skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“Forced to release” does not really describe what happened. It was more like NeXT thought they could take GCC, extend it to compile Objective C and make NeXT’s version of GCC proprietary. When the FSF told them, using lawyers, that NeXT could not, in fact, blatantly violate the GPL, NeXT could have chosen not to release their version and use another compiler for Objective C. But they chose to release their Objective C compiler under the GPL, which was their other option.

This is what happens when you don’t read the license, think that things like copyright doesn’t apply to things you get off the internet, and dig yourself into a hole – your options are limited. But releasing the code as GPL was never their only option, is what I’m saying.
Top 5 Best Action Movies In 2013 You Should Watch Again
There are lasting legal, technical and support operations that we are willing to take on long term if the market's big enough to support it. Otherwise, it's not worth the effort to implement those long term.
We find that neither New Relic nor Analytics gives the full picture: some of our pages are heavily cached, others (e.g checkout processing) are computationally expensive, database heavy and communicate with other systems (e.g payment processors) that can be a big bottleneck. Both New Relic and GA tend to just average those together (although with GA you can create new views that focus on specific pages). You are right that 'number of visitors on site' does not reflect our site performance in every respect.

We first conceived of Dynosaur as a plugin-based autoscaler (with GA and New Relic plugins to start with), but we've found the times we really need to scale fast are the times we have a lot of traffic generated from press stories etc (like this from today, if you will excuse the shameless plug: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/a-start-up-run-by-fri...) and using the analytics live API allows us to react a little quicker than if we waited for New Relic to tell us our response times are getting slow. So far, we're happy enough with just a Google Analytics plugin.

One possible improvement would be to scale differently based on different traffic / performance metrics across the site. I think New Relic or other performance instrumentation would be very useful for that.
But it's not just starlight - it's the light of a whole nova (and the collective light of a whole galaxy.)

I can see starlight from the bottom of a pool, but the water in the pool will still stop a bullet.

(I am not a scientist, I could be entirely wrong, but it seems like the collective dust of 12 million light years would surely ground down a bullet, while being intermittent enough to let starlight pass through in aggregate.)
I'll place a $100 bet against this claim. Any takers?
I'm talking about silicon valley in particular. If you ask me, the privacy implications of facebook, google, et al cancel out the benefits of sharing photos with friends and more accurate search results. Not a net negative either. Just breaking even.

Certainly, the world is a better place than it was in the last few decades. Technology had a role in that, but so did politics, culture, and societal trends.
Very nice, but please remove the confirmation for leaving the page. It's really annoying.
Simply because in digital media, you pretty much always need to prepare your golden master with material better than the reproduction equipment.

The reproduction equipment has no need to support 240fps, 36bit color, 12k resolutions... that would be a total waste of money on hardware. But when editing the media, the extra quality is useful.

Audio does the same thing. Most music is 44.1kHz sample rate, sometimes 48kHz. Studios might record in 96kHz or more; the human ear can't appreciate 96kHz and most hardware can't play it, but when the mix it, the result has fewer distortion/artifacts.
This is why there is no tech innovation coming out of Nigeria
My first guess would be, because they are less popular.
I'm a little surprised they don't do something like iOS does for rendering list views quickly... have a small subset of item views rendered and basically reuse them. You aren't displaying all 7,000 items so while maybe it makes sense to load the data in one shot, does it make sense to load all the DOM elements? Probably not.

Also, I understand why things get slow, but I will never understand why performance benchmarking doesn't seem to exist in many places as part of the QA process. Writing tests and making things work right is usually there, but making sure things are performant and the user has an outstanding experience seems to get left until it's a "problem".
What?

The link is to a UK google trends page and doesn't seem to work. Basically it peaks right at the IPO time and has tailed back to the pre-ipo trend. Wouldn't call it a decline.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook&cmpt=q

That appears to be the only referenced proof in the article (a google trends chart).
That paper basically extrapolates Facebook's future from one data point (the rise and fall of MySpace). I'd be more inclined to believe them if they analysed the life cycles of more than other social network, but this way their results are more than questionable.
I can't get it to work in Washington, DC. I smell a conspiracy...
Jelly’s Novelty Wears Off, But Long-Term Potential For A Mobile #Lazyweb Remains
Soylent Passed $2 Million in Orders, Will Ship Next Month
"The tech elite have by-and-large ignored the poor."

Wrong. For example, Bill Gates has donated the majority of his fortune to his foundation to help rid Malaria from impoverished nations around the world. He has even convinced Warren Buffett to donate most of his fortune to philanthropic causes.
No, I think that the proprietary one would get all the company contributors, and therefore have the lion’s share of developers.
That's cool. I don't completely agree but at least if we're focused on SV then your point is reasonable.
There are so many people that are saying this can't happen for a variety of reasons, at least that is the common reaction I am seeing. I think this type of denial is misplaced.

That search traffic trend (assuming it is accurate and not some type of bug) is very worrisome, incredibly worrisome.

I did a comparison of Facebook, Yahoo and Google search trends in Google Trends. Neither Yahoo or Google saw the same type of decreases, and Google has tons of mobile accesses too, especially since it is built into the UI of Android phones, no need to search for Google.

http://www.google.ca/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=/m/02y1vz,+/m...

I don't think one needs to use a fancy disease model parallel in order to predict doom for Facebook, you just need to look at those search traffic trends.

I think this article is generally right in the broad strokes if something doesn't change -- can there be a Facebook game changer here?
Of course not as a professional any excesses are just officer class high jinks - nothing to see hear run along like a good chap won't you
Nothing, and I'm not sure what the "correct" representation would be. However, I do not believe the representation we have now indicates a field with an equal barrier for entry for a man and a woman who have the same skill set, motivation, and intelligence.
The thing about infectious diseases (the model they are using) are that the virii just die and that's that. What is not clear is where 80% of Facebook's users would be in 2017. Google+ ? Somehow I don't think so. This would be much more compelling for me if there was some Facebook alternative that was growing rapidly in the 14 - 24 demographic but the Princeton guys don't mention one, and I've not come across it yet. Its hard for me to believe that 80% of Facebook's users will stop using it and go back to no equivalent.
> It's true that advancements in science have led to a more fuller understanding of when a human life begins. But that doesn't mean there was ever a change in the doctrine that human life cannot be aborted during pregnancy.

Early forms of the "understanding of when human life begins" were themselves understood at the time as doctrines (and in some cases were doctrine proclaimed by Ecumenical Councils, such as that of the Council of Vienne in 1312.)
It's only open for 1 week? :(
> You either believe in the currency and wish to implement it into your platform, or you don't.

Or you implement it using something trivial like Coinbase (o BTC pricing, you get USD only, Coinbase assumes the risk) and trumpet that you accept BTC for a quick PR boost (see: most announcements in the last month).
I've had the chance to have peter van roy as professor, and i found his courses on programming paradigms the resource that made me progress the most in programming. It is fascinating how advanced concept (eg classes) are built on simple constructs. I also discovered dataflow variables during that course.

Even if you are a programmer, this course could teach you a lot. Very much indicated! And the language Oz is easy to learn, dont be afraid of it!

And if you dont follow the course, at least check the book, it is a gold mine!
I know that most lawsuits against Facebook for a litany of privacy violations end up going nowhere.[1]

But there just might be a tipping point, soon, when one of these class action lawsuits actually becomes a significant drain on Facebook's resources.

[1]
Campbell V Facebook
http://www.scribd.com/doc/195351255/Campbell-v-Facebook
If you're interested in blocking microphone access, you should be able to do so using this user-script:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/110566

And TamperMonkey to enable the script:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgf...
I still remember the commercials for 56k with some little kid boasting to his friend that he could "stream" videos.
> when you are confident of your ability to defend your person

No, because this requires clairvoyance I don't possess in order to know the other guy doesn't also have a gun.

I mean, I'd also be pretty level-headed if I knew I could explode people's heads instantly with my mind, but we don't live in that sort of universe.
Facebook is pretty dead traffic wise already...
Airbnb made a JS lib for this: “∞ is a UITableView for the web”.

http://airbnb.github.io/infinity/
Step 1: Make totally ridiculous claims about social giant

Step 2: ?

Step 3: Profit
After reading several articles about FB loosing teenagers because of "grandma knows FB" and "I prefer chats now", none of the grandma-age folks at my church, the population majority there, believe the news that FB is less of the future for communicating with the "younger generations" [because recruitment for sustainability is important].

I've stopped minding though; I no longer have a FB account, and at this point I'd prefer people learn by their mistakes.
Icahn vs.  Apple: Who is right?
So the argument is:

- Facebook's growth curve looks like that of an infectious disease

and

- "Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,"

therefore

- Facebook will die out as per the epidemiological model.

Allow me to respond to that in a manner appropriate to the level of rigorousness of the argument:

Bullshit. Shoddy analogy at best, wilfully stupid attention whoring at worst.
Are you looking at Thunderbolt cables? Otherewise, it looks like it is about $3 for 3ft or $5 for 10ft whether it is an HDMI or DisplayPort cable.
I think it's dead man walking, especially with an unsustainable revenue base.
You could buy the book, which isn't that expensive and covers everything from the video's as far as I can tell.

That allows you to study it more at your own pace. I'm taking the Visualizing Algebra course from Udacity, after working halfway through Coding the Matrix, because I found my algebra skills to be lacking.

Too bad its no longer possible to get a certificate on Coursera though, now I have to wait until the next iteration.
>Math is totally unnecessary for everyday software development.

You are writing the simplest possible CRUD app for storing / retrieving some client records. You have a database of these records on the back-end, and users can add/edit/remove these records.

Now, your boss asks you to add a feature of bulk insertion of new client records from some other legacy data source, with proper de-duplication. There are no unique ids across the legacy and new data stores.

I hope this qualifies as "everyday software development". Is math totally unnecessary for solving this problem?
lol! I too spent hours tweaking modem params to get the best speeds. Sometimes having to disconnect and reconnect because the ISP connected me at 33.6 instead of 56k (or more commonly 48.8).
Not to be confused with the National Library of Australia's Trove website. http://trove.nla.gov.au/
Fair enough. Would it be better to say, then, that these demonstrators are just misanthropic?
> Its hard for me to believe that 80% of Facebook's users will stop using it and go back to no equivalent.

Really? Why? Who's to say that "social media" (at least in the sense of a unified platform with a real name) wasn't a fad?

Plenty of people are moving to a more fragmented internet life, with personal messages on Snapchat, photos on Pinterest, discussion on Reddit, etc.
It seems that that 14-24 demographic is flocking to less general "social networks" and more image-centric or one-to-one social networking apps, like Instagram and Snapchat. Essentially networks that allow them to not see what their parents/aunts/other families are sharing or taking pictures of.
"The 870 million people using Facebook via their smartphones each month could explain the drop in Google searches – those looking to log on are no longer doing so by typing the word Facebook into Google."

You think???
And yet every day HN is filled with people talking about the things that they like to talk about, and having a nice time doing so, all in their own little space here on this site. For the most part, users like to keep this place intelligent and spam-free.

Want to spam Doge-related comments? I can only imagine that that is what /r/Dogecoin is for. Why bring it here?
Self-driving cars + military robotics contractor = self-driving tanks, perhaps? Which after a future war might find themselves at the disposal of local American police departments? I can see why people might be concerned.
Some random researches with no solid background on this fit a fairly flexible curve to data and people go mad?

Just looking at simple principles falsifies this: Facebook's older public is quite solidified, there's so much built on top of it, etc. Myspace didn't have to enormous infrastructure or the general social network outlook we currently have. Even by pure inertia it'd say it would take more than 5 years for FB to loose 80% of it's users, even if a really promising competitor emerged.
Using an API key with an online demo that uses an ajax response and exposes the demo API key is probably not the best idea...
I think the social usage is becoming much more fragmented. I tend to keep up with my family via WhatsApp and Instagram, business contacts via Linkedin and the rest is Twitter.
Yes, which in my case is an indication of the system working properly. Leads me to wonder if the issues I have with Comcast + YouTube are on the Comcast side, the Google side, or are just the nature of the streaming-video beast.
Healthy Open Source Projects Need People
I believe it. Facebook doesn't have anything going for it at this point other than the fact that everyone is on it. The problem is that it's becoming increasingly less interesting, to the point where it will be no more interesting than the Yellow Pages - everyone is in there, but nobody cares about opening it up anymore, except for once a year perhaps. At that point Facebook is dead, and it doesn't matter if people actually press that non-delete Delete button, or they stop logging in to it.
Many of the people paying the most cumulative fees should be able to maintain a no fee checking account (because regular direct deposits).

I do wonder what the breakdown is on access/credit problems/awareness/willingness to deal with banks. Around here the credit unions are inexpensive and about as close as anything else.
For such a bold claim, I'm not really impressed with the model. Basically, the authors take the well-known SIR model [1] (susceptible -> infectious -> removed) for simple modeling of infectious diseases and modify its removal term to be infectious as well (rather than the infected population just decaying exponentially).

The big problem I have with their model is that the population flow is still one-directional, so ANY infection modeled with these equations will eventually go to zero. There is no term in the equations to account for social adhesion that would prevent people from leaving, and there is no pressure for people who have left Facebook to join again. The authors have validated their model by curve-fitting it against MySpace's decline after the fact, so there's no real prediction here.

It's an interesting model, but take any predictions based on it with a grain of salt.

For anyone interested in reading on similar subjects, here's a paper I co-wrote in which we incorporate a reinfection term into the SIR model and use it to model viral memes [2,3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemi...

[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0307904X11...

[3] http://stash.synchroverge.com/files/viral_memetic_model.pdf
So if I hang out in your front lawn and prevent you from leaving your house (in a non-violent manner) with a bunch of my friends, does that make me non-threatening and non-oppressive?
I tried out ownCloud as well, and I ended up moving to Seafile (http://seafile.com/en/home/). I don't have any hard numbers to show for comparison, but it was easy to get up and running, everything is open source, and it seems to handle large files better than ownCloud did for me. Currently using it across ubuntu, OS X, iOS, and android, and I haven't had any real issues yet.
Here's the direct link to the Princeton study cited in the article:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf
That could be seen as premature optimization. If you don't know things like the average number of cards, or the average for the power users then you don't know if you will have that problem. That would be like saying they should spend time on supporting 30,000 (made up number) cards right now.
At this point I doubt it -- and the exchange rate fluctuates so wildly it would be heard to measure anyway. It seems to take macro scale events to move the price these days, e.g. the policy announcements by the Chinese government.
Awesome, thanks for confirming this and sorry for being overly paranoid.
There are several errors in this comment.

1. The CIE XYZ color space is different from the CIE RGB color space.

2. "Dynamic range" is not about gamut but the ratio between white and black. A monochrome display can have high dynamic range.

3. Neither the CIE XYZ nor the CIE RGB color space correspond to human vision. CIE RGB color space uses three monochromatic primaries (700 nm, 546.1 nm, and 435.8 nm) and so there are visible colors that it can't represent without using negative numbers (such as the blue color of an Argon laser). The CIE XYZ space is a linear transformation of the CIE RGB space designed to represent all visible colors without using negative numbers, the trade-off is that most of the colors in XYZ are imaginary -- they cannot be perceived by humans, recorded by cameras, or displayed by monitors. The color space closest to human perception is CIE LMS, which still contains many imaginary colors.

If you want better colors look no farther than Rec 2020, which is probably going to come around soon. It still won't represent Argon-laser-blue but the cost of representing all colors on a real, physical display is prohibitive (to the point that no prototypes even exist). Agreed that sRGB is a rather small color space but improvements on color representation have to take into account the engineering needed to make it happen. The question, "Which primaries should I use?" was thoroughly explored during the development of Rec. 2020 and I suggest you read their rationale.
Rebol?
> I'm going to assume that T-Mobile believes there is a sizable market of people with $600 phones who can't get a checking account, but really?

Really. You'd be surprised what you can buy with financing (hello "Buy Here Pay Here" loan shark car dealers). T-Mobile isn't doing it out of the goodness of their heart, but they're definitely going to cannabilize check cashing businesses.

https://www.google.com/search?q=unbanked+statistics
The largest indicator of bullshit (as I've commented below) is that based on their model, ALL infections of this type go to zero. They could have modeled Apple, Google, Christianity, or Bitcoin and reach the same conclusion (albeit with different timeframes, I'm sure).
> They are just going to read the relevant academic papers

And how are you planning on doing that if you have no understanding of Maths?
Previous discussion from a different report of the same new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904 (19 points, 3 hours ago, 18 comments)

The first comment is long and interesting: “Um, folks, this is a non-peer reviewed paper written by some Princeton students. [...]” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7103987
$FB
I agree, things that I used to do on Facebook, discuss topics and articles, say whats on my mind, play games, and post photos can all be done better else were. Where I see a shift in my Facebook friends list is most people have inactive accounts but are active on Twitter, Redit etc.
I'd Kickstart the hell out of that sort of study.

https://www.google.com/search?q=unbanked+statistics
Of note though that this has not been a problem I've observed with non-HDMI solutions.
Yet another entry from "I made something similar to this" category, although the tool I wrote isn't as feature rich as this.

https://github.com/mindcrime/dummydatagenerator
What the hell is this? It starts nowhere, it goes nowhere, it stops but never ends. And it has NOTHING to do with YouTube or television or money. Why is this here?
If the poor can't afford basic health care then there is something really wrong with an economy.
That's exactly what they've done. There are no extra legal fees or anything to worry about like the other respondant to my original comment stated either.

They're threatening to withdraw a simpler form of payment if we don't cough up the $10k and fast, basically.
Small Alberta town gets massive 1,000 Mbps broadband boost
Yep — it's a lot of work for us to keep these running. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7074064 for a blow-by-blow account of previous CTFs.)
Is there a website that collates into a single timeline the information about what the typical home computer hardware configuration, screen resolution, OS, browser, Internet connection type and speed, etc. were for a user of the Internet (or rather, the WWW) in a given year?

I've been looking for something like this for a while and the linked post reminded me of the fact (as well as why such a website would be fun to have).
How so? They're transacting through coinbase. It's no different than accepting PayPal payments legally or technically.

Buyers understand that if there is a dispute they will only receive the amount paid in USD, not BTC.
I don't recommend purchasing the current dev kit unless you actually plan to do development. The quality isn't high enough for prolonged use; motion sickness is virtually certain. There aren't any AAA quality made-for-VR games released yet; only demos and ports exist so far.

On the other hand, if you do actually plan to do development then by all means get a dev kit right now; don't wait for the next release. You need to try it as soon as possible because it's going to take a lot of time and experience to figure out how to convert your ideas into usable VR games and interfaces. Any development done now will transfer directly to the final consumer product.