skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Setup was an absolute breeze!

That is a really nice website design and UI, but your tagline (while great on a 24" Dell Monitor) is barely legible on older 17" Samsungs etc.
It seems that the schooling aspect is not as important as the "daycare" aspect. I wonder if it will mean that the students in the longer classes will get better marks or be better educated? My guess, no.
Maybe Google doesn't want to "win" right now. If it needs applications, it seems logical to create a device targetted at the people that can write them. In three or four years, equivalent hardware will cost peanuts...
Again, don't project the sins of Ballmer onto the individual contributors and managers responsible for getting IE out the door. I really doubt that the IE team was responsible for the decision to disband the IE team, or that they made the decision to bundle it in with Windows. Those sort of strategic decisions usually get made by top-level executives.

I actually hate Microsoft. A lot. I work in web UIs, and the bulk of my frustrations come from having to work around IE's shortcomings. My personal computer has been Microsoft-free for the past 2-3 years, as well as a period in college, and in-between was only used as a Windows host for a Linux virtual machine. I try to avoid using Microsoft products whenever possible, I hate the company and would never think of working for them, and I would be rather glad to see them broken up.

But I try not to let my feelings about the company color the way I see the accomplishments of individual employees of the company. And whatever my personal feelings, the IE team accomplished a lot between 1995 and 2002. Netscape was as dominant in 1995 as IE was in 2002; in those 7 years, their positions reversed.

You can claim it was due to extreme marketing, but I was more than capable of downloading Netscape for myself, I was a die-hard Netscape fan up until 2000, and yet eventually I had to admit that they lost because they were stupid and the IE team was better. Netscape 4.7 was slow, it had poor standards compliance, it crashed a lot, and it refused to view a lot of really popular websites. Netscape 6.0 had an incredibly crummy interface that seemed like it was designed to take you to their portal page and trap you there. IE kept getting faster and more stable from IE3 to IE6, and it introduced innovations like XMLHttpRequest that later formed the cornerstone for GMail and Maps.
HumaneBrick: Ruby's WEBrick for sane people
Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving
The stray dog ecosystem of Moscow
I'm not sure there's any one type of customer for Android. Google is throwing a lot out there right now. It's still fundamentally a platform and not a product. For what Android is lacking in fit & finish is nothing compared to the feature set. Integration with Google Voice is going to be huge in the future. It's just too compelling of a service not to be a huge success. Hardware choice is important because there's no one-size-fits-all. People have different requirements. For example we'll almost certainly see a hardened Android phone without a camera for professions where this is an absolute requirement. Apple is a non-player there. Small market? Sure but when you add up a bunch of small markets you get something big. For the mainstream consumer market I think the iPhone's App advantage, specifically games, is going to keep Apple in really good shape for a while. It's RIM/Microsoft/Palm/Nokia who have the most to lose here. I think from Apple's perspective, if they could choose their primary competitor going forward, they would happily pick Google over the others because in the end Google doesn't really care if you're using their services on an iPhone or an Android phone.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/dumb-why-start-ups-dont...
Maybe I'm reading between the lines too much, but this seems to be creating a problem by being overly-general.

Certainly, if you discuss or analyse an article or document which is available online, link to it for the benefit of your audience (and the original author). (Exceptions like discussing a hate crimes page and not wanting to give it google-juice are fine, just let us know you're doing it.)

But the OP seems to blur this with other sources not already available on the web (or, presumably for example, behind a paywall). Are you asking for these to be uploaded, which is potentially copyright infringement and at least may go against the original author's intent?

If I review a book, do you need the primary source included?
Something doesn't feel right in all of this case. Like we are missing something. I suspect there was some otherp particular reason the police were worried he may take extreme action secondary to the tweet; it would explain things more clearly.

There us also a double standard with some of the people outraged over this. Hundreds of people are reported eah month as veiwing kiddy porn. The majority are innocent but you will struggle to find too many people who will disagree With them beig investigated.

If a concerend indvidual, perhaps someone who knows he guy, as worried by what he read and reported it what do the police do? They just have to have a look; I mean ok they went much too far (assuming the story is accurate and this guy wasn't, for example, difficult or refused to cooperate etc.)

as I said, I can't help feeling there is a touch more to this than a busy body stalking Twitter :-)

I'm ac
Just about any scheme would make more sense than the completely random nonsense that we have now.

It's sad to see the gregorian calendar madness from over 400 years ago will probably even be carried into the space-age.

For example, an intercalation scheme that intercalates single days and is based on the mean Martian tropical year of 668.5921 days can be approximated closely with a cycle of 45 leap years in 76 years because 66845⁄76 ≈ 668.592105 and 0.5921 × 76 = 44.9996.

Easy, huh?

Well, here's more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars
Agreed.

Wayback machine is another strategy to date articles. http://www.archive.org/
Your mainstream user does not give two shits about "open-ness" and apps running in the background. Odds are they think the iPhone does already, especially with push notifications.

It is a nice alternative to the iPhone on carriers that don't have it the iPhone yet, but that's certainly not a position of strength. The iPhone will be on other carriers and at that point the iPhone will almost always win out. Android is a nice second best to the iPhone. Price is irrelevant too. There's already a $99 iPhone, so what are they going to do, lower the Android phones to $50? Even at that point, the iPhone is still worth $50 more. I think palm tried this with the Pixi, the Pre, or the Pez. Yeah, that worked out well. Go lower than $50 and you're out of smartphone territory.

Oh an unlocked phone? Your mainstream users do not give a shit, especially when it costs $538.

Everyone is trying to be Apple, no one is trying to BEAT them.
Hofstadter's book GEB talked about chess and intelligence a bit, and it mentioned some studies. There's one I most definitely remember. The study involved taking two groups of people, normal people and chess pros, showing them a chess board for like 5 seconds, and having them reconstruct as much of the board position as they could.

The normal people did exactly like you thought they would, placing a few pieces around, with a lot of off-by-one errors. The chess pros, on the other hand, got board positions comparatively "more wrong" than the beginners. Multiple pieces were radically moved across the board. However, when these board positions were looked at by other pros, the responses were almost universally along the lines of "well, the positions are different, but strategically they're actually kinda similar..."

It's qualitative feedback, to be sure, and difficult to verify and certainly not be trusted in a scientific sense. Nonetheless, it does reveal some of the "intuition" going on. Pro chess players are good at seeing high-level patterns in the positioning of the pieces, related to strategies and advantages and relative positioning. They see these things so well that they stop seeing the actual pieces, to an extent. It reminds me of that scene in the first Matrix movie where the one guy (Cypher?) is pointing to the screen with numbers trailing down, saying "I don't see the numbers anymore, it's just blonde, brunette, redhead, ..."

This seems to relate more to perception than to intuition as it's traditionally thought of, but I would argue that they two are more strongly coupled than most people realize. One type of intuition is perceiving emergent phenomena directly without noticing the underlying layers.
Way to go out and cheapen a heartfelt and inspirational story.
Google is Android's customer.

Before Android, the phone market was either screwed up locked down "smart" phones produced by the carriers or the iPhone which is tightly controlled by Apple. Aggravating the iPhone option, AT&T has a lock on the iPhone, freezing out the other carriers.

Without shaking things up, Google had little market for serving mobile ads. Nobody did Google-style searching -> web browsing on the screwed up "smartphones" and Google is at the mercy of Apple (to some extent) on the iPhone.

With Android, Google is shaking things up and getting their opportunities (in spades) to serve ads to mobile browsers.

The carriers saw iPhone as the major threat that it is, saw their smartphones losing popularity as people realized how poor their UI was, and still were paying lots of money for the smartphone software. AT&T has the iPhone locked up (for now), so Android is the only way for them to be competitive.

Google did the "white knight" on the phone ecosystem: they offered the carriers software competitive with the iPhone and offered the phone manufacturers free software that didn't suck for development and didn't suck for UI. While neither is probably real happy with the leverage Google has over them and the disruption that Google is doing in their industry, the alternatives with Symbian or Windows Mobile is worse and more expensive to boot.
Algorithms for Graphical Models [pdf] (free ebook)
Untested hypothesis: maybe adding some nearly-trivial randomized content, such as a quote from a public domain quote database, can allow you to claim a new copyright each time the page is served?
It's a fair comment. The only thing I would say is that a terrorist usually acts out of anger too

and additionally we are getting hung up on non-existent terrorist parallels; probably cos of the laws used to arrest him. Forget them; the tweet sounded like a threat as much as a joke. There was even a timeframe :-) i think it's fair to say you don't ignore the possibility of a crazy carrying it through :-)
Here's hoping that they keep the device updated like Apple does with the iPhone (unlike HTC/T-Mobile with the G1 that's still stuck on Android 1.6). One of the reasons why I like buying Apple is because they continue to add value after the sale.
Subtyping, Subclassing, and Trouble with OOP
None of this would have happened if the manufacturers and carriers didn't fuck up.

Is this to suggest Google wouldn't have released a phone if they were more impressed with the G1, Droid, et all? There's been "G Phone" rumors for at least 2 years.

It is an interesting thought, though. What is your basis?
Microsoft bots perform denial of service on Perl Testers
Another thing to consider is that dated publications may help in the future if someone accuses you of stealing their idea (or vice versa).
> Being at school tends to be mind numbing, not mind enhancing.

> wouldn't it be cheaper to just get decent game consoles for the kids?

Is this satire?

If it isn't, this is what the article is about:

1. mothers want to work because it gives them meaning/satisfaction.

2. this is not possible if the kids get out of school at noon. Hence the necessity to lock the kids up for a few more hours.

3. this contradicts the German maxim of Kids/Cooking/Church, so a cultural shift is needed.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the expenses of having two cars. Whether day care is a good thing for kids is debatable, but it sure beats the cheaper game console "solution".
Sine scroller with HTML scrollbars
Why not just abandon Microsoft all together? :-)
I'm proud of the team I worked on, but have ambivalence for the company.

I was on IE 1.0 thru 5.0 (roughly '95-'99). It was a great team and in many, but not all ways, I think we made a great product. What happened on IE 6.0 was a tragedy. I wasn't there, but neither was most of the team that worked on IE5.

The only bright spot of that tragedy is it helped open the door for Firefox, which I love and have used for years.
Thank you nostrademons for giving my soul the benefit of the doubt :)
The current system is actually quite convenient. You can divide hours and minutes by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 12.
Articles like this feel a lot like propaganda. Isn't America so enlightened, etc. Is this really newsworthy or interesting, except for the small self-congratulatory pat on the back it gives Americans reading it?
Jacob, I think you are reading more into it than he said. As far as I can see, he said, if you find it online give a link to it. He didn't even go so far as to ask for a citation if it's not on line.
That's awesome advice! Thanks. I'm going to try it. Are you available for mentoring :-)
Imagine if Microsoft had released a "Microsoft PC"? Why would anyone buy anything else?

If you're a Android licensee now you're forced to differentiate whether you want to or not because you have to compete against the favored Nexus. The Android dev environment was destined to be a fractured mess to begin with. The Nexus just sped up the process.
It's punishment for being drab.
I have this sort of experience in programming as well.

For the whole 5 years of my programming hobby and career, I wrote primary in ruby(now, starting to do javascript), struggling with my own problem and bugs and generally learning how to write good code. I didn't think I was learning much, since I was doing this whole thing in ruby and rubygame.

It took a beginner programmer who asked for help to see the extent of my knowledge. From there, I efficiently dispatch each problems one by one, pointing out the simple errors that the newbie made. He was so thankful that he gave me 10 bucks.

Even so, I still felt that I wasn't so smart given the vast domain of knowledge that exists in programming and computer science. Surely, there is someone my age who is way smarter than me and programmed all sort of cool stuff. Surely there is someone who can code a tetris clone with unfathomable beauty.

I reckons that each programmer in the world only solve a fraction of the problem space in the area that they're interested in.
This isn't new. It's not like Microsoft is happy that people still use IE6. Can you imagine being stuck on the team that writes security updates for that aging codebase?

I mean, jeez, they took heat at the time for pushing out IE7 as a critical update.
Good - just me then.
Apple to unveil tablet on Jan. 27
I still don't see how that has anything to do with fragmenting the platform. If anything, a semi-official reference device would work to unify the platform around that implementation, no?
> While the major labels had their faults, the DID act as investors for musicians.

Investment under the some of the most onerous terms ever made.
"Minimalism" is the end of organizing
Note, however, that there's newer evidence that says it's not just incompetent people that overestimate their own abilities, but "Kruger and Dunning’s main data is better explained by positing simply that we all have noisy estimates of our ability and of task difficulty."
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/all-are-unaware.html
I wouldn't count on this from Google. The release of the Nexus shows they have a very muddled strategy as far as Android goes.

It looks like they thought they could pull off some of Microsofts' old tricks but Android is open source and they had no way of keeping the handset makers from messing with it. The Nexus is a retreat from this strategy.
I've never used Windows 7, but does anyone know if there's any kind of... auto-pretty-ficiation stuff that it might be trying to do? Like, trying to center the image on the "most interesting" part of it or something like that?
Every time I see a link that claims that the "iPhone is doomed", I click hoping to find a new argument that makes sense. Except, it's always hyperbole, and disregard for the facts. Consider that _despite_ the reasons he's mentioned, it's still selling more, not less. It turns out that consumers do NOT care about multitasking, the app approval system, etc.

I'd really really like to see a new reason.

PS- Besides, once any of these reasons really DO start affecting iPhone sales, imo Apple will recognize this and make changes to the iPhone OS, which will retroactively apply to all the previous models.
All the other phones will need some sort of OS too.

Absolutely. And from what little I've seen of how the Android market has played out so far, this might as well be Google's official mission statement.

But this is what the original article is about. "The people who aren't well-served by Apple" is a large market, and is always likely to be a viable market. But it is a terribly fragmented market, and it has an ephemeral definition to boot.
Yes. IPhone will be more widespread when it becomes available to carriers. However, I doubt the OS will be available to manufacturers to use for their handsets.

That's the advantage of Android. Manufacturers can use it and have them negotiate with carriers.

With the IPhone, it cannot expand as fast as Android since Apple is the only one producing it and they need to work with every carrier. Whereas with Android, Google will not be doing any of these (or doesn't have to). The phone manufacturers will be doing it for them.
My memory isn't all that great, so I hate to go out on a limb here, but what I think was discussed in GEB was that if shown a sensible board layout that could be reached in real play, the pros could nail it in five seconds, whereas normal people could do only tolerably well in five seconds. Show the pros a nonsense board that could never come up in real play, and the normal people do the same as they did before, but the pros crash and burn. This is meant to show that the mental conception of a board is different between a pro and a novice.
I take exception to American exceptionalism and American self-hatred.

On the other hand my world view is explicitly about "freedom under siege" from all part of society.

Things like freedom of speech and freedom of association being demolished by affirmative action programs and the phony right to broadband. Freedom are now back-seat to the all important goal of combating terrorism with brittle, expensive, and invasive security measure coupled with counter-productive foreign policies.

On one hand, my generation seem to be becoming more culturally libertarian. They evolve an attitude toward "freedom or die" rather than becoming "Generation Sloth".
IE development was effectively stopped at 2001. After IE6 shipped with XP, IE team was transformed into Avalon project (which, after years of struggle, became WPF). Only IE Sustained Engineering team continued to work on IE6. After some time it became apparent that security challenges are too hard for such a small team and larger effort is required to fix reemerging security issues, so new IE team was created to concentrate on security issues. Some old-timers were transferred from Avalon to found (refound?:) this team.

Couple years later it became clear that Firefox is becoming superior browser and Microsoft needs get back into the game. IE7 was announced and current IE team was expanded to meet the challenge. More old-timers left Avalon to join IE7. Then this team shipped IE7, IE8 and (as you would expect) is working on IE9 now.
Simple - reverse-engineer the patch :)
Good on ya!

I was thinking more akin to having a site that would facilitate the redubbing allowing you to upload a dub via the site which would then be patched onto the video. You'd need some verification and voting on best dubs.
I moved my main desktop to Win7 this last weekend, I'm going to guess it has something to do with a untested edge case in the logic that rotates wallpapers in the background.
There is a concept of themes, and part of that is rotating background images.
I would vouch for this being the correct interpretation, and the parent being quite wrong. It's originally from a study by W.G. Chase and H.A. Simon in 1973, but I can't find the full text free online.
The Nexus One does not appeal to all types of users. I know people who would much prefer the Droid.

This fragmenting thing, stabbing licensees etc. are just crazy talk.

Google will come out with another phone that is not built by HTC. The next one will probably be there Motorola.

Google is not stopping any manufacturers from releasing an Android phone. What Google is doing is raising the standard for its Android phones.

Isn't this how an ideal market should work? The most innovative company wins.

Motorola, LG, etc may be allies with Google but they need to step up their game. If you are releasing crappy phones, blame yourself not Google.
Books which aren't available have publisher pages. Amazon pages. Something you can link to.

My pet peeve is articles which are obviously inspired by journal articles but which don't even link to abstracts. Just about every journal article has a free abstract online.

The important thing is to establish a chain of reference. Obviously, linking to a full-text original source is even better, but the chain of reference is incredibly valuable.
Why would HTC and Motorola follow the Nexus? What's in it for them? As far as they were concerned the whole point of Android was that there was no reference implementation.
If the start looking to the Nexus as a reference implementation all they get is to become box makers for Google's software.

As an Android developer, if you want to cover the whole market, you're now going to have to deal with handset makers at war with the developer of the platform. I can't see how the Nexus provides anything but more motivation for Android licensees to make their products significantly different from what Google is offering.
"Oh an unlocked phone? Your mainstream users do not give a shit, especially when it costs $538."

A very narrow view of the phone market. The phone market is not only the US. Unlocked phones are widespread in other parts of the world.
Hmm, so this would mean that a normal player sees the game as just a bunch of pieces, whereas a pro looks at the position (strategy, advantages for one player, etc). Well, it would explain some things about pros, but what does this mean when you train with an AI? I mean, yes, you get more experience, but a typical game for a computer is not a typical game for a computer at all. It would be nice to know which AI Magnus Carlsen used to train and compare it's playstyle to that of pros. Maybe his strategy is just different enough to catch people with something they don't expect/know and give him a slight advantage.
Introducing Quick Security References (QSRs)
- Codd 1969/1970 Relation algebra, operations, model papers
- Crick, Watson, (Franklin, Wilkin) Nature article on DNA.
- Shannon, Information Theory as listed/ mentioned.
I guess the big bags of money aren't big enough anymore.*

*Refers to Microsoft's continued call to EOL IE6. Until a major company complains they have a huge ERP application that only runs in IE6. And then tosses Microsoft a few million $ to keep patching it.