skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$1000 for VC equipment is dirt cheap. I know Cisco's solution costs on the order of $15k/set: http://www.videoconferencingsupply.com/Cisco-TelePresence-s/...

So even if you can't afford it, many, many more people will be able to afford video conferencing with a price less than 10% that of standard solutions.
Well, I appreciate the honesty!

I'm excited by the idea that threads are going to be "the right way", once these improvements make it out of the 'plex.

I also like that I can get a similar API today with Quasar :-)
It turns out that what the people really want, for the moment at least, is Flappy Bird.

The point of the story is not that people want Flappy Bird -- it's that despite numerous predictions and formulas used in the industry to determine which projects get funded, nobody was talking about doing a game like Flappy Bird. Prior to its success, it would have been dismissed out of hand to spend resources on a title like that. The author is making the point that predicting what people want is not formulaic, it appears to be quite random.
One approach is to have Quality Control report to the Product Manager, who reports to Business Development. This might be doubly beneficial since it could help reign in promises that don't align with proven product direction. Also, what many companies call "QA" is really just QC, that is, checking the outputs. Quality Assurance is focused the production process itself, that developers are properly trained and that development/testing processes are competent.
Does that thing really need a Core i7 processor? (which probably represents half of the component costs)
For this discussion's sake, there are two forms of communication: (1) The public forum you can meet up with new people and talk. (2) And the direct message sending kind like phones and emails. Though the NSA is actively monitoring both, here we're discussing the latter.

With that out of the way, they're targeting the former in-order to make it impossible for people to come together and organise privately and anonymously around subversive ideas.

The specifics of targeting IRC are probably tied to the efficiency of the protocol which allows very cheap hardware and minimal bandwidth to the extent that non-complying private foreigners may provide a free forum the government can't control.
The Underground Economy of Dolores Park
Being free is likely the only thing that has stopped Nintendo's lawyers from coming down on him like a ton of bricks at some point in the past 8 months or however long the game has been out.

If he wants to monetize it he really better change the graphics first (though technically he's still copyright infringing regardless of whether he is charging for his game).
One possible solution is to distribute the hosted content to peers, so that when one person's browser is offline, hopefully someone else's is online to act as a server instead. That doesn't serve as a guarantee, but with a centralized fallback it could work. There are some very clever people already doing this with WebRTC.
Israel used to be #2, next to Silicon Valley, in VC fund per capita... but that was 5 years ago. It's now 3 or 4. I'm speaking from memory of some recent gartner reports on VC funding globally.
What we need is Gopher, Tim.
Something that I've been wondering lately but I haven't looked around to see if it's simple or possible is that nobody talks about it the material is reciclable or will it just fill the dumps with more eletronic trash that will polute on forever...

Besides that I really look for the future of the tech :)
What's also remarkable is that the text on the page is editable, and that the alignment and formatting (bold, italic, underline) buttons work.
As usual, Google picks the Intel-solution over a cheaper solution for political reasons (just like with the original Chromebooks, original Google TV, etc), and ends up failing, because the price is not competitive in the market for that type of product that it is.
My biggest gripe with C's string functions is that it's really easy to make off-by-one errors when trying to do anything with two strings, due to NUL and the way they seem to handle it inconsistently. I'm constantly having to check the docs for any given string function to find out how it handles NUL (which isn't always in an obvious spot thanks to the design of man pages). And once I've found it, I have to come up with some contrived example that usually needs to be written in a comment just to make sure I've used its intended algorithm correctly and didn't cause an off-by-one error. If this library hides all that for me, I'm sold.
Every once in a while, I delete one of my own comments because someone else said the same thing, but better. This is one of those times.
Wow this was interesting ... NOT
This is silly. Expectations for phones and tablets are crazy, specifically when talking about apple.

I read things daily that say apple is done for talking about both phones and tablets. The market share numbers aren't THAT important when we are talking about numbers as big as we are. In the mid 90's, when Microsoft "Won" and Apple lost the global PC market was ~50 million. Apple alone sold more tablets than that last year, and they sold more phones than that last quarter.

They don't have to sell 200 million tablets and phones per quarter. Apple is going to die or get crushed because Android has more market share, and tablets aren't going away either.

The only reason tablet sales haven't gone to the moon like some people predicted, is that they misunderstood the replacement cycle. It's not something that needs to be replaced every year or two like a phone. My iPad 2 is still just fine. I would love to have an iPad air because it is nicer, but the functionality is pretty much the same. In another year or two it might get to the point where i want/need to upgrade. But that is 4-5 year replacement cycle, not 1-2.
That's exactly the right comparison, just without the money that record labels use to push songs. Remember Draw Something? Huge for maybe a month, then completely gone.

Flappy Bird is sort of notable because it's probably the simplest "hit" game we've seen in recent memory. It's the sort of thing that appeals to people who aren't even casual gamers, people who wouldn't engage with something like the original Plants vs. Zombies.
Few PC makers seemed to be consistently as willing to try wild new ideas with their devices.

Whether it was because of Apple reasons ("we are too focused on a small number of sure winners...oh and a G4 cube") or HP/Dell reasons ("we are really into playing it safe"), there were just few companies that could do things like Sony could.

I think it takes a certain amount (if not an outright surplus) of engineering hands and manufacturing capacity to be able to do experiments like Sony's VAIO division did. Think of the truly bizarre and occasionally beautiful devices coming out of Nokia in their mid-2000s peak, or IBM in the era of their "butterfly" keyboard..

If you look at those key ingredients for what it takes to "get weird with it" (those surpluses of capability and capacity), I'd say the next ones to get weird with it would be Samsung (need I remind you Samsung has in recent memory tried a Galaxy with a curved screen, a Galaxy with a mini projector...), LG, and a whoooole bunch of Chinese companies we probably haven't even heard of yet.

But today, we take Sony off that list.
Yes exactly: the game doesn't try to sell you shit, just lets you play. That is refreshing and eerily quiet.

Other than that, it has some winning elements: it's difficult but not impossible. You can play it for 30 seconds or 30 minutes. It is simple. It has a goal you can endlessly pursue. It tickles the nostalgia of all those who grew up on games that this game "borrows" the visuals from.
Zaxxon! That's a blast from the past, and the only reason I ever knew for someone to be jealous of a ColecoVision.
It's just a way to access Skype, which has screen sharing.
Not sure about NBA or NHL, but for NFL I'd refer you to these tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159731 (I was the OP of that thread, but I'm not associated with the tools' creator)
> Microsoft didn't replace some standard with a subtly different standard when they did ActiveX and VBScript... what was the standard you claim existed that they were ring subtly different from? JavaScript? Java? (Again: not a standard.)

I agree. I called out ActiveX and VBScript as not being examples of this because I thought somebody might bring them up if I didn't. I don't think those really contributed much to IE's poor reputation on standards. You list some of the examples I was thinking of later on.

> You also claim that Microsoft stopped working on IE6 when they obtained dominance: I directly touch on that in my expanded comments, pointing out that it makes more sense that Microsoft stopped working on IE when they ran into legal opposition and the project became demoralizing and dangerous. Microsoft does not have a history of simply not releasing updates to products they have dominated: their updates are at times problematic to others and sometimes even self-defeating, but something really weird happened with IE6--where there was only a single service pack release during a nearly five year hiatus from any form of update--that simply isn't well-explained by their dominance.

I'm not sure if you think I claimed otherwise, but I didn't. The reason for Microsoft's stagnation wasn't relevant to my point, so I didn't address it. Remember: The purpose of my comment was not to slag Microsoft. The purpose of my comment was just to illustrate that making progress was not what got Microsoft its bad reputation for web standards.

Why Microsoft did things is interesting (and I think you're probably right), but it's beside the point when we're just asking "What did Microsoft do?"

> Finally, now in this comment you talk about "broke the standards": I would appreciate some citations and examples; the primary things I know that people like to argue about are issues with CSS and XSL/T that are entirely explained by "pushing proto-standard"... the IE box model being the prototypical example.

CSS was still newly finalized when IE released support, but I don't believe there was ever a draft specifying the behavior IE used. Here's a draft from a year before IE 3 that specifies the standard box model: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-css1-951117.html#horiz

I can't find any evidence that Microsoft had reason to believe the behavior they implemented was what would be in CSS. As far as I can determine, they simply diverged from the spec. Maybe they misread the spec, maybe they liked their model better and chose to ignore the CSS standard they had available to them — and I mean, hey, I liked their version better too — but the fact is that they just created a competing standard and were reluctant to adopt the real standard, and this caused people to feel that Microsoft had poor support for standards.
Just to clarify: it's not that easy. The syscalls are the first step, and then you'll need a scheduler. Once you have those two, you still need new synchronization mechanisms and APIs.

Quasar doesn't just provide lightweight threads. It has rich libraries that help you make the best of them.
I'm not sure it was ever meant to be intuitive or easy to use. As far as I can tell, INFO pages (and much of UNIX) was intended to be a stop-gap solution until something better and more permanent was written atop them. Unfortunately that dream was never realized, and Linux's accidental popularity standardized what was supposed to be a bunch of building blocks. I could be wrong though, but almost every utility in UNIX screams this to me.
There is an interesting commonality here, everyone "grew up" with computers. Tablets aren't computers, they are smart displays, and that dissonance seems to grind sometimes.

The Kindle/Nook concept of a tablet is pretty straightforward, keep it as cheap as possible and let be your portal into a bunch of pre-created content. I used my iPad and my Nook HD this way, I've got 45 books I carry around in my messenger bag that used to sit on the shelf at home. I've got over a 150 datasheet/appnote/technical manuals in PDF form which works ok on "large" (>= 9") screens. I've got Evernote to index stuff and 1dollarscan to convert things that I can't purchase in a compatible format. I've got a few thousand hours of music I like which I can stream to headphones to keep the noise of the world out.

That is the stuff tablets are really good at. I've got a Lenovo laptop to do code development and computing on. I don't bother trying to do that stuff on a tablet because it makes no sense to me.

A long time ago, people would have a room in their house just to hold the books and references they needed. That became less useful when information was available on the network, but it has become useful again as the network information has become polluted and sometimes vanishes inexplicably. The key though is having an indexing system, which Evernote seems to be a good start at.
As far as a decentralized content-addressable network goes, the swift protocol[0] seems pretty close to what you're talking about. I heard about it here a while back, and was quite interested in it, but it doesn't look like it's moved much lately (the page has a copyright date of 2010).

[0] http://libswift.org/
I think when it comes to laptops, you basically get one of those "here's 3 things, you can have any 2" situations...those 3 things here being:

-Beautiful

-User upgradeable/serviceable

-Affordable
Using Google Hangout video on my corporate Google Apps account requires G+, so I'm willing to bet top dollar that this does.
This is meant to be deployed as a SaaS (hence, why there are user management features included). There are two possible scenarios here:

#1 - Hacker breaks into your production server and steals your config files

#2 - Hacker breaks into your dev computer and steals your config files

If either of these things happen, I think you have a bigger security issue than any you might find on Pasteye.
If I remember correctly, the last time single-action games were hot topic was about three years ago. Back then it was the black-and-white iOS game, with character running through the city roofs, and your only control was a tap to jump. No idea what it was called.

The success spawned hundreds of imitations, and in about a year the craze had died.

The only surprising things here are, in my mind: A) that the full cycle has gone so quickly, and B) that the author of the article doesn't remember (or acknowledge) a fairly recent past.
It really does have to be nearly frictionless and continue to work, though. My coworkers and I mostly do walk into a conference room with our laptops and set up a Skype or Google Hangout, because nobody knows how to work the $$ Polycom videoconferencing system unless a guy from IT is present to set it up. It's also relatively easy to pull in a remote collaborator on a Google Hangout (even if they've never used it before, it's like 5 minutes to install), while I don't know if the Polycom setup even works when dialing out to a third party who doesn't have their setup. Since nearly every call involves at least one off-site collaborator, that really reduces the utility of a closed-circuit "enterprise" VC system to us if it can only dial sites that also have the same hardware (not sure if this is true, but that's the only case where I've seen it work).
Didn't the name have quite a few capitalized As and Hs in it?
Wow.

Seeing this after Bill Nye using Ken Ham yesterday as a punching bag just makes me smile.
I agree that it typically would decrease readability, and thus wouldn't be advisable. My point was that readability is what we should be arguing, for the few places Go To is in fact appropriate, and not that we need it - even with performance constraints we basically don't.
Ask HN: Who created Pastebin?
The articled linked in HN leaves out the actual basis of the indictment: http://www.justice.gov/usao/can/news/2010/2010_09_16_abrams.... ("In April 2002, her joint federal tax return for the tax year 2001 was filed with a Form W-2 that included a 2001 taxable income that was calculated in part on a number of her Mercury stock options being exercised on April 4, 2001. When her joint 2001 tax return was filed in April 2002, she knew that on April 4, 2001, she had not yet told Mercury what options she was exercising. She also knew that on April 4, 2001, there had not yet been a written action by the Mercury Board of Directors that formally approved the executive loan to pay for the options. Abrams was aware that Mercury’s Stock Option Plan required notice of exercise and payment before a stock option could be considered exercised. She also knew that on April 4,
2001, her stock option exercises had not met those requirements. By failing to meet the requirements of the Plan, Abrams endeavored to claim an exercise date on which the company’s stock price was lower than on later dates. This caused her to file a tax return and amended tax return that understated her wages and caused the IRS to assess an
incorrect amount of tax for 2001, thereby obtaining a tax benefit for which she was not entitled.")

Basically, she said on her tax return that she had exercised her options on April 4, 2001, when not only had she not done that, but she hadn't yet met the requirements for being able to exercise her options at that time. This is not being burned by some esoteric rule where she checked Box A when she should've checked Box B. She filed a tax return that said something happened on a certain date that not only didn't happen on that date, but couldn't happen on that date.

That's why Horowitz's premise is false. He wouldn't have gone to jail for implementing the same backdating scheme. Tons of companies did it, very few went to jail, and those who did went to jail because they let the backdating fiction cause them to either lie on their tax returns or commit affirmative fraud on investors.

Also: to make a more general point--companies are entitled to compensate executives in whatever manner the shareholders will tolerate, but public companies aren't entitled to be deceptive about it. That was the problem with backdating: while the process itself was legal from an accounting standpoint, the fact that it was built on a fiction made it easy to cross the line into outright deception. The wikipedia article actually has a great sentence that captures the whole situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Options_backdating ("To be legal, backdating must be clearly communicated to the company shareholders, properly reflected in earnings, and properly reflected in tax calculations.")
My son, who is 13, is playing Flappy Birds this week. At least in part, it is because all the other kids in middle school are playing it. It does have some viral buzz in that sense.
Jetpack Joyride is a better example of the original helicopter game. Flappy bird is pretty much the Profit Bird in jetpack joyride but much more derpy, kind of like balloon fighter or joust.
There is no "what the audience wants" there are markets and things that sell well in certain markets.

This sold well in a certain market for many reasons that are hard to predict and study.

Flappy bird is not displacing revenue from AAA studios and AAA studios still shouldn't be concerned what the next flappy bird is. They're too busy researching, analyzing, and developing the next multi-hundred-million-dollar videogame franchise that fits into the markets they understand.

Just because some game gets a lot of attention, doesn't mean that it's signalling a paradigm shift or that everyone else has it wrong.
At that point you might as well take all those wide open Chrome passwords.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166731
Tales From The Crash Mines: Issue #1
I can’t find the exact quote, but the engines needed a lot of maintenance between launches. It was more a total refurbishment that a simple reuse. The engines had a lot of problems and it was necessary to replace a lot of pieces to keep them working.

For example, reed the section “Liquid Fuel Engine (SSME)” in the Feynman’s apendix report about the Challenger disaster.
I suspect you're being down voted because article is discussing the merits between 3 devices, PC's, tablets, and phones, with the conclusion that phablets are the win in the end (with some fairly feeble 'evidence'). The fact that all three affect some peoples circadian rhythm isn't overly valuable to the conversation. Form factor is the discussion, and you're talking about light sensitivity in insomniacs. Water is a solid at -30c at sea level is also true, regardless of whether people down vote me. And neither are relevant to the article or the discussion being had.
Whoa. Nice to see someone else doing what I am already doing.

https://canary.pw

New version is coming out this week that lets you search via relation.
Canabalt?

http://adamatomic.com/canabalt/
Sorry to be a nitpick, but just FYI in the case of legal advice, it's "counsel" not "council" :)
Ask HN: Creating a REST Api to power client apps?
I'm looking for any bit of advice on what it will take to create a REST API for a company that is looking to release web,mobile applications based on the API?

What tools would you use for development, deployment? Am I better off using a SaaS service that does this like apiary.io? Ideally, we want to own the whole REST api stack, what would be some great tools?

In terms of deployment, is EC2 generally the way to go?

In general, is creating a REST API hard thing compared to building an web app? There's documentation that must go with it as well.

How do I pitch this to my employer, that instead of building separate applications tied to their own databases, we create a central API that the client facing applications (Android, iOS, single page app) can consume. How can I estimate how much this will cost to make and explain that API first approach would offer more value? How do I explain that this in the long run is the ideal place to be without overloading them with technical jargon like "decoupling services and consumers" etc.
I've done work for fairly small regional companies who feel that now that they have an eCommerce site, it means they have Big Data and they now need to spend a ton of money to manage this Big Data, when all they really have is worthless data and no understanding of what they could gain if they were collecting the right data.

Just because you have a lot of data and you don't know how to put it together doesn't mean you have Big Data. More often than not (in my experience), it means you have useless data. Take that money and hire someone who actually understands the right metrics to capture.
The 3 typical traits used in discussing big data are volume (size of the data), velocity (speed of data entry / exit...or as you call it how "hot" the data is), and variety (number of different sources / schema, etc.)...with sometimes adding veracity (trust of the data). Is DJ/Liz's assertion that if you don't have volume, you're not dealing with big data?

I guess my response would be... who cares?

While the techniques and infrastructure for high volume can be different from those for high velocity (near-time / real-time analytics is different than the more batch-based whole hog analytics associated with high volumes), they are often related. Similarly, there is often commonalities in dealing with the various Vs which may just be of different scale.

Would they argue that one shouldn't be looking at using chef/ansible/salt, etc. as long as you're dealing with a handful of machines? If so, I would think most would argue that laying a good baseline so that when growth occurs is a good thing to do. From a "big data" perspective would they then argue that one doesn't need an ETL/ELT pipeline process? That one shouldn't think about how to deal with the high volume? That would seem to ... less than optimal.
Same here, help pls.
Derp. My bad.