skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>A browser permanently playing catch-up will always be an additional, potentially redundant, layer in the technology stack. If a single OS ends up running >90% of the world’s connected devices, why bother writing software for the browser?

I can't agree here. I think the OS world will be fragmented for a very long time (forever) and that the browser world will always have a core set of functionality to write apps once that run everywhere. I don't think Android, iOS, or the desktop browser are going anywhere fast, and so the only platform you can write for that reaches all three is the browser.

I suppose the author is predicting the end of desktops/laptops being relevant but even given that (which I don't think will ever happen) there will still be iOS and Android. That's still double the work to release one app on both. People will always try to find the common denominator and the browser is it (even if in another incarnation, e.g., Cordova/PhoneGap).

And assuming Android beats iOS, I can't imagine it beats the WWW too. I'd like to see a statistical breakdown of "native" apps with embedded browsers vs actual native apps. And if Cordova simply won't ever offer an elegant enough user experience, then I think Firefox OS will become the winner. The WWW is just so much bigger than Objective C or Dalvik, no one's going to port all that. So, even assuming that one OS rules >90% of devices, what percent of existing webapps/websites is that? And what percent of existing mobile apps' tech stacks is that, accounting for apps that are seemingly native but actually built on web tech?
First Google search result of his name: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1997/12/8854

Interesting read.
Show HN: an extremely simple program shows a 2D structure in the integers
This seems unlikely to be a "new" idea, but I stumbled into it by accident and thought it was cool. Java source code below:

// This class is in the public domain.
public class Numbers
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
int numRows = 256;
int numColumns = 128;
for (int row = 0; row < numRows; row++)
{
StringBuilder rowOutput = new StringBuilder();
for (int column = 0; column < numColumns; column++)
{
if ((row & column) != 0)
rowOutput.append("1");
else
rowOutput.append("0");
}
System.out.println(
String.format("row/col %s:\t%s", row, rowOutput.toString()));
}
}
}
Here is another Wikipedia article for your enjoyment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hubert

Given how quickly you responded to my original post and given that you responded with a link to a Wikipedia article to which you bullet-pointed-out your mere opinions, I suggest you think before you post on subjects that you have no knowledge of.
There are 68 people total in this profitable multi-tens-MM/year net revenue company and everyone outside of the dev team is frustrated.

When the arcade/gaming area is packed for several hours a day while everyone else in the company is grinding on their respective jobs and we are filing urgent, revenue jeopardizing bugs, complacency is the only logical conclusion. The dev team is the only team that comes in at 10 or maybe 11 or sometimes 1130 then have "hard stops" at 630 or 7.

In the org chart, I'm unrelated to the dev team, but have visibility into that side of the org.
If they can marry technology to make this a very smart venture, I could see this being hackerish.

For example, there is this guy on youtube who made a machine to automate trying out different cookie recipes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YEdHjGMeho

Just because bread and bakeries have been around forever doesn't mean that there isn't room to apply technology to make it better.

If you can make a process whereby you can bake the bread on demand and have it freshly baked just for me, that would be amazing and totally hacker worthy. Fresh bread is amazing and being able to make and deliver extremely fresh bread on demand that is profitable would be awesome.
Why don't designers make their stacked area charts really oddly proportioned and with muddled palettes so that they're difficult to read?

Oh, wait, they do!
It seems unlikely that copyright would be upheld for a non-creative part of a system like that. A number by itself is certainly not a creative work. Even if it was a creative work, like a poem, I've gotta imagine it'd fail in court given the intended usage.

Maybe if there was an advanced image recognition system and it examined the entire pod. But then I'd still expect (or hope) a court would override any protections given the motivation.
This is brilliant—and resonates with a few posts I found from over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714864

I'm part of a team looking to build a browser extension that provides you with much of this contextual history. A mindfulness tool in a way, which records the steps taken as you traverse a rabbit hole.

Are you pretty diligent with returning to your bookmarks when you're looking for things—rather than conducting fresh Google searches?
Actifio Raises $100M At $1.1B Valuation
As best as I can see from Silicon Valley (SV) VCs,
what they really like is not youth, age,
ideas, or advanced technology
but 'traction'.

If SV makes mistakes on age, then maybe they
invest too much in very young entrepreneurs.
One cynical reason is that people so young
can be easier to manipulate. If they have
a great business but are doing a poor job
managing it, then the VCs can bring in
one of their buddies as CEO; apparently in the
past this was more common and, really,
an intended act.

One SV firm wrote me, "We would not consider
investing in anything like your project before
you have 100,000 unique visitors a month."

Okay. Suppose 100,000 different people come to
my site, on average each person comes 5 times,
on average each time they come they see
8 Web pages with 5 ads per page,
and suppose I get paid $2 per 1000 ads displayed.
Then my monthly revenue would be

100,000 * 5 * 8 * 5 * 2 / 1000 = 40,000

dollars. Then why the heck would I take
their term sheet where I would suddenly
go from owning 100% of my company
to owning 0% of it with some chance
of getting back to maybe 60% on a four
year vesting schedule, when during those
four years the VCs could fire me for
any reason or no reason and, really,
just take all of my company the day
after I cash their check.

And, my company is based on some
technical work, and as the company
grows I will need to do more technical
work. Then a Board would need to
approve the budgets for the technical
work but would not understand that work.
So, the Board would be reluctant to
approve the budgets and, more generally,
would want to exercise their
'fiduciary' responsibility to 'control'
the company. They would kill
all prospects of growth for the technology
of the company. VCs don't always do this
and clearly have not done that for Google,
but the VCs write their agreements so that
they have the power to do such things.

The solution of the two entrepreneurs in the
article is to (1) see a suitable problem,
(2) think of a good solution,
(3) write the software to implement their
solution, (4) go live by having the software
run on a Web site or selling it, say, as
an app. They should think of (1) and (2)
so that they can get to, say,
$40,000 a month in revenue
just with their own checkbooks.

For the VCs, from a Fred Wilson post
at AVC.com some months ago, the
average ROI is poor, really, just
awful. So, Darwin will be along
shortly, and the ranks of the VCs
will thin out.

Net, the VCs will have to make money
or do something else. If they make
money, then their LPs will continue
to invest and it will be a little foolish
to say that the VCs are making mistakes.

Recently Fred Wilson had a lecture on
10 ways for an entrepreneur to be their
own boss and emphasized that getting
venture capital is not nearly the only
way.

My background in doing projects was from
US DoD work and also academic research.
From those two, I have had to conclude
that VCs do projects in very different
ways. While I do believe that VCs are
making some big mistakes, some of the
VCs are making money. Maybe
Benchmark, Sequoia, USV, and a few
more are making money.
Business logic most likely is application code. Not library code.
They didn't drop the ball.

Every single manager did a quick analysis, worked out that the upgrade would cost "Holy shit, how much of my budget?", and punted down the road in the hope that someone else would have to eat the cost.

And, Microsoft will probably extend support (for a big chunk of money) after the big companies scream enough.
You can achive a lot of this without using any browser extensions by simply using a hosts file such as the one at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm (that one is Windows-oriented but it works fine in linux also).

Or you could run your own dns but that's a bit more complicated to set up.
Thanks a lot! I'm hoping to sponge it us as much as I can! And the job placement aspect is more than appealing!
This. A failure to match the CDC's confirmed cases is a failure of the Google model, because that's what it's trying to match.

It also fails fairly spectacularly on a local level when compared to health department data from some top flight state agencies, like NY.
This is an excessively cynical, misanthropic view of events. I know a lot of people who could be described as "long bitcoin" and while there's no doubt a few opportunistic types, most are genuinely excited and actively involved in something they truly believe in.

Your bitter prognostications about "young white libertarians" says more about you than anything else, IMO. And invoking the dot com bubble doesn't help your point - the internet was, indeed, the next big thing, but the bubble was misinformed and 10 years too early. Long term, though, "dot com" was and is real, and many are hoping and working towards cryptocurrencies travelling the same path.
The future of artificial limbs
The death of technological innovation?
The most vexing thing about the research I did on influenza was that my yearly estimates meant despite having a staggering amount of data, my functional N for many experiments was ~ 35, and that was because I reached way into the past.
>Everyone is hopping on DO because it's marketed as a "cloud" and it's part of a tech accelerator (and maybe because it has SSDs and is so damn cheap). Other than that, there's really nothing special about it.

The marketing is good. The quality of the product is good. It's incredibly easy to get started with. The tech accelerator I don't think plays any factor. I searched my database and there are 24 mentions of TechStars out of 3213 positive mentions. That's 0.7%, I can't imagine it has much impact right now on their growth. To give some other comps cheap is 115, affordable is 36, ssd is 133, fast is 174, amazing 212, easy is 134.

Source: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean
The CDC's definition is pretty much a gold standard.

Things like "sales of cold medicine" and the like fall under the heading of "syndromic surveillance", and believe me, they've been tried for the better part of a decade without yielding much that's impressive. Which is frustrating, because theoretically they should be amazing, but they just aren't, especially when asked to predict rather than back fit.
Patenting ideas is also an excellent way to prevent someone else from doing what you suggest; the patent-holder merely needs to grant a royalty-free patent license to everyone once they have the patent.

(See Sections 7 and 8 of GPLv2, for an example.)
Interesting, I've not seen this before. Here is a screenshot of some of the output: http://i.imgur.com/Ro2AA6u.jpg
FWIW, the only times I've seen it as a static library (and the only real place you need a static library) is on iOS (where it was actually extra-dubious and I'm surprised more people didn't point out the problems; specifically this was as part of one of those JavaScript app frameworks like Titanium, although I don't quite remember if it was specifically Titanium), and JavaScriptCore is now provided on the system by Apple as a public framework as of iOS 7. On any other platform you should have no trouble shipping it as a dynamically-linked library due to its simple C API.
Thanks for sharing that. I was never aware of Sega v Accolade and the impact it had on reverse engineering under fair use.
Can't speak for any other sport, but the pirated stream options for the NHL are absolutely impeccable.
The biggest reason DO took off has little to do with the reasons you cite. It's got to do with simplicity and hourly billing. AWS had the latter without former. Your typical VPS host has a bit of both but wont tell you launch 20 instances for a few hours for pennies.
Sierpinski's Triangles?
For anyone a little less familiar with mandatory minimum sentencing -- I highly recommend the documentary 'The House I Live In'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0atL1HSwi8

Streams instantly on Netflix - one of the most important documentaries I've ever seen
Reminds me of Sierpinski triangles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle

I'm sure someone with a greater intuition for mathematics than I have will be able to explain why.
If you want to criticize Pennington's placement in Security Housing, fine. But don't pretend that he's just an innocent leftist being persecuted by the Man. He's a gang member. And his gang's black Marxist politics don't make it any less violent.

http://motherjones.com/documents/458735-pennington-return-to...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Guerilla_Family
Disclosure - this was first posted on Reddit but kind of fitted with my experience so I thought I'd stick it up here
Sounds like a management issue. Make sure whoever leads them is making clear requests (who is responsible for the task, what is the task, how is completion of the task measured, when should the task be finished) and that will give you a framework for communicating expectations and you can measure performance on it. The developers can negotiate the timing of it - but always make sure they give you specifics, "I can have that done by Friday at 5pm". It's a simple thing to do, but leads to powerful results.
The title doesn't match the article, and is incredibly bad. I thought by reading it that USM decided to incarcerate a student pilot for using a free open-source textbook.
I'm happy to see more tools being developed for the defending side.
To reproduce the results of traditional systems is exactly the purpose of Google Flu trends. This is evident when you go back and read the original paper.

The question has always been "Can we match CDC estimates faster and with different information?"

The emerging answer is: "No".
That works both ways, though -- I went through college from 2000-2004, and aside from some brief forays into other languages (Ruby and Perl, from what I remember) we were taught exclusively in C. I had some VB experience (self-taught) from middle school, but in my day job we exclusively use C and Ada ... and I'd never really had reason to learn another language. A few years back, I decided that I should learn some new languages for a) fun, and b) the diversity that I'd need if I ever wanted out of my industry. I taught myself Java, and then the Android framework. Then C# and VB .net. What really forced me to start learning new stuff was teaching - I started teaching as an adjunct at a local college after work (the only favor that getting my MS has ever done me), and then I had learn stuff to fit with their curriculum. Anyway, my point is that it's just as easy for older people to be oblivious to new tech as it is for young people to have a complete lack of understanding of fundamentals. I actually teach binary number formats, boolean algebra, virtual machine code, etc. to my students just to make sure that they're not completely unprepared ... and I will say that your point is valid - many of them have had no prior exposure.
> No one should have to feel uncomfortable at the workplace

I think you're wrong about that.

What about religious fundamentalists uncomfortable with gay people?

What about conservatives uncomfortable with breastfeeding?

What about chauvinists uncomfortable with women in leadership positions?

There is no right to 'not feel uncomfortable'. There is no right to 'not to feel offended'.

What you have to do is choose who you are going to offend.
> > Then Eric Schmidt says: > I would prefer Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later
> How does someone this stupid rise to such a high position of wealth and influence?

What is stupid exactly?

Saying "We should discuss this verbally so we don't risk to get sued" is not illegal. It's not even acknowledging doing something illegal. You could even argue in court that you are explicitly taking an action to not do something illegal.
Because in order to decide which is best, you need some criteria for success. You also need to consider the application and hardware.

E.g. if sorting 16-bit or smaller integers, the best algorithm is to build a histogram in a single pass, then expand it again. That's assuming PC/laptop/smartphone hardware, if you are programming a microcontroller you may not have enough memory available.

Some applications want sorting to be a one-shot deal. Other applications want a dynamic data structure that maintains sorted order -- this is the binary tree. If the things you are sorting are very large and hence stored on disk instead of in memory, you may remember that disk hardware must fetch a whole sector to fetch one byte, having larger tree nodes can be a win because you gain when it makes the tree flatter, but the loss you pay doesn't matter because when reading a anything from the disk, you get the whole sector it's in for no additional cost. These are called B-trees and are very popular in database implementations.

If your hardware architecture demands the indices of the things you're comparing must be fixed (i.e. you're not allowed to use the data to decide which array slots need to be compared), you want a sorting network. This applies to designing sorting hardware, and is also used in programming sorts on GPU's.

At least one other poster's noted that caches on modern hardware give mergesort a strong advantage over quicksort.
100k is a lower salary (adjusted for inflation) than high school dropouts were making in the dot-com boom doing things like server administration for companies like Go/Disney.
> The other replies were mostly variations on the theme that Android users don’t pay for apps, they don’t have data plans, you can’t monetise them easily, and designers are all iPhone users and don’t really understand Android users … Socially, excluding Android users seems almost prejudicial. Unlike Android is difficult, this isn’t about about mere convenience; it’s a value judgment on who is worth designing for. Put uncharitably, the root issue is “Android users are poor”.

This position sells the opposing argument short. It's not so much "designers believe a priori that Android users won't pay for good design," it's "Android users have a long and well-established track record of not paying for good design." People are still experimenting, and I think that this is actually a case you can rely on market mechanisms to handle. If Android users start demonstrating a willingness to pay for good design commensurate with the difficulty of producing good design for Android devices, there'll be a market opportunity there. Someone will get rewarded for providing people with what they're willing to pay for.

This leads into how Bowles sells the other argument short: he conflates design and graphic design when he address the "Android is hard to design for" argument. Design is, to borrow a famous phrasing, how it works. Sure, it was tough to do good graphic design for Gingerbread and it's much easier now. Great. However, the fragmentation and glacially-slow upgrades have a real cost here - to design the same functionality, may require spanning multiple API versions. The comparison to the diversity of Web browsers and viewers doesn't work because that diversity, relies on web standards. The equivalent of web standards that would allow an Android app to do responsive design in the manner of a web app, devices don't have or respect.

Fundamentally, it seems like Bowles doesn't get that the answer to his question is "because doing good design work on Android is more expensive and people pay less for it." Sure, you could ask designers to make speculative investments in Android, but I suspect that'll go about as well as asking people to make speculative investments of their professional time and skill usually goes. Professionals who respect their own time and worth, go where they can do good work and get paid well for it. Currently, that means they don't go to Android.
The problem with "the shape of the graph" correlating is that when modeling a seasonal disease, this is trivially easy. Public health decisions are made on the magnitude of some of those measurements, not their rough shape, and so being off on the exact measurement is a pretty big problem.
> Aw... Eric Schmidt. I suspect Larry and Sergey would have done a couple times better

A couple of times better than what? Being multi billionaires and leading one of the most powerful and most respected companies in the world?

Most experts agree that picking Erick Schmidt as CEO was instrumental to Google's success.
FWIW my best undergrad classes were taught by endowed lecture chairs, e.g. professors who were paid extra by the university to stop caring about and doing research and instead focus solely on teaching.
Live below your means, save the majority of your income, move someone nice and cheap (Central/South America, parts of Asia).
Though it's not advertised on the landing page, Lightbeam has a block functionality: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/lightbeam/

It's also endorsed by mozilla, which makes me trust it more. I've been using it for a while (on top of noscript) and it's quite informative and seems to work well.

My personal setup is noscript with careful whitelisting which I've found to effectively disable most tracking.
Researchers design ‘living materials’
In addition to specific industry issues, ageism in tech in the US seems to be reflective of the wider culture at large here. Older people in the US generally are not respected and their experience and contributions are generally neglected. The "stick them in a nursing home" attitude is extremely common, but even before it gets to that point, disrespect for the elderly is common and is expressed in attitude and culture. Why would Silicon Valley be any different? In fact, considering the amount of young people in SV, I would expect this to manifest itself there the most. In a culture that generally has no respect for its elders, a culture that considers most elders superfluous, why would anyone expect something different?
Re ageism, it depends on where you are and what you are working on. I know and have known many who have 30, 35 and 40 years in and stayed in engineering.

For development, it's all about having your niche. If your niche is stable, age isn't an issue. If your niche is going away, there's little reason to keep a 50 yr old C cubicle guy to switch to consulting, 50% travel and code the latest flavor. There's just no cruising on your laurels anywhere anymore and the market turns over much more quickly.

My observation of recent layoffs is that it's ageism in that most of the people in these jobs are well into their 50's and some into their 60's. Young is 40, and if you weren't in a critical niche, you were just as likely to go as any.
Symmetry vs Asymmetry
MIT is considered by most to be a "liberal license", and phrasing it that way makes for better marketing than stating the exact type of license in a "Features" section.

The additional license is for another project (murmurhash2).
I'd say that capsule machines cater to the people that don't want to spend time making their coffee. For them, I'd rather recommend a good super automatic than a manual like the Rancilio.