skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all you have to define what "using it" means. I would define it as a program is running and/or music is playing. So in those cases automated syncing wouldn't start, such that you can continue to do whatever you were doing and the device just charges.

With such a system you would add a lot of complexity to the system. How many people will be frustrated to see their devices not automatically syncing because the wouldn't know about all this technical nuances or they forgot that they still had an app running.

Another option would be to continue the audio process after syncing the device. Since syncing can take quite a lot of time. Users would be annoyed to see their devices start playing music without apparent reason. I mean how many would sit there with their earbuds, waiting for sound to continue. Admittedly audiobook/podcast listeners would more likely do so than music listeners.

So what are your current options without requesting those cans of worms? Canceling the sync on the device, which would still stop the audio process or disabling auto sync to not be bothered by it while listening to audiobooks, but be bothered to hit sync while updating podcasts.
Another proprietary web framework sigh
If you want to read it yourself: http://wiscreenwritersforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/S...

All 162 pages.

edit: Ironic quote on page 62, which actually exists in the Harvard Crimson:

Zuckerberg said that he hoped the privacy options would help to restore his reputation following student outrage over facemash.com, a website he created in the fall semester.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register...
Move away from china. There's nothing for us there.
Crossfit.
Boating in general. In particular, I love wakeboarding, and I have a stand-up jet ski. The stand-up is my favorite. An 800cc, 80hp engine producing 700lbs of thrust in a <400lb fueled vehicle is pretty intense. There is nothing like going 50mph standing an inch off the water.
I've had this discussion before on a different thread (wherein I didn't get downvoted nearly as much but hey). Yes I realize I can fix the font size (and in this case I just pressed Readability). And yet that is a terrible excuse for the fact that his site is virtually unreadable, considering that he is someone who, by the nature of his work, should be the last person making Yet-Another-Unreadable-Blog.
Indoor bouldering is the loner's form of climbing. Outdoor is feasible too, but even with the small falls I worry about someone being totally alone. Bouldering does tend to be a little more intimidating and requires more upper-body strength, but just take your time and you'll get the hang of it.
He's referring to the movie Pi, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
The HN crowd would certainly find it to be interesting.
Ray Ban Sonnenbrillen
Ray Ban Aviator sind die Pilotenbrillen der 1. Wahl unter den Sonnenbrillen.
I used to have issues getting it to run in Ubuntu, but as of 10.04 it works right out of the box.
Now watch the slow but steady slide of the US into third world status.
Tor encrypts between nodes, the problem is getting connected to the Tor network, you need an entry point. What the government is doing is blocking the entry points. Initially the public bridges, and then the bridge nodes (normal ones anyway).

You need to get the ip of a bridge before you can connect, but once this becomes available(semi public information) the government also learns it and blocks the ip.

There are dedicated teams here whose job is to suppress connections to Tor from inside China.
With all due respect you're guessing, I'm not. You're basically saying "it's worked itself out in the past so it will surely do so in the future." But that's not a logical conclusion. Things do change.

What I'm saying is the fact that we won't have enough jobs for everyone is inevitable just by extrapolating on current trends.

The welfare state being discussed exists because people have been able to retire much earlier without negatively impacting society. That in itself shows a trend towards the amount of human labor our society needs growing smaller.

My original point is that we need to start innovating in how we govern to deal with the eventuality of that trend reaching the point where there aren't enough jobs for younger people. We shouldn't destroy the infrastructure we already have and then try to solve that problem when it becomes a real crisis.
An happy update to Enso's Zenpad gloomy story
Here is the link http://chinable.net/?p=107
A more recent skype feature worth an upgrade is group video calling: http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/05/group_video_calling.html
I agree. I only do BJJ anymore, since really I'm too old to get punched in the face now :) I look at BJJ as a kinda of physical chess match. Every move has a counter and so on, with the question being can you execute it given how physically and mentally tired you might be at that moment.
Which is Win only for now.
Don't give me problems, give me solutions. And by me I mean scribd, not me.
The number of network-effect reasons why an end user should care what OS he runs continues to diminish. This is bad for Microsoft, but good for Apple and everybody else. Microsoft attempted to sandbag the browser because it foresaw this endgame, and it knew that its business model is based on a precarious positive feedback loop consisting of Windows, Office, and a very large install base. This feedback loop is broken when one no longer needs Windows to run most available software, collaborate with others, or find supported hardware.

At first, Google's offerings look, as another poster said, like spaghetti flung at a wall in hope that some will stick. I think there's a more cohesive strategy behind it, and it's all about building a platform on top of Windows (and other operating systems) to cut off Microsoft's air supply. Google's cloud printing initiative is a perfect example of this -- if a site's back-end can generate printer-ready content and allow a user to print it locally from a netbook/tablet/phone/whatever, that takes away a major reason to keep a Windows desktop sitting around at home connected to a printer. A user can just buy a Wifi-enabled printer if he cares about dead-tree artifacts.

I'm working now on a GWT application. Why, other than for its own internal purposes, would Google invest so much in this tool? It allows a new generation of in-house corporate apps requiring fast user interaction (think call center) to be built for the browser instead of the obvious Windows-centric alternatives like Visual Basic. One less reason for a Fortune 500 company to deploy 10K Windows desktops. Perhaps a call center could be run on a bunch of ChromeOS appliances?

Look at the initiative to introduce Gb-to-the-home. Google certainly wins if Youtube becomes like a TV network, but the lack of bandwidth also requires users to use home servers to house their content locally. Although appliances for this are certainly becoming more common, many consumers likely use a Windows machine to serve up their content to their TVs.

If I had more time, I'd write about other stuff Google's doing and how I think it ties in to the "layer on top of the desktop" strategy. While a rising cloud/network tide will float all non-Microsoft boats, how does Google justify paying for all the water required? Is the ROI there to support such a subsidy?
S(Gl)adly I don't live in Beijing, but Nanchang, it's a developing city in the south, Jiangxi province. Nothing like a startup hub here but the cost of living is far below that of Beijing.
He's kinda right, a file format meant for printing fixed size pages will inevitably suffer from some impedance mismatch when automatically converting it to a relatively simple document format meant for screens.

But I disagree with the claim that it isn't HTML. It sure isn't pretty but a if you define HTML as the input that the HTML parser of today's browsers can handle (rather than the HTML spec) it is perfectly fine.
I love to cook. Something that I find most of us geeks are really bad at. Amazes me how many of my friends can't do simple things with a piece of meat and some veggies, but also how uneducated they are about food in general (The fault of the North American system, probably.)

When it comes to cooking, I do it daily. Love doing Italian and French Cuisine and just sometimes picking at random from one of my cook books. I find the entire process very relaxing and a nice removal after sitting on my ass for 8 hours doing code.

Apart from cooking I love gardening, growing herbs, etc. It goes very nicely with my cooking hobby so it works.

I find the best thing about gardening is how close you get to the rawness that is mother earth. It's another nice way to step back into reality after staring at the computer screen.
I try to focus my non-computer hobbies to things outside:

-any board sport (surfing, snowboarding, wakeboarding)

-high altitude hiking/mountaineering

-outdoor photography http://picasaweb.google.com/michael.atwood/PublicPhotos#

-weight lifting/power lifting

-basketball
404 - page not found.

2010/05/15 17:57 BST
I boulder 3 times a week. It's nice to visualize a different kind of problem besides programming/computer specific ones.
I practice yoga. I find doing a physical activity helps my body to relax and take my mind off things.

Initially I had the impression it was a 'light' activity which mainly women practice, but after taking a couple of Ashtanga sessions I was floored :-) I recommend you give it a try.
Actually hacking is the hobby here. Job is different.
Watching anime, sleeping, and reading HN.
Web applications are not the same as web pages. A web page is a document, which ought to have simple clean markup. A web application on the other hand is a tool that can edit said documents. It's more "meta."

To expect the tool to have the same sort of semantic purity as the documents it interacts with is overly idealistic. It doesn't matter as much what we can systematically infer about an application, it is more important that the content be accessible in some sort of standard format.

Similarly, Scribd's HTML5 viewer, is just that, a viewer. Not a full fledged PDF to HTML converter. It's primary purpose is to allow a user to experience a document in its entirety in the browser. In a world of trade-offs, and priorities, the markup of the viewer itself is near the bottom.
We learned just about the same lesson (maybe not so far as ditching the insurance...) while backpacking the globe a year ago. Amazing the kind of junk we've shed that used to be 'important' or 'valuable.'
If FreeBSD does replace GCC, will there be any GNU software left in the base system?
dude i'm in china too.. Freegate for the win
That's what I thought too. Sounds like this guy doesn't really get web apps.
French essays – there are millions of topics to choose from; call us today
If you are interested in submitting a French essay that is both interesting as well as indicative of the country in question, do write to us and we can give you some of the most interesting topics to work on.
A lot of the anger seems to come from the fact that an ebook is cheaper to produce and distribute. As if the value of a book is in the wood pulp and ink...
This reads like self-parody. The author doesn't like the way their <P> tags are positioned. Could there be a more ridiculous criticism?

From where I stand, Scribd's HTML5 implementation (if it turns out as good as the demo) is one of the biggest leaps forward I've seen on the web in a while, as well as one of the most impressive pivots I've seen a startup make to turn a negative into a positive. It's a huge technical challenge to do what they're doing and get it right; one of those things that seems hard to people who haven't worked on it and turns out to be far harder than it seems.

There's also the minor detail that they're producing this output for an enormous class of inputs, so to nitpick the generated HTML as if it were written by hand is to miss the point colossally.

Edit: on another note, it's probably a positive sign if people with this mentality don't like your work.
Broadband makes women happy
Salsa dancing, snowboarding, walks, martial arts, backpacking, hikes, scrambling, rock climbing, see a play or cultural event, read, etc...
I skimmed the guidelines before posting and didn't see any prohibitions so I posted it. Had I known it wasn't allowed I wouldn't have posted it. But it seems that there is no way to remove it. The taleo comment is true and well taken, HR seems to like it though.
LOGISTICA - Google Search
Works for me 9 minutes later from the central US.
On my FreeBSD 8 machine, grep is still GNU grep. Last I knew, bsdgrep wasn't quite finished, but was close. diff is from GNU diffutils, but patch appears not to be a GNU variant. bc/dc are GNU.

Getting really close though. The compiler was the last really huge piece of the system that was GNU dependent.
I would like to continue this thread because I believe I am wrong -- the question is of degree. I also believe you are wrong, and much more wrong than I am (smile) Plus I believe we are being civil, and I enjoy a civil conversation that makes me think.

Using past examples as indicators of future performance is called induction. Great thing. Not bulletproof by any means, but the more examples that exist the more comfortable I am with drawing conclusions.

Think of it this way: given your logic, the vast majority of people will become intellectually disabled in the future, unable to find productive work or work the complex machines required to live. Sort of an Idiocracy.

The problem here is that you can't take a number like "jobs" and extrapolate it, because of the very problem you're stepping into: it's an aggregate, not a metric. They don't make buggy whips any more, car manufacturing isn't done the way it used to be done in Detroit. The average guy who used to just sit behind the back-end of a horse on the farm all day somehow has managed to make it into the 21st century just fine, however.

Markets are funny things. I am not one of those that thinks the free market can do everything -- but I also have a healthy respect for the unpredictable, unmanageable nature or a market. They continuously show the ability for groups of people acting creatively to come up with all kinds of ideas that I cannot forecast. If you are asking me to forecast the total number of fast-food employees over the next hundred years I have no doubt the line heads towards zero. But there's a long way from that to saying that all jobs for average people are disappearing. A long, long way.

I don't know about what to do about this, although I am sure lots of folks have ideas. I think if we couldn't afford the welfare state and promises we had at the beginning of the century, I seriously doubt we're suddenly going to be able to afford it in the next 20 years. My guess is that 2012-2020 will see a huge Charlie Foxtrot with the welfare state worldwide (more than currently exists). That probably means that right now is a good time to talk about these things, because as politicized as they are now, I think they're only going to get worse.
Chess. In many ways, chess is very similar to programming. It is a beautiful mix of art & science. It requires constant learning, studying and practice to get better. It allows you to solve puzzles and identify patterns. It has been around for many centuries and yet people still find new strategies.
Just after Christmas I started taking Salsa Dancing lessons, and have since expanded into Tango, Cha-Cha, and Merengue. Hell of a lot of fun, and I've met some interesting people as a result.

That and the usual; cooking, reading (fantasy and science fiction,) social gaming with friends, running, cycling, and (when I get round to learning how) swimming.
If both Breyer and Scalia are directing sarcasm against business method patents, that's ... well, I don't want to jinx this.

I second the request for a grellas exegesis.
And if it were proper, semantic HTML5, what problem would that solve? I'm failing to see what benefit that has to the user. They don't need to see the markup; it just has to work.
Frankly, I don't know. But it seems that we have accepted that. Someone has, anyway, if the public debate is about how heavily to regulate ISPs, and not about whether we should have ISPs so big that they need a Federal-level regulator.
I think this dude needs to read the first part of Coders at Work with Jamie Zawinski (in reference to Netscape). A version 1 system RUSHED to the public that actually works and has few bugs is amazing. The fact that it's difficult to read and hard to follow can be fixed just as bugs can in due time. I think the concept of "get it done and fix it later" is better than "take forever to work on it and someone already produced." I guess that's an age-old question we all ponder though.
um... last sentence of the introductory blurb:
"The gag order was ruled unconstitutional as an infringement of free speech, in the Doe v. Ashcroft case.[1]"

I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiments, but alot of the arguments and especially analogies you're using in this discussion are intellectually dishonest.
If the author can't be bothered to even pick out a couple of snippets to support his claim, I can't be bothered to pay his post any mind.
For $15.11, you can have the same book on a nicely bound hardback printed on acid-free paper. The production, storage, and delivery of this medium increases the cost of the book by 12 cents. If that 12 cents reflects the actual marginal expense of printing each copy, it begs the question why cheap mass-market paperbacks exist.
Would you really consider facebook to be a "web app"? I think facebook is, or at least should be a pretty normal web page.
Well, sure - what's he expecting? PDF is a low-level, mostly unstructured display format. Converting that to fully semantic markup that recognizes all aspects of high-level document structure is probably an AI-complete problem.

For those of you not familiar with the gory details of PDF, it basically uses absolute positioning for each character. If we converted that directly into HTML it would be a disaster. So, we actually extract quite a bit of structure on top of that, recognizing spaces, lines, columns, and paragraphs, which enables us to write much cleaner HTML. Scribd (and most PDF readers) does this with heuristic algorithms that make reasonable guesses.

In the future, we'd like to push those algorithms further, and extract ever more semantic markup. But this is a "nice to have" for us - mostly, people just want the documents to display correctly and load quickly. And, anyway, expecting the output of an automated converter to match what a human would write shows a basic ignorance of the state of computers and AI.
I love amid all of this uproar on HN and other tech sites approximately 0.00002% of facebooks user list have actually cared enough to cancel their accounts. This will blow over next week when Gizmodo steals new hardware from someone else.
I went to the local blacksmithing group just this week. I think I'm going to join. The work looks like fun and I liked the social atmosphere (slightly grumpy old guys who reminded me of my dad).

> rigging old microwaves to melt copper

Whoa. I guess you're still here to type about it . . .
cough http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth cough
1. work on the car
2. track the car(mostly auto-x since the track is like 5 hours away)
3. started getting into sambo(russian martial arts)
There are massive numbers of unemployed and many people don’t work as much as they used to. That’s the trend I’m seeing here in Germany and I’m seeing it independent of economic cycles.

Wikipedia has a nice illustration: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Ger...

That’s the unemployment rate in Germany between 1960 and 2007. The red line are women, the blue line are men. You can clearly see the economic cycles but also a clear upward trend irrespective of economic cycles. Germany is much more prosperous today than in the 1960s.
All of the equipment is manufactured in China anyway... Why would they not sell to the Chinese government when the alternative is for the government to get the unbranded equipment that is manufactured when the factory is "offline". :P
I think the ebook purchasers are getting a raw deal, but not because of production costs (though I think we all know it doesn't cost 12 cents to print and distribute this book).

An ebook has less utility compared to a physical book; if I find an ebook entertaining or insightful I can't loan it to a friend or donate it. Because of that, I expect the price to be discounted by a few dollars. Since buying an iPad I've bought several Kindle ebooks and find them to be a fair price at ~$10 for a book that would cost $15 in dead-tree form.

When the price is the same as a physical copy, it's worth it to me to just get the physical book. Getting the book delivered instantly does not, in my mind, outweigh the technical limitations imposed on an ebook.
Here's a link to the repository to see versions of the packages: http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5/os/SRPMS/

It's a shame PHP is still 5.1 without using the CentOS-Testing repository.
Playing bridge can get very expensive though. Some of the old guys with 70 years of practice are as good as you would expect.

It's certainly much more interesting then poker though!
When people start whinging about the HTML markup for your thing, you know you're on to something. Early on, we got a guy complaining loudly about how Twiddla sucked because we had put a DIV into the HEAD tag to display a loading message. Not sure exactly how it affected his user experience, but there you go.

If the best criticism that people can come up with is about a piece that nobody can ever see or be affected by, you're probably doing something right.
Why shouldn't it be cheaper? As distribution has gotten cheaper food, physical goods, software, entertainment, and information have all gotten cheaper. Why should books be exempt?

Looking at the prices, I would also feel Like as an ebook buyer, I'm either subsidizing the price of the physical version, which must cost more than $0.12 to manufacture and ship, or simply being charged a higher margin for the same (and in some cases lower fidelity) content.
The 13th Warrior.it is all about being strong and having a will that is stronger than steel.
"hurry up and meet dead before your place is taken"
I play airsoft. It's not a cheap hobby, but it's good exercise in good company. I'm involved with the running of the society (I'll be president next academic year), which has taught me organisational skills; and hanging out with the other players was half the socialising I did last year, so it's probably helped to keep me sane.
One thing that annoys me is how often someone is portrayed in the media as borderline autistic, or having Aspergers.

Borderline Personality disorder or Narcissism would be closer to the mark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism

When I worked around more therapists(I worked as a qEEG tech) it became apparent that some are the worst offenders when it comes to "inability to respect social norms"
Will Google Buy ITA Software?
Volvo collision avoidance fails and other things that will happen again
I produce electronic music. These days production is all computer based, and tech knowledge gets you a long way. Also if you can learn tech skills you can probably also come to understand things like dynamics processing and frequency ranges well enough to get to the top of the game, in terms of production quality. Its one of the few things that I find to be a good mix of my creativity and tech aptitude (along with web design and games art).
And apparently don't rely on a working Internet.
Yes and now. Switching to higher radio frequencies uses a lot of the same systems, switching to optical communication would use entirely different systems (some of which have not even been built yet).
I relieve coding stress by drawing on my tablet at http://brokensign.org

I do daily drawings, but sometimes I make two or three depending on the time available and circumstances. Does that count as afk? :)