skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you stop using words like "vapid", "ridiculous", and "asinine"?

Developers who build on Flash can't multitask until the iPhone Flash runtime exposes the multitasking API. The developers of those applications are beholden to Adobe to get access to a core iPhone OS feature. This is not a complicated argument.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether this is a valid reason to lock down the compiler toolchain for the OS. But I don't think a reasonable person can pretend that there's no opposing argument, no matter where they start from.
Michael Arrington on startups, skiing and getting Seattle's goat
I hate the new comments section. Did Intense Debate pay them for the spot? I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
I've had a Kindle for about a year and a half and have over 80 paid books.

I read a lot of books and the Kindle paid for itself in savings on books in a few months.
Is there some time after which the exact same URLs can be resubmitted?
DNA Referees
The big question: how much have you learned about programming in those 990 days?
Yes, but it only works for managing X apps, not the standard ones OSX ships with.
Conan Thanks Twitter for "Saving My Ass"
+1 for the uber TechCrunch style headline.
Here is my advice, from the trenches: don't handle credit card numbers. Delegate that to a payment processor. All this talk about what to do to comply with PCI-DSS obscures the facts that (a) most companies would be better off not dealing with hazmat data like this, and (b) PCI-DSS could be reinterpreted more onerously at any moment.
Amusing PG book review from 2000
Can switching to Linux protect your online identity?
I would like to see it get back to publishers at any rate. It would be extremely useful for authors.
i see what you did there
Man the toolmaker
Yes, I'm having the same problem. I think perhaps it's because of the contrast. The bold black on white is perhaps a bit too contrasty? Maybe make the background slightly off-white (like HN does)?

Otherwise, looks awesome! I'll add it to my bookmarks :)
A few points:

-the number of people who have friends vote their stories to the front-page (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035206)

-the time of day (and day of week) you submit your story (http://blog.itlater.com/whats-the-best-time-to-post-to-hacke...)

-(related to above) how many stories are submitted soon after yours determines how long your submission stays on the New page, even if they're all spam

Notice that none of these factors have anything to do with the quality of the posted content.
Yeah, indeed.
To teach people how to protect their data...
any reason you didn't use slinkset.com?
Because nobody can say what they mean by "consciousness". "Why does consciousness exist" implies that "it" (what?) exists, which likely isn't the case.
Save your personal data before it is too late.
I don't agree. Science is explicitly concerned with natural phenomena. Anything supernatural must be the domain of superstition, spirituality, or religion.

We suffer somewhat from salience bias: cases where the scientific process is successful are frequent and expected. Cases where the method failed but eventually corrected itself are spectacular. There are literally hundreds of thousands of papers published each year. Quick, can you name two researchers involved in the discovery of the electron's discrete charge? What were their methods? Now, how about Millikan?

As for religions, I would be more likely to believe in one where challenges and debate were frequent, as opposed to something more rigid like, say, Catholicism.
I did not remove any post.

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2005-08/1123273958.Bc.r...

The cells in the body do turn over, but not uniformly every 7 years. Some things are as old as you are. The atoms in your skeleton get replaced every 7 tears, but these aren't the most permanent things in your body.
"One commenter on Y Combinator's Hacker News site makes an interesting point: ..."

Help, I've recursed and I can't get up.
Yes, I did have this experience. Made a trip to Silicon Valley to talk over a licensing agreement with a tech giveback (by us). One of the ideas was shot down by a senior tech guy there as "unworkable". We (stupidly) dropped the idea after being ridiculed for it.

More than a year later, he and the head of their marketing took at exact idea, created a company around it, and later sold it for more than 230 million.

So, yes, it can happen.
Solving the Alt-Tab Problem
Higher-Order JavaScript
If there is, it's not within 100 days. I'm pretty sure that people are just adding superfluous arguments to the urls they submit.

I think that there is nothing wrong with this for old timeless articles, if done infrequently enough.
A quote comes to mind:

"[She] lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side."

-- Terry Pratchett, in "Men at Arms"
I spend part of last week at a conference (TNW), and it's the first time I really loved my iPad: It's the perfect conference device for some browsing, tweeting, quick emails, etc. Way lighter to carry than a laptop, faster to 'start', and using it for a full day only took some 30% off the battery. It's quite easy to use without a table as well.
Last year I brought my laptop, which was way heavier, and lasted only for a few hours.
According to the article, only devout believers experience this effect. If you "suppose" you are a believer, that probably doesn't include you. Be glad you can still reason!
I think Facebook is beginning to have systemic user privacy/comfort issues resulting from their persistence in oversaturating their social graph. yan is right in that only a tiny minority of their userbase (such as us) really cares about this right now, but I think that in this case our concerns are leading indicators for those of the rest of the Internet-using population.

I don't think that any site that tries to combine the entirety of the social graph with contextually agnostic personal content will ultimately be successful - in other words, no one wants a site where everyone they've ever met can see what they're doing all over the Internet, and this is what Facebook seems intent on creating. It's more than just a pure privacy concern (where privacy means restricted access to personal information) - there's also filtering issues, with my 'friends' being exposed to/spammed by content I create that simply isn't meant for them.

For what it's worth, I'm also actively working on an alternative to Facebook, which will be a tool for users to partition their online social network to match their real-world social contexts, and then use those partitions to manage their 'friends' lists on the myriad other sites where people already share content (Flickr, Foursquare, Vimeo, Twitter, and so on).
How Nerve Cells Distinguish Odors
The article is written very calmly. Short sentences and small paragraphs are a writing style that says nothing of the author except a will to be readable.

Moreover, he uses classic rhetorical techniques, including concessions and common places, in a very reasonable way to show that he understands the other side of the coin.

You just don't like the content. Stop trying to pin the blame on the style, and admit it.
File-sharers are content industry's "largest customers"
Permanent Weight Loss
Sure, I agree with all of that.

But the subtext here is the idea that no one with money in the tech industry makes poor or questionable purchasing decisions, and that's nowhere near true.

Moreover, techncrunch has a reasonably strong brand now, even if the site completely sold out, switched to a staff of faceless worker drones for content, etc, it'd probably still maintain a high level of traffic for several more years, perhaps more than enough to justify the investment of buying it.

Not that I know whether or not techcrunch is being bought, I'm just pointing to a hole in your logic.
Matt Cutts: Android apps that I love
Kochan's book is great for the language itself. But, that doesn't help you with the frameworks. For that, I'm a huge fan of Hillegass' Cocoa Programming (and its how I first picked up Cocoa), but, I'd only recommend it if you're more interested in the Mac than the iPhone. AppKit and UIKit are different beasts to learn.

Jeff LaMarche and David Mark's Beginning iPhone Development, Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson's iPhone SDK Development or Erica Sadun's iPhone Developers Cookbook are all very good books to look into (although, I vaguely remember hearing something like that Erica is working on another edition that covers iPad additions. May be worth holding off on this particular book for a bit..).

The problem is, the really fun stuff (Game Center, multitasking, and iAd to name some; there's many more fun things that are.) is still under NDA. Or maybe there's not many printed books written on the topic, period (Blocks/GCD, AddressBook, using Instruments to debug/optimize your app, etc). So you want to figure out how to read the docs and guides from Apple as quickly as you can. Which, luckily, isn't too bad to do — the docs tend to be very well written.
Lammy is correct. Essentially, it means to start a controversy over something not because it's important, but because it's easy to understand. For instance, everyone can have an opinion about whether Python should have an explicit self argument on methods. But few people would argue with me if I suggested that Python should do away with metaclasses (which would probably have a much bigger effect on the language as a whole than doing away with self) simply because few people actually know what a Python metaclass is.
"... the last one I remember was some FoxNews story."

He said he's never seen it in a serious publication.
Review your notions of time, state, mutability (talk by Rich Hickey)
Ok, happy to hear it's just 'regular kids' stuff. You had me worried for a bit there. I've spent way too much time in the childrens ward of a hospital recently and there is nothing sadder than sick kids.

As for the people that modded me down above, what's wrong with you?
It's past Microsoft FYI, only behind Exxon now.
I don't agree with the people who are being critical of you, but I think you may be missing their point. I don't necessarily think you're being criticized for submitting your own articles as it is that you're being criticized for only submitting your own articles.
I had a Kindle DX (which I sold recently) and currently have an iPad.

Since you said to skip the obvious I will just comment on the actual experience of using the two devices. Theoretically I should love the Kindle, far more than the iPad, but in reality it just doesn't work that way. The Kindle has an e-ink display which is easier on the eyes than an LCD, it's very light and compact, it has free cellular internet access (WhisperNet), etc.

In reality though, I found the Kindle to be clunky. The screen is very slow to refresh which makes skimming or searching through a book almost impossible. The web browser ends up being nothing more than a toy, it can certainly render sites correctly, but you can't do anything interactive and even clicking on a link can end up taking dozens of clicks depending on the location on the page.

In contrast the iPad is a joy to use. Everything basically works like you would expect it to. The screen looks great and is easy to read on. Especially with the Kindle app where you can switch to white text on black background. It's maybe not quite as good as e ink, but close enough. I'm certainly not trying to claim that the iPad is a perfect device. What I am trying to say though is that the iPad is a good enough book reading device, and it blows the Kindle away in many other aspects, so in the end the Kindle went up for sale and I haven't missed it.
Cool use case! Great post!

I'm shocked by how few companies, especially those creating dev tools, offer clear tutorials showing you how to actually use their products (that go beyond the vanilla API docs). Obviously you should encourage people to use your tools in any way they want, and even devise new ways to use them, but offering some clear, concise suggestions/examples is so incredibly useful.

Way to go embed.ly!
File this under "most obvious hardness proofs".
War against cancer has more than one target
Twitter seems to be having search issues with OR statements and filters. They are only returning a limited amount of results. I'll update when it's worked out.
OS X is less expensive than Visual Studio, in fact you could probably get the operating system and a mac mini to go along with it for less than Visual Studio Ultimate...
> It's not clear whether the results extend beyond religious leaders, but Schjødt speculates that brain regions may be deactivated in a similar way in response to doctors, parents and politicians.

Could this be how hypnosis works? Patients for whom hypnosis is effective have a mental model of 'the power of the hypnotist', and effectively anaesthetize their critical thinking faculties to follow the hypnotists commands?
Suddenly blocking out faces on google steet view makes even more sense than before. I wonder if we ever get to the situation where there's a law requirement to remove faces from crowd photos in newspapers / passer-bys behind street interviews.
Lala to shut down on May 31
Seems to me there is a big difference between 3.3.1 and the Kodak case. Apple says "this is what you have to do to be in our store," which is very different than refusing to sell people proprietary parts.

Is it anti-competitive if Wal-Mart refuses to stock goods from a vendor who doesn't meet their quality requirements? If it were, all businesses would go out of business.

Apple isn't competing with Adobe. They are saying that they have quality standards for the ways apps are made.

It's as if Wal-Mart said to their (potential) vendors: Company X's factory equipment does not meet our quality standards. We refuse to stock goods made with Company X's factory equipment. So if you use Company X's factory equipment, we will not stock your goods.

This is hypothetical, but Wal-Mart does use its extreme leverage to get conformity of all sorts out of its supplies, including (believe it or not) by eliminating questionable agricultural production processes.

And, so far as I know, nobody has ever screamed monopoly about that.

By comparison, Apple does not keep the parts (XCode) or the instruction manuals (documentation) from their competitors. They are not withholding secrets. They do not lock them out of developing for the platform in compliant ways; they do not block them from cross-compiling to cacheable web app that can also be placed on the iPhone "desktop"; they do not stop them from loading their non-compliant apps directly, outside of the store.

They just will not stock their goods, in their store.

Now. Are there precedents of desirable retail stores being forced to carry products they don't want to?
Your comment is an example of a false dichotomy. We do not have precisely two options:

A) He's right and forcing them to allow frameworks will slow computing as a whole
B) He's wrong and cool apps will start to appear on all the competing platforms

There's also, just as one example:

C) He's wrong but large numbers of cool apps will not start to appear only on competing platforms (perhaps because the app markets on all those platforms combined are dwarfed by Apple's App Store)
I think if they added curvatures it would make the multi-touch gestures hard to use. Hard to do a 3-finger swipe on a curved surface because your fingers would still need to be at an angle to the surface causing you to unnaturally bend your hand upward.

Try to use a touch pad that is at a 45 degree angle away from you, you'll find your wrist straining over. I'm sure they tried a curved mouse, but then realized the touch gestures would be too painful on the wrist.
I understand what NP-complete means and that for a single problem there will always be a particular solution that just prints the solution.

But in the article is said:
The proof is surprisingly simple and he did it by showing how the boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) can be mapped onto a level in the game.

And only an example level was given, one that looks like it was designed for that purpose. What I can't understand is how a "real" level of the game (like this one: http://bit.ly/bOWbgi ) can be mapped in a boolean equation.
I did find them for free, but not until later. I suddenly had a hankering to read each book, and $2 total ended up being an acceptable spend.
Will soon happen given mobile penetration. If we're talking per user.
Actually, it's less than that. It's your perception of the healer. In other words, people don't think skeptically about people they trust. Essentially a tautology, only confirming that those are the regions of the brain involved in skepticism.
The input is energy, and it costs $100/bbl to do it, and the energy comes from coal. All the catalysts etc needed are reused, so availability is not a serious problem.

Of course as the price of oil goes up, the price of coal goes up too, so the dollar amount goes up as well. But if you need oil specifically because it's liquid, then oil's price will go up more than coal, and eventually it will become worth it to use coal. We came close last year - they even started test projects in Pennsylvania.

And we have a LOT of coal. Centuries worth. And liquefaction is not even a serious environmental hazard (like burning coal is) because all the heavy metals are refined out.
no reasonable expectation of privacy, not gon happen
You're right. I tend to assume that everyone takes an interest in their worldview, and can argue about it. It seems incomprehensible to me that someone could not be deeply engaged with their own beliefs--but then I have these paradoxical conversations where I learn that no, many people have no idea what exactly they believe or why it's that way.

It seems to me that religion is something everyone ought to be challenging, because it often includes strong moral directives with enormous impact on our lives.
Noostr will be on GitHub as soon as we reach a stable release. This is expected to be v0.7 (current is 0.5, with 0.6 in the next 24 hours). I'll certainly remember to post here when it officially goes on GitHub (the source is downloadable from http://noostr.com/ already).
Nice. More context? :_)
How To: Run iPhone Apps on the iPad Without Pixel Doubling
I love using the HD280s at work. They replaced a pair of Sony headphones which stopped emitting audio when the active noise-cancellation circuitry died. The Sennheisers block more of the mid and high level conversation noise (32db attenuation) and sound much better.

Additionally, since they are "pro DJ" headphones, Sennheiser offers replacement cords and earcups.
How is this even news, I have a book on my shelf here about fractals with much better leaf patterns from simple equations that is over 15 years old.
im trying to figure this out as well.
Shanghai's Expo nearly ready
Your own personal DNA config file, manipulated through lifestyle choices.
How can you tell when its going to be well formatted versus just a paywalled copy of the free one?
one thing that makes me a bit nervous about this is how frequently it's wrong on its finer points. if you look at the attributes of the tagged people you'll see they are wrong about 50% of the time (for instance a smiling male is auto tagged as a non-smiling female). this makes me nervous because we are in a place now where the layman takes the absolute, digitally measured attribute as fact (ie: this is a woman, this person is smiling), instead of using their own facilities.

it's a minor thing, with this example, i know, but how long before the precision of our digital measurement ends up hurting us because the layman doesn't understand its inaccuracy?

edit: this isn't a critique of face.com, but those who may end up using it. face.com = awesome tech, very cool.
That's not a bad idea, because you're focusing on a segment that FB can't really aim at because it's just too small. That way, you can fulfil your customers' needs better than FB could. The risk is that an app could leverage the FB environment to replicate what you're doing, or an existing health site could pop some Facebook Connect or other social aspect onto their offering...but no reason not to try. Good luck!
Come one come all and play the crazy Hacker News Language Game!
Avoiding Blind Spots in Virtual Networks
At the risk of over-tooting, categories and control over which are displayed on which pages are features that will be in Noostr in the next week or two. Sub-domains are also slated for a future version - probably 0.9.
If you don't see Jobs's writings on the subject as emotionally overwrought appeals ("We have to keep our platform pure to protect you, our loyal user!"), we'll have to agree to disagree.

This is exactly like a "Won't somebody think of the children?" appeal. What else do you call it when the company rejects both a programming tool and a dictionary for "bad language?"
You can tax oil, if we are short of oil. But if we are sort of energy in general, then taxes won't work.

Energy is the input to every single thing humans do. If you tax energy then the price of _everything_ will go up.

You can't build a wind turbine without energy. If wind turbines produce less energy than it takes to make them, you are stuck.

As it turns out wind turbines produce more, but not a lot more. Solar cells produce less.

Even nuclear power just barely produces more than the energy used to build the plant (at least in the first 10-20 years).
Sensational[ist] headline - agreed.

Obvious result. Not so sure as I don't agree that the interesting result is that being spun from the paper (of which I've only read a detailed review and an abstract as it's paywalled).

The takeaway point for me, that harkened back to Milgram's Experiments and the like, was that the person running the experiment was able to induce in the subjects entirely different behaviour simply by saying the level of authority that the people they were hearing [supposedly] had.

To recapitulate they alter their critical consideration according to the level of authority claimed for the speaker by a third party. It is the authority of the scientist that swings the whole thing.
Ten Articles on Test-Driven Development
Have you ever been in a relationship? Once trust is gone you can never get it back. No mater how hard you try.

Once Mark Zuckerberg loses people's trust - which it seems he is doing so now, he can never regain it.
No. You get a new story if no previous one with that url is in memory, which is increasingly likely if it's older. It works surprisingly well in practice.
A physical analogy for monads
Handbrake has a horrendous UI. It just about copes if you need to rip a DVD to the best possible quality, but if you stray from that happy path it's murder.

Have you tried the Miro Video Converter? It's supposed to be easy and does H.264 for iPod, Nexus 1 etc. as well as Theora at web rates:

http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/
Yep. Had a motherboard go wonky on a Mac Pro, and got it fixed for no additional charge, because I bought AppleCare. I'd do so again.
Electricity is not a "source of energy". If the price of oil goes up the price of electricity goes up too.

There are no other sources of energy that are really practical today. Although some are close.
I know that's how it works internally, but I'm not inside. Honestly, I believe in the scientific method in a way very close to how the religious believe in their chosen faith. I have no problem admitting that to myself. Science is basically my religion. The difference between religion and science is what you've described and more (an objective measurable goal for one) and is why I believe in it. But I've never done research, never published a paper. So for me, it's largely faith in the system.
Yeah, that'll get fixed.
RSS feed should be out tonight or early tomorrow.
Exactly like a well-known blogger posting an article to pander to his readership.
... and that makes it completely useless, sadly =(
I would love to have a tiling WM for MacOS X, but it seems impossible (unless Apple suddenly makes one themselves =).