skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Genuine question: How are the restrictions placed by Apple on what's allowed in the App Store any different then the restrictions placed by console owners on what's published for the XBox or PS3? For example, the XBox XNA community games system requires people to use .Net - there's no technical reason for this (the XBox is clearly capable of running native code). However, Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo still seem to be allowed to place pretty heavy licensing requirements on game publishers (so strict you can't actually know them without handing over a lot of cash).

I tend to agree with antitrust action most of the time, but it seems that platform owners should be able to have some say over their platform direction, if they honestly think that doing so is good for their business. Whilst they don't have a monopoly in the market, and there is plenty of choice for consumers, what benefit does the public get from forcing people trying the "Closed is better" business model to open up to direct competitors (who, depending on what you believe, might seriously damage the experience for end users)? If the market dislikes the closed system, it will fail. If it grows to be dominant, then sure - anti-trust seems reasonable. But whilst competition is thriving, it seems heavy handed to rule out certain business models.
Ooo.... thanks for the ProFontWindows recommendation.
At and Between. Evaluating Interoperability through Quick-MI.
Nice, not as verbose as I thought Scala code was...
Ask HN: Any India (specially Ahmedabad, Gujarat) People out there?
I was just curious if there are any HN users from India. I haven't seen a lot of things about indian startups here but that shouldn't necessarily mean there is nobody from India.

It would be wickedly cool to talk to some of you just to know the startup scene in India, specially gujarat.
Medium Shear
I used NaturallySpeaking quite a lot for many years due to severe RSI, and while it's nowhere near perfect, it's way better than the Google VR that you get through Google Voice's transcription. I assume the nexus one works on the same technology.

It's not a fair comparison though, because for DNS to work well you a) have to have a good noise canceling microphone and a good aural environment, and b) you have to talk like a newscaster.

The 80% in the article is a very pessimistic figure, in my experience. I guess the question is what they mean by "conversational". If you speak like you would to another fluent speaker of the language, you're bound to fail. The closest I can compare it to is to imagine you're speaking to a foreigner with only basic understanding of the language. The same issues with homophones and inability to correctly separate an utterance into the correct word boundaries trip up human learners, too.
Deleting online account and privacy
But as long as you don't know that they are untrue, you are allowed to say whatever you want? otherwise all those Apple bloggers might be on dangerous grounds.
Lose Weight by Altering Your Life Style
Replication support has been a big issue with Postgres in the past, with folks needing third party proxies that were clumsy to use to accomplish it. This improvement is big news.

It sounds like there are a lot of improvements with this release of Postgres, and that they are taking a less conservative approach to development than they have in the past; I hope that they won't sacrificed stability too much to accomplish this.
great great post. You're a lucky guy!

There's a reason I voluntarily choose to stay single while being a founder (unless I started dating that person before hand). It probably will not end up well. Sure at first they think it will be all a-okay and just like a "demanding job". Then they realize the stress and emotional unavailability that comes with it as things progress. Girls also always need attention. At the end of the day if came down between making some sort of date with her or getting the product out the door, I'd 100% always choose to get the product out the door. That's why I save the both of us the time and stay single.
Way to be awesome, Lindsay!
You're right. But maybe the computation becomes more complicated and less transparent for the average user.

Another benefit of choosing varying points instead of always the same 1-5 scale is that someone select points from 1-7 or 1-20 also makes it really clear which options weigh more and that can be a statement by itself that maybe, those things that you value and make you want to rewrite (sometimes the reason is just that you don't want to learn the existing code) maybe isn't such an important factor.
Google Bags BumpTop, Adding 3D UI for Android Tablets
The problem is that what Wolfram Alpha can do beyond mathematics is rather arbitrary.
Finish what you start, get into that habit. So when you are ready to start something for yourself you'll stick with it and not flake at the slightest dip (and there will be plenty of dips).

Everybody has issues with their current job. You better get used to it...until you do your own thing.
Good one, Jacques.

Be careful you are not too hard on yourself. There is a difference between having a personality trait "I tend to believe what people say as being true" and making a mistake "I believed that salesman really owned the Brooklyn Bridge!"

Same goes for the rest of them. In fact, most of these are actually strengths -- as long as you temper them with experience. I especially liked knowing how to do too much and not being able to stay out of the kitchen, as I am terrible about that myself.

The one about short attention spans is a good one also because
The C++ STL's map (the associative array) is idiosyncratic in one important respect: while most associative arrays, like Perl and Ruby hash tables, C# dictionaries, and Java HashMaps are hash tables with O(1) performance, the C++ map is in fact sorted by key, yielding O(log n) performance. Unless you need your keys sorted for whatever reason I wouldn't recommend the STL map.
I echo the "Ryan, you're very lucky" sentiment, for sure.

I'm also lucky enough to have a phenomenal, supportive girlfriend. I live with her, so I get to see her fairly often, but at the same time, we usually both leave the house in the morning at the same time, I'll come home at 8, and then head to the coffee shop till 12, so we don't get to spend all that much time together. Luckily, she's still in school, so that helps. I generally make up for it by ensuring to spend some time with her on the weekends.

We had a year and a half-ish in before the startup stuff started, so we'd already had a fairly solid foundation in place to build off of. Also, (even though I try not to talk about this online, but it's relevant, I'll make an exception because I like you, HN) the fact that we have an open relationship helps take a little load off of the responsibilities as well.

The other big factor with women and startups is finding a girl that's okay with splitting the check, going bike riding rather than going to the movies, playing board games rather than going out to dinner. When you're living on subsistence wages, it's quite hard to do the whole "the man pays for everything" bit. It should be impossible. I hate to say that it's hard to find a girl like this, but it kind of is.

My life would certainly be significantly worse without her, though. There are enough unstable factors with startup life, and having that stable support really, really helps.
Higher working memory capacity predicts greater bias in risky choice
"Our results have shown that higher cognitive abilities do not always reflect rational decision making."
Ask HN: Totally different password managment solution
Hi HN,

We had finished prototype of new password management solution, that is totally different from existing ones.

We are looking for early adopters:

- who feels that their passwords are not safe;

- who is ready to play with beta quality software

- preferably ready to share their thoughts and feelings about software.

Solution requires you to be a Firefox (Win, Linux, Mac) user and have iPhone.

If you are interested please e-mail me at kos@coolsignin.com
> I guess we're all going to find out how a privatized monetary system works, at least on the consumer level.

That doesn't make sense. First, general credit cards has been around for 50 years, more limited predecessors for closer to 100 years.

Second, credit cards are decoupled from the monetary system, they are merely vessels for transferring money.
Lisp is cool in many ways, but a lot of those features result in code that is hard to read and painful to debug.

I can tell nightmare stories about even benign-seeming features like multiple-value returns.

Of course, I'm sure a lot of programmers out there can use these features to write beautiful code; I'm just saying that they can also be abused.
The main way they're different is that people have always expected consoles to be walled gardens. They have expected the same things of phones, but because the developer of this phone is Apple, they thought that the model would be more similar to the way desktop applications are developed. The only significant difference is one of expectations.
Context is huge for human interpretation. If you've ever have someone address you in a different language than you were expecting, you know what I mean. It's almost like you can imagine the search just going deeper and deeper without finding anything that makes sense until it swaps in the other language and go: Ah, you said "good morning"! :-)
Great article!

One of the article's points that hits home for me is something I had learned in the first month of my first job outside college where I had to work with customers over the phone and email: Never make a promise you cannot keep. Manage customer expectations; they are the customer's perception.

The article suggests getting things done early for the customer, and that is great, but the customer is also comfortable waiting until the exact time that you specified, too. That early stuff is good bonus cookies, but the core trust issue is doing your thing on time. And if, for some reason you cannot make it, as early as you can figure that out, tell them, and give them a reasonable new time.

As a customer, time is a very important thing to me. For example, when my ISP has told me their tech is going to show up between 8 and 10 AM, 10:15 AM is completely unacceptable to me -- I usually call in for that. If they had told me 8 to 10:30, I would not have had a problem. Even better, if they had called to tell me they were going to be late as opposed to me having to call and find out after the fact that they were going to show up an hour later, I would have been happier.

This stuff is amazingly simple to do, too. I think it relates to an implied point in the article: customers appreciate when you admit your mistakes and arrange ways to resolve them rather than hide/ignore them when they are obvious to the customer.
Nobody would use a system that interrogated you on every fifth word. That would actually be a step worse than silent failure on every fifth word.
I thought the example of per application volume control/mute was pretty useful.
The way I read The Little Schemer featured a lot of skimming, punctuated with occasional moments of re-reading. I enjoyed that series, but I think if I had read it line by line I would have gone insane (at least in the first book). The key is to figure out what they're trying to teach in a particular section (for instance, a large chunk of the first book is really just trying to teach you recursion).
I'd rather see the market handle it. We have plenty of competition and choice.
But the data we're dealing with here isn't on the order of a few percentage points. The values range from about 45-85 on most of them, which is plenty large enough to see given a full range from 0-100. And there's absolutely no reason to use three different scales for four different graphs when the data on all of them is in roughly the same range.

I'm not insisting that the graphs are wrong. I'm saying that they're done badly because they're confusing and make it very easy to draw incorrect conclusions about the data.
Seems to me like the harmful to consumers aspect of the antitrust case will be the hard part to prove here. It seems like people are in near-universal agreement that printer companies were/are price-gouging on their inks in a way that is exclusively harmful to consumers. However, Apple's whole narrative on this TOS section is that doing otherwise would in the long run harm consumers by slowing down the evolution of the platform. Hard to see how the DOJ is going to prove otherwise.
MIT Spinoff Levant Power Producing Energy-Boosting Shock Absorbers For Cars
Good salespeople will create trust by deliberately making promises and then keeping them. So for example, if a client requests some information, the salesperson will promise to send it by a certain time, say in ten minutes, and then send it, even if the information could have been provided immediately. The act of making the promise and delivering on it builds more trust than just responding to a request.

I heard this on a video presentation awhile back. I've forgotten the source but the concept has stuck with me.

Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits for Highly Effective People, also points out that you can become a trustworthy person by making and keeping commitments, even if the commitments are to yourself. He suggests starting by making a commitment to yourself to rise at a certain hour tomorrow.
I highly recommend using fresh pasta if you have access to it. In the US most grocery stores carry it in one of their refrigerated aisles. It's more expensive but the texture is night and day. Be sure to read the instructions as you need only boil if for a couple of minutes.
Read here:

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/

Then read here:

http://faculty.ccp.edu/faculty/dsantos/pages/lecture_notes.h...

Also read:

http://ms.yccd.edu/~jb2/Prealgebra/fm.pdf

A good book series for you would be:

http://www.singaporemath.com/New_Elementary_Math_s/47.htm
Give me a break, this is such a poorly executed rant.

If the 3G iPad has value to you, then purchase it. If it does not have value to you, don't purchase it.

The SIM card is hardly an issue worth getting worked up over, there are already work-arounds for this, and the most likely reason for micro-sim is that this is what future products (iPhone 4G) will use. So it appears the iPad is just the first device to support a new SIM form-factor. Yawn.

The data plan for the iPad is also cheaper and more flexible than the iPhone data plan. If that means it doesn't support telephone/SMS functions, that is fine with me. I didn't get my 3G iPad to be a phone anyway.

BTW, early adopters are almost ALWAYS penalized, especially with Apple it seems. They know this, and yet they willingly buy the products.

The disgruntled consumer tilting at windmills anti-Apple rage shtick has gotten EXTREMELY tired.
The Ghost Protocol – Digital Identity for Immortals
"But sticking to a few topics, like numbers, helped. Saying “one” into the phone works about as well as pressing a button, approaching 100% accuracy. But loosen the vocabulary constraint and recognition begins to drift, turning to vertigo in the wide-open vastness of linguistic space."

"As with speech recognition, parsing works best inside snug linguistic boxes, like medical terminology, but weakens when you take down the fences holding back the untamed wilds."

No, it did not miss it. It was a core point of its argument; the entire arc of the article is about how we made steady progress on the small cases but crapped out on the general case.
"I will be happy to do this, once you produce a whiteboard which allows me to insert a line between two others."
Hmm, am I the only one that had fleeting thoughts that Bumpits had been bought by google?

http://www.bighappiehair.com/
How Frotz Brings Interactive Fiction to iPhone and iPod touch
Analogously:

Ick! So they are taking a chunk off the bottom of the window for a couple icons that could just as well have lived in the title bar? Seems needlessly complicated and cluttered; just put all the icons in one place.
It's awesome that you're in high school and you're already checking out Scheme. I did the same thing (I'm a freshman in college now). (:

On that note (since I'm derailing the topic of conversation anyway), does anyone have experience with teaching Scheme to younger kids? The Little Schemer seems a little too hard for a child, but I think Scheme would make an awesome introduction to programming (or maybe I'm just a horrible language bigot). For the really little ones, I'd probably use Logo.
I am in Bangalore. And you can startups everywhere here! There's like 5 on every street in every locality!
I am a final year engineering student and I have already worked in 3 different startups(out of which only one went totally bust).
I don't understand your criticism. How is per application volume control in the title bar anything like "dock/bar icon apps"?
My Obsession With The Product
Apple just sold 1 million iPads.... It looks like everyone is feeding Apple monopoly. Microsoft seems much better than Apple at this point.
Steak: because Cucumber is for vegetarians
I wish my startup founder boyfriend would partake in that heresy. It's pretty soul destroying to always be somebody's second priority, especially when they're your first one.
"iPhoto and iMovie revolutionized the ability of consumers to organize, edit and display [note: the missing word, create] digital photography and video."

Have you used either of those programs? They aren't some passive entertainment software--they exist so you can take your camera (video or still) around, capture something, and plug it into your Mac later for editing. Apple's Mac software, and the Mac itself, were always targeted towards people's creativity, and there's no indication that's changed. What has changed is Apple has discovered they can sell well-designed products to people who aren't interested in creativity, too.
I thought this was a linkbait title, but it actually is the title of the original article.

One of many thoughts appropriate to this dubious claim: often, questions like, "Do you smoke pot?" or "Do you drink?" have more to do with identity than with the actual frequency of consumption.

I'd bet that people "of class"-- well-to-do, educated, liberal-- are more likely to say "yes" to the question, "Do you smoke pot?" However, a large number of such people are those who haven't smoked for 20 years-- those who wouldn't be averse to smoking pot if it came their way, but haven't looked for it or been near it in a long time. (I have no problem with people who use marijuana, but the fact is that to get regular access often requires association with "unclassy" characters, because most drug dealers are creepy and the process of asking for access is degrading.)

If you look at who is actually smoking pot, and weight by frequency of consumption, I'd guess that the correlation goes away. Same with alcohol.
Jacquesm,

To echo your comment about the DNA testing kit, be careful about uploading a structured analysis of your personal weaknesses to a medium that forgets nothing... People might use this against you (by exploiting your weaknesses) in the future.
Another one? Wasn't there an explosion at that facility a couple years ago, too?
True. Now, when someone points out that the Tea Party types have above-average incomes, will the Times run an op-ed pointing out that the revolution was made by an elite?
Has Apple actually supported any amendments to W3C standards that require patent royalties to be paid? If they haven't asked that the video standard be set specifically to h.264, then I don't see the problem.
Are you looking for practical knowledge (e.g., to solve some set of specific problems at work)? Or just want to understand capital-M Mathematics in general?

Do you know how you learn best? Are you a visual learner? Do you like to read explanations? Do you learn by doing? (Consider http://www.ldpride.net/learning-style-test.html for example.)

I've seen this recommended as a learning resource for math related to computer science:
http://www.rwc.uc.edu/koehler/comath/toc.html
Is that too advanced, too simple, or just right?
At first I was like, “Oh shit how can anyone not get a 10, these words are easy. Society is doomed!”

Then I saw how the choices were actually really strange for some of them. For example, “Emanate” is meant to be matched to “come”, but that's a very poor match. Similarly “Space” matching to ”room” is a tricky sense.
Ford Mustang 2011 V-6 Model Review and Price
The latest sensation of Ford Motors the 2011 V6 Ford Mustang came out with bang. Company disclosed its details to world. The latest V6 Mustang has a 3.7-liter Duratec 24-valve featured engine which gives an impressive 280 ft.-lb. of torque and 305 hp. This machine has specially made to bring good fuel economy and more power.
Seems like a userspace write queue would solve the write-delay problem. On the other hand, it's very dangerous to report success to the user before the changes actually hit the disk, because they might make some other change to the world that depends on the contents of that file being on disk, leading to an inconsistent state.
I wish I could have found it earlier.
Khan Academy
http://www.khanacademy.org
Ok, lets plot uptime on a scale of 0-100%. 99% uptime, 99.9% uptime, 99.9999% uptime, it's all just short of 100%.

Similarly, I'll go to my boss and plot success rates of a certain operation (can't say what due to confidentiality) which usually fails, but occasionally gives us a big win (success rate 0-3%). I'll be sure to plot on a range of 0-100% so that he knows we almost always fail. I certainly don't want to cheat and make him think my improvements of 1% -> 1.5% are a big deal.
It's more basic even than this. Market demand for oil collapses (read: recession) long before it gets anywhere close to $500/bbl.
Sweet, didn't realize these would be unlocked
I have no idea. I can't stand the attitudes in this country towards nuclear. I'm a vegan, ultra-left, hippy and I think the left has it's head so far up it's ass when it comes to nuclear power. I have no idea why they are so against it as a whole. Again, I think a lot of it has to do with lobbying and the existing power structure so it doesn't get the PR something as horrible and destructive as 'clean coal' gets.
But "I expected it to be different" doesn't seem like a sound legal foundation for anti-trust action. In many ways, the iPhone has been the founding of "open" phone development. Prior to the iPhone, there was virtually no real development allowed on phones that achieved any levels of success (carriers had the platform locked down hard). Post iPhone, we've seen actual competition in this space - the entirely open Android strategy (though their App Store also has restrictions, they just apply them post-release rather than pre-release); the semi-closed iPhone and Nokia Ovi models, the web app model of all the platforms. People claiming that Apple has created a locked-down environment have very short memories - even the closed nature of the App Store via 3.3.1 would have been considered insanely open only 5 years ago.

Google have bet that unfettered platform mutability with (almost) totally free development is good for their business model. Great, and more power to them. Apple have bet that allowing a freeforall would cause their business model damage; OK, that's their call. Other platform holders are trying other strategies. The point being, the free market seems to be about allowing them to try these ideas, and fail if consumers don't like them. Whilst Apple are nowhere near a monopoly on smartphones (and they're frankly miles away from one), they should be free to adopt whatever model they think works best for them.
No one with any credibility actually believes he can forecast the price of oil.

Oil is very inelastic in the short term, which is why small drops in supply lead to massive price increases. The long-term effect of unavailable or expensive oil will be "demand destruction"-- many of those who currently use oil will either move to alternatives or go out of business-- and political fallout with unpredictable results.