skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forgive me, I did not meant to imply that "geneticists" as a group do it solely for money... that quip was aimed at Monsanto and typical public policy.

As concerns "necessary within the design" I would argue that you do. I am trying to say that as scientists, we like to say, "evolution has taken us [this far] (whatever [this far] is)". But we don't say, "How far could evolution have taken us?" How broad is the existing code base? Is it individual code bases branching into species, or is it all interleaved in some more subtle way?

I tend to believe it is the latter, and the evolution has taken us much farther than we realize.

This is why I believe our current handling of genetic modification is extremely bad practice and can (?) result in a "genetic seg-fault".
What is Google PageRank?  Why is it important?
Their not going to ban Chrome, they will just wait 6 months to approve every update in the app store.

Like what they did with Google Now for iOS (the Siri competitor): http://www.geek.com/apple/google-now-for-ios-is-ready-but-ap...

They have always been good at sneaky stuff, like making iTunes slow for Windows... Then it's Windows fault :-) http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/05/15/0126252/itunes-stil...

And using an older webkit if a website is launched from the homescreen, so people would prefer native apps instead of websites. http://www.macrumors.com/2011/03/15/performance-of-web-apps-...

It's all about the experience of the user and apple knows that. In all the above stories, it's about bringing a bad experience to the end user and frustrating them, if they aren't doing it the "apple way".

Or just censoring it, if they have to..

I probably had one of the first iPhones and iPod's and as soon as i realized at what sort of company i gave money to.

I switched to Google. Never had any regret.
Becoming remote
Many principles are not about "drawing a line in the sand" because they are focused on consequences.
I also think in this case the simpler the better. GitHub pages is pretty nice solution. +100 to Google Docs too!
Better link - download a VM with it:

http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads

They just updated to include IE11 preview
I really don't see a point comparing apples and oranges. Ubuntu and Android both have their contributions. I am not qualified enough to comment on the OS X part though.
Knuth's Algorithm X
Does your compiler perform any transformations at all? I imagine it can run out of memory pretty quickly if you're performing multiple transformations in succession on large code base, unless you recycle some of those used memory.

Granted...since you explicitly stated that your compiler focused on compile speed, I guess optimized code generation isn't your main concern, since the two are more or less mutually exclusive.
Besides, she can get the content of the talk at home anyway, over beer.
Which is the closed source code that Canonical is failing to contribute back to the community?
A simple region allocator could do that and then you just pay for one free() at the end of the unit test.
great insights, thanks for sharing!
What. Choosing a framework/library because it has a nice website is a bit... Superficial.
You really seem to be keen on not getting it.

What you are saying essentially boils down to "Don't waste your time with PGP because they could just stick you in a concentration camp." Being stuck in a concentration camp is a problem that needs a political solution (or in that particular extreme case, a violent solution...), so strive for one. Nobody is suggesting that everyone abstain from finding political solutions to political problems.

All the problems you seem to have with technical solutions are things that can be solved with political solutions. If you are advocating the possibility and pursuit of political solutions, as you seem to be doing, then why do you think the problems with technical solutions insurmountable?

Here is my proposal: Everybody use cryptography everywhere, to the full extent that we can manage. We then find political solutions to the political or physical threats to cryptography. If they try to ban cryptography, we fight back politically. If they start beating people with wrenches, we fight back politically. If they try to throw us in camps, we fight back politically (...and violently...).

There is absolutely no reason not to adopt technological solutions where they exist.
You're disappointed that a really informative answer has not been closed because of some subtext you've read into it that may or may not actually be there? That doesn't seem like a very productive attitude to me.
The progressivism and idealism is gone

Well yeah, because like most political movements they're subverted as vehicles for power and the original motivation for their existence is just a loose excuse to gain more power. The result ends up being enormous amounts of money going in to feed thousands of regulations and government employees that really only pay lip service to the original intent of the movement or organization.

It's the reason why my default position with any government proposal is: scale it back, refactor what you already have, make due with less money, less laws, and less bureaucrats.
Many IC manufacturers treat their "API" (hardware registers) as proprietary IP, require an NDA from the driver developers before releasing the development guide, and require an agreement not to publish the driver.

I'm mostly referring to the smaller support chips here. Things like I2C->I2S bridges and ADCs and other crummy little parts that every board needs, and that need small drivers. The big ones, though, would be WiFi, Bluetooth, and cell radio chips. They can be very strict.

Even if Ubuntu had the time and money, they might not have the rights.
I've never read this book but of course now I have to.

I'll suggest reading Henry Petroski's stuff, too. "The Evolution of Useful Things", "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance", and "To Engineer is Human" all make the case that the design of things around us are shaped less by insight and more by evolution, incrementally building on the mistakes of the past.

If "The Design of Everyday Things" is half as interesting as Petroski's books, I can't wait to read it.
If Ubuntu Crowdfunding Experiment Works, Backers May Vote Model Specs
I get the feeling Microsoft has stopped trying impress power users and developers. Their market is direct to consumer, which is something they don't seem to be very good at.
I'm really curious why the article states that. So many questions. Do you not have a 65" monitor or is it just not in the living room?
Replicant isn't doing the same thing as Ubuntu Edge at all. Is this just a place to promote any project now?
I'm tired of Micro$oft's shenanigans and the IE 6/7/8/9 saga I still endure today. Never again.
thanks. we'll look in to it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth's_Algorithm_X
I hope I'm not embarrassing myself here, but, does this help? https://www.usvotefoundation.org/state-elections/state-elect...
Almost... and it's still in beta. Which means theyll fall behind again as soon as the next Chrome release comes out.
I have great sympathy and admiration for GNU GPL and the FSF. It's so unusual and refreshing to see clear politics in an industry that tries to shy away from it.

This is an interesting piece about how Tim O'Reilly tried, and succeeded, to de-politicize free software, and make it "business friendly": http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

The OSI's own account gives O'Reilly a far smaller role than the Baffler piece:

* http://opensource.org/history

* http://opensource.org/faq#free-software

* http://web.archive.org/web/19981206185148/http://www.opensou...
The strategy isn't about winning. It's about taking people to court that can't afford it. They can lose a case but if the farmer lost the property over legal fees, that's a win. Swoop in and buy it cheap, sell it to someone at profit to farm with their products with tighter contracts to boot.
That looks like a qt-kde theme problem.
Again, so the only measure you would count is lines of code? That is it, pure and simple?

Relevance doesn't count? A reason for being doesn't matter? A project existing in a vacuum is just as good as a project with millions of users?

TBH, you sound more like an Ubuntu hater than someone who wants to reason rationally.
Google removed the Stop Download command from the context-menu of YouTube videos
The worst CNN article in a long time
That analogy is completely invalid. It was a trading platform. How do you propose they trade bitcoins without those bitcoins being accessible by the server?
That doesn't mean it's not worth mentioning. Just because you think most people will know something doesn't mean that's true, and I feel as though it's incredibly relevant to bring it up along side this discussion.
How To Not Care What Other People Think Of You
This is a huge claim. If you are going to claim that white-collar convictions fall disproportionately on Indians you are going to have to provide data that give evidence of that claim.
>targeting designers no less! //

They're not targeting anyone, they're presenting their software and letting you use it under a free-libre & free-gratis license. In many ways it doesn't matter if you chose it or not. It's not being created in order to develop a need in you it's created to meet a need the creators have.

Inkscape is functional. Of course there's no problem with the website being worked on and perhaps made to answer questions one has more easily. But I wouldn't really want to divert resources towards marketing it and away from making it more usable and functional.

Maybe I've misunderstood the economics of FOSS but that's how I see it.
I'm trying to recall what innovations Facebook has introduced since the IPO and can't think of anything except a failing skin for Androind. What am I missing?
Yup. There's a bunch of impact funds that do this kind of investment and measure themselves on metrics other than IRR. eg. Khosla Impact, Acumen, etc etc.
Would you expect the same labeling be placed on all varieties obtained by induced random mutations?

Or even better would you require all food items to have their genes completely sequenced? Have them certified by independent organizations that the sequences are identical to what you had 5 years ago? Have it done on all apples for example, as it is possible that one particular flower suffered a mutation thanks to random cosmic rays?

Would expect not. The very act of labeling suggests the produce to be inferior. Instead of choice it merely perpetuates the unscientific view.
Edit Distance Problem
Congratulations on this great news, I think what you're doing is really valuable.

Can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by this:

"Also, most startups don't open source their core business code. Some do, and I think it makes sense for them. I don't think it makes sense for us though."

My understanding is that normally as a business the considerations here would be competitive, right? But that doesn't apply in the context of non-profits. If someone else came in and used your "core business code" to make something which was then helpful to other people, that would be a good thing, right?

Likewise, your statement about the app being specific to you and not useful to others makes sense within the normal parameters of a business considering open source. But I think the idea is not that your code would be a self-sustaining open source project because it's especially useful as code, but rather that people (for example here) would be willing to help you do your work for free because they support the mission of your organization. A sort of "in-kind" donation of their time and energy and expertise, right?

I definitely think that between your admirable mission and the prestige of your network you could certainly be getting lots of free help and resources beyond just cash donations. If you could develop a workflow (via open source or some other mechanism) to take advantage of volunteer engineer labor, you could presumably pursue whatever software goals you have radically faster, I would think.
I've purchased something like 20 or 30 credits on peepcode over the years and I really like the model of buying, downloading and "owning" the videos. I'm not a fan of web-only subscription models.

I've always loved PeepCode's focus on design and I hope that Geoffrey brings some of that influence to PluralSight. From the little bit of poking around on their website that I've done, I think they could really benefit from this. What they have feels very "clipart" influenced with little style.
Looks like a bog standard CMS deployment.
Yeah... I was not aware of this. Another food source I will have to investigate. Chickens, I have found, love rice.
I was thinking about this, and was wondering if anyone on here who is a financial nerd can comment. Is market cap really a good way to measure the value of a company? My understanding is that market cap is (spot price * outstanding shares). The problem is that the spot price is representative only of what a single pair of investors believe their shares are worth.

It seems like a better valuation would be something like, "How much would you have to spend to buy the company." Which at any given instant in time is much higher than the spot price-share product, and also probably fluctuates much more slowly.
Sleepwalking into Censorship
Fundraising program for Replicant, the fully free Android-based mobile OS
Ubuntu One server software is closed source. The code which integrates with Amazon ads is closed source. Launchpad was closed source for some time. The Ubuntu sign-on service is closed source.

I wasn't only referring to their proprietary work - their own code is often extremely difficult to consume by outsiders.
I started to use DO but they use a funky custom kernel setup where you can't use your own kernel - so you're at the whim of DO for security updates and such. However it's hard to beat them on price/value.
For a $1/day you could never have a mosquito bite again
You can solve anything with money, but Canonical doesn't have enough.
It's subtle. I think it's a revolutionary UX. Think of how you watch your big screen. You either channel surf or fumble through a crappy Netflix UI. Opening up your method of discovery is a big deal. Being able to push to a bigger screen using established habits (that smartphone attached to your hand) will make standard TV seem quaint.
If you could develop that thesis I'd give it a hearing, but ... well, perhaps start with proposing a mechanism that "interleaves it in some subtle way" or some observations that suggest that's the case.

Me, I hope we're a lot more "modular" and that "genetic seg-faults" will continue to be by definition rare ("by definition" unless they happen after an organism breeds and is otherwise not responsible for its children). What makes you think evolution would go in the non-robust path you think might be the case?
The "line type" label and the value are not baseline aligned either.
Yes, unless IE switches to a fast release schedule like Chrome and Firefox, it is at risk of being quickly outclassed by them once more.
Reddit's new multireddit functionality is now live
Btw. We should just edit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple and update it.

It's probably the best way to do anything against (cr)Apple...
Agreed.

Hardware costs a ludicrous amount of money to design. It costs a ludicrous mount of money for each prototype run, of which there will be several. It costs a ludicrous amount of money to have PCBs fabbed. It costs a ludicrous amount of money to design a nice case that everything fits into and that doesn't destroy the radio signal. It costs a ludicrous amount of money to hire RF engineers for anything. It costs an above-average amount of money (for HN) to develop software and firmware for hardware. It costs a ludicrous amount of money to package for consumers, to store, and to ship. It cost a ludicrous amount of money to convince stores to carry your product. It costs a ludicrous amount of money to support the product and the customer after it has shipped to market.

I would be shocked if $32 million covered the development and first run of product (assuming first run >100,000 units).
Ways That Programming is Like Weight Lifting
Because Ubuntu is trying to go mainstream, do something
other free desktops/phones have not been able to do.

No, other distributions have either resisted proprietary code, read Fedora, or have decided to let user choose, lets say Arch Linux.

There is a HUGE benefit to open source and Linux if Ubuntu succeeds.

Ubuntu rarely develops for larger community.

That being said. Since we don't object to ChromeOS or Android, there is no reason to blame Ubuntu. But Canonical is an enterprise with its own goals which definitely is not a truly open-source-community-project.
Perhaps its a semantic thing, but isn't questioning everything instead of being a true believer the basis of science?
>Facebook has torched tens of billions of dollars of shareholder equity since it first went public.

Not necessarily. Price movements in a stock are not necessarily caused by bad decisions of the company. Stock prices can change for many reasons outside of the company's control. By the article's logic, the Facebook torched a lot of shareholder value on the day of its IPO. But that day, Facebook made very few decisions, despite its price falling drastically. Rather than Facebook's bad decisions, I'd argue that investor uncertainty was the driver of the price movements.
It really does bother me that few people these days are concerned about actual sound quality. At my local Best Buy, there is an entire isle dedicated to headphones with about a dozen on display and connected to a central music box. This music box makes even the best headphones sound absolutely terrible--and all of the headphones are 'trendy' styles such as Beats or Sol which have over-exaggerated highs and lows that make the listener think they're awesome.

If you ever wander in to a BB store with these boxes, go ahead and plug a set of headphones into your cell phone and play a song--you'll be amazed at the difference. They literally do not care how the headphones sound to the buyer, just how they look and how much they cost.

In the back of the store, by the musical instruments and "DJ" stuff there is another headphones display. This display has gear from companies that actually make a good product for music. Sennheiser, Pioneer, the good stuff. This section is completely abandoned and nobody cares about this stuff, which is why the section has been shrinking to make more room for Monster HDMI cables and the like.

Best Buy also has a car stereo section, which is unsurprisingly less than fantastic as well. They carry speakers that are designed with loudness in mind far before sound quality--but they'll tell you they sound great, and most consumers will listen to the expert on stereos in the blue shirt and khakis. Head units are toted as having apps and dvd players and all the gadgets, but no mention of sound quality is ever made with the units. Sure they can read the box and tell you it has a 24-bit burr-brown DAC, but they couldn't tell you what it means.

Disclaimer: I am considering Best Buy to be sort of an 'average' for consumer electronics due to its dominance on the market and with that I am only using my local store as an example. YMMV
I'm a programmer, yes, I use LOC to quantify their worth. Especially when they are touted as a hero of Open Source, when so far their actions are of a typical corporate leech.
It's also different from the Scrolls situation in that Goodsmiths isn't trying to claim the right to use the Minecraft trademark. They'd clearly prefer to put the crafters in touch with Mojang and set up some license deals to make things right, rather than doing a complete takedown. But if the two sides can't reach an agreement, they've already said they're going to deactivate the listings.

The way I see it, the challenge is harmless fun with no actual legal implications. Notch should totally take them up on it.
Compile speed issues are for non-optimized builds. Optimized builds take significantly longer, as those are for maximum generated code speed rather than compile speed.
> Where is Apple's rejection letter?

Be careful assuming everything in a rejection takes place in the official rejection letter. It can also take place over the phone as well, where nothing gets written down.
I know a conference that refused to let a pregnant woman in.
There's literally no way for you to prove a negative -- that you aren't collaborating with the NSA. Sorry.
> The price is nothing, I still ask myself if it's rentable because "it's an Atom" and changes the power bill, or this is more a unprofitable product to attract you to other products.

pretty sure it's the latter. Even if there is minimal human effort on part of OVH involved that probably leads to unprofitability. For example a RAM stick breaks and has to be switched out, I guess it takes a systems engineer in the NOC at least 30 minutes to locate the server, disconnect it, replace the stick, mount the server again, make sure it is running fine. Assuming that employee get's paid 20 GBP, that is a 10 pound cost plus replacement RAM which is...I dont know...let's say 20 GBP, recouping that kind of money would take about a year (I know very dirty napkin calculations).

I bet they have a handful of these gimmick servers and they are going to sell out very soon. Comparable to the Raspberry Pi colocation edis offers ( http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/ ) try to order and you will find that they are sold out.
RocketCloud - Like DigitalOcean but outside US legal jurisdiction
We are fans of what DigitalOcean have accomplished. They have shown that SSD clouds, with their huge advantages in speed and power usage, are the future. But with recent US Gov activities, US cloud providers are no longer viable for non-US companies or citizens.

The recent revelations do not just apply to data stored inside US borders. For example, if your data is on a US-owned company cloud in any country in the world it can be accessed by US authorities without the knowledge of clients; a fact openly admitted by the US Government.

DigitalOcean demonstrated there is demand for a more modern approach to cloud provision, and with no legacy baggage to slow them down they were able to offer this at a lower cost than rivals. They recognized that many bigger, more-established rivals were so heavily invested in legacy technology they had fallen behind.

In response to these developments a few of us got together to consider an alternative (we are devs and system admins). Our own clients were concerned about developments in the US, prompting us to take action.

We recognized the need for a DigitalOcean, but also realized it is no longer viable for our own clients now or in the future.

This prompted us to put our experience to good use and we created RocketCloud: It is unashamedly like DigitalOcean, but based in London and completely outside US legal jurisdiction. We are currently developing the backend for the system, which should be finished shortly. If we get enough people interested in the beta we will scale it up and offer large-scale SSD hosting like DigitalOcean – with no US Government access.

Perhaps you are like us. Perhaps you are a developer looking for somewhere to host your application, or you just can't host anything with a US cloud provider any more either.

What do you think? Is this something you would be interested in? If so, sign up for the beta and we will give you a shout when it's ready.

https://rocketcloud.me
>Aside from higher expenses and a lower operating margin, it’s hard to find a metric by which Facebook is worse off than it was a year ago. And yet we the market public value the firm at $24 billion less than on its first day.

How is this surprising? Growth is always priced in. Stock prices move because expectations change, not because a company changes.