skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typical poor TechCrunch reporting...

"We’ve spoken with a number of high profile Android application developers. All of them, without exception, have told me they are extremely frustrated with Android right now. For the iPhone, they build once and maintain the code base. On Android, they built once for v.1.5, but are getting far less installs than the iPhone."

Is he suggesting getting far less installs is related to maintaining a single code base? Really?

"They say they’re going to have to build and maintain separate code for various Android devices. Some devices seem to have left out key libraries that are forcing significant recoding efforts, for example."

I have experienced broken APIs in Android OS updates, but I've never experienced a missing library between devices running the same Android OS version. If he's going to make such a claim, he should back it up.
I like emacs org-mode. You can create a hierarchy very easy and shuffle items about between the nodes.
Oops, my bad. I didn't know that Symbian became open source this year; then it makes sence.
I know you think you are being clever but you aren't. It was a well written PowerPoint that was saved as a PDF. So what?

I get so sick of some of the posts on HN by people who seemingly live to save something negative about anything.
http://orgmode.org/

Org-mode in Emacs is brilliant for this. Write things as outlines, shift sub-trees around trivially, fold (hide) and un-fold (reveal) subtrees, embed links within your outline, export to text or HTML when needed.
i'm not seeing how answering 'ask hn' posts would have any particular effect on your karma. if you have a good answer, it will get voted up, same as normal. is there something i'm missing?
Thanks for the info.

How stable is Kohana? I'm building a project with PHP/CI right now, because I need something boring and stable that's cross-platform and easily installed by enterprise users (when I'm hosting I'd rather use RuPy).

Edit: That's considering it's just undergone a major transformation; I mean more in general and with regard to future direction.
I find his views on learning from text books vs reading
literature interesting. The problem I have with this self directed kind of learning is that sooner or later I always get stuck and have no one to ask questions to. For example, I'm currently going through this book on neural networks that someone posted last week (http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/neural/). However, when I get to the exercises at the end of the chapter, I inevitably fail to complete some of them. Most of the time I don't even want the answer, since that defeats the purpose, but some kind of hint to get me going in the right direction would be really useful. It would be perfect if you could just
ask someone who knows the area. Anyone doing a lot of self directed learning from text books with suggestions?
Where's Founders At Work?
"Fact 2:
Nonetheless, the world is objectively real."

I really disliked how the author randomly throws in opinions and beliefs like that in a context that didn't really warrant it. I thought I was going to read about epistemology; instead I got a summary of his worldview.
Building your own scanning-tunneling microscope
If you don't know emacs and you already have Word you could use the outline mode of it. I have used it in the past and it works pretty well. I haven't sat down and learned emacs so I have yet to try org-mode but I hear that works well too.

I have yet to find a truly great outlining program yet. (Note: I plan on learning org-mode emacs but I am a vim guy so the initial inertia of learning it is high.)
So that I know how to improve my comments in the future, why was this downvoted?

It's an important thing to know, and I admitted up front that it was second-hand knowledge with some uncertainty about it. Was the issue the second-hand knowledge, the lack of complete certainty, or what?
Ask HN posts scroll off the page usually with just the one answer and 0 upvotes. If the answer is 'to the point' then it's dealt with, so it needs no further votes.
I've been thinking about OpenPGP based website authentication too. You should check out the web pages I have book marked under the "gpg" tag: http://delicious.com/jf/gpg

My main frustration right now is that, aside from Bouncy Castle, all the libraries I've looked at to do cryptography seem to just be partially implemented wrappers around GnuPG.
I suspect JD Lasica was right when he said it should have been called: "Greed: A Love Story"
Strongly agreed. I encounter this reaction a lot when I do the same. Definitely with you.
I just don't have the stomach for anyone calling themself a free electron. Self-praise is no praise.

I wouldn't dare call myself a great husband, a great father, a great thinker, or a great engineer. I have my moments.
Quick facts about GFW:

1. the recent leaked info shows that the GFW and Golden Shield Project are two separate projects led by different research forces;

2. GFW department is only in charge of R&D and maintenance; there is no direct head in response why/how a website is blocked; In fact, any government ministry can order GFW to block a website;

3. GFW has advanced research forces and followed closely to recent advances in Internet security; For example, there are several reports about hijack Google's SSL certificate, and some reports about HTTP/HTTPS attack with GFW;

4. Some whitelisted-IP addresses are provided to high-ranked officials.
OpenID login can be pretty fast if you use a client-side SSL certificate: http://joel.franusic.com/How-to-set-up-a-client-side-SSL-cer...
You nailed it. I'd like to challenge him to apply the Rule "(1) Your guesses and opinions have to be testable." I am just curious to see how he would test this guess (or opinion), and how did he promoted it as "fact".
I believe they are storing the gems on amazon S3 and the costs are quite minimal. Here is the guy who runs gemcutter calculating S3 costs based on metrics for rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rubygems-developers/2009-Augu...
The Forbes 400 Richest Americans
Exponential growth is unsustainable. In a universe where the infinite does not exist (either big or small), we are strictly bounded by things. At some point Moore's law will show it's true colors (a logistic curve) and taper off.
What'd you like about the knack? Thinking about getting it.
A Justification For Short Variable Names
I'm not sure a catastrophic collapse will happen any time soon (unless as a byproduct of some non-financial catastrophic event - e.g. a meteor hitting NYC). Since currency values are only relative to each other, any loss of value of the USD has to be matched by a strengthening of other currencies. The Euro is in no fighting shape, and an eccessive strengthening of the Renminbi would have catastrophic domestic effects in China (hence the Chinese government would simply not allow that to happen).

But... let's say you live in the US and want to prepare for it anyway? The major effect would be rampant inflation, especially for goods and services that are either imported or are highly reliant on imported goods. We import very little food (although we rely on oil-based fertilizers to make it), so I do not believe that widespread chaos and street violence ("kill your lunch, chop your wood, and carry a gun" scenario) are very likely.

To protect yourself from inflation, don't focus so much on your financial assets as on your personal and professional assets. A financial bet can go wrong (what if the USD strengthens instead?), while your skills and ability to generate income will always benefit you. Develop a freelancing business and related skills - salaries adjust slowly to inflation, so you get squeezed, while as a freelancer you can adjust your rates more quickly. Also develop a lifestyle that relies as little as possible on our major imported commodity, oil - a fuel efficient car, solar panels on the roof, etc.
I spend a lot of my free time doing self directed learning from text books and frequently hit a wall where I don't know where to even begin.

Usually I recognise this as either an incomplete understanding of the topic, or a representation of the problem that I'm not familiar with.

When this happens, I usually make a note of the question or topic, and specific questions I have that are preventing me from understanding the problem, and I seek out different sources of similar knowledge.
I find different authors present ideas and concepts in different ways, and sometimes if a concept isn't clear in one text, it's clear in another.

In your specific example, I'd recommend seeking another book or article on neural networks and skim it until you find information on the concept you're stuck with, and see if it can add any pieces to the puzzle.
If that fails, sometimes just forgetting about it and proceeding will unlock understanding at random later on, usually in the shower in my case.
However some things don't fit nicely into a hierarchy. Remember mode helps with that I think
The best things about Kohana is its simplicity. If you've done any framework/mvc building/modding/learning before you're going to be able to understand exactly how Kohana works with just a little bit of effort.

In practice, this means two things to me:

1. Whenever I'm in doubt, I can easily go to the code. I don't live or die based on documentation. Everything from the front controller to the templating library is accessible to any skilled developer.

2. It doesn't have to be a ginormous "all things to all people" framework like Zend or Cake or Symfony. (Those are great frameworks, I'm not knocking them). It can stay smaller because if there's any functionality I need that isn't there I can write it in without much work. And this is very idiomatic in Kohana. The framework encourages you to extend and overload.
My worst professional failure was adding Hibernate to my project at work.
I was charmed by their prospects, everyone reviewing it positively and quality of their docs.

It turned out that I've spent more time making Hibernate do whatever I need without failing than doing everyting else. It followed the principle of most surprise: I could never guess what'd it go given a code snippet, provided all the complex machinery involved under the hood.

Now I fear ORMs. Wrote my own for that project, it's primitive but does its stuff and is completely predictable.
Not if you don't let it fail it isn't! I still don't see any pricing plans listed on your site. Get on it!!
Choosing separate usernames and passwords for each site allows you to form only bilateral trust relationships with all those sites. OpenID requires multilateral trust, which is more complicated.
Unless you're under the impression that Ajay really does strut around Intel to the sound of screaming girls, "acting as themselves" wouldn't really be what they'd need to do in the commercial.
Yup. Another gem in his worldview:

A learning strategy for history or literature: Subjective judgment is important; careful reasoning is not.

Really, careful reasoning is not required? This is patently false, and probably based on his English and History experiences in high school decades ago. I find that people who say such things rarely have adequate exposure to the subject area. Someone I encounter on a daily basis actually in the CS research community.
I don't have ambitions of starting a business, but I consider it a problem that I don't have any recent side projects either. Just throwaway code (from trying to learn a language), and/or notes (from trying to learn a concept). For me, the main issue has always been the thought that I'm not quite ready; that if I just brushed up on X, it would go a long way. Which of course is placing the project on a pedestal. I think the key is to work on small, approachable projects, and see which ones start to grow into something more.

Last night I discovered the You and Your Research speech, and found this interesting quote on why Nobel Prize winners often fail to make breakthroughs after they win: "When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems... The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go." The quote also reminded me of Feynman's story about the flying plate, and how analyzing something unimportant just for fun (and to escape his "real" responsibilities) ultimately started a path to the Nobel Prize.
Try the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, or Atlas Shrugged. Her works seem to polarize her readers into those that love and those that hate her work, but both works were the first that came to mind based on your request. Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon would also satisfy your request, and is a fun story to read loaded with interesting plot – it is definitely targeted at a tech-oriented reader, which may or may not be what you're looking for.
If you add bandwidth and storage to one side of the equation you'll also have to add it on the other side.

Do you get the bandwidth cheaper elsewhere? Perhaps but probably not significantly.

Do you get storage with similar flexibility and scalability cheaper elsewhere? Highly unlikely.

Oh and housing, power and staff aren't free either. Neither are the premium support contracts with your various suppliers to get same-day replacements for failed hardware.

Once you factor everything in you'll realize that EC2 is not nearly as expensive as it may seem at a glance.
It appears as though the impacts that just barely puncture the metal actually do the most damage to the object, which I've always read and been told but never been able to visualize why.

Think of the bullet as a packet of kinetic energy. When the bullet goes through, most of the energy goes through with it. Therefore, the damage to the object is relatively minimal (just a whole).

When it is stopped, however, pretty much all the kinetic energy needs to be dispersed in the object itself. That happens via a number of mechanisms: deformation of the bullet, deformation of the surrounding material, heat, and, if the bullet breaks into pieces, of course, they can each take a chunk of energy with them as they go shooting in every direction.
Partner with someone who thinks more linear.
Scrivener (for the Mac) is one you might try. PersonalBrain (multi-platform) might also do the trick.
actually it is possible already to set up certificates and use them for authentication, in firefox you can check this under preferences/advanced/encryption
The 5-paragraph essay is often the last essay format one learns seriously. We spend the most time teaching it and no other essay format even comes close. A one semester writing course freshmen year in college does not count.

Also, just because some people can run well with 10 pound weights strapped to each leg doesn't mean it's a good idea to run with weights strapped to your legs. I've seen great 5-paragraph essays, but then again, I've also seen some great Visual Basic programs as well. These things serve as great starting points, but it is important to progress beyond them as you become more educated.
I know this is for a name but I have a cure:
Have a friend or close colleague that always starts without reading -- an eager beaver. You can piggy back on that person's momentum and they can pick your brain when they inevitably get stuck or do something non-optimally because they simply don't know of a better technique.
"Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader."

It is easier for the author to convert the PowerPoint into a PDF, but what is easier for the reader is if the information was in HTML/web format. The author should package the information so that it enters our heads as easily as possible.

This is why user-centered interfaces are better than programmer-centered interfaces. The point is to make it easier for the user, not easier for the programmer.
here is the camera used:

http://www.kurzzeit.com/kameras.htm

And it's newer brother:

http://www.shimadzu.com/products/test/hsvc/oh80jt0000001d6t....
How to get more screen space with Chrome Browser
As far as I understand it, epistemology is worldview.
Thanks for the upvote. I had actually wondered--is there any way to know who has up- / down-voted a comment?

As to the growth issue, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "evolutionary suicide." My first guess would be that this term applies to a species that fails to adapt to a changing environment or, in the case of a sentient species, chooses to consciously direct its evolution in a direction that renders it unfit for its environment. That doesn't seem like a good fit for your argument though, so I think what you likely meant was that the population will outgrow the available resources, and there will not be enough food / energy / medicine / etc for everyone. If I'm wrong, please correct me.

Assuming that this is what you meant, I see several implicit assumptions that are worth examining. They are:

1) Humanity does not currently know how to colonize space.

2) It will be S years before we colonize spaces, and S is a large number ("a long time"). This probably means decades, possibly centuries, although you don't specify.

3) The current rate of worldwide population growth will be sustained into the indefinite future.

4) The resources of the Earth are too limited to support the world population that is projected to exist in X years, where X is a small number of decades.

5) X years < S years.

6) Our current knowledge of the Earth's resources is complete and correct.

If any of these points prove incorrect, I would be hard pressed to agree with your argument.

Considering some of the news reports I have seen in the last year or two, I suspect that there might be more resources out there than we think, and that space colonization might be closer than we think:

- Yesterday's NY Times carried a major article about a new technique for natural gas recovery from shale.

- I am aware of at least one study that shows a space elevator could be built for about the price of Boston's Big Dig (i.e. ~10-20B). With such a construct in place, the two major hurdles in space development (launch costs and risk of catastrophic launch failure) go out the window. Even if that study was low by an order of magnitude, it's still something that any G8 government could afford, as could a conglomeration of major corporations.

- JAXA (the Japanese NASA) is currently working on a solar power station project. If powersats prove out, they will represent a major incentive to start building up space infrastructure, which will naturally lead to more people staying in space longer, which will naturally lead to colonization.

- It is pretty clear that population growth tends to level off and even decline once a nation reaches a certain standard of living and life expectancy. Europe and Japan are good examples of this: negative population growth and/or aging populations. More people aren't the problem, they are the solution: we need more minds coming up with ideas, and more hands producing wealth world-wide.
It's got some of the same aspirational tone as Growing a Business, the same vantage point of tiny companies, and it's much more nuts-and-bolts than Growing a Business.
I sold myself short — I moved to a place I thought was a second rate. And what do you know? It was. Truth is my belief limited me. I was bound to confirm it.

I ignored intuition — I should've connected with people. Focus on what I want and doing it instead of learning more. Maybe that's harder for the self-taught to see.
My situation was not identical, but similar.

If you're not there from the beginning I would not expect an equal split. The longer the startup has been around, the less equity you can expect to get.

I like to look on the brightside of things. Being a skeptic can be harmful. If your gut is telling you that something isn't right, than be careful.

Trust your instincts.
It's the average comment score. It doesn't include submissions.
An even split isn't even expected when you're there at day zero. Everything is a negotiation.
my heart missed a beat as I checked to make sure I was still on it.
but people will think thrice before commenting on anything and everything.

I'd say that is a good thing. Since coming here I have started to carefully consider posting each and every time.

I like to think my post quality has gone up because of it!

(also, the majority of commentors are not on the leader board so this effects only a minority)
Whether or not an even split is still to be expected depends on a few factors, such as how long they're busy, what their outlay was and their compensation to date vs yours.

If they've been busy for a while and they've passed through one or more cusps would mean that your risks are reduced, on the other hand if this start up is two weeks old then I'd lean towards an even split, depending on what you bring and whether or not the others have 'an even split'.

If you're being approached then that would be based on reputation and talent, have a long hard look at the business case and if you believe in it then you can weigh your options.

Make sure if you have a s.o. that they're on board, start up life can be pretty stressful.

Best of luck.
That might depend on whether or not he's been caching previous submissions. That and it sounds like a lot of hassle.
Moving just a little too slowly is my main problem. I tend to think in abstractions and try to implement those rather than implementing a particular solution and then abstracting it.
Greed is pretty much inherent to capitalistic systems, which reward greed and treat it as a virtue (along with profiteering and selfishness).
A simple way that Apple can improve iPhone battery life and user experience
Apple's iWork Pages has a fairly good outlining mode since version 09.
OpenID in its present form will never really catch on because it's too involved and complicated for normal people to use. I am not a technologist but I'm a pretty savvy user, and I have never really understood how to use it.
I often use a program called shmux to run commands on a number of remote machines via SSH in parallel. There are many different programs (including fanout) that do this, but I think shmux is the best.

It can be run in both interactive and non-interactive modes. The interactive mode is curses based and lets you easily control how many of your ssh tasks run in parallel, lets you pause and resume, and nicely separates out the stdout and stderr output. The non-interactive modes let you define what success means in terms out output and return code, and splits out output and return codes into separate files for further processing.
SIAI Interview Series: Peter Thiel
That actually fits me pretty good, since I also read and study extremely broadly.