skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The iOS AppStore in 2013
On March 28th 2013, after several months of development we launched Shopster, our groceries list app. On this post I’d like to cover what we did in anticipation to the launch, how it correlated to sales, and a glimpse n our future plans. I think it paints a good picture of the state of the iOS AppStore in 2013.
So, basically, scummy (and bad) SEO tactics killed them (accidental and on purpose), but somehow it's Google's fault?
Kudos to the author for giving him a chance to respond and airing his response fairly.
This kind of spammy comment is not appreciated. Based on a quick read of your site, your product isn't even remotely similar to SnapChat. Why would you damage your brand by leaving misleading comments like this?
You still need to remove the green-screen. This either means an expensive process on the CPU side, or pushing the frame to the GPU to remove it with a shader and then using RTT and rendering that or reading the framebuffer and drawing that to a canvas. Note, it's really not difficult to do this, it's just slightly more complex than the other effects, is all.
I was originally going to post something similar about the Tim Ferris name drop and you beat me to it. I also don't get the point. His credentials seem very irrelevant to the app. I would rather see the names of the doctors who's research is making sure this is the best app possible.

My wife is also an insulin-dependent diabetic and will probably try this out and see if it fits her lifestyle.
I suspect it's simply out of date. Nagios does have a large surface area, but from what I've seen in the past, monitoring systems are very difficult for sysadmins to want to upgrade. :)
Fedora 19 Installer for Nexus 4
Jane Street is an established firm with a large OCaml codebase they depend on. Just an FYI.
hey man, this looks great but will it reduce your sex drive?
OS X's mail client supports IMAP push as well.
From The Inside
Then it's a MEANINGLESS PHRASE.
"If someone could only figure out how to show you laptops just before you thought of searching for laptops, then they would be even bigger than Google."

Unless, of course, Google Now gets there first.
I wonder if that hn poster who thought Parker was lucky we don't have the death penalty for his horrific crime against nature will be around to post on this thread.
Something was happening with their routers, too. Using PingPlotter to one of my servers shows severe packet loss on the hos-bb2.juniper2.rz19.hetzner.de router.

I see it just cleared up for now. Still, I'm moving my traffic to other locations till this blows over.
It doesn't do alternating colors, but this reminded me of cw, which saves you the trouble of explicitly piping the output of common commands.

http://freecode.com/projects/cw
Agreed, but typically /boot isn't automounted when it's a separate partition, which means they would need a root-access compromise already.
This is fun. I wish there was a way to edit or delete my submissions -- I accidentally submitted a dupe and messed up the title of another.

Fun little app, thanks for sharing!
Their SSL certificate is fucked for their security page... oh dear.

https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Security_Issue/en

Hope everyone has fun with their identity theft cleanups. They ask people for ID scans.

Bank details are compromised.

boo!

This was announced AFTER the German work day was done. Really nice for admins. Thanks.
Pirate Bay Founder Now Wanted by Denmark
Fair enough and good points.
What's fallacious about it?
I am having a problem where a story has hundreds of comments. I click 'more' once to go to the second page but by the time I've reached the bottom the 'more' link takes me to an expired page and the only way to reach the page I wanted is to go back to the first page, reload it and then click 'more' on each page quickly until I get to the comment page I wanted to be on.

Is this fixable?
A warning on debian-multimedia.org
7 types of feedback that helped make GOV.UK awesome
I can't cite my claim that "no one" does something. I'm happy to see any example you provide of the Go team/nuts saying that generics are a bad language idea.

Russ Cox, a core Go dev: http://research.swtch.com/generic
gohrt linked an article, and although you could derive the identity for yourself using that information, the article doesn't contain the series you're looking for.

You can find it here if you'd like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series#List_of_Maclauri...
That's how a web crawler works, though, right?
As a developer who also knows plumbing (and other trades), I'd beg to differ. When I talk to neighbors and friends, most of whom are highly "technical", they look at me in disbelief when I suggest they resolve a plumbing (or carpentry or mechanical) issue on their own. I get the "I have no idea where to start", or "I don't have any tools", and so on. It's not a lack of available information, it's the fear, in many cases extreme fear, of the ramifications of not "doing it right": a flood in the house, a wall that collapses because you hacked through a supporting structure, an electrical short that burns the house down, and so on.

You build a website and maybe it doesn't work right (has bugs). In most cases, no one dies or gets hurt. You mess up plumbing, electrical, etc and that's not the case at all. It's easy to look down on the non-technical trades since we live in a time that glorifies (like the OP says) the art of programming. But next time you have a major plumbing issue, your heat pump goes on the fritz, you car dies on the highway, consider how helpful it is to know RoR, Java, C#, etc. Not too much...
It seems a disproportionate number of them were hits in years ending in 0. Coincedence?
Also see this NY Times documentary short, "The Program":

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...

It features William Binney, who apparently is one of the better mathematical minds the NSA has ever had. He quit over the NSA's actions in 2001.
From the 3 reasons I pointed out in the article, only one is scummy. The other two (widget links from our software and download-site campaign) were ACCIDENTAL. I'm sharing it so other HNers don't fall into same trap.
Your site hijacked my back button, so we're not friends anymore.
Assuming that the exploit really is unknown, what better security could they have done to prevent it, without severely impacting usability?

Compromises will happen sooner or later when running a large number of public facing services. With good policy, the breaches will be well contained, which seems to be the case here. What more can be expected out of a premier hosting company, let alone Hetzner which is very cheap budget provider?
In advanced mathematics it's common to define cos and sin by these series (and pi is defined as the smallest strictly positive x with sin x = 0). (Of course that just reduces the question to "why do certain geometrical identities match this sin function")
> And then suppose you encounter a woman who tells you that because of the insults she has received from guys in the skeptic community, she has decided that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist. (Emphasis mine.)

And later:

> This woman has confided her experiences and concerns; in these responses, you are insultingly and condescendingly attempting to diminish them, by portraying her experiences as irrelevant and her concerns as illogical.

There are better ways to confide experiences and concerns, and assuming intellectual immunity after calling an entire movement sexist isn't one of them. Both "sides" should be held to the same standards.
"I can't think of a federal action, even this one, that is blatantly unconstitutional"

That is because you have a conservative view of the role of government and of the constitution. From where I sit, these things are all unconstitutional:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone (should be obvious)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Walsh_Child_Protection_an... (ex post facto law)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs (lack of authority; alcohol prohibition required a constitutional amendment, and this should too)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War (no formal declaration of war by Congress, not that this is news)

Now, I am sure there are various backflips and acrobatics that can be done to interpret the constitution to allow all of the above. Really though, we can save ourselves the effort; the constitution is just not as important as it used to be. Executive branch power has expanded far beyond the scope of the constitution. Congress keeps passing laws without regard to the constitution. The courts have generally failed to strike down unconstitutional laws. Why waste our mental energy trying to figure out how today's government is still in line with the constitution, when we could instead just admit that the constitution is just a guideline that is freely ignored?
There's even an easy way to explore your own (and others') snapchat graph: http://snapgraph.me/
This is a good collection of performance tips, although I'd use Unix.gettimeofday instead of RDTSC (RDTSC needs additional care on multicore).

Also it is interesting that OCaml's tutorial has a section on performance (that is not something common in other language tutorials):
http://ocaml.org/tutorials/performance_and_profiling.html
Unfortunately I feel we're in a negative spiral, where good content (e.g. quality reporting and analysis, as in the example in the article) competes with free content which is just good enough to draw attention and pay for itself with advertising. Something is lost there, and in the rush to make everything free we're also losing the incentive for quality journalism or investigative writing, which are just too expensive to sustain on advertising alone.

If that results in a gradual erosion of quality as less and less effort is put in to researching and writing articles, and more and more of the content is churnalism or opinion pieces, then it's a net loss for everyone - eventually the adverts will be more interesting than the real content which lives in the interstices of advertising - I think that would be a shame. I've seen that happening in major newspapers in the UK like the Independent or the Guardian. We've seen the same in television with the rise of Reality TV etc - cheap to produce, controversial, and the perfect filler to squeeze between advertising segments.
This is a great point. Because software has near-zero replication costs, the "manufacturing" process has no good analog for software industry.

The manufacturing industry is supported by an army of engineers in a wide variety of specialties. In fact, manufacturing, in some ways, is starting to look a little more similar to software, because the non-material costs of production are falling (automation replaces direct labor) so replication costs are falling. Manufacturing will never look exactly like software due to the intrinsic role of raw material costs and the capital costs of production equipment, but there are increasing similarities.

As manufacturing has become more automated, a greater emphasis is placed on the role of engineer: in an automated factory, there is greater need for skilled engineers and lesser need for direct operating labor.

While better software has also helped these engineers become more productive, the net effect has been to improve quality of engineering output rather than to reduce engineering demand. (The exception is people working with engineers, but at a lower skill level. For example, there is little need for draftspeople.) Examples of this improved engineering output are flow simulation software that allows engineers to better push the envelope in part design to reduce part weight and improve production cycle times.

The net lesson from manufacturing engineering is that software engineers will continue to be in demand -- likely even higher demand -- so long as they continue to evolve their skills to use the more powerful software as it becomes available. The more powerful software will lessen the cost of software, which will increase demand for it, and increase demand for the skilled developer. For example, abstraction platforms such as Rails increased demand for those who evolved their skill set, because cost of web development fell due to higher productivity, thereby increasing demand for it.

However, like a draftsperson or an engineer who refuses to learn Solidworks, the more powerful software will be a negative for those who cannot, or choose not to, evolve their skill set above a more basic level.
The Michael Jordan of X
Invite please?

hn at zxvf dot us
And I care about what you consider private why, exactly? For any old thing you can find someone, or even a barrel full of people, who considers it to be true. The arguments matter. You provided none, and that's that.
FBI seized Citadel banking Trojan servers - The Hacker News
Wow never heard of this before, but I might consider using this. This is amazing and detailed info on costs of running a business. Thanks for sharing!

A few questions I have, IF you don't mind:
1. If you're contracted out your dev work, do you mostly work as a manager, ensuring day-to-day operations?
2. Looks like you're now making a profit but a really small one... for May 2013: $5660 - $2377.23 - $1808 = ~$1500, is that right?
3. Sounds like your revenue vs costs/expenses scale linearly as well, but more business = more margins, is that right?

Once again, thanks for this detailed post! Very enlightening!
Thinking will eventually become mass produced. To a pre-industrial revolution artisan, having their work automated probably seemed just as difficult and "far out into the future" as a modern day programmer feels about his work being automated.
Ah! That makes more sense :P
Ok, if you want a great example of how Google is using black boxes to do social engineering, this is 100% it.

The writer doesn't know for certain those things were hurting him, but out of fear their whole marketing strategy changed and now they are going about the business of getting links taken down.

Now, you could argue that they should have been more thoughtful about their SEO efforts in the first place, but consider how deeply dysfunctional it is that webmasters are so afraid of Google and Matt Cutts that they are begging each other to take down links they paid for in the first place.

There is no scientific proof that any of these links had anything to do with them ranking well or badly or changing their CTR or anything, the author is just assuming it's these things that hurt their Google traffic.

Google's ranking policies are now the equivalent of the webmaster boogie man.
I was just thinking about how useful something like this would be. Thanks for reading my mind! And now to see if I can get it to work under cygwin.
I did not get it yet. Perhaps they are only sending to those who might be affected?
It would not be the first case where a environment related government agency went overboard when the end result for the area was better than what the same agency had been ignoring for years or simply did not know about. Read more than one wetlands issue where this occurred.
Geeks internalize the network. It's like an extension of their mind and body. Intrude into their online activities and you might as well be touching them in their no-touchy zone.

You sound like a bleeding "blame the victim" sexual harassment apologist. All the other secretaries are okay with the bosses' constant groping, what's the big deal? Maybe they like being touched. You were asking for it by dressing that way (putting your data on the cloud) anyway.

Well, it's not their fucking decision whether the abused secretary should put up with the boss's wandering hands!
She may have just committed a fallacy in truth.

That doesn't mean telling her so is the right choice.

If you don't address her experience, you're missing the point.

You can "believe" all kinds of things without feeling them and living them out.

In her case, skeptics may believe they are not fundamentally sexist. But her observation would then be that this belief is only skin deep. It should trouble the skeptic that an observer finds their community sexist, and trigger a crisis in the belief.
It's a poor example. If I were black, I'd be pretty unconcerned about the possibility of my friends and family thinking I'm a Klansman, no matter what my phone records say.
The rise of protein drinks for ordinary people
The Economic History of Stereotypes
Fair enough.

> Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery;

Someone like RMS would be comfortable pulling out a battery, I expect.
>Twitter isn't perfect but one thing if does is to give a voice to those who didn't have one before. I'm thinking specifically of oppressive governments and the affected citizens or folks being harassed by law enforcement.

Does it really help with that? I'd think for anything important you'd want to spend more than 160 characters explaining it; long-form blogs and tumblr seem like a more effective way to spread such stories. E.g. the report of events in Turkey that was on HN a couple of days ago was fascinating, and I suspect quite influential - and I don't think it would've been anywhere near as effective as a tweet.
or you could use MacLaurin polynomial series (Taylor series at zero)
Apparently the plant poisoning in the movie (and postulated in the book) weren't correct. If you read the Wikipedia on McCandless[1] research into how he died has made it clear that it was just plain old rabbit starvation[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
I would appreciate an invite. jay (at] jaytaylor d.o.t com

Thank you!
On December 15th 2005, Barack Obama viciously denounced this and the Patriot Act.

Which he now supports in the fullest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

They use network taps[robust ones] to sift thru the unencrypted traffic[most email traffic and regular net traffic]...and most likely a close relationship with the SSL cert-auth roots to scrutinize the 'secure' stuff.

Anything else encrypted in place is most likely sent to Oak Ridge or there own HPC clusters and bf'd.

Defense?

AES 256 with loooooooong and strong passphrases and keyfiles. and generate your own SSL certs[4096 min]....and use VPN's which terminate out of country and don't keep logs.
Twitter taking-on Instagram, adds 'Lenses' to Windows Phone app
Main Street Santa Monica Joins to Crowdfund 13th Annual Summer SOULstice Events
Is asking the subject of an article for comment before ripping them to shreds just a lost art at this point?
John Gruber and friends launch Vesper note capture app
That is a reasonable policy choice, which is worth considering.

It so happens that law enforcement officials and national security officials and politicians do not think that the voters will accept 3 to 6 Boston bombings per year, without their careers being destroyed. Do they misunderstand the public mood?
The Scottish independence referendum is in 2014.
As part of the registration process with hetzner.de, you have to send them scans of personal documents (such as passport, drivers license or similar).

I asked them just now if these systems were compromised and they promptly replied:

"The system that stores scans of ids, credit cards and so on was not compromised.
In addition to that, we delete that information after 21 days."
I spent two years driving from Alaska->Argentina, living in my tent and cooking on my little camp stove.[1]

I'm a Software Engineer, so I did a few freelance projects along the way. It was perfect to get online somewhere, get all the stuff I needed, then drive out to the wilderness for a week or more while I coded everything up. I'd come back into a town, upload what I needed to and continue on my merry way.

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com
... claimed Monday's ISM manufacturing data was leaked 15 milliseconds early ...

While I'm peeved that as an adult I'm still not able to purchase an affordable flying car (though I was able to afford a tiny flying robot recently), there are days where I do think I am living in the science fictional future anticipated in my youth. Reading that CNBC article... this is one of those days.
I like the last line.

The rest? You're insufferable.

If you think it is up to the average voting American to deny the Green Party and the Libertarian Party time during our debates, then I suppose your points are valid.

If you think it is up to the average American to black out coverage of protests happening in our country, then I suppose your points are valid.

If you think the people on the street struggling to get by have enough time to learn about the complexities of our inane and nonfunctional system, then I suppose your points are bearable.

But if you agree that a corporations 1,000,000 dollars of lobbying money is worth more than my vote, then your points are not.

If you agree that big money has thoroughly corrupted our system of government to almost every level, then your points are not.

And if you don't, where have you been?
Looks like something is wrong:

"An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details."
I was also perturbed by the jump from the definition of e to the taylor expansion. I know how to get there the long way (define e first, derive properties of the exponential derivative, then construct the Taylor series), does anyone know a shortcut?
They're really inexpensive, which explains their niche popularity...
Google Apps script proved to be extremley useful recently when I created a small menu item that created Calendar events from a spreadsheet. Took a lunch break and 30 lines of JS to make a really efficient enterprisey interface to make large amounts of events. You can even send invites with the API!
"According to Rosenblatt, in 2009 the entire HFT industry made around $5 billion trading stocks."

Where does this money come from? The industry doesn't actually create any wealth. There must be a greater fool who lost this $5 billion to the HFT industry. But who is that? Who became $5 billion poorer to make the HFT guys that $5 billion richer? Is the article just counting the total profit of HFT winners and ignoring the HFT losers?

This is not rhetorical, I really want to understand this.
AWS Webcast - Scaling on AWS for the First 10 Million Users
And given the topic, there's neccesarily a relevant Less Wrong link:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...

Once upon a time I tried to tell my mother about the problem of expert calibration, saying: "So when an expert says they're 99% confident, it only happens about 70% of the time." Then there was a pause as, suddenly, I realized I was talking to my mother, and I hastily added: "Of course, you've got to make sure to apply that skepticism evenhandedly, including to yourself, rather than just using it to argue against anything you disagree with—"

And my mother said: "Are you kidding? This is great! I'm going to use it all the time!"
How the demise of Adobe Fireworks will change our workflow
So we scale up to (num_cores - 1). We have 8-way and a 4-way machines. I'll update the page to make this clear.
The “Save Money & Pursue Passion Later” Myth
How MyClean made the first million
Great work Jeff!
Welcome to the wild west, where we blog first and confirm later.
Yeah, kudos for trashing the guy without checking his facts first, good job.
The field extension lattice is isomorphic to the subgroup lattice; if you really wanted to, you could write this out symbolically (but I am not sure why you would want to, since it does not really convey the meaning of the theorem any better). I suppose you might say that such an isomorphism does not qualify as an equation, but that is a bit pedantic in my opinion since such isomorphisms have all the properties of an equivalence relation.
Are you suggesting that everyone should just ignore it and continue with their lives... ?

Just because I'm not surprised, doesn't mean I shouldn't be outraged.
Verizon’s Memo To Staff On Alleged NSA Data Requests