skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The card trick mentioned is fun to ponder. Here's a link that gives the full article: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall09/cardTrick.pdf

"You, my friend, are about to witness the best card trick there is. Here, take this ordinary deck of cards, and draw a hand of five cards from it. Choose them deliberately or randomly, whichever you prefer -- but do not show them to me! Show them instead to my lovely assistant, who will now give me four of them, one at a time: the 7 of Spades, then the Queen of Hearts, the 8 of Clubs, the 3 of Diamonds. There is one card left in your hand, known only to you and my assistant. And the hidden card, my friend, is the King of Spades."
I don't understand why anyone expects RSS, the transport and encoding format, to contain filters, recommendations, and social aspects. Where do you think all those people who post (shortened) links on twitter get them from? Visiting all the websites by hand? How many of them are retweeted without actual having visited the site and read/consumed the content? Can sub-140 characters contain enough information to allow the next level of filtering, social or otherwise, to be really effective?
Terence Tao's blog: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/
I up voted it because I like the fact that this guy is a realist. So few of us who read HN will touch the heavens above no matter how bright, or thoughtful, or elegant our work might be. Luck and timing have more to do with success than inspiration.

This story is a reflection of those of us without timing or luck, who grind it out day in day out. It is a nice counter balance to the inspirational, but largely unobtainable heights discussed in the stories normally posted here.

Maybe in the beginning you can take the high road, and find "more to life" than this guy does. But for those of us who left the high road long ago, and are raising families, and paying mortgages, and grinding out a living online, this guys approach is sage advice.

The truth gets up voted.
Somebody downmodded you without explanation, but I agree with you -- the telephone "app" is just one minor incremental feature on an iPhone.

If, instead of being bundled with the hardware, the "Phone" app cost > $25 on the App Store, I probably wouldn't bother buying it.
Perhaps a ring of stolen credit cards were used to purchase these, and they were shipped to New York? That's more believable than the reason this story puts forth.

I can't imagine AT&T's failure to sell them online to New Yorkers will help much if their towers are overly congested. I would imagine most people either buy iPhones from Apple or an AT&T store.

Anyone who didn't find one online but knew they wanted one would get one from another channel. And if there are people who are actually unsure of what phone they want and browse around online to figure it out and who would have chosen an iPhone were it there, those people will probably end up on some other data-consuming phone as well which doesn't really solve AT&T's problem.

I really just can't picture this conversation:

Exec 1: Hey, our service sucks in NYC because too many people are using data. What can we do?

Exec 2: We could stop selling the iPhone to New Yorkers on our website. That should solve the whole problem.

Exec 1: Brilliant!

(Execs toast their Guinnesses)
Um, so? Why exactly would you be using IE to retrieve JSON? It's an API, right?
Proofing and editing the content would still be a valuable service, but I don't know if you'd be able to get authors to pay a sustainable amount for such a service.
Overall I worry that all this squabbling is just accelerating the shrinkage of an already diminishing market. I realize that the e-reader format is ideal for technical works, but what about fiction?

Does anybody outside of us old fuddy-duds just read for fun any more?
HackerMusic
How limited is AT&T's wireless spectrum for voice & data? There must be some limit, in a small geographic area, to how much channel overlap you can have. Is AT&T running out of spectrum?
Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts
Ward Cunningham, Don Knuth (mentioned in the OP) and Linus Torvalds also qualify, as well, I think. Note that I'm not simply listing out random famous software people. I don't think Martin Fowler qualifies, for instance.
With RSS, you get a deep view at very narrow topics (a full feed by one blog). You can set up filters and whatnot, but it's still a very narrow model.

A more social system leveraging your interests, your peers, and all that other crap could surface good content you might otherwise have never seen, plus the best content you were already seeing. It's a pipe dream, but I imagine that a service will figure it out sooner rather than later. As I mention in the article, whether or not they actually manage to make money remains to be seen.
Ask HN: Is this a good “non-profit” idea?
It's interesting the tech media has not covered the fact that Adobe failed to deliver on their promises of a beta of Flash 10 for Android (October) and the Palm Pre ("by the end of the year") Makes me think things aren't going swimmingly behind the scenes at Adobe.
EVE Ships, EVE Items,  EVE Online Ships,EVE Online Items,Cheap EVE ISK
A few of these are predicated on an improved economy, which is probably right.
My favorite mathematical embarassment: what is the chromatic number of the plane? That is, what is the minimum number of colors needed to color each point in the plane such that no two points that are a distance of 1 apart are the same color? It is known that the answer is 4, 5, or 6.
As someone who has just finished reading the entire Discworld series on my Kindle, I would like to say that while e-books on a screen are more suited towards technical documents and "look them ups," any e-ink reader is just as good as, if not better than the paper version.

People are constantly surprised at how paper-like the screen is, and I've never noticed any eye strain or fatigue, even after reading my kindle for hours.

I would seriously recommend checking out an e-ink based reader if you want to try some fiction reading. Then head over to project Gutenberg for a metric load of free, public, e-books.
~/ ls dev/
freelance opensource personal slum

Fairly self explanatory, slum is for random one-off things that probably won't go anywhere.
I started down a similar path about 4 years ago with some partners and we created e3f, "education for everyone, everywhere — for free" (http://e3f.com). We were doing it as a side project, and each of us ended up going in a different direction and the project languished.

Would love to talk ideas for starting it up again.
Main Page - Social Patterns
Thank you for clearing up that unbelievably vague article. "Eliminat[ing] science labs" could mean plenty of things.
The Secret Lives of Amazon's Elves
"Yes, this is correct the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone."
I would like to rewrite that part of the phone script to read, ATT is not ready for iPhone. :)
I never understand why people invent horizontal scroll. It is very unintuitive and sucks. That's the reason I hate reading PDF on handheld devices.

Reading habits of human beings are linear, not two dimensional. Trust me.
Could someone please explain to me why he's still trolling the front page?
It's funny to see how HTML5 is so 21st century.
The Great Fish Oil Experiment
I linked this in a previous HN thread but thought having a thread with its own comments would be interesting.
The OP brought up and specifically disqualified Don Knuth because he had freedom as an academic that working software developers don't. The example given was his ability to take off 3 years to work on TeX.

By those criteria I consider Linus Torvalds likely to be disqualified as well since he made his reputation while using the freedom he had as a student.

Ward Cunningham would be a good addition to the list.
There are two rss readers
1) Feeds of slashdot and 500 other urls leading to 10,000 "news" items a day.

These stories are stuff you would like to read, not that you must read. This might die as it is just overwhelming and it will be replaced with filtered/recommended content.

2) Specific feeds of items that don't come up that often or don't have that much content where every post must be read.

This will never die. This is extremely valuable. Subscribing to a blog where the author posts every six months, subscribing to information about a bill going through congress, subscribing to a feed telling you whenever someone assigns a bug to you, a feed notifying you when someone posts a FooBar up on ebay (once every 8 years). Whenever you want to get notified about something and you will read every story rss is extremely good. The alternatives are you manually checking (time waste) or email (spam heaven).
Right. For most of the things I follow I would want to get all the posts, but I wouldn't mind a sprinkling of content I would be unlikely to find.

However isn't there a fundamental problem with trying to create an automated system that delivers content interesting to you and doesn't simply amplify what's already popular (this one's called Google)? At some point humans with taste and judgement have to read content, so I take the skeptical view that an rss feed (or something functionally equivalent) from aggregated news site read by like minded people is as good as it gets.

For a recent example see the Left Fold weekly newsletter. Almost every article has had a good run on HN/Slashdot/similar.
> Right. I don't get this. If he's a fan of Lisp machines, why bother spending time implementing solutions to tough problems in TECO instead of whatever Lisp his Lisp machines were running?

Because he wasn't so big a fan of Lisp Machines that he didn't get annoyed by their fanboys. He's relating this annecdote to demonstrate that he is not sijmply a die-hard Lisp Machine afficianado who can't let go.
ops, you are right about the email , sorry about that.

We usually open new areas when people request them. I will see what I can do.
While otherwise a great article, the few CS metaphors are a huge letdown. Linked lists and RB trees are very different beasts, each appropriate for its own context. A better example of an artistic part of programming is well-placed unit tests - being able to see where a unit test will be useful in catching bugs, and where it'll sit idly passing for the rest of eternity, is an intuition of mastery.
If I can not re-sell my ebook I wont buy it. If an ebook comes with DRM I wont buy it. Period.
The wolf does not appear to be casting a shadow even though the people do...
Except that in open source software there are well known ways for splitting up work. In mathematics... thats not really the case (or at least, not to the same degree).
They are not part of the EU but there are a number of agreements between the EU and Switzerland and in particular EU citizens don't need a visa to stay there for more than 3 months.

And French and Italian (and Spanish and Portuguese for that matter) are really similar languages, most of my Italian friends could speak French quite well after only 3 months (meaning they were able to deal with everyday life and read good size books with no difficulty).
Not quite.

Adobe is using LLVM to translate ActionScript into native ARM assembly. No flash needed. See http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html and http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone...
Max - what's with the picture above your post? Not sure I understand what you're trying to say with it.

Edit: Nevermind. It's late and I skimmed your post too quickly.
I really wish someone starts selling MIT Lisp Machines built on FPGAs... They would be the ultimate übergeek gift.

If someone wants to help me around with the hardware and software, I would love to help building such an animal.

I suppose the Symbolics stuff is buried under tons of patents, IP and other legal nightmares to be rescued right now.
After getting started with OOP with Smalltalk and doing some stuff with Actor (a Smalltalk with ALGOL-like syntax), it took me five years to seriously read a book on C++ and another 7 to want to learn it. I only did it for the money.

And I still joke to my Java-loving friends how ST-80 made Java'09 look primitive.
The Goldbach Conjecture must be included here.
I doubt it would really be that bad. A couple software patches and we are all set.

I bet the patches are not even that much needed. All software that deals with magnetic North and its relation to geographic North can deal with nothing more than a new config file telling where magnetic North is this week.
Camera IP
The classic Parrot eBook gold mine:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215
Are Dropbox and GitHub wanting to get acquired?
I tried supplementing with various forms of omega-3. It took me a while to figure out the exact correlation, but as it turned out, too much EFA in general made my skin bruise and swell up readily. Hence, the days where I took fish oil and ate almonds and a salad with oily dressing would leave me literally crawling to do things by bedtime because my feet had become so unbelievably swollen.

I dropped the supplements pretty quickly, but was now hyperfocused on the swelling, because it still cropped up occasionally, and, I now realized, had done so for years, but in the past I had just written it off. It took another six months to figure out that vegetable oils - regardless of their ratio of EFA content - were the source of the swelling. Once I got rid of those, problem solved.
I don't understand how you can be complaining about the plan. Surely you can get any plan you want with your SIM card, and what phone you're using is none of the phone company's business?
"Whereas, if the contributor opened a dialog with me, I could help guide them towards something acceptable upstream with much less effort."

Perhaps, but some people really aren't all that interested in such a dialog.

I confess to forking code in order to make changes that follow the principle of Make James Happy. I am often not interested in pushing anything back to the master branch, nor in coding things "just so" in order to fit into some project's coding standards. It's a matter of expediency.

(Yes, I do also submit patches to projects when I run into bugs I think I can fix. But here I'm referring to wanting a lib or app to take a different approach to things and to do things the right way, i.e. as James sees fit. :) )

In the past I would slurp down code as a tarball or maybe svn, and I'd go about my private alterations in secret. Now, I push my quirky changes back into the daylight. The upshot is that if anyone finds my changes useful they are free to take them and apply as they wish, with no cost to me.

It's a big improvement over the past, and observing that it still does not make things as easy as possible for the owners of the upstream projects is seeing the glass as half empty.
Yep, the local deviations would just be 180° ± change instead of 0° ± change
s/Computer Science/Technology/ perhaps?
Yeah. In LHR today, my bag was hand-searched, and I was patted down. Except, they didn't pat my whole body, and they only opened the smallest pocket in my backpack.

It may or may not be theater, but it's certainly not security.

Don't get me started on how I wasn't allowed to use a blanket or jacket for the last hour of the flight. I wish I was joking...
Well, that was entertaining. Now, back in the realistic and hostile environment of the professional world, I'm thinking up an equally convincing tale of the "master" programmer who, despite much efficiency and cleverness, can't shake the depressing realization that his industry work is about as eventful as that of a janitor or plumber.
Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar
The G1 has it, and can be overriden by user apps. Do the newer Android phones not have this or something?

I had never seen or used a Blackberry before owning a G1. Android 1.0-1.5 might be crappy, but not as crappy as the Blackberry Tour. I've had to help my sis-in-law twice now with weird things like the ringer going into permanent mute and not being to come out of "Safe Mode". And pulling the battery is the only answer? Jeez.
I've seen many of these behaviors again and again.

Wish there were more details on the "long term implications" of terms as signed.
Ask HN: Monthly Subscription Plan vs Annual Subscription Plan?
Hi,

We currently have an annual subscription plan for our pro accounts at Muziboo - http://www.muziboo.com/pro ..

I was wondering if having a monthly subscription plan (ex. $4.99/month, cancel anytime v/s $49.95/year) increases conversions. Has anyone conducted such an experiment or seen a study?

Also, would this depend on whether this is a B2B or B2C app?

Thanks!
Hm... If only people could see the pre-process images...
> The editorial boards of oil research journals often include industry representatives

Um... there are oil research journals, plural? I am shocked and apalled that this abundance of ungual knowledge has hitherto escaped my attention!
Google Reader is already trying to do this with its social features. So far, not particularly well: I just use a combo of RSS and reddit to find things which interest me.
Yahoo Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement
Why are modern scientists so dull?
Of course, it's all meaningless if you're just going to let people on your watch lists waltz on to your planes.
Frankly, most airport security is an absolute joke and exists solely to add a certain amount of discomfort to all travelers including potential terrorists. The new TSA rules (like most of the old TSA rules) are utter theatrics.

If anyone really wants to see how security should be done just go to an international terminal which ElAl flies to and watch how they screen passengers at their check in. The ground staff are not there to frisk you or ask you to take your shoes off. They work directly for the airline and have received extensive security training. What they do is actually ask you a battery of questions designed to flush out inconsistencies. ElAl also pays much closer attention to so called "no fly" lists.

I think it's safe to say, and I'm sure the majority of us would agree that ElAl knows a thing or two about how to keep their planes in the sky with a maximum degree of confidence in their security. Would it really be that hard for other airlines to take a page out of their playbook? If not for the profiling (which I'm sure they do) then at least the questioning by ground staff.
When I studied Biology in high-school I found it beautiful but boring to study because it was too descriptive. Many years later, after having done various kinds of engineering, I must say I am amazed at living systems. Now I see connections between biological systems and systems engineered by humans. I see feedback loops everywhere. I think in terms of robustness and fragility.

Saying that "we have a lot to learn from nature" is almost a vacuous statement. Nature is so complex, that there are billions of opportunities to learn from it and to design bio-inspired systems. An example: neural processing is orders of magnitude more power-efficient that CMOS. Sure, our brain can't do arithmetic at high-speed, but if we lose a bunch of neurons, our brain still works. Humans can literally lose parts of their brain and survive and function. It's amazing. By contrast, a dust particle on a Silicon wafer is enough for a CPU to malfunction.

This fascination with nature has a dark side, too. Just because evolution has attained such quasi-perfect designs, it does not mean we can do the same. Neuromorphic electronic systems never got anywhere. People in the 1980s talked so much about analog VLSI and neural networks, and I haven't seen that much coming out of it.

The problem with being fascinated by something is that being in awe is not always the most productive way. Sometimes despizing something works much better. Whatever. I am not saying anything deep, and cheap philosophy never got anyone to actual achievement, to building actual things that actually work. Hence, I shut up.
Neat, I've always wanted to code something like this.
It's a jocular reference to the piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst.
I have almost the opposite problem. When I forget to take fish oil for a few days, my skin becomes very dry and forms a weird rash near my elbows. Fish oil fixes the problem.

(It is hard to correlate supplement consumption and wound healing, but this has happened enough for me to be somewhat convinced that it is true. I was introduced to fish oil to specifically to "treat" this condition.)
"if you can’t get fired for missing a deadline then you aren’t a real programmer working in the real world"

I thought the essay was pretty good until I hit that line. I feel like mastering something kind of requires rising above the daily grind. In order to master programming wouldn't one have to be a programmer simply by existence? I, for one, don't consider myself a programmer because I write code for Apple or because I have a degree that says I'm a certified computer scientist. I'm a programmer because I write programs.

Did that line bother anyone else?
http://cryptome.org/0001/yahoo-cryptome.htm
What value do watch lists have? If someone is a danger to society, then charge and convict them of a crime. If they are not guilty of any crime, though, it makes no sense to punish them.

The 9/11 hijackers had valid passports, visas, and were not on any watchlists.
At their core, these two techniques are not the same thing at all: http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html
After being subjected to these rules today, I almost want to be the legal test case for compliance with secret rules. Is refusing to comply with an unpublished rule a violation of the rules? (I am pretty sure the Constitution has something to say about this...)

Basically, this proves that the terrorists won. One nut with a fake bomb can change millions of lives.
There'll be CHAOS!

Think of all the boyscouts that will get lost without the use of a working compass! LOST I tell you!

The most obviously impactful part of the pole shift will be all the changes in migratory patterns as birds start migrating to the middle of the ocean or steppe.
+3 years ago?
Vegetable oils and nut oils are primarily omega-6 and omega-9. This is why people take fish oil and other omega-3 supplements; it's much easier to get omega-6 and omega-9.

I'm curious if your problems were caused by EFAs in general or a particular type of EFA, e.g. linoleic acid.
He changed the example pic, adding:

"[Update 2009-12-27: There was some debate whether the second picture was the same model. I have changed the second example.]"
I suspect it's more mysterious than that. I have 182 and can't see a downvote thingy anywhere.

And to me a visible points system is part of the problem. If people 'try' to get more points then they'll post lots of stuff that might just get in. Then you end up like Digg.
I thought MMA had killed all the traditional Martial Arts. I'm not aware of evidence that any martial art is effective outside of this list: Muay Thai, Wrestling, Boxing, Jiu Jitsu, and Judo. If they are effective, why aren't there any good MMA fighters using them? The Kung Fu guy got brutally beat down at UFC 1.

Now, you can argue that all the rules of MMA make some of the death-blow containing martial arts less effective. But there were few rules for the first dozen or so UFCs when Royce Gracie was choking everybody out with his Jiu Jitsu.

Yes I am aware of Lyoto Machida. But one good fighter does not mean that karate is an effective style, and most people who watched it thought the Muay Thai fighter Mauricio Rua won that match.

Wearing white suits, dancing around and making noises turns out not to be very good training when it comes down to the business of punching people in the face. I wouldn't be too intimidated facing some traditional "master" across the ring. And if you disagree with me, there are people who will pay you plenty of money to prove that your pet style works in front of a paying audience.
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