skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why, they sold 6.6 million according to Wikipedia. This is not bat, is it? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV)
As an Australian I am totally pissed at this.

First we are getting an internet filter despite a crooked trial run which "prooved" it was possible and the majority of the people being against it (especially when told what it is).

Secondly no R18+ rating for games because too many people wanted it apparently. When 98% of people who respond to the open comment thing say they want it then it must be flawed. It seems to be a game of "Head I Win. Tails You Lose" on that one.

Finally there is this. Not only is porn not illegal in this country but this is being brought in with the age old "Think of the children!".

So so angry right now. You Americans dont know how lucky you are to have a bill of rights which our politicians are still arguing over if we deserve or not. Obviously they dont want it so they can get stupid laws like this in.
House votes to expand national DNA arrest database
http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/01/davos-interviews-etsy-found...
(97%)

http://www.doublex.com/section/work/etsycom-peddles-false-fe...
("There are virtually no male sellers on Etsy")
At least I can write a Windows, Mac, or Linux app without donating 100 bucks and praying for approval. All three of those systems will execute anything you compile for it. So will Android.
The mini has 'true' optical out. Mini-Toslink is Toslink, so it's just a matter of buying the right optical cable.

DD/DTS 5.1 is a limitation of Toslink. If you want 7.1 or the newer lossless codecs, that requires HDMI or an conversion to multichannel analog audio on the device (some HD-DVD players did this, back when that was still a thing :)
Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized for Asperger's
Ask HN: Hacker News Upvote Bug?
I believe that there is a bug in HN. It's hard for me to isolate this but here's how I reproduce it:

1. Logout

2. Navigate to a story

3. Make note of current point value

4. Upvote a user submission

5. Login to HN

6. Make note of 'after' point value and lack of upvote button

What you should notice is that the point value is the same and that the upvote button is gone.

Navigating away and coming back does not seem to register the bug, either. However, I could be wrong and it be a freak incident where every time I've done this (quite a few times incidentally and a couple of times to test it just now) that the comment was down voted.

Edit: Formatting.
I'm considering one for use as a portfolio, and for reading while traveling (if it turns out that it's possible to charge it with solar power, it might even go on the list of backpacking luxury items, to serve as a book, journal, and possibly entertainment (games) device in case of being tent-bound during inclement weather).

But my main intended use would definitely be as a portfolio of my photography. It wouldn't hold a candle to the image quality of my print portfolio, but it would be easier to update it regularly, and to have custom sets for showing different prospective clients.

So even though it's mostly a nifty toy, it does have some potential use. We'll see how well that pans out, I suppose.

I think there are already some apps floating around or in the works that enable tethered photography for studio use, which could be useful also, although I don't do much studio work.
How does Etsy determine what people can sell and can't sell on the site? I know its all hand made, but how do they draw the line?
Lightning May Cause Hallucinations
That update was there yesterday. I think that might be the "claims to the contrary" that this post is referring to.
Yup. Was just IM'd that link too. (I should update the post with related links.)
This, more than anything, is the real reason I don't want an iPad. I tell people it can't replace my laptop, and they reply that I should find other activities where I might be able to fit in a little more screen time ;)
Everest, at >29,000 feet, is something like 30% higher than the highest he's climbed -- Aconcagua, at just under 23,000 feet -- and people die from altitude on Aconcagua every year. The 8000m peaks are a whole 'nother ball game.
They better put in a way to switch it off, similar to noflash plugin for safari, or I may never get an Android device.

One of the huge advantages for Apple, is that the iPhone OS does not run flash. I, and a lot of other people, do not want flash. I understand a lot of people do, but let me switch it off in the OS, and we can have the best of both worlds.
Anyone can play in Microsoft and Apple's OS garden. The major difference in Apple's mobile garden is that they strictly control who can enter AND what you can do once your in it.
This has to be the 1080-backflip-while-juggling off cognitive dissonance avoidance. Explain the goal of these extremists.
I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of this particular app idea, but I'm really impressed by your willingness to give your ideas away, complete with logos and domain names (assuming a prototype is built). I tend to hold on to ideas too tightly in case I want to do them down the road. You've given me something to think about :)
You are right, this is stupid.

Apple will do this for you at the store, but I imagine for updates you still need a computer. You do for the iPhone.
Google Calculator and Wolfram Alpha are good enough for me.
FWIW, the grandparent was a genuine question, i wasn't trying to be a jackass.

> That being said, generally on HN one-liners that don't really add substantial elements to the discussions are downmodded to oblivion in an attempt to keep this place from degenerating into reddit ;)

ha. fair enough. though the long version of what i meant is "hells yes, thanks for saying this more eloquently than I could've".
Are they really trying to tell you to get one so that you can find more screen time?

Or are they explaining to you that the device is for a niche you're not interested in?

I see no problem with recognizing you're less interested in an appliance and more interested in a power tool. I don't see a problem with someone wanting the reverse. Or with someone deciding they would like both. Or neither, for that matter.
Well. Ultimately to put and end to us all :-)

But in this case fear. It is their most powerful weapon by far.

Individuals and the media can be manipulated into raising their profile and spreading fear. There is an excellent book called "risk" by dan Gardner which deals with the topic in great detail.
I had my iPad on the coffee table in front of my favorite couch, and still found that I pulled out my laptop most of the time.

I ended up taking it back tonight after having it for less than a week -- it's a nice device, but it's just not for me. I enjoy surfing the web a lot more on my laptop and don't really play many games, so all I really used it for was reading... I can't justify the cost of the iPad just for reading when I can do that just as easily on my phone (all my books are from Project Gutenberg, the Baen Free Library, or Kindle).

Like I said, it's a nice device and I'm sure a lot of people will have a good niche for it, but I'll stick to my phone, my MacBook, and my Vaio running Win7. For me, personally, there's just no room for an in-between device.
Still pretty poor, considering it's been around longer than the iPhone has. The Palm Pre was considered a failure and it sold more units than the Apple TV did in its first year.
SEO Company in Australia offers FREE WEBSITE ANALYSIS
It's great to have competition. For my needs Android is still a little too clunky in the UI department. I use it but I don't enjoy using it. Lots of simple things are made far too complex. For instance setting the action of plugging in a USB cable each time (or risking data corruption by not un-mounting the SD card) Using multiple e-mail clients because I have GMail and a separate IMAP server setup. The menu/back/home/search button setup is a bit awkward to me. Why have these extra buttons when you have a big touchscreen? I don't really like switching between the touchscreen and physical buttons constantly. It's not a smooth experience.
Sure.

But what result are you (or Mohammed Doodlers - "MoDoods"?) hoping to achieve?

And will antagonizing militant muslims help achieve that goal?

Edit: the point is you're antagonizing waaaay more (likely on the order of 1 billion or more) than the people you're trying to, which is counter-productive.
If there's a killer app for the iPad, this is it. I'm not surprised to see them doing well at a $25 price point. It's worked well for me for a long time, on both the iPhone and iPad.
And "Hacker News" doesn't?
Either the author doesn't understand bootstrapping, or I don't.

according to wikipedia, 'Bootstrapping ... a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help'.

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

I fail to see how either Twitter or YouTube fall under that classification. Both the companies needed outside investment to continue operating, and YouTube was not profitable when it was bought by Google. Therefore they were getting external funding.
Twitter too has been taking external funding.

I don't believe that Napster was ever profitable.

I don't know about the other companies.
A comment to the above site, by 'tlianza', mentioned http://instacalc.com which I found to be pretty impressive.

I didn't know it existed but am pretty sure I'll be using it.
> I tell people it can't replace my laptop

It's not supposed to replace your laptop. It's meant for those times or places when the laptop is too cumbersome. Anyone who has a laptop can tell you those situations are plentiful.
Patterns in the history of science
So if I say no and I do have porn, that's me lying to customs, right? What if I don't know I have it? What if my kids downloaded something onto my laptop, or there's some pictures still in my browser cache?

Despite what Australian politicians seem to think, they won't be able to build an anti-porn wall to keep new porn out and then filter the porn they already have. They can't build a porn-free zone, no matter how hard they try.
I think these guys have also done a great job in showing how to chip away at eBay. Do you see any potential markets/customers/products that could also benefit from a dedicated site?
> What about the unbearable shittiness of Windows in general?

No - iTunes is in a separate class of shittiness altogether.
Weird, I've never thought of HN as heavyweight or formal. People here are pretty relaxed...
Anyone who has a laptop can tell you those situations are plentiful.

You are empirically wrong: I am a counterexample. I do not have any use-cases that aren't covered by a laptop and a smartphone.
I'm not saying there needs to be a 1:1 relation. I'm saying that, if 40% of your users are connected on peak, you should have some number greater than 40% to supply them. (Obviously, you can't account for abnormal spikes in usage). In a normal day, I shouldn't get a busy tone!

In the same way, if you sell me an "unlimited" service, it had better be unlimited. I should be able to saturate my connection (with legitimate traffic; malicious users can (should?) be nuked from orbit) without being disconnected for "excessive" usage. Otherwise, It's not unlimited.
They hired web-designers with ZERO experience.
Paperclip w/ Rails 3 beta is kind of a moving target right now. As of yesterday, the rails3 branch of the main repo wasn't working in my only Rails 3 app, but this fork works for me: http://github.com/enable/paperclip/tree/rails3
I don't even know where to begin. Apple is the one that made the decision to stay with ATT so it's their own damn fault. As Apple loves to say, it's the end user experience that matters. Apple has stuck by ATT for two reasons: Control and Money. At a severe cost to users.

You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just laughable. Brad Feld has more credibility and money than you or I will probably have in our entire lifetime. Completely irrelevant.
i don't get it... maybe i'm being incredibly dense but it looks like it should be B. this makes the correct answer 25%, so the probability of getting it right at random is 50% because 2 out of 4 answers are 25% - so the answer is B = 50%, and indeed the chance of choosing B is 25%

answering the question at random is not the same as answering the question posed - so the fact that the two answers are not equal shouldn't be a problem. right?

edit: i hate paradoxes, i'm pretty certain i'm wrong, but i can't put my finger on precisely why. :)
This is a performance optimization for common (read: integer) numbers: http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Fixnum.html

>> ((1 << 30) - 1).class
=> Fixnum
>> ((1 << 30)).class
=> Bignum

>> ((1 << 30) - 1).object_id
=> 2147483647
>> ((1 << 30) - 1).object_id
=> 2147483647

>> (1<<30).object_id
=> 166070
>> (1<<30).object_id
=> 161200
I love it when you click to enlarge a screenshot only to get a popup of the screenshot that is exactly the same size.
Hey, some of the investors are here on HN. At least, I am, anyway.
Beyond aesthetics – Design tips for startups
Scalable work queues with Beanstalk
> I'm getting a little tired of this "open" vs. "closed" debate.

That's because it's not a debate. This isn't something that we are sitting around arguing about in the abstract. It's an actual real ongoing issue in the real world that affects people. The "debate" will go away when the issue goes away - either because Apple changes their policy or they get marginalised and turned into a minority player like they are in every other market. It looks to me like the latter is going to be what happens, but it didn't have to be that way.
AFAICT, there's not much line-drawing happening. In terms of handmade vs retail, I've seen people essentially buy retail items, paint a little something on it, then sell the "customized" items... but it doesn't seem like it hurts Etsy much for people to do that.

And in terms of controlling quality, there definitely isn't much... :) http://www.regretsy.com/
It seemed really obvious at the time. It was one of the clearest good ideas I've seen.
er.. truth is precisely a mathematical concept, it underlies the concepts of proof and theorem pretty heavily, not to mention formal logic.
Google Maps API Styled Map Wizard
I prefer the Economist coverage myself, but agreed that we only need one on the front page.
To be fair, there's a "C" in there, but that's exactly what I saw when I saw the name. This is taking the dropping vowels of Web 2.0 a bit too far. Flickr I can get, but it takes me a sec to realize scvngr is scavenger.

"So what's your company's name?"
"Scavenger."
"Oh great, scavenger.com?"
"Oh, no, scvngr.com."
"I'll be sure to remember that one."
Shareable: The Psychology of Open Source Explained
Google Maps launches Styled Maps; reskin base Google Map
How will this "compromise" look? What do they give us for their continued moderation?

Could it really be that liberalism, after a 200 (should we count the enlightenment too?) year winning streak (at least), might have found it's kryptonite. The movement that made it safe, legal and even reputable to piss all over christian morals. That made national socialists -- once a formidable force in european politics -- a powerless group with whom any association carries social stigma whose violent elements were easily destroyed. And now, faced with a different enemy, liberals seems to have lost their nerve.
Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole
Apple launches iTunes/App Store affiliate program
You know Google Chrome has noscript functionality built in right?
Well, that kind of freaks me out. I've always kind of assumed killing myself on a project just might require a vacation to solve. Perma-burnout... yikes.
That's an unfair way to say it. For all we know, the majority of people who try an iPad will ultimately decide they don't like it.

That won't matter to those of us who do like it, so long as there are enough of us to keep the market healthy. So far the outlook is pretty positive.
Damn, I really saw it the wrong way :-) Thanks for the correction.

Scavenger would never have occured to me. But if the business modell is professionally organized scavenger hunts, it makes sense.
Thoughtcrimes are a heinous offence.
A lot of apps allow you to enable different behavior based on what kind of connection you have. I'd be very surprised if this didn't also.
I wonder how many of us have come close to this or have experienced it in real life, coders are known for burning out early in life, I know a whole bunch of examples just from my own environment.

A famous example is L Peter Deutsch, the 'wunderkind' that programmed a LISP at the ripe old age of 15.

Read here:

http://devlinux.org/deutsch-interview.html

Or read 'coders at work'.

He's in to music mostly these days, hacks every now and then though.
Perspective:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/ventners-...

(I am not currently well-informed enough in this area to either advocate or not this perspective, just providing it.)
This is excellent data to see. I'm tired of paying for crappy $1 apps and will gladly pay extra for something that works well and looks great.

Good to see that niche markets exist in the app ecosystem that support pricier apps.
Geeks should take lessons from Jazz musicians on how to flame properly.
It's a well-written letter followed up with action. Rather than a knee-jerk reaction. That's the definition of sincerity in my book.
Twitter "bootstrapped"? WTF?

Edit: and YouTube? If you upvoted this you didn't read it OR you wrote it.
Dive in, the water's fine! You may experience a few bumps along the way, but there are a lot of people already in the water ready to help you out. There are already production apps running Rails 3--just don't use it for anything mission critical.
Ryan Dahl: Introduction to NodeJS
_delirium's contention is simply that all brain states (even those underlying "psychological issues") have physical bases and therefore we can (theoretically) measure them. The problem is that a set of brain states may have different "causes" -- and causation get's really tricky here but that's another story.

For example, the measured brain states associated with burn out could be do to a chemical deficiency (either in diet or genetic), or be because the person worked a long day at work, or perhaps could be a result of the person staying up very late playing video games. Most people would agree that the first is a disease state, but what about the second? The third?

Finally, with respect to their finding that burnout was associated with smaller potentials, assuming that they made their measurements using fMRI[1], then they were measuring changes in blood flow, which in turn are putatively reflective of the metabolic activity of nearby neurons, which in turn is putatively reflective of their frequency of excitation, averaged over some interval. There are circumstances where the magnitude of individual action potentials are affected, but I strongly doubt that is what they are talking about here, not the least because I don't see how they could measure it.

1. If they instead used EEG, I can make a similar argument that they are still measuring frequency of excitation.
"like they are in every other market" - last I checked, the iPod is doing pretty good.

The debate is happening with people who need things that the most of the people buying cellphones don't need. Will Apple modify its policies? Maybe,they have in the past. I think it more likely they will add carriers in the US before changing their policies. I really believe the last thing they want is the type of app on the iPhone / iPad that Mac's gets from Adobe.
The origins of "fanboy" (via MeFi)
Mod_pagespeed
Valid opinion on this idea... by far not my best. But a place to start. I'm finding the whole process quite therapeutic. Maybe along the same lines of monks who make sand mandalas.

Will have to post some of my best / favorite ideas as a real challenge.
I'm having iphone/flash/android fatigue.
Validate your business idea with real customers
I had never heard of WebM or VP8 before, but this is just good news. I just wonder if Apple and Microsoft follow, somehow I doubt it.
There are a tiny number of extremists right now.

There are a huge number of rational people.

They would like to even the odds a little.

To do that, they will do things to move people from the "rational" column to the "extremist" column.

Being members of a tiny extremist minority, they have little direct ability to move anyone anywhere.

So, instead of simply trying to persuade more Muslims to support their ultimately futile cause, they provoke us into doing the persuading. By making Muslims into "others". Because when the KKK marches in Skokie, we're uniformly disgusted. But when thousands of people draw cartoons of Mohammad, they're lionized.

You have to be --- literally, you have to be willfully ignorant to believe that death threats to cartoonists are designed to cow us into not depicting Mohammad.

What bothers me about this whole thing is not that we're offending Muslims. What bothers me is that we're so easily manipulated.
So people like those who attacked the professor in sweden are all coordinating to get the media all riled up and scare the shit out of me and thus making me ripe for manipulation by evil politicians? I think not. My strategy is easy. Repeat the pattern of (almost complete) secularization of jews and christians in europe. Treat violence against people who offend religious sensibilities like you treat violence against jews or africans; punish those who do it and make all association or expressions of sympathy with the perpetrators unacceptable.
Windows Phone 7 Apps Must Be Microsoft Approved - http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/03/wi... http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/15/confirmed-marketplace-wil...
Ok, that makes sense. But even if it does not rule it out there definitely is something going on here, which is why there will have to be some more study. The surprising thing to me is that they could find any evidence at all, instead of no differences between people with and without the burn-out symptoms.

After all for a variety of psychological disorders there is no objective difference between a 'healthy' and a 'diseased' brain that we can nail down, to find one in this instance is an indication that there might be some clear underlying cause.

As long as that cause has not been found it's somewhat speculative but my guess is that if they can nail it down so clearly that a cause will one day be found.
To your first sentence: yes. That being the entire point of terrorism.
It's a pretty balanced view, even if it could have done without the 'terrorist' mention, that's just too obvious.
What did you like about the way they built the site and community? What don't you like, if anything? Is there one lesson in particular people can take away from Etsy?
so you can sync your music library between your android smartphone and your computer as long as you have an internet connection?
I hope they included checkbits!
Is there a drop-in open source library that basically does Google-like calculations, including conversions? It's one of those things that Google does so well I don't really feel compelled to do myself, but really feel like I should have a tool for because it's not something you need a massive server farm for.
Andrew Rubin, Android Inventor's Stance on Microsoft Silverlight on the Android
Cyber Lover Story
Great story.
"Once a week I spend a few minutes looking for new interesting subreddits. http://www.reddit.com/r/newreddits/ helps with that too."

It seems pointless to subscribe to new subreddits since you don't know whether they'll have traction. How can you find 'trending' subreddits?

Or am I thinking about this all wrong?
Life on earth has been trying to turn the planet into grey goo for billions of years already. I think we'll be OK.
Have you tried it? It crashes the Apple Tv about twice a day, I reverted back to the Apple Tv OS.