skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All Metro apps are launched in a hosting process. Thus, the Soluto software would simply look for that particular process EXE to determine if Metro apps are launched.

However, most OS features do not trigger a new hosting process. For example, connecting to a Wi-Fi network, or opening the charms. (Control Panel would get detected as a Metro app, but how many people open Control Panel every day?)

So while it's not perfect, it is possible to make a first stab at measurement.
Try telling that to the app market.
Ask HN: Any useful tips for writing in Emacs?
I'm using org-mode to write outline an essay in Emacs and I was wondering if anyone has nifty tips for writing long-form essays and prose in Emacs
Hi Brian.

Spitfire was only on-time compared to the debacle of Viking and Voyager.

Thanks for dredging up the nightmare. :-)
This reminds me of the RealNetworks [0] story a few weeks back.

[0] https://medium.com/launching-ux-launchpad/385ff833f9c8
That's demonstrably untrue.

My company, based in London, couldn't even secure meetings with VC funds before we got accepted to YC.

The week after we got accepted, every major VC firm in London called us.

3 years later, we've raised more than $10m in funding from Accel Partners & Balderton.
Garnering the intent through no actual evidence... wonder how it would be if he had made a bigger donation - worse that way as well?
This really reminds me of the depressing way that Google optimised the blue colour of a button, while ignoring all other considerations:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

If you trust your metrics and nothing else, you have to be very sure that your metrics encompass every aspect of the reality you are modelling. If they just tell you about clicks and sales, they might be missing longer-term objectives like user satisfaction and retention.
This sounds contrived. Being the skeptical sort we should all be, there is no reason to believe the sources (if you believe they exist) regarding supposed cynical reasons they didn't proceed with a considered UI.

Maybe Facebook found that people really actually liked the other variant better? Or maybe they were just ambivalent about it, and if we've learned anything about widely deployed social media sites, it's that you need a really, really good reason to change things.

And to add just a bit more on the "contrived" notion: My Facebook feed looks very similar to the first page, with big, colourful pictures dominating my news food. If my network had people posting short twitter-like missives, I suppose it would look like that. Outside of trivial CSS differences, the only real variation is that I don't have the confusing iconography down the left, instead using that massive area of white space for descriptive text.
Do you often tell your boss he's an asshat? If so, you should read the people commenting here that the Mozilla employees speaking out may be making career-limiting moves.

Regardless, it sounds like you haven't experienced significant workplace discrimination. Some people are prone to see discriminatory behavior as threatening because they have been threatened or harmed.
You are trolling.

And like most trolls on this subject, you try to twist hateful bigotry into "political views". There's nothing political about considering other people subhuman. It's pure, unadulterated vicious hatred.

And even then there is a fundamental difference believing that something is against your religion and actually trying to prevent people from having equal rights. The former maybe a personal view, but the latter is just outright viciousness.

He has the right to believe whatever he wants, but nobody should be expected to work for this asshole, or want to have anything to do with him.

It's also completely beyond me why any company would want such a hateful extremist as their leader.
And there's things you can't measure, like long-term reputation and habit forming. I think long-term reputation is how a lot of good startups become successful against big, organized, optimizing companies.
Heroku prices are per "dyno" which are significantly less powerful than an EC2 small.
Threatened with the sort of discrimination that minority groups often experience from people who have an irrational bias against them.
Does this work with international numbers?
So, I don't know if people remember this; but in the late nineties almost this exact thing was described as being the way that cellular communication was going to come to remote parts of the world. It turned out that demand made this completely unnecessary, within 5 years cellular companies in Africa and Asia became some of the most profitable companies in the world and global coverage is only improving.

Why do we convince our selves that these types of drastic measures are worth the capital we expend to make them happen?
The problem is the liberals "enforcing their social order" with their power... by individually reacting to someone spending money to make sure the government resumes enforcing a particular social order? This is entirely a contest between a liberal desire to enforce social order A and a conservative desire to enforce social order B. There's a few who basically want government out of marriage all together, but that's a tiny minority in my experience and is made up of people from both sides of the left-right spectrum.
Do you have a link? All I can find by searching is that Uber denied liability for the accident.
Generate your own OVRLY with OVRLY Generator. It's easy!
http://kristories.github.io/ovrly/generator/
I've seen a lot of people using "mutated". There is not a good verbification of "malleable".
I am not sure we even know that normal consciousness is continuous. We experience it that way, but that says nothing. We think our vision is continuous, too, but it isn't (http://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo. More info at http://goo.gl/A3jWV (had to use a shortener because the URL gives information away for those who don't know this experiment))
No brogrammers please: Hosted Graphite needs another dev/ops-style engineer
Facebook Will Use Drones and Lasers to 'Beam' Internet to the World
I'm not conflating it. I'm saying that the logic is exactly the same. And that it doesn't work, because the solution is not to further institutionalize discrimination just because some people can't cope with equality.
Yup. You can use any SMS-enabled Twilio number (or voice-enabled number if you change some of the code to respond to dial-tones) - list can be found at https://www.twilio.com/international
Everything appears to be about pre-existing growth now.

It would be a disaster if that were true, because in this type of investing as in any other, returns are proportionate to risk. Fortunately it isn't. As I said in another thread, a quick sample of the current batch suggests half had no growth when YC accepted them.

YC does face a danger in this respect, because as it gets better known, there are an increasing number of applications from fairly established startups. To avoid that danger we make a conscious effort to fund risky outliers. E.g. the 17 year old kid from Bulgaria with zero revenues or users.
That's because market share is a meaningless measure.
Satya Nadella, Office for iPad, and the big new Microsoft vision
That's what I meant... :-|
I also had to implement simple microprocessor on an FPGA about 10 years ago.

I think one of the main reason is programming the FPGA is not easy, the tools needed for FPGA development are all proprietary. Every FPGA has different way to program it.
> I wonder how many universities make their engineers or developers actually build something for an outside or even internal customer.

For my final year full-year Software Engineering project with 16 team members we built and delivered a software product for an external customer - a big name Software company you've heard of.

It was an awesome project, working so closely and directly with the external end customer.
Bruce Schneier: An Open Letter to IBM's Open Letter
Have you seen [0]? This is biological CAD. IMHO about as cool as it gets.

[0] http://www.genomecompiler.com/
Do know evil
>I think there is some anger over how Brendan Eich responded; which is not directly admitting to anything.

There's nothing to admit though, he didn't commit a crime, he gave money to an organization. What is there to admit?
Haskell:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-August/06...

Twice as slow as C but without also in-place like C and extremely similar (see the sort function here):

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Algorithm_Implementation/Sortin...

It's interesting to see is how very similar Haskel and C sources fundamentally become once they really solve the same problem and not the different ones.
As I said below, there are many different externalities associated with Airbnb, and it's nigh impossible to even begin to know them all. I was providing a common example--it wasn't an argument. My intent was the educate on how economists talk about these things, and what types of issues you need to think about when understanding a business. I also wanted to clear up some confusion about the language used in the article.

Anyway, I will not address your other points--you are clearly only thinking about one use case and trying to start an argument where there is none.
I will take you out for steaks at Keen's if you build me one of these.
There was actually a $10/month offer for Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC (expires 31st March) - I got bought it for my other half. At $120/year it's cheaper than buying Lightroom in full here in Australia.

The frustrating part is that you can't pay for the full year up-front for most Creative Cloud plans.
That partnership didn't come about on the day the iPhone was released. It had to have been brewing for quite some time.
He has already worked against their civil rights. They can choose to overlook that if they want, but fear of mistreatment is real and justifiable.
Facebook's new design is looking a lot like the very old Orkut's design.
I prefer 686 myself. Just as easy to remember, and easier to type when logging in.
Ah, I guess I misread. Thanks for the correction.
What makes spatial indexing different than other areas of computer science is that its fundamental operands are interval types (like hypercubes). Almost all other areas of computer science focus on solutions that only work on point-like data and so many idioms and intuitions computer scientists use are not actually valid when dealing with spatial representations. Data types that require no less than two integers to describe break the assumptions of computer science developed for data types that require one integer to describe.

Oddly, there are almost no people working on the computer science of spatial representations and indexing. That was how I became involved in the first place; I needed solutions to specific problems for which no active research was being done in academia (and I was talking to people like Samet at the time). And to this day, academics still aren't doing any interesting work on spatial structures.

The algorithms are not classified, just not published. There are a couple patents out there on spatial sieves -- I am the inventor on the first practical one -- but more sophisticated and advanced variants exist that will probably never be patented. Widmayer (respected CS academic) was the first to propose this approach to the problem of generalized interval indexing but a useful algorithm was not discovered until my work in 2007.

The point indexing algorithm family I mentioned has never been patented or published anywhere but was based on the development of a novel theoretical CS construct that allows the expression of polymorphic space-filling curves. These are essentially adaptive to the information theoretic properties of the high-dimensionality data set but still embarrassingly parallel and distributable. I don't think these are being used in production anywhere (yet) but they've been around for several years. Very cool but the number of people that grok them can be counted on one hand.

All modern research on computing with spatial representations is being done at one of a few companies, which is why nothing is published. People like me, and I haven't done the pure research in years, don't have time to generate hundreds of pages of fairly deep content. Consequently, learning advanced spatial indexing is fairly prohibitive; you have to figure it out yourself, which is far from easy, or be at one of the handful of places where they are using it.
The Kickboxer prepares for Fight
Nice theory, but I think Dustin's conclusions are wrong.

I got to use this alternative design on my second Facebook account that I used for app development, while my personal account didn't have it enabled. I really disliked like the new sidebar design. The concept was similar to what GMail has done lately, with text links replaced by only graphical icons. I found it really difficult to remember what each icon linked to, and I'd have to go through and hover over each icon one by one.

My theory (which I think has as much evidence to back it up as Dustin's) is that if the feed performed better in this design, it was because the poorly designed menu made it more difficult to navigate the rest of the site!
server side pruning of old archives

That's not possible -- the service doesn't know which old blocks are being reused in new archives.
Demo of Kernel Upgrade without Downtime [youtube]
Ramifications of the Quantified Self
>will deliver its users a worse product for the sake of few more dollars

Its hard - we don't know if its a "few" more dollars, the article and facebook doesn't share this info. If it possibly meant that each user was spending half as much time on facebook, which could possibly meant half as much revenue for the company - what choice do you have?

As a product manager, are you willing to graze half of company because a new feature that is pretty, but costs the company a fortune?

Arguably there are those who have considered the iPhone a worse product because of its locked down nature. Does Apple deliver a worse product for the sake of a "few more dollars?" Even then you have to consider is the App Store ecosystem, the relatively high quality of iPhone Apps, and ease-of-use-through-handcuffs just worth a few more dollars?
This is a defining problem of our current urban generation.

It's fascinating to read about the Next City study that "concludes that poor housing affordability in Philadelphia is a symptom of low income rather than of insufficient rental supply."

Having studied this in depth, specifically in regards to China's Ghost Town problems where they increased housing supply by many folds - Here's the current VICE documentary on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trs_udhjWqc

The problem is not one of supply divorced from affordability. There needs to be both sufficient supply (ie. Not SF / LA) and there needs to be sufficient affordability (ie. Not China). Yet with these two constraints people seem to sit around wringing their hands unable to do anything. It's almost as if, politically, people are incapacitated by this problem. To which I always respond - look at Ford. The Pre-Ford cars had the same problem, lack of supply and lack of affordability. And Ford changed the equation with the Model T, by making an affordable, readily available car - thereby jump-starting the car economy worldwide.

We CAN do the same thing with housing. By eliminating the speculative incentives on housing (as is done in Germany) through capital gains taxation, and through multiple non-residence ownership taxation, we can address some of the market structures that diminish affordability. And on the other side we can create growth opportunities, through zoning primarily - such as a reduction in the required number of parking spaces per residence unit - and through a reduction in average square footage (which has been growing in America over the last 30 years) --

http://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf

And while this is just a start. This can be done. We don't even need the 'political will' to do it. We just need to do it. With just a few slight changes in the way we manage our housing inventory, both financially, and with regards to zoning and planning, we could radically alter the availability of affordable (NOT low income! or qualified housing) Over night.
I can't quite parse what you're saying. Can you rephrase or clarify?
They have put the removed features back in.
Office For iPhone And Android Is Now Free
Bezos must feel like he is surrounded by morons.
>If you were to think rationally, the only question is whether YC would improve your outcomes by more than 6-7%. If that's true, it should be a no-brainer.

I'm questioning the tautology of what you wrote.

It is a no-brainer if you don't have other choices. If you do have choices, though, you might not be able to choose to get funded from all of them if the programs might take place at the same time. Also, while accelerators generally don't request much equity, there is a hard limit (unlikely to get hit at this stage) where you need to maintain some equity for the founders and employees.
What if his contribution wasn't because of his personal beliefs, but was out of business consideration? Perhaps Mozilla pays more in benefits for employees that also list dependents and so to help protect "the bottom line" he is resisting paying out more in benefits even if we disagree with how he is "saving" the company money (by preventing gay marriages).
The tone that Eustace, a Senior Vice President at Google, uses with Jobs is beyond deferential.

"Based on your strong preference that we not hire the ex-Apple engineers, Jean-Marie and I decided not to open a Google Paris engineering center. I appreciate your input into this decision, and your continued support of the Google/Apple partnership."

I'd be surprised to see one of my peers use this kind of tone with the President of the United States.
Don't panic! The future of VR is now brighter than ever.
Servo passes Acid2
It's not like Google would know. Those engineers signed NDAs and non-competes, just like practically everyone in the tech world.
Panopticon Rift
> I hope [Mozilla] will very soon find its way back to the core values that I hold so dear.

The whole tone of this post (and that sentence in particular) makes it sound like this person sees some kind of systemic shift in Mozilla, which seems like a stretch.

Over the last few years Mozilla has been focusing on making the web be a platform for applications. This is so 100% spot-on with their mission statement -- it's like Mozilla has found their true purpose, and that is more than just creating applications than enable people to use the internet (Firefox, Thunderbird). Now they're doing more to make sure the web is a great platform for applications (asm.js, Firefox OS). I'm assuming that, as CTO, Brendan Eich had a lot to do with that. It would seem natural to pick him to be CEO. But now people are making it sound like Mozilla has lost it's way all of the sudden.

Obligatory disclaimer: I completely disagree with Eich's view on gay marriage. At the same time, I think he's very qualified to be CEO of Mozilla. Ousting him is not what will ultimately lead to LGBT acceptance. He does hold a stupid belief, but I don't think that means he should be "shunned" and not allowed to contribute to (or exist in) the web community, where he has proven to be a passionate innovator. I've found that I don't like allowing myself to be polarized towards everyone in some group, even if it's justifiable to dislike them.
It's not just marketing, people always say that about Apple because they have good marketing, but they have good numbers too. The fact that they have less than 10% marketshare in PCs is not all that significant when you consider the massive numbers of PCs that are sold for all kinds of tasks where a Mac wouldn't even qualify. If you were to look at marketshare of home computer purchases it would be drastically higher. And that is not even considering the effect of smart phones and tables on peoples usage patterns. My in-laws who are small town folk from the midwest, as far as you can possibly imagine from an urban hipster, had been using Dells for years and switched to an iPad last year and are getting much more out of it than they ever did their last aircraft carrier of a Win 7 Dell that was ostensibly much more powerful.
You're absolutely right. How about your MySQL write server? You typically have one master that you update to and one or more slaves where you read from. If you get a sudden burst of traffic and your master can't handle all the writes, what do you do?
The "direct compare" in Haskell isn't. The Ord constraint effectively passes a dictionary, and even if that were inlined in a particular case you could always apply a newtype for a different ordering.
There are metrics and then their are metrics.
If a new design causes the amount of money the company makes to go down... then its not a 'good' design by business standards.

And its more rational to say here are concrete numbers clearly affecting the bottomline vs well our 5 experts think this design is better so we are sticking with it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7483726
No one, as far as I'm aware, has pointed out examples of him behaving in a discriminatory manner - just that he holds a different view than them and engages in the political process.

I certainly agree that workplace discrimination is a problem, I just don't think that one necessitates the other, as people are claiming here.

> Do you often tell your boss he's an asshat? If so, you should read the people commenting here that the Mozilla employees speaking out may be making career-limiting moves.

I'd expect that the career limiting move is largely that they're linking their speaking out to how things should be at Mozilla, rather than distancing their speaking out from workplace politics.

But for the record, yes, I've told superiors, up to the CTO (while I was working in IT) that they're wrong on a number of social issues. I've also literally used the word "asshat" to describe people who hold opinions contrary to mine on those same issues on social media.

I just don't go out of my way to link it in to workplace politics, and haven't worked for people petty enough to punish their subordinates for having differing opinions.

If the Mozilla CEO is doing that, I'd be happy to see evidence of it. If the Mozilla CEO is discriminating at work because people are gay or support gay marriage, I'd like to see evidence of that. So far, all I see is people intentionally linking their dissent to workplace politics and people trying to punish him for having a view they don't like.

Feel free to cite evidence to prove me wrong.
Two weeks of fresh drinking water and non-perishable foods, flashlight, a battery powered radio, and a deck of playing cards.
Hey Walker, great post. I remember you starting this while at Brown, and I also remember when FishCo was shut down. I did NOT know someone used a Pokémon card for an ID. Totally believe it though :)

Inspiring story, and I'll be in touch.