skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Often when I read something from a file or socket, prior to parsing, it's called data. Same goes for the information to be inserted into a template, or intermediate structures when transforming datasets or documents without knowing their type.

Data is the variable name you use when you don't know, or can't specify, what you're dealing with.
> Usability is a political decision that not everyone agrees with because to be usable is not to make everything possible.

Unfortunately true but I do think there's a happy medium. If Apple just gave some means of installing apps without using the App Store, I'd be happy. Jailbreaking doesn't count, because that voids the warrantee.

Granted those who install "outside apps" would have to deal with malware, crapware, etc. So Apple should disincentives the behavior by making the process somewhat convoluted (sort of like how you enable developer tools on Safari). But it would keep geeks like me content.
> Has someone checked if they are included in Opera and Chrome as well?

My copy of Chrome doesn't seem to have it.

As always, YMMV.
I believe the famous paper he is speaking of in relation to asking for more and getting more is:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/21451/abstract
This article reads like a troll (either that or it's meant to be satirical). It feels like the author is drawing at straws to try to pull as many "reasons" as possible.

Why do I think it's a troll?

2. iPad will not save the news industry, only hasten its demise. -- There are those that would argue this is a good thing. The news industry can adapt to the way consumers want the content or they can fight it every step of the way like the music industry .

3. First-generation Apple products are for suckers. -- I don't really need to explain this one, it's blatantly there to illicit a certain response.

4. Gadget blog writers are mostly useless. -- Same as the last one.

7. iPad is nothing new. -- Grasping at straws here, the article linked is to a device that's nothing like Apple's iPad.

22. iPad is very fragile. -- Taking a baseball bat to a device and dropping it from a 5-6 ft height and then calling it "very fragile" because of it?

Just a few of them that stood out to me.
Is there an app for that yet? With just a little bit of OCR, you should be able to process quite a few license plates with a smartphone with a camera.
Glad to see other people find this useful. If you have any suggestions for good tools I'm missing please let me know.
All I can say is that I feel sorry for you in the US.
In Norway, I get 16MBit DSL at my cottage (yes, half an hours walk from the nearest dirt road). We don't even have any net neutrality laws, and there are only two nationwide DSL providers.
User trust trumps security blacklists
good call - I'll add that :)
On a side note, it also seems inexpensive because it's $499 and not $500! Psychological pricing is one of my larger pet peeves...

Ditto. That's why I round up when somebody asks me how much something costs. The mathematical error resulting from using $500 instead of $499 is much less than the psychological error induced by the smaller first digit.
That is what I said, yes, except that I wanted a tool that does the inlining. But as another comment said, that tool would probably not worth the hassle, too.
Is permission needed to retweet hot news?
To me the important part of "Strunk and White" is the White part -- that is, the part that deals with style. Of course you should use good grammar or something close. The important thing isn't following grammar rules, but in expressing yourself well. There are a lot of bad grammatically correct sentences.
The War on Internship
Use case - scaling social science with Hadoop
Good news! During the 90 minute video you will burn 100 calories, which is right at one serving of Captain Crunch, if you eat it without milk.

The video is also on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM if you have a better youtube player than their little flash thinger.
At the very least, selecting from people who accepts cryonics would give chasingsparks a dating pool likely to be rationally more accepting of the inevitable.
Why games will take over our lives
ISP redirected Google searches to it's own search engine
I am curious whether there are any examples of price anchoring for web apps. I know it is a very specific request, but if anyone knows such anchoring happening in web app space, please share the link.
That's not the way in which the system is structured for 100% trust. The problem is that the system as a whole produces a binary answer: "Yes, this site has passed your trust chain" and "No, it has not." There's no room for dodgy certs, and certainly no room for dodgy root CAs.

Further, there's no room for decreasing my trust in a cert based on the length of the chain, or who's on the chain, or anything like that.

The whole system is structured to produce a 100% certification of trust, or a 0% certification of trust. This has the consequence that when the system is compromised in the way that you talk about in your last paragraph, it doesn't degrade; it falls apart.

It's not that robots from the future might compromise a cert, and going to something so fantastic in the light of the real threat of sovereign governments and the proved threat of compromised root CA certs (proved as in "you could buy this device for real money and have it really delivered to you") is a rhetorical unkindness. It is that nobody can any longer claim with a straight face that the system is 100%, and unfortunately, with SSL that leaves only one alternative.

Compare with the semi-mythical "web of trust", which would have ways of dealing with this that doesn't violate the very mathematical foundations of the system.
Wow, I think you actually may have won. That's a terrible name for a variable given the context. You would probably have nightmares for years after maintaining a project like that :)
How does ZFS work with fuse on linux? From what I've been able to find, it's not available in-kernel due to licensing issues. Is negative performance with running it in userspace versus kernel negligible, or hampering?
Pittsburgh's Alphalab Incubator: Application Deadline is Thursday, April 8th
Not even necessarily a smartphone. Set up a camera at your window hooked up to a spare machine, take photos when motion is detected and look for license plates.

You can probably automate the whole process.
If you’re selling something, ask for much more than you think you’re going to get.

Very often that can be simply offputting and can turn away would-be buyers. There's a difference between being susceptible to an effect and being completely controllable by it.
Not new advice, but it's worth being reminded about. I think programmers actually follow this principle quite a bit. It's just that once they have written a nice tool, they release it as open source software. For a lot of people, I think the message needs to be, "built it for yourself, and try to sell it too".
Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational is also highly recommended! It contains numerous such examples.
They used to have 3,4, and even 5 platters. It could just be that he hasn't opened a drive for a decade or two.
The Economics of Marijuana: What happens to dealers after legalization?
This is going to be a killer with the iPad.

I managed to avoid pre-ordering one, but as the app library grows and the iPad's potential use cases multiply, that $499 will start to look like an increasingly better deal.
Sure. We just build way more of them than people need :-)
According to the article, that's not what happens at all. In the case of personal injury lawsuits, there is no rebound, and people who ask for more simply get more.

It may be true that if you set a high price, and delay telling the customer about a deal, they will leave before you reveal the lower price. However, that's not what is typically done, and it seems like showing a deal is always more effective that just starting at a lower price.
Court tells FCC it has no mandate to enforce Net Neutrality
How about this: http://highrisehq.com/signup

If most of their customers fall into the $24/month "basic plan" category, then the highlighted plan of $49/month makes the $24/month plan look like a steal.
Sounds like quack talk to me. What about that virtual reality I was promised in the 90's.
> By overconcentrating on tech, you put the tech at risk....

I would say this is certainly a fair characterization of where we were after year 1. We missed quite a number of very important foundational opportunities because we made the mistake of being hyper focused on the tech and not pragmatic business decisions.

By year 2 we had many of the same problems until we had a management shakeup halfway through the year and were finally able to approach the business side of things.

We're in year 3 right now, and in the process of turning the corner. But wow, we discuss almost daily where we could have been if we had adopted the right attitude from the start. Certainly profitable, likely 2-3x the size.
I'm guessing when someone notices that they'll drop those two patents from the suit, which still unfortunately leaves 171 patents for which they haven't promised anything.

They probably couldn't actually prevail on those two patents anyway, if it went to trial: a public open letter promising not to sue if someone uses the patents could be interpreted as an implicit patent license, or at least trigger estoppel.
What troubles me is that no one has tried actually looking for sites that use this cert. If any valid sites are signed using this cert, then it's a simple matter of asking them who they paid for certification.

It's of course harder to prove that NO sites use this cert. If there's a way to craft a Google query that searches for sites signed by a particular cert, that could go some distance to indicating whether it's been used and where.
Agree with all the points on price anchoring... but $499 does not seem cheap to me at all for what you get with the entry level iPad. Maybe I need to watch Jobs presentation?
The Digg iFrame Toolbar is Dead / Unbanning Domains
it seems like showing a deal is always more effective that just starting at a lower price.

If you were to believe the article's unambiguous take on this, then your interpretation would be correct. However, I believe this is a naive view or one that is only true in limited situations and often not true in the reality of the marketplace where an unreasonably high price can simply turn someone away without leaving the possibility for any further negotiation.
What his data suggest to me is that people spend most of their time looking at the middle of a standard ~800px browser window.
How to Hack your brain
There was an interesting article back in December in New York Mag about how restaurant menus are often designed with this intent (I believe it made it here but can't find link).

2.The Anchor: The main role of that $115 platter - the only three-digit thing on the menu - is to make everything else near it look like a relative bargain, Poundstone says.

http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/
Plausibly, comcast could create its own "google" and direct all search traffic there. It could sell ads and use the ad revenue to lower monthly subscription fees to its customers.

Except they wouldn't do that. They would use QoS to make sure their search engine was the only one usable to their customers and then they would charge extra for access to the search engine as an added feature.
Court:  FCC has no power to regulate net neutrality
I just found Bust a Name recently and it has quickly become my favorite...

http://www.bustaname.com/

(edit: I just noticed you already have that on your list)
Jailbreaking doesn't void the warranty, you just can't get support while it is jailbroken.
...not to mention that the reporter may be living 12.5 time zones away. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/11/business/fi-pasadena...
SlyShy,

Great point! There is a fine line between open source and profitable apps, I just made the call the other day to open source something instead of making a paid app.
You could probably make a better argument for that if anyone had made something that's just as usable but more open yet.
Yeah well, I like linking to original sources.
The flip side is that sometimes a company can be too "clever" trying to invent something better when they could just copy.

For example, Microsoft waffled for years before adding tabs to IE. They wanted to find a better way manage multiple pages. I think most people still prefer tabs to their "clever" image thumbnail thing. So all they did was waste a few years not implementing an existing feature that their customers were all asking for.

This blog entry reads like a Malcom Gladwell story with it's selection bias. Innovating in itself is not enough if the features you're spending time on are not going to be a big success. That's why you still need to keep copying successful features from competitors. They've already done most of the hard work.
The problem comes when the big money is in "tripple play". So many people are making money pretending TV and Phone are not just Data. The answer of course is to start talking about how TV and Voice are no different than a webpage from the network's pov. Use examples like Hulu and YouTube. This mass education will certainly start helping.
This is truly great news!
Yes, since alcohol is a depressant, if you want someone to indirectly associate you with being stimulated, coffee.
3.4 Million Americans are Extreme Commuters (2005)
Better still is Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Writing with Power is also good, but a bit heavy on the wishful thinking in places.
so what Apple also has an out-of-date OS, which keeps tabs on the users, its called iPad and iPhone, What do u think ??
I think if you read through this somewhat embarrassing apologia, you'll find the answer to the title question is actually "yes" but you have to get through a lot of bluster and logical fallacies including potshots at the competition and smearing of the chairman of the standards committee that approved OOXML to get there.

(And where did the Possibly not... in the title come from? I can't see it in the original)
So, how does it work?
Music Lessons Inform Photojournalism’s Future
Next step would be, I'd think, to bring the humidity in your room back up to sane, comfortable, healthy levels. Either that, or a working freezer.

A 70°F (~21°C) room will have a dew point far above the 0°F freezer, so your drive should develop substantial frost from condensation. Unless your relative humidity is around 5%. (Does a glass of ice water drip from condensation? Your drive will be far colder.)

Subjecting data that you care about to potential thermal shock and condensation, well, that doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Getting a second usb cable for my iPhone had the same effect for me. One stays plugged into the wall with the charger, one stays by the laptop for syncing. Life is great.
Yeah, good article. Thanks for the link. I liked this statement from article:

"Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most."
15% looks great, but how confident are we?

Running a one-sided Student’s t-test with a means difference of 14%, our experimental data yields a P value of 0.000051. This means that there is only a 0.0051% chance that we would obtain a 14% (or greater) improvement if the real effect wasn’t at least this large.

Err... Student's t doesn't assign a probability to P(measured>=14 | actual<14), it assigns one to P(measured>=14 | actual=14) under the assumption of equal variances (which here means actual=0, so clearly not applicable).

I figure that the actual effect is 16.05% +- 0.17%. And that's simply by assuming 145k is close enough to infinity, and for IE.html only.

That is, unless I'm mistaken about this, since I grok only the fairly basic stuff. Which is certainly plausible in and of itself.
You hear about them on here "all the time", and yet you've never heard of them? How does that work?
Court: FCC has no power to regulate Net neutrality
IPads selling on eBay for as much as $5000
It's interesting that he mentions that naming a number first in salary negotiations is to your advantage, when the usual advice is that the first person to name a number loses. If there is really no rebound effect, why don't we hear stories of people asking for outrageous amounts of money, instead of letting the hiring manager name a salary first?
FCC Loses "Net Neutrality" Case
The general bandwidth you get is irrelevant. The central question from the perspective of net neutrality is whether there is any traffic shaping upstream of you.
What's wrong with that? Do you really think there would be so little benefit from building a good search engine that Comcast would build a lousy one? They could even license one from any number of third parties.
I Wish I Knew Then
Cloud Computing Network Primer
I did come across a number of negative reviews by users who had limited activity on the site. I guess this is an effort to block "hit-and-run" negative reviews.

The downside to filtering out reviews by "less-established" users is that you run a risk of angering new users who take the time to contribute a review to the site only to find it doesn't appear. Are they really going to bother posting a second, third, or fourth review that will also get filtered out, or will they just walk away?
Driven to Distraction
High Stakes Poker Season 6 Episode 8
I think the key that the buyer must believe there is room for negotiation. If I walked in to a Best Buy and saw the only TV there was being sold for $10k, I'd walk out. But if I saw that one TV was $10k, but with slightly fewer features and slightly smaller size was less, then I have entered a negotiation where we agree on what I'll pay for a given feature set, but I may have anchored on the $10k figure already.
Wikipedia lists most of them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_money
It looks like an up-to-date Linux with KDE 3.5 so the comments about it being a 10-year-old Windows knock-off are amusing, but surely this is just South Korean propaganda that's being mindlessly repeated?
It depends on the market you are selling in:

If I'm selling a house, the listing shows all the prices and houses in an area - my range of asking prices is a bit limited.

If I'm the only seller of a cool new gadget then I'm just trying to map the customers "I want one of those" feelings into $
I have no problem with private APIs per se and always felt that Apple had found a sensible system: apps on the App Store, including Apple's, couldn't use private APIs, but the built-in apps could do whatever they wanted.

But apparently at least iBooks (and maybe iWorks?) on iPad use private APIs. That doesn't seem fair at all: selling side-by-side with 3rd party competitors on the store that can't do the same things Apple's apps can.
Cramer: The "iPad Is Addictive As Oxycontin"
What else is going on? Currently there are lots of entrenched lobbyists who influence FCC policy. This is why things like nipple slips or use of the word "ass" on prime time TV are a big deal.

Do you think those lobbyists wouldn't immediately start lobbying for internet "decency" regulations the minute the FCC gained additional power to regulate the internet?

Such restrictions will start in obvious ways on largely uncontroversial subjects -- perhaps a law that appears at first to target only pedophiles or hard core pornography viewing by minors -- then more and more ambiguity creeps in until you have horrible censorship going on.

Have you read quotes by recent FCC chairmen? They generally consider themselves to be stewards of good taste. This is scary stuff.
I'm curious as to what you think the scam is. Just based on the information given in the article, the only money apparently changing hands is the company giving participants money, not the other way around. And if the company is paying for the information, it would seem reasonable to assume that they think they have a way of monetising that information...

But maybe I'm missing something...
It is often easier to drive and extra hour each way, then try to move yourself / your family in the current housing and job market.
This is, of course, going to be godawful expensive -- but I hope it gets treated as a "right" in a way that the iBot chair wasn't. I don't mean this particular device necessarily, but there needs to be something driving these enabling technologies to the point that economies of scale can bring the injured (and, where possible, those suffering from congenital disabilities) into full participation in this world. Accommodation is nice, but removing the need for accommodation would be a hell of a lot better for all of us.
Comcast Wins FCC Challenge
If you use RDF stores/graph databases, this python ORM is worth watching: http://code.google.com/p/surfrdf/ . Like activeRDF in the ruby world, but with the advantage of having solid RDF libs (RDFlibs for python is 3-4 years old now) compared to the buzzing mess of new RDF libs for ruby, most of them still very preliminary.
I think he is using a very broad definition of "game". Jesse Schell would say that HN is a game where we are all trying to win by desperately pleading to be voted up.
VC North Bridge Sponsoring a $75k Seed Competition
Oh, you're right. I forgot about that.
I drive an hour to work b/c there is no reasonably nice and affordable housing with good schools anywhere near where I work.
I'm partly excited and partly worried about the implications of how easy automated data collection like this has become. Imagine doing the same with face recognition software or RFID drivers' licenses.

Privacy issues aside, it would be a fun dataset to play with.
The Evolution of a Web Developer
Someone who has time to listen to the whole thing:

Do they mention Zaphod Beeblebrox?
Loading Banner Advertisements with Jquery speedup web page loading time
Asking your customers what to do is not the same thing as listening to your customers. Listening to customers is essential to success.
Well except for here. This Paul Graham persona must be some kind of inside joke here.
Aha! I thought it was a bug of some sort because I'm in the UK on the UK store (where iPad apps aren't officially launched yet, but you can still search for them). Sounds like an interesting plan.. and another interesting blog post ;-)
But, for the love of god, think of the children!
They don't have the usual responsibilities of property owners, though, like a requirement that you maintain sufficient control over your property to prevent it from being used for activities that are illegal or a nuisance.

In telecommunications, common carrier status was a trade: if a telecom treats their network as neutral infrastructure, not discriminating between customers or exercising control over the data that passes over it, they'll be indemnified from legal responsibility for the data that passes over it.

ISPs are attempting to get (and have largely gotten) one half of that understanding without the other half. They want the legal indemnification of common carrier status without the requirements of neutrality that it entails. (The various "safe-harbor" laws passed over the past 20 years, with no strings attached, largely give them that.)
I read on here few months ago that naming your own price first is better. Now I believe it! Recently we hired a sales person on PT basis. At the interview, she gave her expected salary to be about 2.5 times what I had thought about paying her. Now, I know about this notion of anchoring and yet I felt kind of embarrassed to make my initial offer. I fought off the urge to buy into her frame and ultimately made a decent offer but it was still significantly higher than what I had originally planned...and I credit much of it to her naming her price first!

I do think there is an upper limit which if you cross, you risk getting the other party to TOTALLY ignore it as a joke. I came pretty close to doing that with our PT person.