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I find your premise that I should be positive rather odd. Isn't negativity sometimes warranted?

Additionally, my goal when writing isn't to create more "information dense" comments. My goal is to communicate information, ideas, and emotions. Sometimes negativity, profanity, and rhetorical questions are my preferred methods to accomplish that goal.
I've always been confused about this: after incrimination for cases like these, do these people get to keep their money?
In the code kata's I have been to, we use the following model to TDD:

1. If (all tests pass), Do one of the following:

a. Write a failing test

b. Write a passing test

c. Refactor

d. Start a 2 min discussion

2. Else (If a test is failing)

Fix the code.

I would imagine the above model to TDD would fix many of the complaints in the article.
yes, but this subject line allows us to explore "2 guys + n cups" jokes.
Ask HN: What are various incentive models on the Web?
I'm researching on various user incentive models on the Web (like twitter's follower count and foursquare's badges). Can you think of any interesting models that you've come across.
Interesting - which math text did you find worked out OK on the DX? I tried reading "OS X Internals" (the only reference book I have with diagrams for the Kindle) on my D2 and the performance was so poor on all of the line drawings that I gave up after 5-10 pages. Any references to fast-performing Kindle books with diagrams appreciated.
Besides, it's human nature to always ask "who".

Not just nature, but efficiency. The statement, "In argument subject, not author, holds interest" may be true in theory but in practice this breaks down. People without established expertise may have worthwhile contributions but it's easier for people to receive contributions from people with known expertise. For example, I would just as wholeheartedly receive a comment from cperciva as one from "A well-known cryptographer and talented mathematician with a relevant and competitive PhD."

This is mostly notably seen in the physical sciences wherein most theoretical physics treatises are given little attention from the mainstream physics community unless there is a credible and relevant PhD backing it. Physicists simply don't have the time to pick through all of the papers from amateur hour and point out where they messed up the calculation that they should have learned in Quantum Optics 332.

This expedience is partially reflected in HN comments. While ideally everyone would have a chance to respond to every comment to point out where it is factually incorrect, few have the time. It is also disconcerting to see a factually incorrect comment with more points than the factually correct reply. In each of these cases, one could comment to express agreement with the reply and reinforce the incorrectness of the original comment, but a combination of vote up/vote down fulfills a similar function in a fraction of the time. Perfect? No. Expedient? Yes.
If you're a public persona, and stuff like your personal posts about moving to San Francisco get re-posted, then the reposting of your work is probably not a very accurate barometer of your work's individual merits. Instead it's simply a measure of your overal notability.
Re: rental car tax, interesting article about the rental tax on Zipcars; http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121383390638486797.html

Bottom line, the rental car tax was intended to tax tourists and Zipcar has been fighting against it because most Zipcar members are locals without a car. In some states the tax laws are such that Zipcar is forced to collect a fee every time you reserve a car.
Doesn't QEMU do the same?
Given a choice between a $400 laptop and a $500 phone, I think the phone is significantly more useful. You can't shove a laptop into a pocket. You generally can't talk to a laptop and have it understand what you're saying. It's rather inconvenient to take pictures with your laptop. Your laptop doesn't have a GPS, and even if it did you can't fit it on the dashboard of your car. You get cellular service in many more areas than you can find open wireless networks.

If I could code conveniently on my phone, I wouldn't use my laptop for anything. I've switched over to my phone as my primary web browser, e-mail client, music player, thumb drive, GPS, atlas, address book, camera, and game machine.
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I hate to be the only one who is ragging on the thread. It's really slick & clearly the product of hard work. But...

1) on a laptop the controls are cumbersome (hard to aim with mousepad)
2) the game takes forever to load and then does not fit inside my screen resolution..it's just a tad bit too big
3) the store graphics are hard to decipher (blue on black) and it's not clear how much starting capital i'm allocated

love,
zack
What are those use cases?
Technically impressive as it is, the N900 is only being sold to early adopters and thus its market share is a rounding error. Competing against that is a pretty low bar.
[...] Ray Kurzweil, a prolific inventor who is best known for his prediction that machine intelligence will surpass that of humans around 2045 [...]

Today it's 2045 and the machines surpassed humans in intelligence. (or it's 2009 they 'actually' surpassed us).

Am I missing a few decades here?
I find this true not on the Internet more often. For example, one of my friends asked me to describe what I was working on and how it worked. I was perfectly willing to get him up to speed -- until I realized what I was stepping into. My current project was designing and implementing a hardware virtualization support layer. One of the reasons why I was so reluctant to help him was I realized exactly what kind of "background information" (as the article says) I was using in the project.

First, I would have to teach him how virtualization and virtual machine monitors work. But before that, I would have to teach him how modern operating systems work. Well, before that I would have to teach how modern hardware works. Even if we get through all that I'd still have to teach him IA32e assembler and POSIX standard C (he only knew C++). After realizing that, I told him I'd help if he took a couple more courses and later decided he still wanted to know. In this case I would have to say that I did intentionally withhold information, but only because I didn't want to give an incomplete picture.

P.S. You stole my username ;)
The list seems to be concentrated on the last few years. Readers on crunchgear already pointed out RAZR was probably the most successful phone of the decade and still ranks number 2 in the nielson survey. And B&M stores still account for 95% of total sales according to census data.
Ex-Seagate employee claims company stole MIT research, tried to cover its tracks
Thanks for citing this. I think it's fair to characterize Islam as more violent than other major religions. Even if many Muslims do not act in accordance, the text is there for any fundamentalist to rationalize his actions.

That being said, more terrorists are probably motivated by meddling or foreign troops on their soil than what is written in the Koran, so I'm guessing it's more like adding fuel to the fire than the root cause.
There are also limits to what anyone can describe of their expertise.

See the very important essay on describing expertise :: http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_socrat...

At competent level ::

"There are just too many situations differing from each other in subtle, nuanced ways. More, in fact, than can be named or precisely defined, so no one can prepare for the learner a list of what to do in each possible situation."
nice i'llcheck it out
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You're right about accidentally bringing on contraband.

I actually do it intentionally in the sense that if I know my sunblock is more than 3oz and I don't want to throw it out, I just hope they don't find it. I get it on the plane about 50% of the time.
Assuming you don't mind some negative feedback:

* It took almost 5 minutes to load

* It gets noticeably slow and the FPS drops to a single digit on
the first screen with an Ambush.

* The openings in the floor are way harder to recognize as such
compared to version 1. When I fell through one, I honestly
thought it was just a pattern on a floor.

* The Inventory screen needs to some tweaking. It took me a bit
to understand where the Sonic Pulse weapon should go on the
left hand side.

Overall, purely from the "user's perspective" it does not look like a super improvement over v1. It is more of an opposite given the lag and the loading times. That's not to say it is not beautifully done, it certainly is.
Summary: This seems to be an obit.

The silver was used as an electrical conductor for electromagnetic separation of uranium isotopes.
I live in SOMA (San Francisco) on Folsom between 3rd Street & 2nd street. There is an Enterprise on Folsom between 3rd Street & Folsom, right next to Twitter. Draw your own conclusions.
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I assert that gaining admittance and 4 years of study is far more difficult than taking out a subsidized loan for ~30k (give or take). These con-artists with fake diplomas are riskier hires to their employers when compared to someone who had the tenacity to sweat time, tears, and years for the degree. If they weren't riskier, the market would reflect that reality and you would see employers clamoring for the cheaper labor of someone without a degree.
Perhaps a bit off topic, but I'm curious what others think about the idea of privatizing airport security and getting rid of the TSA.

In other words, let each airline compete (and innovate) with it's own security solutions, and spend it's own money to implement them. This would essentially bring the power of the free market to bear on the problem. A terrorist getting onto United (for example) with a bomb would be a huge PR problem and a mark against the airline not the TSA, causing them to lose business and competitors to scramble to learn/capitalize on it.

As it stands if you have a complaint against how the TSA is handling things, there isn't much you can do. But if airlines provided their own security, passengers could "vote with their dollars" on who was finding the right mix of effective security vs. inconvenience to honest passengers, and the best solution would be rewarded economically.

Btw, I realize this would probably never happen given the political climate, but I also can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work better than the TSA. Thoughts?
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It wouldn't be too hard to phrase it in such a way that it seems completely legitimate. For example, pull one of the Russian Mafia guys in and offer him a deal to inform, but tell him it's a limited time offer "because we'll have this guy soon and he'll squeal".

(Also even if there are hints of illegality juries are generally unlikely to convict cops).
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I'm really looking forward to seeing a Pixel Qi tablet.
Considering it would take the deaths of around 300 people for an airline's security to be proven insufficient (and thus not a good place to spend money), I'm not sure if that's an ethical idea. Personally, in such a situation, I would always go with the most safety-focused airline, no matter the inconvenience.
Is there a mailing list for the project somewhere? I asked a question in the blog comments (about the possibility of learning a matrix of values using a custom loss function, instead of a single-valued output), but I don't think these are read.
The problem is not making them but making them in enough quantities to be actually used for applications. A lot of the current research efforts are in pursuit of depositing them on a surface in our group.
Hrmm... unless T-mobile has a different ETF for the nexus one, it would seem smarter to buy it subsidized and eat the $200 ETF.

It's a compelling value proposition as a VOIP/Google Voice phone.

T-Mobile has an unlimited data plan for $40, add in unlimited text messaging for $10. The TCO for a 24 month nexus one on this is $1580. As opposed to the $2360 for an iPhone. That $800 difference could be the tipping point for a lot of people.
The advantage of the iTunes Store is that it convinced the technology-hating music industry to allow people to buy music online. Amazon has already done that for the publishing industry.
I think, in general, you will find that to be a rare thing. Even if you start with a small population that doesn't require "setting the scene," as soon as the population grows, so does the requirement.

I would claim that even in the 400 days I've been here on HN I've seen this happening. When I first arrived it was possible to have a short, to-the-point, informative comment that required the reader to think hard before they got the most out of it. Most of them did.

Now it's necessary to create longer, more detailed, more direct comments that set the scene, make their point, put the point in context, and draw conclusions. This is an inevitable consequence of a larger audience. It also means that the subsequent discussion will be "diluted" because of the wider range of experience and ability of the participants. As far as I can seem it cannot be avoided.

Nor is it necessarily to be regarded as a criticism. If you want a broad range of opinions so you can learn from all points of view then you need a large population from which to draw them. You then must realise that it's not the same as it used to be, and one's style must change to match the new audience.

Finally, I do not think this is a question of "intellectual integrity," and labelling it as such is unhelpful. People will always tend to have an opinion, and setting it aside during a discussion in order to listen/read dispassionately is highly unnatural. It is better to work with human nature rather than demand that your audience set aside their natural tendencies, perhaps especially in the West, where schools are starting to require that their students have an opinion, even when they don't actually know anything.
You misread his second sentence.
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This reads like a press release. I like the screenshot that shows pretty pictures but completely unreadable text.

The Kindle was successful because most books are just text, and it presents text pretty well. Not pretty well from a "typesetting is art" perspective, but pretty well from a "being able to read it for extended periods of time" perspective. Guess which one sells e-readers and e-books.
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Users would have to share their authentication details with the negotiator, which would be a security risk but would mean the negotiator would be indistinguishable from the user.

The service providers certainly wouldn't like it but I'm not sure there's much they can do.
Works nicely on Webkit nightly.
Doesn't Kodak make digital cameras, photo printers, and photo printing paper now? Sounds like their stock price is low because the company is not a good buy, not because they are in the wrong market.
Personally, I like the traps staying. More easy experience!
I definitely agree about the targeting indicator. I was always losing my mouse cursor.

Great game, just like the first one.
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Assuming the US, you'll run into legal problems. None of the Part 15 (low-power unlicensed) bands would have the range you're looking for; the power levels are too low to give that much range. Part 97 (ham radio) wouldn't help; there are too many restrictions on content (no encryption, no profanity, no pecuniary interest, limits on "third party" traffic, etc.) to use ham radio for the purpose desired. And you can't send data (other than selective calling codes, and geolocation bursts only in the FRS) on the various licensed-by-rule "citizen" services in Part 95.

That pretty much leaves you with having to get a business radio license ($260 per ten years minimum, plus possible additional fees), and on top of that you'll need a someone with a GROL ($60 fee plus testing fees) to maintain and operate it.

The only other option would be unlicensed VLF. This you could do, but there's two problems: the antennas for VLF are huge, and the available bandwidth is tiny. Ever used a 300 baud modem? Well, that screams compared to what you can get out of a VLF connection: 5 baud is a fast data rate in this band.

Those Voyager units use frequencies reserved for military use the United States. Using them in the US would be a good way to get yourself in a heap-o-trouble.

The problem you have is that for the range you want you need to be able to operate over the horizon. That means your receiver is going to be in one of the transmitter's diffraction zones, which means only a fraction of the transmitter's signal will get through. We do this all the time in radio, and we accomplish by throwing enough power at the problem to have a received signal strong enough to be demodulated even with diffraction losses. For the distance your looking for, you'll need about 25 watts minimum, way more than you can get away with in Part 15.
Before anyone makes any donations, someone should probably wait for this information to be confirmed by Google or T-Mobile. You know, the people actually selling the product, not some random blog...
This article probably takes too many words to make its point, but the analysis is spot-on. Of course that may just be wishful thinking on my part. If Zynga games are anything more than an unsustainable fad then I fear for humanity's future.
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What cloud features does Google not provide? Add a contact in Google Voice, watch it show up on your phone. Change the color of a calendar on Google Calendar, watch the color change on the calendar widget. Etc., etc.
The first one surprised me as well. It's not like that in Java or in C++. The others are harmless because people either know or at least know that they don't know and look it up if necessary.
Laptops can be purchased with integrated 3G/WiMax now. Laptops can run the exact same software as phones, too. (Fire up Android in VirtualBox.)

I find phones nice for their niche (almost-computer when you aren't near a computer), but if I was sitting next to a laptop and a phone, I would only use the phone for phone calls.
Having played a few web based games in the past (although thankfully nothing from Zynga) I can attest that the analysis is spot on; for the first few weeks the novelty keeps you there, but after that it becomes dull and you go back to real games.

Also after you've gone through a few of them you seem to get inoculated to the genre.
Often people (I, at least) don't care what it costs to make a product, but rather care what value it provides. I'd take a free phone (duh), would probably take a chance at $399, but flirting with $550 is beyond the pain point for me. I suppose there are several other people who feel the same way.

I'm especially annoyed that this piece of hardware appears to have a AT&T compatible 3G chipset but is disallowed in the baseband. To me this is just another piece-of-crap restricted-use telco-friendly piece of hardware, this time with Google livery. To pay for an unsubsidized phone and not get all of the features that the hardware is clearly capable of (modulo patents: multitouch) is offensive, and makes the $550 to me even more irritating.

The whole thing is slightly less appalling when you think of the phone as another iteration of the G1 and MyTouch for T-Mo and not as an honest attempt by Google at offering an open device.
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Thanks! Just one small correction: Tarsnap isn't linux-only. It runs quite happily on BSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris, Cygwin... basically anything UNIXy.
When I view it in firefox (with NoScript running) on KDE the text is flush right and the left side is jaggy.
I've been using Chrome to stay logged into important apps, then browsing everything else in Firefox.

I also open a separate IE window to log in to my banks and then close out completely when done.

Ever since I saw the hack that checks colors of visited URL's using CSS, I've been a little more cautions of what I'm logged into across tabs.

The thing is, the rest of the world is just running a bunch of IE7 tabs or even IE6 windows.
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First a pretty obvious point. The point of the H1B visa is to make it easier to import specialty workers whose skills are in high demand. By definition those jobs are going to be high wage jobs. Therefore not covering low wage jobs is a benefit - it ensures that the visa is only covering the kind of people it is supposed to cover.

Moving on, where did you ever get a $100K figure from? I haven't even really thought through what the bond should be. I kind of like the idea of setting a cap on the numbers then letting the figure be set in an auction.

But that said your extension makes a pretty big mistake. You're adding a $100K one time fee to the $100K/year salary and are coming out to $200K. But you're adding apples and oranges. If the employer only expects to keep the H1B for 1 year, your math is right. But suppose the employer reasonably expects to keep the H1B for 4 years. Now we're at $125K, which is only $5K over the market rate.

Now an obvious question is how long the employer can expect to keep an employee for. There are two possible attitudes here. One is that turnover is out of your hands. The other is that it is under your control. I submit that the proposal is going to appeal more to companies that think the second and believe they can keep people happy. I happen to think that this is a good thing because I prefer companies with that trait and like rewarding them.

Furthermore I believe that the proposal is going to be more appealing for companies with candidates that they reasonably believe are better than the local applicant pool. Again I believe that this is a good thing since that is exactly the kind of person and situation that this program is theoretically for. Except that today we verify this based on the testimony of the hiring company, whereas my proposal makes it in the best interest of the company to act this way.