skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just made Inkpad, my vector drawing app for the iPad, free software. I'm releasing it under the Mozilla Public License, v2.0. It requires iOS 7 and is currently "in review" at Apple.

I've spent the last few weeks updating it for iOS 7 and cleaning up the code for public release. There's a lot of code, however, so I'm sure there are still many untidy bits.

If you'd like to contribute, I'd appreciate bug fixes, new features, and localizations for your language of choice. Otherwise, I hope you can learn something from it, or find bits and pieces that are useful in your own apps.
Good work. Pretty cool site.

This is cool:
"Our long term goal is to build an open derivative platform that anyone can participate in. "

Not that I don't trust you guys. Is there a way that I can test the site?
> food and water regulation

Just wondering. Why do you think forcing companies into complying with some regulation is necessarily a good thing?

If the customers care about this kind of safety, the producers will voluntarily comply with some private standards and will pass some private certification to attract customers.

So that is definitely not a valid reason of where government is needed. It can be done without the govt and without coercion.

(I could expand on every point you consider to be a good reason for existence of the state if you wish.)
Good thing we are only going for a hundred million at the moment.
This assumes that it was printed with a high-dpi printer. From the reports I've read he intentionally chose a font that would be hard for a computer to read. There's also no evidence that he printed it on any special high-dpi printer, so the process almost certainly lost enough information as to make the printed text not-fully-recoverable.
More accurately it would be like the Manhattan Financial District Police vs the NYPD. The actual City of London is tiny.
There are a great number of non-trivial use cases for which Google Docs is inferior compared to Word.
Soon, Drones May Be Able to Make Lethal Decisions on Their Own
Earplugs are cheaper than $100.
> most benchmarks show Java web-servers (of non-static content) to outperform or match C and C++ servers (http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7...).

Umm, there are no C or C++ servers in that benchmark, except for one extremely slow one I've never heard of.

> and a high level of concurrency requires low contention, and low contention requires non-blocking data structures

That really does not follow.

Lock-free data structures are not about reducing contention, they are about eliminating blocking and improving performance when contention does occur. Contention occurs whenever multiple threads attempt to access the same resource, regardless of whether access to that resource is blocking or non-blocking. Lock-free data structures can still experience contention, and while they do not block, their performance does degrade under contention. Indeed later in your message you say that reference counting is a "huge contention point" -- refcounting a la C++'s shared_ptr is a lock-free algorithm.

So while lock-free algorithms don't affect the amount of contention in the system, they do exhibit better performance under high contention, for the (small) subset of data structures that can be made lock-free.

But this is only an issue when contention exists to begin with. Many highly parallel systems exhibit very low contention; for example, MapReduce. Even in systems with inherent contention, there are many strategies for reducing it, like partitioning and affinity schemes.

> nonblocking data structures require either a GC, or some other method of automatic memory reclamation that's extremely hard to achieve in C++ (or any other language, for that matter)

I'm not sure what is so hard about Hazard Pointers (http://www.research.ibm.com/people/m/michael/ieeetpds-2004.p...). Maged Michael is a smart guy who figured this stuff out 10 years ago.

But you don't even have to do it yourself. Non-blocking algorithms are extremely subtle by their nature (I hope you don't implement them yourself in Java; that would be a waste of effort). Just use an existing library like Thread Building Blocks, Grand Central Dispatch, etc. that are specifically designed to achieve maximum multi-threaded performance in C++.
Can anyone explain why Heroku had to enable WebSockets in the first place?
Then you can sell the unused packages of blades on Amazon.
> What happens when the nerd who realizes the absurd amount of money that they can make approaches it like a drug empire? Or rather, what happens when an engineer starts trying to engineer themselves an anonymous drug empire? Not a political experiment, but a true-blue drug cartel?

Drug cartels as currently realized have some serious downsides. Like physical safety. Or to put it another way, in exchange for crazy wealth, you've eroded the base of your Maslow pyramid and polluted virtually all of your interpersonal relationships.

SR sidestepped most of the physical jeopardy, but didn't manage to sidestep the legal jeopardy and the overhead of paranoia this entails.

If someone really smart goes about building the next SR, then it may involve a clever way to sidestep the legal jeopardy as well.
I moved to Seattle a little over a year ago and was pleased to find out about Amazon Fresh. It's a great service overall, and beats the pants off of FreshDirect in NYC (Though, I personally preferred yummy.com in Venice, CA, who were offering same-day delivery back in '06).

At any rate, I was truly sold on Amazon Fresh the day I started having some issues with my PC. I logged on in hope and ended up ordering a CPU and a Motherboard to be dropped off at my door with my milk and eggs before dawn the next day. Incredible.
Case Study: Analyzing Retail/e-Commerce 318x Faster on HAWQ +MADlib
Turntable Live: A new platform to support artists with Live interactive Shows
Why I Invest in Online-to-Offline Businesses
Interesting choice to use pastebin instead of the built in text submission.

Sometimes things just don't work out. It sounds like you had a good experience, but the end result wasn't what you'd hoped for. That happens.

Best of luck on whatever comes next.
All this stuff also applies if you don't want to use LXC, Docker, or any kind of container. You can put processes in control groups, and get all those metrics as well.

This is one of the reasons why OpenVZ was initially rejected from being included into the kernel: all the features (isolations and accounting) were mixed together, and the kernel maintainers wanted something that could be re-used in different scopes. It eventually drove the development of LXC, which is really two completely orthogonal feature sets: namespaces (to perform strict isolation) and control groups (to account and isolate resources).
>here are less than 8.000 people living in the City of London but more than 300.000 people work there

That's quite fascinating.
Some sort of verified caching protocol. Like mixing together the Wayback Machine and a notary.
As a physicist: There are lots of good reasons to go into physics. Doing it for the money probably isn't one of them.
We load a normal (non-retina) page the first time we see a visitor, and then we set a cookie if the devicePixelRatio is high. After that, pages are rendered with retina images directly in the src attributes.

Imperfect, but that seemed like our best compromise. I suppose we could also do this on the first page load, but that felt like diminishing returns.
One of the questions was: "You once called open source “brutal”. What did you mean by that?"

So not much editorializing.
Thanks!

Well the nature of Bitcoin is that all transaction are anonymous but transparent at the same time. For example, you could check out all the bets we've received and payouts we've made. e.g. http://blockchain.info/address/1DXa2tKkoKiR1p7nbt2xSCFdUxzGd...

I'd encourage you to place a small 0.01 to 0.02 BTC bet just to test out the site, and see that it'll update the pool/odds dynamically.
I don't know that one brand is that much better than another. But for something like a smoke detector, you'd probably feel better buying one of the big brands.

Just make sure they're lithium, non-rechargeable batteries, with an expiration date about 8 years in the future.
I seem to recall seeing my first lithium battery smoke detector back in the 90s. I certainly haven't bought a non-hardwired detector that wasn't one of the 10-year lithium battery type in the past decade. (You'd have to ask my electrician what he just installed in my renovated house, I haven't looked too closely at them yet.)

Haven't given me any problems. Haven't heard about them giving anyone else any problems. You seem to be dismissing something that already has a proven track record. Why is that?
Pushing code updates to device (Phonegap/Cordova) [video]
I think this article speaks more about the general public coming to terms with how crowd-funding works in general. Kickstarter has already made efforts to help people identify that funding a project != buying a product. http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store
Problem is your ORM might generate 300 fast queries to get 300 records where 1 would be faster than 300. using an ORM make things tricky since you basically surrender most of Db control .

Scaling databases is hard,developpers like ORMs , but ORMs make scaling databases even harder.
Nvidia’s program to get OEMs like Origin PC to dump AMD called “Tier 0″
Ok I am pushing it a bit with the 128GB SSD but if you stick a standard HDD in there they should be able to keep it at £500 or less quite easily. There are similar spec machines in the 15" range from Acer and others for that sort of price it would just mean scaling down to 13" :)
Data on your users.
I use Dorco too. I think I might give razors as Christmas presents. It's nice to not be nickled and dimed. I started with DSC, I like what they are doing, but I don't think they are building a very defensible business model.
13% of VC-backed startups exit for over $10M, 5% exit for over $50M, and 2% exit for over $100M, although there are many different studies with slightly different numbers:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-st...
Extend HipChat with Plivo’s Open Telephony API
Product is also a defined word [1]. I do understand what you're getting at but I disagree about the overlap you allude to. The ToS does delineate the difference between Services and hardware (Product). Failure in the firmware or software on the Product following an automatic update is clearly not an issue with Services (note deliberate capitalisation).

I'd say the terms are pretty 'clear' about the differences in Services/Product but, as with all ToS, you need a fairly high reading level and sufficient time to properly understand them. That's why I put clear in quote marks. You may be arguing that they could be expressed in more human terms but that doesn't make them any more specific.

[1] "Nest hardware products ('Products')"
In my case, I pay £3 a month to King of Shaves for their razor cartridge subscription. The main reason for doing this is because I have a tendency to forget to buy new razor cartridges. I'm more than happy to pay extra for the convenience of not having to remember.
That's not the point I was making. Let's say I put 1 million dollars into stock, and it grows to 1.1 million. At the same time I have a mortgage on a .7 million dollar house, with total payments of 1 million.

In this case I much prefer them to take the house, because it's significantly less valuable.

I wasn't suggesting any kind of money laundering.
I would also agree about limiting the complexity, but I do think there's something to be said for the benefits of having the additional technologies the Protect offers, coupled with the ability for the Nest team to update them ([1]) as improvements are found.

It seems to me that as usage increases, the Nest team can use that data to come up with additional features that could incrementally increase the safety of your home over time, however small that increase might be. The obvious caveat being that the updates need to be safe as well, but I think the long tail of a product like this could be increased safety over time, which to me sounds attractive.

Not to mention the benefits this adds if you already use a Nest. We have two in our home and the ability for it to know more about the temperature in different rooms is something I've wanted since we installed them.

[1] http://support.nest.com/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-install-a...
Unlikely. Attribution in this case is a very thorny issue. People have been discussing it for decades.

There may yet be an experimental prize, especially once the experimental work at LHC is complete. From a physics perspective, LHC has only just begun. For the Higgs alone, its spin has not yet been conclusively measured; it's an important parameter.
Nitpick time! It would be easy to shut this down by triangulating the source of these transmissions, and whacking them with a baseball bat.
This is only the content site, not the marketplace. See: "This project does not include any source code for the Federal Health Insurance Marketplace (the online systems located under www.healthcare.gov/marketplace."
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. Couldn't the experience gained from starting the first 5 result in a greater chance of "success"? If failure is defined as anything less than 1 billion, it is particularly meaningless as an indicator of future success.
Well, apart from that last fictional character who has arguably brought more harm than good through his ideas (and arguably through them being misinterpreted), I'm all down with that.
In that case an LEO would probably go undercover, spend time building credibility in the scene and eventually get someone to sign their key to be a part of the network as well. LEOs have infiltrated many groups and I don't see anything special that would prevent them from doing it again this time.
While I agree that there's a necessary cultural aspect here, it does not seem sufficient in this context. If the highest court in the land is citing a source in a decision, then that source needs to be available, by technological solution, if necessary, regardless of external, cultural forces.
Adzerk is a world-class team, between Nate, James, and the amazing people they've brought on board (it sounds like you met Patrick, too!). I wouldn't take any rejection personally; the opportunity to be interviewed there is validating enough.
A NodeJS API client for Intercom
Poorly designed smoke detectors are a real problem. They can be overly sensitive to some kinds of fire and completely miss out on other kinds. Tests are extremely irritating and difficult to perform, so people don't perform the tests. Low battery warnings are just irritating enough to let you know there's a problem, but not consistent enough to let you know where the problem is. (I once replaced every battery in every smoke detector in the house, twice in a week, before I finally figured out that the low battery chirp was coming from a long-forgotten CO detector behind the refrigerator.) And nuisance alarms can be very difficult to dismiss, so people disable the alarm entirely, and then have even more difficulty getting it back in place. These are real problems.

The Nest smoke detector ($129) seems to solve these problems. The thing is, if you've got these problems, you've probably spent less than $20 on smoke alarms in the last decade, either living with whatever came with your house/apartment, or buying the cheapest ($5-10) smoke detectors on the market. User-friendly smoke alarms are available for about $30, and they solve most of the same problems the Nest solves. They're not as slick, or network connected, but they'll do the job.
Each country has its own laws for this sort of thing, so it's hard to generalize.
Unfortunately the solution has been in vapourware hell since 1960 - http://xanadu.com/
Thank you, I will give that a try.
I really hate the peace-of-mind marketing gambits. They almost all revolve around creating a fear you didn't have before, and then proffering to save you from your newfound fear.
That wasn't the price point you were supposed to hit.
Show HN: I am sending you best designs of Dribbble every day/week
nb: the book is "How to get rich"
www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp/1591842719
If we know intelligence is largely genetic and differs across genetic phenotypes, it would tell us that public policies designed to alter group outcomes by altering the environment might be counterproductive.

To take an extreme example where genetics is the clear cause, cats are underrepresented in college. Because we know that cats are genetically less intelligent than humans, we can conclude that affirmative action/college for cats education programs/etc are a waste of money.

Another use would be knowing that if only 50% of the population has the intrinsic intelligence for college, college prep programs should not serve more than 50% of the population (modulo technical details).
Exactly. I do all of my development in vim on a vm hosted elsewhere. A chromebook seems like the perfect 'dumb-terminal' for what I need. I'm mostly concerned about the screen resolution, so I'm tempted by the pixel, but it's more than I want to spend.

Basically, I love the concept of a computer that I don't have to setup, worry about backing up, etc. By using a remote VM, I get access to a more powerful machine that is backed up daily, and I won't misplace. This is the main advantage of "the cloud" (or whatever you want to call it) to me.
Nice work and a wonderful contribution to the iOS community. Thanks Steve.
with the time that Perl 6 is taking, I think the may have ended before Perl 7
I very much expect this is the exception to the rule.
LOL. You would cringe at the amount of duct-taped infrastructure that plagues most large enterprises. Their viewpoint often is, "We have a firewall and antivirus so we should be good right"?
Culture isn't going to encourage people to host websites they're no longer interested in, where by "host websites" read "pay money for".

The only solution is some form of legalized archiving. We need the right to copy for archiving without profit, or something. Not sketching out a full, legal solution here, just pointing out that it has to include some form of right-to-archive.
It's a fallacy (though a very commonly held one) that if x% of people succeed at some task, the chances you will succeed are x%. That's only true for tasks where aptitude is not a factor.
Good people have bad days!
It all depends on the razor. For myself, I use a Merkur adjustable -- when my beard is really thick, I open up the gap a bit more. For normal shaves, I keep it tightened down. Also, it works best when you use a good shave soap and brush.

The main reason I started using a DE razor is I've found having a single blade is much more comfortable than the double / triple blades. And you can get just as good of a shave, but you need to take two - three passes (once with the grain, once cross grain, and a final one against the grain).
Thank you, some food for thought in there.

I have tried just relaxing and moving onto something else. I've spent most of the last couple days doing other things, particularly keeping up with work which I don't have much of a choice in. Sometimes I'm able to, other times it's hard to concentrate and focus when I'm worried about the loss of so much.

I fear that if I keep trying now I might burn in a false memory, but OTOH if I wait a while without trying it might be totally gone.
I personally couldn't bring myself to switch to a Chromebook. My personal time on the computer constitutes ~25% coding and ~75% in the browser. If I did not code, ever, then I would probably invest in a Chromebook. Since I do, I'd prefer to have a Macbook Air or a similar machine.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, spends all of her time in the browser. All she does on the computer is write her papers, surfs the web and check her email/calendar. She could save nearly $700 by purchasing a Chromebook versus the 11" Macbook Air. The Chromebook fills a growing niche, the users who need more than a tablet, but less than a fully-blown desktop machine.
I've just never had a moment where I felt it was a particular hassle to buy razor blades. You're at the grocery store anyway, you buy a box of blades, zero thought required. If you're worried about running out, buy three. Or if you're picky about your shave, order in bulk online and you're set for years with blades that are better quality for less money than the ones DSC sells you.

If the pitch were that DSC blades were dramatically better than the ones I'm buying now, that might be interesting -- it'd save me the time of looking for a better blade. But even DSC doesn't claim their blades are better, except for silly marketing copy like "this blade comes from the future and lives in outer space," which is more about setting an irreverent tone than about actually arguing with a straight face that they're better than the competition.
Stormpath & Python: Simple User Management for Web Apps
If you asked the neighbors who might die in the fire stared in your place or the fire brigade who would have to run into your burning domicile to save you, the equation might change.

On the anniversary of the Chicago Fire, it might help to keep in mind that your smoke detector isn't just to keep you from dying a horrible death, but others as well.
It seems to me that the claim he makes re $73k per year is misinterpreting the study he is basing it on.

His claim: "Even if you do raise money and sell a company or take it public, your median time to doing that is probably 49 months. Assuming there are three founders, your median expected payoff would be $300,000 each — that’s the equivalent of $73,000 a year."

Based upon his Stanford talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2sj-U2QSHs at approx. 27:15), these calculations are based upon the paper "The Incentives To Start New Companies: Evidence From Venture Capital" by Robert E. Hall and Susan E. Woodward (http://www.nber.org/papers/w13056).

From Pg. 2 of the Hall/Woodward paper: "Our most important ﬁnding is that the reward to the entrepreneurs who provide the ideas and long hours of hard work in these startups is remarkably small, once risk is taken into consideration. The contract between venture investors and entrepreneurs imposes the burden of the idiosyncratic risk of a startup on its entrepreneurs. Far from shifting the risk toward the diversiﬁed investors, the contract exacerbates the risk the entrepreneurs face. Although the average ultimate cash reward to the entrepreneurs of a company that succeeds in landing venture capital is $9 million for the group, most of this expected value comes from the small probability of a great success. With a coeﬃcient of relative risk aversion of 2, the entrepreneurs would sell their holding as of the time they receive venture funding for about $900,000 to avoid the undiversiﬁed risk of their claim on the company.

It seems to me that this $900k figure (which is the basis for the $73k per year figure) is based upon a scenario where the entrepreneurs sell "as of the time they receive venture funding" and not a scenario where "you do raise money and sell a company or take it public." Isn't the $900k figure referring to a risk-adjusted founder sale a much earlier stage in the process?

Also, from page Pg. 20 of the Hall/Woodward paper: "The median time from ﬁrst venture funding to exit in our data is 49 months. We do not have data on the typical number of entrepreneur-founding shareholders, but we believe that three is probably representative. The return based on the $900,000 ﬁgure is a little over $6,000 per entrepreneur-month. The extreme idiosyncratic risk of venture-backed entrepreneurship and the inability of the venture contract to insure entrepreneurs against the risk result in a tiny incentive facing a prospective entrepreneur."