skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple has the technology headroom to keep making more powerful iphones for several more generations... but will it reach a point where people don't need a more powerful phone? (that they don't get any benefit from it, so that power is not utilized). I would have thought they were more powerful than a phone needs to be already, but obviously not! One view is that they are still replacing desktops, suggesting users will value increases in power until they are as powerful as a desktop. Of course, gaming use is unlimited, but I'm not sure that's a key usage.

I would expect something like the Apple watch is essential for Apple, because that small form factor has lots of runway, as each increase in power would be a benefit to users.
Apple makes luxury products. People like luxury products. Luxury products have strong brand appeal so they can comfortably ask people to pay more for products. Any other company that sells like phones at Apple's price range will FAIL. You either make something extremely better for the same price or just as good at a lower price. Neither is a guaranty for success though.
How the ZX81 display file worked:

http://www.user.dccnet.com/wrigter/index_files/ZX%20Video%20...

Note the encoding of that page causes it to render incorrectly at least in Firefox. Using View → Character Encoding → Western fixes that for me.
Do you see these numbers? Why would Apple care about low-end, low margin sales in China?
Yahoo to spin off Alibaba stake, bowing to pressure
Wow $74.6 Billion Revenue and $18 Billion profit on 74.5M iPhones in a quarter is nuts.

Apple also mentioned in the Conference call that the volatile exchange rate also hurt sales numbers by 4% (vs a constant exchange rate) which they're more susceptible to now that over 65% of their sales are outside of the US.
As a game maker, this stuff terrifies me.
I think that there are a lot of devs out there who string together compulsive elements in their games without realizing just how potent they can be.
But those companies do the same thing to competition. If all sides are below-cost then it goes back to being fair competition, and it weakens monopoly power.
The youtube blog post linked here says they're using EME just the same as netflix is...
See, a friend of mine owned some of those bonds (Icelandic in that case, but similar). He saved money to support his family in case where they'd need it. The money evaporated when Icelandic banks defaulted. The money that was used to prop up Greece came from people that worked for it - some directly, some indirectly. Why should their money be taken from them? Why should German social services be slashed because the EU still needs to funnel more money into Greece? [1] I totally agree that Greece needs help, but I don't have a good answer for those that need to pay for it.

[1] we had a major slashing of social services with the Hartz4-laws. Things are certainly not as ugly as in Greece, but Germany has the highest percentage of low-wage labor in Europe. Germany as a country is rich, but a lot of Germans pay the price.
How is Uber crony capitalism? Uber is capitalism working exactly as designed, workers are disposable and profit seeking is unregulated. The taxi services are closer to crony capitalism.
Chrome isn't an open source browser. Google is "one of the selected companies".
Every time I hear a sob story about how it's hard to find a job as a "self taught developer", then find out that the person telling the story just started "self-teaching" a year ago...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
So as a user of an engineer-oriented product, what kind of testing and validation process would you like to see? If the product makes your life as an engineer significantly easier (as Slack does), would you want to participate in a beta, even with warts? If not, what kind of testing would you want the product to go through?

I think this could be instructive for a lot of startups in the tools space. Clearly, Slack did something right.
Yahoo to Spin Off Remaining Alibaba Stake
Unfair Coin Tossing
> I think much of that 70% number is downmarket.

Yes, it is. Hence the huge margins gap.

> Apple's competition is primarily Samsung, as well as the premium devices offered by Motorola, HTC, etc. (Though to be fair, I wonder how much of Apple's 30% is from older phones costing $99 or less with contract)

No idea, that would be interesting to figure out.
What library contained in it falls under GPL?
He means that money alone won't get you an operational carrier.
This is all good, but when are games going to get AIs more advanced than just attacking you on sight and otherwise just standing around serving up pre-made speeches? While I think view distances can certainly get better, last console gen was otherwise adequate in the graphics department.

This is of course an impressive achievement, but I just view it as a curiosity.
I'm not much into gaming, let alone an addict, but I never got this moral superiority argument people use when bashing games. Why are "sports, going outside, dating, hanging out with friends" inherently better than games? Admittedly all these other things are less likely to lead to addition but that's exactly because they are less stimulating, or to put it bluntly, boring.
More importantly is the sense of community and importance.

I don't think people understand the responsibilities of a Guild Leader in your typical MMORPG. When you're a guild leader, dozens, hundreds... even thousands of people look up to you for guidance.

Not virtual people, I mean real people. And the demands of a guild often demand dozens of hours of game-time. Either laying alliances with other guild leaders, setting up training schedules for the newbies, connecting newbies to veteran players who can show them the ropes. Etc. etc.

For competitive games, like Starcraft, League of Legends, or CounterStrike... the "guild" is not part of the game but instead part of the online community. They are called "Clans" in these games. But the concept is simple, you're in charge of a team, usually dozens of people.

You are expected to make practice, 8pm on Saturdays. You are expected to train certain maps, and make progress with skill.

For WoW, you are expected to be ready an hour before the Raid. You are expected to play your role (tanking, healing, DPS, whatever) for the next 2 hours in the Raid, and you have at least 5 players at any time that are dependent on your success.

People get "addicted" to the social connections, expectations, and in-game status. When you're a guild-leader in charge of a 10,000 person guild (_real_ people), it is a bit depressing to return back to the real world where you're a low-level junkie.

Even at a low level, you're always happy for being able to contribute to your Guild or Clan, especially when your peers appreciate your efforts.
They'd be better off. The existence of Uber is what causes these other "better jobs" to disappear.
>you aren't able to give him a physical key beforehand because he's also traveling out of state?

I actually had this issue once. I solved it very easily, I put the key in an envelop and mailed it.
The recommended and supported way of upgrading the base system is to boot a bsd.rd kernel and type 'U'. If you don't have a console, the manual upgrade guide on the website is an added convenience.
"High" is a relative measure, and "too high" would indicate a problem. Margin is certainly high compared to the various cohorts against which Apple is measured -- that's obviously not a problem. It would only become a problem if competitors can somehow negatively affect Apple by delivering market-equivalent or better products and services while foregoing margin by living in that profit "shadow". Plenty of companies are doing the latter, but not while doing the former.

Edit: As usms implies elsewhere in this thread, competitors can't simply decide to do both simultaneously, since Apple has an optimally efficient supply chain and massive economies of scale.
If you're not reading the code you can just as well curl-and-pipe it. However, we run so much code on our computers that is trusted-by-association (oh, that's from apache.org, that's probably safe!) that it probably does not matter anyways.
On Android Chrome isn't open source at all. On Windows/Linux several key parts are closed source, that's quite a bit more "than a bit of Google integration".
They don't seem to be doing too badly in China. (Armchair opinion but: I think devaluing their brand in China would be the worst thing they could do.)

"74.5 million iPhones, 46% growth over last year. Unit sales up 44% in US, up 97% in BRIC countries. Sales doubled yoy in China, Brazil and Singapore."

and

"Performance of Greater China was particularly impressive with revenue up 70%."
Update: GoDaddy Will Not Air Controversial Super Bowl Ad
I think that if a company cannot have employee-friendly policies in its infancy, it probably will not choose to implement them once it reaches adulthood.

If you only have 12 employee-months of runway, then you should not plan such that you need the whole thing. Parental leave is not the only uncontrollable circumstance that could be disastrous for your company. Your lead developer could get colon cancer. Your salesperson could jump ship without notice. Your co-founder could embezzle 20% of the investment capital. A patent troll could shake you down.

It boils down to a rather simple question. Would you rather fail with your ethics intact, or get money-rich by being an asshole?
Google's lack of oversight in the Play store (which is actually a core philosophy) is really holding back Android.

There are countless really, really crappy apps and clones crowding the app store. Plus, since most people pirate, developers can't make money (Monument Valley saw around 95% piracy rate and just $250k in revenue from Android, vs. $5.5M from iOS).

This sunk Windows Mobile, which I still believe has the best UI of the bunch (sadly, it also had a shit app store and tons of bugs).
In the old days of single-player, the universe of available content for a player to experience was limited to whatever content shipped with the game (with maybe an expansion pack or two later), which was in turn limited by the constraints of whatever physical media the game shipped on. You could only fit so much into a Nintendo cart or a floppy disk or a CD-ROM. Which meant that the game had a definitive "end" -- even the most obsessive-compulsive player would eventually exhaust the game's available content. And adding new content was an expensive, and thus risky, proposition for developers; new discs had to be pressed, boxes and manuals printed, shelf space at retail obtained, etc.

In the brave new world of online gaming, all those constraints are gone. Using the net for distribution rather than physical media means that it's now economically viable for the marginal cost to the developers to get new content to players has plummeted to more or less nothing -- which means they can economically keep you on a drip-feed of new content essentially forever. The universe of available content within a game becomes infinite. So that the game never really ends -- it just goes on sucking money out of your wallet until either you walk away from it, the audience for the game becomes too small, or you run out of money or die. (In real life, I mean.)

In this sense gaming as a hobby is one of those things that was transformed into something socially destructive by a simple change to the supply and demand curves underpinning it. An analogous example from history might be sugar.

Before Europeans discovered the New World, sugar was an extremely rare commodity to them, and thus only used in small quantities by those few people who could afford it. The New World offered prime sugar-growing land, however, and the introduction of slaves as a workforce made growing sugar much, much cheaper. This led to a flood of sugar into the European market, and the resulting price plummet led sugar to be accessible to more Europeans in greater quantities than ever before in history... which in turn led to a society-wide epidemic of rotting teeth as people binged on the stuff.

(You know the old story about George Washington having wooden teeth? This is why. George Washington's teeth rotted out early in life because, in the period he lived in, everyone's teeth rotted out early in life -- because they were enjoying all that newly cheap sugar.)
Are you not answering your own question? The "extra" little bit of Google-specific code tries to tie-in the web to Google.
It's mainly the thermal component, which synthetic fibers aren't very good at. As far as studies go there are many on the effects of thermal regulation on sleeping, which synthetic fibres are very poor at. Wool in particular vastly increases sleep quality for these reasons and is used in the medical industry.
U.S. tries conviction for leak of retroactively classified rotary phone docs
Offtopic: Positive responses like this are why I come to HN. Excellent response to OP.
That number does not include things like airplanes and people and supplies that you need to actually make a carrier useful.
That alternative is already here, javascript. I think that flash is being kept alive now for two reasons only: live video and flash components used for corporate bits & pieces.
Didn't like that article. Spent the entire thing waiting for exactly WHY they shut down but got no real explanation. This is the entire meat of the article:

> But less than two weeks later, the week of its planned launch, Night School was postponed indefinitely while its founders grappled with the CPUC, which claimed the start-up was not properly licensed as a passenger carrier.

And that is literally the only explanation you get for what the regulators did and why it caused them to scuttle the entire project. The entire rest of the article is just crying about other car pooling services and complaining about over-regulation in general.

Would like to read an article about Night School and why they weren't able to operate under the regulation, this article just isn't it. It contains little information and a ton of fluff.
> the estimated $1.4bn worth of card transactions that Americans make annually

This article seems to be off by a factor of 1000 on this number. $1.4 billion in debit card transaction for the U.S. doesn't pass the sanity check ($10 in annual debit transactions per U.S. household??). Source below confirms the number should be 1-2 trillion, not billion.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-2013-credit-and-debit-ca...
Sorry but I don't support indiegogo projects any more. There are more scam projects than real ones out there and the indiegogo team doesn't give a shit about it.
This makes me sad, because I like the idea of crowdsourced projects. But there needs to be a platform either side can trust which indiegogo is definitely not because scam projects attract more people and so they make more money with them.
Unfortunately (though it's considerably more compartmentalized and constrained than prior iterations), Google is trying to replace Flash with a DRM mechanism that also requires proprietary software. So while you might think that the advent of HTML5 video means you no longer need proprietary software to interoperate with the services that use it, Google and its partners are working to ensure that that's not true.
RealPlayer was the coolest thing I'd ever seen when it came out in the mid 90s. It was the first streaming music player, as far as I know. Of course they later became corrupted by the advertising dark side, like every other internet company. But they were cool for a time. This was also before everyone decided that the browser would be the only internet platform.
>I said they make you jump through hoops and open a bunch of related products so they'll waive the $10-15/month fee.

That hasn't been my personal experience. I've never had to jump through hoops or have a minimum balance.

I'm just sharing my experience which is apparently different from yours.

Oh wait... I had to pay a one time $5 fee to join one of my local credit unions.
"Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this..."

Personally I like to divide profits and revenues by the number of employees. They have 98 000 employees so they generated revenues of $761 000 and net profits of $184 000 per employee in Q4 2014.

Think about this: if you work for Apple, on average you helped the company generate $0.76 million dollars in sales in the last 3 months.

Edit: @smackfu: I do not think it is weird to consider these metrics. They show what Apple, as a business entity taking its own decisions, manage to extract from their suppliers (expenses) and customers (revenues).
I think this is a big part of it. I would rather run Windows on an Macbook Pro than any of the other hardware (although the new Lenovo machines are getting closer). That said it is still the phone/tablet/media streams that dominate their income.
The Lite option is free and has no limit on number of users. We use the paid option for a team made up of our staff, but we also just launched a new team with the Lite option as a way to talk to the sellers in our marketplace. I just invited 700 people of those people in to Slack and plan to invite several thousand more.

The limitation is that the archive is limited to 10k messages. But there are plenty of use cases where that doesn't matter.
Apple doesn't need to target the low end. They seem to be doing just fine, making the largest quarterly profit in history by not indulging in a race to bottom in search of market share.
Good write-up. Also, Denny's is a shining counterpoint to this. Many locations are 24/7/365. Friends have made it to store management and are explicitly told that though there are locks on the front doors, no-one has the keys as they typically loose them. Apparently, this is not uncommon. I heard about a place in LA that hasn't closed in 50 years or something. The only time they tried to was during the Rodney King riots, but as the keys were long gone, they decided to stay open.
Pornhub has switched to HTML5
Oh, sure, they might do it anyway, I'm just saying it's not needed.
Yup.

http://ink.hackeress.com/2014/12/crowdfunding-is-too-expensi...

Treating everything by default like it's a credit card transaction is _the_ glitch in the matrix... these companies are not "like" a cartel... they are a cartel.

The screenshot in the article is from my friend's campaign to raise money for her dog that got hit by a car in AK.. We surveyed everybody, and they all donated with cash from their bank accounts (debit). Nobody put their donation on a credit card. Nobody does that.

Somebody should do one of these graphics for The Oatmeal's Exploding Kitten kickstarter campaign... Stripe has already made over $250K on this project alone (more profitable than 95 percent of Kickstarter campaigns).
Ah, I see.

Yes, I think I've come to the exactly same conclusions in the past, both with regard to promises and curried (or partially applied functions for that matter).

This may only apply to me but I've found that without strong, static typing to help out, my brain starts to melt sometimes trying to workout what heavily curried JS functions actual do without using a debugger.
On Bitcoin and South America
Samsung have been loosing money on their smartphones divisions, haven't they?

I went iPhone -> Android -> iPhone

For the same reasons I can't imagine myself using Windows again, I can't see myself using android in the near future.
I never noticed this. You just made my week good sir!
Nice work. The only thing that bugged me (a lot) was the range top: It looked like a flat image of a range, while everything else in the flat was textured to perfection.

Only other nitpick: How many copies of Photoshop magazine does that apartment dweller need to own? ;)
It's funny that just today, before I found out about the glibc vulnerability, I reconsidered if I really want to upgrade my Ubuntu 10.04 mail and web servers to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I was triggered after reading some bad things about 14.04 [1]. I've looked at the M:Tier binpatches and package upgrades for OpenBSD, looked at FreeBSD, Debian with it's experimental LTS, but eventually I'm still in favor of the 5-year support for Ubuntu server.

I have bad experiences in upgrading production machines in-place, whether it is OpenBSD, Ubuntu or Debian and always install a new machine (vps) side-by-side which is really the only stress-free guaranteed way to go in my opinion. Having to do this only once every 5 years is really a lot nicer then at least once a year. The good security backports of Ubuntu, minimal breakage (auto-security upgrades at my Ubuntu servers have been working almost flawlessly [2]) are the least maintenance, stable and secure setup I can imagine.

OpenBSD having only one year of support, no binpatches of the kernel and having no stable security fixes of the packages are the reason I only use it with anything that can be done by the base system (backup host and nameserver). OpenSMTPd looks very promising, but I would need supported amavisd packages, same goes for httpd that needs php in my setup. Besides it's limited use, I still love OpenBSD and the mindset that stewards it. If only they had longer support and binpatches for kernel and packages :)

[1] https://tim.siosm.fr/blog/2014/04/25/why-not-ubuntu-14.04-lt...

[2] the mail config was overwritten once after an auto security update of dovecot in 10.04, quickly recovered it with etckeeper (/etc in git)
There are just as many who intentionally make the game as addictive as possible. It was bad enough before F2P, now it's getting out of hand.
Do Apple investors care at all about market share if the lion's share of profits are going to them?
I remember talking about this to to a friend who went to college in the 70's.

In those days, people used to fail out of college for playing hearts/spades/Risk etc so I don't think this is purely a online phenomenon.

I would say that computers give you an "always on/always there" opponent you can play whether it be a person or the computer itself.

As a side note, I can imagine in the past reading being the same way for children of parents who put lots of emphasis on doing vs thinking. E.g. they would see their children get "lost" in a "fantasy" land rather than being productive.
Does Apple care about beating crappy Samsungs in market share? Probably not. There will always be a market for low end/ cheap/ burner phones. There's little room for margins, and those customers don't buy into the ecosystem as much. Comparing ecosystem revenue per user, Apple's doing fine. They sell a top-end phone to people that will pay a premium, and continue to buy apps and media. It's kind of like telling BMW that they need to compete with Kia.

Sure, more market share would be nice, but it's not necessary. If iPhone's are seen as a luxury item/ status symbol, then there's little advertising needed. Plus, Apple could still sell iPhone 4s and 5s to compete with lower end. (I think)
Great point! How would you feel if they sold an iPhone as the old iTouch (ie wifi only no telco attached)?
Well I absolutely think it should be opt-in, I'm not sure I said otherwise.

But if the "opt-in" is "install and configure all this software" vs "tick this box," I'd rather tick the box.
Huh? My understanding of mainstream physics is that our universe is neither 3 dimensional nor stable. (search for "metastable" in this transcript, or look up string theory)
God I hope not, I just looked at my usage and one month (November) I had 800G of transfer.

I backed up a lot that month, been making a lot of videos lately.