skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was about to comment on point 2, when I saw you covered it in point 5. I imagine that the resting touch problem could be solved with software, the iPhone keyboard for exams supports resting a finger on one key while you touch the next. I was surprised that it didn't work on the home screen, eg, ignore the touches from a resting hand.
The card interface used on the new Palms works pretty well for that. You can basically see it in the way MobileSafari handles tabs, which is about as close to multitasking as you can get on an i$Device.
People often don't have the upfront money to change their situation. It really doesn't matter the final cost, if you can't afford one of the options. You do what you can do.
Actually, I had not considered this. Thanks. QOS could easily be controlled on the client side, the same way Firefox or Safari apply less memory and bandwidth to webpages in unfocused tabs, while giving the page in the current tab the most love.
Mindig a legfrissebb Digi Tv Kódok Key
Are you back in Boston now? I had heard Reddit moved to SanFran; I guess I assumed you stayed there post departure.
So their OS is the equivalent of Windows 2000? Is that really as terrible as the article implies?
The scene from the life of Brian comes to mind: "You are all individuals" chorus: "We are all individuals"...
really? why?
I found K&R great ... until I got to the arrays and pointers chapter. It wasn't my inability to get the concept, I think, the Lions' Commentary n UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code which I tried next did the trick.

And nowadays I too keep Harbison and Steele handy, I lost track of my copy of K&R sometime in the '80s.
What I find striking is how intuitive it all seems. She just "knows" how to use the device. It is very interesting from a user interface and HID perspective.
>Having the money available also makes things possible that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. When you see an opportunity to make a difference, having $5m in the bank allows you to make things happen that would be simply impossible otherwise.

Why, yes. In particular, having $5M enables one to donate $5M, which is what he did.
Yes. Coming from android, the ipad app-switching interface feels cumbersome.
Already tried in UK. Didn't work, just more addicts.
"So easy a child can do it?"

But is it so easy a caveman can do it?
Source?

WSJ disagrees:

"Marijuana accounts for anywhere between 50% to 65% of Mexican cartel revenues, say Mexican and U.S. officials."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870425460457461...
It's called minimize.
safer funding and saner work hours != startup.

do you want to work for a startup, or pretend you're working for a startup?
As a father of a 1.5 year-old who loves the iPhone, this looks very familiar. But toddlers pick up on all kinds of new things incredibly fast, so I'm not sure this tells us much about the learnability of the iPad for computing novices of any other age group.

It seems easier than the typical desktop/laptop, but there are many subtle interactions that have to be learned and practiced to use the iPad. I would like to see how well a 60+ year-old without prior computing experience interacts with it.
My question is what happens to people who have already been jailed for possession or possession with intent to distribute and the like? Do they just get set free? Would there be lawsuits if so? It's a tough situation.
or make profits through sales of movie tickets by giving a better theater experience (air conditioning vs. no air conditioning) Some of the movies are already doing that with IMAX and 3d technology.
And the biased editorializing here suggests their "verification" and dissemination will be biased too.
Please... no one "pushes" drugs, it's a completely demand driven market. With illegal drugs demand ALWAYS outstrips supply and the consumers find and "pull" the dealers, not the other way around.
Well, since much of the US was built on cheap energy prices, and no alternative seems to be able to roll out in the next 5 years, all high energy prices will do is cause people to give up other things. Many cities and rural areas have no effective alternatives. Heck, I once consulted at a place in Minneapolis, MN that had no bus stop for miles.
Former iBook G3/G4 owner? :)

Remember, they've been called MacBooks 3+ years now.
They're different books for somewhat different purposes. Harbison and Steele was written because Tartan Labs (CMU (compiler gods) spinoff) needed a strict definition of the language suitable to use for implementing it. And that's what Steele has done with all his language refs (well, I haven't looked at the Fortress one yet).

K&R ... I don't know. To really judge it, I'd want to e.g. look at the Algol 60 spec, and some inbetween.

Anyway, I'm not sure it's a "cult" book, but I do agree it's overrated (see my other comment; at the time I found the Lions' Commentary to be the better tutorial, but it had that tiny problem of being samizdat).
For people interested in interface design paired with kids new to UI's. The following link points to research performed in India, where computers were dropped in slums for children to use. They monitored their progress in understanding the interface, and in discovering the web. http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/kids.html#04
"no sillier than being a Firefly fan, or a Red Sox fan, or a Beatles fan."

Have you met these kinds of people? I would consider those as evidence of cultishness right there :).
Atlantic Media Takes a Stand on Intern Pay.
I realize we're stretching the analogy thin, but maracas, bongos, and tambourines can all be had for $3-$20 each.
Interesting, I didn't know about the <NSFW> element.
As many people have said, marijuana is only a gateway drug in the sense that you have to buy it from a drug dealer.
The glib answer is this: You have a problem. You solve it with heuristics. Now you have two problems.

If I had to guess why Apple designed it this way? Here goes: Apple can't determine what a resting hand is as an abstraction, because sometimes a resting hand should do something (e.g. the pinch gesture; one static touch + one moving finger). So app developers would each have to implement their own heuristics to decide what's "probably" an accidental touch and what's "probably" a deliberate (but sloppy) tap. Result: you won't be able to predict anymore how the iPad will behave. That's far worse than having a predictable but imperfect system.
The grandmother test is a few gazillion times harder to pass. Beat that one, and you conquer the world!
Good cop, Bad cop.
DragonFly BSD swapcache: using SSD as filesystem cache
It would probably have the same effect as giving the iPad to a 2.5 year old with no iPhone experience. The movie basically shows that the big screen works almost the same as the small screen and even kids don't get confused. It tells absolutely nothing about iPad itself imho.

So yeah - try giving a "laptop with Windows"-savvy 2.5 year old a netbook with windows...
"UI design & graphic design - it’s not just about pretty pictures"

Correct. Clear, readable text plays an important part as well.
Just do it. Like Seth says, there's no Idea Approval Board. Where you run into trouble is when you fall in love with your solution to the exclusion of seeing the actual problem.

I once had a boss/mentor who believed that teachers should have a nation-wide lesson plan repository. He lamented that there was no way to get teachers to use even the most "simple" version control system (e.g. TortoiseSVN). I realize you're doing more than lesson plans, but you may want to consider teachers as a good first market.

That brings me to my next point: make sure you find out who your market is _soon_. This advice is old-hat for HN folks but its worth repeating:

1) Read up on mvp [1]. Create a "smoke test" to see if you're even in the right universe. We could psyche you up and tell you this the best idea ever, but until you verify that with The Internet you don't really learn anything

2) Read Steve Blank's book [2]. Get out of your bubble of encouraging friends and contacts and, say, find some teachers and ask them if they would _pay_ for that sort of service. (Find people who have a problem, know they have a problem, have hacked together a solution, and who are willing to _pay_ for a better solution.)

It's these visionary customers who are really the only ones who can answer this question for you.

[1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...

[2] http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch
How to Build an SQL Storage Adapter for RDF Data with Ruby
http://xkcd.com/125/ covers it nicely.
"git add -p" is one of my favorite things.

Do you know if anyone's written some porcelain that combines add -p with commit? Maybe you're adding annotations to the hunks as you 'y' them, which then gets inlined into COMMIT_EDITMSG?
Good point. But also consider the same thing can happen on the other extreme.

For example say that internet service provider gains a monopoly through its cheap service. Now it can unfairly suppress new search engines by only allowing Bing.

The thing about the net neutrality law would be that it is equally applied across the board. As long as it doesn't unfairly benefit a specific group, it's fair. And it benefits people in general because it prevents companies from leveraging power from short term tactics which have long term negative repercussions on society.
Backward Steps by the WSJ and the NYT on the iPad
Actually writing a network spider and page ranking mechanism and chasing after an organisation in real life to keep contact details up to date don't have that much in common... It would work the same as in any other company - i.e. would require time and money.
Perhaps I'll rephrase: they use the accounting voodoo as an excuse to buy stuff they have no business acquiring, as their MBA textbooks told them about capex and operational leverage.
Adding new components to Padrino
And it seems like the legal repercussions of DoSing the phone-home server would also be minimal. For someone in the US or EU, I mean.
I have often used my finger trying to scroll on a GPS screen, only realizing it doesn't work a few seconds into it.
As opposed to its ugly user interface, Git’s underlying infrastructure is very solid and extremely well designed. On top of that, it’s actually not that hard to understand, and once you do, a whole new world will open up.

This is the crux of why I love git and why I think so many people hate it. I love it because at the end of the day what it does under the hood is quite simple and intuitive, as opposed to systems like svn or cvs which even after using for ten times as long still were extremely opaque to me. It's a shame a lot of people can't make it past the interface.
It's a rehash of other established ideas:
Get a bunch of people to do it, call yourself a college. Use the credentials of your teaching staff to raise the rates you charge 'students', you have a university.

Who's to say who is the 'expert'? As they say, those that can't do, teach.

You can expect a ton of poorly created curriculum, with the assumption that the expert _might_ fix them at a later date, but without ownership, why bother? And without the front payment, why make the effort?
dlsspy:

It depends. I make complex merges/branches on a regular basis and I find myself using `commit -a` pretty often, but I am also diligently branching out whenever I start working on something different, so I'm often confident that all the files that are both tracked and modified are the ones I want to commit.

blasedl:

I think that `git add -p` (committing certain changes in a file but not others) is a pretty advanced feature. I can see how it can be a life saver for experienced users, but I recommend creating two branches with each 100% of your changes rather than using just one branch that contains 60% and 40% of your changes.

One switch that I find very useful is `git add -i`, which you should use whenever you want to add 2 files but you have 20 untracked ones in your working directory.
I agree; it really depends on the individual situation. Most of the hourly folks I know who are commuting long distances are in the 30-45 dollar/hour range. Sometimes you have flexible hours, sometimes not. Other times you can freelance. Other times, those extra hours can save you money on childcare, parking, cooking, housecare... there are many factors. I chose $20 as a reasonable example that fits some real-world people.
:) At 2 I've been told that I could find out the Print-Shop-Pro disk, put it in the Apple Mac Plus and do my own drawings. I'd then save my work and wait for mummy/daddy to wake up so I could print - I wasn't able to line up the paper properly in the printer.

Moral of the Story: Kids are smarter than you think. (And they don' have a phobia of technology so they are willing to try anything)
The more "higher level" thought processes required just to operate the basics of your device (e.g., basic navigation, app launching, scrolling, etc) the more mental effort (and thus, frustration and cognitive load) it takes from the user.

As an extension to this, the less brain power you have to devote to basic, fundamental interactions with the machine, the more bandwidth you have to dedicate towards other things (e.g., if the calculator is hard to use, you're spending more effort wrangling the calculator instead of solving math problems).
The average person does not care at all about framing people's stuff. Look at all the URL shortners on Twitter. There's a good number of "normal" people using Twitter and they don't seem to care.
Each USB device has a set of descriptors to describe itself and its supported capabilties. The amount of current required by a device (from the cable) is provided in the configuration descriptor. For example, a device could have two configurations that are exactly the same, only differing by the amount of currented needed from the cable. Host software can determine if the port to which a device is connected can provide 500 ma, and if so, select that configuration which instructs that device that it may draw that amount of current.
I like the idea. I've often thought about this within more narrow verticals (e.g. programming).

I like to learn using iTunes U, but it would be nice to have those video lectures included in a broader curriculum recommendation from somebody whose credentials I trust.

<Off-topic rant for your consideration>: Personally, it would be nice to force me into a certain timeline. Perhaps using some form of calendar style metaphor where I can check things off as I complete them and it lets me know if I'm getting behind (or even how I'm doing compared to the average). Maybe it's just me, but sometimes it is nice to have some enforced discipline when learning. Further to this idea, imagine if an author could create a curriculum and then constrain it to what they considered an optimal timeline; that way a group of learners could be working through the curriculum simultaneously - asking questions in the forum about "this week's task" etc. Or meeting up with other local learners. Then again if you had enough learners participating, there would always be someone at the same stage in the material as you anyway. Maybe I just miss my undergrad years :(

Anyway, I really like the idea; would love to know how you will recruit curriculum authors with the necessary credibility.
PyPy 1.2 Released
Even if all Rose does is re-energize his core audience and get people talking about Digg again...that'd be pretty terrific.
I'm not sure that always applies. I find myself much more productive on an RPN calculator, once I learned to use it, than on standard calculators, even though the learning curve was higher. I also find that with window managers, tiling WMs were harder to learn, but are a lot better now that I know how to use them.
IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days? - ESR
Being a sysadmin (who did a lot of gem installs on production for the devs) rather than a Ruby guy, I didn't know this was a tip. I always figured everyone wanted this stuff, and I was the odd one out. Besides, no one should be reading rdoc on the production machines anyway.
Make damned sure the "test automation position" is really a software development position, realize that the field in general doesn't get any respect, and be prepared to explain on your resume etc. how this wasn't really a testing per se position. Especially if you discover you don't like it and want to get back to software development.

(OK, yeah, I've been burned badly here, Lucent in 2001.)

As for deciding in general, can you convince them it's not a bad idea? Best is the enemy of good enough ... except for the longer term a true software development position where you'll be doing cutting edge stuff should leave you in a better position for the future. And you have already gone through the startup failure experience, just without the minor baggage of a family and a house....

Good luck.
Founder of Viralogy, Yu-kai Chou, on driving traffic fr social media and more
Might want to check out the date when that was put up...
This article is an example of research done in a very surface manner, and where pre-judgments were decided on and the facts bent to meet the judgement.

They control piracy by keeping costs low and pricing at a level that makes it uneconomical to pirate. That's it.
A couple of weeks ago everyone in the administration of the school my mom works at got Android phones.

Only about 2-3 people understood anything the phone had to offer of about a dozen people. They recently had to take the entire administration through a full-day course on how to use the phone.

Do you think this 2 year old could understand the android platform as easily as she does iPhone OS?
There is also a good book of the same name:

http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Property-P523.as...

...as well as the more in-depth, similarly-titled and themed Against Intellectual Monopoly:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

Those inclined to opt out of the copyright game, put your code where your mouth is and release your next software project using this:

http://unlicense.org/
If you're addicted to crack, getting rid of your crack supply might be a good way to help break the addiction.

You may think money and crack are completely different, but you would be wrong.
It certainly appears that Congress needs to address the definition of what internet traffic actually is for regulatory purposes, if only to spare business and the public the expense of arguments over how that traffic is regulated. The FCC variously invoked its existing authority to regulate broadcast, telephony and the provision of infrastructural access to ISPs, but since none of these things are properly definitive of IP packets the existing authority isn't applicable, and so they had no right to order Comcast to submit its load-balancing methodology to the FCC for approval.

Put another way, it seems as if the FCC has the authority to regulate the creation of infrastructure but not the manner in which it is operated, and the origination and transmission of data over that infrastructure are not protected from interference by network operators. It's as if anyone is entitled to set up a railway terminal and have access to the track network, but no customers of a given terminal are entitled to any assurances about how fast their shipping containers will be delivered, if at all.

All the existing regulation seems to be built on the premise the communication takes place over a limited swathe of electromagnetic spectrum or physical wires, with fixed geographic points of signal origination or relay as a unifying characteristic. The fundamentally diffuse and ephemeral nature of data itself (which might be collated from multiple different sources over temporary ad-hoc networks that are neither physical nor persistent) isn't explicitly treated by any existing regulation that I know about. For example, if HN is run on a virtualized server spread across multiple slices running on computers in a variety of data centers, it becomes hard, or perhaps even meaningless, to talk about 'where' this discussion is taking place - it may not exist in any single physical location.

The sheer abstraction involved might be a problem for Congress (as exemplified by former Senator Ted Stevens' flailing attempts to explain the internet as a 'series of tubes'). Then again, we manage OK with a shared agreement about the contents of the US Constitution, without the necessity of running off to the National Archives every time wish to refer to it, and are able to exchange money in the economy without needing to correlate every transaction against the gold stored in fort Knox. I hope this ambiguity will be resolved by Congress rather than by being appealed up to the Supreme Court.
Anyone else think this could have very well been a father teaching his child how to use current caveman technology? Like a bow and arrow.

"It doesn't work when you hold your thumb there. Good. Now pull the arrow back and release."
Cleveland Clinic chief on the business of health
Yes, it is absolutely possible to be intelligent and inarticulate simultaneously--as any video of Richard Feynman on YouTube can attest.

Articulate people tend to be well-read. In fact, being well-read is often sufficient to give one the appearance of being articulate, as it enables you to recognize literary allusions and references made by others and empowers you to make your own. Being well-read also gives you a better appreciation for language as a tool and ideas on how best to wield it. You need to start reading much more, particularly the Great Books of centuries past. Yes, it will be difficult and slow-going at first, but as your vocabulary and literary knowledge grows, it will get easier and more enjoyable.
I really like the calculator example. Imagine a buttonless calculator that just took dictation in plain english and gave the result for really complex equations.
thing is we tend to complicate things unnecessarily when things are simplified down to an instinctual intuitive process the experience becomes more enjoyable.
I read the book reviewed in the article "The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050." It's a horrible, pollyanna-ish book. It simply hand-waves away every possible problem. It talks about how fantastic the suburbs are and ignores how dependent they are on cheap oil for transportation. It literally just says that oil dependence isn't an issue and everything will be SO AWESOME!1!

A more facile book could not be written.
I'm a sucker for good slogans...
Earlier discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243815
You make good points. But I think the difference is that juries have an absolute duty to try to be just. I think a lawyer is extremely unlikely to loose a case by trying to ask for too much money. On the other hand, a job candidate can loose the entire offer.

If someone asks for a few grand more than what I was thinking, I think we can work something out and start negotiating. If someone asks for more than twice what I was thinking I may just keep looking.
The growth from the first edition (skinnier than K&R as I recall) to the third astonished me.
totally thinking about this while I was watching
I have a 2 year old boy and he loves the iPad. There's an app called Doodle Buddy he really likes.
18 iPads in one day: Australia’s April iPad pilgrimage
I think it depends on how aggressive your aggressive offer is. It seems if you make a very aggressive number, you definitely want to signal strongly that you are willing to come down so they don't just move on to someone who starts with a lower number. And according to the article making that first offer very aggressive indeed seems to be taking advantage of the anchoring effect.
Convicted film pirate dies one month after completing sentence
I agree that forcing content to be framed with the 'diggbar' is annoying/wrong/bad/etc, but I kind of like it as an optional feature. It can be very handy when you open a bunch of links from the main page at once, and then forget what the headline was or want to check out the comments quickly.