skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The cost of parasites was too high for facebook, when weighted against the opportunities: facebook is all about being flat and appealing to the general public, complexities like possible scams are putting off too many potential users.
Facebook could not have grown to its present size if it had not killed the platform.

Also they can't share the social graph; the monopoly on the data that they have gathered on us is the whole point/worth/wealth of the company.

If facebook or google run into financial problems (this might happen if tax loopholes are closed, and countries decide that even big companies have to pay real corporate taxes) then these companies will be bailed out as they are 'too big to fail'.
From the blog post:

> But what does Android stand for? They don’t seem to have any coherent philosophy or aesthetic. Maybe you could argue that Android stands for “openness.”

I've been almost totally focused on Android since spring 2011. It's openness is what drew me in as a programmer. It's openness is also what drew manufacturers in as well.

In its newer Android versions, Google added something called an ActionBar. While Google backports some things to older Android versions, they did not backport the ActionBar. A programmer named Jake Wharton dug in to the Google source code and did a back port of the ActionBar. Now 10% of installed apps use his third-party backport. Even the Facebook app ( http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/sherlock/act... ).

There is a cross-platform library called the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL). It is used by many commercial and open source games and applications. I ported two popular and pretty cool GPL games to Android that use it ( http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.panaceasupp...
and http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.panaceasupp... ). Apple's App Store doesn't allow apps licensed under the GPL, so those apps can't go onto the App Store.

Only time will tell whether the "centralized and closed" or "decentralized and open" model will dominate. Both have advantages and disadvantages. IDC said in 2013 Q1, Android had 75% market share and iOS had 17.3% for worldwide smartphone shipments. For every iPhone shipped, over four Android phones shipped.
Common Language Runtime? I can't find any mention of this backend.
I feel like blogs about community ROMs, running Android on random devices, running other stuff on Nexus devices, etc. are the blog market. Just like Android devices are varied in their capabilities and what people use them for, blogs about them are scattered and varied. Ever heard of a coffee machine running iOS? http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/06/10/android-based-coffee-b...

Chaos is the Android philosophy, and absolute order is the Apple one. Gruber is akin to the high priest of Apple's philosophy, while Android by definition has none.
"asm.js might not be useful or necessary for this" So for situations like this, would Duetto's approach of mapping C++ objects/functions to native JavaScript objects/functions be better? If so, is this a feature that could be added in the future to Emscripten or are the designs mutually exclusive?
I would rather Android not have a John Gruber than have one. He says some negative and snarky things on his blog about non-Apple manufactured products and rarely positive things about them. I am potentially flawed but I have a difficult time trusting someone who can't be objective. Android is better off not having someone like that.
Do you believe Gruber offers an Objective evenhanded perspective on his posts?

To me nearly everything he writes reeks of one sided immature fanboyishness. He writes solely to appeal to those who seek affirmation of beliefs and reinforcement of Apple's 'Reality Distortion Field'.

He is the king MacFag.
That's not what he is doing though. He is actually manipulating the pixels, applying the filter will not give him any control over the pixels. He wants to do pointillism, not achieve a pointillism-like effect on a regular painting.
But the rights in question are those of the end user, and these rights include that of recieving the source code of the actual binary containing GPL licenced code, which will include any (possible) modifications of said GPL code.

This is in my opinion the main attraction GPL has for developers, as they as 'end users' are given the right to any source code modifications done to their original code.
I got my acronyms wrong, it's called the "CLI" backend, but it's definitely in there: http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/cli-backend.html
Executive Coaching Firm Strategic Development Lets Clients Pay in Bitcoin
I've been working from home for 2 years now. My wife also works from home. We each have separate physical spaces in our home dedicated as offices for us.

As a developer, here are my tips:

* Go to meet ups in your area more often to connect with others and stay in touch with whats going on outside your company. This is a good idea even if you're not working from home, but it's a good excuse to get out of the house when you are.

* If you have access to a local coworking space, make use of it. These are another good opportunity to network with others in your area.

* Work from a coffee shop once in a while for a change of scene. I get some of my best work done outside of the house in a coffee shop. Meet a fellow WFH friend so you have someone to chat with throughout the day.
Ugh, I hate these. Instead of disabling it at the OS level, where they should do it; they create a "let's give unethical companies another bit of information" option.
3D Printing Will Explode Next Year, When Key Patents Expire
This strikes me as an odd comparison. Apple to Android seems about as arbitrary as Apple to Windows or Apple to Dell or Apple to Samsung.

Point being that Apple makes a whole host of products in several categories- OS's, productivity software, desktops, laptops, and phones. Why there isn't an Android John Gruber is the wrong question because he reviews all categories of Apple products, not just the mobile OS. The closest company is probably Microsoft, and I can say that there are PLENTY of MS fanboys and bloggers. You can find them in any software shop that run a .Net stack.
A bank you say? http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2079431/citibank-ha... http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/super-bad-first-sta...
I actually prefer the feel of laptop style keys so the apple keyboards get my vote. I find the low travel and light weight touch is easier on RSI.
Garbage Collection: A system wherein memory is automatically allocated when referenced and freed for another allocation when not referenced.

It sounds like you believe a garbage collection system must achieve a certain level of complexity beyond reference counting, and I can't help with that—however, it's a fairly pointless distinction if we switch from saying "GC" to "GC and reference counting" to talk about automatic memory management. What does that give us? And why WOULDN'T you want this simplicity? I don't much care how trivial you consider ARC to be, it certainly collects garbage effectively. No memory scans to worry about interrupting your real time application. If you really need to not deallocate in a tight loop you can autorelease (I never claimed it was a garbage collection mechanism).

And I am not aware of a way to be notified by HN itself but a lot of apps and sites provide that. (I don't use one myself, I just check threads I am still interested in.)
Speaking of sf/fantasy authors, Steve Brust writes using emacs.

(And on mandrake linux, according to the acknowledgements of this unpublished work: http://dreamcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/My-Own-Kind-...)
One of the key differences between Apple and Android - for me - is that people who buy Apple generally buy into the hype created around Apple. And the reverse - people who buy Android don't buy into the hype. I can't say I have seen a single Android advertisement like I have seen iPod/iPhone/iPad ones. So there is no need for an Android John Gruber; all of the hype of "The Smartphone" has already been done. People know what's on offer, and base their decisions now on utility and price.
>are they useful or practical for most common users?

Photoshop purchased legitimately is extremely expensive, it's not targeted at common users.
That would be the 300px radius inner box-shadow set to 5% opacity on the body tag, which happens to be over 40,000px tall.
> He is the king MacFag.

Nothing to add – I just wanted everyone to know your character in case you later thought better of that line and deleted it.
Not to defend but for context most of this stuff isn't new and just looks like the direct marketing industry applying their well-honed scammy techniques. If you look at the old record and book clubs that used to advertise in magazines it's the same story.
Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire Sourcefire
Imagine that frequency is color (actually true). Tuning is searching for that color. So you, the receiver, are tasked with finding a (for example) blue light and counting the blinks. Easy until you surround that blinking blue light with 1000 more just like it all blinking at different speeds. Complete the metaphor with the fact that directionality is hard or often impractical so imagine your field of focus is slightly blurred, like looking through the viewfinder of a camera that isn't focused. All that other blue light is interference.

There are only 11 or so distinct "colors" in 802.11g and some of them are close to each other and quite hard to tell apart.
Back in 1995 when I was about 9 my parents paid a princely sum of Rs. 500 to enroll me for 4 classes of MSPaint spread out over 1 month at a local school that had secured two personal computers with color monitors back in India. So, I guess MSPaint was my gateway drug too :-)
[For comparison, I think a loaf of bread in India that time used to cost about Rs. 5.]
The Path Not Taken on Dialysis
> It is 2013 -- I can't even think of a good reason to jailbreak anymore. The low hanging fruit are gone and there's not much left to be OCD about

What about removing that bookshelf icon permanently? Customising the UI? These are all visual things people who subscribe to self-diagnised OCD obsess with.
Any thoughts on Vitamin D3 being re-classified (by some) as a hormone? http://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/09/donald-w-miller-jr-md/con...
A lean monitoring platform for Twitter
We built this tool to help you monitor your audiences on Twitter, either leads, influencers, partners, customers or even competitors for Brands, Businesses and Persons.
Why do caterpillars swarm? We built a game to find out
Absolutely. Further highlighted by the link at the end of the story to a page on Tatsuo Horiuchi, who creates his artwork with.....Excel!

http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel...
Node/v8 is not lightweight, it's hard to justify a ~30mb process just for monitoring. By all means, if you already have node in your system, use it; it's just kind of pointless if you have node only for forever.
Agreed.

This stinks to me of AT&T and their legal team trying to make them look like "the victim" - where in truth their subscribers are he aggrieved parties here and AT&T are as much in the wrong from he subscribers point of view as weev is.
Show HN: We are Aerospace Engineers and have just made our first android game
Take magnesium citrate instead of the cheapo magnesium oxide. The magnesium oxide is useless. The magnesium citrate works. It's suppose to de-calcify the pineal gland and allow proper melatonin production. You can google all of this since I'm just a stranger on the Net.
How can you violate rights of end users? Your open source code hasn't disappeared. End users can still use it, copy it; and share it.

If end users don't want to use proprietary extensions to open source code, they don't have to. The original code doesn't just disappear.
Would you like to send that extension to the google integration team? This is the 6th time they've asked me to merge my account with google plus.

I'm starting to think the only way to get them to stop is with violence. I wonder if those nag screens come up in a standardized way...
As the copyright holder of a piece of code, I can use the GPL to ensure my users won't ever have to wonder about the provenance of my bit of code, no matter where it ends up. When developers adopt the GPL, it should be a conscious decision to protect those rights for future users.

The goal isn't for code to be open source Just Because. Take a moment to consider the motivations behind the FSF's definition of free software, as linked above by drcube. RMS has been talking about this for 30 years.
Depends how you pronounce it. An comes before vowel sounds, like the E in "en", while A comes before consonant sounds, like the N in "no".

I'm curious, then, how you pronounce NSFW -- "nnnsfwa?"
It depends if one says An en-ess-eff-double-U ..., or A not-safe-for-work ..., or A nsfw ....
Users already have that right with liberally licensed open source code. If they don't want to use proprietary extensions for which they can't acquire the source, that's fine; nobody is forcing them to.
Two statements from Grandpa that made an impact on me:
"I got a lot of patience. That's what you really need anyway." and "When I worked I always had to do something to please the client. Now I can do whatever I want."
Why Package Signing is not the Holy Grail
agreed, but it might also be a testament to how good a tool ms paint is
Re-titling this submission really removed a lot of information from the title. I get the desire to discourage editorializing, but it'd be nice if, when the mods change a title, they ensure the new one is not worse than the old.
The use of "a" and "an" depend on the sound the word after it begins with. Since the "N" in NSFW is pronounced "en", it should be "an".

Source: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/540/01/
I say "not-safe-for-work".
Tell your friend to figure out how to bring his own internet into work. Turn his phone into a usb-hotspot and plug it into his work computer or bring in his own laptop / mini-pc (size of a raspberry pi, there are plenty of options) and plug it into the monitor and keyboard of his work computer.

One way or another, get access to the net and if he doesn't want to do something productive at least he can read Hacker News all day long. Just stay off facebook in case that CTO looks over his shoulder. That would be too easily recognized.
> Isn't JWZ mainly famous for Netscape (and later the DNA Lounge)?

Depends on when you were born.
I heard about that. I thought they died out years ago. I did not realize they are still alive.

It might also be your demeanor. People seem to know who to trust through the little things. Do you act differently than most of the guys you're around with? Less judgmental, more ears than mouth? People confided in personal stories, but nothing close to the 9/11 janitor staff. Ever heard of ABM?
You can remove the bookshelf icon in iOS 7. :)

Fiddling with the UI style is like going through all the various window managers and desktop environments for Linux with the significant difference that there's really no chance at any productivity wins whatsoever when it comes to the smartphone form factor.
"In case you ever thought writing, calling, or emailing your representatives was a waste of time, take it from Steve Hildebrand, Barack Obama's openly gay deputy national campaign director: "I don't think our voices are as powerful as they should be. I think too many people in the gay community do not push their elected officials as hard as they should. If you had 20 gay people together in a room and asked how many of them actually have reached out and either called, e-mailed or sent a letter to their member of Congress over the last two months, I would say the vast, vast majority of them will have done nothing. My suggestion is that people need to become strong activists, that we need to multiply by hundreds the number of activists we have in the gay community. We need more voices, we need louder voices, and we need to tell politicians at every level we're not willing to take their excuses anymore."

And in case you needed reason not to write, call, or email your representative: You will almost never be able to get her on the line. An office staffer will answer the phone (or sometimes just a voicemail box), sort the letters, and go through emails, responding with a form reply, if anything.

What those staffers will hand your legislator, likely, is a tally of how many notes and calls they received from X number of constituents on Y different issues. That summation, however, is what's powerful. In a legislator's very busy day, these briefs are easy to digest and send the most black-and-white picture of what his voters believe.

So yes, your letters and phone calls matter. In aggregate. JUST LIKE VOTES!"
The GA cores are meant to be linked together. According to the docs and videos, you use the special IDE to define blocks or grids of GA cores and have them working in tandem.

The GA's biggest weakness is probably the lack of software and libraries. On the other hand, you could essentially create software-configurable DSPs, or program the entire array to act as a single, traditional CPU core.
Sync Hacks: How To Deploy Web Projects
Convolving images on the fly would be one, the Zynq architecture allows for some pretty high bandwidth throughput. Xilinx keeps pushing it as a solution to 'smart' cameras (things that know what they are looking at by doing analysis on the background)
excellent overview of the whole thing : http://blog.anitian.com/cisco-sourcefire/
Yes, my numbers were off due to poor research.

In reality, the top end AMD 7970 has ~32 compute units, while ~$130 AMD 7770 has ~10 compute units. Each compute unit can has 4 SIMD units, each SIMD unit executes 16 single-point floating operations per clock, from a pool of 16 "hyperthread-like" work-items that are queued up. (Total of 64 FLOPs per clock)

But... that is a bit difficult to say, now isn't it :-p

In comparison, Parallela's $99 unit has 16 discrete compute units, and their (unmade) higher-end offering will have 64 compute units. Both of which will operate with 2W of power.

Its a difference of scale. GPUs focus more on SIMD instructions, because graphics are innately matrix-based operations that very easily translate into SIMD. But if you are going to be doing unique operations per core (ie: lots and lots of branching on a single work-item), then Paralella's approach would give better performance.

So... yes... I over-simplified earlier, and got a few numbers wrong. But the concept is the same. Epiphany has no SIMD units at all, and each core instead focuses entirely on single-threaded performance. (at best, 2 Floating Point operations per clock with the super-scalar architecture). This makes it slower in the strictest sense... but "more agile", and able to handle branches and conditionals better than the GPUs.

Also, remember that Epiphany works with only 2W of power... while a GPU like the AMD 7970 works with something like 300W of power. So of course, the 7970 is going to do more (especially with faster GDDR5 RAM and a PCIe x16 connection feeding it). So it isn't really a fair comparison there either.

Nonetheless, Epiphany does see a few situations where it might perform better than a classic CPU and better than a classic GPU. Its just a different software architecture, focusing on a different problem niche.
What you secure is the end user right to the source code of the _actual_ binary they recieve, which gives them the further rights to _examine_ and _modify_ said code and generate and _run_ a binary with their own modifications.

You know, those end user rights which GPL was created to preserve.
The problem is that criminals are free to harvest data thanks to insecure programming, while white-hat hackers are banned from discovering these vulnerabilities (hopefully) before they are exploited.
I remember 3d printing stuff happening at the MIT Media Lab in ~1997, and patents being the big block to anyone other than the professor and a couple companies actually caring about it (well, prices and that the vendor used patents to charge really absurd prices for everything). They wouldn't even license to other people from the same lab.
Not everything, but most of the important stuff was backed up I think. Probably lost a bunch of pictures though.
> you might think he'd have something to say about releasing code into the public domain

Author of the post here. I'm Austrian - the whole concept of public domain does not even exist in my legislation. I cannot legally waive copyright currently. The closest to putting code into the public domain is probably something like the WTFPL but I am perfectly fine with my stuff having a few more restrictions through the MIT/BSD to avoid license confusion.

> How is licensing your code under the copyright monopoly supposed to be "post copyright"?

It is not. However there is a certain trend ongoing that people wish the whole copyright system would be reformed and that would have more impact on Copyleft licenses than MIT/BSD.

Aside from all of that I don't want to make license decisions for other people. :-)
Semi-related, a simple porn site that pulls gifs from tumblr:

http://theworstdrug.com/
Treasure Data Partners With Sierra Ventures, Raises $5M in Series A Financing
Is there a list of emacs users who are famous for using emacs?
we've been discussing this a bit at Continuum, the motivation for me is that we're building some data viz stuff in the browser, and so access to some numerics in the browser would be quite nice. we could try numba -> llvm -> emcsripten, but then we might also just make a js backend to numba.
I read it as "Not safe for work". For other acronyms, I read them like they spell eg C-I-A or F-B-I. I always lose this fight because people can point to "official English usage" documentation. Its just that to my ears (and internal voice) saying "an N..." vs "a N..." sounds wrong. You're adding an extra "n" sound, so that when its spoken you say something like "aaaahhhnnnnnnnnn" with no break there's a loss of distinction in what's being said. Saying "A NSFW tag" where the letters are pronounced individually forces the distinction audibly.
You don't need the GPL for that; just provide the source code for your software. If users actually care about having the code, they can use your binary for which code exists.

If they don't care, they can use proprietary software, or proprietary extensions that make your software better.

Either way, the user has full control over their choice of software, and nobody's actions can make your original open source code disappear.

The GPL is really about enforcing your ideals onto other people's code if it happens to be reliant on yours. That's a legit quid pro quo for a license, but it has jackall to do with freedom or user rights.
Of course you have nothing to add. You haven't added a single thing to this entire thread. Best to avoid the question and glom on to something you perceive as offensive and white knight for those poor people whose tender feelings may be rustled by my brutish and ugly language. I shudder to think of the world thinking less of the character of my quasi anonymous hackernews account.
A question is - does Android need one? I don't think so. It's not a religion.
I should be asleep but this has caught my interest.

"These next series of posts chronicles the untold story of how one professor returning from one war decides to enlist Stanford University in waging the next one and by accident, laid the foundation for Silicon Valley, venture capital and entrepreneurship as we know it today."

http://steveblank.com/2009/08/03/the-secret-history-of-silic...
> I'm pretty sure that Stallman would love a post-copyright world, unless it led to a world of rented locked down single-purpose appliances run on gifted code - an outcome that MIT/BSD would be totally fine with.

He would not. Abolishing copyright does not imply that people are required to release their sourcecode.
Evolving the design practise in a startup – James Mansfield's 99designs story
Apache Open Office 4.0 Released
Greece Reinstates Forced HIV Testing | HIVPlusMag.com