skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We want to break into Android as soon as we can but right now there's a lower barrier to entry for iOS apps regarding testing & development. It's also convenient we happened to have Macs to develop on. If we were using Windows or Linux, we'd likely be developing for Windows Phone and Android.

As for "1024x768 MSIE-only websites", while that's a great analogy, I should point out the entire web is "unpredictable" like that; everyone has a different resolution, browser and OS where as iOS is fixed which is what makes it attractive to develop for in this circumstance. When IE had 90% marketshare I'm sure plenty of people developed using it's specific APIs. What would you rather have done?

Incase your interested, our website is an HTML 5 responsive site that requires IE 8+.
Unfortunately SIRI is already taken!
Paternalism goes full-circle
The only problem is people expecting niche experiences with large general service platforms.

Want to have engaging and enriching discussions about a topic? There's probably a website for that exact topic. It has a forum or IRC chat room and probably a mailing list. It might have a twitter/facebook account, but those aren't the channels you use if you're really involved.

Want to find those places that have engaging enriching discussions about topics? Stop looking at Facebook, Twitter, et al. That's not where it's happening. And my money is on it never happening. That's not what they're for.
Money. Resources are limited, so it makes sense to prioritise (Whether the resulting accounting efforts end up costing more than it's otherwised saved, it's another matter).
I don't entirely disagree. All I can say is REE and Rails 2.3 were far lighter weight and faster than Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.2. Given it's a 3.5 year old app, the landscape was pretty different back then. I looked at Lift and didn't like it. Django was still in a weird place. And ultimately Rails looked like the best option for a variety of reasons.

Things evolve and whole hog rewrites are difficult. Nowadays we run in JRuby and things are quite a bit better. But we can't run on anything smaller than an m1.large. The low I/O and meager RAM in a c1.medium preclude its use. (BTW, that's where a lot of the original 15 came from -- with a process using 100 MB RAM and only 1.7 GB available, it's hard to squeeze much more out of that).

But the larger point is with virtually any other provider you can pick a configuration that matches the needs of your app (rather than the other way around), don't have to fight with CPU steal, don't have to fight with over-subscribed hardware, and don't have to deal with machine configurations from 2006. Yeah, Rails is never going to outperform your Scala web service. But if the app would run just fine on the other N - 1 providers, then it's disingenuous to gloss over the execution environment as well.
Yes, I'm not denying causality of real world, just saying random factors tend to exert less influence here.

Taking America going to Iraq war, it might be a disturbing fact, but America wanted to go at war back then. The bloodlust of a common, red-blooded, mall-shopping American in the wake of 9/11 is the foremost reason the U.S. ended in two prolonged conflicts. Yes the reasons for Iraq were pulled from the hat, but the nation was eager to be deluded. Not a conspiracy of two men in DC: can anyone really imagine the USA not invading anyone after the 9/11 attacks?

But again what's happening here is that in democracy, the influences become averaged with certain cut-off of extremes, like a signal through a band filter. The politics becomes statistical, as opposed to heuristic deal in feudal countries like North Korea, and as such becomes harder to disrupt.
Cloud new features: Support & Other Cost Modeling and Import from RightScale
How'd this advertisement wind up on the front page?

My main problems are that the author has failed to distinguish between estimates and plans. They are not the same, or rather, they should be treated differently.

When you consider plans and estimates as identical, two things happen.

First, your estimates start becoming subject to political pressure. After all, the only reason anyone starts a project is to meet some goal or goals. And those goals tend to come with certain constraints. If you work backwards from the goal, you get a plan and then suddenly, if the plan disagrees with the estimate, guess where the pressure goes?

Likewise, if you simply take your estimate and transform it into the plan, you've failed to plan adequately. An estimate is a probablistic statement about some future outcome. By itself it fulfills one and only one of the required features of a plan:

* Job sizing: How big is this job, and how long do you expect it to take?

* Job structure: How are you going to do the work? What will you do first, second and so on?

* Job status: How do you know where you are? Are you going to finish on time and are the costs under control?

* Assessment: How good was your plan? Did you make any obvious errors, what mistakes should you avoid in future, and how can you do a better job next time?

If the estimates were actual estimates, expressed in terms of uncertainty, then the "overflow" statement is a nonsense. In fact all such approaches are a nonsense, as they require hundreds of people to miraculously become expert forecasters in what are often novel tasks. Given how many ways people can fall into the "planning fallacy", that's unfair. Estimation deserves at least a structured process of its own -- whether by parametric model, points poker or PERT 3-point estimation.

Disclaimer: I'm a bit of a wingnut about estimation and I've been working on a tool to make it easier and better.
Your graphs are impossible to read on an iPhone (or at least a pre-5 iPhone). Regardless of rotation, the right edge of the graphs is cut off, and you can't scroll or zoom.
IBM to Acquire SoftLayer
Play Marvel Heroes MMO Free Today - MMO Strategy Guides
As we can see in Japan because no true Japanese person lets their work take away from their family life.

We can also see this in Foxconn assembly lines, the home of the work/life balance in China.
International Startup Fest, FounderFuel Team Up For Demo Day, Accelerator Rally
Obama to propose plan targeting patent trolls
Configure your browser to send the target domain as the referrer and you won't have that issue.

In fact it even makes any hotlinking filters set up like this not work at all, and serve you the picture normally.
China Snuffs Out Discussion of Tiananmen
Yes, you're right, but I think what you're describing is the current situation. It doesn't say anything about how we got there in the first place.

For me this process is compareable to education of children. If you let your child drink coke instead of water, it will do so. But since we're good parents, we don't allow that, do we?

Btw, this whole argumentation isn't restricted to media. E.g. clothing companies: they want to make us believe, we want our stuff from Bangladesh, where the mortality is significantly higher in a cloth company than anywhere else?

So you're saying there are groups of people here who want this?

I just refuse to believe that.

In the end I'm not the one who makes a fortune of all this, so I'm not willing to take the responsibility.
I am an idiot. I bought at $29.85.
That was the intent of Boxee, although it didn't really do it very well.
It's in line with the National Trust's (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/) corporate identity, and the font is custom for the Trust

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6416447/National-...
I think building solidarity and values is tremendously important, and here's why: what is the government really responsible for? Even as you go down the political spectrum to libertarians (short of anarcho-libertarians), you have consensus that government should at least provide security, from domestic crime and international threats, the enforcement of contracts, etc. Most people would go on to say that it's the government's job to provide at least basic education, utilities and transportation, etc, and do so with low waste and corruption. Fostering a culture of solidarity and shared values goes directly to those basic functions of government.

When you look at Scandinavian countries, and wonder how their systems work so well, you have to consider how shared culture and values plays a role in that success. When you wonder why the welfare state works so poorly in the U.S., you can't ignore the impact of the tremendously acrimonious culture we have, steeped in animosity between the races and between different socioeconomic classes. And if you go further down the spectrum of dysfunction, you can't help but notice the stark contrast between the extensive but relatively corruption-free governments of the Scandinavian countries and the very limited but highly corrupt governments of places like India or Bangladesh. I think that comes from a lack of solidarity. There is no motivation to, say, not take a bribe, if your mentality is that you're only in it for yourself.
Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
Instagram isn’t really suited for the photographer.
Marketing push?
Build a mobile application layout using Less and CSS3 (advanced)
Those sorts of jobs are not often posted. I would think the vast majority of these roles are filled through networking.
I think you're missing the point. This is not about "mandatory fun", it's about recognizing the runaway restrictiveness of public parks and historical sites that has resulted in people expecting that common activities will be prohibited. It's poking fun at the uptight reputation that such places have, and attempting to reverse the trend by loosening those irrational restrictions.
This is a really nice idea. I like the concept that you can get this made into a real physical product.
How to Create Compelling Technical Screencasts
Why would there be a hospital policy against gender disclosure?
Am I the only one that really dislikes writing on a white-board? I love the idea in practice but I always end up reaching for a sheet of white printing paper in the end.
There are a million Chinese companies making little ARM devices running Android 4 and selling them for about $50. Basically everybody's waiting for Google and bigger manufacturers to sit up and take notice and start supporting the platform (poor wake-on-USB behavior is a huge problem).

Dell is supposedly going to be the first one on the scene with a real brand-named "mini-PC" device.
Residential Roofing Warranties: What You Should Know | LGC Roofing Blog
SoftLayer Acquired By IBM
Knowing a bit about the Asian way to handle conflict, I think it is possible that the bombs gave a good pretext (not the best word) to end the war. It would mean that many in Japan headquarter knew it was foolish to continue the war but it was not possible to change boat without a special new circumstance that can be used to explain the change.
I use a combination of mythroku (https://github.com/ear9mrn/MythRokuPlayer/tree/master/mythro...) and plex channels for playing local content on Roku.
Thanks for pointing this out!

I didn't find the original source when I submitted it to HN. Unfortunately, it is too late now to edit my submission for the improved link.
Processing 2.0 released
Anyone know where Ireland fits on this chart?
I use this simple rewrite rule to prevent user submitted images from being used on other sites...

<Directory /images>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !mydomain.com
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://images.mydomain.com/no.gif [NC]
</Directory>
What is Lambda Calculus and why should you care?
> It's a top-5 program internationally, so I take it to be quite good.

Most of the international rankings are heavily biased in favour of English speaking countries and particularly the USA (especially ARWU). It's mostly fine in sciences where all the important publications are in English. It's clearly dubious in the humanities. Beware this kind of claim.
"I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking." Dorothy L. Sayers
Roku supports a unified search now, though unified search doesnt support all apps/channels. It does support Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Vudu, and Crackle though.

Also, most (all?) Roku's support local storage, but it isn't ideal. Usually, I need to throw some content on a thumbdrive and stick it into the Roku. Not horrible, but I wish I could use the Roku to download content to use it to stream via DLNA.
My school has whiteboard paint on some of the hallway walls and my dad just painted a wall in his new office with it. A few things:

1) Markers leave more residue with dry-erase walls vs. a normal dry errase board. I suspect that this has to do with the less-smooth texture of the wall

2) It's expensive, like prohibitively so. Expect to spend thousands to paint a single room.
Look at France's socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn. If not for an allegation of sex abuse by a not-that-important cleaning lady, he would probably now be France's president.
This is a fun and interesting approach to learning an editor, or git. I tried the git tutorial and was impressed. I like how it takes longer and longer for the correct answer to fade in, giving you a chance to enter it from memory as it continues on, like digital flashcards.
My e-mail is pretty clean, and every now and then, like maybe once a month, I get down to a totally empty inbox. I don't subscribe to many lists (but more than none), and I reply to important things, and delete sometimes. I use a "pending" tag to move off items where I am waiting for something else to happen. It seems to me that most people don't know how to handle e-mail (which is a serious problem), but it isn't fundamentally broken.
You can have everyone's images when you're willing to pay them for the bandwidth. The internet has changed (unfortunately.)
Pretty sure that nowhere in the definition of social does it enforce the need to meet or otherwise speak to people that you didn't previously know. Please don't confuse "social" as a general term with "social discovery".

For many people, having something that's pretty easy to use and lets them communicate with people that they already know is a really great thing.

Email really isn't designed as a social discovery tool. There are many other technologies (some of them built on top of email like mailing lists) that _are_ designed for those purposes, and several of them work perfectly well.

If what you're expecting is one tool that both fits and performs well at all possible use cases, then you're going to be severely disappointed.
Also, liability caps are the stupidest way of dealing with the potential for frivolous ligation. It punishes the people who were actually injured, not the ones who filed a nuisance suit hoping for a small payout. It's utterly non-sensical!
Sorry about that. I should have added some auto scaling. I just made them big so they are clear but without realizing the lack of a horizontal scroll bar.
SEEKING WORK / Remote is great, based in Oregon

Hi! I'm Josh. I'm primarily an iOS developer (with decent-but-not-as-good skills on Mac and Android, and a previous-ish lives doing webdev mostly with PHP, but also Ruby and Java), originally from Australia.

Typical projects have involved a lot of rich media delivery. I care a lot about the end user experience.

Contact me via josh at not josh dot com
I would comment on this, but DHH has captured my thoughts nearly exactly on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/dhh

This is insane. $2.5b for a company that has lost money through its existence, has a very small set of (likely not-so-diverse) clients (6,000ish), and makes 10% of what they paid for them in revenue? Strikes me as a crazy purchase, but perhaps there's something else afoot that I don't see. I've been proven wrong about this stuff before.
Definitely all good points, only quibble is that not everyone has the option to work for the their first company for free or would have to take a second paying job to make it work. That limits the amount of time you can spend on your own projects and personal development.
Notes Essays—Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Stanford, Spring 2012
Why I wouldn't work for you:

I don't work for free.
My time is more valuable than free. Perhaps at reduced rate, but never for free. Working for free makes your clients balk when you finally dare to charge.

I like my free time.
Free time gives me a chance to do what I want, as I'm young only once. It's not always easy to have some time off when in college / uni, so the time you can make is time you (should) treasure. How you fill that time does not matter, but it should be fun (as that's what free time should be).

The other points I agree with.
Building a portfolio is a great way to get at least one foot in the door. Writing code and text is also a very good way to learn to express thoughts (both of which I do too little of, personally), which also helps your future senior to get a reading of you.
I've used this method too. But I thought the image type you were supposed to serve as an alternative had to use a nonstandard extension (like .jpe)?
Not sure that the pacifiers are a good idea, do they have them in the Finland box?
Partisan Bias Diminishes When Partisans Pay
Each week my municipality sends out an email the night before garbage collection stating which items are to be picked up the next day (e.g. blue box, garbage, bulk items, garden bags).

Historically it was a friendly, we're-all-in-this-together sort of email sharing information about what helps the recycling process go most smoothly, maximizes taxpayer return, etc. Recently they had a change of responsible parties, and now the new emails are full of stark, accusatory statements of absolutes and rules -- the classic underlined/bold/italic "DO NOT" type list of exclusions.

It is absolutely remarkable the effect this has. Suddenly we're not all in this together, but it's factions working against each other. I and my fellow taxpayers are now suddenly trouble in someone's life.

I've always been against hostile communications where they aren't necessary, but this has absolutely opened my eyes to how much of an impact this sort of adversarial approach can have. It's purely an anecdotal datapoint, but it really struck me.
The purchase makes sense, though I would have thought they have all the cloud parts they need in house.

Is this more of an application play?
Improve TeamCity Build Times with Compressed Artifacts
I think it's somewhere in-between. He's not really hating on the fun, he's hating that it has to invade a scenic place with unnatural signs.

I can't blame him--I like to see things as-intended. No trash in the woods, no modern equipment at historical sites, etc.
A few years ago I worked on a digitized whiteboard system that could be projected onto any surface. Took input from a Kinect, or other input system and recorded the history of the entire life of the canvas into a database that could be exported. Even recorded audio and video for final conclusions and wrap up.

I think we learned a lot of HCI lessons from that project, mostly about guerilla arm. Smart boards can already do what you're looking for but they're insanely expensive and far from portable which is what we we're tasked to "beat".

Oh, forgot the best part, they were networked ,~20 tables at a time and used a server to facilitate connections and store sessions between each other.

Point being, what you're looking for exists but is expensive or requires some custom development of your own. I'd open source mine but my grant won't let me do that.
Ah, so you're talking about moving some of the logic from the SQL into code? Yes, that can certainly give a huge boost, no matter what the language.
I feel sorry for your co-founder if just going by your post. Are you seriously asking this question ? If your co-founder is any good, give him access to the source code asap and move on with building the business. You are worrying about the wrong stuff.

"Once I get customers, they will be my worth"

Sure and what about your co-founder ?

"but in case of disagreement, I can't go to his laptop/dropbox/drive and delete all the codebase."

No you don't want to do that. Do we need to tell you why ?
Show HN: Ambient Timer - A low-stress visual timer
Generosity & Entitlement
I just wanted to add -- since you're not the first to point out the Rails part -- that I've also run a 42 node Cassandra cluster on a m1.xlarges and did a fair bit of CPU-bound operations (encryption and compression) on hundreds of TB of data on cc2.8xlarge. I just used the Rails one as an example.

In the case of Cassandra, disk I/O was a constant issue. So, we grew the cluster much larger than would be necessary on another provider. We also lost instances pretty regularly. If we were lucky, Amazon would notify us about degraded hardware, but usually the instance would stay up but do things like drop 20% of its packets. Replacing a node in Cassandra is easy enough, but you quickly learn how much their I/O levels impact network performance as well. Nowadays Cassandra has the ability to compress data to reduce network load, but you then run into EC2's fairly low CPU performance.

The CPU-bound application I mentioned wasn't so bad, but we paid heftily for that ($2.40 / hour - some volume discount). At the high end the hardware tends not to be over-subscribed.

Performance, price, and reliability were all issues in all cases. Those are not EC2's strong suits and haven't been for a while.
Yes. Would the politics of France have changed in a significant way though?

There are multiple presidential candidates in most developed democracies, but chances of national politics taking really unpredictable turn remain low.
Turkey - Anonymous publish how to connect to the internet
Quick Guide to Making your Website Social Media Friendly
Dynamic Languages have Jumped the Shark
Cannot possibly disagree more.

- Of course, ugly code is fine for experimening, short-lived code, or code that won't be touched again.

- But beautiful code makes me enjoy my work, which is really important.

- It makes lives of other devs better. Devs want more money for working with ugly code (ie. it costs the company money).

- Ugly code supports the culture that aesthetics is not important.
In China there is.
"Blimey, I don't trust anyone to effectively estimate their time over any period greater than 5 days. And I tell them to add 20%..."

I find it more accurate to double the # and bump the metric.

1 hour => 2 days
3 days => 6 weeks

Estimation is one of the hardest parts of the software management.
It would make for an interesting (and almost certainly viral) test to concoct artificial scenarios of a "newsworthy" event, having participants armed with each type of capture device. Instructing them that something important is going to happen in a few moments (already giving them more information than they would usually have) and then having a staged shoot out go through the scene, or a pretend robbery, etc.
There's sort of a standard way. But really no. It's one of those situations where if you're going to use custom webfonts and aren't using a service you'll need to go through some trial and error, do some research, and basically decide which platform/browser combo is most important to you. The second most popular post on my website discusses this. Not trying to self-promote and there are problems with my implementation too but maybe this can get you started http://billpatrianakos.me/blog/2012/12/26/fix-webfont-render...
It really annoys me (much more than it should) when software claims to do "management" of something and then offers absolutely no management features at all. This thing is doing delivery and manipulation of images, which is very useful, but actually managing what's there is left up to the user. Argh.

See also, every "content management system" ever.
The author's point about "entrepreneurs" not being exclusive to the world of startups is exactly what I hope to show with my book this fall. It's a dangerous mindset because in this internet age, we need more people to be thinking about themselves as entrepreneurs.