skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right to say that the quality of the merchandise affects the brand of the store, and that's the problem with the App Store model: Apple has implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) taken responsibility for the quality and content of apps in the store.

But the iPhone is not just a store, it's also a platform. Sometimes shitty software is the only choice you have. Sometimes you want to do something most people would consider offensive with your device.

The lack of an (authorized) way for consumers to load apps onto their phone independently of the App Store is leading to continuous PR problems for Apple, alternately with consumers for hosting offensive apps or developers for rejecting inoffensive ones.

Apple needs to turn the App Store into a premium distribution channel (most people will still find their apps via the store) but create an unregulated channel for installing apps. Otherwise people will slowly migrate to platforms that are less restrictive, like Android.
Alex Tabarrok: Insiders, Outsiders and Unemployment
And how are going to make Apple force the issue with companies like Foxconn and Wintek? These conditions are the reason why Apple enjoys the margins it does.
National entitlements and obligations are at about 100 trillion dollars (medicare, medicaid, social security etc.). This is based on estimates made by David Walker who was the head of the GAO under Clinton.
You still don't understand branding. When a product is new, people do not differentiate content and channel. When an offensive app is available on the AppStore, the iPhone is offensive. When there is an offensive web page which is viewable in Safari on the iPhone, the web page is offensive. Only after years of establishment does the public differentiate the product from the content. I still hear people say that something is available "in Internet Explorer". It's a long journey to establishment, and during that period, it is Apple's duty to keep their brand legitimate.
The lack of an (authorized) way for consumers to load apps onto their phone independently of the App Store is leading to continuous PR problems for Apple

Step out of the echo chamber. The only people complaining are the tiny minority of customers who happen to be developers.
I know there's Hadoop, etc for map/reduce; what is available for correlations like Amazon?
In cima il vin brulè fa buon sangue
Thanks. Title corrected. By way of followup/addendum:
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/weak-tsunami-hits-polyn... - "Weak tsunami hits Polynesia"
Documentary: Digital Nation
Why doesn't anyone like PHP?
Stocks Close Higher on Light Volume
No, dantheman has it right. Inflation hurts poorer people proportionately more. Richer people tend to have assets like property which inflate in value right along with the currency. If you inflate by 15% from one week to the next a rich person's standard of living hasn't decreased much, but a poor person's certainly has.
Which office is this?
I really like my flavors.me page; so much so that I redirected steveklabnik.com to it. I had gone through several iterations of designs before, but I'm not a desiger, so they always looked like crap. The ten minutes I spent on my flavors.me page looked approximately 10000 times better than anything I'd made previously.
Regarding billions of dollars in lost productivity, and having done ten years in an enterprise, I don't think the large expenditures (called spend in the jargon) can be attributed to language choice. I think you need to look a lot deeper than that, particularly to the culture of the organization. One factor that prevents programming language choice having a deep impact is the pervasive cultural allergy to programming. This results in not really seeking out or nurturing high-productivity programmers and programming efforts.

An additional example of that symptom was an article posted here in the last couple of weeks that said effectively "To improve your IT career, learn to negotiate with vendors." This is to me is a problem orthogonal to the choice of language or development practice.

For another take on this, consider all the interviews in Coders at Work. These are at the top of list of productive programmers of today. Some of them wrote in C, some despised C++ and C, none were methodologists.
I love that story, always nice to hear a story is real and not just an abstraction for the many 'real programmers' out there. But who are the modern Mel's?
http://www.codemaestro.com/reviews/9
"I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself. " - Reagan
One, they've been of less value in first world countries for the past sixty years. Call me a pessimist, but I'm not sure if this trend will continue.

Two, fitness signals health, which is valuable.

Three, even if fitness isn't valuable, we think it is, which makes it valuable for at least selfish reasons. Through most of history, fitness and ability have correlated strongly to attractive and charisma. Nobody's gonna give you social status or bear your children for getting all the achievements in Fable 2. (OK, some people might, but not very many.)
Tell HN: Free SEO Marketing
Im a student learning SEO..i'd love to help your site grow with SEO. For free.

Please send me an email if you're interested at (josh.menssen@gmail.com)
For those who can't stand Flash, we will soon be switching to exclusively licensed @font-face web embeddable fonts, which use HTML5 instead of Flash on compatible browsers. Also, we use OAuth where possible not for the write access, but to reduce user confusion that arises from trying to figure out usernames/passwords for authentication, particularly Flickr and other Yahoo properties.
Here's the paper. It was interesting translating journalese back into physicsish.

http://prb.aps.org/abstract/PRB/v81/i4/e045206
>> Apple needs to turn the App Store into a premium distribution channel (most people will still find their apps via the store) but create an unregulated channel for installing apps. Otherwise people will slowly migrate to platforms that are less restrictive, like Android.

I don't necessarily disagree but I admit that I don't know that to be the case. One of the causes of Apple's growing arrogance, IMHO, is that everyone concluded Apple was wrong about 10 years ago in regards to the Mac.

10 years ago everyone said "Controlling the hardware and software of a computing platform is stupid and that's why Apple will always be a niche and Microsoft will always rule the market"

Now it seems that might not be the case. With Apple's growing Mac sales and iPhone success Apple's theory that "controlling everything is good" seems to be justified and there's even a question as to whether Apple could retake the PC market (Quantcast recently put Web user market share at Apple: 29.4% vs Microsoft: 51.8%)

Again, I'm not saying Apple's right. I don't know. But they're on a high right now and that high is based almost solely on the fact that they do insist on control. The theory being that people are so sick of all the cr@p on PCs that they're willing to submit to Apple's control and see it as a good thing.

That's why Apple's pushing for more control via the app store.
how's that namespace working out for you?
I understand the general sentiment against child labour, but somehow a 15-year old doesn't seem incapable of working at a factory. Child and teenager are diferent words, except when they're not. People have been working the fields from small ages throughout history. As long as the child didn't drop school or something else to go there, maybe getting a job was the best idea. Having a hard age limit just seems arbitrary, outsourcing the worries about worker mistreatment (a real problem) to a magical number. Perhaps, counterintuitively, not being able to get the amount of workers necessary for the cost allowed by apple's contract, leads manufacturers to press workers to work longer.
I think you're looking for the words devalue or debase, not deflate.
People who can't use their Google Voice service, make Skype calls on 3G[0] or tether their laptops to their iphones are complaining. Those are still a more technically sophisticated audience, but they're not developers.

Long-term, what I think will end up being a bigger issue is the apps that aren't even written for the iPhone out of fear of rejection. Once Android captures a bit more of the market, I think we'll start seeing a lot of high-quality apps coming to Android first because developers know they're not going to be blocked.

[0] Yes I know that has changed or is changing soon
This stack is awesome. I spent months trying to build an easy-to-replicate django environment, and after I discovered bitnami, it was a piece of cake. Highly recommended for local development.
The most important takeaway for me is that people have a hard time telling the difference between the perceived value and the real value of things. So if you can't increase the real value of things, go and increase their perceived value instead.

And so moving forward brands are going to tap into this a lot more. They have been doing this to a certain degree but by marrying the online world with reality there is a greater opportunity to do this. An example of this is the mafia wars idea where I am beating my real friends in a game. There is also the part where they can make the perceived value more apparent. So a good example of this is the point system; buy 5 subs and get the sixth one free.

So when you put the two effects together marketers and brands can really benefit from the great increase in perceived value. An example would be where something you normally do (like brushing your teeth) can have a much greater perceived value when the brands show you that (a) you are doing better than your peers and (b) doing it multiple times helps you level up (and possibly get free stuff in the future).
I'm past the point where I get particularly excited only any given language only because most great features get adapted by other languages before too long. As it is I don't see anything in Go that's significant enough to make me switch.

But what I think Google does need, and what Go could do for them, is to give them a standardized language. One of the things Microsoft does very well with C# is to make sure it works across the board. If you are a C# developer you have access to everything Microsoft does. You can still choose another language like Java, VB.Net, Python, etc... but C# is like a promise that it will work everywhere Microsoft is.

Google doesn't have that right now and I think it inhibits their efforts to recruit developers to their various efforts.
Yes. Try visiting any page with flashblock on.
I worked at a lab programming for minimum wage when I was 15; this isn't sweatshop work. Children are allowed to work in the US, too. (Though, certainly, not at factories.)

The title is is misleading, as well: Apple contracts these oversea factories; they don't hire or force children to work for them. It's all a bit inflammatory.
agreed.

"Child labour" should mean either young children or sweatshop style working. How many US/EU teens work paper rounds for less than minimum wage? :D
ICA (Independent Component Analysis) for dummies
So reality does have a liberal bias?
Aggiornare o Installare Kupfer 0+c19.1 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
Inflation hurts the poor to a greater degree than the absolute value of wealth it steals. If all I have is a paycheck or two, a jump in the cost of everything hurts me a lot more than someone with a pile of dollars and assets.
I think the increase in depression may be a result of changes in the human environment over time. Depression may be an evolutionary acceptable downside to some other useful trait, which is simply more common now.

This is pure BS, but an example might be: People respond to rewards with mild addictive behavior, which a useful adaption. However, in our day to day lives there are few short term rewards which messes with the reward pathways in our brain leading to depression. So the an effective treatment might be playing games with a specific type of reward structure.

PS: Depression is a vary generic problem, so there might be hundreds of different failures that all result in the same symptoms.
I disagree. The idea that our society hyper-medicalizes and therefore overmedicates human problems is, to my mind, very sensible. It by no means follows that all emotional problems are "just weakness" and that the solution is to pull oneself up by the bootstraps. Indeed, given that the latter is the ultimate in crude ideas of how to approach the psyche, it actually goes hand-in-hand with the hypermedical approach: if that's the only alternative, it's no wonder that people resort to drugs.
How they scale automatically on python (a non-functional language)? I am puzzled.
Hold on, I'm not sure that's fair. Yes, everyone knows that school is insane, marijuana is safer than alcohol, you shouldn't have different tax treatment for corporate and individual health insurance, et cetera et cetera EXCEPT WE DON'T ALL KNOW THAT AND THEY'RE STILL DOING IT.
Why doesn't the dad give his daughter points when he's proud of her? When society has a bunch of different points systems like that, social points from each individual ought to be one kind of points system. It could help make trust networks, too.
Sean Carroll on the arrow of time (Part 1) [video]
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30.
telegraph.co.uk:

"Apple admits using child labour […] At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.[…]"

apple.com/supplierresponsibility/auditing-compliance.html:

"In 2009, our audits identified 17 core violations: eight violations involving excessive recruitment fees; three cases where underage workers had been hired; three cases where our supplier contracted with noncertified vendors for hazardous waste disposal; and three cases of falsified records provided during the audit."

"Apple discovered three facilities that had previously hired 15-year-old workers in countries where the minimum age for employment is 16. Across the three facilities, our auditors found records of 11 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age, although the workers were no longer underage or no longer in active employment at the time of our audit."

EDIT: Emphasis added to highlight relevant bits.
'"Trying to define what should be meaningful for other people is pretty arrogant and an insular perspective on life." - I think this statement is lazy in that it's taking the cultural relativist approach.'

And the funny thing is, such statements come off as absolutist claims about how other people should not be making absolutist claims. I mean, isn't it pretty arrogant to declare someone else, um, pretty arrogant? :)

It's hard to criticize someone for criticizing someone, or to judge people for judging people.
Ask HN: Still using thesixtyone?
There was a lot of discussion here and elsewhere when thesixtyone released it's new design about 5 weeks ago. At the time many people applauded the redesign and many people hated it. I'm curious as to how many of those who started using it 5 weeks ago still use it, and how many of those who used it before the redesign still love/hate it. I know the founders are extremely busy but I'd love to get their input as well.

Full disclaimer: I had/have an artist page there, I don't like the redesign, but I wasn't invested enough in the page to be particularly upset. I've also been slightly annoyed that there is _still_ no way to delete my account.
Also, where conditions allow, the developers who know better will generally prefer better languages than PHP--leaving disproportionately more of the people who don't know better on the PHP side of the fence...
80-Year Old Puzzle solved- Computer Modeling 100,000 Times Faster
We're in agreement. However I'm not sure if you see this as an 'organic' phenomena (i.e. most people prefer to be mindless cattle that is educated only to the minimal extent necessary to be functional production units) or (as I do) as a systemic policy driven elite project to shape the human society. They haven't exactly been quiet or secretive about it.

The current elite clearly think that a systemic leveling across the board (aka domesticating the people identified by Ghandi) and homogenization is the only way to address the inherent contingent (your context) and intrinsic (your genetics) differences between humans.

My experience (obviously a tiny sample) is that the distribution is not smooth and quite lumpy, actually. I am not yet convinced that people generally prefer to be misinformed and deceived, and live lives of animals as opposed to a beings primarily distinguishing themselves by their possession of minds.

I do remember High School and do remember the history and government teachers (History: leftist progressive; Government: (presumed) future Bush voter). I remember (as memorable "learning" events) the woven tie of the history teacher and his half-hearted efforts to inject a bit of reality into the official version, and, the episode where the government teacher discussed "Deep Throat"[] with a flirting jock in class. No, I did not live in the ghettos among the disadvantaged and downwardly mobile; this is somewhere in a suburb around Washington DC -- the "Empire's capital" what a joke -- circa early 80s. in a county that likes to boast of the exceptional concentration of the highly educated amongst its residents. (Boggles the mind.)

[edit: The movie not the source. In any event, the film in question was actually "The opening of Misty Beethoven" ...]
New Answer to 80-Year-Old Question Makes Computer Modeling 100,000x Faster
- The first one, even with all its well-known shortcomings, was "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kyosaki. It opened my eyes to "there's another option out there".

- Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (translated into modern English).

- PG's "Hackers and Painters" (why I joined this forum).

- Tim Ferris's "Four Hour Work Week" (has to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, but has many very helpful and practical tips and ideas.)

- "Mastery" by George Leonard

- "Good to Great" by Jim Collins

And finally (and I don't want to turn this into a political flamewar, "grain of salt" applies here as well, etc, etc) but the book that had the most influence on me was "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Unlike all the others on the list above, it's a work of fiction, but I think it is the best at capturing and romanticizing the joy and euphoria that you feel when you build something that works.
The correct answer: Yes.
What's wrong with redmine? It's not like they're using trac!
BTW, the comment thread for the article is quite entertaining.

I especially liked this exchange

- 'They're getting close to completing "1984" so they figured starting on "A Clockwork Orange" was a good way to get a jump on things. Funny how the authors of both of these books hail from the UK. Can't the UK read the fucking books that it produces? Can it understand them?'

- 'No. They've been banned.'
For anyone looking for missing persons http://chilepersonfinder.appspot.com/?lang=en
They probably spawn several python processes
This is a really bad thing to post publicly by the way. If I was HARO's lawyer, I'd frame your comment for later use. Seriously. Actually I will use your comment in my next slides as an example of what not to do.

That being said, I'm working on blog post about your situation. You'll see...
A relevant music video bringing awareness to child labor exploitation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdrCalO5BDs
Chile earthquake pics
Not sure I would call it "trivial." You just trade your segfault (or NullPointerException) for a pattern match error.

Although that little bit of static typing would probably have dealt with the vast majority of expensive null-pointer bugs.
If nothing else it may have improve documentation.

The API docs are generated from comments in the code. To fix or add to the docs you need to get the source from svn, add your stuff, make a diff patch, and submit that patch to the ruby-doc or ruby-core mailing lists.

I've done it, its not that hard, but it's sort of tedious, and annoying enough that people who might otherwise want to help by adding a few notes or fixing the examples just won't.

Maybe I've just gotten used to it, but the use of git and github for this seems much simpler.
Sentiment Classification for Online Consumer Reviews
Social problems are caused by the beliefs held by individuals in the public, and the actions they take as a consequence of those beliefs. For example, if many people in a society believe that theft is an act they can live with, there is a high rate of thievery. The beliefs currently held in most western societies that lead to a lack of defense of personal freedom are that security is more important than freedom, that security can be improved through restriction of freedom, and that the average people in law enforcement and the government have the capability and will to restrict freedom in ways that increase security. Since most people no longer seek rational justifications for their beliefs and rely on naive intuition, it is impossible for their beliefs to be corrected through rational argument or by better informing them. Intellectualism is viewed as a form of extremism, and their intuition tells them that all extremism is bad and that truth always lies 'in the middle.' Therefore, when someone wants to appeal to them to consider the ideological underpinnings of their belief, or the logical consequences of it, they turn off and immediately ignore the person. Anything that is substantially different from their present experience is rejected, regardless of its rational basis. For example, when it was found that almost all of the MPs had been illegally using taxpayer money to pay for personal expenses, the concern of the public was never whether this is a behavior that should be punished on principle. The fact that throwing almost every MP into jail, or even just ejecting them from office, would seem "extreme" to them, so they reject the idea out of hand.

Were rationality still a valued trait in western society, the public might come to realize the things learned about human behavior over the past hundred years or so and the futility of efforts to improve security by limiting freedom. They might realize that conditions in prison are caused by the lack of freedom rather than the type of people put into prison. If prisons were full of plumbers and judges rather than criminals, they would be nearly indistinguishable from prisons full of criminals. The Stanford Prison experiments and many other real-world scenarios (Abu Ghraib was one that garnered publicity) illustrate this facet of humanity well. Having your freedom limited strips you of your humanity, and stripping someone of their freedom also strips you of your humanity.
> I spent months trying to build an easy-to-replicate django environment

Really? What problems did you encountered?

sudo aptitude install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi \
mysql-server-5.0 python-mysqldb python-django

Or if you want more flexibility in regards to available packages ...

sudo aptitude install python-pip python-virtualenv
virtualenv ~/django-env
pip -E ~/django-env install Django
source ~/django-env/bin/activate

And yeah, you still need to configure an app.wsgi and the site in /etc/apache2/sites-available, but it doesn't take longer than 20 minutes the first time, and then you can easily replicate it (personally I have a little script written by me that does the configuration). Just cargo-cult the stuff in here ... http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/modwsg...