skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a telepathic, shape-shifting alien, it's an omnipotent alien that created the universe and implies that there is no reality higher than this. Would that impact your faith? Assuming for the sake of argument that he's not lying, would you think that a) he's God, b) he's mistaken, there's a higher reality over which God presides or c) there is no God.
I eat up stuff like this, and it brings back memories from my childhood. I remember that intro! Thanks for sharing.
The best way to do well with any "2nd" product is to fix important problems in the first product.

ChatRoulette is not short of problems. Some people on reddit did a "study" where they found that some large percentage of "chats" were with masturbating men. Can you fix this? Probably. Add a check box saying 'show masturbating men' (I'm gonna say this should default to 'no'. Then when you end a conversation, allow a user to specific that they ended it because there was a masturbating man at the other end.

As far as I'm concerned, ChatRoulette is unusable until this is solved.
I second that. Bought Galcon Fusion a few hours after it was released.
In many respects, TCL is dead at this point ... there is still a lot of legacy use for it but few new users in comparison to Python, Ruby, etc. Rexx is dead outside of IBM shops, and was ever since Amiga and OS/2 died.
Gruber - a great blogger, terrible twitter. agree?
I really think Google can, should and must win in this message-oriented social networking space. I'd like to see it win too. But between Twitter and Facebook, Google shouldn't become too dependent on either for fresh, quality content from the masses.

They stuffed up the launch: so what. Twitter had scalability issues for a long-time, it much worse than this, and not easily remedied.
>The app store is unlike anything else out there,

If you run Ubuntu on the Adam, I'm pretty sure the internet w/o limitations > the app store.
I really wish I could use Readability on all these Scribed PDFs.
Swiveling cameras are not a new idea, Sony picture books had one at least ten years ago: http://www.transmetazone.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=381&#...
Surface temperature records: Policy driven deception?
I think some websites would be entirely in that font.
I would have never guessed that the HBO logo was a metal model and the colored light streaks were fiber optics. I was sure that was early CG.

The real question is, what are we doing now that in 25+ years will be looked back upon as incredibly tedious and unwieldy (but we see as state of the art)?
A very interesting article on the impact of Orwell's writings. I had occasion to reread 1984 last year, the first time I had read the book since before the year in its title, and it is still striking how vivid its imagined future era--fortunately not realized in the year of the title--is. I have more than tripled my years on earth since the first time I read through 1984, but it continues to have an unmatched ability to disturb with real-life observations of human capacity for evil, while retaining just an ever-so-slight glimmer of hope in the appendix on Newspeak, carefully written in the past tense and including a quotation from the Declaration of Independence. Not a literary novel, but a great novel nonetheless. And Animal Farm and many of Orwell's essays are also must-reads.
Please explain yourself, because no atheist argument that "there is no god" has ever convinced me that the lonely, yet repeatable physical laws we observe weren't created by something higher than ourselves.
Your argument seems to be that people cannot tell the difference between offense and defense. I don't think that's the case, but I don't have a coherent argument against it at the moment.
i disagree.
twitter is just the blogosphere in shorthand.

if this also applied to the blogosphere then yes.
but no.
so fail.
Wait.. the iPad runs the same OS as the iPhone (slightly modified) and this tablet runs the same OS as the Droid (slightly modified). So how is this not directly comparable?
I really don't see why I would want to know that my significant other is drinking. There are tons of other ways of communicating. This one is subtle, I'll grant that, but it's a little too far out for me.
So it pays to be a bit of a pain in the ass. Good to know, thanks!
He mentions in the video that he filed a patent for it not so long ago.

I suppose there might prove to be a few problems there that may ultimately end up delaying its release, or worse, killing it altogether.
Kinda sounds like entanglement.
I would add 2 more to that pie chart. 'sht you don't want to know' and 'sht you wish you didn't find out'.
The ridiculous amount of time & money that goes into a big budget computer game might be an example.
If you're interested in using Google Apps, you can register a domain name through Google and they will automatically configure Google Apps for your domain upon setup. http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new
Less Code is More
TEDTalks in a spreadsheet
Except, of course, that people clearly want more. They're literally asking for it.
A better statement would be that political motivations and money affect scientist not science. Science is a procedure for validating theory with observations. The extent to which some claim observations validate their theory is always debatable. People with political or monetary motivations sometimes forget this.
While the requested app isn't something you'd actually make, it's a useful request in that it's a real problem, and people voting it up indicates they want a solution to that problem.

The essential trait in a startup founder is the ability to find workable solutions to problems people want solved. This is the public doing their part, now founders have to do theirs.
To be fair, shoddy science is probably common in every field. It's just that this is such a politically charged issue that it attracts far more attacks and attention.
No, man, it's different. The iPhone/iPad isn't any kind of great boon or new magic thing.

Like, cars are much different than walking because while both are means of getting from one place to another place, the cars is several dozen times faster. That's a huge improvement in the "getting somewhere" field.

The same with cell phones. Cell phones are a huge boon because they allow you to call people almost anywhere. They eliminated the need for a hard telephone line, meaning you can now use your phone in thousands of places where you couldn't use a phone before, at least not without paying.

Now, what major game-changing feature does the iPad enable? Nothing, really. All of the major iPad apps could be performed on a laptop just as well. The touching might make the interface more humane, but it doesn't create such a universally, obviously superior thing. The fact that it's made for couch is nice, and nicer for couch computing than a laptop because of the design of its hardware, but it doesn't enable anything that wasn't possible before.

Some people might like or want an iPad, which is all fine, but it's not a major or revolutionary improvement like buggy -> car that made so many things possible that were impossible before. Like, before cars, it would take weeks or months to go from, say, St. Louis to Denver. With cars, you could make that trip in a few days or less. That's a huge, major, revolutionary improvement. Now, what thing does iPad provide that is similar to that?
especially things like motion capture.
Ubuntu actually released a netbook remix that would handle much better on something like this than the traditional GNOME desktop. Take a look: http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr
Last year, me and a friend built a chat application which would connect you to someone random. We had an impressive backend, and some really neat features including mining abuse reports to extract offensive conversations, etc. (Even considered applying to YC with this)

A week before we were set to launch, omegle.com came out which was the same thing - simpler - but essentially the same. We abandoned the idea immediately because the internet was abuzz with omegle's brilliant concept, and we'd be seen as imitators and won't get enough people interested.

One week, that's all we lost by. If I hadn't pushed for combing the site for security holes and writing in spam protection, over-optimizing the comet-server, etc, it would've been our site over there getting several hundred thousands of hits. This taught me the importance of releasing early and iterating and improving quickly.

Still, every time I see omegle.com in the news or other sites, I feel sad that it could have been us, but I also feel proud that I came up with, and implemented an idea which would've worked nevertheless.
Recently experienced this with 24 Hour Fitness in SF.

Visited the location to sign up for the $199/yr my buddy paid. "That promotion [wasn't] currently running," but I got a call two days later saying that it was back on.

It's a shame to delay a customer like me who'll wait for the better price, but I bet you lose a lot of low-hanging fruit if you make the better price available permanently.

Without the system, eventually everyone gets the better price. And though slightly inconvenienced, I ended up joining for $199/yr.
Is there anything like this for meeting designers? Programmer => Designer
I think the author is wrong in thinking a "swiped at the door" and "no sales staff" is a better model.

Most gyms make their money locking people into annual contracts in exchange for a slightly lower monthly fee. This is especially true for "full-featured" gyms with lots of classes and staff.

The only way his idea works is for the 24 hour/keycard type of gym where only 1 employee is needed and there are no instructors necessary. (like SnapFitness)

I'd like to see some actual creative pricing based on actually going to the gym. For example, if you check in 100 out of your first 180 days, then your rate drops $5 a month. Or your rate drops $1 for every 5 pounds you lose (with a cap of course).
I shipped laptops to Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.) Forget starting an Apple shop, or a Linux shop. Most IT people there get trained in MS stack technologies, and most techies you will be able to hire will be familiar with them.

If the purpose of your startup is profit and not some other altruistic or fun reason, I suggest you don't try to introduce you them too many new things at the same time. You wont be able to service Apple hardware there, at least not cheaply.

You can source newish IBM Thinkpads for $350 a piece, if you're buying 10 units+ (feel free to contact me for that) same with HP and Toshiba ones.

They should be able to pickup Python and Django on their own, and fairly quickly. They're already competent in ASP.NET and other more complex technologies.

Nairobi has some decent IT scene as well.

Good luck!
Finally: How to leverage social media, right now
Seriously, haven't you ever met unemployed systems programmers? I have, they're a dime a dozen, and most happily take crappy admin jobs and 10-people insurance and travel agencies. I happily waited tables and poured coffee while writing compilers for fun.

Technical competence does not in any way imply employment in the field.
The first time I read "1984" was during the "smoking gun" talks that congress was having about Iraq. I was amazed that in a classroom of thirty people I was the only one that was drawing the parallels between the novel and the then current political climate. That's when I realized that very few people have meta-cognitive abilities and are able to learn from past mistakes whereas others are doomed to constantly repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Orwell was in tune and aware of political thought like no other and it is a shame there aren't more like him during modern times.
Yes but the vast bulk of costs for a gym are fixed costs. You've got large fixed costs in the form of rent, machines and staff just to have the doors open.

Sure there's the idea that he'll be taking up space in the gym, but, statistically speaking, that's unlikely after the first couple of weeks.
The core of OS X and Springboard might be shared, but if you think that the UI of the applications on the iPad shared with the iPhone, might I suggest that you go and watch the iPad release video where Steve Jobs shows the device off?

From what I've seen in the video, this device doesn't have much custom UI and the main selling point is hardware.

Also this tablet might also run Ubuntu or ChromeOS. Which means that the OS won't be nearly as integrated with the hardware as it is on the iPad. Or that the tablet's UI won't be designed specifically for the device it is on. Or apps that it will run won't be designed specifically for the device and instead will be generic, to the lowest common denominator (which, most of the time, will be a phone, not a tablet).
I'm sure if there is a God he wouldn't have resorted to anything as crude as 'creating' the laws. It's more beautiful that they weren't sledgehammered into existence. It gives them some substance, instead of just a proxy for something we couldn't possibly understand.

Besides, we're been explaining anything inexplicable as the work of the gods for thousands of years. This conversation could have happened in Greek times and you would still have been convinced at the existence of Apollo at the end of it.
The iPad (and this tablet, for that matter) is not a netbook. Throwing Gnome without the bar on the bottom on it won't magically make Ubuntu usable on the tablet in any way that makes sense.

I can go compile an X server for the iPhone and run all of those apps on it as well (or, most of them. Some apps or their dependancies might do weird things with bits that may break). That doesn't mean that I will have a good experience using them.
I've always kind of felt that any claim to empiricity in programming language comparison will be fatally undermined by a focus on only one task. The choice of task itself is very opinionated in a way that makes it difficult to apply the conclusions of this study more broadly.
"The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god?"

Well, if you program it to worry about that stuff then yes. If you don't, then no. My current program couldn't care less about me. I'm okay with that.
It's a WTF in the sense that every other language with curly braces scope at the block level.
It's not their fault - lots of people prefer to pay more over time rather than a smaller lump sum upfront. I mean look at the credit card industry which entirely built on this.
Ask HN: I want to cancel my Gmail. Alternatives?
I'm now looking to cancel my Gmail account. What are my best alternatives?
I can't agree. What's revolutionary about the iPad? Only that isn't running a desktop OS? There have been Windows CE tablets for ages. The difference is realization, which is everything, of course, it's the difference between Altavista and Google. The iPad will be successful But revolutionary?

On other side, you have the first device that it's at the same time, a tablet and a eink reader. I don't know if it will be successful, probably not at the same scale, but certainly it's much more revolutionary.

Anyway, if anything, I think this device could hurt more Kindle sales than iPad ones.
I'm sorry, but as sure as atheists are that there is no god, you have convincede to belive it
WSJ: Microsoft Targets Phones
The iPad isn't about hardware, at all. The iPad is about getting away from the hardware. About having a completely new way to use a computer. Yes, to do the same tasks you do now. But to do them in a better way.

That this device is betting on hardware to beat Apple means that they've already lost. That they had to resort to comparing their device to a MacBook Pro with the brightness turned down to have a selling point looks desperate. The tablet these guys are selling doesn't offer a new way to go about your routine. It just offers a more complex device to go about your daily routine.
I'm making orders from all kinds of online stores, there is no way I will add them all to the address book. Especially so because I don't know their address before they send me something, and I don't care about it after their first order confirmation/tracking number email.
Believe me, it's frustrating to see how much press they get.
Note the form of this submission.

The article is behind the WSJ paywall.

Rather than submitting a direct link to the WSJ article, I submitted the google search for the article. This link will inevitably appear in a comment for the submission, in response to "I hit a paywall." Let's just go there in the first place.

I prepended "WSJ" to the article title, hinting what to look for when following the google link, and adding back information that is obscured by HN (properly) labeling the link as to google.
Suggest HN: For paywalled articles, enter the google search for the url
I just submitted a WSJ paywalled article demonstrating this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124281

When you submit a paywalled article, someone will almost always comment "I hit a paywall," and then someone will respond with the google search technique, and sometimes the actual search link.

How about let's just cut to the chase, and submit the search link as the link, and prepend the actual site name to the title, e.g.

NYT: Paywalls greatest thing since sliced white bread.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121269
> To be fair, shoddy science is probably common in every field. It's just that this is such a politically charged issue that it attracts far more attacks and attention.

You get a pass for making mistakes when:

1. You don't claim there's a "consensus" when anyone disagrees with you.

2. You don't try to paint people who disagree with you as "deniers" and otherwise ignorant and horrible people.

3. You don't try to suppress publication of dissenting views and campaign against people with dissenting views coming into important positions.

4. You're not asking for trillions of dollars of bureaucratic measures to be put into place by claiming there's an imminent catastrophe if we don't.

5. You take it seriously when someone points out an error in your method, instead of calling them "an idiot" or dismissing them in a cavalier fashion.

6. You're more concerned about finding out the truth of the matter than pushing your agenda and trying to fit the facts to your agenda.

Really, the climate science people are reaping what they sowed. They were nasty to people who disagree with them, even boring unemotional scientist types who disagreed with them.
The touching might make the interface more humane

Bingo. This is exactly it. it makes things more humane. Easier. You don't have to worry about where you saved that file to. There's no accidentally deleting a folder that had an important document among a dozens of useless files.

You don't need to use a clunky device to click on something. You use your finger and you push the screen. Which a lot of people do anyway, to point to something on their screen. Only, it doesn't do anything for them yet.
I don't see what Kafka's hunger artist has to do with such bromides.

You give me an idea though. The genre of famous-author-gives-anachronistic-business-advice has never been done with Kafka before. I see a great need.
What gets me is how much effort was done on the street and countryside portion, which wasn't shown much after a couple of years... (Cuts straight to the flying logo were the norm for what I swear was over a decade afterwards.)
If this story was actually about an "error over data on rising sea levels", it would be interesting. It's only a minor factual mistake that is easily checked and corrected.

The important story is that the change in sea level rolls up many other effects into a single indicator of the extent of global warming, and that sea level is rising faster than IPCC models predict.
Such an interface is not a major boon, or it would have been implemented many years ago. Touch screens are not a new technology, they've been around for more than twenty years. They may be becoming more popular right now, and Apple may be exploiting that with the iPad/iPhone, but it by no means deserves a comparison with such revolutions as the cell phone or automobile.
The girl looks incredibly unenthusiastic about this in the video, which I'm guessing is highly representative of how it might work in real life :)

Sadly (for most HN readers), engineering is not the language of love...
These tablets are essentially netbooks that use a touch screen instead of a mouse. As such, I think that UNR would be pretty much just as usable on this as it would on a netbook.
via said reddit thread:

http://www.multiupload.com/W6BRMLW5ST
http://www.multiupload.com/FO2WO6GP6C
‘Obscene’ U.S. Manga Collector Jailed 6 Months
“We abandoned the idea immediately because the internet was abuzz with omegle’s”

I can’t help but read that as giving up at the first sign of trouble. Sure, competition sucks, but if you had just a single advantage you could have used the Omegle buzz to your advantage and effectively ride their coattail, what many tablets are presently trying to do with the buzz surrounding the iPad.
> Also this tablet might also run Ubuntu or ChromeOS. Which means that the OS won't be nearly as integrated with the hardware as it is on the iPad. Or that the tablet's UI won't be designed specifically for the device it is on. Or apps that it will run won't be designed specifically for the device and instead will be generic, to the lowest common denominator (which, most of the time, will be a phone, not a tablet).

Please correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems this means you would prefer a device that didn't have any advanced capabilities so that way all applications won't attempt to use any? Making the iPad without any extensibility was a design choice because it would be easier to make applications uniform? You would prefer to use a hindered device by design rather then software that selects its functionality based on available hardware? By contrast a gigantic portion of applications for the iPad will be designed to be run on a phone... the iPhone. I think you underestimate or don't fully understand Android.

I don't intend to sound condescending here, I am truly curious.
Yes, frequently, especially attached to intelligent blog posts! For instance, good, well thought-out articles linked here have insightful comments that sometimes people even point out here.
Wouldn't using the six word phrase most likely be a much more secure password than condensing it to a mere 8 characters?
"Admit" or "were caught"?
Personally, I prefer a platform, where I won't potentially run into an application designed for a device with hardware that I don't have. I would prefer a device that is consistent. It doesn't have to do everything under the the sun. It just has to do what it claims to be able to do, well.

By contrast a gigantic portion of applications for the iPad will be designed to be run on a phone... the iPhone

Can't really talk about specific UIKit additions, due to the NDA. But, there are plenty of them designed specifically for the iPad. Skim through this photo set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fraserspeirs/sets/7215762322426... to see a lot of the things added in by Apple that devs can (and almost definitely will) be using in their apps.

I think you underestimate or don't fully understand Android.

So all of the stories about apps working on one phone but not another, on 1.5 but not 1.6, with a physical keyboard but not an on screen one, they're not true?
<span title="I'm joking.">This is a great idea.</span>
As does Boeing, except it's funneled via the DoD. Anyway, that's not the point. Can European engineers bring equivalent products to market as quickly as American engineers, despite taking vacations and being in the office fewer hours? Absolutely yes, it happens all the time.
Twitter isn't just for people who are famous or who acquire fame. Most of my twitter feed is from people I personally know, only some of it is from people who have thousands of followers. Twitter isn't just a broadcast medium, it's also a narrowcast medium, extremely useful for friends to keep in touch.