skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The milestones have definitely moved, but so have the underlying costs. It costs far less to build a solution, deploy it and acquire users. Modern languages, frameworks and API services save man-years of time, cloud hosting means you can get on demand for pennies what would have cost thousands in upfront server costs.

The milestones for user numbers have also inflated, because simply the number of people on the internet has exploded as has the amount of time they spend online across multiple devices. It's also become much cheaper to acquire users due to the collapse of ad prices and virality of modern distribution platforms.

Seed rounds are also much bigger, a seed round of $1m would have been exceptional in 2004. Now people wouldn't batter an eyelid. You've also seen VCs who were previously Series A investors now doing seed investment as well.
The Wolf Of Wall Street VFX
Celsius is no more intuitive for everyday usage. Of all the scientific unit debates, the temperature one is by far the silliest. There are very few temperatures that people need to memorize, and they're trivial to memorize in either temperature scale.
Is it possible the rover carried this rock inadvertently and deposited it accidentally.
> Of course, Amazon’s algorithms might sometimes err, prompting costly returns.

If I keep getting boxes on my doorstep that I didn't order, I don't think Amazon should expect me to keep sending them back.

I'm not turning my front porch into an Amazon micro-warehouse.
I absolutely love these, "Get off of HN and get some work done" posts that get voted to the top of HN. Are we heroin addicts that know what's bad for us? :-)
Pngquant vs pngcrush vs optipng vs pngnq
Found a discussion here of the changes & rationale here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ControlGrou...
I'm not sure whether you or my wife need a new eye doctor. Hers knows she is diabetic and is doing extra screening watching for any possible damage from the disease but has never said anything about her contact lenses being a problem. Other than while sleeping she always wears her contacts.
I don't think they are improving shipping speed to compete with online stores, as much as to compete with stores in your community. I think the goal is to make ordering from Amazon almost as quick as getting in your car and going to a local store.
If JFK could say, "We're gonna go to the moon, I have no idea how," then Obama can say, "The NSA will not undermine cryptography standards."

You don't see the difference between those two statements?

Every American can dream about traveling to the moon and the ambition that represents. There's probably not 1% of the country that even understands what cryptography is, let alone how it might be undermined.
Tepid global reaction to Obama’s NSA vow
Or simply to prevent someone smarter to come up with a real-life implementation.
Ah, similar to Amazon's "shopping cart," the shop could provide a physical cart (imagine a cross between a baby stroller and a faraday cage) to help customers carry inventory to the exit of the store.
UMN also allowed some Schedulizer website (now defunct :() to pull their schedules so you could just plug in your courses and search for optimal schedules.
> Choosing the freezing point of water isn't really mystic. It lets you know whether it will rain or snow.

Fahrenheit also has a chosen freezing point of water: 32 degrees. This is no more difficult to remember than Celsius' zero degree freezing point.
I got around this by zooming the page out in Chrome, in case anyone else is having trouble.
I do not see how getting free stuff is ever a problem.
Hmm, it looks like they just raised a Series C though.
I've never bought the same thing twice from Amazon. I think this is publicity/advertising like the helicopter drone story.
Unfortunately, reasonable customer-oriented space is much more expensive than a (semi-robotic) dimly lit warehouse somewhere on the industrial outskirts of a city.
"A modern startups costs are all people costs."

This one sticks with me a lot. All the cloud/virtualization/thisandthat/outsourcing really puts the people at the center. It makes fighting for sustainable competitive advantage that much harder.
This was my reaction as well. The article calls out high selling manufacturers directly, implying that they are the worst offenders, but without sales data you can't determine recall rate (something like recalled toys per 1000 sold), which is what consumers need to act upon this data.

It strikes me that the largest manufacturers with the most mature design and fabrication processes at least have all the tools to outperform smaller manufacturers in this regard, and so the article may well be nudging readers to manufacturers with higher recall rates.

I mean, one of the principal challenges of empirical data analysis is putting together data from disparate sources in order to come to actionable analysis. One doesn't just publish the data that's easy to come by and then call it a day. And the poor analysis presented in this article is a good illustration of why.
Note my point in that line was not about criticism, but about thread hijacking.
Doesn't have anything to do with "sheep." It has to do with availability and expertise. People aren't aware of every product that can fulfill their wants (availability), and sometimes don't even have a want until they have already been exposed to a particular product. They also frequently don't have the expertise to effectively differentiate the products that they are aware of.

It works the same whether the product is good or terrible.

>I often read the "it's all marketing" screeds as "a lot of people like this thing, and I don't. I am bothered by this fact. Therefore the only reason the sheep buy them is marketing." Could be that the sheep truly find that it's a way to trim their wool that suits them better.

This is more a screed than anything I've said. I don't care if you use an iPod.

>"Worst of breed"? I can name a half dozen examples that were far worse than anything Apple has ever produced.

You're right - it was a bit of an exaggeration. Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" cert was nearly as bad, and all of Sony's lines were garbage (IMO.) What I mean to say is that there was never a point when you couldn't find a $50 player that offered a far better UX than an iPod.
There is something more going on than just that. There are places in the US that take highschool football more seriously than other places take all of their highschool sports combined. Like, a highschool game isn't just something students and their families go to, but something the whole town goes to.

Its not like that is the only thing to do in town either, they have cable TV, the internet, and bars just like the rest of America (well, except for a few dry counties).

I honestly have no idea what to make of it. Calling football in the south a religion is cliche, but as far as I can tell it is just an accurate way of describing it.
Nun who gave birth in Italy 'unaware of pregnancy'
Keep in mind, this is coming from the same company that gives their devs root: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pts6F00GFuU#t=169

Otherwise, I agree with their endorsement of systemd.
Oh for the love of - does this really need to be said?

Really?

I mean, of course it's false! It's an instructive example of how apparently reasonable things go wrong, and why you sometimes really, really need to pay attention to the details.

Do we really need to be told that the sum of all the positive integers is a negative fraction? Of course we don't.

I despair sometimes, I really do. I need to go away and spend some time in my happy place.
> What Obama thinks Snowden "deserves" is irrelevant.

Sort of. Obama has the ability to pardon Snowden, if he felt strongly about it.
Certainly not, but the "costly returns" implies an expectation that the customer would ship the product back if it were sent in error.
Turn User Goals into Task Scenarios for Usability Testing
This is a pointlessramble. The winner(s) produce 8-bit dithered PNGs.
Well it sounds like you aren't a 20 year old ready to abused and take patronizing compliments of being a "rockstar" in lieu of given pieces of paper with dead presidents on them ... So not in the same pool. :)
I don't understand how this comic relates to absolute vs per-capita
4 Ways To Make Extra Money
of course each one might have "an incredible amount of time and work behind them" but that's not the issues, it's that there are many of them, giving the accurate appearance that things are happening quickly - because indeed they are.
Arnold Renderer
Why stop there? Similar to amazon one click purchase, if customer has amazon credit card with rfid chip, they can simply pick up the item and walk out of the store - it would be charged auto magically.

Actually that is pretty sweet idea.
who uses path? who uses windo phone?
Sarah Palin, then?
Is the issue privacy, or making it too easy to compare faculty ratings with one another? In general faculty and class ratings are not popular with tenured faculty who view greatness as synonymous with citations. Tenured faculty also are fighting the "dumbing down of classes to improve ratings". (I'm not sure if this is a reality or not at places like Yale)
You can connect to the core without it going through the spark cloud, as documented on their website.

http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication

Eventually they promised to open source their entire cloud stack. Eagerly awaiting when they do.
which for some reason is being kept off the front page...
Ok... but what else could it actually be?
This type of plan seems a lot more reasonable when you picture it coordinated with a marketing plan or advertising campaign. Given Amazon's analytics, they can certainly target a certain geographic area with an ad and predict the response rate of that campaign, while the estimated quantities of product are already staging at the local warehouse.
This is exactly the problem. As ck2 seems to be suggesting, laws should be passed which make it illegal. At least, that is how I interpreted her critiques of "executive changes"
Even if Snowden were to return to the US to face "justice," as one of his supporters I would expect nothing more than a show trial.

We'd be relying on a legal system that has already been completely compromised to render political outcomes rather than legal ones, and there's too many "powerful" people who have been shown to be terrible liars and dishonest by Snowden's revelations for him to get a fair shake.
I'd be interesting in finding more about the source of the sales quota #s. And is that one time sales or lifetime revenue? (Since most new firms have a SAAS model now)
And already you can bypass the cloud for data:

http://docs.spark.io/#/examples/local-communication
I think it needs to be said because the people promulgating the falsehood are legitimate mathematicians. And most of the time their blog has quality stuff. But they dropped the ball on this one.
Why are you transitioning to Ubuntu?
Ben Horowitz: the hard thing about hard things
For compacts, I'd agree. But most articles, like this one, pretend it's true for DSLRs or similar. And that's simply not true, or even close to true.

Like I say, the people who have replaced their DSLRs with smartphones didn't need a DSLR in the first place.
Maybe. You need to understand that diabetes equipment is a lot like a Segway - it's interesting and solves a problem but it's expensive and somewhat infeasible.

Many things could contribute to this not being as revolutionary as it sounds. Everything from cost down to accuracy is a concern. Diabetics do like to have hope that this will be the game-changer but they've heard that many times before.
Auckland, New Zealand seems to have mostly "even decimal" FM stations. 95.0, 90.2, 99.8, to list a few.
Education standards: Nuclear core
Only after he's been tried?
A century or two from now, when other nations reflect on the rise and fall of the United States, the Bush-Obama era will be one of the most striking because of how it fundamentally changed civil rights and the relationship between government and the press.
Yeah, but that isn't exactly news. Or patentable. (The details of having the analytics fine-tune how much of what to push to which edge node may be patentable under current law, though...)
So you will get in touch with him because the issue surfaced on HN. Says something about being proactive. Doesn't it?
Other comments already pointed out the use of "nofollow". But it is also worth a mention that old, well established sites of high rank link to Hacker News. Most link farms do not have incoming links from highly ranked sites, so the existence of such links is another clue that Google uses to distinguish a discussion forum like Hacker News from a link farm.
I like massive attack instrumentals and hang drum solos.
It is also perfectly legal to hold a trial where he is represented by counsel, rather than physically present. So if they were serious about trying to achieve 'justice', they could. But they're not. They're serious about trying to get him back on US soil. Which doesn't really speak well of their intentions.
For me as a German, all this does nothing. It was never and is still not advisable to store data on US servers and it is not advisable to use US IT services. Data is collected by the NSA and will be used by the US in arbitrary ways (economic espionage, extortion, no-fly lists, physical attacks, influencing political decisions, kidnapping, ...) without any international control.
Gah. Can we please stop with this bullshit already? Fahrenheit has nothing to do with body temperature. The human body temperature is ~100F by coincidence, not by design.

The Fahrenheit scale has 180 divisions (nice round number, evenly divisible by loads of integers) between the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water (212F-32F=180, for the math challenged). The 0F point is the equilibrium point of a frigorific mixture of equal parts ammonium chloride, ice, and water. One can easily produce two reference points for the F scale in a way that isn't sensitive to the local pressure using just ice brine (0F) and ice water (32F). The melting temperature of ice and the equilibrium temperature of the brine mixture are constant on the pressure scales and temperature scales available to metrologists before about the 19th century[1][2].

The same can't be said for the Celsius scale, which requires either a triple-point cell or a known atmospheric pressure (so that the boiling temperature of water is well-known).

Edit: So the close out the point, the Fahrenheit is a unit which is much better matched for the calibration tools and computational methods available around the time it was invented.

[1] Maybe a better way to state this sentence is that the temperatures are constant "to within the experimental uncertainty achievable at the time."

[2] It's well known to anyone who has ever cooked that water boils at an appreciably different temperature in Denver than in Los Angeles.
Precisely. Of course, somewhere down the line Snowden could get in trouble for something else, failure to pay 2013 income taxes for example.

EDIT: my meaning is that if the Justice Dept. wants to nail him, they will have options regardless.
Wow those HTML5 videos totally caused my browser to freeze on a very good hardware.
Is the experience in years or just a scale of 1-5?
This is why I love software companies:

Revenue per employee. The beauty of software businesses is their leverage. Google's market cap is 40% larger than Walmart but it has only 2% the size of Walmart's employee count.
Since he has not been convicted, he would only need to get the DOJ to drop the charges, not pardon him, right?
Ignoring ethics for a moment (heh), one has to consider the ramifications a pardon such as that would send. That's tacit endorsement from the president of the US for everyone who thinks wrongdoings are going on to come out and tell the world, regardless of the chain-of-command, regardless of any oaths these people have taken - it's basically carte blanch permission for people in the government to start leaking privileged information.

I can't think of a way to pardon Snowden without sending that kind of message - you can't say, "Only do this if you're really sure what's happening is super bad."

So yeah, he could pardon Snowden, but the consequences could be ruinous to the US, even if it is "The Right Thing" to do.
I thought a similar thing, imagining mud getting squeezed up between two rocks.
> refuse to play anything but a proprietary vendor format

iPods have always had the ability to play standard MP3s. I've never converted a file to AAC for actual use.
for months everybody is leaning back, watching information we already knew being unveiled. comfortably everybody is waiting for somebody to do something. for politics to correct itself. now politics reacts, everybody is kind of outraged because, you didn't guess it, they don't do anything instead of lamenting utter bullshit and discussions rise again. endless, as you should know by now, useless discussions pointing out this and that but nobody, in the middle of all confusion, reaches the simple conclusion:

you are fucked.
we are fucked.
we'll get fucked forever if we go on like that.

but i guess it's too hard for us tech people, supposedly highly educated with great intellect, to wrap our head around this. code, business and money are more important.

better go back to sleep, sheep!
After years of working on Arnold and saying it could use a website, it's finally up. If you're unfamiliar with Arnold, the about page has a useful history:

https://www.solidangle.com/about

and of the 5 movies up for the VFX Oscar this year, all of them except the Hobbit were rendered at least partially with Arnold (Gravity basically 100%).
I have a blog post about this: http://alp.im/blog/go-linq/
Granted, believing anything ANY politician says on any issue is particularly foolish.
>You know the thing that forces you to use the most dreaded program of all times...

lotus notes?
hey manishsharan, we have a collection of financial model templates within foundersuite.com. They are completely free to use / download.

when you login, go to Corporate Docs then click on the folder "Models". There's a SaaS model, an ad-revenue model, a subscription model and one or two others.

hope that helps, Nathan
There are purpose built combination units:

http://www.aubetech.com/products/list.php?noLangue=2&noFamil...

They apparently pay attention to how loud it is.
The point was that it lends contrast. If you are forced to live without a hot shower for awhile it makes you appreciate it when you have one.
from what I recall most of the data programs wouldn't keep stuff after 5 years, but that's slightly pedanting (on your "50 years" comment).

He could ask congress to pass laws, but he's the executive, and considering the executive's contempt for all things from congress, down to the right of congress to check the executive's use of the military (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution#Questions...), one can't hope for too much. At the very least, these executive orders being put into place means that he's signaling Congress that he wouldn't necessarily be against rollbacks of certain points.

If you want a law passed, ask Congress.
Secret courts, secret opinions, NSLs and government sanctioned lists of "undesirables".

Am I the only one who sees shades of:
-Nazi Germany
-The USSR
-(Cultural Revolution) China
-Insert random eastern European cold war regime
Note to self: Be sure to insert backdoors any HR algorithms I write...
I can listen to almost anything. I usually end up having repeat on and can end up listening to the same songs 20-30 times before I even notice... and then the process repeats :)
"Changes" but it will all be in secret, so we'll have to take their word for it. Uh huh.
They can play and practice year-round without renting out expensive indoor facilities.
IMO security is the least interesting part of Ori. I think efficient syncing is the key feature.
New Book by Ben Horowitz: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
I was thinking it'd be a fun project to take my laptop with my as a commute to-and-from work and log the Probe Request and MAC address that it sees from cars around me. It would make for interesting data mining to see if I regularly travel with the same cars.

Does anyone know a simple way to log this information via Python?
Putin: Gays Will Be Safe at Olympics If "They Leave Kids Alone"
The Future Of Jobs: The Onrushing Wave
Ford pardoned Nixon without Nixon ever going to trial. So no, don't think it's necessary.
Reminds me of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation":

Lundin Crast said, "And where is the analysis?"

"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications in short, all the goo and dribble he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire."
Hey, nice site. FYI I can't copy and paste from the examples on the site without also bringing in the text on the left too.
I could see this working.

For example, the 7th Harry Potter book, especially if you ordered previous books with Amazon.

Or some videogame series, or something similar. Still, for these there's a "pre-order" period, so preshiping without a preorder is kind of moot
is there a set karma score at which point one gets downvote privileges?
Let's be honest with ourselves for a moment - while not proven, I think we can both agree that Snowden broke the law as it's currently written, and that it'd be trivially easy to prove as such.

The only question during this trial would be related to the jury and the judge. Those are the two sets of people who would be able to realistically intervene on Snowden's behalf without risking the federal government's endorsement of leaking privileged information to the public, and even then the judge would be setting an alarming precedent for future cases involving the leak of privileged info.
> Third, the legal safeguards that restrict surveillance against U.S. persons
> without a warrant do not apply to foreign persons overseas. This is not
> unique to America; few, if any, spy agencies around the world constrain their
> activities beyond their own borders. And the whole point of intelligence is to
> obtain information that is not publicly available. But America’s capabilities
> are unique. And the power of new technologies means that there are fewer and
> fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special
> obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do.

Thanks. We, foreign consumers of american services and products, will sure remember this one.
Look up OOCSS and/or SMACSS. Twitter Bootstrap is an example of SMACSS principles at work.
Actually I meant this one : http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Systems-Computer-Science-Mad... I mis-remembered it as a Springer book. Instead it was part of the McGraw-Hill Computer Science series.

Silberschatz is the probably the seminal work though.
This is one of the very few times that people are upvoting a Hacker News post just for the purpose of snarking about it.

Not that there's anything wrong with that (both Path and WP8 win from the exposure), but it's an interesting occurrence.
> ps. someone needs to do a mashup of his first campaign speech to end abuses, arguing against this other person

Here you go. It's rather painful to watch, as you might expect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8

(FYI, I did not make this video)
Stories with "NSA" in the title get an extra penalty applied to them.
Update on Hoefler & Frere-Jones: For Immediate Release
I don't use Path, but I do use Windows Phone (Lumia 1020) as one of my two main phones (the other being a Moto X). And I definitely exist, so there's one...