skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Australian Telco Telstra Acquires Ooyala For $270M
> the people who still have android 2.x phones aren't browsing the internet with them.

Not true. Only devices with regular Google Play store access get shown in those statistics.

The 20% are users with at least regular Wi-Fi access.
Ooyala acquired by Telestra
Started by a friend : http://www.maposmatic.org/
I want to put a bunch on a weather balloon and send it to space.
It's not supposed to be a natural connection. But it's much easier to kill time with people who live close by.

I don't know about you, but I find watching a movie or sitting around a fire with my neighbors far more therapeutic than text messaging on my phone.
I'm must be older than you I guess :) . I was heavily involved in typesetting work between 1986 and 1990 (offset litho printing [0]). One of the tools we used for authoring was WordStar (and PostScript - we wrote a pile PostScript using WordStar's very capable text only editor mode).

WordStar beat the pants off of WordPerfect for technical layout and hackability when it came to printers and the like for rush documents. I used to mod WordStar to support printer escape sequences where there were none using a hex editor. That dated back to at least around 1985.

I still miss WordStar, its keycords (^K^B to begin a block), context menus and loads of other things outshone WordPerfect for technical writing. I wrote thousands of lines of DBase II/III and C using WordStar's text mode. Hell, even Brief (circa 1988) implemented the same keycords as WordStar, it was really popular with DOS app programmers back then (e.g. the Clipper season based releases before Clipper 5 arrived).

But then that was maybe the dev in me. WordStar was more versatile as a tool for both Word Processing and as a text editor. However WordPerfect was more loved by the non-technical writers and I can kinda see why, but I could never get my head around the function key sequences.

* caveats here being that I wasn't introduced to vi until 1987, just as I left college, and didn't have affordable access to unix until I stole a copy of SCO Unix for x86 around 1992.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_lithography
If the people that you are no longer friends with have your contact information (email, phone, etc.) and sync their contacts to Facebook, and you have the same details associated with your new account, then a relationship can be inferred and Facebook could show these people as suggested friends.
I'm not saying I agree with how he made money, but if he made 100000 €/year writing software would you still claim he was trading something that doesn't exist?
Ha ha, you know it's a ham web site when it has as many page counters, mouse pointer effects, and other such garbage as possible. Not knocking it, I'm an RF/MW EE and ham extra, it's just a given.
That is AWESOME. I am inspired to do this.... though I don't have a techshop membership.

Anyone know if they finally got the laser cutter working over at Noisebridge? I haven't been in a while...
Uber's dirty tricks quantified: Rival counts 5,560 canceled rides
Chill out dude it's called progress and it's a good thing. The web is fundamentally different now than it ever was and software is very different. If you wanna go back to 19diggedey-two theres always ancient operating systems or GNU/Linux with some oldass WM like Windowmaker or something.
How to Read Books Consistently, Every Day
Candy Crush generated $100k every ~35 minutes for the entire year of 2013.
> To present something less extreme than an 8086 running DOS and Windows 1.0, consider that in 1999, a PC with a 366 MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM, and a 6 GB hard disk was quite adequate for browsing the Web, running office applications, playing MP3s, encoding said MP3s (faster than real time), and developing software -- all at the same time if I wanted to.

A 2007 iPhone with similar specs could do all that just fine. Probably the biggest difference is what we ask of our systems. I'm typing this into one of eight browser tabs, each running some JavaScripty thing or another. I'm also running an end-to-end test suite of the software I'm working on today, and that suite hits PostgreSQL, Mongo, Redis, and some other stuff all running on the same laptop. There are a bunch of Internet-connected apps doing their own thing in the background - polling Twitter, listening to Hipchat conversations, and downloading a playlist from my iTunes Match account. And through all this, I have an instantly-reactive, shiny desktop with drop shadows and transparency in quite a few spots.

Maybe the difference is that we expect our computers to wrap around our needs now and not vice-versa. It's been years since I quit one app so that I could run another, and I'd upgrade my laptop in a heartbeat if running that test suite made other stuff sluggish. I effectively don't have to care about my machines limitations anymore and I like it that way.
Cur.to/RobinWilliams
During my 7-year stay in Singapore (a city with very low car ownership and where almost everybody commutes with the public transport) - neighbours don't typically chat either. People commutes at different time, and people who wait in bus stops or train stations usually prefer their gadgets/phones/iPads to talking to strangers
Convert complex spreadsheet formulas into simple reusable functions
Following the tip to Stephenson's article, here's also a really good book, 'The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers'.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nine...
There are also people who just don't care enough to put in the time to sell items for their real value. I never sold much on the RMA, but when I sold stuff on the GAH I would eyeball the item and just throw a price on it that I think would get it to sell fast, but still get me decent gold. I didn't play Diablo to make money, I was there to have fun.
Well, journalism was also a good middle-class job back then. Magazines don't pay like they used to. Like upfront budgets to write a high-quality long piece.

Reading Hunter S Thompsons letters from the 60s as a freelance journalist you can tell he was able to spend time writing quality articles, with the odd hack job thrown in for extra cash. I highly doubt there are many full-time journos left like that.
The experimental three.js renderer is especially nice and lets me see the 'big picture' well. Nice work.
You are talking about the default map tile style, not OpenStreetMap itself. The default style is really designed for mappers to give them feedback in the editing process. The real intention is for a commercial entity (mapquest? mapbox?) to go and create beautiful consistent tiles and charge for their provision.
Making Contact In The ‘Olympics’ Of Ham Radio
That sounds painful. Ever since I went to Win 8 my shutdown has been instant. Startup is around 3 seconds.
I've lately seen an NT 4 server that's still running on old hardware. It's amazing how responsive this system was, every click immediately showed the UI element I wanted, windows explorer takes under a second to load, etc. Around 99 was probably the golden era of PC, right before it all got messy with required anti virus systems, firewalls and later UAC tying back your hands and people wanting silly things like a desktop system with touch display. I'm only 29 and didn't quite see the beginnings in the early 80ies, but the 90ies still give lots of nostalgia.
Nvidia claims Haswell-class performance for Denver CPU core
Yes, I agree. But as far as I can tell, it's mostly due to: 1) lack of available zoned space in Mountain View, 2) high demand, low supply, 3) market willing to bear the price

Now don't get me wrong, these are very nice "duplex-style" homes (there's generally 3-5 houses attached together). But these same homes would sell for a fraction of the cost (practically) almost anywhere else in the United States (excluding parts of the eastern US coast).

I live in the Bay Area, but I'm from the midwest originally; four+ years later, I still can't get over the ridiculous cost of housing here.
Sweet! I just bought 5 acres in South Florida where I plan to have a combo art center/research playhouse with greenhouses and different solar systems. The glow in the dark plants will be a nice accent.
Robin Williams, Oscar-Winning Comedian, Dies at 63
> Over the course of several generations, the US government has taxed away trillions upon trillions of dollars that otherwise would have been saved and invested and thereby added to the capital of the American economy.

I'm going to stop right there, because that's the problem.

If capital saved by the wealthy were invested in value-creating, productive pursuits, there would be no problem.

The problem is that investing in value creation is hard. You have to play angel or VC, more or less. You have to understand your domains, pick your investments, do due diligence, etc. There's also a limited number of good investments available at any given times. The best are either oversubscribed or very difficult to recognize and require contrarianism... and contrarianism is not a magic bullet either. Some contrarian investments are incredible, while others are contrarian because they're bad.

It's so much easier to invest in rent-seeking and debt issuance. It takes far less time and far less domain expertise. It also generates -- at least in theory -- more predictable returns. (The 2008 crash occurred when multiple classes of rentier investments suddenly became unpredictable and did things that violated model assumptions... like millions of mortgages defaulting in unison.)

It's easier to invest in schemes to ratchet up real estate and commodity prices to extract rents from the rest of the economy, or to simply lend money at interest. The former has created phenomena like real estate rising while wages are not. The latter has created a series of credit bubbles and a system of debt-based indentured servitude.

At some point private savings seems to become a net social ill and lead us back to feudalism. Or at least that's what things look like today.

Everything is going up except wages (across much of the economy) because money is flowing into rent extraction, not industrial expansion.

Where is all this investment in new productivity?

P. S.

The most unrealistic thing about Ayn Rand is her depiction of businessmen. Characters reminiscent of her heroes are so extraordinarily rare I can name the ones I know of on one hand. The vast majority of "captains of industry" more closely resemble her villains: short-term pragmatic influence peddlers, boring bean counters who harbor a vague hatred for the genuinely creative, political wheeler-dealers, second handers, sociopathic exploiters, ...
I doubt he meant that third-party developers' hands were tied. I think he means that Microsoft spent incredible resources on backwards compatibility at the expense of innovation. To take the most extreme example I can think of: going from OS 9 to OS X, Apple preserved a (comparatively) handful of APIs as-was, another pile as nearly-the-same-but-requires-modification, and regardless of which they temporarily preserved, made it very clear that you were going to completely rewrite your application if you intended to have a genuinely native OS X experience. By contrast, farking Microsoft OS/2 apps survived into Windows NT 4, and Windows 3.1 apps ran from 1993 through some forms of Windows XP without blinking. Even in the hated Windows 8, Microsoft went out of their way to make sure that they maintained very clear and well-spelled-out migration paths. It is theoretically possible (though you'd be insane) to write a WinRT app in C that mostly uses kernel32.dll, if you want to, because WinRT is unapologetically based on COM, which is in turn based on an old way that vtables happened to be laid out in VC++, which is in turn based on how C structs used to lay out function pointers. This hurts WinRT performance compared to what they could've accomplished with a Swift-like linker.

Did this insane focus on backwards compatibility hurt Microsoft? I don't think you can conclusively say. Did it hurt me as a former Windows developer? Only at best tangentially; all the backwards compatibility crap is pretty abstracted from you if you hang out in .NET land. (Except when it isn't.[1]) And at any rate, I don't think the bleed-through is noticeably worse than e.g. POSIX intrinsics showing up in OS X. But I think the argument that the engineering required to ensure Windows maintained such a strong backwards compatible stance ate out of resources that could've kept Windows more up-to-date has a point.

[1]: http://bitquabit.com/post/zombie-operating-systems-and-aspne...
That's kind of pathological. I also don't care for ad-hoc social interactions, but you can learn a few routines to manage them, like wave but don't engage, or greet but say you had a long day and you'd prefer to talk later. It's probably not worth seeing a therapist over, but a little work on dealing with the small talk is much less stressful than the anxiety of skulking around hiding from eye contact. If you can't get past this then you should see a therapist, letting it stress you that much is unhealthy.
That passage doesn't rub me the wrong way at all. It is a clear set of statements. I don't have to belong to such a company, but if I did, at least I would know what the bounds were. At the start-ups I worked at, I saw a slippery slope of abuse of the "company culture."
What is the over head of running a service like this is this 50k in profit or revenue?
I'm guessing they're going to get a C&D on their name before too long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_(clothing_retailer)
4-5 years ago this was how you did it in World of Warcraft:

http://www.lavishsoft.com/wiki/index.php/Inner_Space

http://www.lavishsoft.com/wiki/index.php/LavishScript
Max salary aside (which is obviously reserved for the bosses - what can the rank and file expect to pull down their first 2,3,5 years on the job?), the problem with working for the government is that you're working for the government. I don't think you can fathom the level of bureaucracy and pointy headedness that exists in the government. For most it is a burden too great to bear.
If your comment isn't simply rhetorical, there was a lot of coverage of the root cause: the federal procurement process is a mess, which is especially harmful for IT. A quick summary is Clay Johnson and Harper Reed's oped from last year: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bot...

For a longer read, you might enjoy a Clay's essay on fixing procurement that delves a bit deeper: http://dobtco.github.io/fixing-procurement-ebook/final/fixin...

It sort of fails to convey the scope of how enormous, byzantine, and Kafkaesque the whole system is, however. For a hint of that, you can try clicking through https://www.itdashboard.gov/ (remember, this didn't exist before the huge efforts of Open Government Initiative pushed in the Obama admin) - it's still completely opaque who runs, bids, owns, or works on any project.

There's some more detail about how the bidding process for Healthcare.gov went down: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/m...

CGI Federal's bidding actually preceded the conception of Healthcare.gov! They were one of 16 companies certified for a $4B contract via a GWAC (that means if you weren't one of those contractors, you couldn't even be in the running). The way that GSA scheduling works pretty much guarantees that you won't get small effective teams building lean/effective tech.

CGI Federal of course was only part of the picture: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/25/240532...

There was some interesting tech analysis of how this actually played out in terms of the data flow: http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/apm/technical-deep-dive-what...

The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (HR 1232) would help. It was introduced back in March 2013 and has slowly making it's way through, but basically doesn't have any traction and is IMO pretty endemic and a great example of the type of deep regulatory/legislative dysfunction at the Federal level.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr1232
https://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/123...

Of course, all this information is readily available, so the indirect answer is that things are the way they are because more people don't care enough to fix things.
Ohhh... THAT explains a lot... Might explain why cards dying in phones is so common.

If you could find that bug for me it'd be much appreciated.
No. He's likely doing transmons
Yup. The art looks better than the concept or gameplay...
What is the percentage of the population who can access APRS at this moment? 1%? Anyone who has a smartphone or a PC can access Twitter which is almost like 99% of people (in US) these days. Twitter can reach everyone on the Internet worldwide and APRS not so much...

APRS is a system that has good uses but the Internet is revolutionary.
I've been living in Japan and access across the pond is a bit flaky at times. Most of the time I can blame my local service provider (a sharehouse) for their piece of shit router, but there are countless numbers of times when a stream will suddenly cut or a connection will just time out for no good reason (while other simultaneous connections even across the ocean are fine).
looks like it could be beautiful, but I'd really prefer being able to at least browse some of what's being talked about in my neighborhood before signing up.
Part of the problem is the hiring process. I'm very interested, but knowing where to start on something like this is difficult.

When I applied to the Presidential Innovation Fellowship a year and a half ago, and there was no communication from them for 3 months -- far longer than they said they'd respond on the site -- and no way for me to get in touch.

(Just out of curiosity, have you seen a lot of interest?)
That's a very hypothetical question. Modern optics require huge lenses for any sort of decent zoom (0.5m for bird photographers) and it's not budging. We would probably have to discover something in modern physics to make it happen. I get your point, but it's not really relevant to zoom specifically.
Help us improve our 20 Question Cyber Security Assessment for small businesses
There's a balance to be had though with every project between IP/licensing concerns, the implementation of the algorithm itself may not be appropriate for all hardware / software combinations, and cost vs. implementation time and complexity of algorithm.

Component reuse is generally preferable to re-implementation, but it's not a blind creed to follow.
Is this something that the investors of Uber encourage / don't discourage? If not, what actions are being taken by either Uber or Uber's investors to prevent this from happening again? (cnn reports this is not the first time)
Why the software industry will see incumbents become irrelevant every 60 months
10 Silicon Valley area hardware startups that raised the most cash
except that he lives in bulgaria and he gives the average wage price 250/350 euros per month.

That's add a little flavor on the whole thing for me :)
I never said I think I'm more important, but even if I did, how does that make me have no regard for your well being?

If I'm taller than my dog, does that mean my dog has no height?

Look, I'm not saying society should value me more than someone else. I'm saying I value myself and my loved ones more than some random person. Your ideals may tell you that you value all living things equally and that "greater world" follows suit, but you don't have to read too much to know that you're fooling yourself.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” – Animal Farm
"I'm going to stop right there, because that's the problem."

... and in consequence you're going to repeat Piketty's assertions, which are pretty much demolished in the article you haven't bothered to read.

Also, you're wrong in your description of Rand's portrayal of businessmen as unrealistic. The majority of businessmen in Atlas Shrugged (and, in fact, the Fountainhead) were as you describe: looters, second-handers, rent-seekers, statists and sociopaths. The exceptions were her heroes, who were as rare in her novels as they are in reality today.
Twitter Paid $134M for Data Partner Gnip
Oh captain my captain. Rest in peace Robin Williams...
Terribly sad. He sure was fun to watch. He must not have been very fun to be. I'm thankful for the decades he was able to cope and share with all of us.
"It'll be possible to guess fairly accurately whether you are single or in a relationship, how much money you make a year"

Well, you could probably get a decent guess just by looking at the house and garage. Some things have always been easy to guess accurately, but one novel problem is that we need more and more effort to be anonymous, online and offline. Double lives may be desirable for some, and it's just getting harder. Now you can at least withdraw a wad of cash, leave all your cards and electronics at home and be reasonably anonymous. In the near future you would probably need face paint to avoid image recognition and even further on you would need to subject yourself to an electro-magnetic pulse to get rid of nano-robots you can't wash away.
Tallying Female Workers Isn't Enough to Make Tech More Diverse
Hard to know for sure, but most of the problems would have been exposed at even moderate amounts of load--there was no load testing or performance monitoring in place initially.
Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide (1994)
Think of the job of digging a swimming pool sized hole. With bare hands it would take a ludicrous amount of work. With shovels and wheelbarrows it still takes lots of labor. With heavy equipment it takes (I'm guessing) a few people a few days. The shovel removed 90% of those jobs and heavy machinery removed 90% again. That does not however mean there are fewer jobs. It could mean instead that we dig more holes.
Android Makes Me Sad
"The best way to get into business is to be in business". That's inspirational.

I'd like to add that maybe one doesn't need to be obsessed with inventing something new or fulfilling an unmet need.

Sometimes you can just copy and do better. For ref:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2d51zq/why_do_...

Great book about beginning with 'inspiration':
http://www.amazon.com/Copycats-Smart-Companies-Imitation-Str...
WoW's botters took this one step further, disassembling the game to the point where they made WoW "clients" which could bot/gold farm at <15MB of memory - meaning you could have a hundred accounts botting on one PC.
Particularly when our government's leadership, our politicians, don't really embody the "show up and try" attitude.
Note: this is how the Ivy League works. A decent education combined with a "credential" that grants authority to parachute in as a "management consultant" to tell people how to do their jobs.

It's nice to see another avenue opening up ("White House fellowships", but it's still the same sort of bad old cronyism.
holy crap...before everyone spooges all over themselves and this guy mike. might it not be a good idea to step back and understand what it means to turn the ship at the federal level!?!?!?!

it's embarrassing enough that someone in the HHS thought they had even a remote clue about delivering technology at scale, but seriously, does anyone really think that much has changed!?!?

it's super cool that a few more than 10 or 15 folks can sign up for a federal service at one time, but does that have any relevance at all to real change?

short answer: no. as in hell no....as in fuck no....

if you vote for someone with an R or a D after their name you are a part of the problem not a part of the solution...in particular, if you bail out an empty suit like obama or bush, you are also a part of the problem, not a part of the solution...
Interesting to see that associating a mathematical term to a fashion company is no longer a bad idea.
Where the hell else will rental properties come from?