skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keep fighting the good fight. Making documents that highlight relatively unimportant aspects of a device when talking about the device's value in general is an implicit endorsement of those qualities as the important ones. If this sheet was a titled "raw material breakdown" or something like that, it would be fine. As it is, this piece communicates something entirely different than the raw specifications.
In a related thought, try "Islam will"
BerrySki - only blackberry app with GPS Ski Maps & track analysis
Answers the question: why should automatic updates be opt-out rather than opt-in.
what does ApunKaChoice mean?
So if I understand this correctly: they fixed poor uptake by making it so you cannot opt out of upgrading to the next major. It just does it without asking?
A look at some of the Nexus One's faults . . .
The Ladder And The Elevator
It is surprising, but the human brain is wired to think logarithmically, it is only by years of training that our brains get re-wired to do otherwise. Stanislas Dehaene has done a lot of research in this area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislas_Dehaene). The study of how the brain interprets continuous and discrete signals (for example sound and numbers) has led to the discovery that the neural representation
of number is comparable to the slide rule calculators, which was also graduated with a logarithmic
scale. See (http://www.unicog.org/publications/Dehaene_WeberFechnerNiede...)

It is very efficient to do calculations logarithmically and evolution appears to have optimized our brains (and that of a few other animals) in this respect.
I actually came here to post the same link but you beat me to it! I also remember seeing some of the research related to humans estimated comparisons between two things, and that we naturally use a logarithmic scale to do this...but I couldn't remember the details of the paper.
The Boxee Remote
Does the iPhone now include turn by turn navigation?
Apple's tablet will use Verizon 3G
It's pretty horrifying from a performance perspective.
Jason Calacanis Shows His (Horribly Bigoted) Stripes
Jason Calacanis’ Top Tech Products (And A Political Rant)
I wonder why Verizon is coming soon but Sprint is never mentioned. Is Sprint going to lock the Nexus One out of its network even when a CDMA version is available?
Ask HN: Please write the year or 'old' in non recent submissions
It's getting boring and inefficient to click on links that are posts from 2+ years ago.

It's cool that you're reminding us of something prescient, but it just looks like you only just discovered it. Lets keep the signal up!

Thanks.
Yes, but only in Minneapolis and Miami.

Elsewhere maybe a remark and some incredulity but nothing beyond that.
I'd prefer (2007) to (old)
Facebook's 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots)
The Birth of Obvious Corp.
Hah! I was just saying the other day that there needed to be a Mechanical Turk like site for Proofreading!
i didnt understand this at all..can some one explain this to me ,please. . .
No no, that's not how I read it at least.

There are two types of update notifications in Firefox. There's a little overlay slider that pops up in the lower right telling you about a minor update available. Then there's a large dialog window that can pop up to tell you about a big update.

Unless the user left the browser open for at least 12 hours, they were never being shown the big dialog notifying them that the upgrade to Firefox 3.5 was available, only the small notification. The fix is to make the big dialog pop up. It is not to make it install automatically, you still have to click the button to say you want that update.
well yes, but that's kinda my point, for every one of these "do this if you want success" lists, there are a ton of examples of people doing something completely opposite and still succeeding.
If they are censoring the suggestion list, why do you assume they are not censoring the actual search results?
No, I think the bug was that Firefox 3.0 doesn't even tell you that 3.5 is available but now everyone running 3.0 will get a big window advertising it. The upgrade is still opt-in.
10 Things not to buy in 2010 ?
There's apparent favoritism here, or bias against, depending how you want to look at it. If there were no filtering going on either way, I'd have no complaint.
<ACHTUNG> Vaporware Ahead! </ACHTUNG>

But, I'll support the spirit/thought anyway.

Relevant: Free e-book of Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler, http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Table_of_Contents.html (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_Creation)
Instapaper Text view bookmarklet
Ultracold atom experiment confirms universal series of states
#11 (bonus!): Be Wary...Overgeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.

Not sure why Twitter needed to be an exception, but he did mention it.
The fact that 2 suitcases per passenger can now routinely run you hundreds of dollars when it used to be free is a credible incentive to travel light.
Lot of good points you make here.

One enterprise that I spent some time at has some systems that are very old and have been continuously running. Some are on the order of 40 years old. It wasn't until the 90's that they finally decreed that new assembler code was not allowed. And lots of COBOL.

So as functionality has been added to these systems, the word "Legacy" doesn't quite give the feel of the sheer size of them.

I would agree that management resists smaller more talented teams, and add that the obscure tag is supplied by gartner, which is about as risk adverse as one can imagine.

And as you point out, there is the whole change control issue. I remember two hour meetings weekly for a small division in which changes had to be fought for and coordinated.

I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but let's say that Sun or other vendor does exactly the right thing and offers the right kind of solvent for the enterprise monolith. The systems that exist are so interwoven into the fabric of the business that not only do the IT portions of the problem change, but also the structure of the business itself. Not clear that Sun or IBM or MS can add much here.

A useful thought experiment here is to consider the spreadsheet and how, as a significant piece of new technology and forward looking tool, did change the way that business is done. Did it reach down to the core of the business to alter the monolith?
Yes. There's more opportunity for irony now:

"While it's true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company's ass....design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal)."

also fun:

"Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go."

Ahem....what's Twitter up to now? $1 billion? Hope they get that paypal feature launched soon...
Odeo had enough cash flow to work on their second idea: Twitter.

According to Cruchbase, Twitter has 83 employees. That is pretty tiny with respect to the number users that they have.
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter
Google Nexus One - Price, Specs, Comparison And Availability
Interesting to read, although the suggestion that you try a turnkey service is potentially bad advice. Most turnkey services ("we'll be your IT team for you!") suck. They don't care about doing a good job. They care about minimizing effort to maximize their profit. The SLA that you thought would protect you -- that turns out to only refund the money you paid the service for the time you were down. (Most SLAs don't promise to recoup your lost profits.)
Yawn, Google Introduces iPhone Clone
This was interesting to me. I'm learning Haskell right now, after using Python as my main prototyping / glue / tools language (I get paid to write in C++ and Objective-C).

The horrifyingly broken performance of the Python Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) on multi-core has me looking for an alternative for performance-sensitive higher-level code.

Typically I experiment with a new higher-level language, and then fall back on "I'll meta-program in the high-level language, and emit portable C code." Sigh.
Real content sites aren't the problem, it's the sites that consist of nothing but thousands of pages of filler text and ads. A lot of them take articles off "free to reprint" article sites, and run them through programs that rearrange sentences and swap words with synonyms, to create "unique" content. Once Google finds the site, they start listing the pages, unable to differentiate between this garbage and real content.
Agreed. I can't remember the last "10 Things" list that was this worthwhile.

I didn't even realize it was written by Ev until after I read it through.
I really hope Boxee can gain some mainstream traction. I absolutely love the software, and this remote is pretty slick as well.
I did a similar thing with our kids' LILLABO set. Except that rather than build from zero, my algorithm was to start with the smallest possible loop (8 curves - a circle) and add similar parts to both sides until the set was used up. The main criteria for the additions was that they had to translate but not rotate, ie. AC or SS and B, although more complex ones are possible, like BCA vs. SCAS. It doesn't seem to make any difference as long as they translate to the same thing.

You should be able to generate all possible loops relatively cheaply, since you're just moving characters around. You might need a separate character for the original circle/curve parts though, to make it possible to find the originals.

I never got around to implementing this - it was just an observation while building interesting tracks for my children, but I might have a go...
It makes sense for HP to offer a PC alternative considering they have had multitouch tablet PCs and desktops for well over two years now. I have one of their multitouch tablets, with Windows 7 on it (native multitouch gesture support) and BumpTop for a 3D multitouch environment. It'll be interesting if they have something even more novel up their sleeves, without the commercial 3rd party software I had to buy.
Sure, but as a general list for a general startup this one is as good as it gets because it is both practical and really to the point.

There are exceptions to literally everything, these things apply to 90%+ (I made that up ;)) of the situations that most starter-uppers will find themselves in and may wonder about.

Of course you can't make a list that will guarantee success, if that were possible then that would mean that the competition is over and that everybody can succeed.

But if your competitor has looked at this and you haven't you're probably missing out on at least one thing you wished you had known, and in that sense it is a good list.

As opposed to what usually goes for startup advice it is well above the average.
Yeah, the same for Ireland here. "Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country."
They don't. They also withhold suggestions in the case of "jews are" and "white people are" and "hot teens".
mint.com ?
If this was generated from some math formulas or from some other code (such as a fortran translator as another comment hinted), but if this was the code that was created by the author I stand by my original statement.
Ive spent alot of time in this field and can give you a perfect answer:

Serious domainer (buying + selling domains for a living): Moniker or Fabulous.com - Both are designed to handle mass updating of domains easy and for optimal parking. Monikers support is 9-5 and fabulous is invite only. Both are still fantastic.

Everyone else: Name.com :

Why name.com? Outstanding support staff, Free privacy, Low prices, Great reputation in domaining community. Outstanding security.

You are right to not use godaddy. They are pure evil, see godaddysucks.com for more proof. I recently moved all my domains off of them just to be safe.

Also, do not use a domain registrar thats tied to a host ( dreamhost or otherwise ) - While they may be a good HOST, they can not simply compare to a dedicated registrar. I do believe they are nothing more than opensrs resellers anyways so their involvement is limited and should you have a problem, prepare to jump through quite a few hoops.
Slovak Police Planted Explosives On Air Travelers
It's the same all over India.
/Bangalorean.
It definitely depends on the types of services you are using. Services like UserVoice/GetSatisfaction, Gmail, Posterous/WordPress blog, etc are a better use of resources than hosting or rolling your own if its not core to your business.
We're doing pick your price music on http://anjuno.com and for some reason no one is paying $22,500 per song. I wish those RIAA lawyers would start using Anjuno, it would really help our bottom line.
How to spend in a SaaS business (hint: customers cost money)
I know I've gone native (in Tokyo) when these images are no long Lost In Translation.
There are some good suggestions in the post and in the comments, especially by David Barrett of Expensify and Lance Walley. Two suggestions I would add:

o probe for how satisfied customers would encourage others to try your product.

o listen to "drop-outs" to understand what is dissatisfying

Here are two blog posts that contain more suggestions for direct conversation to understand customer perspective from the stories they tell you as much as the multiple choice questions they answer.

The Best Feedback From Your Early Customers Is a Story http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/11/29/the-best-feedback-fr...

The Best Way To Get Feedback From Early Customers Is a Conversation http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/11/28/the-best-way-to-get-...

EDIT: It's also good to bear in mind http://xkcd.com/523/ for the limits of numbers for understanding relationships, Lord Kelvin's injunction to "measure everything" doesn't always lead to greater understanding.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033823
I'm currently working on a build system. I'm effectively scratching an itch. It's my first serious project, where I actually plan to use it on a regular basis. You can find the repo at http://github.com/sahchandler/buildit :)
"I am extremely" provides further amusement as a search suggestion prefix.
Then again there are businesses which don't lose money on a per minute basis. Consider an insurance company. Its cycles (except for web portals) are monthly. And how much money does your bank lose when you have to stand in line for their system to reboot? Maybe not all that much.

Then there are businesses, like ITA which is used to sell seats on airplanes, where there could be an effect of cascading downtime could cost money all along the line.

Much more likely is the project failure cost. Dozens or hundreds of programmers working on a large project that gets cancelled. This is the real nub of enterprise software risk.
I dont "get" Twitter. Not in any way that I'd put money on, at least. Selling people a product is much more predictable than playing the attention economy game, let alone creating a social network. While he is riding the Twitter growth for now, it is not apparent to me that it is something he should bank on.
Pardon my shortsightedness, but how can a physical architecture be devised that doesn't ultimately compute via a sequence of state modification (ie. imperatively)? Von Neumann seems neither here nor there. Lambda calculus is a mathematical model, it exists only as a concept, it can not physically be excecuted in spacetime without an imperative implementation. Am I missing something here?
Whoa. A little familiar there.

I only have android--curious what additional features iPhone has for facebook?
Oh cool. A dead platform jumps onto another dead platform. The concept of a modern Amiga has gotten beyond ridiculous at this point.
Ask HN: Should I trust online password management services like passpack.com?
I've recently been looking for a good password management system. Key features being cross-platform and cross-browser implementation.

I started using Passpack.com a few weeks ago and it seems to be a pretty good solution. My only issues are how exactly they store your password database and how much can I really trust this service? Storing any sensitive data online always raises flags so I'm wondering if it's safe to use an online password service such as this? Are there any security tests I can perform to help ensure the security of this app?

The other option is to use something like Keepass--the advantage being that the password database is stored locally and is in my control. Though it might be a bit more complicated to get all my computers synced to use this.

So basically, can I trust any online password-storing site, and if not, should I switch to using only desktop apps like Keepass, where I'm in control of where the encrypted password database file lives?
I think there would be nothing cooler than to be able to "pirate" food. Farming would become a niche operation for those who love it, and those who want "real" food, while most of the world would live on "photocopied" watermelon, bread, and steak.
Building on .net? Get promoted startup of the day by Microsoft
if you are a bizspark startup or just building your apps on the MS stack, we d love to promote you and your company on BizSparkDB.com (you ll also hit techmeme.com), drop me a mail julienco AT microsoft.com thx
I think this is absolutely awesome. It has all the beauty of rspec and it's javascript.
Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation
Will T-Mobile let you do prepaid + $30/month for unlimited data? If so, that's an extremely compelling reason to switch.
Need to learn
At Rapleaf, your personals are public
> The iPhone didn't take its swathe of market share because it had better specs (God knows it didn't), it won by user experience, something no spec sheet will ever reveal.

It still had a base level of features that it needed to gain popularity, and user experience is not everything. If you need feature X and the iPhone doesn't have feature X then it is worthless to you regardless of how great the rest of the user-experience may be.

> Take the battery life data for example: hand a phone shopper two smartphones and let them play with it. How much weight do you think he/she would place on a 250h vs. 300h standby time? Compared to how slick/snappy the UI is? Compared to how intuitively they can get around?

People 'flocked' to get the Motorola Razr because it looked slick, that doesn't make it a good phone. Most people make impulse buys. How many people do you think bother to look at anything more than 'how many megapixels does it have?' when they want a new digital camera? Things like battery life are always going to be secondary considerations because people (in general) are very poor at planning ahead and making careful, considered choices. Things like that will (most of the time) end up as complaints about the phone after they have purchased it. Now I realize that most people (even after contemplation) may not want/need that extra 50 hours, but there is a difference between ending up with what you wanted and/or needed due to blind luck or due to weighing of your choices with your wants and/or needs.
It's pretty nice from a correctness perspective. If you cared about performance, you would not be using Python (or Ruby, or Perl).
Send Email(E-Mail) from VB6 using CDO [ Visual Basic Knowledgebase ]
Dan Everett is a pretty engaging speaker, you can listen to a talk he gave at the Long Now Foundation:

Talk Description:

http://www.longnow.org/seminars/02009/mar/20/endangered-lang...

Direct MP3 Link:

http://foratv.vo.llnwd.net/o33/mp3/2009-03-20_everett-LNF-16...
A couple of things in that article stood out as particularly flawed:

"Meanwhile, Apple is getting ready to announce an entirely new iteration of its iPhone in three weeks — the tablet — that will likely make every other player in the market look like a laggard — again."

The tablet is aimed at a different niche than the "mobile phone/mp3 player" space. Very few are going to buy a tablet and ditch their phone.

"Why didn’t Google subsidize the Nexus One so it was half the price of an iPhone, instead of the same price?"

Perhaps because they like making money?
The project has not been released yet. The project website says nothing, except that it's a question collection and suggests to leave an email to let you know when they're ready. I think it's not worth a review on ReadWriteWeb or here.
One pedantic correction: SSE is the 4-wide floating point instruction set. SSE2 added integer instructions using the same registers.
Last month my mom emailed me asking if I knew of any new/good places she could take her friend to eat in Philadelphia. I went on Yelp and found a few suggestions for her. Had my mom known about Yelp, she could have done that herself. I went over the next day and showed her Yelp and now she uses it every time she wants to go out to eat.

I'm tired of my mom treating technology like it's a chore so I'm working on something that will introduce her to new tech that can really make a difference in her every day life. Like most of you, I'm immersed in the latest and greatest technology every day but she's too intimidated and too busy to discover it herself. I find that once I get her past those two bumps in the road, she actually enjoys the benefits of whatever it is I introduced her to.

Right now I'm compiling a list of awesome sites, services, gadgets, etc. that I think my mom would actually like and benefit from... if she only knew they existed.

Then I'll send her a weekly email with a 2-5 minute video showing basic use of a new piece of technology and explaining how it can benefit her.

My gift to my mom.
The greatest program ever written
A seemingly good analysis. I remember when Rapleaf launched as the public alternative to the closed (and therefore limited) eBay rating system - I bookmarked it as a potentially beneficial tool in the future. Now it would appear it has crossed several of my personal ethical lines, but when it comes to putting information out on the net we can't say we haven't been warned.
StackOverflow is looking to hire another developer
> [...] I stuck to my trusty 8 bitter for a bit longer and built the Elektuur 'GDP', a hardware assist for vector graphics.

Interesting... This one?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron#Slogger.2FElektu...
Sort of like "Yawn, Microsoft introduces clone of Mac called 'Windows'". But with less evil and more open source.
Suntouch Floor Warming Thermostat
Suntouch floor warming thermostat provides greater comfort than any other heating systems. suntouch floor warming thermostat heating is the most efficient means of heat delivery in existence.
From their website:

Your data is encrypted on-the-fly before leaving your browser. Passpack uses the AES-256 encryption algorithm...only you can decrypt it with your secret Packing Key.

If the technology works as they say, it is secure. Now the problem becomes how to verify whether it works as they say. It is almost impossible to verify claims like these. Theoretically, they can read your password anytime they want just by modifying the JavaScript (or whatever they are using ) and you will never know.

Personally I would not trust them with my really passwords.
Suntouch Heated Floor
They can grab all your passwords, because you're going to type them into their service, and because it's a web service, they can switch the implementation as they please. If it's implemented as they seem to imply (server just sends you an AES-crypted blob of passwords, JavaScript AES implementation decrypts the blob client-side using the packing key), then what happens if the bad guys root them and "enhance" their JavaScript to send the packing key back to the server?

I think that you are going to have to trust such a service with your plaintext passwords, because you need to recover the plaintext passwords from it. The problem is aggravated by it being a web service whose implementation can be switched at any time.