggesting CC NC.
Sure, spacesuits are part of the process of an Astronaut entering space. The Astronaut is part of a Space mission. The Space mission is part of may experiments on exploring the universe. The experiments conducted on the exploration of the universe lead to some results that have impact on earth. Those with impact on earth might lead to tangible innovation. These innovation might make it into definitive products. The products are measurable my monetary dimensions.

Yeah sure, with enough dedication you can measure anything and everything. But if it makes sense is another question.

I think even pg put in one of his more recent comments the question forward how innovation should get measured. And the answers were (at least for my taste) very, very limited.
You could also say we've vastly overestimated the intelligence of human animals.
This is pretty cool, I like just being able to scan a qr code and start presenting. However, I just finished creating a presentation using Reveal.JS, it would be awesome if I could upload my reveal markup and use that.
Access to mass communication is a basic necessity in any democracy. People have to be able to inform themselves about current political topics if they are to take informed decisions.

As such all that’s needed to access that information is not a luxury item. I agree that nowadays it’s possible to inform oneself equally well if one can access the internet (and a newspaper subscription was always a possible substitute), but I think it would be wrong to privilege certain forms of access to information, not the least because certain forms of accessing information might be harder or easier to use for certain groups of people. Consequently privileging, say, internet access would potentially exclude certain people from the political process.

Mass media plays a central and important role in the democracy of any larger democracy. Its existence is vital and as many people as possible should have access to it.
They misstated the statistic. It's that 56 percent of Google News users sometimes click through to excerpted stories (i.e., 44% of users never click through to the original), not that the average user clicks through to 56% of the stories.

When I read stuff like that, I always wonder if the reporter simply worded it wrong, or if he actually thought that what he was saying might be true, or if he simply didn't think about it and didn't care.
تحميل حلقة ون بيس 588
I can't even count the number of times I've attempted to block every variant of "w3schools".
Their lack of transparency is not a new problem.

I had a problem with their API and it took days for them to even acknowledge that I had even emailed them about it.

I doubt they will be around for much longer.

When it comes to money, customer service must be the first priority even if it is to say "sorry".
Will be making tables and lots of other things availble soon. Trying to get Techstars a table now.

Business Model
Get wood sent to you cut - no hassle - Paid.
Get a file to download - know what you are doing - Free
I may get down-voted for this, but how about WordPress? Not for a long-term product that needs to scale and support tons of customers, but as an MVP. There are some really slick plugins that can help you create some pretty advanced functionality. Here's a 2 part podcast on that very topic:

http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/05/episode-3-building-mvp-ap...
http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/12/mvp-wordpress-part2/

As for design, WordPress has a rich market for themes:
themeforest.net
woothemes.com
and many more

Between plugins and themes and hosting, you can easily accomplish in an afternoon and a couple hundreds bucks (or less, depending on your needs) what would take you weeks to build. Get it out there, validate it, and then build it in your favorite language and framework once you know it's golden.
You have it backwards. Unless the C89 standard describes behavior for this scenario, it's illegal. The business with putting the array at the end of a page is just an example of how "illegal" can translate into "crashes" on a real-world system.
Career reorientation, best way to get into programming/CS?
I'm 28 and a recent graduate of a mechanical engineering degree and an aerospace engineering master. I'm also doing a CS certificate part time while working full time at the transport ministry of my province (yea, I know, it's totally unrelated to my master's degree).

The problem is, I'm not happy with what I do. I've always been passionate about technology, I love programming and the challenges associated with it, I also love hardware (really enjoyed the hacking xbox ebook that did the front page on HN). But, for reasons that would take way too long to explain here, I never got into actually studying all that at university (except for the certificate).

I would like to get into programming, system development, embedded system or pretty much anything related to CS. I know it may sound vague, but I really have lots of interests and I'm sure I'd be pleased in any of these fields. Problem is, I don't have any real life experience, but I know how to program in C/C++, python, java, I even did some assembly. I also have a strong mathematical background. Like I said earlier, I'm really passionate about all this stuff, I learn very quickly and I'm willing to make any sacrifice to make it into this industry.

What would you guys do in my position? I'm willing to go back to school if necessary, I just want to make sure it's the right decision.

I'm also french canadian so please excuse my imperfect english!
I am probably not a domain expert, but I did see a nifty demo of Meteor being used to make stuff in literally 5 minutes.
For me it was Google Wave. The presentation[1] got me very excited and I couldn't wait to start using it. I signed up for the beta and told everyone I work with to do so as well. It quickly became an invaluable tool for me, I couldn't imagine what I'd do without it. And then, a year after it was introduced, only 3 months after it was released to the general public, Google announced Wave was dead.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
Ask HN: CS253 or rails?
I read that Steve Huffman, who is teaching CS253 at Udacity, said that it would be better for a beginner to start with a simpler framework, than for example rails (or Django etc.)

I know a little bit of python, and I've gone through some very simple rails tutorials (teamtreehouse). I have just started the Michael Hartl tutorial on rails. But after reading the comment from Steve Huffman, I'm unsure if I should start there instead.

Is the learning curve with webapp2 (on GAE) lower than with Rails?

I want to learn webdevelopment/programming to create my own start-up and make a MVP. So while rails has more features, would it be faster/easier to get something going on GAE and webapp2 (and possible also better for understanding the technologies?)?
No, they're trying to patent a system in which one component is a gyroscope. They reference previous patents related to gyroscopes - if you bothered to look at the application.
The point of the metaphor is you don't do your thinking in one shot. Usually you build on what you did last time and it requires effort focused at a point each time and a repetition of the process over a sustained amount of time. After you've thought through something, usually it stays with you. So there is some permanence to the results of the the process, much like the hole you dig.

The flow thing is related to being a little lazy and listening to every whim and fancy of your mind while you're thinking on a topic. If I were to choose, I would choose depth over flow -- it's more difficult to go deep.
Mouse path smoothing
I'll make the pizza. You bring the beer.
His argument is not that it costs more to run Google Reader than there is benefit, so we need the government to run it. His argument is that the benefit to society of Google Reader is greater than the cost to society of Google Reader. Outside of a free market, it is better for society to have Google Reader. Unfortunately, there is no price structure that allows Google Reader to exist as a for-profit service. The market is inefficient, and the government should step in to fix this inefficiency. Therefore, it might be useful to run some services like Google Reader as government services.

I think that Google Reader should not be government-run, but he raises a larger point. There could be some internet services that would be better run by the government, and we don't really have any today. I don't think we can dismiss that possibility. I can't think of any sites like that right now, though.
Google's been picked on a lot over Reader, but it's a microcosm of the entire web services industry. We've developed a culture over the last two decades of launching compelling new services without a clear revenue model in a land-grab for users. Many software frameworks utilize lazy loading, whereby they defer the execution of expensive operations until the last possible minute. Our business culture lazy-loads revenue models. We set up a product, hope for enough users, then hope to monetize those users effectively. Without a compelling product or an audience to consume it, a business model is useless, so we've optimized that out to focus on the bare minimum.

There's an implicit assumption in all of this that the perceived value of a free service outweighs the potential costs of the service eventually failing in the user's eyes, that they'll keep coming back for something free and cool every time we ship it. As an industry, we haven't addressed the risk of crying wolf. At what point do enough consumers say "I'm going to wait until this has traction" before they're willing to invest their time and their hearts into the services we build? If the wait-and-see crowd grows large enough, it could seriously impact our ability to launch minimum-viable-products on the hope they'll monetize later.
> I feel a white board (or even better a smart board) works for most purposes. Paper gets lost too easily. Although the ubiquitous lab book is going to be hard to kill off entirely

I get tired after writing on a whiteboard for half an hour or so. If it’s not a smart board, you will have to erase parts eventually – and even though boards are larger than A4, they’re not infinite (and markers make you writer larger than HB pencils).

The lab book is probably not only more convenient/flexible but also slightly harder to fake than an Origin table or some such thing.
Reinventing The Condom
I don't like assumption 'Google'=='search engine'. There was Altavista and dozens other search engines before Google.

Work force is grossly overestimated. 99% queries could be filtered with simple encyclopedia lookup. For rest some sort of caching would be used. I think you would need about 10 000 people to constantly handle this type of load without any computers.
Introduction to Simulation using R
Meltwater searches for phrases its clients identify as being of interest. Presumably the Google comparison is based off of searches for phrases of interest, in which it's not surprising that search result clickthrough rates are 56%.
There are a lot of market issues with this; I just don't see this working. It's not as if CNC and automation processes are new to the furniture industry, especially for small-scale furniture makers.

Even once you automate a good deal of the production costs, there is still additional labor, materials, and expertise required.

First of all, CNC machined plywood is not sufficient for anything other than workshop-grade furniture (as in, furniture you'd use in your workshop). You need -- at a minimum:

- Edging applied to protect against splinters and damage to the veneer.

- A finish/varnish/veneer to protect the surfaces against damage/dirt/warping.

Those things involve additional semi-skilled labor and cost. On top of that, people don't usually want raw wood furniture, which means that you need different kinds of veneers and surfaces, which increases material costs and complexity.

On top of that, you're unlikely to be able to produce purely "slot constructed" furniture of any appreciable complexity. You're going to need joints. This significantly increases the costs of the machinery/tooling/design required.

Now that you've added additional materials, labor, and more complex end-user construction, your costs have gone up as well. On top of this, your production facilities need to figure out how to efficiently ship these one-off flat-pack low-end creations to your end users.

Congratulations, you're competing with Ikea, and Ikea has the cheap flat-pack mass-production process down to a science.

If you start trying to scale up to more high-end furniture production, you now have more problems.

First of all, what's described here is essentially already how furniture (and clothing, and electronics) production works, just without the "crowd sourcing". Designers, production facilities, and brand management companies come together to produce furniture for sale in retail outlets.

The problem is that each entity in the chain (design -> production -> sale) does a lot more than operate automated machinery. The machinery itself is not the major expense. The trained labor, raw materials, stock, distribution, storage, and sale of the products are where the complexity come in.

The place where you find efficiencies is in either doing this at scale, not doing this one-off. When you order a piece of furniture from a high-end company, it will be dropped into the production queue, shipped via freight some time later along with a huge batch of other furniture, distributed to large warehouses near major cities, and then pushed out to a subcontracted or directly managed furniture freight delivery service.

Trying to do this on a non-local, distributed, crowd-source bases via UPS will not be cheaper.

The only way to do this for an equivalent price is to buy furniture made, designed, and often delivered by local furniture makers. They tend to have their own workshops containing things like CNC machines, or already have access to those machines through shared workshops. Insofar as they require less skilled labor to assemble the work, they already have it.
I believe its called 'solo founder'
Fun fact: Orkut is slang for "orgasms" in Finnish
are you offering? have you had ads out that no one has answered? if you're just hypothesizing it seems like a pointless exercise to me.
Ask HN: Google Product Timeline?
Does this exist?

It would be great to see in a timeline fashion the average lifespan and category of products and possibly trends. Maybe even the reason for the death. Even killing off subfeatures would be interesting like Activesync.<p>Froogle anyone?
"That's not even implicit!"
You find it unlikely a compiled language is faster than an interpreted one...?
I write Android code for a living, linux desktop works great for me. Also, anyone doing web development would get by just fine.
Those scans/bruteforce attempts are mostly harmless anyways, so there is very little benefit in changing the port. Has there been yet a single drive-by 0day attack against opensshd, because that's essentially the only thing the port change would help against.
According to the article, the judge decided that news reporting -- what blogs do -- is not transformative but is competitive with the AP. Taking enough of an excerpt to get the gist of the story -- what reputable blogs do -- is taking "the heart" of the copyrighted work, which is now infringement according to the article.

Blogs that add their own criticism and commentary, which rewrite the story in their own words, reduce the incentive to read the original story. The blog acts as a news site and a substitute for the original story, which according to the article strengthens a claim of copyright infringement. The circumstances in which criticism and commentary would justify a fair use defense just got tightened, as did the amount of an article that is considered a sufficiently small portion to be fair use.
I don't understand why this was discontinued. Surely this data would be a gold mine in improving the quality of search results, which is core to what Google does.
They seem to have missed out on the "original" flat design. TWM:

http://www.ludd.luth.se/~wilper-8/computer/screenshots/twmde...
Analysis of Login Methods
"This is really what the search engine that Google launched in 1998 did that was so great. Its results were ordered in a way that seemed like magic."
Yes, if that's really true one has to wonder about the common sense of the scientists who did that research!
Well, I guess it looks like they’re suppresing competition, but if Nokia’s correct that they own patents on VP8, then VP8 is patent encumbered and promoting it just creates fragmentation. This argument seems kind of tautological if Nokia’s the only company with patents on VP8 that Google does not have a license to, but otherwise it seems reasonable. They could offer to license their VP8 patents at the same cost they offer their H.264 patents at, but instead they’re choosing not to license them at all. What other motive would they have for “suppressing competition” if they could charge the same to license their patents either way?
w3schools was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the headline. Long time ago, I blocked this site and It's reappeared some time ago out of the blue with no option to block again.
I would not classify this particular case of humor as "criminal cruelty." Get over it.
Show HN: SharePastes - a tool for quickly sharing text via Gist or Pastebin
I find both its birth and death interesting. The birth because the fact that you could mark sites as spam was one of the early talking points at Blekko, the back end architecture of our engine includes a 'selector' mechanism (slashtags) and maintaining a personal 'spam' slash tag came along for free. Its one of the features I continue to use.

And then it showed up as a feature in Google's results which I found interesting because having worked at Google and had the 'deeper than non-Googlers, not as deep as someone in the search group' classes on how the two services that made up Google search at the time, I had a feel for how much lubricant it would take to squeeze that feature into the existing pipeline. It made me wonder if Google was following us :-)

The death of it is also interesting, because having it in the browser as a plug-in vs the results means two things; You can't offer it as a service to your partners, and you can't know apriori if you're sending junk. If Blekko's partners say "We'd like to use your index but we don't want any results that include x,y or z" we can do that but that is at the API level with results coming right out of the index filtered by a 'negative' slashtag, but its unclear if anyone can (or does) use Google's index in that way (unlike BOSS for example). On the browser side, since you don't know what the plug-in is going to kill, how do you select the 10 documents to send? It makes me wonder that if you're doing a search in a highly contested search (like 'weight loss') and Google can't know that the 10 blue links it is about to send you are all spam (and on really contested keywords this is not uncommon) are you left with just sponsored links and no organic results?

'Panda' update all you want, even Google now admits they are adding staff to curate results (Microsoft/Bing had already gone public with their 'editor's choice' announcement). This is a good thing, but it only covers half the situation. At Blekko we got flamed by a user for not having any 'alternative' medicine sites in our 'health' slashtag, which started a conversation with that user about creating their own slashtag with all of those web sites that were unfairly penalized by the medical establishment just because their methods and claims weren't the product of some 'big pharma' company. But they could (and I believe they did) create a slashtag of all those 'hidden' sites and they got great search results for them. Reinforcing to me and others that 'spam' can be relative, and really it has two sides, user and index.

So pondering this move on Google's part makes for interesting reading.
Did they rip it off or what?
Ha, I would agree with you if it were a startup, but this is a 300 person company. I'm a PM for the product line, but also spend half my time coding.
The undefined vs null Pitfall in Javascript
Finding zeros in a haystack
I wonder how long it takes till someone comes up with "Blockedsitesly" ^^
I don't think it's necessarily a problem that you can go after individuals for copyright infringement--the problem is the statutory damages. In nearly every other civil suit, the fact that you can only get actual or punitive damages filters out suits where there wasn't really substantial harm to begin with. Without the statutory damages there would be no reason to go after individuals for copyright infringement unless they were setting up a major operation in which case you should be able to go after them, individual or not.
I don't remember using this feature much, but when I downloaded my block list this is what I found:

www.teachexcel.com
craftkeys.com
softwaretopic.informer.com
www.telerik.com
eggheadcafe.com
www.kaboodle.com
bigresource.com

Damn those aggregator sites are annoying.
The "Sorry" had no ill Intention. My apologies if I conveyed the wrong meaning.

Anyhow, I now fully understand your position. I still maintain my point, and further discussion would only be useful if accompanied by beer. All in all, it's the ever present tug between theoretic perfection and real world constraints. It's doubtful this back and forth would ever reach an acceptable compromise.
The one person I feel most strongly about this is Elizabeth Iorns.

Elizabeth was named one of the 10 most important people by Nature last year, for her work in the Reproducibility Initiative and with Science Exchange (http://www.nature.com/news/366-days-nature-s-10-1.11997). She is one of the most genuinely passionate researchers I know, and she cares deeply about doing good science.

If she is not teaching the next generation of scientists by the time I die, all of my work will have been for naught.

I could go on and on about the number of brilliant scientists who are struggling in today's system. There is a huge bottleneck of innovation and it's entirely self-imposed. Someone or something is going to blow that bottleneck to shreds, and the world will start to see incredible things.
I trust BitStamp, they are people only few KM away from me, that's why.