skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They care that suddenly they're on Microsoft docs.com, and their settings are being changed. They may not look at the deeper implications, but they know they're being jerked around and don't like it.
It is unfortunate that many people here actually believed this to be some kind of invention. huh..
I'm happy with Rspec. It accomplishes the same thing with slightly different wording. Actually, I can have Steak in rspec.

class Spec::ExampleGroup
class << self
alias_method :context, :feature
alias_method :example, :scenario
end
end
I agree. In fact, a little while back NPR had a story about Shakespeare's Double Falsehood. There's a free ebook but the quality sucks. I spent some time putting together a decent ebook and put it up for sale on my startup's catalog - http://fifobooks.com/Catalog?bkid=629c4fc4-cac6-4702-ad97-3b...
The Notion Ink ADAM is on the way. It looks like the best competitor to the iPad, and it runs Android.
And this idea is patented. Imagine what it the intelligence of person at patenting office must be.
Derbyshire is a weird and interesting person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Derbyshire and follow the links - a self-professed racist and authoritarian, married to a woman of a different ethnicity and who is also a former illegal alien. I am unable to decide whether he is a genius with a wicked sense of humor or a total crackpot.
18 of the top 25 Facebook games lost significant monthly active users
* My advice to anyone who fits this bill (as do I), next time you think "I should have done it myself", stop yourself and instead ask "What could I have done differently to help someone finish this task better?" *

Thanks for the advice. I'm struggling with delegating work and I find it hard to take a step back and look at it from that point of view instead of just complaining that I could have done a better work (when actually I couldn't have done a better work because I didn't have time hence the delegating).
Thank you, and sorry for the harsh tone, in daylight I winced and could read nothing :)
No, I'd never seen that. It looks like exactly what I've wanted to recommend to people.

I didn't say I was happy with recommending handbrake, it was simply the least complicated option I had seen and my brother seemed to be able to muddle through so it was just good enough.

Miro looks a lot better though, thanks!
You might as well complain "I wanted a forest, but all I got were a bunch of trees!"

... for sale on racks at the local nursery, with their roots stuffed into plastic bags.
They would be anti-competitive to other competing smartphone manufacturers not to developers on their own platform.
Many people here are taking this invention seriously. seriously!
True but what are the API endpoints? How does one actually get data out of someone?
If exponential progress continues, we should be able to replicate the functions of the brain within fifty years or so. At that point, we could in principle follow the procedure outlined by Hans Moravec: study a few dozen neurons, program a neural simulator to replicate their behavior, splice the simulator into the brain and discard the neurons. Repeat, with massive parallelism.

Whether this would actually preserve consciousness in the new medium is a philosophical question I don't feel prepared to answer. For all I know Penrose is right, and we need a breakthrough in physics before we can really do that.
Well, duh, Steak is an extension of rspec. Very nice. :-)
Anyone solve the "I have to scroll down to reach content" problem?
If TC wrote it:

"There is no indication that Michael Arrington has entertained any actual offers to buy TechCrunch at this time, and in fact we don’t even have direct information that negotiations are taking place. But it’s clear that Michael Arrington is at least considering selling TechCrunch."
404-notifier modified for more details
The demo page gives a lot of fun and space for experimenting... It seems popular fastfood mascots don't get recognised properly either re. sex and smiling (even though 2 of them have beards!) (tried these links: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bf/KFC_logo...)
When you say market, you mean the size of your potential customer base as a percentage of New Zealand's population? I've thought of this, and New Zealand does have a small population, but the internet has a large population, and it is there that I shall establish my startup. If your product is digital, you can sell to anyone, no matter their distance.

I'm not in New Zealand now, but I expect to move there at year's end. (It's my wife's home.) I'll keep an eye on this thread, because I'm also interested in what the startup scene is like in New Zealand. It'd be nice to have a little preexisting knowledge of the industry when I got there.
Try reading comics using the Marvel app - that certainly wouldn't translate well to a kindle. I wish there was a better selection (and other comic companies would jump on the bandwagon), but it's pretty fantastic. I ended up buying 40$ worth in the space of two hours.
> Sometimes, I wonder what a religion would be like with rapid-fire talks anyone could speak at, poster sessions, and critique for every presenter.

It would look like the Talmud, since that's exactly what they did. Most of the scholars were also farmers, and in the off season they would all get together and argue. Someone would present a logical conclusion, other would refute it, etc etc. They wrote it all down, including all the arguments.
Hell yeah! Looking forward to unwinding after Day 1 at TechWildcatters. My gamertag is pza83.
Apple and Multiplatform Apps
I apologize for being That Guy, and your comment's content was very nice, but hyphens should not be used to separate words -- for that, you should use longer dashes. You can imitate this in plain text with the string " -- ". This makes your words easier to read, since using a single hyphen makes it look like you're just using hyphenated-words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

(Back on topic, my public school education never mentioned this. I learned it from the documentation for LaTeX. A sad state of affairs.)
Webrat and/or Capybara. Other than that, it is pretty much rspec on top of integration tests.
I will also be playing and am also taking part in Day 1 at Tech Wildcatters. Gamertag: runItsADinosaur
Are you implying that there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in google steet view case?
Both Kindle and the iBookstore offer free samples.

They usually work really well though they do sometimes have problems, such as cutting off before the main text starts due to a long introduction. (And I downloaded a sample of the famously footnoted Infinite Jest from iBooks... didn't include any footnotes. Anybody know if that's just a limitation of the sample? My purchase decision depends on how easy it is to get to/back from the footnotes...)
The key difference is that if the bug is in your own code, you can fix it. This could be trivial or it could not be, but it's within your sphere of control. If the bug were in (say) Adobe's code, you could not, nor could Apple.
I think it would be more accurate to say that they don't care about privacy "at that moment". In my experience many will later care about it, and regret the convenience trade off they made at that time.
+1 I really like rspec because it reads nice and has a nice object model, however, I'm not really compelled to use Cucumber because it seems like a there is overhead involved and I havn't had the case where the project manager needed to read the specs with the developers.
"I didn't give them any private data"

Do you consider the websites you browse to be private?
Apple shuts down cloud-music site Lala.com
Google Ventures: Year one
you devil; you just made my day! Do tell the trick, because I run into this all the time.
Police Probe South Park Link to Times Square Bomb
I couldn't get any animations to work

Make sure to remove noLoop() from the setup function.

Try this:

void setup()

{

size(200,200);

frameRate(30);

background(0);

fill(255);

PFont fontA = loadFont("courier");

textFont(fontA, 14);

}

int x = 0;

void draw(){

background(0);

x = x+1;

if (x > width) x=0;

text("Hello HN!",x,20);

text("Hello HN!",x-width,20);

}
Vintage Tech Ads: The 15 Funniest Videos
I love how he takes pot-shots at Adobe:

By the way, Adobe’s shares dipped two percent the
day Apple published that piece.

As if the dip in stock price somehow validates his pro-Apple attitude. If anything, it validates the concerns about anti-competitive practices coming out of Apple.
I wonder if that is in part due to there being so much else to do on the iPad. When you buy a Kindle, I imagine you spend a bunch of time in the book store going, "Hmm...I'll grab this, and that, and that..."

Whereas on the iPad you have books to browse (Kindle store, Apple's store). Apps to download and play with. Music to listen to, videos to watch.
The long gamertag makes it easier to aim at his head area.
And how do you break such a "habit", once formed?

Sorry, MRU is still the best. Pisses me off to no end that Firefox and Chrome, by default, do not use it anymore for their tabs...
Samba and Likewise can co-exist after all
I think a problem is that people will initially load up on apps and books when they first purchase something. I think I bought 7 books when I got my KindleDX in Jan. I have a few more on there already. However, the initial burst of the iPad sales and the sustained KindleDX sales numbers are incomparable at this point imho (unless you can get the data for the Kindle right after it came out?)

I wonder if there is a way to put in the newspaper & magazine that Kindle readers are getting -- though I am at work and my laptop is broken.

Interesting discussion, I plan to monitor closely.
Clue: an ANSI C Compiler targetting high-level languages
Here's the site if anyone is curious about Farmscape: http://www.farmscapegardens.com/#home

The cost saving argument is probably a stretch:
"In many cases, installing a Farmscape garden in the place of an existing lawn can lower your monthly yard maintenance and irrigation expenses. Depending on crop selection, most customers can expect to break even against the installation cost of the garden with the savings over organic grocery or farmers market purchases and the gas and time for the errands. This also depends heavily on how you value high quality fresh-picked produce and how you value your own time spent inspecting fruits and vegetables in the produce aisle."

But as another commenter points out, this is more about keeping up with the Jones than saving money. There's a chicness in CA these days in having a bountiful garden (chickens provide an extra level chicness in some places). And whereas the DIYers have set the trend and have embraced the dirt and sweat of the enterprise (see http://www.amazon.com/Farm-City-Education-Urban-Farmer/dp/15...), the green-leaning elite are willing to buy their way to the promised land. Another version of the same old story, no?

In terms of urban harvest, I think this is way cooler, although who knows if it's successful from an environmental-economics standpoint: http://nymag.com/guides/summer/2009/57477/
I'm curious, what in my comment would make you think that I think otherwise?
Yeah, it sounds like webOS could make a great tablet OS. But I'm not sure about the market reality... apps are so important on these things, and when you've got iPad appealing to the design-centric crowd and Android appealing to the open/hacker-crowd (and no doubt, soon a broader variety of hardware than Apple will ever offer), what place is there for a third OS unless it's leaps and bounds better than one of those two competitors?

Considering it in comparison to the PC market: iPad has both the "cool/design/ease-of-use" of the Mac and the large 3rd party app market of Windows; Android has the openness/choice/capability of Linux. Those both seem to have a very obvious niche and I'd think will continue to see much success. So what room is there for a 3rd OS? And it doesn't help any that Microsoft's going to want a big chunk of 3rd place, too...

Still, it's nice to see more vendors attempting to sell/take responsibility for "the whole widget".
Conceivably, yes, but that's beside the point.

My point is that comparing a Visual Studio Ultimate requirement to an XCode requirement is misrepresenting the weight of the XCode requirement. XCode is free and included with every copy of OSX, while Visual Studio Ultimate will set you back $3,800 (the cost of a well equipped Mac Pro). Requiring VS Ultimate would no doubt cause angry mobs to storm One Microsoft Way, but it is not a fair comparison by any means.

A more realistic comparison is that if Zune/XBox development required Visual Studio Express[1], which is a free download. And really, I can't imagine there being much backlash out of that. I wouldn't be surprised if it was currently the case.

[1] That's still a bit off since there is no up-sell from XCode, but for the sake of argument, say they are equivalent.
I wonder if there's more money in making apps ipad enabled now since that market isn't nearly as saturated as the iphone market. So if there's 80 million iPhone/Ipod touches out there, but 200K apps, and only 2K ipad enabled apps, it may be worth it.

And yes, I'm aware that iphone apps work on the ipad, but my friends who have ipads won't install iphone apps on their ipad because they come out looking so pixelated.
I have a Kindle (bought 1 when it first came out, gave a 2 as a gift, now DX); plus kindle app on an ipod touch and on mac. iPad is enroute. Eagerly awaiting an Android app.

I have about ~150 books paid for (maybe more? I see 10 pages with 15 items per page). 1-2 books per week are consumed, but I tend to buy 5-10 at a time.
If you are interested in the philosophical implications of this, then the following book is a favorite of mine (and may have indirectly inspired this research).

http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...
I'm not convinced that a brute force solver that doesn't find the optimum path and which actually requires the recursion limit to be raised to execute on large mazes without exception (!!) is the best demonstration of Python. This should be easy in any language, even assembly wouldn't be too hard!
I use Spaces (OSX's virtual desktops) and have them on hotkeys. Command+1 gets my editor, Command+2 is browser, Command+3 is terminal, Command+4 is Photoshop.

This setup eliminates the need for alt-tabbing. I just go directly to what I want.
Well, in Firefox I just move together the tabs I'm likely to switch between. This way I can use Ctrl + Tab and Ctrl + Shift + Tab to navigate between all tabs with a very specific and simple behavior.

Yes, it takes a little time to move the tabs next to each other, but I think it's still better than breaking the "suspension of disbelief" when things go wrong.

So, I think the solution for the Alt + Tab problem would be use MRU, but with a movable, always visible order: basically, let me drag the apps in the task bar.
Feels like a fun hobby and stress release, not a cost-efficient way to grow food nor particularly environmentally friendly (they're using drinking water irrigation in the Los Angeles desert instead of agricultural water or graywater, the guy has to drive from plot to plot, etc).
Yes,

And an application framework might, maybe lead to substandard application. But Apple can and supposedly already does control for application quality, so the only reason for the further restriction is ... monopoly control.

Both Microsoft and Apple created an skewed playing field in the application space to further their agendas. Microsoft did this by having secret APIs that only they and their friends could use. Apple did this by including extraneous requirements to the App Store.
Pretty cool to see a design lead with knowledge of Markov models. Granted, someone on his team may have filled him in.
______ enables you to connect, interact, and engage in powerful new ways. Streamline how you work, collaborate more easily, and create high impact communications. Designed to meet the needs of today’s business, ______ helps you get more done — easier, faster, better.

Can you guess which popular product is this?
On my first point, in international comparisons the USA tends to score very poorly. Therefore evidence suggests that the USA is exceptionally bad, and better systems are average.

On the second point, your arguments strike me as very confused. For instance you think that private schools are worse because there are large Catholic private schools that serve poor communities. But the relative quality difference exists even after you control for parents socio-economic status, which puts those Catholic schools on an apples to apples comparison with public schools in similar neighbourhoods. (In fact controlling for socio-economic status is important, because there are strong correlations between socio-economic status and educational performance, and private schools tend to have richer parents.)

Similarly while I agree that advantaged schools have extremely good funding, exemplary public schools compare very well with private schools with similar levels of funding. The funding difference between schools helps explain how parents socio-economic status leads to different educational outcomes. But again it doesn't explain the discrepancy between public and private schools.

It seems to me that you've correctly laid your finger on some of the blatantly obvious problems in how education is delivered in the USA. But your observations are not as general as you claim, nor have you made a convincing case that public provisioning is necessarily broken.
Changing from a simple "most recently used" approach to a complex machine learning approach doesn't seem like a a good idea. Perhaps there would be some other small modifications that would keep the system simple and deterministic?

For example, he mentions the problem that one gets into once one switches accidentally to the wrong app: once you've switched, it becomes the MRU when you try to switch back. Perhaps a rule that an application isn't added considered the MRU unless you interact with it in some way? So that if you switch to it but immediately switch away it is no different than hovering?
Fair enough as long as you aren't talking about the small sliver of coastline running along the western half of SF. A marathon is held there every summer. I ran it once, on streets that were wet with fog, in a nice cool (mid 50's) mist. It was 80+ in Berkeley that day, and 90+ in Sonoma.

When you drive up the peninsula along 280 on a hot summer day, you see an amazing wave of fog rolling over the mountains. You hit it, and within 5 minutes, you've turned the air conditioner off and the heater on. It's no exaggeration to say that 30-40 degree temperature changes are common over the span of about 3 miles.

And on skyline, near the coast in pacifica, it actually feels hazardous to drive it's so hard to see.
Nuts & Bolts of a Non-Compete Agreement (From both sides)
Similar API's are available all over the web. the best seems to be www.pittpatt.com but it's kinda pricey. A big advantage is that PittPatt can be installed locally on a server to provide a secure app. Privacy could be a concern as the images are stored on a CDN.

A big question is what is the confidence score of accurately matching images? The smaller the dataset the better but this was a big concern with the app that i was building. General uses like celebrity sites wont have this concern.
Actually, as a holdout from my fvwm2 days, alt-tab raises a window, and alt-shift-tab lowers it.
Microsoft: 267 billion

Apple: 237 billion

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl%2C+msft
The iPad (which I've ordered but don't have yet) is heavier than the DX, and needs to be charged a lot more frequently (especially if you leave wireless off on the DX). I think that would take it from "book replacement" to "another phone-like device", where I need to worry about charging it every 1-2 days.

My plan is to just carry both, though.
The tests performed on Xiph.org (and all other locations bringing up the same topic) are, in plain words, downright shitty. They are not using any advanced or even intermediate features for the H.264 encoder in question, and I believe they are not even using x264 (which happens to be the best H.264 encoder available), but instead one of the other "underperformers" available, and indirectly (or perhaps even deliberately) spreading the misnomer that video always looks the same at N kbps bitrate, while the truth is that the result can be higly, highly different depending on the feature set used in the video stream, as well as the feature set used to analyze frame by frame.

In a test like this, it's anything but fair to use the first, simplest h.264 encoder at hand, with the weakest settings possible, and then claim that "this is what h.264 looks like", when the most substantial component in video quality is not the data format itself, but the frame analyzer software and the stream programmer (read: the encoder itself). I've dealt in video ripping and encoding since the late 90s, having experience in pretty much every mpeg-1, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 asp and mpeg-4/avc encoder available, and Theora JUST DOES NOT COME CLOSE to what x264 can create for the h.264 format. In fact, it barely beats what Xvid can produce for the older mpeg-4 asp format.

So far I have not come across a single, proper, honorable comparison of h.264's capabilites compared to Theora. One of these damned days I hope I myself will be bothered enough to get my thumbs out of my ass and put the definite facts out there for people to see.

add.: if anyone wonders, i have ripped and encoded video (and audio) for illegal distribution in the so-called "audio/video scene" for almost 13 years now
Right.. I don't really like the wording of the statement. But the article makes sense though. If already believe in someone, your "doubt" mental processes shouldn't be firing.
An insanely useful collection - I'd never have spotted some of these just browsing the Android app store, which badly needs improvement.
I wish I could un-upvote articles.

Actually, it was my fault for doing the pre-emptive upvote thing. I need to stop doing that. It works on reddit, because I can undo my upvote, but even then it's a bad habit.
Did Obama really wear shorts like this?
Most sites lose traffic in summer.
Why Is MPEG-LA Getting Into The Patent Trolling Game?
I can understand the issue the author discusses with making tabbing MRU, but I think preference for this behavior differ between users. I have no trouble internalizing the order of the last few applications (or browser windows), thus MRU is the best for me. I'm likely to have several windows open, and it's fastest for me to be able to quickly bounce between a constantly-updating MRU list.

Let's take the "Order of Application Opening" model:
If, say, I had opened iTunes between a messenger program and a browser, and I were flipping between browsing and chatting, I would think that iTunes, being a background sort of application, would require me to remember to double-tab every time I wanted to bounce, requiring an extra button press and an internalization of that data instead. (As well, wouldn't the static list then require me to Alt-shift-tab every time I want to bounce backwards? I certainly could tab forward and wrap around if I had only those two applications open, but that's rarely the case, so it seems that a static ordering would only ever hinder me. Keep the static order to the taskbar/dock where it belongs!)

Somewhat related:
Something I've always wanted is the ability to navigate tabs in Firefox with CTRL+Left/Right-arrow, similar to the CTRL+# to get to a certain tab number. I looked around once, perhaps a year ago, to no avail, and haven't searched since. Anybody know of an add-on that adds this functionality?

edit: BoppreH, in another post, mentions CTRL+[Shift]+Tab. I'm basically asking for this functionality, remapped to CTRL+Arrows (It's more comfortable this way, rather than isolating the button presses to one hand)
Search Engines don't create Intent, they Harvest It
some good news at last!
(you gotta be really retarded to play facebook games)