skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The EFF is about electronic freedom. The iPhone takes away the freedom of users and developers. They are merely enumerating how that happens, so that developers who are unaware of the strict contract they signed understand what freedom they gave away just to put an app in the app store.

I'm tired of hearing about how Apple is "abusing" developers, unlike shared global resources like the Internet and clean air, there's nothing compulsory about using or coding for the iPhone.

Because people really care what you're tired of hearing. (I'm tired of hearing about what you're tired of hearing about. And you're probably tired of hearing that I'm tired of hearing what you're tired of hearing about. Do you see where this leads?)

Anyway, that's not what this article is about; it's just a list of strange conditions that you agreed to when you signed up for the iPhone SDK. You can only sue Apple for $50, you can't talk about the SDK, you can never exercise your legal right to reverse-engineer any Apple product ever again, etc. Pretty strange, and not something a reasonable person would expect to find in this sort of agreement. That is all the article is saying.
Nice attention to detail: note how the censored text is pixelated _in perspective_ ;)
I suppose you can achieve a certain kind of success when you turn every employee's action into an "ROIable" dollar value, but it sure makes for a miserable workplace.
Making gallery submissions easy for designers
Submitting designs to galleries has always been a hectic task for designers. This post is to give you an overview on the procedure I follow to make this easy.
And in this you're assuming I'm the one arriving late and witnessing this? I certainly do occasionally, but I'm far from the worst in any of my classes.

As to missing those 5-10 minutes, if they're that valuable, the students will either arrive or miss out. That's their choice. And I wholly feel that way. I'll also point out that many many professors spend those first 5-10 minutes doing very little to progress learning, instead going over the previous class or simply getting ready. Not all, and I'm not accusing you of it, it's just that it's most certainly not the most valuable period in a class.

It's not your job as a teacher to make up their losses, it's your job to teach to the students. If those interruptions are taking teaching time away, it's because you are taking time away to deal with the interruption. That's your choice. All of the most effective lecturers and most valuable classes I've had have been taught by people who kept teaching, because these interruptions don't truly exist unless they're made to exist.

The student comes in late? Then they have to pick up from where they came in. You don't need to point out to everyone that they came in, nor do you need to tell them everything they missed - they'll ask other students (who they likely know) if they're interested. And with two exceptions in my 5 years in college thus far, I've never missed anything in the first 15 minutes that I couldn't pick up in 5 minutes from paying attention from that point on.

Those two exceptions were in art classes, when a demonstration was occurring. They couldn't rewind, and I didn't ask. It instead took me 5 minutes of experimenting and watching someone else go first, and then I was caught up.

If the teacher had made me go first, it'd have been identical to stopping everything just to berate me; it's only purpose would have been to see me fail, wasting class time, which is infantile at best. Sadly, many teachers feel this need.
I still receive too much spam. Still relying on Thunderbird.

I wonder if Thunderbird's filter has been improved at all lately. Some possible improvements come to mind. For example it could take into consideration who is already in my address book. If somebody sends me an email with only an image and no text, and that someone is not in my address book, it seems safe to consider it spam.

It should also remember whom I actually sent mails to, and filter all "Unknown Recipient" mails that I never triggered.

Also, how can emails with "VIAGRA" in the subject pass by the spam filter? It must have had thousands of opportunities to learn that VIAGRA in emails equals spam.

Guess I should go find Thunderbird's bug tracker.
I guess most people here, including me, are conditionalized to regard anything advertised as categorically unverified and possibly false. I didn't say advertising would work for nobody, however.

The advertised data filtered through a number of acquaintances and backed up by empiric knowledge slowly evolves into actual information. A new product basically flows through a pipeline where only some people need to buy something "blindfolded" and the rest can then enjoy the product if it turns out to be any good.

Yeah, Dell has to initially tell "we're Dell, we make these computers, please try out a few of them". That's pretty much the only piece of information to which all advertising reduces to.

The rest of the advertising mumbojumbo is only there to cut people off the said word-of-mouth pipeline and encourage them to buy it now, i.e. blindfolded with no prior experiences.
Designing Sound in SuperCollider
>Well, you could actually write your own code to read the files, since the format is open.

I think the parent's point was not vendor lock-in but rather, that publishing the source code to your particular implementation would lend more credibility to it since anyone can inspect it and verify that it does what it says it does.
The problem is that HN is not evolutionarily stable. We are susceptible to large numbers of new users upvoting each other's undesirable content.
Fark generates some fun stuff :)

And while it'd be a privacy nightmare, I'm sure nearly everyone would love a search that indexed their house. Think of it: never lose anything, ever again. I could use that pretty often, especially with roommates and cats :D (guess which cause more lost items)
Asian iPad Knockoff Runs Full Windows 7
Hah! Thrift is a knockoff of an older Google technology called Protocol Buffers, which is also open source.

Take a look for yourself.
ILLUSTRATIVE LOGOS FOR LOGO DESIGN
See thousands of illustrative business logo design examples created by LogoMojo.
In Denial
As well as "IT LIIIIIIIVES!!!!" when you get it spinning for the first time, and scaring / awesome-ing the neighbor kids.

What the heck is that thing made of, anyway? An erector set? Juice bottles? Over-powered wires and motors? That beast is worthy of a Frankenstein moment.
2D barcodes for tagging the real world
10 Tips to Stress Less
The Techology

* Ruby On Rails
* Gems & Plugins:
o asset_packager
o acts_as_list
o clearance
o declarative_authorization
o facebooker
o formtastic
o hoptoad_notifier
o paperclip
o sanitize
o will_paginate
o vote_fu
* rSpec, Cucumber, Selenium
* PostgreSQL
* jQuery and a range of plugins
* Facebook Connect, XFBML, FBJS
* Heroku with the RPM add-on

Things I learned:

* Facebook Connect is awesome
* Ruby on Rails continues to be awesome
* Heroku is awesome times infinity
* http://topsecretproject.finitestatemachine.com/tag/ruby/
Just a short list of icon designers I follow on twitter, I plan to collate this into a blog post eventually:

- Sofa: http://www.madebysofa.com/

- Pinvoke: http://twitter.com/pinvoke_com + http://www.pinvoke.com

- ByLine Break, Midtone Design: http://www.midtonedesign.com/ + http://twitter.com/DDrDark + http://twitter.com/bylinebreak + http://bylinebreak.com/

- Cocoia: http://twitter.com/Cocoia + http://www.icondesigner.net/

- Louis Harboe: http://twitter.com/spiralstairs + http://www.graphicpeel.com/

- Jonas Rask (retired): http://twitter.com/JonasRask + http://jonasraskdesign.com/

- Mathieu White: http://twitter.com/MathieuWhite + http://mathieuwhite.com/#funtime
Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages.

I dislike what Apple is doing with the app store as much as the next guy, but to be fair don't most contracts try to include some clause limiting liability like this, that in reality is almost never enforceable? Is this really so strange? (Honest question, so would love some real answers.)
People were writing free software long before the FSF existed.
My spam counts for the last couple days (that spamassassin caught), working backward from today:

554, 481, 489, 901, 1192, 932

So the last couple days have been good, but it's been running about 1K per day for as long as I can remember.

We have about 55 accounts on this machine. Let's assume most legit mail doesn't bounce (i.e. human mistakes and misspellings are rare). Grepping for "user unknown" in the mail log gives about 100,000 matches per day.

In short, the bastards are still hard at work.
I've admired Franz Och for quite some time now. Giza++ is an impressive piece of software that has really put SMT on the map. Nice to see the man finally get some press recognition.
My cofounder and I discussed this as an interesting offshoot of the idea we applied to YC with. Our application uses 2D barcodes and this was one of the other uses of the technology we discussed. We decided not to pursue it for a whole lot of reasons but it's cool to see someone trying it.
Ask HN: For the prototype.js users -- is it worth it?
Prototype.js sounds very interesting. I'm about to start writing a pretty hefty JS lib of my own, and I'm wondering if any of you guys use it regularly and your opinions? To you find you can get more work done with the added constructs prototype provides, rather than just straight JS and maybe jQ?
Well, if anyone's interested, these links should work in a bit over an hour (or two... fluctuating speed), provided it all downloaded correctly (I'm headed to sleep). Don't try before then, they won't be complete, I'm just downloading to my Dropbox.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/temporary/3g-side.3gp (16mb)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/temporary/3g-floor.avi (159mb)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/temporary/3g-payload.avi (43mb)

Please mirror / set up a torrent if you can, I'd prefer to not nail my Dropbox too hard. (payload is interesting, you can see the twisting caused by the spinning)
If you haven't read Clay Shirky's essays on the difficulty of maintaining an online community, do it now ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html and http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html ). Actually, read all the source articles in Spolsky's Best Software Writing I ( http://brevity.org/misc/bestswi.html )

Every online community, from the very beginning, has faced its own crisis of identity as it scales. Perpetual September is as inevitable as the second law of thermodynamics.

I long considered HN to be a counterexample precisely because the group is not only self-selecting, but constitutionally disinclined to enjoy shallowness. A group of true geeks and entrepreneurs does not have to be coerced into expressing a love of Erlang internals and a hatred of celebrity gossip.

But, inevitably, any given community will attract people with different interests. A war of sorts inevitably occurs as both subcultures clash and try to gain power. The result is one we've seen in every single online community that has ever been created.

imho, the culture of HN is smart enough to either find a solution or at least a way to delay this process. There's a reason PG tells us not to complain about "redditization": such complaints are the very thing that dissolves a sense of community and shared values.
AT&T ads urge drivers to save their texting for later
5 Exercises That Will Get You Fit
S/he first made a mistake

You can't assert that as truth, because that is the question being debated. I find all the speculation on how this student would behave in corporate life rather amazing: it suggests knowledge of correlations that you can't possibly have evidence for. It's just putting this guy down for the sake of feeling better about yourself.
This is the project that influenced me to start my NGO (http://savethem.net)...we're buying computers and building a library in a village in India, and teaching the children how to use them. Actually, it's been very little teaching...the kids tend to learn how to use the computers themselves.

It's actually quite amazing to see first hand how the children learn to open MSPaint and within minutes have taught the other kids how to draw pictures.

Now we are building a library for an entire village and letting anyone use computers, whenever they want. Very rewarding!
Excellent comment.

Most non-technical professional firms I've worked in evaluate performance solely on results. We book our own flights, we schedule our own meetings with clients, etc. In other words, the company expects us to be grown-ups and one either meets those expectations or ceases to be employed.

I've also worked for companies that are obsessed with hours. The worst was a software firm that was focused on an increasingly complex set of "flexi-time" rules designed, on the surface, to allow flexible work hours while maintaining some common work time and also enforcing "fairness".

In reality, I found that it was really just a way for managers to avoid having to deal with cracking down on lazy workers. Without the byzantine set of flexi-time rules they would have had to confront dead-wood employees and can them. The software firm was unsurprisingly filled with engineers with poor people skills that had become managers and were uncomfortable doing this.

Hire carefully, have high expectations, make them clear, be goal and result oriented, check in often and communicate well, and fire people that don't get their work done.

100% agree with comment above. I've never, ever seen a functional, professional services company where working from home was the norm or even a good idea. It's just that, as an adult, it's sometimes the most useful, necessary, and responsible choice.
I think he's right...but....doesn't there need to be a basis for that creative thinking? It seems to me that the early "memorization" of stuff (elementary school and middle school) is pretty essential. It's pretty hard for MOST people to understand calculus without first being able to solve 2x + 3 = 15
When I work from home I get up like I'm "going" to work, put on decent clothes (no pj's) and don't screw around before sitting down to work. I keep a regular schedule just like I was working in situ.
As someone familiar with Indian IT ecosystem, please bear in mind Indian IT system is different bit and lags behind SV. Indian IT system is pro-Microsoft rather than Linux based. Indian CS/IT education concentrates on MS Windows from lower grades itself.

There are two sections of people you might face - those who need IT literacy so that they can move on with jobs like DTP, Admin Assisstant and those whose career would like to be built on computer science.

For IT literacy section, familiarity with MS Windows, MS Office (or OpenOffice alternative), Internet Browsing, Accounting packages like Tally, Computer and printer hardware assembling and troubleshooting

For Computer Science section, you will still need

Programming: GWBASIC (or latest MS Simple Basic) to get them familiar with programming and their syntatic structures.
Database: SQL language based on DBASE III (or latest MySQL alternatives).

Teaching programming in C,C++ and Java always helps, as most schools and companies insists them as your passphrase in your resume to be even considered for written tests (talk about idiocrazy)

One another thing I faced during my career start, I could not afford any computer literature like books, magazines as it is way too expensive even for great Indian middle-class. So wherever possible, I try to sponsor computer magazines and books to local libraries and private lending libraries so my fellow citizens have better learning opportunities than me.
I know you're being sarcastic but the springiness of the iPhone controls is one thing I miss when using any Android device. If nothing else it let's you know all your input is being recognized, which is very important. But yes, I'd much rather have an open device without a restrictive dev contract than springy scrolling.
I asked "How could a lack of multitasking be made up for by rapid switching between tasks?"

Single-task at the speed of light for all it matters, you still never get the benefit of not closing everything you're doing just to open up the iPad's text editor.
no...there are satellite sticks, but they cost an arm and a leg..
I love everything about this. The bus times, the little icons of every employee but especially the ticker of twitter updates about Panic. Definitely inspiring for the developers.
Fixing X is the reason I keep lynx (actually links2) installed.
I don't have a use for a car, but a quad-socket machine may be pretty fun in terms of those "let the computer search for answers over the weekend" type problems.....
My Top Sources of Traffic and Quick SEO Tip
you're pretty close, it does mostly that, using my algorithm that determines which ones are valid or not...the new iteration of my software determines the best cousin keywords, evaluates the competition more powerfully, finds the words that are most likely to get to #1 on google, and then does the rest of it's work by itself....if anyone is interested in seeing the updated version sign up to the newsletter at maneeshsethi.com or email me...maneesh [at] maneeshsethi [punto] com
There's no war here, and not much of a debate. Different companies with different problems use different languages and platforms.

I use both. It's nice.
also yea, i remember you brian! Good to see you here :)
a little less than a year...and it's pretty profitable :)
Reliance wireless goes at 3MBps, like 300 KB/s sustained... all over India. Yes, youtube or HD vids stream fine..

the costs are minuscule in comparison to the profits, esp caus ethe costs are one day costs and the profits are passive and month fter month
It's time for this I think: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142045.

Personal reprimands from you are effective in snapping otherwise reasonable people out of the mindset that sometimes results from anonymity, but it's just a stop-gap measure. I know you already know this, but it's worth pointing out.

Tangential anecdote: the last 10 or so uncivil comments I've read have been from throwaway accounts and accounts with small post counts/karma. I suspect most of these accounts are proxies for more active ones. Not sure if this metric can be leveraged in some way without producing too many false positives. Using machine learning to enforce civility is kind of ironic actually. Still, might be worth investigating.
Britain Celebrates No Smoking Day On Wednesday
Search performance at 5 million volumes
Vagrant - build and distribute virtualized development environments.
This sounds like a humanist reaction to the increasing amounts of research and evidence that intelligence does in fact have a large genetic component. Nobody says environment and hard work aren't vital factors for success, but it's already understood that intelligence doesn't equal success anyways. Still, that doesn't mean intelligence isn't by and large an innate quality. Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate goes into this in detail, but his point was virtually the opposite of this author. He was instead making the case that much more about a person than most people expect is a direct result of their genotype, and that it's best if we face up to reality and talk about these things in the open rather than pretending that everyone is equal. As for success, it seems there is wide agreement that insane amounts of practice and perseverance are are sure fire recipe. I wonder how much the ability to persevere in the face of difficulty is affected by a persons genes?
The bigco I work for has three monitors showing primary sales and login numbers in real time. In the scale of thousands of employees, the simple metrics serve to keep a basic level of group connectivity to the top-level objectives.
Looks generic enough to me.
Cool. :) I was on the WAC team, working on the Word Viewer web app. I know a couple people who are going to be there this summer - can put you in touch with them if you like.
I didn't meet any of them - different part of the company. I was in Office. But from what I hear, IE9 will dispel the notion that they suck...but I didn't see anything firsthand.
Hotels, Resorts and Guest Houses Booking at affordable price
Budget Hotels and Resorts provides hotels in various locations through out India at affordable price with in the budget via our secure and easy to use booking system
Tell HN: Sleeping for insomniacs, found an interesting product.
This might seem like an ad, but it's not. I just wanted to share a product that I've gotten my hands on that's finally helping me to get some decent sleep.

So I've suffered insomnia for years which has caused me no end of trouble. I've tried many different methods from the pharmaceutical to new age. The two that worked best for me were sleeping pills and sleeping with white noise on.

I had issues with sleeping pills in that I would wake up in the morning and feel groggy for a few hours. It worked for sleep, but the after affects were horrendous. I'd feel drowsy for hours in the morning and couldn't get anything done.

With the white noise, it works if you live on your own, but if you live with someone you have to use headphones. The problem I found with most headphones was that they were uncomfortable to sleep in, especially if you sleep on your side.

Where I'm going with this is a fried of mine bought me some headphones called sleepphones. They're essentially a headband looking thing with thin speakers where the ears should be. I found they were incredibly comfortable sleeping in and for the last 2 weeks I've slept very well.

So that's the pro's, now for the con's.

I felt that the sound quality that came out of them wasn't as good as you would get from a decent set of headphones, but they weren't terrible. If you're an audiophile and expecting to get something awesome, this isn't for you.

They can also be rather expensive when you compare them to other headphone products, especially earbuds.

So I just thought I would share this with you. I'm enjoying mine and it's a niche product that you might find some use out of.
You can install software to check on the temperature of your CPU and video card to ease your paranoia :) Most of these programs can even start beeping loudly if you are getting close to overheating the hardware.

That said, high-power modern video cards work at ridiculous temperatures, around 95C. That's almost enough to boil water, and yet is considered acceptable. Any modern CPU will shut off if overheated.

Anyway, you will probably have to replace your video card due to obsolescence rather than thermal damage.
"Basic SEO" to me would be doing a good job of understanding the client's products & services during the design process and making sure these come across well in the build - especially with good URLs (eg http://www.mycompany/weoffer/service-name/ etc) plus making sure that key page website copy is written in light of the obvious keywords/phrases for their industry.

If the above sounds obvious then you'd be amazed how many sites I come across which blatently ignore this - if you don't put the raw ingredients into the mix - Google aint ever gonna bake you a cake!

Basic SEO (to me) is NOT:
- advanced keywords research
- advanced off site SEO tactics
- probably not keyword/time tracking

Joel

Ps I never really class Adwords as SEO

Pps apologies for any typos - on my BB
Do the insurance companies pay for safety equipment or training in their customer's workplaces? No.

Employers pay those costs themselves in return for rate reductions. Not sure how that differs from any of my other comparisons (auto, life, homeowner's).

I think you have to admit that one's health care premiums have nothing to do with that individual's "actuarial" risk to the insurance company. There is not a single form of insurance that follows that pattern. NONE.
You're forgetting 'swap a spider' (garfield)... but I agree with you.