skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is spot on. The only thing I would add is to point out how meticulously little has changed in the Apple OSX over the years. It's mostly carefully vetted polish & performance improvements. Microsoft tries to reinvent the wheel with every other release when what people really want is something stable, fast, simple & familiar, with tasteful updates so that nothing feels stale. The last few OSX releases, WinXP and 7 were in the sweet spot.

When Apple added touch-sized icons to the Application menu in dock and eventually Launchpad, Microsoft and Canonical saw it and just completely jumped the shark on device/OS convergence. Meanwhile, Apple has tip-toed with the changes, to the point that they're not really moving forward with touch UI on OSX because it seems the value-add is not really clear for the end-user.
Getting Started with D3js
IPhone with killed ‘Flappy Bird’ reaches $80,000 on eBay
More or less...

Microsoft started as business software company, then switched to be a OS company, when this happened, their dev software divisions for example were assigned to support Windows, not develop on their own.

After Bill Gates left, that Ballmer tried to do several things at the same time, resulting specially into a Windows division detached from everything else, MS stopped making good games for windows, stopped making tools specially geared to windows (tools obviously still work, and depend on windows, but Visual Studio team is not a "windows API" team anymore, and a team on its own, with its own profits and vision), and so on.

Then they alienated windows costumers with a insistence in driver changes and creating shitty drivers (like... Xinput, instead of using the still much better Direct Input). And the destruction of some of their most popular services (ie: MSN Messenger, in Brazil people used solely the MSN Messenger to communicate, and mostly on windows, MS killed it in favour of Skype, and shot themselves in the foot HARD, because Skype is crap, and so people use other stuff)

Then they alienated Xbox costumers with the shitty Xbox one (less power than PS4, more expensive, and their headless chicken policy decision making).

They don't have a choice now, the only stuff that they are STILL making right is the business software side, everything else (costumer facing windows, xbox, mobile, games, etc...) became a sort of trainwreck.

Going "lean" on the business side, and later rebuilding the other side is possible, but trying to fix everything at once I think is much harder.
The most important number about Flappy Bird is 4.

From dying you can be back flying again in less than 4 seconds and be back at the first obstacle in less than 8 seconds. There are many games that should learn from that.
> (Do they ship worse components there?)

There is actually a chance that they might be, considering not all models are available in all regions, thus there are models that are marked for South-East Asia. So as a manufacturer, it's relatively easy for them to be biased.

That said, vendors in South-East Asia have a history of being scammers and taking out original parts and replacing them with cheaper hardware, so that could be a cause too, and HP might be innocent.
Exactly. Also, the HTTPAUTH is directory based and does not necessarily include subdirectories, just like permissions on all Linux distros. So that doesn't imply in any way that subdirectories should have been private.
Out of the top of my head, mips, Alpha, AM29000. There are plenty more.
Libc random number generator flawed?
>Doesn't make me very confident...

This makes no sense at all. For one, it's a language under heavy development. Obviously most of these issues where things not implemented already, library ftuff missing, temporary implementations that had to be changed to the new one, small and bigger regressions due to syntax and library changes etc etc.

Second, you'd rather those issues remained open? Or that magically some rainbow unicorns perhaps would have prevented the language from having any issues in the first place?

What matters is that the number of issues drops low enough, as the language tries to reach version 1.0. And what the announce here is very well aligned with that goal.
Some unnamed source says that targets aren't double checked and that maybe innocents that have been lent a phone have been killed. This article is extremely light for such length.
He might want to rethink the branding there...
First two ideas that spring to mind would be a realtime video encoding service and a CI service. In both cases your users to server ratio would be very low and in the first case your data costs would be very high. So you might be only making profit of $X per server per month even if your revenue is $XXX per server. When you're running your own servers you need a big investment up front but lower operational costs which is where the funding would come in.
It's a stock photo. Two clues - the only non-apple app visible is ebay's - and the caption "stock photo" beneath the image ..
We shouldn't equate giving with tax write offs. Basically, MZ took $1 billion of our money and decided for us how it should be spent.
Lumoid, Upcoming Startup That Allows You To Try Camera Gears
Double Bro Seven: James Bong, Episode One
Article poses good questions, although the load time is terrible[1]. Here's the intro while you are waiting for it:

There is one thing which has puzzled me for a while, and
it is the performance of programs written in C when it
comes to big numbers. It may or may not help with the
decades-long ‘C vs Fortran’ performance debate, but let’s
concentrate on one single and reasonably well-defined
thing – big number arithmetic in C and see if it can be
improved.

In fact, there are very few things which gain from being
rewritten in assembler (compared to C), but big number
arithmetic is one of them, with relatively little progress
in this direction over the years. Let’s take a look at
OpenSSL (a library which is among the most concerned about
big number performance: 99% of SSL connections use RSA
these days, and RSA_performance == Big_Number_Performance,
and RSA is notoriously sslloooowww).

...

OpenSSL prefers to use assembler for big number
calculations. It was the case back in 1998, and it is
still the case now (last time I checked, the difference
between C and asm implementations was 2x, but it was long
ago, so things may have easily changed since). But why
should this be the case? Why with all the optimizations
compilers are doing now, should such a common and trivial
thing still need to be written in asm (which has its own
drawbacks – from the need to write it manually for each
and every platform, to sub-optimality of generic asm when
it comes to pipeline optimizations – and hand-rewriting
asm for each new CPU -march/-mtune is not realistic)? If
it can perform in asm but cannot perform in C, it means
that all hardware support is present, but the performance
is lost somewhere in between C developer and generated
binary code; in short – the compiler cannot produce good
code. This article will try to perform some analysis of
this phenomenon.

[1] Maybe they are using IPoAC? It sometimes exhibits high packet loss with heavy rain, particularly on international links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
Doesn't appear like they do have influence http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/17/bbc-drm-w3c
While I don't agree with your assessment of privileges, let's look at it in another way: should boys be artificially constrained so that they don't outperform girls (and I am not implying boys would outperform girls, just that that is what society seems to think)? If you offer a robotics course only for girls, but not for boys, this is what you are effectively doing. You may end up with a better gender ratio, by preventing boys from getting into robotics (I doubt it'll work that way, but let's assume it does). Is this the way we want society to resolve this issue? Why not foster everybody's talents?
There's not that many, this particular one has been known for some time. Most seem to be legacy issues (OP_RETURN used to return true when it should be false) or quite reasonable misunderstandings (the lock limit for the BIP50 chain fork was tested, but not fully).

http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_Malleability
"Slashdot Media is doing badly"

I've always believed that admin moderated link aggregators have a ceiling as far as traffic/popularity goes. And so far, I seem to be correct in that belief. Sites like mefi, /. and fark all hit a peak than plateau or more commonly, drastically decline. I firmly believe a large part of that is due to the moderation itself. When you have the same group of minds selecting the content that gets seen, over the course of years, the users eventually get burnt out seeing the same type of stuff, chosen by the same people over and over again. The content becomes stale even if its fresh (if that makes sense).

There is one exception to this, however. That's reddit. Reddit's genius lies in its subreddits. That, in short, is the ability for users to create their own link aggregators within the site. In this, the content can never 'get stale' because if you get bored visiting /r/Cars, and your interests are now about photography, there are a dozen different subreddits focusing on that niche. There is always something there to keep your attention. Maybe you're a political nut, maybe you're into botany, or even my little pony. There's literally something for everyone. It's a link aggregator with virtually no limits.

I think the biggest thing that separates reddit from all the rest, however, is that the links aren't moderated by the admins or paid employees of the site. Each subreddit/community has its own mods who make the rules. Some communities are modded very laissez faire-ish while others like /r/askscience are modded with an iron fist. The drawback to that is it can give rise to internal drama, but I believe that's easily offset by the limitless potential. I think reddit will eventually be spoken in the same breath as twitter and facebook a few years from now and sites like slashdot, fark and mefi will all but be gone or forgotten.
I think this is what Christopher Alexander did at the Eishin Campus.

The first year they didn't pave. Only after a clear route was created by the students they paved that route.
Rather than having two physically separate computers, just having a work "user account" on the single computer might be enough.
Random question, if my speakers get blown, and I uninstall VLC before taking in my laptop for repair, does that mean the warranty will cover it?

(Yes i suppose that is morally wrong, but so is blaming VLC for your own bad designs)
Horrible extrapolation, and shyster prognostication. Would not read again.
It's not arbitrary. There are logical security, reliability and convention boundaries that systemd doesn't consider which are raised in this article.

Microkernels are a different subject altogether.

To be honest, the only service management solution I've seen that I actually like for Unix platforms is BSD's simple rc and daemontools on top of it for process management.
The argument re: larger surface for updates is true. Systemd is smaller than the things it replaces, and consistent in itself, but all the logic is in PID 1.

I fail to see a better alternative though.

Old, disparate init systems repeat logic for:

- starting services (the same init script copied 90 times, often badly)

- journalling (unmaintained syslogd facilities means apps all report themselves as local0 and five different fixes for that)

- a billion different 'sentinel / watch' type apps

- various hacks on hacks for dependencies, parallel init, etc.

If you rip out all the redundancy and replace them with something unified, that unified functionality can (and should) exist at low level.

Maybe the argument is that a better way of handling systemd updates is needed?
Discussion on reddit: https://pay.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1xggg8/broken_...

On that note, nothing screams FUD like a screenshot of Windows behaviour on an article like that. Is there a Linux-Windows equivalent to Godwin's law?
There are tools to do it as people allude to but I can't help but feel this is a square peg in a round whole solution.

When I use linux, I use a tiling window manager, when I use OSX, I use tabbed terminals and fullscreen mode and workspaces.

Also, I should note that the Command-~ functionality which doesn't exist on Windows and spotlight is enough to make me prefer the OSX desktop to the Windows one.
Why is this trash the top of the comments?

Oh yeah… fanboys
I already have a small stockpile, but I might have to make it a larger one.
Early on, I was big into customization. I even baked my own widgets into VGA.DRV to make my Windows 3 look the way I wanted. My programs used CTL3D.DLL to avoid standard 3.x dialog boxes. Later on, I changed every icon in Windows Explorer to make them look like BeOS. Even on XP, I used Royale and Royale Noir themes instead of the original Luna. Then I moved on to Linux. I downloaded countless themes and icon sets. My Linux machines were unlike any other and were exactly the way I wanted them to be.

Then it ceased to matter. Now I use Gnome shell or Unity. I install software using package managers. The most radical thing I do it to customize the launcher and change stock Ubuntu background to a bluish one. Sometimes I even power up my AIX machine and work from CDE. The way it looks doesn't matter. I spend my days between browser, text editor and terminal. From the desktop, the feature I use the most is task switching followed closely by virtual desktops.

Making the OS look a certain way is doubly risky. It's a waste of time and, if you develop desktop apps, you risk making them consistent with your taste rather than usual conventions your users rely on.
GPU incrementing an array example (10x faster)
Isn't this related to 'network confirmations'?
Bitcoin is like a dividend-free stock or commodity

Yes, it is an asset. A very easy to trade purely electronic asset. Due to its easy tradeability it is similar to a currency, but much like stocks, it is not a currency.
> For one thing, my phone no longer leaks memory. My start screen doesn't randomly take 10+ seconds to load up. My dialer doesn't occasionally decide to just screw it and not appear.

All these are problems with Android, would be a different story if you were switching from iOS
These problems are all solved without destroying the Unix philosophy completely:

starting services - daemontools.

journaling - daemontools

billion different sentinel/watch type apps - daemontools.

dependencies - just don't do it. This is the old age of power sequencers again. It's coupling.

Daemontools is a set of tiny programs that talk to each other, are fully privilege separated and guarantee reliability. Why they can't do this for systemd, I don't know. If you remove the DJB path conventions from it (the major objections), it's the right tool for the job.
ZenGoals – 3 Goals per day mobile web app
Keep up your productivity. Set three+ goals per day and have an easy overview of your focus and progress.
Europe isn't a country.

In Holland, I registered my business and then went and got a business bank account plus working (temporary) bank card in about four hours total...
"future of money"... Could I respond to a silly meme with another another meme? "Stupid people, stupid people everywhere".
> The web is not proprietary, not an app, and only to some extend controlled by the w3c, which is much more than Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

Well lets see if DRM makes it into HTML5 then.
Not to disagree with you, but worth pointing out that 'was' is past-tense - he'll still be creating ad revenue from the established userbase. He's just forced it to tail off quicker.
Transaction malleability is a known design issue with Bitcoin. It is interesting to see that people are now trading "goxBTC" for "realBTC": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=457723.0. One could imagine a conspiracy theory in which... ;-)

Also, it is technically possible for someone like Mt. Gox to publish a "proof" that they have enough BTC to cover everyone's deposits: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xedpu/headlines_yo...
Thread on bitcointalk.org Dev subforum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=458076.0
Huh what? what do people in chatrooms and reddit have to do with anything? If that's your choice of credible information then life must be very dark.

If you follow the article you'll find that some of the core bitcoin team is confirming the flaw.

But maybe reddit is right. Clearly.
I don't think so, he seemed to hit right about the time Operation Yewtree began, it's almost entirely a British sense of humour that he's drawing to, and the majority of people I know, despite the atrocities of what Savile did, seem to find it hilarious that everybody knew he was a blatant pedophile, but nobody did a thing.
PanicStrap
There's an app that just shows an egg and you have to tap it a million times until there's even a crack in it. Apparently, toddlers love it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9CYhfpQnB8
1. No company has as many smart people as Google.

Really? Because I'm less than impressed with what Google has done lately: Wave, G+, etc.

2. No company is as ambitious as Google.
3. No company is working on as many hard problems as Google.
4. No company makes as many big bets as Google.
10. Only one CEO is more ambitious than Google’s Larry Page.

There are hundreds of startups working on hard problems, making big bets and which are shamelessly ambitious. The company that will make Google irrelevant may not exist yet, but if it does, you haven't heard of it.

6. No company has more data than Google.

That's a silly point. My startup works with big data and it's all about making it useful. Having lots of data in-and-of-itself is not as huge a win as it seems. It's raining data right now.

9. No company is as ruthlessly efficient as Google.

Except every two-person startup in existence, anywhere.
I think that kind of research is interesting, but feminists are prone to jumping to conclusions. All sorts of things could happen in the classroom. For example, maybe boys raise their finger more often to ask questions (no idea, just an example). That could be a reason for "teachers giving them more time and space". No theory of discrimination necessary. Or maybe boys are dumber and need more help than girls - another possible way to explain the measurements without calling for discrimination.

But "feminist scientists" (deliberate ") WANT to see discrimination. As soon as they see any data that can be interpreted to support the presence of discrimination, the case is closed and no further inquiry is being made.

For example, in the wage gap discussion, I have never seen anybody ask an employer why they pay women less. Who knows, there might be some surprising answers.
I've done a little toying around with GamePlay3D, and I must say it's a nice engine, with a clean API and it's relatively easy to get started with it and get some results early on.

I'm actually rather disappointed almost nobody is using it. I hope it doesn't get canned.
OP is talking about going to the moon, you are bringing the topic back to retail, which is ok but a bit cold-showerish.

I think on HN we could and should go further in the "no-limit" thoughts, even if as a simple exercise.

For example, I always wondered why would Google need to make money. In some weird views, we could think the maybe it already have enough money to be self-sustainable, in financial orbit. Maybe they could put all the money they have in some low risk investment and use the annuity to paid engineers and researchers. They sure could cut a lot of expenses on PR and office prettifying.

Then a Google that was not required to make money anymore would really become something. It could provide every human with free internet without relying on forced data mining. It could pay researcher to produce open whitepapers on topics of their own interests.

This would working be a little bit like Universities in the middle-age or renaissance: having some funds, hosting interesting people, being a center for innovation, etc.

I do not think this is pure utopy, or to say it otherwise: only a massive ship like Google could carry such an utopian experiment.
I loved that phrase :P
Except that exposing too much hardware state to the coder might give less room for the compiler to optimize aggressively for all architectures.

What if the architecture doesn't have a carry? Then the compiler has to generate one when needed.

What if the architecture has better ways to do the addition anyway? What if the architecture is only 8bit and even regular "int" adds take several instructions anyway, so it makes so sense opmimizing for 128bit adds?

C doesn't even mandate what happens in case of an integer overflow, it has no business exposing carry flags.

If I ever write a C tutorial I'll title it "How I learned to stop worrying and love the compiler".

EDIT: of course in this case you can't really "let the compiler handle it" if you care about bignum performances. The only solution here would be

a/ expose much more hardware state to the language, which as I've already stated doesn't sound very convenient or C-ish enough for me,

b/ modify the optimizer to better handle bignum code or

c/ use a bignum library and possibly make it part of the standard.

I wouldn't be opposed to a standard <bignum.h>, I think it would make some sense. In the meantime I just use gmp.h, it's faster than anything I could come up with anyway, asm or otherwise. Bignum is hard.
It causes problems for the middle class being priced out of the market, yes. How is dropping rent controls supposed to anything but exacerbate that problem?
This is incompetence on the part of MtGox.

It is not even clear that the malleability problem is solvable. Besides the problem that there is innumerable ways to transform a transaction to give it a different hash without affecting scriptSig validity, it is simply unknown whether it is possible to algebraically transform an elliptic curve signature without invalidating it. If so, then no matter what you do to cover up the other holes, that gaping one is left open.

Transactions are malleable. Deal with it. If a transaction is observed on the network that has the same input outpoints and the same outputs, it is the same transaction, and mtgox should treat it as such. This is a simple check to do, and trivial to automate.

And instead of reporting only the hash to the user, they should record, report, and track the transaction itself. You should be able to go to your withdraws and see the actual transaction, including which inputs were used, and what the change address is. You can then go to any block chain service and verify for yourself if/when those same outpoints are spent in a modified transaction.

This is MtGox's problem, not bitcoin's.
> Same look and feel is just a (unfortunate?) consequence of that.

It's actually a consequence of a strong coupling of GUI and the programs and the unwillingness of developers to refrain from pixel-perfect control. In order to make a program consistent with different interfaces, you need to write them against a "generic" layer. You should declare your screens, menus and visual elements in a GUI-neutral environment and let the specific device use the GUI consistent with it.

In order to make a multi-GUI app you either code for each and every GUI or you give up fine-grained control.
Game Art Tricks
the picture is very adequate when paired with this sentece:

> Unfortunately, by moving large amounts of functionality that's likely to need to be upgraded into PID 1, systemd makes it impossible to upgrade without rebooting. This leads to "Linux" becoming the laughing stock of Windows fans, as happened with Ubuntu a long time ago.
If you look, that developer has a bunch of similar applications that all use the same style. One of them was a soccer game where you tap two little people to keep the ball in the air.
No visualizations, bizarre.
I'm still wondering if culture has a bit to do with this.

Eastern (Asian) culture is a bit different than western attitude and way of approaching things.