skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did that for the last 18 months and have recently taken a temp (6 month) programming gig to amass some capital before I revert to crumbbumhood.

On the one hand - the professional slacker lifestyle is pretty brilliant: youu sleep when you're tired, work on whatever you like, and you can finally get that stack of books read.

On the other hand - the lifestyle can be somewhat isolating, especially so when you find that everyone else is asleep when you're awake. It becomes too easy to lose yourself in tangents, endlessly exploring to eternal infecundity.

So - while I agree - it is a great lifestyle - I make one small addendum: to be "magically unemployed" along with two or three other persons whose interests all overlap.
JavaScript: Private Variables are Evil
I think it's f-n awesome he got banned for life. If you read the article carefully he tells you the reason why - he is buying and selling these marked up (though he 'claims' he wasn't as bad as others - yeah right!). I hate duecebags like this... you didn't play by the rules and you got burned. So it goes.

Oh and really what does it matter, if the guy wants an ipad legit he can get someone to buy him one later. Or get it used off ebay later. This will just stop his bs mark-up scam, and probably scare off others doing it.
I started imaging a proper re-dubbing. "Aber Neiiiiin ..."
Facebook deepens ties with intelligence agencies. Is it selling data?
See also:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3654.en.h...
http://hackermedley.org/archives/4
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/26C3-GSM-hacking-made...

and

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2997.en.h...

for similar and more advanced attacks on GSM.
Scalpers are a market-making phenomenon that occurs in free markets when a product has a set price that is artificially low for high demand; e.g. concert tickets, sports games tickets, etc.
...What's his point? When Google is down he can't access his Google apps. If these were all desktop apps, they would be unusable when his computer was dead.

To non-geeks, a dead laptop 'owns them', in the sense that they are powerless against it, as much as Google owns Gmail users.
Awesome! For several years I've wanted to build this camera.
Yes, it's called capitalism. Not popular with Apple, I understand - they're a bit more corporatist.

(I jest, but to make a point.)
That only explains why companies want to limit the ability of customers to resell their product, not why companies should be allowed to do this.
No, not intelligent, or snobby. Big-souled.

Like Douglas Hofstadter said: "Small-souled men, beware!"

I (and a lot of us here) have no patience with constrictive thinking. In this case, why was sex brought in? Trying to artificially decrease a person's worth is petty.
Mike Hudson was mean to me back around 1999. I've never stopped using python, but I've always been leery of participating in its development. :-)
I'd do it if they do something like that for the NBA. I can't function without my Blazers. Are there blackout areas with the MLB plugin?
How does Apple know that?
What defines a good presentation really depends on the type of presentation. Steve Jobs is excellent at emotional presentations. If you pay attention, you will realize that he doesn't communicate a lot of information. However, the product announcements are about hype rather than data. This presentation style is more appropriate for external rather than internal settings.

Regardless of the setting, one of the most important elements that I've noticed is the Story. Successful presentations have a unifying thread throughout.
I wrote this snippet ~10 years ago when learning Perl:

for(<>){chop;$s{join'',sort split'',lc}.=" $_"}for(sort%s){/. /&&print"$_\n"}

Running against wordlist.txt was fun (anemic cinema, bedroom boredom, etc.)
The iPads were being shipped out of the country. Are there certification/liability issues involved here where Apple is not permitted to put a device on sale unless approved by gov't regulators? Could this be a factor? I recall how Israel has been (still is?) banning and confiscating the iPad.
The price is artificially low for the demand. Fighting against this is essentially fighting against the free market.

If you're a capitalist, or believe in free markets, there's plenty to be outraged by here.
I would also add that the opportunity of selling extra iPad accessories, insurance and/or warranty is only possible instore, and not from a reseller. This would hurt Apple due to the lost revenue.

I still have the view though that if someone has the money they should be able to buy it and a lifetime ban is not really ideal.

Also a CNN article I read recently means the limit of 2 isn't stopping the trade in Hong Kong:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/08/ipad.hong.kong.china.sale...
I emailed Constantin (the movies producers) to ask them about this, clearly they must be aware of it and must be aware of the enormous 'hit' they scored with the parodies being a once-in-a-lifetime marketing gift.

I'm curious what their reasons are for this, even if it is automated they must have been aware of the effect the scene 'claim' would have on the parodies.

If I get a response I'll follow up.
Just to confirm... the typo in the title of this submission is on purpose, right?
Ah, Grinnell, alma mater of Robert Noyce.

Actually, I'm not sure what the point is. The fantasies with which underemployed recent BAs make the 40 hours pass? A take-off on the brand of thriller in which Joe Normal gets sucked into international (or interplanetary) intrigue and danger? Revenge for the balderdash the author was forced to write last year?

But wasn't the lead in _The Eiger Sanction_ an art history professor who did CIA hits in the off-season to support his Picasso habit? Yeah, Clint Eastwood's a bit long in the tooth, but I'd back him against Bruce Willis for asteroid destruction any day of the week. (Cf. _Space Cowboys_<liberal arts mode>, another profound exploration of the human spirit</liberal arts mode>.)
Buy a second monitor $300
Buy a second keyboard $15
Buy a 4-way USB $15
then add a little stand to the existing table, $50.
It's not some kind of moral imperative that you have to raise prices to the prevailing market rate if you're selling electronics or baseball tickets.
See I find the opposite is true for me. I don't have much experience with OS X but between ubuntu and Windows 7 I _much_ prefer Win7. I just can't stand how much screen space is eaten up by useless padding, menu bars, sidebars and panels, not to mention the overly large fonts. I realize that everything is customizable, but I don't have the patience. Windows 7 also seems faster and more responsive to me but responsiveness is largely subjective and situational.

To each their own I guess.
you couldn't put y-axis tick mark labels on bar graphs, to start.
I use sawfish with the lines theme for roughly the same reason.
The problem is that Windows will have gone through another design interation by the time Ubuntu has reached the XP/Vista generation look-and-feel.
Possibly because he told them? Maybe he's lying I don't know but I tend to believe people. I realize that's a serious shortcoming :)
That's the risk mitigation part, and in the 90's Apple had a lot of problems like that (too much inventory of unwanted products) but then you start to wonder how, for instance, the Nintendo Wii went a whole year understocked.
The iPad is one big bug. Defective by design, if you will.
Interesting. Your argument could be interpreted to read that apple misjudged their launch price.
Why do people in engineering/scientific fields get a free pass make fun of my philosophy degree?

I'm getting kind of tired of hearing jokes about how I should be working at McDonald's and that because I have a non-science degree I can never contribute anything to society.
That's bullshit.

I'm in a masters program right now for computer science, and that it is a ton easier than the bachelor's in philosophy was.

My first thought is that these people majored in the sciences because they were terrible at abstract thought and could never work beyond memorizing equations. These people are useless as they will never make the breakthroughs that the greatest scientists have made. (Einstein's approach to relativity included plenty of mathematics and science, but it was also based in thought experiments).

Secondarily, people have a tendency to mock and belittle anything that they don't understand. By definition, they do not understand most areas of the liberal arts (too abstract). So you get shit like this thread.

The original article was quite good, however.
This is exactly Jane Jacobs thesis in the greatly influential book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

What Jacobs found is that communities thrive when there's a certain amount of chaos and layered complexity that arises from people interacting withe each other and the environment. That's why places such as Greenwich village and many old European cities seem so vibrant and full of life - they're not centrally planned, they've had time to mature and people have had the possibility to interact with the environment and each other in the chaotic neighborhood.
Well, that last city was optimized for population count, not longevity.
I love the it-was-an-automated-process defense. Something happened but I guess no one responsible for it because it was an automatic process. It's the contemporary version of the Nuremburg defense.
No it's surprising that it has international mindshare.
.
Zer computers ver only following orderz.
Heck, it's feasible now, but the power consumption and maintenance costs would be fairly insane compared to the plain old cars-and-roads solution. (How often do you see an escalator broken down? Pretty damn often.)
Fantastic, I am just sad that KDE didn't do this first. It has been known for years that the system tray as it is today is a POS. It is being abused every way possible and causes a complete mess for users. The one I _really_ hate is when I click the CLOSE WINDOW button and the application hides in the system tray while still running. I am glad someone is trying to make things right.
It's not fear that motivates me. It's simply desire.

I desire to read thoughtful, insightful commentary, and I don't want to get bogged down reading boring garbage. Therefore, I upvote comments that I find thoughtful or isnightful (even if I disagree with them) and I downvote anything I think detracts from that.

I don't have anything against snarky one-liners, memes, or silliness per se. They just have to be remarkably clever or insightful in order to meet my standards. The "nerds have no sex life" comment that triggered this subthread was a boring retread of a tired joke, and the whining about downvotes that followed it was even more boring.

Don't think you can't be silly or snarky or post memes on HN. Just understand, the bar is set a lot higher here -- your silly/snarky/meme-filled comment needs to provide a lot more value than on other sites.
If I remember correctly he was charging 650$ for a 16gb. Hardly making a profit after all the fees and shipping.
"Netbook collects data and streams it over Wifi"

-- Wouldn't this, hm, affect the readings somewhat?
I think in a free market you should be allowed to decide who you do business with.
0.0.0.0 facebook.com www.facebook.com static.ak.fbcdn.net fbcdn.net ...
You don't just buy an Apple iProduct - you embrace the Apple lifestyle.
That's why iPads come with adoption certificates, simply handing over money for one would devalue the whole experience of transferring the love from Jobs to you.
It also seems as if the guy has been "ticket scalping", which I believe no reseller anywhere accepts.

I am sure if I bought 10 eeepcs or something from Amazon, they would be more than happy to fill my order. And if I wanted 10 more, they would send me those, too. It's like if you give them money, they give you the product, or something. Pretty awesome.

Anyway, why doesn't the OP go to Best Buy or something to get the rest of the iPads? They probably don't care how many he buys. (Or rather, the shifts change frequently enough that nobody will recognize him.)
I think most retailers have policies to prevent scalping. I'd be more mad at Ticketmaster if I was you. (Most people already are, but not because their prices are too low!)

And to hell with the Green Bay Packers, if only their season tickets were more expensive, all those middle class people in rural Wisconsin wouldn't be able to afford them and the decades-long waiting list would just dry up! Stupid corporatists and their 3-4 defense.
"...helping legislators and intelligence agencies understand how to use the social network for campaigning, reaching out to their constituencies and in their regular line of work."

Hmmm...I wonder what "regular line of work" Facebook is helping the CIA with.
On 2. You don't have to boot the phone after a fresh build, just load the updated build onto the running simulator.
The video at the bottom of the page was pretty informative: http://vimeo.com/908888

In it, they showed and discussed WiFi interference patterns, which looked like standing waves and remained stable for months. Cool!
Are you serious? They don't need your permission to do this—it's their product, they can implement whatever sales policies they like. They don't have any responsibility to defend the practice, it's their prerogative. But even if it wasn't, they simply don't want middle men marking up their products and taking a cut, while at the same time depleting their in-store stock. I don't blame them.
This is some old news. I think it has been previously mentioned on HN.
I wanted to use courgette, but I found that:
1- It is a part of the chormium project, it needs the rest of the project's source in order to build.
2- Even if it should support Linux x86 binaries, this algorithm works only with windows binaries.
Ah OK - good point

I guess it's good to have the choice though - for some things Canvas looks a good choice, for others SVG is better.
Ah well, didn't know that price, drag for him. Either way, it's not a big deal, he can still easily buy them if he really wants too.

I think people would have a different reaction if this was their company. They have the right to decide how and when they roll their products out, and mostly this is an effort to keep the 'pro' traders at bay. They know this just makes it harder, it doesn't stop them, but it slows them down.
The line length is very small here, so it may be a pathological case IMHO.
No, they'll release Java 7.0.0.1 for free. If you want security updates and other bug fixes just fork over a couple grand for a Jmetalink account.

Tongue-in-cheek, obviously. IBM's implementation is generally a good one as well, and is likely to always be free, which should keep Oracle doing the same.
I never got that argument really. It can become messy. So can the desktop, or your home directory. But do you prevent users from storing a file where they want it because of that? Windows world went too far with any program and their dog putting an updater, or status icon in the systray - but in Ubuntu you have the choice of not putting new stuff there. For example, I've got an update notifier, power, network, dropbox and volume in the notification area now. How is this abuse? Why should I resign from having those icons there?

They've already done the experiment with removing update notifications from the notification area (names point at the irony here). Instead we got a system approved pop-under, 200+ people complaining in the bugreport and Mark saying something like: That's how it's going to be, now be quiet. It was the same for window button placement lately. And that's a reason I'm upgrading to Debian this time instead of 10.04.
I've recently tried Mint Linux, and it's very aesthetically pleasing (screenshot http://i.imgur.com/2OBiH.png). (Disclaimer: Mac user)

Edit: except for the tray icons.
I think you got me wrong, I'm certainly against criticizing someone's neat simcity video with a jab about getting laid (frankly, such pent up frustration might say more about the accuser).

But I also see a fair bit of "oh my beautiful mind is too good to read this pointless article" on occasion -- That's simply a perhaps-better-spelled version of the same small mindedness.
There are a fair number of geeks who were liberal arts majors in their earlier years. It's not a crippling setback. In fact it can be an asset when you need to communicate densely abstract technical topics to those of a decidedly nontechnical background.

I've met a fair number of philosophy and language majors who are programmers, web designers or system administrators. And a number of them have much greater mental flexibility than someone who got a four year CS degree for the job prospects but have never demonstrated any great degree of intellectual curiosity.
It's very difficult to pull of decent price discrimination in practice.
As an aside, and because SimCity doesn't get mentioned much here, if you're on OS X and want to play Simcity 4, I spent a lot of time getting it to work "just so." The trick is.. Windows XP + Parallels 5 (I'm a big VMware Fusion fan but Parallels 5 boosts SC4 performance wise somehow) + software rendering (hardware rendering is a FAIL/unstable on both Parallels and VMware with SC4).. and I can run everything on high no probs on my iMac. Works a treat.
Years ago when I was still in high school I somehow stumbled upon these and tried a few out (the one with the one time pad and the movie titles). I certainly was not ready to tackle them at the time, but even when failing I learned a lot. Years later I ran into a paper on finding the shortest path in a directed graph with negative cycles and it reminded me of all of my attempts to do the same.

It is a shame they don't have a post-mortem after they retire the problems. I really enjoyed reading the break down of one of them ( http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber... ) even though I did not attempt it.
'Distributed', 'Extensibility', and other fancy words
Sobriety anyone?
Focus or Fail - saying no to great ideas
Sounds like legitimate glee, if you ask me. Those videos are amazing.
Lean Startup Meetup Lessons
I wonder if this guy will sell: http://www.wtf.com/
Exactly. The whole thing is fishy imo. Buying iPads privately and shipping them worldwide?
Sure, where can I send it to? Alternatively, drop me a line at antonio@thinkcode.tv.
It drives me nuts that iBooks or the Kindle doesn't use ragged right. Fully justified text has been demonstrated to be harder to read by multiple studies (though is arguably acceptable aesthetically for use in thin columns): http://kaiweber.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/research-about-ragg...

I guess my point is.. don't be quick to jump on a bandwagon in order to achieve an aesthetic ideal at the cost of readability.
Wear it like a Badge of Courage.

You've certainly helped highlight Apple's narcissism and tendency towards being a god-damned control freak. Making and selling products is about making and selling products. They sold a bunch to this guy -- customers are to be appreciated. Volume and repeat customers, who expose your wares to larger audiences, are to be cherished.

Apple? they abuse them.

Substitute 'developer' for 'customer' in the above -- still true.
Indeed - so there's nothing wrong with buying something through an intermediary (i.e. the cash in the parking lot deal - another free market transaction).
That's ok. Mark Shuttleworth wants to be Jobs mk II. This is his text from the ubuntu bug report on removing the update notification from the notification area.

"But, we're not afraid of making bold moves. Ubuntu itself was a bold move, and has attracted a fair amount of criticism for its very existence, but that didn't stop us. If we want to transform the Linux desktop from where it is today, to something that Apple will feel obliged to emulate in parts, we are going to have to make bold moves and big changes, and those will cause distress. If we're right, the result will be fantastic, and the changes will be embraced by other distributions and upstream. If we're wrong, they won't."

Unfortunately many people get the feeling they're trying a lot of things without enough thought put into it - and when people report problems as bugs, Mark steps in and says no. They're simply becoming something like Apple of Linux world.
Ubuntu needs to be a bit cocky if they're serious about improving desktop Linux. They won't get anywhere if they're too afraid of stepping on toes.
The vast majority of the stopped escalators I've seen are because some idiot thought it'd be fun to hit the stop button.
In my experience, Firefox has been checking add-on compatibility before updating for quite a while now. Have you tried it recently?
Wow, I'm impressed with how they actually make a good argument, while being hilarious at the same time.
Writing compilers is hard
But if you're a profit-oriented free market agent, and you see an arbitrage opportunity, would it be wrong to take advantage of it? Isn't objecting to arbitrage wrong? I don't see that the making of profit by buying low and selling high is wrong.
I want the followup...

How To Build Utterly Rediculous Systems
Immigration and Jobs: Where U.S. Workers Come From
Yes, so there is nothing wrong with Apple deciding they don't want to sell to someone.
Google To Bring Free Turn-By-Turn GPS Navigation To The iPhone
We do not log any information that people exchange. The data job is to better understand usage/users and to improve our matching algorithms.

http://bu.mp/privacy
I don't know much about this guy, but this post and an earlier one--an email exchange about a fellow giving notice/being fired--makes me think he's a right proper douche.
what typo?
Readability's job is to make text easier to read, not harder. Fully justified text is harder to read and has negative effects on retention.

http://www.adamsdrafting.com/2007/05/03/justified-text-versu...

Study 1: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120024982/abstrac...

Study 2: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordD...

The UK government also gives this advice in a style guide:

Avoid fully-justified text - the 'ragged' right edge can particularly help people with dyslexia in keeping reading position.
Local computer security expert investigates police practices
Yes that statement was about iPhone OS devices which are used by the majority of our users.
Outrage? Author's comment: "I don't think that I was wronged at all. I'm not even upset, nor do I think I was complaining."
Strange to read about this here: Micah is a childhood friend of mine.

I'd still rather use wget than curl, with its clunky syntax, but most places have curl and not wget, so I'm stuck with it.
>The annoying part was that the clerk was not able to volunteer any information at all about what the policy actually says.

That was probably because they were making it up on the spot.
Location services has three sources: cell, scanned wifi, and GPS. Not having GPS does not mean not having location. In many cases we do not get a GPS lock because it can take a loooong time.
Yes, sort of.

Yes apple could have made the launch price higher - but then they would have to lower it after the launch to get the rest of the customers.

But the last time they did that, there was a firestorm as all the early customers were very mad at the very quick price reduction.

So apple chose to start at the more longterm price.

The correct way for them to handle it would be a premium or collectors or limited time edition. AKA the first ### buyers get a special dodad, or a signed shirt or some item to make them feel important. Then they pay extra, and don't feel cheated when it goes on sale at the regular market price.
do you affect picture taken by camera by looking trough viewfinder?
> Cette vidéo n'est pas disponible dans votre pays en raison du non-respect des conditions d'utilisation.

= This video is not available in your country due to the terms of use.

I'm unhappy now
Cool. I've seen and used stuff like this at peer's company in Stockholm, in 2000, just before the dotcom crisis.
Your hunch is supported by research: http://kaiweber.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/research-about-ragg...