skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Previous results from this question:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861970

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919468
I read, or at least scan, the comments first to see if the article might be worth the trouble.
How Washington Abetted the Bank Job
You don't pay a toll at inter-state crossings if you're a private vehicle. What I think you might have experienced are just the ridiculous number of toll booths setup on highways to collect fees for newly constructed sections of the highways. These road project contracts are handed over to external construction companies and they recover the costs by collecting toll for the next 10-15 years. A 5 hour journey from Bangalore -> Chennai includes 6-7 stops at toll booths each adding 5-10 mins to the journey depending on whether the cars before you have the exact change or not and how lazy the toll booth operator is.
Ah yes, the old discussion poisoning fallacy of "drawing a straw man and implying the other party are hypocrites for not following/implementing/adhering to the straw man".

And somewhat less abstract:
if someone argues in favor of a smaller government, they are not automatically anarchists that think there shouldn't be a government at all. Painting a world without a military and challenging them to go live in that world is not a proper counterargument.
> "Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file."

He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
anyone have one for google reader??
"If history has taught us anything then that open always wins."

The web and unix-like OS's are the only two examples I can think of off the top of my head where open platforms have done well. Windows was closed, and its much more popular for consumer desktop apps and game development. Video game consoles are all closed and there are no open alternatives I'm aware of.

I'm not saying I don't think open might win in the long run, but I don't think I would agree that history has taught us that it always wins. Not yet anyway.
I don't know what world you live in, but in mine, Apple is crushing Google, so I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of users don't care about the "progress" Google is making either.
What about all of the energy savings that computers bring us, Greenpeace?

Advocating that computers should use less energy does not equal advocating that one should not use computers. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that computers that use less energy are somehow less useful for coming up with other ways to save energy. Your argument is completely besides the point. How a dozen people can miss that and upvote you is beyond me and has probably more to do with a shared antipathy towards Greenpeace.
In fact, the iPhone/iPad is vastly more open than any game console: you can develop commercial applications for it on an almost level playing field with the largest title producers, and market your products on the same shelf as they do, at a tiny cost. What do pro dev kits for the X360 cost again?
Good examples of how to give a close reading to the references in a popular book supposedly about new scientific findings.
Wonder if there are many people like me here, I mainly read non fiction, stuff about business, the world and statups and programming ect, a lot of the stuff featured on here but in longer format.

I read the occasional fiction but because of my limited reading time and my reading speed not a lot, I can certainly appreciate well written text and love a good story but I find myself having zero interest in reading a lot of the classics of literature.
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If there is no notice you can assume it is copyrighted. Because unless explicitly stated otherwise, it is.
You know what.. I am supposedly skilled sysadmin, middleware admin and a DBA, so let's assume I know what I mean. And I dare to say that for many cases many tasks usually attributed to "us" can be automatized (and who's writing such layer? of course an admin, not a programmer; a casual programmer doesn't have mindset needed).

I earn money on the large projects (telco industry mostly) where people like us are absolutely needed and without us the things would turn into chaos & hell. Still you don't need an admin to build an infractructure for a small app when you have service providers like Heroku. Then admin can be given another work to do (esp. coding, as most of admins make excellent coders, not necessarily vice-versa).

You may think these are quite strong opinions, inconvenient for some people maybe, but I live in the industry for 15 years or so and that's what I see all around.
1.You won't typically get "empty packets" but there can be mismatch between what you ordered and what you get. E-commerce sites(rediff, indiatimes) in India are usually terrible. But it is changing. Sites like flipkart provide excellent service.

2. Most payment services are also terrible (ICICI, EBS).They even have a captcha in the payment page!. Some like Citibank
are nice though
There is zero chance Food, Inc. is going to change anything. Agree with it or not (and I'm very sympathetic), it is neither cost- nor time- effective to eat in the way that Food Inc. suggests. Normal people do not have access to a supply chain that provides cost-effective and palatable protein from local, "responsible" producers. For a lot of families, the 6 pack of Tyson chicken breasts is the fancy, careful dinner.
Yes, quite a few items this past year or so. No issues with any so far. Most items have been books, ps3 games or supplements in the 500 to 3k range, so nothing past 5k yet. Not too sure about insurance, but companies like DHL/BlueDart should have something I guess.

Shipping charges have ranged from free to Rs 50/ Rs 100 (for local items) to Rs 500/ Rs 750 (for US shipments). Shipment times range from a couple of days to about a month depending on if you're paying anything for it.
How will you pick the 100 corrupt bureaucrats? By lottery or by targeting your political enemies? Would you really hang your nephew's corrupt best friend, or would you target the guy most likely to be challenge to your party in the next local election (despite his crimes being relatively minor)? The end result wouldn't be a cut down in corruption, it would just make the corrupt more careful about covering their backs.
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you mean, you're going to try the bribe notes in india?
Closed is never better. I guess it's like saying "If I eat _all_ my meals at McDonalds, the world would be oh so wonderfully predictable and consistent"
I find it ironic, that closed system iPad and iPhone advocates are propounding the same arguments that Microsoft advocates have used defending closed source programs and desktop computing. :)

Closed vs Open is a techno-religious argument. There are intellectual merits to both sides of the argument, but ultimately people choose what aligns with their ideals and beliefs.
Looks fine to me, I can read the text and everything. I'm not a designer, though, so no doubt you'll have to hide the text somehow in order for it to be satisfactory.
Haha, now I have absolutely no idea how to interpret your story.
> But are the degrees themselves necessary? I'm not sure.

Good point, probably no more than a CS degree is necessary for somebody to be a good developer. If somebody likes businessy kinds of things as their hobby, in the way a developer codes for fun, than they could probably do a good job just the same.

I think the MBA has the same effect as a CS degree, it formalizes and focuses the person on what they should know as a foundation to what they practically need to learn.
The top MBA programs nurture extreme arrogance in a way that is really bad for the country. They create a set of "high priests" that often believe themselves superior to the rest of us. This is why, for example, entrepreneurs pay legal fees in VC deals; because the "business people" are just so great that you should pay them for existing.

We need people who are skilled in business, but what we don't need is an echo chamber that encourages many of them to become arrogant, unethical, short-sighted fucks.
Btw I can attest to the fact about having to bribe indirectly in order to get a driving license (learner's permit actually).

I go to the DMV/RTO office and submit my application and the guy just throws away my application form stating I don't have a valid address proof. I showed him my rental contract. I showed him a mobile phone bill, bank statement proof, etc but none of those were acceptable to him.

So I go downstairs and find a driving instructor and pay his fees. This time he files a separate application just 30 mins after my application gets rejected and this time the guy doesn't even bother reading anything in the application. He just signs it and it's all taken care of. Basically the driving school guy pays the DMV officers a commission for every application that they approve.
Yeah, that's poor wording.

The techie in me was aghast at the idea of Apple shipping iPhones with a full Unixy kernel but with no swap (and minimal background processing -- and for that matter, I wondered why its Objective-C runtime didn't support garbage collection) until I actually laid hands on one and realized how fluid things can be when they don't stutter and stop randomly while swapping in parts of the foreground program.

Such jerkiness gives a feel of "computeriness" to the user when running desktop OSes, breaking the feeling of fluid interactivity that one gets with a "real-world" object. It also causes a lot of user anxiety and even errors: it becomes a normal part of the experience to click on an item and then have a second or two of wondering whether the app "heard" you or not. Often followed by more clicks, which end up being misinterpreted when the app finally gets to run again, and now the user's mental model is completely out of sync with the system's state.

In the physical world, you never flick a real switch on a panel and then it actually moves a second or two later!
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The iPhone sold 25.4 million units last year (15% of the market share). There were 7.7 million Android units (8% of the market share) sold. As the first iPhone came out 1.25 years before the first Android phone, this is by no means a crushing. Android has only recently been advertised, most of that by Verizon (99% of my customers who ask about android ask about Droid, not Android).

The fact you can get android phones for free/cheap and on almost every carrier is likely enough to grant them a larger eventual marketshare than iPhoneOS. There are only so many AT&T subscribers (or people willing to be AT&T subscribers after that wiretapping thing and their poor performance in cities).

You can like the iPhone better (and I do) and still admit "Oh hey, Android phones are getting sold a lot these days".

Source: http://technorati.com/technology/android/article/nearly-8-mi...
Unfortunately it doesn't automatically fetch news items from the following pages. Anyway, it's an improvement.
Ask HN: Anyone use Quattro?
I've used admob for awhile and signed up for adwhirl yesterday. Then I signed up for Quattro.

Every time I go to the Quattro analytics to see any reporting of ANYTHING, it says "under construction".

Does anyone else see this? Is it temporary? Has it been like this for awhile?

Until I know, I've switched admob to 100% of my allocation.

Thanks.

Oh, and check out my app: "Dirty Fortunes" on the android market :-D
And in practice, its still wrong. The 3rd party repos have an app called Backgrounding that does precisely that... And no sdlowdown on most apps.
I think you missed the point.

Yes, the iPad is not a desktop, and it's not expected to do the same things. What the post is positing is that Apple may release a laptop similarly locked down, and if they did, would it be an appliance like an iPod or DVD player?
Rediff and Indiatimes are the swamplands of online stores. Hesitant to even provide them my email-id leave alone banking details.

Not sure what issues you have with ICICI. I find them to be excellent. Not seen any captchas on their site. I think their number-grid security system is a decent one but would be happier with an SMS passcode system.
Exactly. I think after the last 20 years of Microsoft utter-domination, we're used to the idea that there will be one and only one winner and that it will control everything to the marginalization of everything else. On these devices that are primarily used to connect to Internet services (for consumption and creation), I don't see that as nearly so big of a concern.
Swapping has been demonstrated to be seriously detrimental to the life expectancy of solid state drives.
Bad example, you can get on the XBox360 marketplace for $99 dollars these days.

The iphone was vastly more open than almost any phone before it was. Just android is completely open.
imagine being able to walk down the street and not see anything you don't like

i think i'd be bumping into a few things :-)
This was reported before, albeit from a different site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1229821
Nice to know that Greasemonkey scripts like this work as a Google Chrome Extension.
I'm not sure what you mean by "crushing". As far as I know the battle has only begun a few months ago, and obviously apple-marketshare is dwarfing android marketshare today - android is the newcomer.

However, I think the simple problem that apple will be facing soon is that android undercuts them. You can buy android handsets in all price-ranges, whereas apple will probably want to keep the iPhone a premium item.

In consequence that means daddy is more likely to buy his daughter a $99 android for her first handset than a $499 iphone. And when that handset breaks she will be familiar with android, thus might tend to look at the higher range androids before the iPhone.

That's how the userbase is building already. And as we know, userbase means developer interest, developer interest means apps, apps mean improved experience. Improved experience eventually means trouble for the iPhone's unique selling point ("best expirience money can buy").
Maybe Indian Customs has gotten better and is not acting petty but try importing USD $500k worth of equipment/machinery from Germany and then see how many ways Customs figures out to hold the goods and cause unnecessary delays and somehow everything magically works when you fly to their office in Kochi and do what's necessary to please them :)
Does this in any way explain the omission of multi-touch from the Apple v. HTC lawsuit?
This guy is just wrong: Apple OS has turned off multitasking for 3rd party apps to maintain battery life.

It fully supports it. This is a control situation, where Apple has decided "We want our devices to have good battery life more than we want to allow multitasking".
Start by reading books by people who write things your are interested in and are also well read, Oliver Sacks and Haruki Murakami work for me for example. While reading keep a list of the authors, books and music they mention, then read and listen to them. Iterate.
I've done a bit of work with tries and hash functions and found that in-memory tries are almost universally faster than in-memory hashes, no matter how good the hash function is.

Do you have any insight on why this would be? It's not very intuitive to me.

A hash-table with low load has relatively small hash buckets and so touches fairly little memory, and string keys are fairly local, so I would have expected memory costs to dominate. Insertion and deletion from a hash table should require fewer allocations than insertion and deletion from a trie.
Hacker News Article: Why this should have been called "iPhone rich client implementations have better UX characteristics than web apps on the same web browser". It says nothing about openness or closed other than "other video games are closed platforms too".
Russian (another Indo-European language) and Latin (the classical Indo-European language in the Romance branch of the language family) both do just fine without articles.
It’s only one third at the moment, so no big deal :)
But the price part isn't relevant- iPhone is $99, the only advantage Android has right now is being on more carriers in the United States. All signs point to Verizon being up to bat in July, nixing that single advantage.

I'm not sure that open matters as much on a phone- the iPhone, as a 'kind of open' marketplace, is able to filter for quality and provide a more consistent interface for getting applications. Browsing the Android Market just isn't a good experience.

Open usually wins because better applications result- so far, that hasn't come even close to happening. The Android UI elements ensure nasty looking out of the box products without major tweaking, and the Mac designer culture has lead to beautiful interfaces for iPhone that aren't available anywhere else.

History's useful as a guide, but sometimes things happen that break the cycle- it's my belief that that is the case with iPhone OS.
The funny thing is, charging for content does work, if the content is known to be good. My favourite examples (ie, ones I subscribe to) are The Economist and Crikey magazine, in Australia. Both are best-in-class news services that actually do real investigative reporting and deliver information that people widely consider worth paying for. They both focus on quality, not quantity. Or niche services - I subscribe to WestEast magazine just for its fantastic quarterly survey of fashion and design trends. I consider all the above a bargain, for what I get!

Paying for generalist press-release AP-cut-and-pasting junk like the WSJ, though? Give me a break. I see no reason for most of the generalist news services to exist at all. I am not sure why we require all these different "brands" to republish the same damn AP story 20,000 times.
I don't understand what the issue with the wsj iPad app is - I'm a web subscriber, got the ipad app for free, and automatically had acess to all the ipad content at no additional cost. Of all the content providers on the iPad store, @$1.99/week, or $103/year, it was a no brainer. NYT is the one that doesn't get it -- they increased my subscription to $240/year, but provide all their content for FREE (unlike the wsj) on the web. And to add insult to injury, the nyt reader is actually only a subset of the web version. They don't include the figures and diagrams on the app version - and have no plans to do so last time I contacted them.

So, wsj gets me as an app/web subscriber, and I read the nyt (for free) on the web.
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That's great. Maybe the question of hiring a tech guy versus hiring a business guy does not fall in favor of one side all the time, but is rather about limiting factors. A tech company that is only business guys may find its first technical hire goes an incredibly long way, just as your counterexample found the hire with an MBA produced great results.
If that's a genuine incident you're talking about, you could try contacting Shashi Tharoor (the local MP, who's on Twitter and seems very accessible) to see what can be done for the future.
Nothing's going to change if you don't atleast try to fix them.
iPhone/Android developer here

>Closed systems like the iPhone allow for programs perfectly customized for the hardware

The closed nature of the platform doesn't help this at all. The fact there are only 5 iPhoneOS platforms, 4 of which are virtually spec identical (iPhone 2g, iPhone 3g, iPhone 3gs, iPodTouch[most different]), and now the iPad makes it easier to use fixed width layouts and screen mappings. The hardware variation between the handsets is only noticeable, not an impediment. However the fact all of them can run the latest iPhoneOS release means the platform is much more stable. The lack of fragmentation is what makes iPhone OS so powerful. If google makes it so all future phones have sufficent specs to handle all upgrades, then streamlines the upgrade process, then we're likely to see more inroads in android.

Android's biggest weakness is that each phone is on a different OS version (and there are vast differences between these versions). Some of the phones (notably the G1) aren't ever going to be upgradeable to the current latest version (as said by engineers) due to the small onboard memory. The capabilities of these different OSes are very large. It would be the difference between running iPhoneOS2.0 vs iPhone OS3.2 (the new one that's on the iPad).
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Is it "because women talk too much"?

No, I've not read the link yet.
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The idea of a "canon" is in reality a valuable one in that it seeks to identify quality expressions of the human mind in literature, history, and philosophy as expressed in different times and places throughout history.

The core idea is really a by-product of the scientific age in which people came to believe that human knowledge can arrive at various forms of objective truth that are of lasting value and not merely of ephemeral appeal to a particular culture and for a particular time. It has come under severe assault in our post-modern era by those who claim that all such expressions of what is ultimately supposed to be true or good for everyone are in reality mere pretexts by which particular groups gain and keep power over others. In other words, a work of supposed lasting value is nothing more than something that is held out to be such by those who stand to gain from propagating the values it reflects.

This is far too jaded a view for my tastes and, unless we are to give up on the idea of human betterment by learning from the works of those who preceded us, the idea of a canon as a basis for self-improvement remains strong with me. By reading widely and variously across a spectrum of great minds, you will become much richer in knowledge and in your means of expression.

Harold Bloom is probably the best-known modern proponent of a Western canon and his list is large and varied, as chronicled here: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html.

A pretty good overview of "great books" lists (Western and Eastern) also appears here: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtintro.html.
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In an interview posted here not so long ago, Jason Fried said he never reads fiction. And something about the way he said it - I can't remember the exact wording - scandalized some folks (here and on the tubes). The reason I mention it now is that many people on the HN thread agreed with him and you that they didn't read much non-fiction. So I suspect there are a lot of people like you here.

I tend to go in waves. Once upon a time, I was a Comparative Literature major, then a Classics graduate student. I read novels and scholarship about novels and then ancient philosophy and scholarship about ancient philosophy pretty much only. My days had only so many free hours. About five/six years ago, I became interested in programming, learned a first language, and now I devote most of my free reading time to programming books or books about programming. (With some breaks for this or that novel...)

The big constant for me is reading. In my experience, it's not so much a question of what you read but if you read. Readers read - a lot - even if their tastes vary over time. I remember literally running my middle school library out of books in five or six categories. The librarian would laugh and point me in a different direction when I finished a type of book. That part has never changed.
I'm (almost done) writing a blog post about this.

Concise summary: I used to think the same way but now I don't. Fiction allows you to experience situations that test your character by comparing your theoretical actions with that of the fictional characters. It's not only passive entertainment, but it's very active process of introspection.