moxiemk1

While McMaster shipping certainly isn't free, it's always overnight, and often less than 100% of cost, so if Amazon is actually 2x price, McMaster still makes sense.

Side note: McMaster has, hands down, the best/most useable site I've ever used. The flow always gets me quickly to exactly what I want, even if I don't know what that is going in.

When discussing data-portability of social networks, Facebook's data download feature is sometimes brought up.

I periodically use this feature, to see if it has improved any since it's initial disappointing release. As of a few weeks ago, it has not.

A true data download from Facebook would consist of: a machine-readable form of every action I've taken on Facebook (likes, friend requests sent/received, photos I added tags to, photos uploaded, status updates, messages sent/received, comments made, etc.) along with timestamps and at least URIs pointing to the objects referenced (photos, people, etc.) if not a copy of my view of those objects.

(I understand why Facebook might claim they shouldnt give me, for example, dates that other people de-friend me, since that isn't accessible info. However, I do think that copies of statuses I commented on and can still see isn't unreasonable)

What we have now is: A static HTML dump of your profile page, photo page, and messages that is massively incomplete. Since the switch to timeline, fewer actions I have taken in the past seem to qualify for inclusion on my page ("moxiemk1 commented on friend's photo" used to feature more often in my profile than it does now). Since the revamped messages/chat integration, the messages dump (which always eventually cut off at some point in the past) is even smaller, and harder to read.

I would indeed like to have copies of the data I've created, and would like to emphasize that Facebook's "effort" to do so is complete BS.

One minor quibble: "sexual content" is a set that most definitely does include "homosexual content". There's no need to grant Happeh the idea that they weren't properly warned.

It seems to me that we should not feel any compulsion to cater to those who think that there is inherent moral difference in non-heterosexual behavior.

What?

The way to fight terrorism is to provide an environment where people not want to be terrorists. Terrorism requires no state sponsored infrastructure. Bombing places to hell doesn't stop the spread of hopelessness, of desperation, of taking comfort in extremism.

Note: Using the "anti-establishment guerrilla fighters" definition of terrorism, not "causing terror". That's a whole other bag of bagels.

And indeed - by declaring yourself mature enough to handle a startup at a young age, you're also declaring yourself mature enough to act like a human being. Young people in prominent settings shouldn't get a free pass - if you want to be in the "big leagues", you've got to act like you belong there.

Perhaps, but if we can continue to make it known that inappropriate behavior is unacceptable, it will be impossible for them to miss the signs.

Women shouldn't have be the only ones calling out their peers for making othering comments - everyone can do that.

While I think this is a great idea (and similar to things I've been slowly working on in spare time), I don't think that the execution really does "Fair" or "Fact based" justice.

The facts that are presented are pretty minimal - while I may agree with some of the conclusions that seem to be pushed by it, it doesn't feel like a general-use tool in order to provide better information. It feels like a presentation with specific goals.

EDIT: I think a better way of phrasing what bothers me about this is: It focuses on making the presentation of the data compelling. That's a good thing - if the presentation is compelling, people are likely to engage and learn. However, here that seems to have been accomplished in an "editorial" way - by hand-selecting things. Compelling presentation of data will be meaningful and honest when it can happen with minimal editorial influence. This is (or at least appears to be) completely hand-selected.

A lot of people seem to be surprised about the ToS for this.

It sounds to me to be clearly a tool for fans, not "Entepreneurs". I know tons of people who would love to analyze sports data for enjoyment, not profit. Since the data is so hard to get access to anyway, this API is a way to let those who are interested play around with things without being a potential competitor. ESPN wins, fans win. "Sort of like Zynga for sports-focused Foursquare groups" gets no dice, apparently.

I'm worried that in presenting math with visible, tangible intuition dominant will do more to silo the knowledge inside the ivory tower.

N-variable calculus isn't something that you can draw a picture of. Lots of (very practical) Linear Algebra is derived from the pure "Linear Transformation" interpretation rather than the "Matrix" one. Stochastic...anything (seems to be all the rage these days) is not made with helpful pictures.

If we train people to do math in a non-abstract way, they won't be as easily able to grapple with the real problems, which are only approachable in the abstract.

$1 Billion in profit => $1/(user year) in profit for 2011, correct?

That's pretty darn good money, but not a huge amount more room for user-growth. They'll grow by having new businesses/making current ones more profitable. New business would have to be monetizable (eventually, at least), current businesses would either have to convert better or become less costly to run.

Facebook is full of some smart cookies - it'll be interesting to see how they accomplish those paths.

Now I know what Android users feel like when people announce endless iPhone-only mobile apps. I was super bummed that I missed the last Humble Bundle, since it was chock full of games I had been meaning to buy. This one is smaller, though, and the having the "cool" feature targeted at a group I'm not in makes me feel like the bundle isn't really worth paying attention to.

This is the first time I have ever felt left out by not using Android. I think I'm going to more seriously consider needing Android versions of projects. The feeling sucks.

One of the reasons Tesla is better positioned than other makers to do well in electric cars is how they've designed the Model S. It's from the ground up designed with being electrified. The consequences of how they can lay out the architecture of the car is awesome. This isn't some sedan with a battery pack thrown in it, it's a sedan designed around having one.

Tesla might still be in a bit of a rocky position, but if this succeeds...watch out.

I've long wondered how well using a DOM serializer that was a reasonable inverse of a browser would work. I feel like it appeals to my math-y "generalize everything" side, but might not work out well in the "many pages have special needs" real-world.

This is pretty interesting. I'm interested to see how maintainable "pretty" HTML ends up being.

This announcement in particular stood out as meaningful to me, because it seems with the iTunes U app, Apple is taking on Blackboard.

There are few products that, as a student, more directly inhibit education than Blackboard. Ripe for disruption? More like rotting on the ground.

Absolutely. The dissonance caused by re-implimentations of standard UI elements has caused me to uninstall many phone applications, several desktop applications, and avoid purchasing a few mainstream applications.

If you don't think the stock UI works well for your application, then you either have special needs, or are wrong. Special needs can be implemented however you like, since they're by definition not handled with standard widgets. Re-implementations of standard widgets, however, immediately stand out to me, and make using an application similar to listening to out-of-tune musicians.

That is a fairly disappointing rebuttal by him. Hopefully we can simultaneously absorb the good of a nuanced discussion of the issue and condemn bad arguments about it by the same.

In what is a largely evidence based/logical culture, it's frustrating how both sides are often almost completely filled with illogical shouting. Hopefully HN can become a place with a lot more productive discussion about it than it previously has.

I wonder how much of this acknowledgement can be done effectively as a group vs. as individuals. It seems like individuals can change their behavior very well this way, which eventually trickles to the community, but I've come to be a bit disheartened on the group side.

In a thread not long ago, I made a comment calling out an article (of an article about Steve Jobs, not gender) for expressing a (to me) particularly exasperating form of the "pedestal" side of female-discouragement. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3229502) If I recall correctly, the score of my comment fluctuated a bit before hitting 10, then going back down to 2. I didn't find any of the responses particularly thoughtful, but clearly it is a contentious issue.

A number of recent call-outs by women about conferences seem to indicate that accusations of sexism without 100% proof of sexist don't fly in our community, much as anything without 100% proof tends to fall flat. However, one of the most frustrating parts of sexism (and related problems) is that they are subtle and often subconscious. This discourages me.

I really enjoyed this article. Harris O'Malley seems to actually see the real problem, and expresses it with a hell of a lot more nuance than most other treatments of the subject do.

>> And when you check back on Friday, I'll provide you with some concrete applications on how being cognizant of male privilege will improve your relations with women.

I'm excited about the possibilities of the "practical applications" - there is an awful lot of "identifying the problem" and "raising awareness" (as Helianthus refers to in another comment on this thread), however, not a lot of solutions. Obviously they're not simple, and they're not easy, and they're imperfect, but I'd like to see some other people's ideas about them.

This page, like several other parts of Facebook, is completely inoperable for me. Something in the page dies before it gets to the <body> tag.

This is perhaps irrelevant to the topic, but it's really frustrating that there's basically no way for me to do anything about this. I've waded through their highly unhelpful help pages to submit bug reports for all the things I've found not to work, but this has been the case for months.

I assume that I managed to be a part of an A/B test that causes some really inoperable things to happen? Regardless, it sort of reinforces my negative opinions of Facebook engineering when something can consistently break for me to the point that it renders no page.

As someone else who disables flash, I hope this isn't all that I am missing. These are all video/audio applications, for which non-flash implementations of the same application (Youtube, Vimeo, Apple's HTTP Live Steaming) work strictly better for me: smoother, faster to load, more responsive UI elements, more generic => more able to be optimized in the future.

>> But what worries me is the amount of stupid businessmen who’ll be copying Jobs’s behaviour. (I say “businessmen” on purpose, since I’ve yet to encounter a businesswoman, on any level, who treats people in an unpleasant way).

Recognizing that I say this from a white, cis-gendered, born to highly intelligent (if not at all successful) parents perspective, I don't think that comments like that are appropriate. First, it continues to perpetuate the mindset that women and men should be approached due to their gender, not their being. Second, to counter the anecdote, I have met such people.

Using only male-gendered pronouns and nouns would (as regrettable as this is) probably have gone unnoticed by me. That sentence put my conception of the author squarely into the most nefarious category of misogynists: those who try to better their own image while still perpetuating the problem.

This is true - the Google Voice app is now much much better, but it is worth pointing out that there were tons of bugs that weren't fixed for over a year, like:

* freezing irrecoverably when opening the app/going to inbox very often

* losing all the text you've typed when anything causes the textfield to lose focus

* things like gaining network connectivity causing said textfield to lose focus

Perhaps this qualifies as ad hominem, but this experience was biblically awful and from a major software company. Seeing how this new Gmail app is a bunch of Web views and needlessly non-standard widgets (=> part of the worst dredge of apps), it makes me start to feel pretty cynical about their iOS strategy.

Then again, taken the experience using the Android browser while developing mobile websites, maybe it's an institutional inability to develop polished mobile applications.

The the code the article links to for zipmap.c (https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/zipmap.c) is rather literate.

I haven't dug extremely deeply into the sources for many F/OSS projects; the code I'm interested in reading has been inevitably opaque (at least to my inexperience). This particular source file (and maybe the rest of Redis?) is really good. I think I'll be taking many more looks at Redis (code- and usage-wise) in the future.

The Nobel Committee is indeed one of the people who is destroying the meaning of important words, in this case "Peace".

As I said, I do agree that transparency is most often on the side of right, but I believe that making statements like the one I replied to is the reason why being among the cynics seems to me to be a lesser evil than being a part of the problem.

Sometimes here on Hacker News people get lambasted for excessive pedantry, but I think in this case, being pedantic about what we allow to be said unchallenged is crucial to having any claim to being a place of nuanced ideas and thoughtful solutions.

I think it's highly detrimental to peace to equate "bringing sensitive government documents and other material to light" with making the world a better place.

I agree that it very often is, but if we make this equation, then yet another term, "peace" will have zero meaning, co-opted by those who will push their own agenda by making it sound like that of others.

I am having a similar problem with a current-gen Air in Safari 5.1 w/ WebGL enabled. I just get a half of the screen (by diagonal) of green dots, and some other stuff that I think is the X-Wing. (then I die)

The user-experience of a workstation is something that I wish were economically viable to provide.

One of my dreams is to make hardware/software systems like NeXT did, designed for people who use computers as a tool to compute. It's a bit tough to sell hardware/OS design as a fundable startup, alas.

On the page I link to, Amazon says "We've refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack to push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this “split browser” architecture."

Computation (in the context of webpages) indicates JS to me, though they concievably could mean DOM construction. I'm fairly skeptical that transmitting a serialized DOM and unpacking it could be more efficient over mobile network connections that is using our time-honored DOM serialization, HTML.

I do hope I'm wrong, as I can't see how this sort of proxy can be healthy for the web, but I don't think my speculations are out if the realm of reasonable given the information.

"Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content." (from http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-Multi-touch-Display-Wi-Fi...)

This sounds conceptually similar to how Opera delivers pages with one of its mobile browsers, which is to say that Javascript and rich web apps will be severely crippled. Is it indeed possible for the server and client to collaboratively decide what parts of my code to run client-side and which ones proxy-side and still have anything approximating good performance/identical functionality?

I agree - this (to me) is indicative of the difference between an application that intends to be useful to me vs. one that is useful to the provider.

One falls into the woodwork, presenting a painfully standardized and predictable interface, enabling me to do things instead of "using an app". The other calls attention to its existence, and challenges me to "explore" instead of "use"