skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unlike other kinds of purchases, most people usually consume books relatively slowly (at a rate of one per month or more).

Do you know many women in the 30 to 50 range? Find one who reads romance novels or urban fantasy (cough romance novels with vampires in them). I will bet you that a conversation with her about how many books she reads will greatly change your estimate of the behavior of "most people."

Anecdotally, from what I've seen in customer reviews, Amazon is making huge inroads with Kindles in that sort of core customer segment.

I'm also a bit of an outlier: I just picked up my 78th, 79th, and 80th books in the last 2 days, having had my Kindle since October.
Kraft Foods abandons “one computer fits all” policy
The majority of those game anyway which attempt to appeal to the lost common denominator.
Steak is an extension of rspec and sortof inspired by Cucumber. I do remember Obie Fernandez had a blog post about a dsl that looks very similar a few years ago, however I cannot find it.

Maybe I'm going senile.
Drops Windows 7? More like RUMORED to do so.

Please use accurate headlines people... Unless you want hacker-news to become like Digg?
There's http://www.mathoverflow.net -- I can't vouch for whether it's good or not, as my math sucks, but it seems like it might be useful and I stumbled across it on a usually reliable site.
I switched back to Linux last month after 5 years of OS X usage and XMonad was one of the main reasons.

Now, whenever I try using OS X on my 13 inch MBP again, the WM makes it feel really unproductive. Once I have few apps opened moving around is slow. Exposé and Spaces don't help much. It feels like going back to whatever good IDE from Emacs or Vim, not very fun.

In contrast, with a tiling manager, even small screens are bearable. I really recommend giving it a shot. Of course not everyone likes it, but I'd say it's not particularly unfriendly. Bindings are very simple. Setup is mostly straightforward.
That's about as accurate as saying "Amazon stars sharing what books you read" by... publishing bestseller lists.
The Kindle hasn't increased the amount of books I purchase, but I do find myself subscribing to far more publications because of how trivial it is to do on the device. Never again will I wait seven weeks to receive the first issue of a magazine.
I think you're probably right about ensemble setup overhead not mattering very much if you are creating a cluster in your own datacenter for your own apps. In my case, I need to bootstrap an ensemble in someone else's datacenter without a priori knowledge of ip addresses.

I don't mean to be totally negative. I really respect what the zk team has done and it's a fantastic tool that is often and unfortunately overshadowed by Hadoop. I think a small, reliable, coordination cluster providing atomic distributed primitives is an excellent distributed system architecture. Obviously Google and Yahoo have had success with it. I just recently learned that Ceph takes a similar approach.
Ah, but you see, there doesn't need to be bijection between his level and SAT problems. There only needs to be a function that when given an arbitrary SAT instance (your "boolean equation") and a blackbox way of solving his puzzle problems can solve that SAT instance.

The proof of NP-hardness is basically

For every instance of a SAT problem, there exists some puzzle whose solution encodes the SAT solution.

You are asking about

For every instance of his puzzle, does there exist a SAT formula solved by this puzzle

Which is a different question.
http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

size up is worth a look, but it's not quite the same if you're used to Xmonad, that's for sure.
Will the real standard terms please stand up?
Those generic manufacturers have to follow the same rules and regulations as the name brand companies to sell in the US. The only difference is your putting your faith in a different company, one you may have never heard of. I'd rather put my faith in a company with a strong reputation like McNeil/J&J. At the very least I know that they'll want to preserve their reputation in the eyes of the public by keeping their product safe.
Well, we also have the base of OSX (Darwin). Does that mean it's useful? NOPE. Because all the core libraries (and aqua) are missing.

The packages provided by WebOS are useless too. It's built from a lot more than that.

Anyway, it's just some silly rumor masquerading as fact. It's more likely HP will offer something like expressgate, and offer 2 OS's, so that people can use WebOS for basic tasks, and Windows 7 for complex ones (at the cost of greater battery usage).
Good point. And I don't know how the vocabulary test was made. I think the monotonicity can be explained by, in general, people who read marginally more are marginally exposed to more things (even after to discounting for the important fact that there is less free time and they're more intellectual, etc.). But it's a very good point.

It seems like there are a lot of different factors.
It's free at my local community college. Mileage may vary.
And also pay for people's rent, food, medical expenses, etc., etc...
http://www.uat.edu/
Wii Remote Support Coming to Google's Android
I don't think you can really draw any useful information about how much people prefer each device for reading by comparing the average number of books sold per device.

Everyone who buys a Kindle buys it to read books on. Some people who buy iPads don't care about e-books at all. That doesn't say anything about its capability as an e-reader, it just means that the device appeals to a wider audience.
I prefer browsers' tab switch system, because I always see my tabs. I do not always see my Cmd-Tab prompt, nor do I want to study it when tabbing around.

And the "breaking" is just a question of implementation, not a big theoretical headache.
Back In
Wow. Do you really have to be over-dramatic with VCs? sounds like quite a lot of game (fore?) play.
This problem has frustrated me so much, here are things I do currently:

- Ctrl-<number> focus on or start my regular applications (with an autohotkey script). That is 10 applications, more then enough.

- Alt-Tab and Shift-Alt-Tab are replaced with Ctrl-; and Ctrl-h

I've also tried a script that matches Ctrl-<number> with the programs that are in the taskbar. But found that as the order changes from time to time, I have to recheck what number to use.
Sounds more like a "one computer OS fits all" policy.
as the saying goes

"To understand Recursion you must first understand Recursion"
I always felt that left hand ctrl+tab is an awkward position for the fingers. I prefer Ctrl + PageUp/PageDown to switch, and like Chromes Shift + Ctrl + PageUp/Down to move tabs.
What a shoddy piece of work is man
Keep the order fixed but let me shuffle it manually
I'm talking about it terms of actually playing them, not the developers side of things. I understand why they would want to reach the biggest market possible.
I've lived in both places. Dubai for 3 years, then 2 years in LV and then back to Dubai for another year. The similarities in the urban landscape are worth noting. Sheik Zayed highway is just like the Strip - highrises on both sides, behind which are parking garages, behind which are one to four storey buildings and then the desert . . .
I'd like to see how the brain activity of people reading the article compares across religions. Do Skeptics become more or less skeptical when presented with a claim that seems to reflect negatively on religion? Are Christians more or less likely to be skeptical when reading the same claim?

What's the actual phenomenon being measured here? Is it a shutting down of skepticism due to prayer, or due to trust, or something else?
Did you see the Metal Detector app? I don't know if it's useful, but it's a cool idea.
I would simply use autohotkey:

^{Right}::Send ^{Tab}
^{Left}::Send ^+{Tab}

But then, that changes behavior for all applications, not just Firefox.

There is a keyconfig extension for Firefox: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyconfig_extension you could try that.

In Opera it is easy. Personally, I have this functionality under 'j' and 'k'.
There are people like that sure, but at one point I saw a rather depressing statistic that each american household probably averaged something really low (this article says 4/year in 2007)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08...

Mind you I probably average between 15 and 20 books most years, some going 30+ depending, so I know I'm a total outlier in that respect.
That's a title to go to one's head.
Aza Raskin is also a developer: http://code.google.com/p/pythonicjavascript/
OP is talking about a Kindle DX, which is only $40 cheaper than the cheapest iPad.
I think this kind of thing is great - people gaining a closer connection with nature and also knowing where their food comes from.

My wife and I have a small ranch near College Station Texas (home of Texas A&M University) where we raise a herd of Texas Longhorn steers, for natural lean beef as well as their beauty. I can't tell you how relaxing it is to walk through the pasture at the end of the day. It's not only relaxing, but a great opportunity to get more "think time".
I threw out most of my pots and pans, ate some dinner, and wrote this.
Nice. I am a partner in an upcoming Med startup and I will follow this site.
NoSQL presentation by Neil Robbins
There was a smiley at the end of my comment, though.
They have the same price constraints that the developed world does. If oil goes up to $500/bbl, we'll see one of three things happen.

1.) They'll substitute more efficient yet more expensive cars for gas guzzlers, as the TCO of a gas guzzler goes up.

2.) Efficient, cheap, yet small cars will start being developed for emerging markets. (This is already happening a bit - consumers in Beijing tend to drive much smaller cars than consumers in Houston.)

3.) They won't buy cars at all.

There's no innate reason beyond price why consumers in developing companies can't buy plug-in hybrids. And if price is the governing factor, they simply won't buy cars as well. Either way, it puts downward pressure on oil demand and hence serves to limit prices.
Google Ventures  Deals in San Diego, Boston, Dallas, and Silicon Valley
Pandora's Briefcase
Aha. Thanks, Goggles does work. The shutter noise might be in part so you and the subject can tell when the picture has been taken. There's been a lot of lag on every phone I've owned and the previews can be jerk, leading to "oops, let's try again" syndrome.
Yes, I tried it, but gave up after a few days: it provides nothing that manual tiling doesn't (I have a background with a spot in the center, helps tiling 4 terminal windows).
what place is there for a third OS unless it's leaps and bounds better than one of those two competitors?

Host webOS inside Android. Then you get both JavaScript and Android apps as 1st class citizens.
Imagine it is not the tabs of the browser, but rather the knifes of a surgeon or the controls of an passenger airplane. Would adapting the machine to the human still be that desirable?

Humans (still) learn faster and adapt better than machines. Over simplifying stuff for them may actually make things more complex.
Yeah but this is unfortunately something more than that. Platform changes have been very painful recently and might be about to get worse.
I really love his ideas, and think he's right on so much, but as for the question of STM, i'm gonna have to go with Cliff Click on this one:

http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff-click/2008-05-27-cloju...
That's the ultimate version.. Microsoft not only has much cheaper versions, but they also have free express compilers these days too (and have for years). But sure, pretend its 2008 still (at least the best video card available for the Mac Pro was slightly competitive at that time). Regardless, Mac's are heavily overpriced too. You have to own a mac to develop for the iPhone's. And you must use Apple software to develop for the iPhone.

And then you need Apple to censor your app (since they obviously know better than anyone what people should be allowed to buy).

And even after all that, Apple are using all of these, to kill Adobe (because that's what it's all about, since adobe is a competitor to Apple). Remember, when Aperture was first released, people were much more impressed with Lightroom, and Adobe hasn't lost much traction.

Anyway, Apple are treating developers like crap. Even if this is only a rumor, it is only a matter of time until antitrust trials get underway (for any number of things). In fact, I'm surprised they didn't happen sooner for the iPod's (which surprise surprise, use protocols to limit them to Apple's own software, which doesn't allow foreign music stores to be integrated).
Gasoline costs versus per capita miles driven in the United States
For me, the most desirable method changes based on the context. In the context of Alt+Tab between applications, I agree that MRU works best. (Even though I get annoyed when I get a third application in the loop and accidentally tab to the wrong one, it seems like the "habit" business would just make the order of switching unpredictable, which would be even more annoying.)

However, in applications like Firefox/Chrome, where the tabs are always visible, I'm the opposite from you: MRU behavior drives me absolutely bonkers. This is because the actual order of tab switching no longer matches the order implied by the visual position of the tabs. To my disgust, Visual Studio changed to this MRU behavior in (I think) 2005, and ever since then the Ctrl+Tab behavior has been useless to me, because even though the tab I want is right next to the active one, it might take six or seven switches to reach it. My memory of the order of the most recently used tabs while I'm coding is poor enough that the ordering might as well be random.

If you wanted to keep the MRU method in this type of application, I think a solution is to automatically reorder the tabs. But VS at least doesn't do this...not sure about Firefox (it didn't originally, and I turned off the feature ASAP).
HP should host webOS on Android. That could give them an app ecosystem that can draw from JavaScript and Android together.
How long will it take to download a 100 Megabyte file over 10 megabit/s conn.?
I'm conducting job interviews for a System/Network Admin position. I've gone through tons of really impressive resumes (managed network of 500+ PCs, 50+ Windows servers etc.) and interviewed many candidates so far. Not one person has been able to answer this question.

Am I asking something only Comp-Sci people should be able to answer? How can you manage and grow my network if you can't calculate the capacity and maximum throughput? Most of these candidates have Cisco certificates. How can you even get one of those certs unless you understand such fundamental concepts?
Well, right now there better be more books selling for the Kindle then for the iPad. :-)

The Kindle is a single purpose device that has been on the market for a couple of years and every single one of them was sold to a person who is a regular reader, otherwise they would not have bothered buying a reading device.
I'm not convinced by the proposed solution. You're changing an ordering method that's predictable to one that is unpredictable, from a human perspective.
OMG YES YES YES! That is exactly perfectly described. When you are switching tabs the 3rd application messes things up. And what is worse is that what if the third application was an accident, now you have to re-alt-tab everything to the proper order.

Its kind-of the same problem as when you send out emails. Why can't your email client remember that while there are 5 harrys in your address book, only Harry C is the one you send emails to and thus should be on the top of the auto completion list (FF3 betas missed this feature, FF3 has this now).

The problem is:

1) If we do long-term computer learning, the person might judge that this feature is useless. A second person sitting at the computer screws the whole deal.

2) If we do a manual way with "rearrange" were still screwed. Too much work for temporary windows.

3) If the computer guesses wrong, were also screwed because now were stuck with an incorrect ordering.

Consider this one:

What if instead of trying to get alt-tab to work right, we try to get a consistent (press alt-tab x number of times to get from application foo to application bar) which will remain consistent no matter how many windows are open. So if you go from Eclipse -> Firefox, Eclipse -> Firefox -> Twitter, Firefox -> Eclipse, Firefox -> Eclipse -> Twitter, the user can now form a great habbit: If you are in FF, alt-tab = Eclipse, if you are in FF 2xalt-tab = twitter. Etc.

I think a simple formula of Frequency of Use will help. If a habbit is frequent (person switches from application foo -> bar, even using non-alt-tab ways) we can use frequency of use to determine the ordering. Otherwise fall back to LRU (we can always ignore some random tabbing cases). Since a person will keep the recent "places" they been to in their head, it will feel intuitive for them.
Yet another reason California reigns supreme in entrepreneurship. And I think a very big one, e.g. the evolution of Silicon Valley would have been tremendously slower if key people had been prevented from leaving Shockley and then Fairchild plus all the cross-fertilization from ... job hopping (boo, hiss :-).
Poll: Public's View of the Economy is Improving
The month of March is 64% winter and 36% Spring. April is 100% spring.
Yeah, I really should have responded to the original commentor.
It's not awkward if you remap caps lock to control.
The phrase 'Good luck with that!' has the connotation of being misguided, which is probably the causus downmoddus.
Not for the developers of those games who still have bills to pay.
MacRuby 0.6 Official Release
The problem with using a learning model in an interface is making it smart enough to do its job, but dumb enough that the user can easily have a mental job of how it will act. (See the excellent article "Wolfram Alpha and Hubristic Interfaces" and HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=695582)

The more knobs and heuristics used in the interface, the harder its going to be for me to both guess what's going to happen, and know how to "fix" it when it guesses wrong. I think this is an interesting UI problem, because I encounter it frequently. But I also know how to remedy it easily.
Amusingly, Google can answer such questions: http://www.google.com/search?q=100+megabytes+divided+by+10+m...
What answer (or maybe what kind of answer) are you looking for? The correct answer depends on too many variables: from protocol used to network configuration. Do you have a particular number of seconds in mind or are you interested in the process that the candidate goes through to answer this question?
Your example of a BMW vs. a Toyota only emphasizes my original point. A BMW is fundamentally the same thing as a Toyota, but worth 3× as much. An iPad is not the same thing as a Kindle—for my purposes, the iPad does what the Kindle does except way better, plus it does a million things that the Kindle can’t do. And I wasn’t looking at a list of features, I used one.

If the iPad is a BMW, then the Kindle isn’t a Toyota that costs ⅓ as much—it’s a golf cart that costs exactly as much as the BMW. If they made a futon that is better than both a stand-alone mattress and a stand-alone couch, then, yes—it would take over beds altogether.
This change is almost impossible to predict and is breaking existing UI. Will not fly.
Wolfram Alpha too
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+Megabyte+at+10mbps
Block CPALead - Bypass CPALead With Ease
“Lifestyle Business” Defined in Under 140 Chars
Please Review Our App:  Manage Your Searches
In ion3 I have a fairly efficient set of keyboard shortcuts for tab navigation:

Alt+Left jumps to left tab. Alt+Shift+Left moves the current tab to the left. Same for all other directions. Oh and obviously tabs (windows) never change position
on their own.

This works much better than any other system I have used. Muscle memory is a beautiful, magical thing.

It's a pity that all mainstream OS'es insist on deliberately making it impossible to take any advantage of it. MRU in alt-tab is the most idiotic idea since the modal dialog.
this is why you shouldn't base your business model on another companies platform. should they make a design change (or even decide to clone your functionality), your business could be significantly impacted.

i'm sure facebook also sees the millions in revenue that 3rd party games are making on their site and are probably developing a soon to be released "Facebook Games"...

it's business.
Yes, the radio messes things up, which is why I leave it off 99% of the time. It's mostly useless when I'm just reading.

2 weeks if you don't use the Kindle? I'm confused as to how you came up with that. Some quarters I will go months without a chance to read. I turn off the wireless, my Kindle 2 auto-sleeps, and it still has a mostly-full charge months later.

If you don't use the wireless and don't play music (I find music distracting, and prefer my iPod or my stereo anyway) the battery life is truly epic. Though, this may be different for the DX.
"The reason these words are abused is because they work..."

Isn't this just an example of a bandwagon effect cognitive bias? How does the ubiquitous nature of bad copy make it any more effective? If anything, that's 180 degrees from true.

If every marketing statement could be taken at face value, this would work fine. Unfortunately, everyone has access to the same thesaurus I do. How am I distinguishable from my competitors if both our sites read like a checklist of abstractions?

Your point about the request processing number really drives this home. Whether someone prefers the word "powerful" as a stand-in for a demonstrative figure depends entirely on whether they're already inclined to believe whatever you say. If that is a good description of your average first-time visitor, then, um, I wouldn't waste much time on writing copy anyway. Just have a headline reading "This is exactly what you need." and a sign-up button.
i actually am pretty interested in tech. yea about the username, this is one i created because i just wanted to get an opinion without people giving me answers based on who i am. thanks for the link too!
How does the tax thing work if you build the business while in CA, but get the capital gain while a resident of another state?

With US federal taxes, they actually tax you on the unrealized capital gain if you expatriate, but that's a much bigger change than changing state of residency within the US.
I don't feel so bad about not upgrading from my first edition (1996) copy ^_^.

(I do "engine" work so it's not a big deal for me.)
Ask HN: Who's offering internships?
We have been seeing some "Who's hiring?" posts creep up over the last couple months, but I am willing to bet that there are a significant amount of students who read HN that are looking for internships for the summer or fall (including myself) and these threads haven't directly addressed their needs.

Please include contact information, location, and anything else that a student should know when applying.

Thanks.
These proofs aren't really that interesting, it's more of an exercise really... most solitaire games with certain properties are NP-complete and most 2-player games are PSPACE-complete.
The lawn needs mowing and the dishes are dirty!
Response to Matt's important post about the Twitter API
If you are like us, you do a ton of searches across different sites, and you don't bookmark the searches, and your broswer history just captures them chronologically. That kind of works, but we are moving towards a world where people need to recall their searches from multiple devices, across multiple browsers, from any location.

This is a tool we built to try and help with that, and we'd love to hear what you think.