skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have always lived and died by one product. First it was the Mac, then the iPod, now the iPhone. At the current scale, yes, the iPhone sustains 70% of the company. If the iPhone fails maybe the Mac will be the one product to sustain a smaller Apple. Maybe the iPad will rally and do the job.

It's not that weird of a predicament. Not all big companies are diversified. Microsoft has sustained itself for decades with only two products (Windows + office). Google is sustained basically by advertisement on search results. They have other revenue lines but not as important.

If these lines fall companies do the same any other complex organisms do. They adapt to survive, find new businesses, reinvigorate old ones... Or they die. It's really not that exceptional.

What makes Apple exceptional is the scale of it all.
Isn't Unity's publish to web feature timebombed with Chrome?

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/28/the-future-of-web-publis...
I'd love to hear about that experiment in more detail. People often cite Google's Understanding web pages better[1] as evidence that it's now OK to render everything with JS, but this is the first time I've seen someone publish actual evidence.

[1]: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understan...
If you are not adverse to piracy, or you believe you have a valid fair use right to access the content, but you don't want to be guilty of distribution (a much higher penalty) then Usenet is probably the best bet.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I missed the part that said that Hound is indexed search rather than straight file search.
> It was created to solve the problem of single page web apps running slowly.

Wait a second, is this premise in any way true? Admittedly I don't do isomorphic JS so maybe I'm out of touch, but in my mind the primary driver of the development of isomorphic JS is simply the pain of seeing repetition of code across the front and back ends.

Obviously there is an appealing symmetry and reduction in toolchain complexity from isomorphic JS, and it's certainly an idea worth exploring, but I don't see it as holding any kind of dramatic promise. At the end of the day servers and clients are very different beasts that are not fundamentally served by attempting to make them look the same; there are probably a lot of incidental gains when focusing on small details of the code, but I don't see how it translates into a paradigm shift. Not that I dislike the idea, but is the article setting up a big strawman?
I'm curious how you weren't more savvy with carloans and credit in general?
Was it never discussed by your family? Did you ignore advice? It always seems completely obvious to me to steer clear of financing cars (never had a car loan, ever) yet I see so many others dive right in and end up very poor as a result.
I don't propose a change to the title on HN, but the linked PDF is an informal paper that's about immutability in databases.
I think everyone underestimates how much the slack team's game-dev experience with Glitch (even a failed one) would have impacted Slack's success.

There are tons of things that makes using Slack "an experience" - tiny bits of things that are not really "necessary" but just add that little bit of polish. This is gamification at it's best - when it stops being a excuse to add some points and silly badges and developers use real, practical things they generally use to build good games and apply it to non-game products.

The end result is an experience, as opposed to just "features". Hipchat doesn't get it. Neither does Hall or any other startup in this space.

Slack's only real threat, IMHO, is Whatsapp. Whatsapp has a brilliant mobile experience which works offline too - Slack is weak there and I don't know why they can't have a mobile app that works properly offline. With Whatsapp coming to desktop (although via a mobile go-through), whatsapp is suddenly a bit more usable for a team.

Now if they introduce a whatsapp API which works without having a phone number, it can rapidly make it an amazing alternative to Slack. Don't know if they will be going behind the B2B market though.
I'm surprised Moyn doesn't mention Edge.org, whose founder John Brockman has explicitly talked about starting Edge and becoming a literary agent to offer alternatives to what he calls "book reviewers" dominating "intellectual" conversations. Incidentally, the Edge.org annual question books are excellent.

In addition, WRT this:

It seems as if, in roundabout ways, all of our current historiographical trend-followers finally agree with White, in the face of what they regard as a great crisis for historical writing today. But it is one thing to call for speculation for the sake of relevance, and another to bring about a new marriage of history and philosophy.

writers like Keith Windschuttle have been discussing these problems since The Killing of History, if not earlier, and Camille Paglia has been discussing them in essays since the 1990s.

Finally, the lack of jobs in the humanities has been acting as both a negative IQ test and a conformity test for decades. I wrote a little more about that in the context of English here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor... . This may relate to the willingness of academic historians and other academics to speak to the public or avoid conformity more generally.
I know they pull the "you've been through enough' here is a new machine" thing to help customers. But how many more mobos do you have to go through to get to that point. How much time would you waste?
When I spoke with some senior Google search guys, this is what I walked away with:

Be a good player. Provide good content that your users care about. Positively add to the Web. Google will find you.
Playing devils advocate is all very well, but your questions have pretty easy answers. Unfortunately they involve math, and so people tend to tune out.

But how do you quantify it? How much harm is caused to herd immunity by 1 more child not getting vaccinated?

Herd immunity is a threshold. For measles (which is highly contagious) it is generally accepted to be between 82% and 94%[1].

What is the expected value of that -- the probability that the disease for which the vaccine is available actually occurs in such a way that the voluntarily-nonvaccinated person contracts it and then passes it on to someone who is involuntarily nonvaccinated?

In a non-vaccinated population, a single case of measles can be expected to infect 12 to 18 people[2].

In the recent Disneyland incident, 3 people were vaccinated and caught it (because the vaccine is only 97% effective - less if you have only received the first dose). 2 children who were infected were too young to receive the vaccine[3][4].

32 people were infected in total.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number

[3] http://www.wired.com/2015/01/vaccinated-people-get-measles-d...

[4] http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/disneyland-mea...
When you wish upon a star: nuclear fusion and the promise of a brighter tomorrow
Yeah, unless you're literally making an app where the concept of pages does not make sense (ie -- a lot like a desktop application), I think single page apps are usually just not that necessary. And single page apps are WAY more complicated to write. There's so much more state management.
I understand what you're saying, and I get that you're playing devil's advocate here.

I'm not saying 'screw vaccination deniers', I think we should have this conversation.

My position is simply that your rights end where mine begin.

This isn't like teaching alternatives to evolution in public school. If you don't want to believe in evolution, it irks me, but that doesn't really hurt me.

People can die when others refuse vaccination for bogus reasons. Even if it isn't readily quantifiable, I think many would agree with that statement.

If enough people start refusing vaccinations, it is reasonable to expect that a LOT of people could get very sick and many could die.

>What about the harm from wood fireplaces?

There are regulations in populated areas. The Bay Area has 'Spare the Air' laws

>What about swimming pools and trampoline and the probability of injury or death from both?

There are laws requiring fences around pools. And home insurance rates skyrocket when either of those is present.
It would have to get a lot nicer. I work in film and shooting an image of a TV or computer monitor is often a pain, even with high-end cameras, due to interference between the frame rates of the camera and display devices, as well as light intensity. For high quality results the typical workaround is to just throw up a grid pattern on the screen in question and composite in the desired image afterwards.

Is it possible to get results this way, yes of course. Are the results any good, not really. Commercial pirates work with people in the exhibition sector, amateurs rely on known weaknesses in popular disc formats. You'd have to be pretty desperate to rely on streamed media as your 'original.'
I'd argue that we lived in such a world until the 90s. When the big investment houses were partnerships with directors holding personal liability, they didn't pretend that 30% car loans were AAA paper. Dodgy car loans were often held by the dealer, and were sold for what they are worth -- pennies in the dollar.

And it isn't a tool for the poor, it's a funnel, draining wealth from people who don't have much to begin with.
I wish they'd do it now. We need a new government.
Straw Man Concept = build it up, knock it down, and create a solid final solution

I'd be happy with that.
Tumblr was acquired after Marissa Mayer became CEO and one of her goals was to improve acquisitions.
Isnt there a Step 1.5 - Make your own internal messaging app then?
This is a neat concept. It could potentially solve the vertical videos problem we have lately with smartphone cameras in everyone's pockets. My only nitpick is the "tap to take a picture/hold to record a video" control scheme. A viable alternative would be: tap to focus, tap and hold for a menu (think Galaxy Note 4 Air Command) where you can toggle flash, choose photo or video, etc.
Define victory.

Yeah, iPad sales are shrinking but more than 20 million devices in one quarter is still a pretty impressive number.

Lenovo (largest PC manufacturer) sold only 16 million "general purpose computers" in the same period.
Last I checked, the bits of Chrome that aren't in Chromium are:

1) PDF viewer.
2) Flash.
3) Some audio/video codec support (e.g. Chromium has no support for MP3, AAC, H.264, or the MP4 container format; see <http://www.chromium.org/audio-video>).
4) Crash reporting, metrics, that sort of thing.

#1 and #2 are certainly closed-source. I can't speak to #3. [EDIT: as surrealize points out, #1 is no longer closed-source.]

From an end-user perspective, there's a significant difference between "browser that will play the music and the videos and show me the PDFs" and "browser that will not do those things". Chromium, while open source, is really not a viable end-user browser on today's internet.
I agree with you about the great content for humans bit, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't still aim to maximize your current traffic through technical means.

If it gives you a whitehat traffic increase of even a few percentage points, that can still mean a big deal, hundreds if not millions of dollars.
LISTEN / NOTIFY is not recommended for production use. It will consume all of your connection pools gradually.
And just how many serial busses, wireless networks, HDD heads, flash level detectors, and DRAM sense amplifiers did those words of yours have to travel across to get from you to me compared to 10 or 15 years ago?

Analog only looks like it's falling in importance if you divide by the size of the digital industry.
It sounds good in theory but you're still learning.

If you remove the market for 20% loans, then those people will not get finance for anything, ever.

A 20% interest rate merely reflects the reality of lending to people like your younger self. They have a habit of defaulting. So to recover the money, a higher rate needs to be charged. Thus the amount of defaults can be higher and a return can still be made.

While you may think'banning' high interest rates will lead to better outcomes, it most certainly will not. See drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc. prohibition on any activity forces the activity underground, and then when you default, it's not a black mark on your credit but a black eye or worse.

What does need to happen is that credit understanding happens in school, and that every single credit product comes with a simple worksheet to clearly spell out the cost of the interest over time, and the final payback amount.

Yes, lending, even at higher rates, is a net good for society. It allows people to achieve things they currently do not have the money for. For every kid who defaults there is a family who buys a car, gets to work and builds up their credit score. A 20% rate actually says that the default rate is not too bad, overall.
This is precisely what we're moving towards right now. It allows us to break away from our current, sub-optimal backend server serving up all the services to an isomorphic JS app that consumes variety and spits back out results from API calls. It allows for great flexibility -- not to mention speed and consistency.
> How can we not start looking at some of these organizations less as companies, and more as countries?

Because they are not. Similarities start and end right there.
> the interface is ok, but not as polished as iTunes

Is 'polished' some kind of euphemism in this context that I'm just missing? The last time I tried to simply copy an MP3 from my laptop to my wife's iPhone I wasted almost an hour wading through nonsense errors, online tutorials, and absurd UI before I decided it's actually impossible to copy/paste an MP3 through iTunes and downloaded a standalone free player so I could load the file to the phone through the browser.

I don't own a lot of music, I don't have a library of albums, just a folder of files I wanted to copy/paste.
Kepler telescope identifies ancient solar system
You mean the coast guard or a random other ship?

There are no corresponding rules for rendering assistance to people on land, so I'm not sure the NP comparison is valid.

I definitely had the impression that, like the article you linked, there was a "maritime tradition that holds that the duty to render assistance at sea to those in need is a universal obligation of the entire maritime community". Maybe they can try to recoup their costs later, but that was not my (uninformed) impression. Or maybe things are different in national vs international waters?
Yep that's b/c the lender has drastically different levels of risk in each scenario. If you're a bank, you get negative overnight rates.
Not all sites are about content. A friend of mine recently struggled with this. He is able to get top quality swords and has a cool selling platform. Problem is that this does him no good on search rankings.
Seconded. Every developer should read this book. It's short, a pretty easy read, and oh-so captivating. Makes you a grow a fond appreciation for games and software in general.
Concatenate them into 1 file and problem solved (not the SEO one).
But it is profitable, isn't it? Google keeps telling everyone that they're not going into the fiber business to lose money.

I think what's more important is that they're willing to spend money on fiber that they could spend elsewhere to get better returns. Returns on being an ISP probably aren't as good as returns on other kinds of infrastructure, at least up front.
Naturally, there's an app for that. Lux solves the nighttime light temperature problem for Android. (Similar to the desktop program F.lux.)
"10 hours programming daily"

Gods, man, get up and take a walk now and then!
I don't understand why as someone in the technology world you would arbitrarily draw the line here. We've all been working on stuff that the world could do without. Why wouldn't you have drawn the line years ago when personal computers became a big thing?
The NZ govt site https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/move-to-nz/new-zealand-vis... is a good start for your research. My sense is that degrees count untowardly for permanent residency/migration. However, I don't think they're so important for temporary work (NZ has "skilled occupation shortages" and most types of sw development is on it). I know that http://catalyst.net.nz are a massive open source employer in NZ—check them out. Good luck!
I manage a large isomorphic app (m.trulia.com), and it's wonderful for our specific use case: Mobile website offering an app-like UI.

All our node layer does is route requests, make API calls to our non-javascript business logic / data layer, and render the backbone app into HTML on the initial request. So there's a nice clean separation of UI and business logic, in different repos even.

But as other posters have mentioned, it's only right for you if a single page app experience is right for you AND site performance (and SEO) is really important.
Agreed. If the features are optional, then this sounds fantastic. If they're not, well, they should be.
Exactly. Everyone I know who's built isomorphic apps has mainly done it for:

- SEO - having a static ver of a single page app for Google

- Efficency, delivering a rendered view to browsers when they're not transitioning from another rendered view.

I've never heard 'single page apps are slow' being the primary reason before. The load time of a JS binding is pretty low. Most people don't generally realise they're in a single page app until they move around the app atand in those cases the user perception is of speed.
>As a result a well equipped and well connected organization like Pinterest launches tests designed to improve this important signal.

One may think so, but I have worked at an organization where SEO was well known about but due to the lack of attention their recommendations were given by engineering teams, many of them left. The site subsequently suffered some penalties.
Are the sound waves sent to the cloud for processing?
wait - are they actually building aircraft carriers??
Clipboard API and events. W3C Working Draft 09 December 2014

http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/
Lisa Angell: retrouvez la chanteuse à la finale de l’Eurovision
OK that is where we diverge, i'm thinking no pre-rendered view. Ideally your frontend would be serving statically from lets say Amazon S3 and your api from another domain. Treat your frontend as if it were a mobile app. Now if you apply the data bootstrapping technique this can't happen totally but the only thing to do dynamically is insert some initial API data.
There are people for whom even $100/mo/user would not be a big deal but then there are bootstrapped businesses in 3rd world countries with lots of non tech part time employees (I want all of them on same communication medium). For them its not an easy decision.

This is not to claim Slack is pricing it utterly wrong. Of course they have their target audience and should do things best for their business.
Top February 2015 Korean Dramas! Which will you watch?
The Way We Hire Is All Wrong
Sorry Professor, the American Dream Is Not Dead
From efficiency to airflow, it’s a golden age for racing tech in our driveways
You're not alone. There's a group of people that this will sell to, and that's fine, but I'm not one of them.

I can use any one of the following tools at my disposal to regulate my sleep temperature: a blanket, a fan, an air conditioner, a heater, a window, less clothing, more clothing. Some people in the world don't have the luxury of ANY of these, much less all of them. The last thing I need is a new device to piss me off and do something poorly that I've managed to do just fine since I was a toddler.

And yeah, the video got creepy toward the end. If at some point in my life I can't be bothered to turn off the lights and lock my door before going to sleep, I've become something I really don't want to be.
We can base it on the consequences. If someone dies from an outbreak, and an unvaccinated person is found to be a vector, they are guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Hopefully the prospect of that is enough of an incentive.
Simple hydrophobic coating. It wears out eventually, but by the time it does your device is already gathering dust in a drawer.
Are there any good charting sites which graph market cap and float instead of price and volume?
You don’t have to work after hours to be passionate
Finding comfort in numbers
And the style that he has just puts it over the top. There are tons of skaters now who grew up attempting to directly copy his repertoire, but when they get to the more difficult flip tricks to manuals and chains he puts together they are lucky if they can land it much less make it look that good. That much physical talent and equal creativity are an extremely rare combination.
I loved that book. Glad to see an update. It has much practical advice that you don't get in the classroom.
My history:

1995: started using Linux as a hobby dev OS

2000: switched from Windows NT 4.0 to Linux at work (C)

2002: moved to .NET, used Windows at work and Linux at play

2006: mix of Linux and Windows at work

2011: abandoned .NET entirely; mix of Linux and OSX at
work, Linux for play

2013: entirely Linux

2014: mix of FreeBSD and Linux for work and play

So it's fair to say I've solid experience in both, plus a fair amount of dev environment automation under my belt.

Linux vs OSX: Linux wins hands-down unless you're happy hitting a wall when it comes to customisation and automation. Mint is in my experience the equal of OSX out of the box, and just gets better as you start automating things. Productivity with a decent keyboard-driven WM and editor (StumpWM + Emacs in my case) is great.

Recently I've become a bit concerned that some of the design directions taken by the Linux community aren't aligned with my priorities, so I've been trying out FreeBSD. It's awesome, and my current OS of choice, but hardware support is more limited and the desktop / laptop experience isn't as polished as Mint.
New Graphene  Breakthrough Enables Doubling of Solar Panel Efficiency
That's cool. What did you use to slow the music/vid?
Most of these are great if you can get away with them; of course it depends on how much authority you have to set the rules. (For example, I would love it if my workplace followed the "no all hands meetings" rule, but it ain't gonna happen in my lifetime, and I certainly can't make it happen.)

> If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I lock the door. No meeting. If it's with several people, I will only meet with those on time.

I sympathize with the desire, but I have never worked in a workplace where everyone always had control of their time to the minute. If they do in your workplace, great, but I doubt this advice will generalize very well.
Actually sometimes it's noticeable slower. Solution for this can be entry point detached from SPA (when index.html is not part of SPA, renders on the server side and load SPA in background, while user enjoying first 2-3 seconds of reading index.html), or it can be just hidden (white page) body of document, while everything is not ready. Second variant is poor copy of usual sites loading, so detached index.html or cached data in template or even isomorphic option - they are better.
Interestingly, a lot of the parts discussed are still in wide use today. Much of the concepts are necessary for understanding circuits and how they work.
I'm not familiar with plane tech, but wouldn't the pilot have a compass?
People are still scared of revealing their sexuality. I think this is a great idea. A new way of socializing.
I still see its asking for flash if plugin is available, with firefox flash plugin on ask to activate mode.
That hasn't been my experience. I find the mouse experience equivalent to my Lenovo. The Lenovo maxes out with an HD screen (1920 x 1080) and has about 2/3rds the battery life. I will concede the keyboard point. I pretty much hate all laptop keyboards equally though.