skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, from that thread the service looks very useful(even if you have a smartphone with data). Wish I knew about it before the shutdown.

I guess such is life in the Googleverse now: if you're unprofitable then you're "distracting us from our core mission". Who wants to make bets on the next service(s) to bite the dust? :)
I'm so tempted to get one of these. With the shell plugin, I have access to my very high-powered servers, and Chrome comes with a nice development environment. Besides that, it's cheap and light -- a perfect roadkit.

The only problem I see is the keyboard. I hate typing on netbook keyboards. I don't even like the keyboard on the Macbook Air.

Maybe I'd get used to it after awhile?
I'm curious what the "few other things" are because the things you mention specifically are a few years out of date at this point. I'm not sure what licensing issues you've had but phobos is Boost licensed which is extremely liberal (basically "use for whatever you want just don't remove this license text when copying this source code").

Pretty much everyone uses D2 these days unless they are maintaining a legacy system written in D1 and transitioning to D2 isn't worth the effort in their case.

Phobos versus Tango hasn't been an issue for years. In fact, in D2 you can use Phobos and Tango side by side[1].

Rust is very interesting and I'm excited to see where it is headed but it's still rather immature compared to something like D.

1. https://github.com/SiegeLord/Tango-D2
Yes, a description on why every permission is required should go a long way in helping the user make an intelligent decision.

I will add those prominently on the Chrome Webstore Installation page (and maybe the homepage).

I agree, with the iOS App Store, one doesn't have to worry about it as much because you know that all apps go through a review process and wouldn't be approved if they were doing something terrible.
Google "Babel" is coming. Maybe that's why.

I also think Google's top executives have a certain vision about what apps they will need in the future, and where they are heading, and that doesn't include many of the more "random" projects that were built before.
Mobility probably also include weight and battery life.
A macbook air/ultrabook probably have a ~5h of battery when streching it, a tablet could last a whole day ( and probably 2 ) without a sweat.
And they both have the same weight.

There is a lot of work that can be done/ tested on android depending on your work ( botbrew provide gcc plus other scripting environment for example). Making you less dependent on the internet connection.

There is other options to code source editing on tablet ( droidedit being one good option ).

On the adapter issue, even on macbook pro/air people usually forget to bring adapter, and most projector in the wild still use the good old VGA adapter.

And while I agree with some points, I think this was mostly an experiment ( successful for him to some degree ) , like the guy who tried to work only with his iPad before. And like other experiments, results are open to discussion.
Because the experiments to conclude the "natural" language by not teaching children any language at all are highly unethical.
How do you ping a browser? Where can I find more info about this.

I figured the real-time dashboard of Google Analytics must be doing something similar, but I don't know what exactly they use.
I do a lot of content based marketing in different market/industries. The type of testing you describe is best used in addition to click-through rates. Due to how presentation and content can be both right, and still get you bad results. How come? The offer stinks. If the offer stinks, then the click-through rates will show. And that's the most important metric of this group that you should pay attention to: how interesting is my offer to the market.
"I don't think you need to worry about only accessing the web via apps - it just won't happen."

That's all right then.
Isn't there substantial evidence that Goldman Sachs were telling clients to make investments into areas they were themselves betting against? I am not sure if they are the best people to use as support for any economic argument, but especially given the wealth of other critics of pension sustainability who don't have such a track record.
>Are Google having cashflow problems?

Nope, they are more profitable than ever.

My friend who works at Google explained to me that a big issue is maintenance. It's a tougher problem than it sounds because if an issue comes up someone needs to understand the codebase well. When a product is no longer worth the budget of full-time employees the best course of action is to kill the product.
NP-completeness doesn't say anything about the difficulty of a specific instance of a given problem. It's trivial to construct CNF formulas that are solvable in polynomial time, for example.

An algorithm that is able to determine for every Zelda level, in polynomial time, whether or not the exit can be reached from the start is something quite different. As shown in this paper, this would imply that the same algorithm can solve every instance of every problem in NP efficiently, a.k.a. answer the million dollar question.

A cleaner way of stating the results of the paper would be: "The puzzle mechanics of Zelda are NPC". This statement is harder to misread, though I wouldn't hold my breath given the extreme illiteracy concerning theoretical computer science prevalent even among programmers with a degree, never mind the internet.
document.addEventListener('visibilitychange', onVisibilityChange);
I feel like I'm missing something here. Surely you can get an accurate time with some simple Javascript? There is the onbeforeunload event, and you could always do polling.
The browser pings the server.

setInterval(function() {
$.ajax('http://analytics-site.com/ping?page=' + window.location.href);
}, 5000);
I add a lot of these articles to my Pocket and read them later. I wonder how GA reflects that.
Ask HN: Need help...Rails app seems to take 300ms+ for everything.
Ok, I will admit. Its not the simplest app but yet its not the most complicated one either.

The rather frustrating part is that most of the time is being spent in rendering views.
Here are few examples.

- Completed 200 OK in 272ms (Views: 236.9ms | ActiveRecord: 15.7ms)

- Completed 200 OK in 275ms (Views: 148.2ms | ActiveRecord: 42.6ms)

- Completed 200 OK in 384ms (Views: 335.1ms | ActiveRecord: 3.5ms)

I am not doing partials in a loop etc. I am NOT querying while rendering either.
Its just ruby hash operations etc which are taking up lot of ms.
Now I am starting to wonder is how many SQL queries is considered normal, like in my app its around 4 - 10 queries. Is 300ms+ an acceptable response time for a Rails app which is not even launched yet (so no server load as of now). Hosted on $20 VPS Linode.

Thanks in advance for sharing your insights.
The only thing Samsung is hurting is the patience of people waiting to buy the 32GB or 64GB versions of their fucking phone.
In Turkish, mother is "anne" (pronounced ah-neh) and father is "baba". I don't know whether or not Turkish babies make the mama sounds or not, not having experienced them doing so.
Snoopify, The Greatest Photoboming App Of All Time
The key word in the original paper (from 2012 (!)) is "Generalized".

IIRC, it's trivial that to "solve" Zelda Polynomial time (with an emulator) -- the entire state space of the console can be represented in constant space, so a trivial algorithm would be to traverse the state space tree with breadth-first search.
Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos (video)
Fighting Google is the lesser of several evils. There are three companies doing serious mobile business: Apple, Amazon, and Samsung. All of them are at war with Google one way or another.

Everyone playing "nice" with Google is losing money and/or insignificant. They're going down the same road that the PC vendors went down playing by Microsoft's rules. It looked like a different game at the outset because Google wasn't charging them an $80 tax on each device. But the end result is the same, they are being commoditized into irrelevance.
I'm surprised they don't have a timer running that pings themselves every N seconds. The ads all do that. Pinging themselves on visibilitychange or beforeunload could also be helpful (though there will always be people who disconnect without warning, which is why you ping periodically if you care about time spent as a metric).
Never knew about it, either.
Yes. In most cases, it means extra visitor trust.
Hm well "stones" and "balls" can mean "testicles" in context, but it's usually pretty clear when they should mean their literal definitions. If someone was "throwing stones" or "throwing balls" I doubt anyone would think they were throwing testicles.
and fifth, I do not want your app to litter into my notifications or eat RAM/battery on my (android) phone.
> There is a large overhead when doing TDD.

I don't think that's true.

There may be a requirement to do unsexy tasks that volunteers aren't interested in, but the actual overhead to create software that works as intended is lower doing TDD than without it, which is the whole point of TDD.
http://www.examiner.com/article/la-pit-bull-attack-shows-sav...

"LA pit bull attack shows savage consequences of citizen disarmament"

"What this means is, top LA law enforcement knows perfectly well that savage beasts are preying on peaceable citizens, they are unable to stop it from happening, they know what will give those being attacked a fighting chance, and they deny them that option under force of state arms. Through their mandates, they confirm that they would rather see a 63-year-old woman mauled to death, ripped apart in the most horrible, agonizing and terrifying way conceivable, than simply have the choice to the means of defense."
Here's another way to measure engagement for longer content, scroll depth: http://robflaherty.github.io/jquery-scrolldepth/
I'm not sure its useful for me, but great implementation!
* = Wildcard A record often held to the same IP as www (and this is fine according to RFC1034) :

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034#section-4.3.3

To be fair, NFS Has had a history of doing things old-school (which is fine for most of their clientele), but the availability implications of Heroku is for something completely different. Also they're a special case with a much more complicated backend.
>feel entitled to a job

Should we really insult people's character for wanting to work? Entitlement is a connotatively charged word that implies privilege, laziness, and an unreasonable desire to enjoy the fruits of other people's labor while sitting around. I can at least understand the use of the word "entitled" when leveled against welfare, progressive taxation, refusal to do entry-level work, etc.

But how is it wrong or anti-personal responsibility to want to work to support oneself?
MomTats - Sick Tats for Rad Moms
StartSSL (https://www.startssl.com) are very good in my experience. Class 1 certificates are free.
In Japanese, the work "Manma" is a baby-talk word that means food. "Mama" is used for mother sometimes, but I think this is a recent influence from the West. "Haha" is the normal (non-polite) word for mother, although children are taught to use the more polite "o-kaa-san." "Haha" still has those repeated "ah" sounds.
Is "shiv" really a common synonym? I've only heard shim.
Hmm....perhaps there should be a "I don't want your fucking app" setting on Android and iPhone. This would make sure that an X-App-Fuck-Off header is sent with every browser request, informing the site not to prompt you about its fucking apps. That way everyone would have a choice.
> If ITV wanted to avoid fragmentation it would have chosen to make its app compatible with only pure versions of Android

That isn't what causes Android's fragmentation issues. Even between virgin android devices there is a LOT of fragmentation, these devices just happen to be popular with developers so most people aren't impacted by it.

Different screen sizes/resolutions, driver issues, graphics acceleration, aftermarket distro's, all cause a LOT of issues and these things all exist on virgin Android just as much as Samsung's strange re-imagining of the ecosystem.

Nvidia Tegra in particular has broken a LOT of stuff.
I think the Money Moustache guy has a much better take on this than someone trying to figure out the complexities of finance.

Yes there is a limit to how much you can put into a retirement account that isn't taxed by the government, but there is no limit on how much of your income you can save, caveat you need some of it to live on.

And while saving and investing can get as complicated as you want it can also be greatly simplified with funds investing.
It looks like this will be the first sceptical comment... ;)

I didn't try Fries, but I tried using PhoneGap for prototyping and found that building such a web app is not much faster than building one in XCode (and I was a web developer for nearly 15 years!). So why bother?

Another problem is that if I want to build prototype in your framework, I must learn its conventions (what was that CSS class again, "buttonnormal" or "button-normal"? Since the web frameworks can't really compete with native apps in terms of user experience (behaviour of UI elements differs from what user expects), I will have to build in Objective C - which means I have to learn both iOS programming AND your framework.

Granted, such a tool would be useful if UX team wants to build prototypes and they only have web knowledge - and you have a separate team for building a final (native) version. Other than that I fail to see a point.

I would love to be proven wrong though. :)

BTW, my comment doesn't apply to Titanium which basically produces a native app (but I don't use it for other reasons).
>> Sure, but who cares? Apparently not enough people, because nobody is leaving.

Did you read the part where the whole PC market is being depressed by Win 8?
Either way this conversation was not about numbers - linux people probably aren't leaving because gnome's changing either.

>> While their position is certainly precarious in other areas, Microsoft's dominance on the desktop is pretty hard to excuse away; it seems to me that they could have another three or four missteps of this magnitude and few people would consider leaving even then.

This is absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand or the point I was trying to make! Of course they're not going to lose dominance anytime soon, you'd have to be a moron to think otherwise! The fact is that they've made missteps that negatively affect the desktop experience compared to previous iterations, that's the beginning and end of it!

>> There's no "single Windows desktop", either

Umm, yeah, there's the one Microsoft ship and don't really allow you to change very much, or. That is the windows desktop. That you can over-install third party bits and pieces is not really the same thing as the myriad of different desktop environments in Linux.

>> for a majority of Linux users, GNOME and GNOME-y things are the Linux desktop.

And I'd be surprised if that continues, and it still doesn't mean there's a single linux desktop, nor that talking about 'the ui' and then referencing Gnome icons is particularly useful.

>> Or, put another way: You knew what he meant. He knew what he meant.

Yeah, I know he meant Gnome, because that's all he talks about. If he did mean the umbrella term then it's not meaningful to talk about whether a highly disparate set of projects have got worse.

>> Does being That Guy help anything?

I don't know, why do you feel the need to be that guy and argue against a whole bunch of stuff I didn't even say?
In Japanese you use "haha" and "chichi" to refer to your own mother and father (respectively), instead of the more formal "okaasan" and "otousan".
This might sound crazy, but it seems that Google are trying to do the same to Apple as well. Obviously they won't switch to Android, but most consumers don't really care about the OS. Nobody can replace Google's apps - Apple can't, Samsung will fail if/when they try.

By placing their apps on iOS, and essentially being the best of breed in every category, the long game seems to be to relegate Apple into the realm of the Android OEM. When it comes time for average iOS consumer to replace his phone, if Google have managed to push enough apps on him, he probably cares more about them than iOS. If Google can play it right, they might be able to make choosing a phone choosing your favourite front for Google apps, with no revenue difference either way.

They're not there yet, but it looks like they want to be. If Samsung, Apple, whoever has market share don't move fast, and Google play it right, they could all become fronts for Google's apps. And then the market share just shifts around between the current best front for Google's apps.
the mark of a true HN user - everything is about money and status.
If the government were to make the current cost of attendance available to students, colleges would just double their prices (unless you implemented gasp price controls).
Well, "mama" in Turkish is a nickname for breast milk. So if a foreign man in Istanbul is calling his mother "mama" all the time, expect some giggles.
That applies for the core kernel. But drivers/hardware support on the other hand is pure Linux way of doing - don't think any mainframes or enterprise UNIXes had to bother with multi-GPU systems, so what you see in that area of Linux design is pure, quick to market hackery aided by delay-design-until-it-no-longer-works-without-it.

It's depressing in a way but that's the best we got when it comes to a hackable Open Source OS that you can somehow run on your hardware and even patch things you don't like.
You can buy a RapidSSL standard cert through DNSimple[1] for $20. Easier to set-up then doing it yourself too.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/x7q6tme55gerkql/2013-05-...

[1] https://dnsimple.com
When you think "startup," what comes to mind? And for "Small Business"?
The pros and cons of working freelance
how do you get around without native skype and gmaps?
Why is the graph so small?
Great idea, but why do we require real-time and user-impacting statistics in the first place?

Why not place a AJAX script to a local session monitor that stores up details about a visit and flushes the results via hits to GA? That way, a user doesn't have to wait for GA to load on a page (I've see it be the majority of load time on many websites). The AJAX script could be tied to all types of events such as mouse movement (people hover over links, images, ect. without clicking so capture that as interactivity), onFocus events, and in future eye-tracking events.

This could be built up as a off-screen buffer that generates a more detailed session and fires it off to AG in near-real-time. One other important factor could be to label the events in a concatenated nomenclature so that home.hover, home.idle.30s, home.unFocus, home.gaze.rightMenu.17s, and home.scroll.down.x143 all make sense.
I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by Matlab
That's the controversy. I do TDD at work and I don't for my contributions. I know both quite well. Most projects have little regressions and it is hard to quantify upfront time you will hypothetically save later on, especially if all you do is contributing and moving to something else.

There is some projects where TDD is down right vital, but most of the time, it is not.
JavaScript data structures in CoffeeScript
Error: TypeError: sock is undefined

Ubuntu, Firefox 20.0
This dream of freedom being brought about by purchasing "mobile" computers has remained nothing but that since I purchased my first laptop many years ago; a dream.

"I can work anywhere now!" I thought to myself.

I quickly realized that on sunny days it was much too bright out for me to see my screen, and on dark days it was too risky due to the chance of rain. Not to mention a massive pain in the butt to run out of electricity while away from an outlet.

I realized I only used my laptop in "do or die" situations where using a desktop computer was all but impossible. That trend continues to this day.

I had a similarly bad idea bouncing around my brain when buying my first Android tablet.

"I'm going to ssh into my servers and thwart attacks whilst laying back on my couch." Only to realize that my tablet was just as good as getting any real work done as my laptop, except for the fact that it didn't have a keyboard which actually made things more frustratingly slow than my first attempt at freedom.

tl;dr I imagine I will be using a desktop computer or some version of it to do my work for quite some time to come.
What do you mean by not available? It's working for me
I haven't tried the Topres yet. But I have bought a Leopold MX Brown TKL (elitekeyboards.com), then a CM Quickfire MX Blues (had to resolder the PCB several times), and now another Filco MX Browns TKL, which hasn't arrived. And shipped them to Brazil. I'm very satisfied with them.

One is at home, another at work.

In the first moment the MX Blues felt nicer, but after a few weeks I'm back prefering the MX Browns, and my colleagues really complained about the MX Blues noise.

I'm actually waiting for keycaps from a Deskthority Round4 order (Cherry MX keyboards have an active customization community).

I'll buy a ergonomically weighted Realforce when I feel that I deserve it.
I've chosen to extend[1] that definition to:

Quora. (n). A site that used to appear in my search results.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
Let's extend that idea to it's logical extent: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
This: Nope, they are more profitable than ever.

Goes hand in hand with "shutting down a lot of services" since rounded to the nearest billion dollars the only business Google has is search & display advertising, generally deleting anything else accretes positively to the bottom line :-)
You "need" to, in the same way an engagement ring "needs" to be diamond and cost 3x your salary. Certain things matter!

WTF? We're talking about a PHONE CALL vs a tweet for your mom not spending $20K. If you can't spare five minutes, don't bother with a tweet (unless you're in Iraq, the South Pole etc.)
Reading Henri's post, I don't understand how the conclusion can possibly be positive. What's described there is a series of limitations and painful workarounds, with basically no advantages.

A couple of years ago I did a similar experiment of using an Eee Transformer as my main device for a couple of weeks. It was miserable in so many ways (http://jsnell.iki.fi/blog/archive/2012-02-22-android-on-a-ne...). The only good thing about it was that with a Transformer you could get 16 hours of actual usage. But a normal Android tablet wouldn't have even that benefit -- if I'm only going to get 9 hours of battery, I'll rather get it from my ThinkPad.
I get mine from Gandi.net, along with the domain. If you just need a single CN, it's free for the first year. Verification is automated and usually done within the hour.
Desk exercises: The mini exercise bike
Looks like it's a big chance to make a startup based on big-company closed service.
E.g. Feedly is a good option.
It seems to me that this service would be really, really handy in countries where Nokia bar phones are prevalent. I'd love to see how many people actually used this service in those areas, because it depriving those people of this service goes against Google's mission of providing the entire world with information.
Or services that have no future? SMS search is a dead man walking in 2013.