skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The parent said:
- well known things are good
- the iphone is well known

Relative to other technologies, it is not.

Also, changing the platform might require interface changes that are clearer and easier on that platform. I'm not saying iphone checkboxes are bad. I love them. But they stink when they aren't on the iphone. They even stink when they are on the iphone but in a web app.

The issue here is whether something from a new platform should be used on an old platform. No, if the tools aren't standard.

Note that new browsers and browser versions render checkboxes differently, which yields incremental changes over time.
Wow. QUite an interesting approach.

May I suggest that, since you're' using Wordpress, consider using digress.it?

http://digress.it/

It makes for very nice user commenting on book material.
It's good, but it's not the same.
When 2020 rolls around, and astronauts are stepping onto the Moon or Mars...

Sadly, no. Definitely not NASA, and I doubt even private industry or China / India will be there by then.
See the comments for the article. The numbers used are so far off that they are meaningless.
The voting system selects someone best for an election game, but not quite for presidency.
This! If you are doing Ruby, definitely start with Heroku and Sinatra. It's very simple, clean, and an excellent starting point.

You can move to Rails once you got the basics of Ruby down -- Rails will make a lot more sense then.
Your observation about geeks fearing phone conversations is spot on, but I think it has to do with more than just turn-taking. I think it's a general social anxiety that manifests more strongly with phone calls because they're easier to avoid or procrastinate and because they often intrude social anxiety into a very safe, non-challenging social environment. I would guess that face-to-face conversations that are easy to avoid or postpone are just as anxiety-provoking as phone calls.

Anyhow, I am certainly a phone-phobic geek. When I was a young child, I was terrified of talking on the phone. I was too geeky to understand the social aspects of a phone call, but I was smart enough to know I didn't understand most of what happened during a phone conversation. When my parents called somebody to ask a question or invite them somewhere, it would take fifteen minutes. Typically, I had one goal in mind, such as asking my friend Jon if he wanted to play. That was all I understood, but I also understood a phone conversation was supposed to be more complicated than that, and that I had to be polite to whoever answered the phone. I had terrible performance anxiety.

Strangely, I still have an aversion to making phone calls to people I don't know well. Even simple, low-risk, impersonal tasks like calling to ask a restaurant's hours or calling the dentist to make an appointment produce a significant amount of anxiety. The more often I talk to someone on the phone, the more the anxiety decreases, though. Talking on the phone to my family and close friends generates no anxiety.
Email address sign-ins have lots of problems with respect to support, and you have to factor in your support costs.

The automatic verification of the user identity is a bonus but for most sites you don't really need that.

In the case of this particular website, which already seems to have a bunch of free options, the 'freemium' model would seem to work a lot better, get them in small steps at the time and make a conversion funnel.

Goal 1 would be to get the user to visit several times

Goal 2 would be to get them to invest a bit of their identity in the site, make them a 'registered user'

Goal 3 would be an upsell, give them access to premium content for a fee

It's a tough model to market, but because you have a number of steps you can automate the analysis of how effective the various steps of the funnel are. By the time you are ready to ask for card&expiry you have built up a trust relationship already and 90% of the signup process is over.
Somebody needs to get on top of appropriate encryption and anonymization for this area. After all, there's nothing I want more private than my DNA sequence (against health insurers, if no one else), and nothing that is less anonymous than something that can identify me uniquely out of all the world.

At the same time, I want my doctors to have access for testing before they begin a course of treatment.

I would also like to participate in studies that use my genome for others' benefit and data mine it, but appropriate safeguards and protocols will be a must. I want a way to share part of my sequence, to compare one sequence to another, or to perform a test on the sequence, and be secure doing so.
McGraw Hill CEO found dead. Silver Mercedes with no license plate seen fleeing the crime.
There was a guy in our university tutorial support group (a PHD grad) who, in the first session said, "I only do C, Im your speed guy".

We all hacked around with other languages and implementations. And when we needed some fast and efficient little "thing" to plug in we went to the "C guy".

He was by far the most important guy for all the teams there :) (save me countless hours in writing a non-crucial but useful optimized array sorting algorithm to work with our program)
This is their hail-Mary pass, if the subscription model does not work what are they supposed to do next?

Put someone competent in charge of the paper and removing quality articles and placing ads in the paper instead. Also, go back to a format that resembles a newspaper that has news in it, rather then tabloid newspapers. I used to read Newsday on a daily basis.

It took approximately a month under the Dolans (current owners) for my subscription to be canceled due to the reasons above. If the problems were fixed, I'd gladly go back to reading Newsday instead of switching between the Times and the Daily News.

Because currently, this isn't a story of a newspaper dying. Its a story of the tabloids dying. And good riddance; perez hilton and the ilk don't need syndication.
Acer Aspire 1 with 2gig ram. Running XP Home SP3.

My usual app mix:
firefox with 3-10 tabs and 1 or 2 windows
cygwin x server with 0-2 remote x apps
2-5 ssh terminals (local urxvt clients)
notepad++ with 1-4 tabs open
openoffice writer and calc

Throughout the day I sometimes run: a native windows web server, a hosted virtual linux install, pdfs, torrent clients, rdp clients, cygwin or native java tools, and several oldish video games (diablo2, morrowind, warcraft3, galciv2, angband)

My primary problem is the screen size, many games are unplayable without connecting to a desktop monitor since the max native resolution on the screen is something goofy like 1024x600. This also means that some web apps have layout issues - they can usually be worked around with some combination of browser and plugin configuration.

The dual core 1.6ghz processor is surprisingly capable - opening spreadsheets and pdfs sometimes open in 2.5 seconds rather than 2 seconds, but I somehow manage to get by :D
Bummer - I thought it would be interesting for iPhone web apps.
Could be off by five years but I think it’s doable. Depends on how fast the US recovers.
> and apparently a lot of them give it willingly

No, it was given unaware, or you can't really do anything about it.
Assuming you took out a mortgage, you are financing consumption by leveraging up. It's no different than buying a pack of beer on the pay-day-loan money. Not a financially smart move (unless your loan interest rates is below the long-term treasury rates).
2 options:

1) Legally incompetent CEO of a major international corporation

2) Another controlled leak from Apple.

Which do you think is more likely?
Not exactly convincing. And to me highly confusing behavior. They certainly wouldn’t do something like this just to spite Google?
I haven't seen any studies about general men and woman, the only study I've seen is that men seem to have a wider distribution than women -- this was offered to explain why men seem to dominate certain fields. This is not saying that men in general are better at math, just that the underlying probability distributions are different and it might not be reasonable to expect a 50/50 split at the top of a given field. The underlying distribution might 60/40 or 70/30. Just as the prison populations, and serial killer rates are different.
In all seriousness, option (1). There's no upside to leaking this 24 hours in advance of actually announcing it when hype is already at fever pitch.

And if you need examples of hilariously incompetent CEOs I refer you to the automotive and banking industries.
Adobe's excuse about not having a hardware acceleration API is a red herring, and a painfully obvious lie if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. There are several reasons I have come to this conclusion.

1. This is clearly demonstrated when you play a video "natively" through flash on OS X. Watch as the < SD resolution video immediately hogs an entire core of your CPU; in fact the lagging starts almost from the moment the flash object is initialized! Even a trivial operation like clicking fullscreen on a YouTube video locks up the entire host process and beachballs Safari for 5+ seconds as it sits there with it's thumbs stuck up it's arse, causing you to miss whatever was playing at the time.

2. Ok, so now try playing the same video through XP etc on VMWare or Parallels on the same machine. What's this? It's perfectly responsive and uses a small fraction of the CPU power? Apparently it is ≈5x less CPU intensive to emulate and deal with the overhead of virtualising an entire PC, it's CPU and associated operating system than it is to run the same thing natively on the host OS. *Note that due to limitations inherent in virtualisation, there is no access to any kind of video acceleration whatsoever, let alone assisted h.264 decoding. You have a framebuffer and that's about it (and even that highly abstracted, double buffered, composited and managed by Quartz as with every other window on the system)

3. My original MacBook which I still use has no hardware assist (GMA950) - yet QuickTime manages playback of fullscreen or windowed 1920x1080 h264 at around the same CPU usage playing a fucking YouTube video.
4. Flash video on the mac has always been excruciatingly slow, even before h.264. I remember seeing iMac G3 600Mhz's struggling to maintain even 15fps with postage-stamp sized h.261 (which is what YouTube used to use) just 5 odd years ago. A G3 600 is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what is required to playback video of that complexity. A G4 867 can do 640x480 h264. Clearly something is very very rotten in flash, and getting more offensively pungent by the day. Which now brings me to:

What in the everloving FUCK could their code possibly be doing?!?!

I think their programmers have quite clearly gone insane and subscribed to (or invented?) the Rube Goldberg school of software engineering - I don't see any other rational explanation.

I'm quite certain we could have cured cancer while making SETI look like the equivalent of someone with a funnel stuck in their ear and pointed at the sky, what with the aggregate difference in CPU cycles of mac flash vs windows.

Meanwhile, if Adobe can't even manage to lie effectively about the reasons why their own software is so utterly broken, I'm not holding my breath for a resolution. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, though if you ask them it's all Apple's fault.

To think that people want flash on the iPhone. God almighty, haven't we all suffered enough?
Towards Creating Blood Vessels
"The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million"

I didn't realise people still spent $4M on what is basically a CMS. They could have bought a news focus and proven CMS like Ellington for less than a fraction of a percent of that. Leaving plenty of change to play for design.
With McGraw-Hill's CEO for all intents and purposes confirming this product to be real and running iPhone OS, I'll be very surprised, and saddened, if a shut-tight, app-store-limited device like this will lead to world domination.

Are tightly closed environments like this where we want personal computing to go next?

Are only a small number of people going to own powerful computers with which they can do anything they want, with the rest going through app stores and the cloud? It sounded good to me before, but now that we may all be on the receiving end, it seems disheartening.
The best thing about this program is that it shows the power of Clojure's Java interop. Doing graphics programming in other languages often feels like a dirty hack, but this isn't so bad. This might lead me back to try Clojure again

Aside: A few months ago I decided to reproduce a program a friend of mine wrote, which was to draw Koch's Snowflake without using recursion. By the end of the day, this morphed into a throwaway Lindenmayer system viewer in C++ with OpenGL. Basically it just lets you toggle the number of iterations and switch between 13 different fractals. The Clojure code is a lot nicer than the C++ that I banged out, which probably goes without saying! I was trying to add 20, but they were a pain to derive and I didn't want to work on it for more than a day

http://github.com/jakevoytko/fractals
"Based on the iPhone OS" doesn't mean it IS the iPhone OS.
About 18 months ago I was driving on the 101 near Mountain View, headed north at 10pm or so, when a white Mercedes with no plate zoomed past me. I was doing 70, it must have been going over 100.

Always wondered if that was Steve.
Optical Trapping and the Momentum of Light
I don't think there was ever a reasonable chance of anything else. I mean, if you're Apple, why do anything else? For the most part consumers clearly love to use the App Store. It has serious review process and barrier to entry issues, but those can be fixed over time (hopefully) and as long as there is an active audience, vendors will continue to come.
Read this: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/21/the-simple-truth-whats-...

We also wrote quite a few other stories about the situation that you should be able to pull up using the Google query below. For more on applications that are similar to Google Voice, check out the stories on Line2.

http://www.google.com/search?&ie=UTF-8&q=Google+Voic...
Article: when you are small, do X because big guy can't do X.

You: when you are big, don't do X.

Your post looks like you wanted to disagree with something, yet you are in complete agreement with the article.
Hard drives have two extremely powerful neodymium magnets in them anyway, attached to the arm which moves back and forth. Millimetres from your platters. I have a hunch that a fairly steady magnetic field is probably fine, it's erratic/alternating magnetic fields which are likely to kill things.
Your point #3 is incorrect if in a lot of situations, especially ones in which transportation and time play a factor -- for on demand production with minimal inventories.

And second, he was saying by not automating and improving we would never have the jobs (develop the talent and abilitiy) to have the roboticists when we need them.
If e-readers are really going mainstream, McGraw-Hill will have a whole lot more to worry about than a sour relationship with Apple.
these are the guys that run the textbook market. ill go with option 1.
Has anyone seen more info on the SDK? Any real info at all?
Real Story: Some off hand comment made over 2 years ago is dredged up to provide a tantalizing headline which is put in place solely to drive traffic.
Where does the typical cavalier attitude toward correctness come from? Is it innate? Does it come from religion or politics? Something else?

(To me, this is the question that needs answering.)
"Real World Haskell" was done this way: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/
My theory is that the people with "distaste at overt sexuality in minors" are actually just uncomfortable with their own sexuality.

For example, this Skumanick guy sees young girls at the beach in bikinis and is uncomfortable with the fact that he's sexually attracted to them. To me this is just part of our biology and it's not a big deal. But this guy is so insecure that he goes on a mission to make it be known that he does not approve of this behavior because to him the thoughts he's having about the girls at the beach are impure. He even goes so far as to say he's able to prosecute minors in bikinis at the beach.

It's the same sort of situation with the article's reference to Mark Foley.
I'm not sure that that's true. There's plenty of rapists, child molesters, etc on them. We shouldn't put people on there for sexting or having sex with their signifcant other who is only a year or so younger, but we shouldn't prosecute them at all.

Though the registries do have the issue of leading to discrimination against the sex offenders and not giving people much of a 2nd chance.
BART is definitely very automated. The 'drivers' don't drive; they mostly operate the doors.

I've noticed that over the past year+ that BART has become very cognizant of current technologies. They are surprising active online:

- Twitter (http://twitter.com/sfbart)

- Posterous (http://sfbart.posterous.com/)

- Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/bartsf)

- FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/sfbart)

Whoever is running the show is doing a great job.
He did say "based on iPhone OS", but I wonder if he mis-spoke especially given that he's not necessarily tech-savvy.

In all likelihood, the tablet OS will be based on OS X in the same way that iPhone OS is - many of the same architectural underpinnings, but a completely different presentation layer that's optimized for the hardware.

Maybe he meant "based on OS X, like iPhone OS"?
If someone, as a mother of a child, has the right to know that a sex offender lives in her neighborhood, then I, as the owner of some expensive things, have the right to know that a burglar lives in my neighborhood.
I doubt that guy even knows what "based on the iphone os" even means.
Analysis of HTML5 Canvas Javascript performance in various browsers
Well, he also claims to have spoken to Kay late last year:

Kay still wasn’t sure whether Apple would actually come out with a tablet when I talked to him late last year, noting that such a device could theoretically compete with the company’s iPhone business. But, he added: “I bet a thousand dollars that they had a five-by-eight-inch version for the last couple years in house.”
Who reads TechCrunch comments? they're worse than youtube, at least youtubers are not self-promoting.
Now that you've mentioned it, somebody should explain what it is.
For some additional information about the performance of caponia, heres some details about the pain points:

The particular pathological case for this system is query where the search stems occur in the majority of documents (there is a small exclusion list that helps, but its not a panacea) because the merging of stem results is at best a linear operation (:or queries are currently much simpler than :and queries)

The other difficult case for this system is updating or removing a document from the index; removal is fairly easy: generate the stems for the current state and update those stems in the index.

To update (an existing document in the index) efficiently you need the set of stems in both old and new versions of the document; For the stems that are in new set you can just add them to the index as normal. For the difference of the old set and the new set (ie, those stems only in the old set - clojure's difference function is not symmetric i believe) you then need to remove the document id from those stems in the index.

edit: clarified meaning of update.
There is a commercial Visual Studio plug-in that will do what you want, but I don't recall it's name.

I wrote a Lua remote debugger myself years ago. A nice trick was that you can associate a string with a chunk of code when you load the code. Then you can retrieve that string from the debug API based on the current instruction. I used that to make a table of "chunk name" to "source" as a global variable in LUA. That made it easy for the debugger to retrieve the source regardless of where it came from (file vs interactive console vs who knows what).
That was a prototype iCar. Crap, I've already said too much. They'll be after me now.
Sure there's an upside. Now that the market knows media companies are involved, they all will spike tomorrow morning when the market opens.

You also prime the hype pump one more time. Remember that the financial types don't read tuaw, gizmodo, and engadget all day long looking for Apple rumors. I consider it the noisemaker they shoot off before the real firework show starts.
I have a single username (barrkel) but multiple email addresses (depending on degree of personal connection, so bulk email lists / notifications go in one category, etc.), so the problem is rather reversed for me.
Extreme Weight- Loss Plans
But for the study to be meaningful you'd have to study the opposite cases as well, and that makes for four combinations in total.

And they've studied only one.
No upside?

That is a pretty outrageous claim. The upside is more press. The 'news' agencies/tabloids hate repeating material and need fresh information to talk about tonite before the big launch.

You have to throw some meat out to the lions, even if you are intentionally leaving them hungry.
3-day turnaround times of late have mitigated most of the issues, if you aren't conflicting with Apple's interests.
2 words - Web Browser.

App stores are just a stop gap until web browsers catch up.
I moved on to an interesting job about a year ago, and there's only so much meaningful code you can write in a day...

I'm still working on metalua, but there are few things which are worth being published yet. Promising works in progress include:

- friendlier syntax to write grammar extensions (current grammars are too verbose, AST builders are ugly and barely readable)

- a library of "for ... in" generators, to walk through ASTs in a nicer, more lua-like way than with the current metalua.walk library. This should eventually become generic enough to become an interesting XML / JSON / whatever-kind-of-tree tool

- integration with LuaEclipse, and generally speaking, more focus on metalua as a way to manipulate / refactor plain Lua programs, rather than as an independent language.
So in that case, age really has very little to do with it. Like you said, they'll be even MORE awesome with age. They'd still probably have something to gain from listening to older people, as long as those older people are at least as awesome as they were.
I take a very different approach: When I have it, I'll gladly share my entire genome with anyone who wants it (after all, with the rapid decrease in price, and the ease of collecting a sample from me without my knowledge, any sufficiently determined person won't even have to ask my permission in a couple of decades).

But, I'll always be very strongly in favor of legislation that prevents entities like health insurance companies from using my genome against me.
Indeed the headline is not news, but McGraw's bit about how it "is going to be based on the iPhone operating system" probably should have led the story.

Not that that was highly in doubt either, but it's still "important" corroboration. As important as any of this can be 19 hours before the thing is announced, anyway.
No radiation shielding?
At this point I would not be surprised with the headline "Apple tablet to poop rainbows and give you a pony."
Ask HN: Software for Creating an Affiliate Program?
Hey,

I'm looking for some third-party software/service for offering an affiliate program for my product. The product/service I'm offering is irrelevant. Just to note, I'm not looking for a network to join. I want to offer the affiliate program myself.

Thanks for any info
This is really just a ticketing system in their unfeatured style, given that only 37Signals staff can mark something as "answered", and they appear to do so any time they reply to a question.
Power Programming - Decision Trees in C++, Python, Perl, Arc