skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But ordinary, everyday people don't want to infer how a system works. They don't want to think scientifically, and they won't invest any effort in building a mental model of how the device really works.

That's not true ... "everyday people" (whatever that means) always have a mental model of how something works (be it a computer, a car or a washing machine) ... that's how humans think, the problem is that their mental model is usually different from reality.

And you can almost always put blame for this on the interface or on the education given to them.

It's like you're saying I should know how the internals of my car works (lots of science in there too). Well I don't ... all I know is how to drive it, and I've had problems because of that ... but it's not like I care. If it ends up bugging me so much, I'll search for a smarter car.

Regular users are lazy indeed ... some of them just don't get it, others are doing just fine for their day-to-day needs. Those that are doing fine, like my wife, tend to have a good teacher nearby ... so the only meaningful way of countering their laziness is through proper education.
The global warming industry is Too Big to Fail.
Disappearing into the Fire
Thank you. Yes, there are lots of verticals, and depending on what you search for there are usually better than the general search engines.
That always was a stupid strategy. Trusting stuff on one side of the firewall just because it is on the other side is not good enough, that means that after any breach at all your whole network is wide open.

Security should be applied at the lowest possible level, just like you would in a physical installation.

It's not like when you work in a bank once you are allowed 'backstage' that that automatically gives you the right to visit the tellers cage or the vault.
That is a very interesting approach. I believe Searchme did something similar.
VCs & Tech Lawyers: Innovate, Automate, Simplify
Lots of other people on twitter are also checking their flash stats. You can see the results here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shareyourflashstats

I would be intrigued to see some big players announce their stats also but anyone of any size usually keeps stats close to their chests.
Thanks for the detailed feedback. You are right about the extra click, I will try to load at least of page then let users navigate.

I think I will keep adding vertical search engines and improve the UX.
Amazon data usage on mobile devices strictly prohibited
I don't see how Macmillan has a long-term future under their current business model. Arguably their best hope is to go into competition with Amazon and sell eBooks directly, at razor-thin margins. Technology is driving their margins down just like everybody else's; the only question is if Macmillan will be around (and lean) in ten years, or just a memory.
Don't you just think these news about hacks from China are getting way to frequent?

The attack on Google was said to be a way to get access to the accounts of free rights activists, but they also attacked several other US companies. The reason must be to steal the companies' know how.

Would you be surprised if a few years from now a Chinese Google was announced and similar and maybe better products in other industries?

And I think these actions are all supported by the Chinese goverment which knows getting chinese competitors in some key fields is the only way of exponentially develop its economy.
... how many times Eric swore to me that Google would never make a phone
Then why would they make hardware?
I've just been having a play around with Timetric and it looks pretty neat.

I used to be the developer for Bloomberg's CIX (an excel like language for historical & real-time financial time-series calculations) so it's always interesting to see new people in the space :-)

I'm based in London as well, so if you'd fancy grabbing coffee or something sometime feel free to shoot me an email.
Filing lawsuits because people tell your secrets is not "evil", nor is a very up-front policy about having a single, moderated channel of distribution for your mobile devices.

It's very "closed", and that's no secret, but that has nothing to do with being "evil".
A Revealing Interview With Steve Jobs (1994)
"Closed" has nothing to do with "evil".
I doubt if this is a new development at all.

There is a big difference between stuff happening and having the media spotlight on it, that usually gives an impression of something being suddenly much larger.
The numbers show wii's have massively outsold xbox+ps3. There's only one winner in the current console lineup.
I don't think any delivery could actually make that joke good. The only way I can see it being funny is if it actually happened to me...

How are you imagining the delivery though? Maybe I'm missing something.
If one government trying to hack another using gifted USB sticks and cameras isn't hacker news then I really don't know what would be, but if you feel that way there is always the 'flag' option.
Ahem:

Tor (who are my publisher -- I've visited them there) occupy one of the 22 floors of the Flatiron, along with their fifty staff (total) who publish 300 books a year. They rent, the building's been bought, and they've been served an eviction notice of sorts -- the lease almost certainly won't be renewed; they can't compete with the hotel chain who want to turn the Flatiron into a des. res.

The Flatiron may be famous as the first steel-framed skyscraper (and the view from Tom Doherty's office at sunset is awesome -- the Empire State Building, backlit!), but it's an elderly and rather badly maintained building.
That depends. Closed doesn't have to be 'evil', but open almost never is. So even if there isn't a 1:1 correspondence between the two you'll be finding 'evil' (lock in, proprietary protocols, overpriced hardware and so on) invariably when stuff is closed.

But of course there are manufacturers of closed source that do not do 'lock-in', that open up their interface layers and protocols and that price their hardware reasonably.
Log Collection Server with Node.js
Steve calls it like he wants you to hear it. What he says has no necessary relation to the truth or what he actually thinks, or sees.
Seniors and Diabetes
??? Why not just set it to run at say 1am? Stateless, simple. Or did I miss something?

def deleting_thread():
while True:
# 10 minutes
time.sleep(10 * 60)
# pseudocode
if 01:00 <= time() and time() < 01:10:
deleteFromSolrAndOptimize()

And no I'm not creating an account to tell this guy so on his blog.
"How much training are western corporations giving their international staff about high-tech security?"

Everywhere I have worked (public sector, private sector, startup, ISP, defence) there has been scant regard given to security. Anyone who wants to attack a UK-based organisation via its IT is basically at liberty to do so, often through the most old-fashioned of means (password guessing would be fruitful, for example). I have never enjoyed any success, as a sys admin with > 15 years trying, getting people to take security seriously. They still think it won't happen to them, even when you explain to them that when it does, they won't know about it (let alone the danger of honeytraps against specific personnel; lambs to the slaughter afaic). So, yes, it will be routine and lucrative and it's all but encouraged by lax security and dumb optimism almost everywhere.
Because if Google actually managed to kill the iPhone, it wouldn't be like all the iPhones would just disappear. They would be replaced by Androids.
Don't you just think these news about hacks from China are getting way to frequent?

Perhaps it is just being noticed more now, and publicized by the press.
Sorry! Thought I'd updated my profile with it. Here's my work address: http://imgur.com/zEwd6.jpg

Mention hacker news in the subject.
No, what I'm saying is that, of the $16 net price you pay for a hardback, you might think that the lion's share goes to the publisher and the author gets 10%, but the reality is that 70% goes to the distributors and booksellers while the author and publisher split 30%.

What Amazon have done is to sneak up on the distributor/bookseller pipes and merge them into one lucrative hose, and now they're playing both ends for their own benefit.

Amazon squeeze their suppliers, just like Wal-Mart. Amazon is already corrosive -- if you're a small supplier.
A few years ago, I took a class called "Homelessness an Public Policy" through a San Francisco college. My recollection: There are roughly as many homeless people in SF as there are in New York, even though the overall population of New York is way higher (8 to 10 times higher?). Most likely, part of the reason is the weather. The San Francisco Bay Area is the only part of the US with a Mediterranean climate, which means it is relatively temperate year round. It doesn't get that cold in the winter, it doesn't get that hot in the summer. Iirc, the average daytime temperature in Napa is 60 - 80 degrees Fahrenheit year round. I was in Solano County at the time and we had much hotter weather in the summer. I went to San Francisco for a medical test in June. It was in the nineties in Fairfield. It was 30 degrees cooler in San Francisco. I made sure to take a jacket. I still was uncomfortably cold. Extremes of heat and cold both kill homeless people. So the weather/climate probably has a lot more to do with the high levels of homelessness in San Francisco than the political climate.
Lessons Learned for Getting Better Results from Developers
I agree, but I don't think there ever really was an inside versus and outside. Flash drives, or even floppy disks for that matter, can bring worms into a company even if the firewall blocks them.

Companies have always needed to put security measures on each individual computer, or in this case, each individual person.
Mark Pincus's Secrets To Success: Make Everyone A CEO Of Something
someone needs to build a web app that asks a few basic questions, gives you some check boxes to click and then generates all the standard PDFs you need for seed funding, employee agreements, etc.
Ask HN: What should I include in a tech discovery phase?
We just got a new lead, and they want to buy a "tech discovery" phase from our software development consultancy. They basically have an idea, a graphic designer, and an information architect. They will put together a set of wireframes and we will be responsible for figuring out what they need on the technology side. I want to be able to come out of this phase with the ability to make a phase 1 development proposal for the first working prototype. They have enough budget for about 40 to 50 hours of work in this phase.

What do you normally include in the proposal at this stage in the game?
my company is looking to hire at least 1 intern for the summer, paid. It's a media monitoring mature startup located in the NOVA/DC area. You'd be working on the team that builds the system that gathers the data. It's all Java. So if you like data mining massive amounts of data on the web, you should send an email to djb.email@gmail.com. I'm not making any hiring decisions but I'll pass it along to someone who is.
I wonder why they don't want the Amazon API used on mobile devices? That makes no sense at all.
Exactly. 7-8 years ago, these same types of stories were going around about France being the evil hacker country, and that in most hotels catering to business travellers, there were pinhole cameras above the desks that would monitor and record businessmen typing passwords, so the evil maid spies could then unlock the laptops when the travellers were away.

Back then our media was also slamming France for being "cheese eating surrender monkeys" and renaming "french fries" into "freedom fries" because they would not support our activities in Iraq. And now we're slamming China because China isn't supporting our activities in Iran.
Points about Starting Up
Note: 2007 - not much has happened in 3 years, has it...
Cutting ties with my old friend Microsoft
Why my books are no longer for sale via Amazon
Amazon is doing a great job to make sure that not only are they not represented in the mobile space, but that when they decide they want to be, it will have been so poisoned that no one will want to deal with them.
According to Bruce Schneier, the Google attacks were using the CALEA intercept points which are mandated by US law. There is no possible way that Google could shut down those access points without violating US law.

> In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hackin...
World hottest news: Pakistani Taliban chief Mehsud buried - state TV
Submitted for having a pretty good explanation of the economics of ebook publishing (through major publishers), and discussion of the recent Amazon-Macmillan dispute.
Very good, the first item is "Be a developer", the author gets it.
The explanation given when they put this policy in effect 2 years ago was that they hadn't decided on what they wanted to do in the mobile space yet and they just wanted to make sure nobody moved ahead without them. It's been 2 years and this is still their policy, so they must really be struggling over whether they want people to be able to give them money from mobile devices. Even something like this, with using Amazon data, fosters a much more active and healthy market that Amazon benefits from. That kind of thing is intangible, though, and businesspeople can be stupendous boneheads when it comes to such things. They assume the market is always open and active, with people integrating media products into their lives, regardless of what happens. They're wrong, and Amazons business will hurt if they make it more difficult for people to read about products Amazon carries (even if Amazon is not mentioned at any point). If some other source steps up, the market will still be helped, but Amazon will be left out in the cold as far as the information they currently gather from usage of their API, so it will end up hurting them one way or another.
Fear of this sort of thing is why many larger corporations are locking out USB drives as part of group policy updates. They will never disable autorun, but by gosh, they'll make it so you can't plug any sort of USB device in.

There have been several stories of people tossing trojaned USB "thumb drives" into parking lots at large companies in order to get their payload installed, and it works. This is a fatal flaw of autorun.
Perhaps they want to make some exclusive deals with Apple in the future, and don't want to go through the hassle / bad publicity if they disable the Amazon API on mobile devices in the future ? Perhaps they have some plans with the Kindle and are afraid that having other mobile devices using the Amazon API will hurt those plans ?
I suppose I can't prove to you that I know Perl very well any more than you can prove to me that you actually tried to port a library over to a language without even bothering to learn the language. The latter sounds kind of stupid to me.
it's hard to find any examples where patents have stiffled innovation. Of all the hundreds or millions of patents it's only possible to find very few if any historical examples where patents stifle innovation.

What patents do achieve is exactly what they are there for. which is to protect the inventor of something usefull for a period of time.

If you want to use innovation that has patent protection, you should reward the person who invented it, OR invent something better youreself.

That applices to things like Ogg Thorbis, where new technologies were developed in spite of patents. If there were not patents on MPEG Ogg would not have been innovated.

Same with file systems, if there were no patentson NTFS or FAT, then why would ext3 and so on mabey would not be where they are now.

Fact is patents are there for a reason, (apart from it being law). They appear to work, and they dont appear to be affecting innovation to any degree.

Sure, there are groups who would be happy to ride the coat tails of others innovations and inventions. But that is only so they are not able to innovate themselves. They like something that works, and have a 'me too' attitude.

(why should someone else get rich, when I can copy that and get rich as well).
Count me in. I can't understand everyone complaining about the lack of open programming/standards/access on the iPad. It appears to be the ultimate html5 client. Adding a Bespin editor would make it a one click cloud coding dream (well, with an external keyboard so we can have a control key...)
I wonder if anyone is working on an open database of books, movies and music...

It might be interesting to work on something like this.
I'm graduating from CMU with Cognitive Science + HCI this semester; looking for entry-level jobs in FE engineering, Rails.

More info + links on profile.
Clash of the Titans: Amazon vs Macmillan
You probably don't want it totally turnkey - I mean, you can - LegalZoom is the most well-known, but Wilson will incorporate you and give you the whole kit and caboodle for just $5k. Plus, if they like you, they'll make intros to angels and VCs for you when you're ready.

That said, there are some reputable forms and sample documents; here are some:

Wilson's Term Sheet Generator: http://www.wsgr.com/WSGR/Display.aspx?SectionName=practice/t...

YC's Series AA documents (also by Wilson): http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

Yokum's walkthrough of the Series AA docs (he's the Wilson partner responsible): http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/08/23/how-do-the-sa...

The incorporation docs for Founders Fund companies were once available on TheFunded.com, but I can't seem to find them in my thirty seconds of poking around.
Please keep in mind that Google IS presently the world largest censor. It's pretty clear that they only avoid doing evil when it is not financially incentivized. Apple is just being stupid and shortsighted, especially with the iPad. An open market alongside their closed one would boost them both. It's clear that Google realizes this as a point of business, and I think given their other actions it's clear that they are doing it for those reasons and not to avoid evil.
Are MI5 trying to suggest that they don't use the same tactics against other countries? Industrial espionage has always been common, so this is nothing new except perhaps for the particular technologies used.
>Check out the smudges

Oleo-phobic screens need to become more prevalent IMHO.

I liked the basic idea, snap the screen into a notebook for heavier work. But this looks like a cheap tech demo. I see no reason the major innards couldn't be in the screen, so there would be no OS switcharoo (I wasn't impressed by that after thinking about the lack of utility), put another battery and a hard drive in the keyboard and it could just be recognized as a few usb devices...

I was also expecting sub-$800 price point.

>Check out the REALLY slow framerate with a simple resize operation

This is a point lots of people are making I think. The slowness is not excusable...
Well, I've seen Firefox crash numerous times on different platforms. Flash is more prone to crashing on OSX and Linux but I've seen Flash kill browsers on Windows (XP, Vista, 7) frequently enough to be quite aggravating.
they're not content posts, it's kind of like a very specialized, narrow and niche classifieds board. Links are not only allowed, but necessary in most cases.

I don't think the audience would see it as a greedy attempt if I explain that it is both to keep quality, preventing spam, and keeping the site up. I'm not really interested in making money from it, but I'm not interested in financing the venture completely for no return.
Might be a nice step up from docbook, though.
yes, I pseudo-coded it. Using the simple Amazon payments API, just make a micro payment and return to the site with the amazon token. Everything should be done in 15 or less lines of Ruby.
Web, e-books, virtual paper, annotations on top of existing media....after that I'm pretty much done.
So would I :D
Time to write an open-source mobile app that uses Amazon's API.
In general, a scientific review does not cite nonexistent/non-peer reviewed/advocate sources [1].

It's entirely invalid to say that because they came to a certain conclusion and the majority of the cited studies support that conclusion, they picked the citations to support it.

The argument is being made that because they eschewed the normal practice and included unscientific citations only in support of their thesis, we can conclude cherrypicking was going on. You can't apply it to a normal review, since a normal scientific review doesn't normally base their claims on anecdotes from mountaineering magazines.

[1] Such sources are occasionally cited as novelties or as evidence of importance of the topic. E.g., "as evidenced by recent media attention \cite{NYT, FOX, NBC, CBS} my topic is important".
Google Voice Web App Circumvents Apple’s Blockade
"I didn't have an automatic right to use Google's service in an innovative way. And indeed, I tried it anyhow, just to see how they reacted, the server stopped responding after the first 50 or so hits."

No, you didn't have the automatic right to use their servers as much as you want in an innovative way. Putting in a time delay (say 2 seconds?) between each request and you can do that just fine. Google is in no way saying either method is inappropriate, just that they consider one to be an action done by businesses and they don't give away as many services to businesses for free.

I hope you got the list done for your friend though, it sounds like quite a nice thing to do.
Paul Volcker: How to Reform Our Financial System
That's an interesting application I never thought of. Typically I thought about these as being harder to use do to the lack of tactile feedback. But in environments where you have no tactile feedback anyways, something like this would be great: service workers who work outdoors in the cold, astronauts, lab techs, soldiers, etc.
Advertisers don't want to spend wastefully either. So if they know you won't spend, then you shall get less ads.
And even then we will only have half the picture as the first well thought out, well designed apps will just be making it out. The iPad is just as much a platform for 'awesome' as it is a complete device.
No joke, just overtired. Wow, I can't believe I did that.
If thing http://openlibrary.org/ might be one (for books). There are some other sources for book data.

For music http://musicbrainz.org/ might be a good source.
This is an excellent list, and I would love to work with someone who ascribes to it. I also find it a very depressing list, because almost all of those items involve an awful lot of effort. It's really hard to imagine many people even half-way living up to it. It ends up making me think of the times I've done projects for people who have done just about everything the author is cautioning against.
I didn't know about flash cookies. That's a mini scandal.

Here's Adobe's terrible UI for viewing and deleting your Flash cookies: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...
It isn't magic: Amazon takes a loss on certain Kindle books with the goal of changing customer behavior, in much the same way that WalMart loses money on most new titles it sells to bring customers in the door. MacMillan would rather they dictate prices to Amazon so that they can avoid channel conflict.

To enforce this, they told Amazon that if Amazon doesn't play ball with their dictated prices, MacMillan will use their strict legal monopoly on sale of MacMillan books to make it impossible for Amazon to sell them in the crucial post-release window. Amazon said "Two can play at that."

(MacMillan doesn't "need" $12 to $15 to make money, but if they demanded it, Amazon would pay $2 a book during the new release window to make boku bucks on the hardware, midlist/backlist titles, and non-book services.)
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