skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you explain why?

Specifically, I'm curious why wouldn't you want your representative (your publisher) to have the power to achieve the best possible outcome for you, the author. Disregarding the specifics of this case, why would you trust Amazon to set your books' prices, seeing as how they're trying to subsidize a platform, and they're in the volume business?

Thought experiment: As a developer, would you support a decision from Apple to set a price ceiling of $0.99 for applications in the App Store?

I haven't really seen a convincing argument from Amazon's supporters why they feel Amazon should be able to set prices to goods they don't produce. That is, apart from the fact that these folks would like cheaper books--and that misses the point of what's at stake here. Even if you agree with Amazon on their current pricing model, it seems like an arbitrary and likely momentary alignment of opinion.

If MacMillan's ebook price system doesn't benefit them and their authors, they'll almost certainly adjust it. They're a profit-seeking entity.

As a side note, this whole episode reminds me of Walmart squeezing down the price of pickles by sheer monopsonistic purchasing power.
IMDb and DropZap were top free and paid socially recommended apps via Chorus
Very nice. Can you turn it into a web app, say on Google App Engine?

Could be a fun thing to play with, in addition to the ability to tweak the code and play "what if" games.
Sorry if I muddied the debate by bringing in other cases. I was attempting to contrast the decision which perhaps was not necessary. The decision against McCain-Feingold was strictly a 1st amendment one and the 14th does not effect the decision, at least not in what I've read about the ruling.
Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal, Department by Department (Infographic)
No. Robots are still very much special purpose, humans are still very much general purpose.
UTF-n: Brainstorming alternate text encodings
Yeah, I know who you are, and well, with respect, I think you're wrong. I cannot produce hard evidence for what I'm alleging. But I strongly suspect it.

NSLs are a fact. TIA/ADVISE is, or was, a fact. The massive expansion of data centre capability is a fact. What do these facts point at? You could claim there's no certain conclusion and you'd be right. But you must admit that taken together they do not exactly paint a rosy picture for your data privacy online.

Let me concede that I am most decidedly not law enforcement and readily admit I have no first-hand information from LEOs in the US or the UK. But I do have some little experience with the national technical means in your lovely little sun-and-surveillance-drenched colony Down Under and, well, why d'ya think I'm so paranoid ; )
Popularity of a product is not a true sign of "not sucking" :P
I haven't read the article, but going from your description I'd guess the answer is electrostatic forces.
I don't see the site I used to estimate my IQ before.

But http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/psychology/iq-conversion.html presents a calculator. And if you google around you can find other conversion charts that vary slightly from each other.
The idea is that with FuseJS powering the framework it will be more stable (additional bug fixes, additional browser support) and faster (less abstraction, forked methods, speedy design). So you can replace the emulated framework with FuseJS + emulation layer and not have to reprogram your entire application that is running on the old framework. FuseJS is designed to be modular so you can use only the parts you need :D
I think everyone "knew" video delivery would go online back then. But what's the saying? Everyone overestimates how much will happen in 5 years, and underestimates how much will happen in 15.
Skin Cells Transformed Directly Into Neurons
Is there a workaround for the lack of event driven support? For example, in this Expense Approval tutorial:

http://www.google.com/google-d-s/scripts/expense_report_appr...

Section 4 says:

Google Apps Script still does not support an onFormSubmit event, so administrators need to regurlarly run a script to process new expense reports and approvals. Subscribing to notifications (menu 'Tools', 'Notification rules') could be helpful for now.
1. As an administrator, from the Code Editor, manually run the script onReportOrApprovalSubmit.

Could those events be raised from another job running in the app engine?
And so few questions!

Watterson is so modest that he gives his only interview to a local journalist with no particular interest in comics who mainly asks questions about celebrity. This is like Einstein being interviewed by a sports journalist.
Also in Silver Spring, the company I work for uses Python extensively and has been a diamond sponsor of PyCon. See: http://www.woti.jobs
I agree 100%, but there is precedent for lawyers to follow, so that is considered when pursuing each new case. Much like "I didn't mean to" is not an excuse, it is stated in law that ignorance of the law is not an excuse either.

It's the same that no one will prosecute a minor for sexting another minor even though it may be considered "child pornography", or at least they shouldn't.

What is needed is clear and concise law that does not bog down the process and micromanage what should be left open for interpretation. I stand by the fact that the aspects of law mentioned in the article are simply very poor jurisprudence.
I hope Google adds support for browser history and password storage to their Chrome extension API so that I can write a similar tool for Chromium.

Weave (and Xmarks) use these:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_the_Places_history_se...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/nsILoginManager
Any good hardware book for software people?
Hi all,

I am currently studying computer science only, and i would like to understand more about hardware side of things (from basic circuit to micro controllers and others). Is there any good books/lectures for such a endeavor?

Thank you very much for your help!

Jason
It does have interesting points but just comes across as a defense of Flash, even with heavy mention of not necessarily wanting to see it survive.
The problem is that these stupid laws are selectively enforced. There are so few people that are prosecuted that the normal population doesn't care enough to throw a fit. We would need an auto-prosecute system so that whenever anyone breaks a dumb law they are inconvenienced (at least), then enough people will be affected to changes things.
The article answers that:

> The rest of exemption five lays out a host of limitations to the exemption (yes, it's a bit confusing), but they all apply to "an establishment"—a public gathering place, not a home. The rules get remarkably specific, apply differently to small and large venues, and come with restrictions on how many TVs or radios can be used in a place of business without running into trouble.
The tools are also not there yet. In order for HTML5 to really gain momentum there needs to be a set of tools that are as easy to create with as Flash.
Actually the 14th comes into play, not WRT McCain-Feingold but in that the Supremes explicitly reversed Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which was about a state law.

I've read that 28 or so states have laws which will come under wilting scrutiny now.
Dovetails nicely with the 'i break the law...' conversation here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1091814.

This is actually a concern as I've been invited to a superbowl party via facebook, no less. What happens when these invites are discoverable and suits decide to start filing lawsuits? Good times.
Three separate categories of DBMS: relational, business intelligence, and NoSQL
A new buzz-word for the same old idea.
I want privacy for the same reason I wear clothes - I don't want you to see certain things. That has been my right since these nations (both Canada and the US) were founded.

You'd probably find, if you removed my clothes, nothing remarkable really. That doesn't mean that because of that, I should walk around in the buff.
I would pay to read Einstein being interviewed by Hunter S. Thompson.
Why are you so terribly disappointing?
My team is using Flex SDK + Eclipse right now. What "standard GUI controls" are missing?
Ask HN: What's the best place to start?
I'm relatively new to programming. I'm fairly experienced at C and basic HTML/CSS, but that's about it. I'm not really sure where I should go from here. Should I learn C++? Ruby? Javascript? What's the next step you would take if you were in my place?

Any thoughts you might have, please share.
Proposed NASA budget cuts moon missions, seeks to privatize routine flights
I'm not worried about what happens at application, but what happens when it breaks down and comes loose from the surface. The former may be in a controlled environment, but the latter may not.
Looks very promising! Can you tell us about the customer development process you went through for this? Did you get a chance to speak to reporters or newspapers about their needs or the chances of them partnering with you, or are you going for individual early adopters for now? Best of luck.
Actually, Lockheed is the company that is designing and building the Orion spacecraft. Which is why this whole thing is slightly confusing... NASA does very little design and construction of their own hardware. At least on paper, our manned space program is privatized.
Alright, I'll bite. We've all worked with really bright individuals before.

What magically transformative thing happens when they become the average that would be so incredible and unbelievable to non-googlers?

I would describe CS grad school as having "really bright people" as the norm, but while pretty cool, I would never deign to think it as incomprehensible to outsiders or that "nobody would believe [me] anyway".

Are you guys just enjoying some hyperbolic kool-aid or is there really some new breed of uber-man filling the halls of Google?

What's the big deal (sincerely, not sarcastically)?
Make sure you've built a functional admin panel before you launch.

Sorry, but this is bad advice. For 99% of startups, their biggest risk is not going to be spending too much time mucking around in the production database because they don't have an admin panel, but that no one is going to show up or care when they launch their product. Building cool stuff like admin panels, metrics dashboards, and loggers is just more procrastination to keep from doing the most difficult thing: launching.

If you're going to build those things at some point, make it after you've seen that users care enough about this product that you're not going to scrap it and move on to the next one. Otherwise you're just wasting effort.

EDIT: To be fair, I think this is otherwise a great post. It is important to build those things early but I think building them pre-launch and pre-validation is a big mistake.
Why has global warming paused? Water vapor suspected.
Jerome Lettvin
Fascinating interview with an amazing polymath. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Lettvin for an amusing anecdote about his experience with his son's pet octopus "J.D." (juvenile delinquent).
It depends on what you want to do. Do you just want directly marketable skills? Then learn PHP, Perl, Java, JavaScript, C++, Ruby or Python.

On the other hand, if you want to increase your personal skills then learn something radically different. A variety of Lisp such as Scheme, Common Lisp or Clojure would be one option. Another option would be OCaml or Haskell. These are truly mind-expanding and will help you in the future.
He ran 240 km (150 miles) in two days. He then ran the 40 km (25 miles) from the battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) with the word "Νενικήκαμεν" (Nenikékamen, 'We have won') and collapsed and died on the spot because of exhaustion.

So, after running 75 miles a day for the first two days, don't run another 25 miles the next day.

PS: The story is improbable, as the Athenians would more likely have sent the messenger on horseback.
> But perfect advertising is when you're looking for a car, and you get presented with information about a (more expensive) car that you buy, but that you wouldn't have bought if you spent time doing the research yourself.

That would be perfect, but only for the advertiser. So I want to ask you this: do you think there is a potential win win scenario in advertising? And if there is, why do you think Google would pursue the advertiser favorable outcome over the both party win outcome?

Example time

---------------------------------------

Ok let's take the Google search example for a ride.
I'm looking for a new pair of headphones. They must be closed, really good quality, and nice looking. I want a good price. But most importantly, they must have favorable reviews. I've spent a few days searching google for reviews and specifications. I've settled on the Shure SRH840 (can't wait for them to get here).

From Shure's perspective, let's see if they could see exactly what I searched for! They would see exactly what I wanted based on the reviews. Then they could decide whether or not their products matched exactly what I'm looking for. Wouldn't Shure be interested in paying to put their headphone, along with all the information I was looking, right in front of my eyes? That would be a win win situation. I save myself some time researching, and Shure makes some money off of me.

---------------------------------------

(How do you type an asterisk?) Please note that in a real world application Shure would not see what I searched for. Instead they would target by telling google what type of people looking for such and such information would want Shure stuff.

But unfortunately advertising has not reached that ideal point yet. There are advertisers who have shitty products that barely function, and they try to target uneducated people. This could be an example of good targeting too, because the advertiser can reach its intended target: the idiot. Unfortunately because of the inefficiencies of ad targeting systems, we have people like you and me who are mistaken for idiots (at least I'm hoping it's a mistake) and served these ads for shitty ass products that we don't want. These targeting inefficiencies add noise to the system and not only serve us unwanted ads, but block the wanted ads. They also make advertising less attractive for people who have genuinely good products that could potentially be exactly what some people want.

It's understandable that you and most people hate ads because they've been quite inefficient. And so far advertiser's haven't been able to target to the point of relevancy. Instead they employ a brute force method of either spamming the masses (television) or minimal targeting and slightly less spamming (Google ads). But I believe there is a place for ads to be beneficial by letting companies pay to get favorable information to a target audience, and I believe Google is trying to achieve that.
I currently do freelance work, and a lot of it has been "write me a little application that helps me search these websites for these terms relevant to the services my business provides". Python is very well suited to such tasks.

There seem to be quite a few smaller-to-medium web-shops using python.
You should check out 280north's Atlas. http://280atlas.com/ It's still in beta, but you can get access to it by preordering it (highly recommended).

WebKit's Web Inspector is quite awesome -- Apple actually has bankrolled a few full time employees to work on it, and many more contributors have been hacking away at it for quite some time. In my opinion, it is the best example to learn HTML 5 best practices from (it is written in HTML 5 itself).

FireBug is also great (I prefer the WebKit Web Inspector myself, since about 1 year ago, due to its rapid updates) but FireBug is quite excellent.

Apple also provides some a rudimentary IDE called Dashcode, which I don't really like, but might be helpful for others. The OS X dashboard has been 100% WebKit / HTML 5 powered for quite some time.

Not to say that these are necessarily better than Adobe's dev tools, but the writing is on the wall. The awesome thing is that all of these I have mentioned, with the exception of Dashcode, are open source and rapidly developed both by full time employees of various interested companies and the community.
There really is a gray area between "home" and "public exhibition" and it is extensively litigated over.

It sounds like a simple, reasonable thing to determine. Something that would never ensnare honest people who inadvertently walked across a line you imagine is well-delineated. But it really isn't.

Are most personal parties in the clear, despite size of TV? Sure.
Does that mean all of them are or that you'll clearly know when you cross that line? Case law says "no" on both counts.
I don't know about exploding. The impression I got from the last year and a half there was that they're always asking each other and investors--how come we're not Silicon Valley?

While there is defn a tech scene there, it doesn't seem to compare in spirit, concentration, and amicability here, when it comes to tech. Even just a month and a half in Mountain View, I've seen a noticeable difference.
I get a lot of my work off of craigslist. It takes some sifting through, but it's not too bad.
Files should be put in their place; they should be put away.
Be Here Now...by writing about it later
And it will never happen for that exact reason. At least not exactly like that. I rather like the idea, though.
That's so specific as to be meaningless. How many PCs are bought at retail as opposed to online? How many people that buy PCs at Best Buy are looking for a high-end machine?
Again... why worry about converting to/from a figure most people are skeptical of as representative of anything meaningful?
Thanks! I launched statsheet.com two years ago. Since then I've talked to several big sports media companies as well as a dozen TV/news, sports betting, and other sports-related website owners. They all liked the content I was creating on statsheet.com and was interested in getting it on their site(s). Embed StatSheet is my solution for that. If someone says: "I wish my sports site/section had some of the stuff statsheet.com has", now there is an app for that :-)

This also fills a gap in the current sports data provider market today. Small content creators (ie bloggers) are completely priced out of the market. Second, you either need to be a programmer (to consume XML feeds) or use a white label hosted service. Embed StatSheet enables website owners to maintain control over their website without needing to hire programmers to do the integration (for many deployment scenarios).
Your welcome. I'd love to interview any of those people!
In my mind there's a big difference between, say, driving "traffic" speed (where traffic is moving 10-15 mph faster than the speed limit), and drunk driving or failing to stop at a red light. The former actually improves safety - most accidents are caused by speed differences between vehicles, not absolute speed. The latter is a good way to kill someone or get killed.

And in my experience most traffic enforcement seems to be against the latter kind of behavior. (Well, except the cops who sit at the bottom of a hill where the speed limit drops from 35 to 25, because their town needs revenue.) I've never known someone to get pulled over for speeding when they're driving traffic speed on a highway, even if there's a cop right behind them. I think people should and do get pulled over if they're weaving or blindly zooming through red lights.

Isn't it interesting that something as clear cut as traffic laws could spawn such a debate? Pretty good evidence, IMHO, that laws are not clear-cut and there's room for judgment calls in a lot of them.
We should allow the Flash developers to secede from the web. It's what they seem to want, anyway.
Actually - I have some data. I had a product priced at $2 per month subscription vs $50 one-time fee. More people paid the one-time fee than the subscription.

From talks I've had with people, people prefer to pay a one-time fee than a subscription.
I agree sorta, but only for the more tweaky visual design aspects, rather than interaction design.

If anything, I see Google as actually less data-driven in its design than many areas. Industrial psychology and HCI are traditionally very big on data-driven design for interaction design, with a big focus on Methodologies, quantitative measurement of task performance improvement, and various other statistical evaluation metrics. But the main downside of that is that you can't really answer open-ended design questions: you can A/B test between two specific proposed interfaces, and determine A causes N% of users X quantity less hassle than B does (or whatever your metric is), but if you want to invent an entire new interface, you're basically doing a random walk in design space, which will take a really long time to get anywhere. I mean, imagine how many A/B questions you'd have to ask to invent the Gmail interface, using, say, the Hotmail interface as your starting point, and having to justify every change you make from that starting point using data.

I suppose it depends on your norm, though--- Google is very data-driven by the web-design standard, but sort of loosey-goosey, anything-goes compared to the much more statistics-and-methodology-heavy design practices that go on in traditional engineering and HCI.
> It's the same that no one will prosecute a minor for sexting another minor even though it may be considered "child pornography", or at least they shouldn't.

You seem to have a faith in the intent of a law and reasonableness of its enforcement that just isn't backed up by fact.

There is no shortage of cases where minors are facing child pornography charges for sexting other minors. It seems a week can't even pass by without yet-another poor kid having his life ruined by adults ignoring intent and enforcing the precise language of a law.
IPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up - Engineers
Why Microsoft can Blow-Off with C#? (2004)
I found this article disappointing.
10 hours of video. Oh yeah, that bit about getting on a flight across the Pacific, watching video all the way.
Solution for job creation? ‘Startup coworking’
Why Russians see a different Kind of Blue
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/04/28/...
Why? In this case, it's better than most. The details need work, but the idea is sound.
I was unable to find a school zero tolerance policy that would remove a child from the parents' home.
>"Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a pretty low threshold"
<citation needed>

We've already been over this ground more than once:

According to one 32,000 person study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1999), "fit persons with any combination of smoking, elevated blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol level had lower adjusted death rates than low-fit persons with none of these characteristics". The same study found that aerobic fitness had a far more important impact on longevity than obesity did.
This was cited in Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil and Grossman, Chapter 22.

Another 100,000+ person study found that men who ran two or more marathons per year were 41 percent less likely to suffer from high blood pressure, 32 percent less likely to have high cholesterol, and 87 percent less likely to be diabetic than non-marathoners. Those who ran only one marathon every two to five years also had significantly lower risk for these conditions than non-marathoners.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140104.php

Here's a different piece on how regular hour-long runs stimulate neurogenesis and memory improvements in middle aged humans:
http://www.dana.org/news/brainwork/detail.aspx?id=7374

Distance running is one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself. Racing marathons is also fine, with sufficient training.
I meant that I don't want the profits from space-related technology to get filtered through government.