skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I combine two of his statements into one:

"I used it for a day and a half and think that it will be an excellent couch companion PC"

and

"This version isn't a replacement PC for anyone yet, but future versions might be. You probably want to save your cash until then."

and I roll my eyes. If the casual browsing bit sounds good to you and you have the extra scratch, do yourself a favor and buy this thing now or you'll be screwing yourself out of 1-2 years of an awesome cutting edge experience.

I do agree with him that user profiles should be implemented, but his other complaints are nit-picky. I personally think the lack of Flash is a feature, not a problem, considering I have flash block installed on all my browsers. If Apple had included flash support, it'd be very unlikely that they'd have provided a flash blocker, so I'm actually very grateful that they made this decision. In my opinion, flash is only good for two things: games and videos; and I tend to avoid both of those things when I surf anyways.

As far as the keyboard goes, I can actually type on the damn thing almost as fast as I can my laptop keyboard, but that's probably because I'm so awesome. I do, however, often find it hard to get into a good position for typing, however, since I'm usually using the iPad in some obscenely relaxed pose.

I'm a total Apple fanboy and in love with my iPad though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Cord blood can today save the life of someone with leukemia or other diseases that require bone marrow transplants. While other cord blood stem cell therapies may be speculative, this one is real and already works to save lives. My sister has leukemia and we just found out that some kind person donated cord blood which matches her tissue type...I can't describe how grateful I feel now. Thank you, whoever you are.

In my case, for my children, I would certainly make sure the blood is saved. The only question is whether to do private cord blood banking or to donate the blood to the public blood bank. I would find out how rare is my child's human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue type as part of making the decision. If it's rare then it becomes much, much more important to bank known compatible blood.

One confounding factor: if your child turns out to have a blood disease later in life, it's not clear to me whether there is a risk in using your child's own stem cells. For example we know little about the causes of leukemia, it could be that even the cord blood cells are potentially cancerous. I'd suggest reading up on this and reaching out to researchers in the area on this front, since it's unlikely your OB/GYN would know the most recent results.
Like you said, the distinction between meaning and information is largely superficial and arbitrary. Letters are symbols, symbols carry meaning - a particular squiggle only contains information because it has meaning (outside of models and other artificial systems). If I don't read Sanskrit, one letter contains zero information/meaning for me.

"If something is more probable, it contains less information." I don't understand, why would "ee" contain less information than "hh"?

I'm also wondering where his comparison of English to Japanese came from:

"For instance, we could compare the number of bits per character in Japanese versus English (it turns out that English is only 60% as compact as Japanese, which explains why Japanese book are always around two-thirds the size of their English counterparts...)."

Are we talking about kanji or hirigana/katakana? If we're talking about kanji, we're talking about thousands of pictographic symbols (a lot of which are multi-syllabic), which are fundamentally different in nature than English letters (as for the 60% more compact bit, citation please?).
Based on his own assertion, "Let’s say that there are 32 letters and punctuation marks... each character represents 5 bits of information ... a total of 5*16 = 80 bits of information." There's somewhere between 2000-7000 kanji ... so each character would represent...?
You probably mean "extraordinary abilities". http://www.messersmithlaw.com/green-card/eb1-extraordinary-a... It does look like you have to be a world class athlete, artist or scientist to use this visa.

Good luck with this! It shouldn't be this hard for motivated people like you to be able to work in the US.
> Not that it's right and good, but wholly fair and justifiable and moral.

Typically "good" in this context is equated with "moral", so I'm a little confused with your statement. Could you please elaborate?
This is the best thing to come out of twitter yet.

EDIT: Will trade beer for an invitation ;)
I always wondered why Kevin wasn't the CEO in the first place, he seems to have all the ideas and the drive. VCs probably wanted someone experienced at the helm. I dunno. :-)
multiple incidents? i don't recall hearing of even one in US soldiers returning from the gulf. perhaps the media didn't cover them.

regardless, the question that follows is whether or not that rate is higher than the rate of postal workers doing similar things.
Apps only run in the background if they specifically register a background service. Usually this is when you click a button in the apps preferences like "update in background", etc.

Read this: http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-wi...
I'm not crazy about their chosen marketing stance either. I've been careful not to say that I like what they're doing, just that I think I know why they're doing it. It's a little distasteful, but so are the various fundraising strategies most other orgs employ ("Don't you have two minutes for starving orphans in Irkutsk?" or public radio's week of not playing any music to lecture you about donating instead).

At the end of the day, if this is what it takes to get Wikileaks back online, then I support it because of that. Because I still very much believe in their mission, and believe that they are unique in what they provide the world right now.
"The programmer did not read the pay code properly and gave the person assistance" - The???

Maybe they should have done some testing or had a biz analyst to go over the requirements.
US 2009 rate: second-to-last 39.1%! (US 1984 rate: 49.8%!) How on Earth has the US managed to have such a dynamic economy with those tax rates?
Task Killers are a waste of time.

http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-wi...
And if you want to help the savvy swap out the automatic transmission for a manual, you'd better have the EFF on speed dial.
It seems like the article may have confused two concepts from information theory. He talks about entropy (without explicitly naming it) which can be used to bound the best possible data compression scheme.

Data compression is not the problem with interacting with devices though. What he should be instead looking at is channel capacity, where the user is encoding information for transmission that the device will receive and decode.

Maybe that's too technical for the nature of this article, but oh well.
Absolutely fantastic. I hope one day to be able to get into a hissy fit with one of my co-workers and just stop working for a year (but still get paid).
Is the browsing experience really better than the iPhone, or is it just faster? There are things that annoy me on the iPhone, but screen size has never been one of them. I wish my phone had the computing power of the iPad...
This city is a big rip off and is greedy. If they adjust the pricing, they need to do it across the board so that some of these garages don't have a license to steal. Personally I think it discourages commerce and freedom for the merchants and citizens. Everyone is for it probably already takes the bus or does not have a car. Everyone should be able to make their own choices without getting ripped off by this greedy city. They are already raising the meters which means a bundle so what they are doing is condoning greed.
Accurate and fast! I had location services turned off because it's slow on the iPhone 2G. I just fired off Maps, hit the crosshairs, and ZAP. It was right there. 3 seconds later, it corrected by 30 feet. Right on the money!
I played around with one for a few hours. Typing was far better than I thought for the form factor. Would I use it to write a novel? No, but that's not the point. I was able to type little things like forum responses reasonably well. There cases where the form factor is actually better than my netbook, like standing (It's not great, but it's better.)

The lack of flash, usb and a webcam are pretty much the only things that prevent me from buying one. It's too bad, the price isn't half bad, the device fells pretty good, I didn't really have any problems using it.

But those things are the easy stuff and they aren't even present on the device and they effectively lock me out of most of the daily web sites I use, connectivity to devices without buying some ridiculous adapter connector, and the ability to use it for the one thing that it seems to be absolutely designed to do, video chat.
Agreed it is not accurate for huge servers and IO bound cases but I have found it to be a good rule of thumb for a LAMP web application stack on anything from single to 8 core machines.

It is a useful metric to start digging deeper into the machine.
I watched the most recent Diggnation podcast and Kevin Rose had a hell of a time trying to figure out the difference between a megabit and a megabyte.
It's definitely qualitatively better. It's better than my windows tablet. I wish I could have Chrome on this thing, but Safari is pretty darn good.
I got my undergrad at VT, and spent time working at the CRC. This is EXCELLENT news for the entire VT community. I wish there had been more of an entrepreneurial spirit/teachings when I was in Blacksburg. Hopefully this will motivate some of the students to create something amazing.
Yeah I certainly wasn't trying to justify the shooting, as I disclaimed. It's morally wrong, and certainly SHOULD violate laws. I'm just pointing out that you can't criticize it using outdated conventions.

Out of curiosity suppose you're the soldier in that situation and your CO says to engage. Do you refuse to do so? That itself has to violate military protocol right? Do you say "but they're unarmed, are you sure?" then follow whatever instructions you're given?

From what I've read/heard of Marines, the people in the field are expected to make more of their own decisions than in other branches of the military. There's less micromanagement I suppose would be a good way of summing it up, and as a result this would have been less likely to have happened in the first place in that branch. Is that true?
I'm going to assume (very much so) that the Apaches are answering to whomever is commanding the ground column. So permission to fire will come from him.

They actually ask twice for permission to fire on the van. The first time with some detail about the target and the second without.

Did the person who granted them permission to fire have another source of information about the situation, or was the decision based entirely on the crew's description of the situation?

The latter. Although being that authority to fire is in the hands of the ground commander, he should have asked what the heck they were firing on. From the sounds of it, I think he was tied up with other things at the time he gave said permission, which doesn't absolve him from his role.
NASA takes on climate change with new $2.4B
The RSS feed is buried and the site is invite-only. Two major failures for an otherwise decent idea.
That's an excellent order of language quality, but:

1. There are more good Java hackers than good Lisp hackers, although the proportion of good programmers is much higher in the Lisp camp.

2. At this point, I'd put Java ahead of Perl for most purposes.

3. There are a lot of smart people who program but, for whatever reason, never become good programmers. Examples would be traders who use VB because it interfaces well with spreadsheets and scientists using Fortran. This shouldn't be terribly surprising; everyone speaks and writes but not all smart people are articulate and good writers.
The root of this problem is simply that there are a lack of blacks with technical backgrounds (of the high-level blacks listed in your post none of them had cs, engineering, or math degrees). If more blacks opt for technical training, the number of blacks in the startup community will grow. For those who do have an appropriate background, funding probably proves to be another barrier. All too many times, I hear of founders raising initial funding of tens of thousands of dollars from "friends and family." For obvious reasons, this is not an option for the majority of black founders.
I'd argue that the crown is more like choosing one value from a set.
Hiroshi Ishiguro Unveils New Smiling Female Android
The demo really needs to disable autocomplete for the input field:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/How_to_Turn_Off_Form_Autoco...
"Er, they could have joined the Peace Corp, Red Cross, etc. They didn't accidentally wake up one day and kill someone, they made a series of choices and put themselves into a series of events where they got to use powerful weapons against people."

-- Good point. I'd add that in addition to the US soldiers who made a choice to serve their country, and who must take responsibility for those actions, I'd add that the terrorists/insurgents made similar choices. They chose to dick around with AK-47's in a war zone. They made a choice to allow kids to be around them, knowing they would become targets.

Similarly, the cameramen made a choice to hang around insurgents who were dicking around with AK-47's. And the people in the van chose to drive up into the middle of a battle, without red cross markings, to pick up wounded terrorists who were dicking around with AK-47's and RPGs.

So yes my friend, we all make choices. Sometimes they turn out to be dumb ones, or will at least seem like dumb ones when someone like you is watching them on video, and doesn't understand their context, 4 years after they are made.

Cheers.
I think that's part of the reason it's so important that things like this become public. I think every American of voting age should have to watch this video, because this is the reality of war and we need to come to terms with what we're inflicting. People need to realize that there are real people dying horrific, needless deaths, because war is always horrific and no amount of euphemisms changes that fact. If we are going to support a war, we should be forced to reckon with the real face of it, and accept that some of the blood is on our hands. It's easy to pretend otherwise when you've always lived with an ocean between you and the conflicts.
I meant robust in terms of security and lack of other bugs. So I guess I'm agreeing with you :)
Yeah, it's actually the same guy. CmdrTaco
Five Portland startups looking to hire developers and technical talent
Short and long versions have been released. Here's a link to some torrent links listed on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/bmooi/wikileaks_video_j...
Modular Innovation 201
He is overshooting it, but so are you. Really, you just need to know when it's time to stop turning the crown, and that's all.

You won't stop at the exact position, so there are going to be some adjustments that need to be made, but overall it's quite close to 9.5 bits, as he says.
There also seems to be some caching going on. The maps application in my iPod touch could track me accurately when walking around the city – with Wifi turned off. It seems to download the locations of all the Wifi routers in your area as soon as you have a internet connection, when you lose that connection it can still find out where you are (it needs only the MAC addresses).

Nice feature, pretty useless, though.
Also anton van straaten edited r6rs.
Does Amazon.de or Yahoo.de allow international transfers of their employees? I would be surprised if they didn't - I used to work in the financial industry (GS), where international employee transfers (US, Tokyo, London) were the norm.
did have problems when you wanted to accelerate quickly and at certain speeds they couldn't decide what gear to be in

I've noticed the first one on pretty much every automatic I've ever driven, but mostly that's a "doctor, it hurts when I do this" sort of thing. If I turn from a residential side street (20mph) onto a larger four-lane road (45-50mph) and pound the gas pedal into the floor to speed up, then yeah, it's going to be jerky. If instead I just gently give it more gas and let it speed up a bit more gradually, it's nice and smooth. So the solution to that appears to be simply "don't drive like you're on a racetrack".

Indecisive gears are a problem I haven't seen on at least the last couple cars I've owned (both Ford); they've been just fine at picking a good gear for the speed and sticking with it.
You might be able to get away with it if you own (at least part of) the company. :)
Saying that MBA programs nurture extreme arrogance, bad ethics and short sightedness is like saying that CS programs nurture introversion, poor social skills and an inability to communicate effectively.

I actually would say this, not about CS programs per se, but about academia.

There are tens of thousands of highly successful MBAs running or working in small businesses you've never heard of, not generating any noise, and contributing a great deal to society. To lump them all together as a bunch of frat boy lunatics is ignorant.

The same goes about PhDs and ex-academics. A lot of them are socially normal, but people tend to notice the aggregate tendencies and turn them into stereotypes. As for MBAs, I don't think the stereotype is remotely true of each individual, but it is true of a certain culture that exists in MBA programs. To be fair, I doubt it has much to do with programs themselves; the students track it in from investment banks and corporate boardrooms. So, even though the programs are designed with great intentions, a certain set of people get in and feed off each other. This is much like how prisons are supposed to reform criminals, but some of them just use the exposure to others to learn how to become better at crime.
You don't clamp it. You wait (IIRC) 15-30 minutes before doing anything to it, to give it enough time to drain. The immediacy with which the cord is routinely clamped and cut rose quite a bit in the 80's and 90's. It only makes sense that you shouldn't tamper with nature so much as to cut off the cord from the baby immediately after birth, while there's still blood flowing through it.

I'm not really sure why doctors started doing that, but it reminds me of our society's pressure towards having everything natural seem perfect and sort of sterile, like when our grocery stores reject all but the most flawless produce. We wouldn't want our babies to be handed to us with all sorts of icky, biological stuff like still-intact umbilical cords attached.
It's funny, but when I was watching the video, I was actually waiting for "Engage what, exactly" or "Negative, check fire" from the ground commander.

He was doing something else and these guys were a piss off that he trusted to actually be responsible. They weren't, and because of that his failure is highlighted as well.
I bought a new car a couple years ago, and was ridiculed by friends who considers themselves "serious drivers"... because I bought an automatic. Which, I guess, makes it a decent iPhone/iPad analogy since to them the important thing is to master every aspect of the car and know how to get every last bit of performance out of it, while to me the important thing is that it lets me cover longer distances easily.
btw ... Russell Simmons is a co-founder of Yelp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08...

Its an old post, but the point is you use your cells for this. I guess I was a misinformed in the reasons for the Obama bill. Nevertheless I don't see why there is no big push to show that you don't need to kill babies to get stem cells!
Linux Mint 8 'LXDE' Edition Review
Who is "we"? I think plenty of people don't want world peace, actually. Look at Africa, Israel/Palestine, Shri Lanka, North Korea...
Product Launches In Affiliate Marketing
This Bogdan guy sounds a lot like Paul the Prophet: "I remember a guy who worked as a mainframe tech for a bank back in the late '60s who went by the name "Paul the Prophet," and had a dyed-green mustache. He was the only employee of that bank other than janitors and loading dock people who didn't wear a tie to work, but he had unique skills his bosses needed, so they put up with him."

http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/31117/
tl;dr version:

The average number of threads/processes in the run queue and/or blocked on disk i/o sampled at 1, 5, and 15 minutes.
I feel like a lot of the arguments here boil down to the same fact: There is very little chance that this will be useful. Most of the time this is a waste of money, but on the small minuscule off-chance that this might help people put money into it. Its like snake-oil, can't hurt but can't quite prove that it can help, but people take it on the off-chance that it might.
The Don't Be a Dick License
Why do founders usually step down after a while?
For some reason, many people tend to greatly undervalue their time and effort.

I have a couple of apps in the AppStore. All of the apps that I've made were initially solely intended for my use, but I usually end up throwing them on the AppStore, mostly for the fun of it.

One of them is a extremely simple app I literally put together in about four hours; when I put it on the AppStore I priced it at 99 cents just to see what would happen. Surprisingly (for such a simple app), I was getting a steady 5-10 sales a day. A couple of weeks later, I jacked the price up to $3.99 just to see what would happen. For the first week at $3.99, I actually had between 15-20 sales a day. Since then, my sales have never dropped below 8 sales per day.

By increasing my price, I actually had a net increase in both quantity sold and revenue.

As with most products, higher priced goods are perceived as having more value than their lower-priced counterparts - even in the AppStore.
After I got past the introduction, I liked this article a lot better.

I like to focus on what something says, rather than on how it's written. Unfortunately, the introduction is so tangled and wordy, I found that hard to do.

Example: "In many cases, purists see the essence of immutability as a precondition for any given language to fall into the category of functional programming." As an editor, I might suggest "Purists would say functional programming requires immutability."

Example: "But we can extend the larger picture of immutability beyond the strict ecosystem of data structures alone and instead encompass any object that adheres to the notion of immutability." How about "But immutability applies to more than just data structures."

Happily, where it talks about code, the article is pretty straightforward.
"...the fact that Digg has no iPad strategy"

Ah dear the iPad stuff just gets funnier and funnier.
Wow, that's really interesting. I can definitely see how that would work though, most of the 99c stuff on the app store is utter crap, I tend to just mentally skip over it. :-)
What you see relates to what you think you are looking at. Most people who see a dark stick on the ground you will probably indentify it as a stick.

However, if you are looking for your escaped pet black snake you are more likely to assume it's a snake. If you are a zoo keeper who was just told a black mamba you are going to assume it's a snake and try to kill it / run really quickly.

Now let's say you received a lot of military training and are in the middle of a war zone and you see someone holding a dark blob at their midsection. How likely are you to think camera vs. AK-47 relative to someone sitting at home that knows innocent people are about to be shot?