skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a very strong argument here but the claim appears to rely on the author's expansive definition of "smartphone", in which he encompasses app stores, cloud servers and networks. Perhaps he has a point about the difficulty of investment in taking on these well established players in the field, but I don't feel it's entirely accurate to claim that smartphones themselves cannot be successful.

A new phone with a bare-bones linux-like OS designed to piggy-back on existing networks may have a small place in the market, and others like Jolla that seek to grow toward something big may pick up fractions of a percent as well. Even surviving a decade with a low, but consistent, share is a success (e.g., Apple in the 80s).

Finally, there's the novelty and growth of industry to consider. The current big players in the smartphone market are already scrambling to address the emerging wearable revolution. The "internet of things" is right on the horizon as well and there's no telling where the chips may land. To be fair, the author did mention innovation as a key to potential success. We should consider the grander implications of a constantly evolving business model and offering in that sentiment, though. It's not just a matter of making a neat new feature, but of the entire game changing every 5 years.

While the author makes plenty of good and valid points, I don't think the outlook need be so bleak.
It is the second time in this discussion that you mention the downsides of using FreeBSD, and you present it as an historical choice. Do you have upsides as well? What were the criteria that made you pick, 10 years ago, FreeBSD over another OS?
> The internal audit team's review determined that Upshot's mobile app was created during the hackathon and met these criteria.

Let's be honest. Upshot is pretty solid before the hackathon. It was functioning to some great degree. How many days did the event last? Three days? A mobile app for this hackathon is small. What innovations / cool business logic did they develop in the mobile app? I probably will see none. Pretty UI... maybe that was the winning shot. I am sure.

The fact that Upshot guys haven't spoken is also ridiculous. Or have they?
One of the problems with this approach, that I'm not seeing anyone mention in a cursory scan of the existing comments, is that it would make the front page different for different people. Other sites work that way (notably Reddit), but AFAIK, the HN front page is the same for everyone who views it at the same time (possibly modulo showdead; does that affect posts?). This is a useful property to preserve, and one that this proposal explicitly breaks.
To me, the most interesting part of this is buried. Whereas previously only the five finalists were showcased, now many (all?) of the losing entries are now published.

http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/submissions
I don't study every press release by police but it strikes me as an unusual statement.

It's obvious enough why this would be the case. Keep in mind, in America police departments will be financially liable to the dead person's family if they admit an error, anything they say can be used against them in court, and shootings like this happen a lot.
I guess the point is that it will become like the PC desktop ecosystem. There are new OSes all the time, but which OS broke the 4% mark in the last 20 years? Perhaps OS X, but Mac sales are dropping. The PC market is being disrupted not by another PC but by a change in paradigm to mobile. The mobile market is fast approaching a place where it takes risking billions just to start competing.
So I should take financial advice from a random anonymous internet dude who doesn't understand quoting and can't spell "ouch"?

I said, "can think of", because you can think of it that way for the purposes of the point. I needed an easy phrase to convey the short-term twitching of the market. If you have a better phrase that sets up Taleb's point, go ahead and suggest it.
"The internal audit team's review determined that Upshot's mobile app was created during the hackathon and met these criteria."

They just took an existing application made during a nine year tenure at Salesforce, threw it into a generic responsive / mobile app framework during the "hackathon" and made a cool mil..

It helps if Salesforce is already an investor in your product, of course.

And this doesn't address why most apps that were submitted weren't even ran. It's not like 149 apps are all that hard to at least take a look at.
I have never seen the police in the US apologize for anything.
They're not hit pieces, they're educated responses to a marketing announcement.
Apparently a cat was also involved..

"10 people and one cat was provided with trauma counseling"
http://www.visir.is/arbaejarkirkja-veitti-10-manns-og-ketti-...
EFL 1.8 (Enlightenment Foundation Library) is out
You are right, of course. Current interfaces are not well suited to high-DPI large form-factor displays. But if we wait for interfaces to happen first, I worry the wait will be prolonged.

Plus, if you gave me a 65" 400 DPI screen today, I would drop everything and immediately put it to use. I would set it up on a drafting-style standing desk and would enjoy extremely high-clarity text throughout my desktop user interface. I would hand-craft the desk myself and I'd shower you with thanks and praise.

The point being, I want to be an early adopter and hopefully there would be enough of us for the UI designers to eventually target our demographic. Right now, so much UI R&D is on small form-factor that it's a little heart-breaking to someone like myself who spends 8 hours a day working at a desktop. Science-fiction movies routinely taunt us with immersive desktop computing and we're just barely moving the needle in that direction.
the markup before <body> is already 1,836 bytes

All those bytes are justified because they are rendered on the screen provide direct utility to the user. The extra 50 bytes does nothing but slow the page down.

there would be a lot more potential in the source by shortening CSS class names etc

There is no either/or here: this can and should be done as well.
I beg to differ: $61 billion gross for 2012 - http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jeff-bezos-believes-aws-cou...
I've used Balsamiq Mockups in the past and it's been absolutely swell.
It's not that shoot to kill is the only option, ever.

It's that center-body-mass is the largest target to shoot at, and therefore the safest to shoot at in a public area. Safest for everyone except the one being shot at, that is.

God, does that make sense? It's hard to explain that. You want the largest part of the bad-guy to catch the bullet, to make sure the people around him don't. Therefore, shooting at the (relatively) stable center of his chest is a heck of a lot easier and safer than shooting at his moving arms or legs.
It's a Terible Life
Here's one example of many I could pick:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeNszro5dQ8

I guess by your estimation this is a tiny audience with no musical composition involved.

Are you seriously declaring that your own work is more compositionally developed than any of the 100s of live coders working over the past ten years? While clearly knowing little about the movement or the events we put on?

And do you think the manifesto is particularly serious? Have you read it?
* A few new Android manufacturers may join the game*

For anyone interested, Fairphone are doing so pretty successfully right now.

http://fairphone.com/
Why People Don't Learn To Code (And Why You Shouldn't Make Them)
The way I read this article, It is less about building new smartphone but more about the next technology shift that is going to change the direction. Basically, as oft repeated Ford statement goes, 'if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horse'. So, at this point, smartphone business is settling into a faster horse business.

So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPhone but something utterly different. Neural implants, anyone?
The cheap korean monitors can almost do it, but you run into ATI's DVI cap.
I think the real problem is that most of us come to the site too often... take a stretch and go outside :)
Well they fail to prevent falling on you very well as the link shows. A lot of the accidents are from spurious behaviour and unrecoverable flight profiles.
> In the US, Walmarts do not seem to exist inside of cities

Walmarts don't exist in places where property values are high, as a means of keeping costs low.

> If Walmarts were common in cities, then urban food deserts would not be a thing in the US

Well, no; even if they had no effect on other existing businesses, regular Walmarts would have no effect on food deserts, as they don't carry fresh food. Super Walmarts do, but those are even bigger stores, and even less likely anywhere with significant real estate costs.

But, even if we consider big box food store could well -- through competitive pressure on already marginal smaller stores -- increase the average distance/time for urban residents to reach affordable, healthy food.
It's surprisingly good, overall, but there are some glaring omissions. For instance:

sudo apt-get install tree
Only sudo is explained. I understand apt-get is distro-specific, but it's widespread enough to deserve a special case. Interestingly, apt-get install tree (without sudo) works better.

Common, widely known system configuration files like /etc/issue, /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, /etc/fstab ... deserve to be special-cased, too. Many of them actually have their man pages, so it's possible to script.
I don't recall any other incident. By the way the only armed police force in Iceland are the special forces. Regular police officers and agents are not armed.
Salesforce Declares Tie, Gives Two Finalists $1M Each
Well, I don't own BTC myself, am not in the BTC community and I'm not NSA even :) But judging by what the internets says.
Yeah, this seems to be the the case in the BTC community to monitor and track suspicious activity. I've also seen a 00666 BTC transaction being used as a community effort to mark the blockchain. The number in the amount should need no further elaboration for the intention.
That
Before you extrapolate anything about Iceland to a larger country (say, the United States), remember how tiny it is.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+population+of+icela...
FWIW (not much), document.lastModified gives 11/11/2003 22:43:30.
Are alternative news sites better? If so, how? If not, why not?

Discounting the questionable journalistic ethics of the 24-hr news cycle media, I am hard pressed to consider the other major news outlets to be as equally questionable.

CBS screwed up recently with the embassy bombing recently. That in of itself is bad. But the fact they admitted fault I think speaks volumes for their efforts.
This is a strawman. This isn't a useful case for lists.

Since he needs to scan the list to find the position to add/remove to/from.

If he used an intrusive list, the removal from a vector-with-list would be faster in a list already for relatively small N's.

What I learn from this video is that Stroustroup is also misguided about linked lists. He thinks you always need to do a linear search to do useful operations. The whole point of lists is the O(1) operations, not O(N) operations.

Indeed, std::list is the culprit here: "We shape our tools and then our tools shape us". std::list users become unaware that list operations are usable on elements without a linear search first.
"Long period of time" and "50 years" aren't really the same thing in my book. You can get lucky for awhile. At some point it stops being luck. I'm not sure where that line is, but I am confident though that Buffett has crossed it. I'd be willing to bet you'd have a hard time finding anybody credible that would say what Buffett has done is just luck, which is exactly what you are claiming. Once we accept that he isn't just a lucky guy, EMH is disproven.
UK Royal Mint Plans To Issue Gold-Backed Physical Bitcoins
The kernel could start 100 processes in the time it takes me to type those extra four characters. We won't run out of processes. I did a test, finding .txt files in /usr/share, it took about .25 seconds longer with du and grep, which seems like less than it takes to type 4 more characters.
It's a nice toy, but seems to break down with more interesting stuff. For instance:

for FILE in `ls`; do echo $FILE ; done

http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=+for+FILE+in+%60ls%60%3B...

That's a simpler equivalent of something I cooked up which probably didn't belong in a single line of shell anyhow.
Trulia - San Francisco, Full time, (H1B transfers)

Innovation happens every day. http://youtu.be/YJHsr2ep1cw.

Trulia is one of the largest real estate search platforms in the United States with over 40 million visitors across our platform every month. We're solving interesting problems and building cool things in nearly every software engineering discipline.

We've got lots of interesting and large scale projects to tackle including:
Building our next generation of APIs (for both internal and external consumption)
Creating new mapping and data visualization experiences
Improving our web experience using a JS MVC framework and our new OOCSS library (similar to Bootstrap)
Innovating on our top ranked mobile apps
Diving deep into the terabytes of housing and user data we have in order to tailor custom experiences for our users
Our core web stack is a pretty traditional LAMP stack, but we use a ton of other technologies as well including: Python, Java, Hadoop, Solr/Lucene, CouchDB, Backbone (though we are currently exploring other JS frameworks as well), d3.js, Sass, Git, and a whole lot more.

I've been an engineer at Trulia for over four years now and can honestly say that it is a really fun company to work for. There's a great culture of letting people run with projects that really interest them and drive the entire engineering organization forward.

The perks are fantastic:
great health benefits
unlimited vacation
monthly transportation and "well being" allowances,
lots of happy hours
kegs on two out of three floors
stocked kitchens,
quarterly hack weeks to name a few

You can checkout all the open positions and apply here - http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=qzZ9Vfwm&...

If you have any questions or want to chat you can also email me at tim[at]trulia.com
No. Police aren't Annie Oakley. Chances are, they wounded the suspect while trying to kill.

In a life or death situation (which is the only time it is acceptable to shoot a person), nobody has time to make trick shots. If the target deserves to die, aim center mass. If not, don't shoot at all.

Imagine if the cops tried to "shoot to non-fatally disable" someone who didn't deserve to die, but killed him anyway? That would be murder. You don't shoot at anyone if killing them isn't justified.

Then if you miss and shoot the gun out of their hand, or whatever the movies have told you is the easy, humane thing to do, well, that's a bonus. You can breathe easy knowing you didn't end up killing anyone.
depends. when the code changes, how do you enforce that the documentation changes, and that they change in sync? depending on how you're storing the documentation off to the side, do you have two versioning schemes to reconcile when trying to look at code history? does you documentation even ha e versioning?

if you keep the docs in the repo, during code review you can say "hey, update the doc while you're at it" or "this doc change doesn't agree with this code change, can you take another look at it?"
Re: Keynes. It's hard to be a failure when no major nation adopted Keynes' approach in the 1930s. It was far too new, though he was certainly trying to convince people.

Keep in mind General Theory wasn't published until 1936. FDR didn't become a convert until 1938 -- after his attempt to balance the budget in 1937 led to a disastrous recession that undid a lot of the prior gains from the depression (the US government had a budget surplus!). WW2 spending was what wound up being the stimulus that dragged the world out of the recession.

Liaquat Ahamed's _Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World_ goes into great detail as to why the great depression occurred (the Gold standard), and why it lingered.

I also think you may want to read more into Japan's economic policy and financial history. Japan's troubles started with a financial crisis and asset bubble bust twice - in the late 80's and late 90's, similar to the global 2008 crisis, Except Japan had a much, much weaker institutional response than the USA and even the UK did. They shuffled almost annually through a series of milquetoast PMs. Their central bank governors wouldn't commit to anything. Japan had to nationalize a lot of the private losses and bank bankruptcies that were occurring while contending with no growth and a deflationary spiral. Japan's debt was not the result of Keynesian stimulus (that would have required sudden and massive expenditure, given the size of Japan's economy), it was the result of "keeping the lights on" in an era of almost no growth.

Now, in 2013, Abe and Kuroda are finally attempting what looks like a quasi-Keynesian approach -- massive quantitative easing to drive inflation expectations skyward. I say "quasi" because it's not a fiscal stimulus (people are too nervous to try given their debt-to-GDP ratio). And this approach is more Krugman than Keynes. It will be interesting to watch.

Detroit was a case of structural problems combined with bad governance. Sorry if that was not clear. It was a side point to basically say that Southern Europe is not Detroit. They were a victim of private excesses fed by capital flows from the North and a lack of EU-wide fiscal integration to cushion their economy after the crisis.
I'd drop everything for a 65" 400ppi display, of course, but I'd take a 24" 400ppi over a 65" 200ppi without even thinking about it.
For context, the U.S. has about 1,000 times as many people as Iceland, and here police kill about 300-400 people per year.

Moreover, Iceland is a much less violent society to begin with. Apparently the country had just one murder in 2011, which would be equivalent to about 1,000 murders in a country the size of the U.S. In actuality, the U.S. has 14-15,000 murders per year.

A more interesting statistic might be to compute the ratio: police killings divided by total homicides. If Iceland has the same ratio as the U.S., and averages one homicide per year, one would expect about one police killing every ~40 years. If Iceland had the same ratio as NYC (16 police killings in 2012 divided by 414 homicides), one would expect about one police killing every 26 years.

I'm not sure if we have an "ultra-violent" style of policing, or rather just policing consistent with a very violent society.
They do address it, they lie by asserting that every apps was viewed twice when it's clear that was not the case unless there are dozens of developers lying about something random which I'm pretty sure isn't the case.
The problem with Upshot's exemption of "they built the mobile app during the Hackathon so it's fair" is that it sets a bad precedent for all other Hackathons. Why shouldn't teams do what Upshot did and develop the cool tech beforehand and polish it during the Hackathon, especially when winning offers such prizes/publicity?
They reached out to all the teams for their permission to publish their submissions. Not all of the teams have agreed to do so yet.
Displaying 24fps content on a 60fps screen repeats frames. If you repeat half the frames of the 25fps stream twice, and alternating half of the frames three times, then you get 60 frames per second, with a stream looking like:

AABBBCCDDDEEFFF...

This isn't perfect, since really each frame should be on the screen for exactly the same amount of time, which is why 120hz TVs came about -- 120 is evenly divisible by each of 60, 30, and 24. But it's also pretty much good enough, or else there'd be a lot more complaining about watching movies on computers or other 60hz devices.

A 30hz screen makes that harder, since you're going to have to repeat every fourth frame once, so the unevenness could be more noticeable since those frames are now twice as long instead of 50% longer. But I haven't tried one to tell you just how noticeable it would be.

Native 60fps content (sports is the most common one I know of) would require throwing away half the frames, but at least the remaining frames would all be shown for the same amount of time.

NTSC "video" content (stuff shot at 30 interlaced frames per second, so 60 fields per second, stuff like old TV shows) would work alright. You wouldn't be able to take advantage of deinterlacing methods that try to reconstruct 60 full frames, but it wouldn't be a huge loss.
Still, first Police killing ever, pretty impressive that the record held so long, even if they are only 332000.. err.. 331999 people.
10 super-cool chemistry GIFs
(Un?)fortunately it usually is the only option from the point of view of the American judicial system. I work with police officers on a fairly regular basis in a professional context, although I am not employed by any government or police/security force. It’s a fairly common though among laymen that shooting to wound is almost always preferable to shooting to kill. Legally, it almost never is.

The way it was explained to me when I asked the very same question (I don’t necessarily agree, just offering this officer’s viewpoint): discharging a firearm is a deadly act, which always carries with it potentially deadly consequences. It should only be done to save a life, whether yours or someone else’s. The problem is that if you shoot without the intent to kill, you’re saying that you weren’t really in fear for your life, you were just stopping a lesser threat.
While the Upshot mobile app used some pre-existing code,
this did not violate the rules. Use of pre-existing code
was allowable as long as the code didn’t comprise the
majority of the app and didn’t violate any third party’s rights.

IMHO, the whole idea of a hackathon is to see what teams can come up with on the spot. Any pre-existing code you bring is an unfair advantage. But if the rules say pre-coding is OK, then it is OK ;) disclaimer: I am not familiar with the specifics in this situation, just commenting on hackathons in general.
I beg to differ. Cscope, vim, make .. gcc. These are all the things you need to navigate a great codebase with plenty of online documentation.

The 100% source-onboard setup, wherein you do actually have sources to every single thing, means .. if you're sane .. documentation problems don't get in your way of reading the code.
so then, your answer is "Yes. I am saying that Linus' father doesn't understand his son, and that he misinterpreted a "joke" to be something serious enough to provide testimony about in EU parliament."
Seems like the author is trying really hard to make Bitcoin fit current monetary theories rather than allowing the possibility that Bitcoin could break them.
> All the time?

Examples?
I also competed. We had from when the hackathon was announced (October 25th) to November 17th to build our submissions.
personally, i don't suspect any of the obstacles really matter.

look at it like a cart-before-the-horse problem. similar to the ebook/kindle, amazon will simply create something that solves an enormous pain point for people and then effectively whitelist the delivery of it.

meaning, the ebook is to the kindle as air prime is to pre-determined-as-safe landing spot in your yard. you can't have your 30 minute delivery unless you've gotten your landing spot signed off by amazon. just like (back then anyway) you couldn't read your amazon ebook unless you had a place to deliver it.