skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife and I are both hard-core gamers. We play games for all they're worth, often inventing new challenges, and on a few occasions impressing either the game designers or the relevant game communities. We both recently picked up a viral Facebook game, did some analysis and testing to create a near-optimal design, and quickly moved to the top of our local leaderboard. Most of our friends quit playing soon after.

One of the major problems with leaderboards is that they can discourage those who don't have the time, resources, or sk1llz to compete with the top of the (local or global) food chain. Restricting leaderboards to "just your friends" only resolves the issue if everyone on your local list plays at a similar level of seriousness.
Argh, having a hard time finding the paper I was thinking of. I thought it was in JAMA in 2009 but perhaps not. It had a lot of this information nicely graphed, but alas. I'll keep digging around and reply again if I find it.
Competition is good, but there's something in that article that made me think:

>“Contrast with Apple’s approach: it took us about three months of resubmitting our app to Apple before they stopped rejecting it for inappropriate content. And even now (after we peaked at the No. 7 paid app)"

It's the "after we peaked at the No. 7 paid app", part. While I think it's pretty amazing that Apple managed to create it's own microindustrial economy within the App store, it seems that a leading motivation for writing Apps is just to be in the App store and get ranked.

Now I know full well this isn't the only reason people write apps for the iPhone, and maybe it's because of the walled garden effect that once you write an App you're dying to get in and hope people use it. But personally, I like the Android ecosystem where writing and distributing software is as native as it is on any computer.

And based on that conjecture alone, I don't think it's an issue of 'quality control'. Taking one giant step back, when you have a format that's easily distributed across whatever medium you choose, and don't put quality apps beside apps of less quality in a closed-off 'store', people don't even notice. They go for the apps they want to use and they can search whatever marketplace has it, to purchase and install it.

Competition in the App Store is good. Consumer choice in the market place is even better. That's why I don't own an iPhone and never will purchase an iPad.
If I find a secret prototype, should I put it in airplane mode ASAP to delay the remote-wipe as long as possible?
I don't disagree with your premise, but I think you may have missed this part of the NYT article:

>But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.”

>Another potential backer invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes. When a third financier discovered that her husband was also a biking enthusiast, she says, he spent more time asking if riding affected her husband’s reproductive capabilities than he did focusing on her business plan.

That sounds pretty, uh, sexist.
Very cool, quick and responsive.

I'm curious if you could use websockets to connect directly to an irc server rather than going through your perl backend?
Unless you see a lot of $30 apps running around, which I don't.

Right, but that's kind of the point. Apple has already commoditized the app market. Some apps cost a lot in terms of developer time, but you can't realistically charge more than $5 per app. I think there's still room for prices to sink lower though.
There were several free apps in the top-grossing list last time I checked. And I think ad profits are worth mentioning. iAd is a pretty significant investment on Apple's part... not that they aren't hoping to profit from it -- but the more devs profit, the more they profit -- I think that's the real point. To say they "don't want" devs to profit confuses me.
"The longest path is the shortest and the shortest path is the longest"

back when i was in school and onwards in the academic world, it was always said aloud that the quicker you grasp, the intelligent you were. A lot of students(i perceive - even now) were in rush to prove that they understood - many a times getting to the end of the book before understanding the basics. The momentary appalaud of "well said" and "hurray!" turned out to be a disease - a disease of skimming thru and finding the answers. This got into an habbit and now well embedded in my approach to even outside books. 20 years (outside school) and still counting on the skimming the book[most recently, I picked up a Math book (Intro to Analysis- as suggested Brad's earlier post)]. Struggling thru is a small part of the battle; mind plays the depression game while I try to search for a notation (the greek for complement of a set), while I don't give in as I used to, nowadays it plays the second game of age-"35 years and you don't know 'xyz'!". So yes, my the shortest path has been so long that I have not been able to put an end to it. </end-self-humiliation>

"avoid isolation"

would anyone suggest how to get by this? I work in the enterprise world, where the likes are 9-5/fix-the-bug-save-my-arse. I haven't met anyone whom I could ask about a notation or even discuss about this. I am shy to meet people (read- fearful).few people I did try to ask usually have the repulsive smirky grin. I looked for user groups in the local area (seattle-at present), but didn't find any. It would be awesome if someone tells me this proof of A-intersection-B-intersection-C is going to help in XYZ.
I think that comment was just intended to highlight that even the developer of a pretty successful iPhone application (by the metric of popularity) hasn't received any outreach from Apple.
I've been using this for about two or three days and apart from a few issues (unable to create more pages, no revisions, import your own symbols) its a fantastic v1 product and the live aspect is better than most I've tried.
You don't think it has more to do with the fact that most men have little interest in womens' makeup?

I find it hard to believe there are many men out there who'd really like to be cosmetologists but are afraid of being seen as gay. But if you're out there, feel free to reply!
Looks like they tried to unify the design with that of the MacBooks and the iMacs, but to me it ends up looking decidedly less Apple. It reminds me of a generic digital camera design, or even an external hard drive.

My guess is that making laptops and desktops look like digital cameras makes them stand out as sturdy and simple, while designing a phone with similar goals just makes it fit in.
I'd been wondering for years why people's eyes got more deeply set as they got older. I thought perhaps some tissue behind them shrunk. I had no idea the zygomatic arches actually moved.

It isn't only in the really old that you see this. Even by 35 people's eyes are more deeply set. It's one of the main reasons plastic surgery can never really reproduce the appearance of youth. Or perhaps I should say, can't currently. Presumably one day they'll get good enough at munging bones to move people's eye sockets.
Not saying this is likely, but: what if this is an older less-featured prototype, or a design/features direction they're not going, or the low-end model of a batch of several new models? Leaking this could create complacency in competitors, or even effectively lower expectations among fanboys (making the ultimate release more surprising). Compare: Apple's misdirection on iPad pricing which helped make actual prices seem lower.
The first thing I'd do is make the tag line more prominent to announce it's intent clearly - "If it was on the front page of Reddit, Digg, or Hacker News then you'll find it."

As for the name I don't mind it, since it sounds like "Dijkstra". But that's my inner geek talking.
They're probably on cosmetology message boards, not HN.
Read a little on web sockets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket) - it sounds like the server is required to speak HTTP for the initial handshake, so connecting directly to an IRC server would not work.
Came here to say this. G-tests are the way to go, any other method and you end up with problems. I usually go with a 98 to 99% confidence, because really, the odds of the loser being much worse than the winner are so small that it doesn't really matter and I would rather iterate quickly.
And yet, apple has taken concrete steps to try to encourage more high quality (i.e. pricier) apps, including adding the "top grossing category" to the app store.

The post also fails to give any examples whatsoever of how apple is actively encouraging the cheap/free apps. One might argue that they kind of discourage it by charging the $99 fee to join the program that lets you post apps. Apple makes it so that it costs you money to give away your programs.
I could not agree more. Sent from my Nexus One that literally just arrived. My semi-new iPhone is on Craigslist, and I'm already working on an Android app.

That's quite some free advertising.
I think I've only heard of two of those (mint and docstoc) - and they're not sites I use.

Getting some venture capital, which is hard enough in itself, doesn't seem to be any kind of decent predictor of success. This SaS business is a tough slog despite all the excitement people have about it.
I feel like I'm missing something here. Why would someone copy around a single private key instead of generating a new key pair for each user@host?
Why would they, when they're paying $70 for something that should a lot less expensive? Can't find better customers! :)
I understand, and I'm not trying to be a hard ass. It's just that the internet has caused a giant flood of information, and one way I'm trying to cope is to prefer/choose concise and efficient expression. This means that I tend to stop reading or watching if a piece of content seems to take a while to get to the core of it's point.
Most user groups that I know of are purely for "networking" or to push for a sale of the latest book. But sure- a meetup like the one for clojure in bay area/NY might be enlightening.
what strikes me, when reading these figures is the comparison between their total funding and the monthly uniques! E.g $2,880,000 vs 373 uniques in Feb 2010 for BroadClip ...
Intel demos software that reads your mind
Drug Policy Prof "prepared to bet" that a hallucinogen will be FDA-approved soon
Drug Policy Prof "prepared to bet" that a hallucinogen will be FDA-approved soon
01234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
Honestly, I can't remember. But more than happy to change it with better (or for that matter... any) reasoning!
I think personality quirks are fair game - if you can't interact with Normals the way they interact with each other, then almost by definition, you are abnormal.

The main social failure that I tend to notice in CS geeks (not all, but some) is complete indifference to other peoples mental states. They don't notice, or don't care, that their conversational partners are not interested in or knowledgeable about what they're saying, they don't seek out a common ground, and they write off any resulting awkwardness as a mere symptom of geek discrimination or (worse) take it as an indication of the stupidity of the other person.

I realize that sometimes this is actually a result of Asperger's, which for whatever reason seems more common in CS than any other field, so I'll always cut a lot of slack to those that have such a disorder. But I also think that a lot of kids that are mentally normal end up getting too deep into the dorking out that tends to happen around computers and lose all interest in social interaction, which is a shame, because it's really rather simple - I know people with Asperger's that have learned to "fake it" well enough to be enthusiastically welcomed in social settings, so people without it have little excuse.

Hobbies are a red herring - you can obsess over Doctor Who, World of Warcraft, or gruesome Internet porn all you want, the issue is whether you can read people well enough to stop talking about them and move on to something else when they are making the conversation less enjoyable for others. For better or worse, most geek hobbies are peculiar to geeks, so when you're around non-geeks, it's usually on you to leave your area of comfort in the name of finding good topics of discussion.
I don't think the author of this blog post supports his argument well enough. I don't personally see a conspiracy from Apple to make free succeed.
>There were several free apps in the top-grossing list last time I checked.

Okay, how many of them are making a serious profit? How many are breaking even? How many are profiting primarily due to an existing customer base? (I'm thinking of Pandora as an obvious example; they're making money off of Apple's platform, but they were making money before they wrote an iPhone app.)
Right, so we should concentrate on making sure that talented female potential CS types are not deterred from going into CS. But what we can't do is use the fact that few CS types are women as evidence that such deterrence exists.

Actually there are features of the CS culture which discourage not only most women but many men from wanting to become programmers. It would be worth fixing these anyway. So guys, go have a shower and find something other than Battlestar Galactica to talk about.
It'd be the point if people weren't already making a lot of money at the 99c and sub-$5 price points. But they are. Apple indeed encouraged cheap apps on the iPhone, but the market didn't really suffer.
Sorry I didn't think it was very confusing:

Partisan = strong commitment to an ideology. In this case open vs. closed.

Politics = the rules, methods and policies that dictate how a company runs internally and externally.

So the point is Apple uses open and closed source/platforms/standards on a case-by-case basis. Most of their products a hybrid of both. It's hard to be hypocritical if you don't commit. That doesn't preclude them from making bad choices for other reasons.
Good article, I especially liked the quote: "Avoid the dualistic mistakes of technical execution without intuition, and intuition without technical execution.".

Personally, I feel that if you don't have an intuition for something you don't quite understand it -- it's still a a jumble of memorized knowledge.

Separately, I've started to realize the term "self-learning" is a pet peeve of mine. You can't teach someone; you can present, and they can learn. It's like having a word like "self-exercise" -- a coach/teacher can only show you what to do, not do it for you. In this case, "self-learning" means learning in the absence of a structured environment/coach, and the goal is to find or create your own.
Online Health Insurance Quotes
The good thing about instant health insurance quotes is automation. Technology has made it possible for you to get instant health insurance quotes online as soon as you need them. You can get them online, offline, over the telephone or in the mail. All you need to do is log on to a website or speak to a health insurance company representative. They will trip over themselves to give you a wide variety of health insurance quotes.
(Why is this an image?)
I like the idea that the cosmetology boards are filled with male programmers who really wanted to be cosmetologists, and HN is filled with female cosmetologits who really wanted to be programmers.
Why is that? To me it is extremely, extremely unlikely that some important person randomly "forgot" their new prototype in a random bar. Apple has tricky marketing/market research tactics. I wouldn't be surprised. They thrive on hype.
You can get 100mbit here for $150! At least it's not paraguay
Google: Controversial content and free expression on the web
What struck me was that profits, or even revenue, apparently aren't even interesting metrics, at all.
Random, but not by chance: A new kind of random number generator
Where is the evidence? People like to make random statements a lot now days.
Microsoft debuts 'fix it' program
Trojan poses as Google Chrome extension
Dr Dobbs - F#: Putting the 'Fun' into 'Functional'
It's an "infographic."
The possible illegality of them is no problem for the interns, only the company. I can't see how your lecture could be convincing, especially since a lot of people think they're moral, each side is getting consideration in the legal sense.
Sales stats for the Android Market: not so good
I think that's the idea, to make it impossible for them to be useful and legal.
But they're not about developing a positive opinion of the company in the potential employee's minds. Yes, a company will do that because a company always wants to paint itself positively -- but from their perspective the purpose of internships is to filter through and prove talent.

The company isn't investing (after all, they're not paying). 'tis the intern investing in his or her own career -- as it should be!

The company is more concerned with if _they_ like _you_. The reward for the intern is experience, and maybe a future position.
The story on the iPad and piracy: Rubbish
I don't think there's a conspiracy either. I'm only suggesting that Apple would rather your app cost $1.99 than $19.99, and that they have an incentive to make you believe you can make a lot of money even when the App Store is quickly becoming a race to the bottom.
What would the alternative be? Require all students to pay their own way, thereby disincentivizing parents to work hard and save for their children's college education?

On the other hand, there are a lot of intangible benefits to be had by paying your own way through college; benefits that will never be recognized by those born with a silver spoon in their mouths.

In other words, I don't see this as a fundamental problem. It's just the way it is.
We're going through this right now ("converting" an LLC to a C-Corp to make VCs happy).

It's not hard, not expensive, and not cumbersome. We're creating a new C Corp, and making the old LLC a subsidiary of the C Corp. It's common and standard and it's about 5% of the paperwork that lawyers do to close a Series A round. It's basically the easiest part of our financing.

Don't worry about starting your company as an LLC. If you don't take VC, you'll be MUCH happier with an LLC than a C Corp, because it avoids double taxation in many scenarios.

The best of both worlds is to start as an LLC and only convert to a C Corp when and if you take Series A financing, in which case you'll be doing so much paperwork the conversion will be the least of your worries.
3mbps (509kbps upload) 41.64 euro/month (~56 USD/month) Spain (Europe); ISP: Jazztel

(in my opinion is too much expensive)
Why wouldn't you just generate a new key pair?
Deck being talked about: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

It's been around a while, and looks great on paper, however, I wonder if people at Netflix are really truly happy... just like I wonder if people at Fogcreek are really truly happy.

One measure of that is the fact that no one ever really leaves Fogcreek, but perhaps that's cuz Joel tortures them if they try?
Thanks for asking. We don't plan on supporting it. The main reasons are two-fold. The first is that we don't want to confuse the market and consumers by allowing too many choices and so we decided on QR Code. The Second, and more important reason is that QR Code is by far the most prevalent type being used and AFAIK there isn't a scanner out there that only supports Data Matrix and not QR Code. QR Code also has better error correction capabilities which is important for things in the wild.
Bill Gates Talks About How To Change The World (Live Video)
Cosmetology is a pretty broad term it doesn't just cover "women's makeup." Cosmetologists also do hairstyling, mani/pedicure, and electrolysis for example. You can have flexible hours, instead of working in a cube staring at a screen,you spend your days talking to people and making them look good, you don't need to go to school very long to get your license, and while the wages aren't all that great, if you do a good job and build up a loyal clientele, you can do alright for yourself. Do you honestly believe there aren't some men, even straight men, who wouldn't be interested in a career like that?
"In Computer Science, at least, you will not be taken seriously unless they are paying you"

Indeed. I very recently checked with my friend who runs MIT's EECS undergraduate program and she said that all their internships are paid.
Bill Gates speaking live at Berkly (streaming right now)
Unpaid, at home, and with my own money. I didn't treat the internship as a career. It was a part of my education, and I was happy to invest the time and effort. I learned an enormous amount, and it benefits me to this day.
It's true, but as you go on, it gets much harder to find books with worked solutions. Sometimes, authors inline examples in the text which almost suffice.
Hey btilly,

Just wanted to let you know that that slideshow changed my life. It made the company I'm with (FreshBooks) truly shine while doing split tests, which made me look good. Anyways, thanks dude.
The BeetleCam Project
Obviously the argument about if Apple's growth is sustainable or not also hinges on something troublesome about its history: the presence or absence of Steve Jobs. Will you invest in a company that is so much personified in an individual who will definitely leave someday?
Women in Tech. A Revolution.
How did you find the job? Did you go through an agency of some sort?
Are you one of the 10% of programmers who can write a binary search?
As with so many articles about Apple, this post completely ignores the issue of quality. If you assume that Apple would just as a soon have a bad app as a good one, then sure, this argument makes sense. But I don't think most people would make that argument, especially people who know Apple. It's not in Apple's interests to have lots of nonprofitable apps because developers have little incentive to support those.
would anyone suggest how to get by this?

http://mathoverflow.net/
OT (but related): I pay for a 20Mbps connection in the DC area through a cable provider. On a number of speed-test sites, I only get around 6Mbps. I tried calling tech-support, but my representative went down a script asking me about clearing my cookies, etc. I was unable to convey to him that my speed wasn't "slow", it was just less than the advertised rate.

Is it normal to get far less than the advertised speed for a residential cable connection?
Right! This is why the iPhone App Store defaults to the Free section of each category, massively reducing potential Paid sales.

Oh. Wait...
Some might prefer having a shorter commute to work and their preferred nightlife to a cheaper rent.
I'd actually argue the complete opposite, that the race to the bottom has come and gone. You can't go any lower than $0.99 and free, and we hit those points a long time ago.

This next bit is anecdotal. There's so much shovelware and apps without polish on the app store, and many of them typically reflect this free and $0.99 price point. I'm starting to see trends of quality apps that originally priced at $0.99 to compete, changing their price points to $2.99 or $4.99 because compared to the competition, they're apps are of a premium and well-maintained quality.
That's what I meant. I simply could't believe that someone would do this.
Thanks for the feedback. It's true that our home page is not very descriptive. We did this because most of our traffic has been referrals and google searches in this technology space. But you do bring up a good point and we will look in to seeing how we can add more info to create a different impression.
Air Travel to Resume in Europe
IPhone OS 4 reveals its social side: Facebook integration?
Securities laws are mostly about the sale of public companies and the purchases of public companies.