skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Individual developers might not make much money, but the profits for Apple and Microsoft depend on the sales as a whole across all developers. In Apple's case, they're making plenty.

That's true for now, but I don't think it's sustainable.

Apple's effective monopoly on the distribution channel is already a big risk for developers. You might not get approved at all, and have no real recourse if you don't. You might be effectively forced to update existing apps to comply with arbitrary new rules or UI guidelines because another iOS update came out, even though there's nothing in it for you (except for not losing what you already had). I've lost track of how much it costs or soon will cost just to be able to develop and ship apps in the first place via Apple's App Store, but it's more than nothing. And even if you jump through all the hoops, the near-zero price point of any app no matter how large or high-quality is now firmly established, and Apple can take a huge cut of those near-zero revenues purely because they have that monopoly on distribution of software for their own devices.

So for users, the software available for iOS is limited in scope and much of it is junk. For developers, iOS apps are one of the most high-risk, low-reward options, so that situation isn't going to change. And Apple's market share, particularly among consumers, seems to be diving faster than you can say "Good Android devices cost half as much", making iOS an ever-less-attractive platform for new development. If you're Facebook and giving your app away for free because you make your money another way, or if you're a specialist consultancy making business apps that integrate with cloudy things like SalesForce and are priced accordingly, you're playing a different game. But for typical consumer apps, the rules are heavily stacked against developers, and sooner or later the only people left will be the naive ones who haven't learned better yet, until the default wisdom becomes Android-first for any app[1], at which point Apple's mobile device business model is finished (and potentially so is Apple itself, though it's so huge now that like Microsoft and IBM before it there will be several chances to reinvent itself and recover first).

[1] Edit: Or Microsoft-first, if they really land Windows 10. Or Web-first, if mobile browsers and the APIs for using features traditionally reserved for native apps catch up. Web apps still have a huge advantage in portability compared to native ones, and that will also get more important if Microsoft/BlackBerry/anyone else manages to establish additional significant mobile platforms that aren't iOS- or Android-based.
I don't understand how any article with this title can get by without mention of Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. He's probably the most famous of all of Japan's 'rockstar' executive producers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeru_Miyamoto
The quality of the prediction also matters on the quality of the photo. I tried the photos that I do have of myself online, which each have a distinct lighting profile. One is a soft, orange glow in a restaurant... the guess was off by +11 years. The next photo has a portion of the left side of my face obscured by shadow. This was off by something like +31 years.
Please continue to do so. I'm sure that there are others like me that seriously appreciate you doing so.
I get asked this and similar a lot, so I have a post outlining the problems we've had with various resources including LYAH: http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional-education.h...
It's a good place to start. But I want to know that the person using a tool has a better understanding of what they are using than "everybody else uses it".

The most popular solution could be the best one. I just want to hire people who think for themselves because I don't have time to do their thinking for them. But first I need to make sure they are really adept at problem solving and can adapt.
He explains in http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional-education.h...
Given that the cracking is cavitation bubbles, it's kinda surprising that it wouldn't be doing damage. You just have to look at metal ship propellers that are worn from cavitation damage to see how cavitation bubbles can eat away at things.
Key paragraph for us mere mortals:

"In my time with Mercurial, I have seen it grow in fascinating ways. These include the concept of changeset evolution coming to life and the announcement of both Facebook and Google choosing Mercurial over Git. The future of Mercurial is that of scalability and because of that, I believe the best days of Mercurial are ahead."

Is it time to give Mercurial another shot? I first migrated from SVN to Mercurial way back when - but after the massive increase in Git's popularity I bit the bullet and switched.

What does Mercurial have over Git today?
I don't need more than a few seconds to find that the contextual menu at the bottom of the screen was absurd. Being frustrated with it means I would try to avoid using it, go around that problem. The solution Microsoft advocated for desktop: use keyboard shortcuts!

I do not dispute that keyboard shortcuts are faster than any mouse based UI. And I am sure that you became more proficient having to go around the Win 8 hassles using the keyboard. However if the UI can only be practical if a user learns by heart all sorts of commands and shortcuts, then it is a massive failure, it defeats the very purpose of a UI, particularly a UI targeted at consumers.
I pop my knuckles, all 3 thumb joints, wrists (by pronation of hand and supination of forearms, or vice versa), elbows (by hyperextension), shoulders, and cervical vertebrae on a regular basis, and occasionally thoracic vertebrae, toes, and hips. I can very rarely manage to pop one knee or the other, or lumbar vertebrae. I have never been able to pop anything in my ankle; there's just too much joint stabilization there. But I can manage the metatarsal-cuboid joints sometimes by twisting the foot from the toes.

If you can snap your ankle every time you move it in a particular way, it is probably not the same thing. I have never been able to pop the same joint twice in rapid succession. Indeed, that's why I pop so many different joints. Once you've done them all, there's no choice but to wait.

I'd certainly be wary of pops emanating from joints without a great deal of natural range of motion, or those so wrapped up in muscles and ligaments it is practically impossible to isolate any one joint in particular. If you experience any pain while joint-popping, stop doing it, immediately.
Facebook Bolsters Artificial Intelligence Research Team
There is some evidence that lack of sideways flexibility in the joints contributes to synovitis in climbers. A common recommendation is to regularly twist and stretch the finger joints like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMO__OrzM_U . Perhaps cracking the joints has a similar effect.
I've been waiting for this feature for years!
What is the value of a life?
You can deploy your own custom portfolio templates and assets to DevPort. This way you can use your own design while using DevPort admin interface to manage your projects and information.
http://devport.co/creating-a-devport-template/
Damn, I downvoted by accident. Also count on my vote for a black bar.
Messenger probe just impacts on Mercury
They have some of the codebase in c++ already from minecraft Xbox and pocket edition versions. If they expect it to be a long term ip/revenue source they will probably want a unified c++ codebase. Hard to improve the graphics engine much without biting that bullet.
AquaDataStudio was my choice at the time. Expensive, but worked on pretty much all the DBMS I had to use at the time (which included oracle, pg, teradata, mssql, mysql to name a few).
I'm struggling to find an example of the auto-generated API so I can evaluate a bit. Add a link?
Is this a new venture to support Java in VS? I was under the impression that they didn't really do Java in the MS IDEs. If so, that's far bigger news than Minecraft-specific support.
They should really run this against a bunch of photos from a dating site to measure the difference between the claimed age and guessed age and then compare to the result from whatever training set they used. I'm guessing they would get a bimodal distribution for dating site photos -- some people claiming to be younger than they are, and some people giving their actual age but using very old photos.
What's wrong with https://hg-git.github.io/ ?

I gather the difference is that hg-git has a mercurial repo locally and maps hg bookmarks to git branches and commits at push/pull time, while it seems like this experimental interface is using the HG UI against a git repo locally, but why is this better?
It's almost surreal to see that one of the douchiest companies around is so radically transforming.
By definition, the auto-generated APIs are specific to your Airtable Bases (eg, databases or mini-apps), so you need to first sign up for Airtable and then go to Airtable.com/api to choose a Base for which to view documentation. Sorry if this wasn't clear!
The unlikely origins of the word 'thug'
I guess if we're talking about this kind of powerset (because why not) a really, really simple way of generating all subsets of an N-element set is to iterate an int/long/whatever from 0 to (2^N)-1 and convert the bitmap at each step into a subset, where a 1 bit indicates inclusion and 0 bit indicates exclusion.
Now I'm imagining the change log for a program that generates two random change logs and then creates a change log of the change logs. Forever.

Step 1: Create two random change logs m and n
Step 2: Create a change log that shows what changed between Change Log m and Change Log n
Step 3: Create a random change log n+1
Step 4: Create a change log that shows what changed between Change Log n+1 and Change Log n
Step 5: Goto Step 3
> I can rotate my right foot in a circular motion and it will pop just below the top of the ankle on every single downstroke no matter how many times I do it.

I've been doing that, also with my right foot, since high school.
8 updates, listed in reverse chronological order, at he too of the article.

:(
Why not just recommend one way of naming things and do it in all standard APIs? If someone obviates in his custom library, that's his problem. I think below are pretty much a standard in many languages now.

THIS_IS_A_CONSTANT
SomeClass
someVariable
someMethod()
I'm getting the following popup when I visit the page:

The page at blogs.msdn.com says:
The target of the callback could not be found

I really want to like Microsoft, but it's the little things like these that make me uneasy. Especially when you're blogging about debugging javascript.
One of the main reasons it's hard to restart a rocket in space is simply because there's no gravity to feed the propellant to the outlet of the tank.

While the rocket is running, the acceleration caused by the motor causes the propellant to pool at the bottom of the tank where the outlet is. As soon as you stop the motor, the acceleration stops and the liquid starts floating around inside the tank. If you tried to restart it now, you would get an unstable mix of propellant and pressurizing gas which might not allow the rocket to startup properly.

To restart reliably, you need to apply a force to the tank to force the liquid back down to the outlet. During Apollo, this was done with many small solid rocket motors called Ullage Rockets. These would fire for just a few seconds just immediately before the rocket was restarted. The force was just enough to get the propellant down to the outlet in time to be sucked into the turbo pumps before ignition.
Maybe this is where crowd funding steps in. It's hit or miss because some times the demand really isn't there, but you can get AAA level bankrolling from crowd funding.

If you can't maybe it's time to learn to manage scope and deliver iteratively.
> that in itself would require a massive constitutional change.

I'm not seeing that. There is no inherent, nor implied right to immunity. You can legislate it away (however unlikely that might be) and there is no recourse to the constitution.
I guess the biggest functionality here is the ability to create repositories easier from within VS?

Because Visual Studio already has very good integration with git. I probably only use git from the command line once every couple of months.
I have it installed on a VM but can't seem to get Cinnamon running properly. Haven't messed with it too much but I was wondering what Desktop/Window Manager you installed to get to the point where you could use a "modern graphical web browser"?

I'm not picky and I just kind of randomly picked cinnamon during the install. Then Tasksel failed so when I restarted that part of the install I left the Desktop stuff out and everything worked fine. Once booted up I used aptitude to grab it, updated xinitrc to launch cinnamon-session but when I ran startx (after fiddling with enabling the hurd console that is) I was greeted with "Cinnamon Session Failed".

Anyway, I don't have a ton of time to mess with it but I'd like to try some options and see what I can get working. Any insight you have is appreciated!

Edit: When I said VM above, I mean VirtualBox if that matters...
I tried my picture and it told me I looked 41.

I am 21. Geez
Another black bar vote.
> I replied "well there are 1.5 billion Muslims and 1.2 billion Catholics. They can't all be right". Ergo, a billion people most certainly can be wrong. (In this particular case, 2.7 billion people are wrong.)

Very smug and condescending statement. Feels like an insecurity on the author's part.
I gave it a go back in college, but didn't get far, even with the help of a skeleton key. I tried it because it was reputed to be "hard". But making a bunch of references to things / people / places I never had a hope of knowing about makes it more "obscure" than "hard" in my book.
Eventually. Unfortunately not the priority at the moment. You can look at the scoreboard to see if you're in the same server, though.
I took a picture the day before I turned 28 and the day after. This tool got both of them right.
Dymaxion would be disorienting but it would certainly get you thinking

Example: http://basementgeographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/uap...
Open Source Is All about Love
So what does it mean if your joints don't pop? I'm unable to induce it, and it happens very rarely by chance. However, my wife pops her knuckles (and other joints) all the time.
Didn't he mention that these binaries are statically linked? i.e. no external dependencies?
Maple App Upgrades to Maple.com
No, it's just a joke.
I don't want you to see this as a personal attack, but isn't it your father's fault not having taught you to speak this "dialect" (which, I guess, is a language called despectively a dialect)?
Debugging Turing: An excursion with Scheme (2009)
I wondered the same thing myself. For an even more in-depth look into how truly brilliant this man is, read his interview over at the New Yorker[1].

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/master-of-play
GitHub gearing for a Microsoft acquisition OR am I reading too much?
The reason you're valuable as a freelancer is because you know things that their existing developers do not. Take this lack of knowledge as a gift: it's how you can add value to their organization and justify raising your rates. (You do want to select for companies that are open to implementing these dev practices, and sell them on the benefits up-front. But a company that wants to implement all of these but doesn't currently have the headcount for it is a gold mine. It's an opportunity for you to improve the efficiency of a whole team instead of just writing some code.)
> None of that indicates to me that there's any difference at all

Really? There's a big difference in terms of structuring, risk, ownership etc.

When you sell the receivables, your risk is gone. Whether your customer ends up paying or not is no longer your concern. Whether he pays two months late, is no longer your concern. Whether his company goes bankrupt, or he flees the country, is not a concern. You got paid, your financial relationship with your customer just ended. You have no obligations or responsibilities. You need not sue him, chase him, you need not collect payment.

That's NOT a loan. You just sold your receivable to a collecting company. In reality, you didn't borrow money, you SOLD a loan that in essence your customer had with you, but now has with someone else.

When you borrow money, you simply borrowed money. It changed NOTHING about the fact that you still haven't gotten paid. You're still at risk of a customer not paying, you still need to chase him, maybe even sue him. You still haven't actually earned any money. All you did was increase your risk by borrowing money that you have to pay back even if you don't end up getting paid in the end.

The former is a sale of your risk, the latter is a loan. They're not the same and not at all identically structured. In fact in one way they're completely opposite.

What is preferable depends. The former carries less risk, but the discount is higher than the interest you tend to pay. For example to sell a 30-day receivable might cost you 3%, which is a lot of money compared to the <1% you pay to borrow money for 30 days, especially with some collateral (which reduces your interest rates as the risk with collateral is lower, but doesn't absolve you from your debt if the collateral ends up being worthless!).

So these are two different products with different cost/benefit rates, one offloads a lot of risk and alleviates cash flow issues at a high price, the other doesn't really reduce risk but alleviates cash flow problems at a relatively low price.
Thanks, I'll check it out! Did you cut out coffee for focus reasons? Or any other reason, and did it help?
There are rumors of him retiring as well. Though I doubt this changes the way Nintendo will do things by much since like Apple, Nintendo is different.
I don't know about AAA-level bankrolling[1], as current-generation AAA budgets are in the tens of millions, but Keiji Inafune's new company, Comcept, was able to raise almost $4mm to fund his spiritual successor to Mega Man[2]

Edit: I didn't realize Star Citizen had managed to raise over $50mm via (non-Kickstarter, mostly) crowdfunding. Wow.

[1] http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-...

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightyno9/mighty-no-9
"Exactly - and talking about the app "helping the needy" is especially dishonest. Sure she can pay $3 a week instead of a $35 over-draft on her Bank Account -- and if you think that's help then I assume you've never had to live on minimum wage."

It's not up to me to decide, nor does my income-level have anything to do with the validity of my arguments. You simply have to answer "is this person better off with this thing X".

If we go under the assumption that steady-income is better than unpredictable income, then the answer has to be yes because this app satisfies that requirement. Let's not confuse that component with discussion about "real" help for the needy. There may be better ways, but that's a separate talk of "what is the best help for the needy".
Violence is the only way to be heard, sometimes. #BaltimoreUprising
Apple opens up early access to App Analytics for developers on iTunes Connect
This was my guide for finding books to buy when my son was little and I first discovered his interest in mathematics. (This list has been on various places online since the turn of the most recent century.) There is good stuff on this list. Now my oldest son is all grown up, living on his own, and teaching other people programming. Life is good. This list helped.
It won't have any access the hosting website doesn't already have... It's just interactive instead of strictly the delivered JS.
Indeed, that's precisely what first popped up in my head when I read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak
I've been using https://github.com/alixaxel/ArrestDB for a while, which is kind of a "no frills instant API" over MySQL so I'm interested in this. But man, from a lone indie developers perspective, the pricing seems kind of steep. It probably does make a lot more sense for mid to large orgs though, so props on that.
I am a person who, as a polyglot, feels a lot of passion for languages, and can get really upset when I hear about languages that are dying. Guess you could compare the feeling with those of animal species getting extinct.

I often ask myself if I, as a programmer, could contribute to helping preserve at least some information about that of dying languages, or even prevent them getting extinct at all? Any ideas?
I mentioned that I couldn't get a fully static binary with Rust and D.
> What does Mercurial have over Git today?

There exists no easy tutorial, that takes a beginner up to speed with git. You need to read almost a book length of material and familiarize yourself with some of the git's internals, and to some extent build your own mental model of git by experimentation, before you can use git without regular wtf-moments.

Well, there is also no tutorial that would provide the same level of understanding of the internals of Mercurial, but by some magic it seems that beginners do not need to acquire the same depth of understanding of Mercurial that they need to acquire about git, before they can start to work with Mercurial without wtf's and frustration.

Once you have a solid understanding of how DVCS's work, you can use both Mercurial and git without problems. But if you need to bring a bunch of beginners up to speed, somehow it goes easier with Mercurial.

At least, this is my experience. If someone else has experience in training teams to start using a DVCS, and has compared both git and Mercurial, and has opposite experiences, I'd be interested to hear.
Show HN: Timely for Apple Watch – Scheduling and time tracking on your wrist
Ah, but you can't publish benchmarks about any of the RDBMSs for adults (Microsoft and I think Oracle too) as per their license agreement. So never expect these types of articles to have any substance.
Awesome team. Congrats guys!
RETAIN USERS WITH THESE 6 EASY TIPS
Very neat. Been using Airtable as a personal CRM for the past couple of months. Is it possible to integrate with Slack? I can think of a couple use cases for working with my remote team.
It's been both terrifying and a whole lot of fun to design for the Apple Watch. It's uncharted territory, which I cherish. But it's also weird to launch something and not being able to test if before everyone else does.

Anyhow, there will be a lot of useless apps made for this thing, but we feel that this product was made for Timely! It's such a natural extension for a time tracking and scheduling app.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Well this is depressing... constantly told me older than I actually am.
sounds like the D binary was not statically linked.
Think about bubbles in a bottle of carbonated soda. Before you open the bottle, the carbonation is a liquid inside of the water because of the pressure inside the bottle. When you open the bottle, the pressure drops and the carbonation converts to a gas and becomes bubbles.

But, imagine if instead of opening the bottle, you just somehow reduced the pressure then quickly increased it back to what it originally was. The carbonation would go from liquid -> gas -> liquid very quickly. CO2 bubbles would form then collapse.

Converting from liquid to gas is not a special property of CO2. There are liquids in your joints that will convert to gas if you drop the pressure. That's what happens for an instant when you crack your knuckles. What you are hearing is the bubbles of gas collapsing as the gas converts back to liquid.
Blaming people contributes to this discussion how?
Amazon would probably tell you otherwise.