skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main problem is that we want to do time-based licensing, so they can only use the product for a month or whatever before buying a new license. Anything we do in the program to check that license, they'll be able to edit the program to remove.
Critical detail is that they are separating 'considered for the grand opening of the iPad App Store' from the actual submission.

To me, that says that they will test submitted apps on actual iPads, then accept the ones that actually work. The rest would then get feedback that they need to test first in order to go live.
Some more useful advice for Open Source projects and security/release management can be found in "Producing Open Source Software" from http://producingoss.com/en/publicity.html
We'll I've read plenty of posts about business guys trying to get in on startups and I've talked to a lot of other guys in that position. I believe there was a recent thread here that tried to partner people for startups and almost every entry read as "I am business guy looking for a technical partner/startup". This is my attempt to shed whatever light I may on the subject and if the post feels a little overly "Go me" it's probably because I feel pretty "Go me" :)
Three-legged races are fun.
I've been looking at a dongle that allows you to run code on it, so you'd be able to pass it an encrypted program and it would encrypt it for you (without putting the key on the host machine). That should be as secure as the dongle is.

My problem is that I've been thinking of a dongle as a secure-ish way to store a key, which still leaves the responsibility for using the key on my code.
Very inspirational. I'll be doing the same thing come April. After my contract is done at the end of this month, I'll be spending the next few months just working on my own projects. I can't wait to get started to see if I can turn them into profitable businesses. Just 12 more days to go...
And you should probably err on the safe side.
Four Ways to Mix Fonts from Hoefler and Frere Jones
I'm waiting for a good portable tablet that someone has verifiable root access to. As long as I can get root (and preferably compile a kernel), then everything else should fall into place as root access is the ultimate in customizability. I hear Android provides this, but I don't know.

If we have root access, we have control.
Meet skipfish, our automated web security scanner
Publicity and vulnerability management for FOSS projects
I have an app (nowhere near top ranking tho) and I agree with you for the most part. My first submission took 2 days and any updates have taken less than 24 hours. One took less than 6 hours for them to turn it around and get it on the app store.

My only issue with the app store now is the returns. I have had 1 return and all I got from Apple was the form letter that if you have a lot of returns it might be a quality issue. What I would like to see is at least the questionnaire the customer fills out in order for Apple to grant the return. At least this way I can know if it's some sort of serious problem or just someone who made a purchase by mistake.
Recommended reading for Recommender Systems?
I'm looking at working on a project that will involve a recommender system and was wondering if there was any reading that people here would recommend. I've done a little poking around and found quite a few papers and the equivalent of text books. Knowing that these things can vary greatly in quality and practical application I was hoping there might be a few people here that could recommend a book/paper/website or two.

Thanks

Mike
We know the N1 is not an iPhone. It is a very good phone for people who don't want iPhones, though.

Maybe people really only care about superficial looks, but then I don't know why all mobile phone makers except Apple just close shop.

I personally prefer the design of the N1, but that might be the geek in me. I get a sort of "eeew" feeling from most Apple products that is hard to explain, because it is too much design for me. Comparable maybe to seeing a prostitute in latex trousers and everything - yes, it looks good, but I still don't want it. But that is just my taste. The masses will decide, and the spare change in their pockets, too.
Does Flash CS5 for Windows Violate the iPhone Developer Agreement?
Yes but I also think that in some cultures people sing more and informally. ot just education but also general attitudes towards singing.

For me growing up the only time I would sing would be in church - the essence of drudgery.

Working and traveling in Asia - I was exposed to people singing pubicaly a lot more. In Korea it seemed pretty common in parties or general gatherings for people just to sing. And NorReBangs (karaoke) as a common destination.

This was so foreign to me as an American. It was hard for me - fun but awkward.

Traveling in Mongolia, I stopped in gers and people would stand around and sing and ask me to sing.

This doesnt make people from these countries automatially better musicians - but I think in my particular upbringing it was really uncommon for people to casually sing. 'If you were not good at it you shouldnt do it' - was the fallacy that I internalized.

I remember my wife, when we were dating, and I were walking through a bohemian area of Seoul full of street musicians, etc and she spontaneously got up in a little outdoor ampitheatre and sang a song she liked. I thought this was great but was so outside my reference...

Japan - despite its proximity to Korea - is a pretty different culture in many ways but I felt the writer was also talking about a comfort or naturalness with music which was not the result of education but culture.
I'm not so sure it's all about education. I've always thought it had a lot to do with "listening talent", that thing which people refer to when they say "He's got a good ear."

Of course, this is just my own theory based on my own, personal (and therefore anecdotal) experience. For example, to enjoy a song, I first need to like its music. If the lyrics are in a language I understand, then I need to like them too, but I'm more forgiving in that aspect. I've always thought that this is because I have a rather decent ear. Even though my voice often lacks the capacity to reproduce the music correctly, I can distinguish sounds well enough that I can reproduce at least the main melody on a keyboard.

On the other hand, I've noticed that most people who have less-than-decent "ear" tend to focus more on lyrics than on music. My theory is that if you can't distinguish well enough one melody from another, your won't be able to enjoy songs based on their music -- it's sort of like expecting a blind person to admire a painting.

I think the weakest link in my theory is the fact that I'm basing it on my "anecdata": among all the people I know, those with "not-so-good ear" are more frequent than those with "decent ear". It would be interesting to see what other people's experiences when it comes to that.
Sit down and listen to it 50 times without distraction so that you know all the changes, turns, asides, tensions, contractions, contradictions, and undulations.

In college I had a minor in electronic art. We'd sit through each other's performances and then comment on all the various artistic work that went into them.

The elephant in the room was that it was all BS. I couldn't count the number of times that someone told me "I appreciated the way you used X to emphasize Y". In truth, nothing had been farther from my mind; it just worked out that way.

So I think that a huge portion of what you're interpreting in the changes, turns, etc. are just happenstance. It's just that our minds are such incredible pattern-recognizing machines, and are so malleable, that it's trivially easy to spot some pattern and rationalize a whole lot of noise (in the information processing sense) into spurious meaning.

How else to explain someone deciding that Ursa Major looks like a bear?
Is this a real device? Or is it still just a 3D Max sketch and a Fact Sheet PDF?

One of TC commenters said he saw it on CeBit, but he did not sound nearly as excited as he should've if the specs are true.
Contacts in the Browser
I don't see why not, unless Amazon attempts to blatantly sell books in the app, instead of just linking you to the Amazon website like in the iPhone app. And even then, I doubt it.

No doubt Apple will make the whole book buying/reading process seamless, and make the interface appealing enough for people to want to buy books from them instead of from Amazon. I don't know many people who use the Kindle app on iPhone as their only Kindle, so to speak, while I do know lots of Kindle owners that use the Kindle app for when they don't have their Kindle around.

Lastly, given that Kindle books are mostly text and b&w images (lowest common denominator I suppose), I can't imagine Apple could feel threatened, as the iPad is larger, has a color display, and has a far larger potential for doing more interactive/immersive content, e.g. for education, no matter what Amazon tries to do.
It appears, from his report on the trial, that he was basically found guilty of assault for failing to immediately obey an order by a border guard to drop to the floor ... after being punched in the face. (He paused to ask "why".)

The problem here isn't the trial, or the prosecutor, or the jury: it's a law that's drawn so broadly that failing to immediately obey an order from a US border patrol guard is classified as "assault".

(If this is remotely typical of the breadth of the law, then most of us are guilty of serious criminal behaviour and should turn ourselves in. Or something.)
I used to be a huge jazz fan. I discovered it around my senior year in high school and just started eating it all up. While other cars were blaring rap music and Guns and Roses, I would be playing John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington.

So I can speak from personal perspective on how I lost interest and give my 2 cents on why it's lost popularity. It's actually pretty simple. There's just nothing new. No innovation. That's it. I enjoy the melodies when I hear them and there are appropriate times when I will put it on, but it is what it is and nothing more these days.
bah, that's annoying then - I hope Apple "fixes" it at some point.

Im quite enjoying it as an app actually - I generally dont have many apps on my iPhone (because I never use them..) but this might be a keeper :D
If you don't need a ton of information from users, then at the very least offer a Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Facebook login in addition to your own sign-up. Vimeo does this pretty well (with Facebook Connect).
Those seemingly random notes are improvisation. Depending on the arrangement and/or preferences of the individual player, yes, those notes may be based on the chord progressions... or based on a particular scale or mode ("modal jazz")... or pulled together from a catalog of memorized melodic fragments... or some combination of all of the above.

In general, players who are also proficient composers tend to be the best improvisors. Players who are only players can be good improvisors, but their improvisations tend to be more on the mediocre / less inspiring side.

Unfortunately, it sure seems to me that we've had less and less good jazz composition over the years, which might explain why more and more jazz improvisation sounds rather lousy.

On the other hand, some improvisation made by expert jazz players really does sound very strange on purpose, e.g., the "Science Fiction" recordings of Ornette Coleman. You might like it, you might not, but either way, it's pretty far out there.
Yeah, whenever jazz sounds random to me, I dislike it. I love stuff like Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk," because the tune is odd enough to be interesting, but my brain can catch it and I can sing along in my mind, whistle it later, etc.

If I listen to a whole song and have only vague impressions, no tune, then I feel like I've wasted my time.

But perhaps I'm just unsophisticated.
And all producers should probably stop naming their phones phones, because that is reminiscent of iPhone? If it is only the name that is a problem, I can live with it.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

I work through these a while ago and can attest to the validity of the above statement.
Highly unlikely that a German company will be able to muster a global mass market audience. They just don't think that big.

Apple is not going to be too worried of losing their base over something that's likely of the same quality as a windows beige box
Few points...
MHZ are (somewhat) irrelevant as a judge of actual CPU performance, supporting flash isn't really a positive thing, at least in my book, and certainly will kill the battery life unless adobe has pulled far, far better linux flash player performance out of wherever they were hiding it, and the lack of any mention of price for something that's supposed to ship sooner then the iPad makes me suspicious.
Apple begins accepting iPad app submissions today
Just got word from Apple that they will start accepting iPad apps to be a part of the iPad App Store Grand opening.
I should clarify that by "instruments of a bygone era", I really mean "acoustic instruments speaking the language of bebop, swing, etc."

While I agree that square dancing and other folk dance traditions can be fun, they can not by any means be considered "contemporary". Their appeal these days is that of nostalgia and fondness for these bygone eras.
It is true that Protocol Buffers are not optimized for low-mem systems. On the other hand, for preserving bandwidth and storage one can use lightweight compression algorithms on top of general-purpose serialization library. (This is the approach that Google ended up using, AFAIK.)

I think such approach is more flexible than making explicit assumptions on how much data is actually carried in integers.
Les Miz also has only a handful of spoken lines.
I find protobuf easier to catch bugs, because it can catch if you're missing data or trying to put the wrong type in or leaving out a required field. There is a ascii-version that is more readable than JSON, too.

That said, overall I agree with your overall sentiment, certainly do look at JSON as well. Protobuf is overkill for a lot of things, and JSON keeps things simpler.
Actually I quite like (possibly even prefer) the Android design.

My issues have always been with:

- responsiveness (even the latest Android phones aren't speedy enough for me)

- phone - in my mind the iPhone is by far the best pure phone (and text message/email/web browser). There are little innovations and usability tweaks that make it my favourite phone.

seeing a prostitute in latex trousers and everything - yes, it looks good

Sounds horrid to me :s
I can't wait until someone comes out with a tablet that has a camera on the backside, so you can do proper Augmented Reality. Imagine being able to walk around with a window into another world - now that's revolutionary.
Yeah it's tempting to go after Viacom, News Corp etc., and as wrong as I think they are, I can't help feeling all this is just a symptom of a far bigger problem at a completely different level of abstraction. Edit for clarification: I agree with you that if we have laws we should follow them, but law should reflect culture not vice versa.

I'm not sure I'm with you on the production quality video necessity. A lot of youtubes virality has been stupid cat videos. While I'm sure there are people logging on and looking for naruto, I would bet most people don't find youtube for the first time searching for Naruto.
You're exactly right: marketing something like this is hard. But writing the code is harder. Making it open source was risky, but brave. Oh, the perpetual downfall of open platforms.

You're handling this extremely well, btw. I've had my work ripped off before, and it is beyond upsetting.
Great! David Gelernter wrote almost exactly the way I was thinking. Albeit, he presented it eloquently.

The reason I specifically mentioned Google because, it is the only company that is crazy enough to do something like this without expecting any direct profit in return. They also have the engineering muscle and deep pocket to make it possible.

I always felt, throughout my years in school, how inefficient our education system is. Not only in USA, everywhere in the world (AFAIK).

Imagine how much effect this will have on third world countries (with the help of cheap computers like OLPC) with course material translated to local language? Ok maybe it won't be perfect and some problems needs to be solved, but it will be better than having little to no access to high quality courses of higher education?

Hell, if I had couple of millions lying around. I would give it a shot myself.
I still am a fan of jazz, but I agree with the sentiment. By the late 1960's or so, jazz innovation was beginning to wane in favor of copying elements of rock music, seemingly in an attempt to gain more listeners.

Some great jazz/rock fusion came out of this (e.g., Weather Report), but it was more or less an evolutionary dead end for jazz. By the 1980's, jazz started going back to the styles developed in the 1950s/1960s, and most of the jazz we hear made today is just rehashing what the masters did during that era, only not as well, and without the creative freshness.

I personally think pretty much every genre of music has hit up against this lack of creativity recently, though... I really don't hear much new music that I think is all that great.
The Miley Cyrus videos are most likely licensed as well. It's really not difficult for record companies to take this stuff down if they want to: hire an intern at $8/hr to do searches for your top 50 artists and report the videos to youtube (they are pretty damn responsive). Bam, problem solved for < $30k a year. If the intern can't find the stuff it's not going to be doing much harm.
How a tricked out Gaussian copula function brought about the financial crisis
How to Study: Taming the 1st Grade Reading Journal
I think your point is more effective with those who recognize the music you're talking about. Which most here won't.

Here is "Take 5" from "Time Out" by Dave Brubeck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwNrmYRiX_o

And "Midnight Blue" by Kenny Burrell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wAmxuHt5nw
Android has a root user, of course, but the person controlling the touch screen doesn't need to be root. So if the device manufacturer doesn't want you to control your own property, they can ensure that.

Archos does this with their Archos 5 with Android tablet. They think they are Apple and are going to one day have a movie store, so for DRM reasons, you are locked out of your own device. They also won't release any documentation on how to program the DSP, so you can't replace the horribly broken media player software they include.

So basically, Android will not save you. The company needs to not be on a power trip, and they need to care about openness. It unfortunately seems that any company that can afford to design nice hardware is unable to hire anyone with a clue about software, so my guess is that this will never happen.

It's too bad, too, because the Archos 5 is an amazingly good piece of hardware. It just has buggy software that I could be fixing instead of whining about here!
It wasn't until after I started playing Rock Band with friends that I noticed that a whole lot of lyrics in general are completely inane. (count me in as one of those guys that never listen to the lyrics)
Don't tell VW that. Or Aldi. Or...
Related link - full breakdown and critical look at so called "no touch knockouts" including vids . . .

http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/05/29/the-%E2%80%9Cbullshido%E...
Do animals commit suicide?
Just include an audit clause in the contract which allows you to audit them for licence compliance. Add a comment in the code around the check which says "If you report your employer for illegally using our software we will give you a $10,000 reward anonymously".
The LoseThos operating system was designed from scratch and supports multicore. http://www.losethos.com

It does master-slave multicore, not SMP. See the multicore flight simulator, done with multicore and not GPU. http://www.losethos.com/videos/flightsim.html
If only it was just a piece of hardware Apple are launching. Its so much more than that, its the whole experience. Comparing physical hardware specifications with a company like Apple doesn't really show you the whole picture. I am not saying it can't be done and I wish these guys every success.
That's not the part that sounds like a knock-off. Take the 'i' in iPhone or iPad as the first person pronoun and the names wePhone or wePad sound like puns, like they're actually referencing Apple's products.
Since knowledge of jury nullification is far from widespread, and any mention of it during a trial would likely lead to an immediate mistrial, I think he is correct not to begrudge the jury their verdict.
I'm actually waiting for a camera-enabled iPad. Imagine being able to Skype with friends/family while lying back on your couch. Or even docking it at the dining table, with Skype turned on, while eating dinner. (That way you'd still be able to have family dinners, even while separated by distance.)

It's unlikely that the WePad would have Skype installed, with that Android/Linux OS. Sigh.
Look, I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitious...
I see what your trying to say; and I do sympathise. Really there are two situations though (and I think youir mixing the two together and making a general statement).

Firstly parents teaching a child about their own religious views. Now I personally think that the correct way to do this is to present those views and allow the child to make a choice; but I don't think I can turn round and tell a parent instilling their views on a child that what they are doing is wrong. They are trying to teach the child things they believe to be correct and are doing so in good faith and with love. I am hopeful that our society now is modern enough to give the child their own choice later in life.

On the other hand we have people teaching religion to children generally. For example here in the UK primary schools are supposed to have so many hours "worship" each week. I find that kind of thing just sickeningly horrible (partly because I consider organised religions pretty evil (or non-benign) entities). Unfortunately it doesn't worry most parents (who may not have beliefs - but just shrug their shoulders at the "brainwashing" and say it's not having an effect). Removal of choice is something I despise.

With all that said this is not really a topic worthy of a forum like this. :)
Google releases Skipfish, an open-source web security scanner
VW the car manufacturer? An industry where innovation consists of switching the color of paint to yellow?

And Aldi's? The poor man's Walmart?
Yeah the "whole experience" of reality distortion field.
Inspiring Websites Having Red Color Scheme
Apple Starts Accepting iPad Applications
Let's hope Adobe is as interested in this device as they should be and help keeping the power consumption as low as possible.

I am a bit puzzled about the combination of Android and Air. I did not yet see any device doing both.
There's a lot of music having lyrics that seem engineered to be ignorable, making me think that the artist only intended them to be placeholders, either because they wanted the voice to be a freer instrument, or just because the genre format demanded lyrics.

Aside from the obvious case of scat-singing, examples that come quickly to mind are Frank Zappa, Presidents of the USA, and Rob Zombie. I lot of the lyrics on King Crimson's Discipline seem to almost make it explicit that the lyrics themselves are an appendix. (I recall an interview with Zombie: someone asked him what some strange lyric was supposed to mean, and he replied something like "I don't know, it's just the song").

But it would be wrong, I think, to assert that instrumentals or lyrics for the sake of the voice are somehow on a higher plane. I think that being able to produce excellent melody and harmony as well as excellent lyrics, and to integrate them well, is the highest form.