skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The interesting lines in the large graph are the faint ones showing the adoption level of specific versions of each browser. With Firefox, each new version quickly replaces the previous one in terms of adoption, so when you see that Firefox market share is around 22%, that's almost entirely the most recent release, installed over the last 12 months. Safari has similar adoption curves for each version, but releases are more frequent so the sum is smoother.

Now look at the peak of each curve for IE versions. IE6 held over 80% market share for at least 2 years, by this graph, and probably longer. (IE5's peak would have been even higher, if memory serves.) IE7 had a strong initial uptake, and then gradually grew up to a plateau around 47% -- and now, with the release of IE8, it's dropping again. Given that IE7 was a substantial improvement over IE6 (tabs!), I don't see any convincing reason why IE8 would have a higher peak adoption level than IE7 did.

That's an interesting trend, to me. If IE can't reverse it in subsequent releases (IE9+), and Firefox stays the course, then the peak adoption levels of FF3.5 and IE8 will be close, and as IE6 and IE7 inevitably drop off, it will become increasingly difficult for IE to maintain its overall lead.
HornetsEye: elegant realtime computer vision for Ruby (GPLv3)
Man I really hate Java applets.
I was using SliceHost for about 3-4 months for playing around. Service and support were good, but I recently switched to a MediaTemple Rage DV and I love everything about it except for Plesk. Linode looks interesting and cheap, hmmm.
...if they are defacing him and he ACTUALLY filed a complaint of some sort I see no reason for those accounts to still exist.

But I highly doubt any complaints were filed and I don't think quality control of usernames is the highest priority on twitter right now.

Indeed. One gets the feeling that he expects something to be done about the situation simply because he is Kanye West and he said something about it.
The focus on Comet and an event-driven model remind me of HAppS. Is there something about this approach that's especially appealing in pure functional languages?
Actually I hope that you can transition to a nonstandard "big" business. Maybe one like 3M - a lot of products, with a lot of autonomy in each product division.
Very satisfied with MediaTemple service and support.
In some ways, it would be suspending a machine: if a textbox were really a <canvas> controlled by Javascript, you'd have to suspend the Javascript VM state in order to still have the text upon going back.
Maybe not in pure functional languages per se, but it meshes nicely with the actor model that underlies most of Erlang's computational abilities.
Motorola VE538 Unlocked
Motorola VE538 is a simple web phone in candybar form factor with a 2 inch TFT display that supports a 240 x 320 pixel resolution. The handset brings the following: tri-band GSM connectivity (900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz), 3G connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, easy access to websites like ShoZu, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Google, MSN or Yahoo
Interview with Ayn Rand (1964)
Advice from HackerNews on my Facebook app and website?
Our app is at http://apps.facebook.com/textcontest and our site is http://TMTCinc.com .

It is a weekly contest in which you receive a prompt in the AM (ex: "What's a funny way to lose a girl in 10 seconds?"), to which you are encouraged to respond. If you have a cell phone, we can text you the prompt. If not, you can use our application.

I post and rank the funniest entries that afternoon, awarding points and updating the standings throughout the season.

So far it is just a few dozen ppl who play each week, mostly friends or friends of friends. I experimented by spending a tiny amount on targeted ad space on Facebook, and got better-than-expected results as far as CTR and getting people to install and even consistently use the app.

But I'm hesitant to spend more on advertising if this is just going to be a waste of time. What do you think? Funny idea?
Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals"
I took it for a few weeks last year. I didn't notice any more improvements than I'd notice just from being well hydrated.
Charles Stross on the future (and gaming) in 2030
When is the story too big?
Job seekers willing to work for free with Bay Area start ups
Amazon _has_ door desks. Its an ironic (and often quoted) point of pride that a door desk costs more than a standard office desk at corporate buying rates, but symbolizes thriftiness which as a corporate ethic provides much more value.
To pull this off, several great sites will have to launch as Contenture-enablers/providers all at once, or it will go down as a flop (imagine a console launching without games!)

This is pretty much as hard as making sure multiple startups launch successfully simultaneously. It would probably help if they had a VC working with them. Either way, I wish them luck.
Well, as you can see, HN serves a lot of traffic and has a system() call :-)

Of course, everything is compromise between performance, ease of use, features etc. I'm not arguing with this.
Economic crisis good for economy?
isking social unrest? This is not necessarily a bad thing. Social unrest can be peaceful unrest. It can inspire people to take action, to demand more from their leaders, to work together to bring change.
Computers are useful in maths, and like all tools, will always have limitations. Two solutions for very different facets:

GNU multiprecision arithmetic library - http://gmplib.org/
Coq Proof Assistant - http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/coq/
It is never possible to represent all the numebr in a fixed length binary string.
How to Solve the Browser Wars
I didn't notice anything.
During the current recession I've heard ads from various Financial Services firms in my city making it clear that their staff will do all of the paperwork in switching your super (401k) or other investments to them, at no cost.

Most Health Insurance countries here in Australia offer the same service, and then meta-provider iSelect also make it simple to compare and recommend where you switch to.

Regarding business model, it's basically a question of loyalty. If we pay you or one of our staff to help you switch, we want the pay-off to be revenue from you for a long period of time. That's fine if combined with decent client service or a loyalty program, but if you're just as crappy, and your industry starts making switching easier, it will cost you in the long run. Not the easiest way to get clients and make money.
It would be interesting to find purposely erected barriers.

Eventually most of these will be shaken up one way or another. Each is a potential place to create wealth.

What other services are people stuck with?
Computers suck at some kinds of math. They excel at others. Mathemetician, know thy tools.
Yup - if I want to come back here, I'll use a new tab. If I don't, click through, and it's gone forever (not just 'hidden' in memory on my noticeably a slower machine).

What's that - I need to go back? My fault, I deal with it, I'm not paying someone $1000 to fix my stuff-ups.
Apramana | Beyond Dimensions
I disagree. This "form style" response may be a meme, may be in a humourous vein, but it serves the important purpose of ramming home to the inventor the well-known difficulties of implementing their scheme and the long, long history of similar inventions in the past.

I don't even have to look at this new scheme to know it won't work. It won't work because it relies on a critical mass, and until it gets that critical mass sites won't switch, and until they do users won't sign up, so there's no critical mass .. your classic chicken and egg problem. No-one is going to pay unless everyone else has to pay. There is nothing to force everyone to move at once. See: history of "penny stamp" email anti-spam ideas.

The form style helps ram these notions home; it's a welcome reality check in situations like these.

(updated to stay on topic)
Completely Uninstall Unwanted Applications with Perfect Uninstaller
Les Paul saw a need and invented something to fill it
Perhaps next time you'll think harder about the likely reward for your work.
Users don't need to know anything about how things really work to complain about usability problem. This is actually one of the most useful feedback developers can get.
That's because iPhone has only 256 MB of RAM and no virtual memory.
If we're getting collisions it means we need a better hash algorithm.

It would hardly be the first time. The hash function which is the default for Java strings, for example, sucks.

int hash = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < length(); i++) {
hash = 32 * hash + charAt(i);
}
return hash;

(Lots of collisions on any English dictionary unless you use huge numbers of buckets.)

This actually had important implications for a project I once worked on, in exactly the manner you would expect it to have implications for this interview. The difference was that, in meetings about this issue, I did my best to a) give the customer what they needed and b) did not give the impression I was saying "Screw what you want, I'll tell you what you need".

The birthday paradox problem, by way of comparison, is negligible for this use case. Words in English follow a zipf distribution (you may hear "long tail" more these days). If there is a collision, it is overwhelmingly likely to be between two words on the long tail (no impact to first 10k words) or between a word on the fat head and the long tail, in which case you're overwhelmingly likely to encounter the fat head word first, and even if you don't, whoopsie 1/100th of a percent of your output was corrupted.

Wow, twice in one day natural language processing has reared its head. Thats more than in my last two years! Booyah, old interests.
Visio Drawing Software, Visio Drawing Stencils
Microsoft Visio Software Architecture: Microsoft Visio incorporates news about various Visio drawing software, drawing stencils, Visio architecture news, drawing software news and also for various IT business software news.
i don't capitalize, but i double space after the period to make sentences more readable.
Some people have a mind that is so open that their brain has fallen out. I don't know the origins of the citation, but I love it.
I figured you had the choice of username, so even though you're Patrick in your profile and if I ever met / emailed you I would use that, you had chosen to be patio11 in this forum.

I also find it odd at times - my username is my full name, yet people responding to me will call me JacobAldridge not Jacob.
We've got access to the people who run the 100,000 web sites being monitored by getclicky.com (same team). We shouldn't have a problem there.
I'm an Israeli and I am studying at the best Technical University in Austria (TUWien).

Tuition is 742 Euros per year. Germany is similar, and I'm pretty sure France and the vast majority (if not all) of continental Europe is somewhere in that ballpark too.

The UK is more expensive, I'm not sure about Ireland.
You can still store a symbolic representation of those numbers that you can't represent though in limited cases (such as rational division) and write your algorithms so that it doesn't truncate it in the worst possible way.
Warning: this is a loud auto-play video.
very good analysis, thanks for sharing that
A cousin of mine got a Master's in Germany and only paid the local fee which was something like the equivalent of $800USD per year at the time. The catch is that you have to know German. She took a 10 month crash course in German at a German community college before doing the Master's. It seemed like quite a bargain, if you're into Germany.
Weapons and Systems Engineering!! The art of war - Sun Tzu was the first thing that popped into my head for some reason. Not that it has anything to do with that subject.
Oops, didn't see your reply for a while. I'll check out the explanation - very interesting to me since I've been grappling with implementing flexible roles programmatically for a while.

Thanks for the link!
Honda Jazz to be Launched with "Made in India" Engine
Yes, exactly, assuming you're using a JS VM. But I'm saying you'd have to preserve the JS state anyway, because anything on the page could depend on it.
I've been using Revo Uninstaller for some time now. I would give this a try and compare sometime.
I honestly don't see the point of browsing with NoScript in this day and age. Don't you get tired of every website having broken features? Without javascript, for example, you wouldn't even be able to see the comments on my blog. On my businesses' website, we've made an assumption that if you're browsing with NoScript, you're probably one of the 2% of users who's going to scream and shout about Flash too, so we don't consider you part of the market of potential users.

Javascript is essential to the web experience in 2009.
I'm impressed with 5 comments and no mention of Twitter
Scribd - it could have been nice, but unfortunately i hate their Flash overkill.
Am I the only one who thinks the comic book superhero motif for the intro pitch on the homepage is way too cheesy?

Clean that up to something a lot more professional (and attractive) and it can be a big boost in getting people to sign up.
No one proposed MySpace or Facebook either.
Having access doesn't mean they'll all sign up to it. Case in point, I'm a Clicky user (and I love it), but I'm not going to be signing up to this until I see evidence that it's worth the hassle. So there's a typical chicken and egg problem there, basically.
As one who has been vocally critical of Atwood in the past for his lack of CS knowledge, I'll take this opportunity to congratulate him for discovering floating point arithmetic, and recognizing that math is important.
We'll i don't know about it being least deserving. I'm not a twitter user but i can see the simplicity that pulls people in. And it can be as useful as any blog, social network in general if you put it to good use and follow the right people.
The anonymous writings
Insert a Record with animation slide down effect using jQuery and Ajax.
Few days back I had posted tutorial "Insert and Load Record using jQuery and Ajax". Today's post new feature added animated Slide Down effect apply to every upcoming post.
Java persistence with Hibernate and Annotations | united-coders.com
"Computers are awesome, yes, but they aren't infinite.. yet."

No. Just no.
Side point: Why are they still using polling in this day+age :/
I worked with 2 VC's, one was an idiot and the other was great. It's like anything else.

As for $175/bay area, what he really means is live like you are 'supposed' to live if you are a hot CEO -- live in the right neighborhood, send your kids to the right schools, take the right vacations at Tahoe, etc. That may sound silly but it's part of the networking needed to play that game among that crowd.
Alessi Lamps Facts
In fact, a few grammatical oddities aside, the automatic translation is quite readable. I was quite surprised, not least because it's been a while since I had to use one.

Germany seems to suffer worse from the reactionary types who are quick to pin blame on anything innocuous (paintball, anyone?) over any kind of human tragedy. I mean, look at the ludicrous film and videogame censorship they have over there, partly self-enforced just so companies can avoid having their works indexed (which effectively puts a permanent black mark against it, and I suppose nobody would want to touch it).

And when you combine reactionaries with career-seeking politicians, a recipe for disaster is in the making.
Yes... but how many times have you re-written a sort? (Where 'you' is your average programmer, or, even, the above-average programmer who reads technical blogs and toward whom this post is targeted)
> What I worry about is the safety of my data. When the day comes when I can't use a desktop client to download email from GMail, or when I won't be able to open a .doc file without M. Office, then I'll be worried.

But then it will be too late.
If apple gets 30% and makes a max of $45 mil; then all the users together got no more than $45 / 30% * 70% = $105 million.

If this is the case, this seems like a very small market for everyone to be fighting after.
Interesting - I've long said that I think Erlang might be well suited to very ajax-intensive apps. It's not that great as a templateing language, but does ok when you're just passing json back and forth. I suppose the issue is sorting out what sort of 'model' component to use... Mnesia, CouchDB, or a more traditional db?
the n00bs are making us dumber
they should state that more clearly then, if that is their intention..
like this it seems to me as if an engineer who designs some important technological invention and starts a startup around it, would be excluded...
Also, would it be that bad if a significant amount of companies changed their formal structure in order to take advantage of this? It would mean an across-the-board incentive to create (and grow) companies, does it really matter that much what sector they're in?
Why It Sucks To Be A VC
"They have exactly the same copyright policy as any other UGC site. They take down infringing stuff when they're told about it."

Looks like an Everybody Else Is Doing It argument. What makes "the same copyright policy as any other UGC site" morally acceptable? It's easy to read that as "we'll make money from your content until you catch us".
I think it could go viral. What is the mechanism you are using to get new users? It's probably worth spending $100 on advertising to see if you can hit critical mass, it's just important that your viral loop is as efficient as possible. You should consider having a prize of some to give people an additional incentive to invite their friends
This is pretty solid reasoning and touches on a lot of good points. But just as there are people who make the close-minded mistakes he cites, there are also people who are entirely too self-assured in their reliance on scientific data.

What makes me skeptical of the (overly) scientific mindset is that quality of life has nothing to do with understanding whatever physical realities we can ascertain by experiment. I don't think science will ever meet philosophy, because a scientific theory must be falsifiable, and I don't believe that is a property of all truth (why should it be?). To the contrary, I think the layers of human consciousness are far more subjective, subtle and complex than science will ever be able to tease apart. Furthermore scientific research can easily makes flip assumptions about the nature of reality without suitable evidence (eg. that consciousness is a by-product of brain activity). In these cases Philosophy is much more capable of addressing the issue than Science.

The problem is that we aren't an external observer of a closed system. At some point everything we think we know boils down to some common-sense assumptions that are in no way provable. This makes some people deeply uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough that they lash out against any form of mysticism or intuitive knowing. Sure, the world is full of charlatans and scammers, but then so do we have sham research done on the corporate dime merely to have the appearance of scientific rigor. It doesn't mean that traditional forms of understanding and wisdom have no place.

To the contrary, there is a lot of richness to reality that can't be captured by measurements and control groups. Honestly I don't need to know the mechanics of every experience in my life. When people say "God told me..." and you get hung up on the person's beliefs and the definition of God you are bound to miss the relevant point.
Interesting idea. I look forward to seeing what it turns up.

For my part, I must shamefully admit that I don't really "hold back" what I think. There are certain kinds of post (e.g. purely negative criticism/accusations) that I don't want to publish, because they are too easy to write and don't add anything to the conversation, and because I don't want to become known as "another guy who rants a lot". However, the main reason I don't publish those is the first one - I don't think they add enough to be worth polluting the internet with them.

When submitting articles to this, do remember one thing: It's easy to make waves by flinging accusations and heavy-handed criticism about. It's easy to destroy. Anyone with two brain cells can do it. What's hard is to create something where there was nothing.
> Computers are awesome, yes, but they aren't infinite.. yet. So any prospects of storing any infinitely repeating number on them are dim at best. The best we can do is work with approximations at varying levels of precision that are "good enough", where "good enough" depends on what you're doing, and how you're doing it. And it's complicated to get right.

Rationals?
I don't now how much this topic is discussed outside Germany's blogosphere. A short summary on what has happened so far: Germany's federal parliament will be elected in September. Minister Ursula von der Leyen (family, youth) decided to do something about child abuse: the BKA (federal police office) is supposed to compile a daily blacklist of child pornography websites which all ISPs are supposed to block for their customers. Something similar is already deployed in Norway and other states, though usually not with access logs available to the police for prosecution.

This met fierce opposition of internet users, who argued that it would be more effective to just have the local police take down the servers and find the child abusers, and that turning the BKA into a censorship office would certainly offer politicians an opportunity to slowly grow the black list to include other illegal sites and, in a second step, sites with opinions.

This is currently the hot topic number one in German blogs, and the petition to stop this law is currently the second-most signed petition to the federal parliament (the most-signed petition being one to reduce taxes on gas).
I am puzzled that people think this is a Wikipedia or Google killer. I think it is much more disruptive to general websites. This project makes many websites obsolete for many purposes. If people now want to know how many calories are in a product, they go to a website that specializes in that (directly or they find it through Google), but why do that if Wolfram Alpha gives you that information quickly, and presented in a more interesting way? The same goes for many of the topics he presented. Baby names are also popular website topics, but none of the specialist babyname websites are as comprehensive as a Wolfram Alpha search on different names.
The 12 hour days, the dust that cakes all their clothes and that causes a wracking cough at night, the crippling heat in their workplaces, the risk of a cable snapping and taking off a limb (or worse), combined with low pay, I imagine...

The point of the article is not a bad one, but the title is terrible.
I hear children as young as 5 are forced into VC work in Thailand
Would love a few folk who know how this works to clue me and anyone like me in on what this could be doing in five years?

Take a DVD player as an example, if he was inclined to load the data I could put in a model number and it could show me the technical specification, picture, manufacturer etc.

If I put in two model numbers he could compare them. Could he include in the contents things like product reviews? (is the only problem a trusted source for the data?)

Or, he seemed to have a link for movies - presumably if I type the name of a movie he can list actors, year of release, sales gross etc. If I put in a band can he tell me whether they're touring, back catalogue?

Its obvious from the demo he hasn't been building something to help me pick a DVD player to buy, but does anyone know if this system is likely in the future to support this kind of thing that would be useful to the layman? because that's what might scare Google (or not if I'm barking up the wrong tree here).