skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I guess we can continue to dicker about the relative merits of a "Refresh" command in the MacOS X Finder, except:

1) It's not just Samba networks, it's other things too, up to and including 10.5 [1].

2) People have gone to the trouble to write Applescripts to do the job for them. [2]

3) "Just use Terminal" does not justify a broken auto-update system, which...

4) ...is all fine and dandy when it works, but really needs some kind of sensible fall-back system when it doesn't, which...

5) ...brings us to the original point, which was that continuing to integrate software of this quality into automobiles, without manual override systems, is just plain stupid.

So, would you like to continue to beat this dead horse?

[1]: http://robsheldon.com/brokenopsys -- in which the problem frustrates me enough to actually complain about it.

[2]: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/16/refresh-the-finder/
Inkling and the iPad
The sheer arrogance of the author of this article is astounding. Apparently he knows all the answers and the American people are a bunch of idiots.

The general populace may not be the most informed, but in general they're much better at determining their own interests than some central command bureaucrat. Look at where central planning got the USSR.
I'm no lawyer but are the signs some kind of legal disclaimer, at least the refusing the right to service?
I don't believe it's condescending because I include myself among the great number of people who have trouble figuring out my own best interest.

Case in point: gambling. I love to do it. It is astonishingly easy to convince yourself your likelihood of winning is easily 10x, 100x, or in the case of a lottery, 100,000x as likely as it actually is. Humans have a well known tendency to take small probabilities of positive outcome and act as though they are, in fact, quite likely. Even knowing this, I still frequently over estimate the likelihood of good things happening when I play poker. If that tendency right there isn't my own brain being hardwired to have trouble figuring out my own best interest, I don't know what is.
For the record, what is wrong about concentrated wealth in the US, if everyone has a high standard of living compared to the rest of the world?

Some people are more productive and generate more for society, shouldn't they be rewarded for such?
I had similar thoughts when I saw this. It made me think of that old Audi case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes#Unintended_accelerat...
Can flash be saved?
another nail in the coffin
As an american, my observation is that _most_ Americans are bunch of idiots. How does that compare to most people from other countries? I don't know, I haven't lived in most countries.
Pretty cocksure guy himself, it might be added ...

P.S. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." was Yeat's line in the 1919 poem The Second Coming
How is that propaganda? It's pointing out that support for the micro SIM format in the United States is small- nothing more, nothing less.
Black Perl
Apple vs. Amazon: The Great Ebook War Has Already Begun
Ask HN: Review My (Twitter) App: Follow Ham
Good points, but there are even more basic ones. I've been to sites that don't even have a Search box and could have used one.

Or sometimes the Search box doesn't work well (try entering "allen wrench" to the Search box on WestMarine.com).
http://www.dyndns.com/

My Linksys router is configured to automatically update my dyndns info.
I simplify for, well, simplicity. No 20-word summary could capture the bills. (After all, that's, what, 1 word per 200 pages of bill or so?) As summaries go, it's not entirely unreasonable either; once the bills are in place, the only things the government won't control is basically things it is choosing not to control, which on the grand scale of how much control they'd have comes in pretty close to "total control". At least in the US, that is not how our government is supposed to work.

I mean, it's not like I made an effort to hide my biases here... :)
I imagine he made it up. The number itself doesn't matter; you probably believe it is in your interest to have an extra $100,000.
It is also perfectly reasonable to believe that the problem is that we already have too much government control, so turning it all over to the government is hardly the solution.

> I am not aware of any health care reform legislation in the United States from any party that advocates turning it all over to the government.

"all over" is an exaggeration, but do you really want to argue that Obamacare wasn't imposing significantly more govt control than we currently have?

If you concede that point, then you're just arguing about the magnitude of what's left in private hands.

Note that using private firms for health services does not imply that those services are not under govt control. For example, the postal service uses contractors to transport mail, but that doesn't imply that the postal service isn't govt controlled.
Cost for non-programmer in NH to make an iPhone contacts app: $2500
Brainstorming a better commute
I learned a lot about machine learning in AI courses the past year and a half in college, and really wanted to apply it somewhere outside of the classroom. This was a one-day project app, so it's really functionally simple. It looks at your Twitter follower and following list, computes the difference, decides if each of those people is "spam" or "ham", then recommends which you are safe to follow and which you should block. Since the API calls can take a while, it does it all with a background worker and e-mails you when the results are ready, rather than doing the work synchronously while you wait at a browser.

The hard part was getting ready for it. I decided to do a very basic spam filter for Twitter, one which looked only at the profile information, and not the text of anyone's tweets, since that'd require too many API calls without special access beyond even a whitelisted API account. I wrote some scripts that would use Twitter's search API to find tweets directed at @spam for a week and a half. It took that long because looking at old tweets would yield accounts Twitter had already suspended, meaning I couldn't get any info about them through the API. I had to get the reports while they were fresh and download the profile info of known spammers to build a training corpus. For the "ham" examples I used the following lists of trusted friends with various interests.

I used that corpus to build and prune a decision tree, which tested to around 99% precision/recall accuracy with 2000 ham and 2000 spam examples. Then I manually rewrote the tree as simple conditionals in PHP to create the classifier for the website.

Note: I'm about to hit my rate limit (on a whitelisted account, so 20k calls) in only half an hour...
The article mentions the Madonna similarities. When I first saw Lady Gaga doing talk show interviews, media appearances, I thought; this woman knows Madonna is a spent force and is stepping into her shoes. Madonna has proven conclusively that there is a market for a global controversial female solo artist, provided the talent is there. So she's taken Madonnas trademarks (controversy, stunts, outfit changes, catchy tunes, simple stage name) and turned the volume up for a new generation. And the success has followed. Good luck to her.
Paul Graham's take on it:
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Hey we're working on it now! At She's Geeky Mountain View. Stacie & Anna. Cheers.
Q: What's an anagram of Banach-Tarski?

A: Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski.
How do you join the mailing list? By joining the google group??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude ?
Just one question: why not use Twitter OAuth?
A good part of why the XBOX 360 has done well as a gaming platform is because they were able to leverage the success of the PC as a gaming platform. Of gaming platforms, the PC has been one of the most open and easiest to develop for on the market and a lot of that has carried over to the XBOX.
This is a very intuitively appealing assertion

The politically opposite assertion, which is that the members of the speaker's set know better than the masses what is in their interest, is also extremely appealing.
> Why would a trained political scientist / economist not know what's good for you - within the domain of their expertise?

Because they don't know my values.

Every time I read one of the "people don't act in their self interest" research reports, I see that the folks doing the research don't understand their subjects' self-interests or don't understand how what their subjects are doing serves that self-interest better than what the researcher posits as the "correct response".

I don't know if it's their training or self-selection that produces such results.

Since you disagree, how about providing a list of specific experts in political science or economics who you'd let run your life. Better yet, which politicians would you let control your life?

Names, please, not affiliations.
The Forest of Rhetoric
Console businesses operate in cycles. Profitable now, means nothing in 5 years. You might be completely dead in the next round of consoles.

Most xboxes are in teenage boys bedrooms not in living rooms.

The impressive part is how they've been able to convince some people that the xbox is a success.
I was able to submit the form without entering an email. You should add some form validation.
Yeah, sorry I wasn't clear about that; updated. http://groups.google.com/group/sd-hackernews/subscribe is the link
when i spent some time there, the average price of a good but average meal was in the below 10USD range.
On the other hand, do big companies ever get BETTER at something?

Large companies tend to walk off their own skyscrapers. Microsoft toppled IBM with the "PC on every desk" mantra. In turn, Microsoft never won on the Internet, because they just never understood that humans network. Phone+cable+Internet companies are begging for a sassy upstart to eat their lunch when competition opens up. American car companies missed game-changing trends in consumer automobiles towards fuel efficiency.

Should Microsoft abandon search? Probably not, but they're more likely to make money if they attack markets that only have awful products. Attacking a market with strong loyalties and gold-standard type products seems like a fool's errand
This is troll bait -- FLAG
Economical fallacies all over, there's a very simple way to measure the true cost of something, and provided government isn't subsidizing anything or skewing the market it actually measures things quite well. It's called a price. If you think that the quality of local produce is higher than the quality of non-local produce though, go ahead and buy things locally, it all comes down to what you're willing to spend for the produce and what quality you're demanding for your money.
Here's two great articles on it by Art Carden: http://mises.org/daily/3026
http://mises.org/daily/3059
It's really quite easy to do with a bit of javascript magic and some backend work. Not sure why you'd think it's impossible.
Just some design points:

The right side of your screenshot on the homepage has a sheer edge, kind of awkward because you show the left edge in the browser. Probably should balance that out because I thought the image was cut off.

If I wasn't paying attention I would try and login to check my Basecamp projects when landing on your site...I know they have an attractive minimalist style, but just be careful...
Too early to say, but I would agree that having the US Government as the majority stockholder of Toyota's largest competitor, GM, could subtly influence disclosures from government agencies and media coverage.
Reasonably full-time now, my brother is pretty much full-time on it now also (Not abstractbill, our older bro). Things are going well :)

I think it's always good to have a few things on the go though, so I doubt I'd ever be 'full-time' on any one thing ;)
sudo apache2ctl restart
Tell HN: I'll work for you for free this summer
I'm an honors law student w/ a background in finance looking for some interesting (read: not corporate drone) work this summer. I love startups and I've taught myself some very basic coding over the past year or so. Looking to dive into any legal or business areas that you might not have the time or energy to explore. Send me a link and I can shoot you a full resume.

My basic qualifications: 4 years at a major i-bank (2 in banking and 2 in bond sales). 1 year of law school (good grades). passionate about startups.

Contact: My HN username at gmail
If anyone actually uses the site I'll take the extra time to implement that, I considered it non-trivial for me to learn that in addition to building something in a day.
Chemistry Creates Self-Stirring Liquids
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Deflationary_spiral
A while ago on Newswipe, there was a fantastic segment also by Dr Ben Goldacre (author of the Bad Science column in The Guardian), on the same issue. About 3 mins in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn8trMXe8ok&videos=uwLZJH...
I am someone who is proud to not be blindly partisan and proud to be someone that always votes.

But for many people, if there party tells them something they accept it as truth. My party says it, I believe it, that settles it.

Two things the GOP are very good at is branding and riling up their base. Here are direct quotes from e-mails from "Michael Steele, RNC Chairman" <ecampaign@gop.com>. I only went back about 1 month)

"socialist health care takeover scheme"

"socialist nightmare"

"past the liberal media filter"

"health care experiment"

"trillion dollar health care gamble"

"the liberal media's biased coverage"

"impose socialism on America's health care"

"Obama Democrat scheme to seize a fifth of our economy"

"put Washington bureaucrats between Americans and their doctors"

"their leftist goal of controlling every facet of American life."

"the American people don't want to surrender their health care freedoms to Big Government."

"Republican senators are on the side of the American people"

When I try to tell people that the proposed reforms have much in common with proposals passed by the house under GOP leadership they don't believe me. It doesn't fit the narrative their party has extolled AND I tried to explain, I don't have a nice easy story to tell.

I argued with those in OFA that they should be selling health care reform as a moral issue. But they don't listen to me either. At least in the e-mails from the Dems there is a textarea where I can express my opinion. GOP e-mails contain push polls and only once did they have a textarea (the form didn't work the first time I tried it).

The Dems believe in governing with PHD's, the GOP in governing with MBA's. MBA's are better at marketing.
A guide to hidden merchant account fees
I love the background. I think you do a decent job of explaining what's about to happen.

My only suggestion: perhaps you could tell me how many are in the queue ahead of me, and estimate time till arrival?
It would be better to publish as epub. Pragprog does this.
I can't help but wonder if we could derive a whole new term specified to Microsoft.
This might actually spoil my plans to buy an iPad. I usually won't need 3g coverage on it, but being able to throw in a sim for a road trip or whatever was a huge plus for me. Enough to pay the extra for the 3g model at least.

I remember shaving down multiple headphone connectors with my pocketknife so I could use them in my original iPhone. A normal headphone jack was probably the biggest selling factor for the 3G for me. Ugh, curse apple and their beautiful products.
Where I live, 3G has minorly more latency and 2MBit down. And the only reason it isn't 7Mbit down (as fast as my home connection) is because I have an iphone 3G vs a 3GS. Alot of the 3G browsing slowness is from the smartphone web browser being slow vs. the actual connection itself. It's alot more zippy for me to browse the web tethering to my laptop than it is on my phone.
From the site guidelines: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

Regardless what they actually say, political material like this is an excuse to start a tribal argument.

Nothing is going to be said here about health care or transatlantic relations that hasn't been repeated ad nauseam elsewhere, and the oppositional vibe lingers.

HN gets less useful for everyone as a result.
I believe this has to do with the privacy changes last month, which made it so that Friends Lists can no longer be hidden.

After an initial backlash, Facebook made it relatively easy to remove your friends list from public search results, but it sounds like it isn't actually blocking access to them — they're just harder to find.

From Facebook's blog post ( http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130 ):

"In response to your feedback, we've improved the Friend List visibility option described below. Now when you uncheck the "Show my friends on my profile" option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won't appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications. "
How Videos Are Found And Consumed Online
I really like the idea. I think if you provide some interesting statistics as example can make it viral. For example: how many spammy followers aplusk, techcrunch, mashable etc. have. How many of them are common to all etc., etc. This might get you a follow up article on techcrunch or the likes too. :)
I can't help but chuckle -- this why geeks hate the iPad, and everyone else will love it.
I'm talking about the corner of 9th and Irving. Golden Gate Park, and public restrooms are only two blocks away.
Bit of a baity article insofar as MS can't "admit" they suck at the web and it would be suicide if they gave up on it.

I have a question regarding Bing, though. A while back, someone here made a suggestion that struck me as brilliant: that Bing provide an option to exclude web pages with Adsense ads on them from search results. This would get rid of untold jungles of webspam and deprive Google of revenue at the same time. Of course it would also exclude many legitimate pages, but webspam has turned into such a horrible problem that at this point I just don't care (especially if the filter were an option I could turn on and off). If MS did this, I would use Bing regularly. I can't think of any other reason to say that.

My question is: what besides accusations of anti-competitive behavior (which strike me as rather weak in this case, MS being far from the monopolist in search) would prevent MS from trying this?
Wondering why you can't order an Ipad?  It's not legal yet
The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It
Country?
Ask HN: Anyone went from PHP to Python?
I'm considering learning Python (coming from a C/C++ and PHP background). Did anyone else go through that process? Could you share your experience? Which is your preferred language for web development at the moment?
I've played warcraft over 3g in the US. It's alright.

3G is pretty fast, a lot of people think it's slow because the iphone is so slow at rendering pages in Safari, and there's a high latency on each image request.
very cool. you need to register @followham though and add it to the "do you want to tweet about about this?" message rather than "follow ham" as it currently is so we can refer directly to you to spread the site.
In America only about 50% of us can be bothered to vote in a Presidential election, far less in congressional and local elections. So out of the people who do vote most are ideologues with a strong affiliation to a particular party. They usually cancel each other out. 20% D, 20% R. That effectively puts control of our Democracy into the hands of less than 10% of the population with some variation to be factored in for voter turnout. At the risk of generalizing these people often make their choices based on fear and ignorance. Some small subset of these people are true independents making informed choices but most are just jumping to whatever party is offering the easy answers and a good talking points.
Note that they haven't actually decided that it's commercially viable to buy renewable energy generation capacity. They've decided that it's a smart business move to be the guys who manufacture the wind turbines and solar panels for other countries.
So what? Microsoft can make & has made acquisitions too. It's not Google's fault that MS is bad at that too.
Looks like the young ones are going to have to repeat history. What is in your "best interest" is entirely subjective. Joe likes sausage and Peter likes pickles, so you solve a massive linear programming problem and you deliver them grapefruit. The idea that any person or system outside of yourself can objectively determine what is in your best interest is impossible. Even in defined settings, like healthcare, a good physician will give you a range of options. Maybe you'll opt for the transplant because you want to see your son graduate; or, maybe you won't because you cannot stomach being on immunosuppressants for the rest of your life.
The syndrome exists (or does not exist) independent of the diagnosis.

I can't comment on your second sentence but it seems completely speculative and I can't imagine how you can substantiate it.
5 Ways the Kindle Can Fight the iPad
Is it really single tab browsing? Ugh.
based off of screenshots, seems so.
In my experience the apparent speed of 3G is strongly device dependent. When I tether my phone to my laptop it feels much, much faster then when I browse the web directly on my phone. So you are actually watching the page render not download.
Safari on iPhone remembers text that you've input into a form when you make a new page (roughly the equivalent of a "tab" in a desktop browser), switch away, then come back.* It behaves similarly when you switch to a different app (through going back to the Home screen) and then come back to Safari. [Though I will note that it doesn't "remember" such things as a partially-entered URL in the location bar. It should.]

In general, the trend in "nice" apps seems to be very much toward them remembering exactly where you had been when you switch back to them rather than starting back at "the top". This seemed revelatory when the first apps started doing it; now it seems obvious.

Doing that requires a fair bit of work, though, by the app developer... so perhaps Apple could do something with the system frameworks to make that functionality be more "for free" to the developer. When iPhone first came out, developers found out that their apps were completely shut down by the OS when they switched away, so they imagined their apps working the same way as they would on a desktop OS when they get closed and reopened: back to the "main menu". There's no reason that has to be the case, though, if developers just persist the relevant bits of the user's state when they switch away then restore it gracefully.

* in general; if memory is running low, Safari will "forget" everything about other pages, so if you were writing something substantial, it'd be best to remember to Select All + Copy before switching away. This is unfortunate.