skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can think of only one multi-tasking use case that I would like to see, which is this:

While commenting on some web forum (HN, Reddit, etc) or chatting on AIM/IRC, I often find while in the middle of typing a comment that I want to look something up on the web, e.g. a fact or spelling, and then come back to finish my comment armed with whatever knowledge I just looked up.

The best interim solution is to copy the text of my partially-finished comment, quit the current app, open a notes app and paste the comment, quit the notes app and open web browser, look up whatever I'm looking for, quit web browser and go back to the notes app, copy the comment again, quit notes app and open up the original app and find whatever I was replying to again, paste in my comment, and finally finish typing.

I don't really need multi-tasking to get around this, but it might be helpful if there was a way to "freeze" the current state of an app so I could use another app for 5 minutes without the first one having to quit and lose all of my context.
Why The iPad is not a "Fail"
Ask HN: Settlers Of Catan For iPad?
Anyone wanna make Settlers Of Catan for the iPad? You could link it so that players view their cards on their iPhones, and the board on the iPad. I bet if you got on the ball and contacted the company right now to discuss licensing you could get it out in 60 days...
I'm getting my MBA for free right now because I had a good enough average in undergrad. Hearing about all this MBA bashing I'm kind of worried people will make assumptions about me before even meeting me. I am applying to many start-ups for internships. hm
I actually had a hard time believing this, since the moon seems to be so much bigger when it's near the horizon.

True to science I set up an experiment with a stick and a caliper - I could look from one end of the stick to the caliper fastened at the other end, and slide it so that the circumference of the moon would exactly fit. I could then look at the moon both when it was high in the sky, and when it was just above the horizon.

Lo and behold - they were the exact same size, even though it didn't look that way at all. What I learned is that you can't always trust your senses.
Yes, that is us, Tynt (www.tynt.com) on all the sites mentioned. Our analytics are tracking hundreds of thousands of sites worldwide. The attribution link feature is something that individual site owners can turn on and off. Also note that we don't track any personally identifiable information. We track content and help publishers learn what content of theirs people are finding most engaging.

What if I don’t want this behavior? We are currently working on a global opt out for users who would rather not have Tynt monitor their actions when they visit a site. In the interim you can opt out on a site by site basis (i.e. the opt out for the SF Gate is here: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/faq.shtml#faq1.5#ixzz0bxLIAb...

More info on Tynt is available in our FAQs here: http://www1.tynt.com/faq-technical-topics#ixzz0bxGzIgPZ
It was reportedly 00000000, the source for this is a former US missile launch officer of some sort named Bruce Blair. Google him and the zeros, plenty of references, although I don't know if it's ever been confirmed by documents.
I imagine that someone can go crazy when living in a sub for a long period of time.
15 updated and awesome addons to make your Firefox more productive
Actually, the Xbox development model is more similar to iPhone than MS would like to admit:

- Cost per-seat to even get your hands on the SDK, check. $99/year for Apple, rumors put the 360 Dev Kit at $10K+ per seat, which is in line with historical numbers for Playstation also.

- Strict review and approval process, often taking a very long time. Developers have long complained that much-needed patches have been submitted to MS, but are stuck in approval/QA limbo.

- Strict control over distribution channel, onerous rules on what can or cannot be included.

- "App Store" model where MS handles all transactions between customer and developer.
Microsoft certainly can. You have to accept their license agreement and possibly an NDA to develop on the Xbox platform. I don't think the exact terms are public knowledge. We can look at the XNA license/participation terms for some hints though:

"Microsoft reserves the right to take down a game retroactively without notice. Microsoft encourages peer reviewers to report objectionable content in a game."

"Peer reviewers will reject your game if:

-Your game contains prohibited content, which is content not allowed on Xbox LIVE services
-You misrepresent what is in the game play or in the promotional materials for the game. All games must have a trial mode that showcases the actual game experience. If you fail to do so, or use this method to provide your game for free, your game will be failed in the Peer Review process. Games are NOT available for free currently on the system. This system is NOT a video hosting service and should not be used as such.
-The promotional content for your game ( for example, the box art, description, banner or title) is not appropriate for all ages on Xbox LIVE Marketplace
-The game crashes, it has too many bugs, or it is technically defective in some way"
The economics of Lady Gaga
As soon as I read that problem my brain went on instinct and quickly calculated you need 3 vans and 2 cars. And somehow I'd skipped over the part that implies you need the number of vehicles to total five.

But I guess I'm just wired like that. And one thing I'm getting out of this how-do-we-teach-math kerfuffle is, people who are "just wired like that" think differently from the people who most need to learn math. Paul Lockhart would advocate dropping the pretense of real-world relevance altogether: "Suppose I were thinking of groups of five and seven things (as I very often am). How would I divide 31 things into groups of five and seven with none left over? It's the beauty of solutions to problems like this, which exist purely of and in the imagination, that we are denying today's children!"
People said it was just another uninteresting mp3 player. They were right, no?

Didn't the iPod rise to market leader have far more to do with marketing than any performance merit?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1082464
> "but it IS their job to criticize their competitors"

I disagree - both Google and Apple in the past have been very polite about their competitors' products. MS (particularly Ballmer) has a long and colorful track record of badmouthing competitors, only to have to eat their words later. Some of what MS has done for competing platforms/products has really bordered on smear campaigning, which IMHO is something that is far from standard procedure in our industry.
It's a riff on Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, and if it's in the same spirit, it's self-satirizing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Dont_Eat_Quiche
Huffington post does the same thing with their article headlines. Users are always copy/pasting them into the story submission fields on a website I run.

It's very very annoying.
I mentioned it only based on what I had heard from my own coworkers and such. Most of the data I'm looking up now show it being a moderate success commercially, albeit with declining profits. My point remains, though, as I don't think the majority of the comments made about it at the time of unveiling were predicting "moderate success".
I agree, I typically despise this sort of thing, though not as much as right-click hijacking (with a few exceptions). This one is useful, though, and it makes a LOT of sense to have on a news-like website (lots of people don't include attribution, this makes including it the easiest option, thus more will include it).
I think a lot of this disagreement could be cleared up if there were studies done on the long term effects of low doses of mercury.

Mercury is bioaccumalitive and so I think such studies are justified. Why is no one doing this?

Also from a business perspective if there is such concern about methylmercury in vaccines why doesn't someone bring to market vaccines that use a different (more natural?) preservative? It seems like this would be a win win all around.

Also I would avoid using wikipedia as a direct source.
DNS purist will not like this. For many reasons ( other than CDNs, for e.g SIP) source-based DNS routing seem to be needed now.
Doesn’t that only apply to stuff you use standing up?

Is that a problem when using a touchscreen lying or sitting on a couch? Or sitting in front of a table?
I've noticed this behavior on quite a few sites recently. It was annoying since I was trying to quote a bunch of sites and I had to remove the links at the end every time.

Now it makes me double check every time I copy and paste. At first thought this might not seem too bad but modifying basic user behavior should be frowned upon.
Agreed. My guess is the shoes broaden his foot and make it easier to run on sandy and unstable surfaces.
"Apple would never approve anything remotely like the OPML Editor"

Why wouldn't they?
Adobe Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow Plays the Porno Card
If Omni can put it all into an easily-browsed "notebook" format, that might just convince me to get an iPad.

This is the first idea that actually has me considering it.
Same here, I literally laughed out loud at that, and read it to a nearby programmer. I've used .NET and Cocoa, he's used .NET, and we both think it's a laughable claim. Personally, I vastly prefer Cocoa's API / frameworks to .NET.

Programming for Apple products is frickin easy.
That's a very good strawman. Nobody's complaining because it's too simple. As far as I can tell they're complaining because it's not open.
OK, I take it back:

http://blogs.sun.com/kevinschmidt/entry/oracle_and_sun_middl...
http://blogs.sun.com/HPC/entry/watercooler_signing_off_hire_...
http://blogs.sun.com/chienr/entry/farewell
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog/entry/goodbye_sun_it_s_been
http://blogs.sun.com/raskin/entry/so_long_farewell_auf_wiede...
http://blogs.sun.com/jessie/entry/good_bye

Looks like the pink slips have gone out.
You're 100% correct. According to the news reports at the time the transport was characterized as being a "mistake", i.e. human error. I don't know the intricacy of warhead arming etc., but another article on CNN talks about codes being handled insecurely: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/24/missile.error/
Tech.view: Running out of juice
Ira Glass did an insert on this bizarre 007-esque practice in last week's This American Life podcast.
I think that's the point. The first iPhones were nothing special either. Apple's first products are usually "minimum viable products". They provided a springboard for future products to launch from.
Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows: David Reilly
I think those criticizing Apple's closed environment should focus their energy instead on creating a better platform or product.
"When Melinda and I first started our giving, in the late 1990s, our focus was on reproductive health rather than childhood deaths. We felt that giving mothers the tools to limit their family size to what they wanted would have a catalytic effect by reducing population growth and making it easier to feed, educate, and provide jobs for the children who were born.

We were surprised when we saw a newspaper article in 1998 showing that only a few diseases cause most childhood deaths and showing how little money was being invested in creating and providing vaccines for these diseases. A chart in the article showed that a particular type of diarrheal disease—rotavirus—was killing over 400,000 children per year. How could a disease we had never heard of get so little attention and kill this many children? We sent the article to my father and asked him to look into how we could help. A surprising but critical fact we learned was that reducing the number of deaths actually reduces population growth. Contrary to the Malthusian view that population will grow to the limit of however many kids can be fed, in fact parents choose to have enough kids to give them a high chance that several will survive to support them as they grow old. As the number of kids who survive to adulthood goes up, parents can achieve this goal without having as many children."

2009 Annual Letter from Bill Gates: Childhood Deaths:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2009/Pages/2009...
Not only that but there is an entire student loan industry ( that Obama wants to get rid of) that has a vested interest in expanding the amount of student debt.

It becomes so easy for a student to justify taking on extra debt to keep from working at a minimum wage job. Year after year the cycle continues but at some point you have to ask is the debt worth the benefit. It seems that for liberal arts majors with advanced degrees it is becoming less justifiable from a cost benefit point of view.

Maybe the bubble will pop when business, engineering, and law degrees aren't able to make back the money spent on the degree.
I kind of miss an @memoized version
No, it became the market leader by ignoring the feature race and creating a device that was usable by "normal people." It wasn't the samllest, or the biggest screen, or the most storage, but Apple grew the market to include everyone, not just gadget freaks.

The clickwheel and iTunes sofware were part of the equation, and the iTunes store was the other. If I had told you nine years ago that your nontechnical family members would soon be downloading music from the internet and playing it on their portable device, would you have believed it? Would any amount of marking have gotten them to use a Diamond Rio and MusicMatch?
Reocities PLAGIARISM 
Reocities has plagiarized our copyrighted web site and has refused to remove it from their servers after we wrote them and told them to remove it. It looks like it will take legal action to get them to stop stealing our Copyrighted material that had been moved a new URL when geocities closed. STOP THE THEFT REOCITIES!!!
We have located the servers that hosts this site. If you are having problems with your copyrighted material being plagiarized the place to place a complaint is here: http://www.virtualxs.com/content/con_hom.php
Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on New Measure of Fiscal Shocks
While that's true, the orthogonal skills can sometimes make the real work easier. Knowing even a small amount of VBA could save you hours in Excel. Knowing a small amount of Python could let you rename every mp3 file on your hard drive in 5 minutes. When you remove access to the low levels of the computer, you remove a lot of the ability to solve one-off problems. There are people who put panels inside panels on WinForms just to get a border color other than black, because they aren't aware they can override Panel.OnPaint. Having only high-level access may make easy things easier, but it can also make hard things much harder.

There was a great submission here recently called "Programming as a super power" (http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2010/01/20/programmin...), where the author said that "there are more programs that should be written than professional programmers can ever write." This could be abstracted to "there are more things that should be done at a low level than superusers can ever do." So if the iPad doesn't let you do things at a low level, there will be negative consequences.
And there was me thinking this would be yet another Apple story...
The Price of "Free"
And where did I say he can't insult me?

It saddens me you both get, IMHO, up-votes of irrational bandwagon self-validation instead of having a good rational discussion.
I am reminded of a talk I attended in college about (elementary-level) math education. One of the first intro problems to estimation was something like 27+75, and the presenter showed us a (real) dialogue where the student gave the exact answer, and the teacher had to "correct" them to the estimate, and then proceeded to talk about how this wasn't exactly correct. The teacher's guiding the student through the "proper" reasoning was convoluted, and not effective teaching. The presenter concluded that if you teach estimation, you should use an example like 209385324579+394875293745, where estimation is actually faster and easier than exact arithmetic.

Now, what real-life example demands systems of equations? I suspect none, until you get into industrial applications. Therefore, maybe you should ask what the kid wants to be when he grows up, and create an example in that setting.
Well, it is probably for ads and doesn't have anything to do with this item.
Why New App Stores are Embracing Open Development
http://www.amazon.com/School-Dead-Penguin-education-specials...

http://www.amazon.com/Deschooling-Society-Open-Forum-Illich/...

or

http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Theory-Retrospect-Mark-Blaug/...

for a somewhat different perspective.
British Newspapers Make Things Up
I completely agree. Of course stuff like Active Record can save a lot of typing for back-end code. But:
1) a large system often requires hand-crafted SQL anyway.
2) hand-crafted SQL performs MUCH better for anything but the trivial stuff.

The biggest issue for me: FRONT-END development. Most web apps are pretty simple on the back-end, and coding database access by hand doesn't take long at all, I can live just fine without ActiveRecord.

Where I end up spending 90% of development time is on the front-end. Writing HTML code by hand (and visual tools don't help here) makes me feel like I'm in the dark ages: I miss one character and have to spend ages hunting down design issues. Javascript isn't much better for that matter.

IMO What's needed is server-side UI libraries, along the lines of windowing toolkits for desktop apps.

Reason I say server-side is because client-side libraries exist already (eg GWT) and most web apps still need SEO, perhaps unfortunately.

ASP.NET and Java Faces components don't really count either - you still have to write HTML code by hand to glue things together.

Ask any designer what a pain it is to get the layout correct in all the different browsers. How many CSS hacks are required? Just look how long it took Google engineers to make those Gmail buttons. Crazy.

Why can't we pull all these "best-practices" of laying out and rendering common components into a server-side UI framework, so a programmer can use his knowledge of the programming language of his choice to build a web application?

Moreover, encapsulating everything into components leads to re-usable code with proper inheritance (instead of html template "inheritance") - something every programmer appreciates.

This is what I'm working on now - a java library to do just that.

Sceptics will say this is a "one-size-fits-all" and it won't work. That's not what I've experienced so far. Sure, some web app may need a custom "component" - so you need to write one yourself. But from then on - it's re-usable.

Will all apps look the same, like on Windows? Although that may not be a bad thing, they won't - proper separation of concerns allows designers to style components to their liking with CSS.

The aim of a GUI framework like this is to make sure web apps stick to proper design guidelines, instead of a developer deciding that he'll make his own ajax scroll-bar cause it looks cool, though most visitors can't figure out what it is. There's a reason Apple apps look so professional. They are designed around human interface guidelines. Why re-invent the wheel for each web app?

I'm only doing this cause I got too frustrated with all the frameworks out there when trying to create my new web app. They don't solve my UI needs.

Who else feels the same way? I plan to open source the code, so if anyone wants to help, give me a shout.
Bored Python programmer:

def fact(l):
return sum(map(bool,reduce(lambda I,l:''.join([l for I in I]),
['+'+'+'*l for l in xrange(l)])))
assert fact(6)==720
reduce is pretty much the same thing as foldl. The functional programmer is already included as "Expert Python Programmer"...
Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order)
Techcrunch just deleted all comments older than 1/24/2010
Charge portable electronics with every step with flexible sheets
The scary thought is that their "solutions" page doesn't really offer any good solution. TOR = slow browsing, privacy mode = doesn't really help that much, browsing from your cell phone = hell no...

With regards to the "privacy mode" of most browsers, I think that the feature is mis-named since it mostly refers to the browser's tracking of your activity, not the server's.
Um... no. From the article:

"I thought I'd demonstrate this functionality, with a bit of real world code. Postabon recommends deals to users based on a variety of factors such as the age of the deal, other people's votes, your preferences, and (relevant for this example) your distance from the deal. Most of the other factors can be computed asyncronously and just cached, but your distance from deals is computed a lot, and can't really be pre-computed since I have no way of knowing your location a priori (well, that's not strictly true, and we do do some memoization, but it has a relatively low hit rate)."
Real-life Color Picker
Here's a Star Trek prop from 1987, called a PADD.

http://imgur.com/e3fju.jpg
Cisco announces it won't charge royalties on TIP
this is a really smart idea.
I wear mountain boots all the time for that exact reason!
Net Note Book
I honestly believe Bill Gates is trying to use the opportunity he has to do improve the lot of humanity. Good for him.

However this is a massive opportunity for the vaccine companies who stand to gain a lot (far more than the $10bn) from this. Bill Gates might be in this to make the world better, but they are in it for the profit - and it's reasonable to question their recommendations and motivations.

For example look at the Pentavalent vaccine in india: DPT + Hib + Hep B

GAVI pays Rs 145 subsidy

India pays Rs 380 extra

Subsidy for 5 years

After that India pays Rs 525

Similarly it's suggested India include a number of new vaccines on their schedule (HPV @ Rs 9000/child, Rotavirus @ Rs 2000/child, and Pneumococcal vaccine @ Rs 650/child), but the situation in India is that 50% of the population don’t receive the basic EPI vaccines costing Rs 30. (not a typo, rs30 vs rs9000). In a nation of limited resources surely the first priority needs to be getting the basic vaccines to the rural poor. But the vaccine companies aren't interested in spending Gates' money on low margin vaccines, they want their foot in the door of a national program. And the WHO and UN unfortunately aren't immune to their pressure.

Away from India here's an article about the swine flu 'pandemic'
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,637119,00.h...

If anybody's interested I've half a dozen well cited papers and presentations on the topic of vaccines in India - and they make quite depressing reading. Email in profile.
I am seeing this too. Check out the scamville post from last October:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-ga...

Just one comment from this week.

It's premature to say that it's related to the TC hacking incident. Could be some other glitch. But I do hope the old comments are restored -- there are usually some interesting viewpoints or additional details in those old threads.
Tinkerer’s Sunset
One can only be so philanthropic.
Your Econ 101 class must've been far more definitive than my Econ 600 classes.

Econ 100 -- Keeping all other variables the same, if the cost of wages goes up, demand for workers goes down.

Econ 600 -- When wages go up, the other variables do not remain the same, so a useful comparison must analyze the second-order effects to determine the change in aggregate demand for workers.
I don't understand. What's wrong with the factorial function that comes with python?

from math import factorial

done.
I've always wondered what I'd do. I imagined ripping off some clothes (pants in particular, if I still had them) and creating just enough of a "parachute" or flying squirrel effect that I'd be able to slow down to about 60mph and hit the ground at 45 degrees instead of 90 degrees.

Inspired by, e.g. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/21240738.h...