skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zuckerberg acknowledges that complex privacy controls are a problem. But I suspect that's only true because the defaults are evil. If users didn't have to worry about being deceived, they wouldn't complain about complex controls because they'd rarely use them.

Like simplicity, defaults are hugely important in UI design. But Zuckerberg appears to be carefully avoiding the subject.
From what I understand, what you say is true. When you go to Pandora, a bar pops up, on which you have the option to click 'No, Thanks'. If you click it, they won't have access to any of your Facebook information.
I bought tickets on Fandango and later found the Fandango App in my FB profile. I never installed it or approved it--it just appeared. To me, that's simply wrong.
A project made up of 12 million lines of code, and Google can give it away for free. Mind boggling. There's not many can do that.
ASK HN: Randomization at work
Hi,

I was wondering how people overcome getting randomized at work, i.e, getting too many little things to work on from different projects. This in my opinion is causing the quality of work on a particular task to deteriorate.

Any advice will be appreciated.
Froyo-style notifications on iPhone
Dylan is worth taking a look at to consider what lisp sans parens might look like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_%28programming_language%2...
One recent one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hjcHjN7Fe8&feature=relat...

7 year old innocent girl killed.

Details and a very decent analysis are available here:
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/2010/05/17.html

So, long story short, police in the USA operate above the law. This family, without a doubt, operated on the shady side of the fence, so if you want to write it off as that, feel free, it won't bother me.

But how will you feel when they start coming into your neighborhood and making "honest mistakes" like shooting sight unseen into a residence? I don't have the time right now, but I could link you to many youtube videos where people were doing pretty much nothing and the police came and just fucking hammered them, hard.

The thing about this one that struck me so personally is, I have a daughter.
Video: The Gradual Demise of Social Media Marketing... AWESOME.
"Facebook spokesperson David Swain contacted us and confirmed that the appearance of unauthorized apps was a bug:

In this case, there was a bug that was showing applications on a user’s Application Settings page that the user hadn’t authorized. No information was shared with those applications and the user’s list of applications was not shown to anyone but the user. This bug has been fixed.

It does appear that unauthorized apps are no longer being added to users' pages, however any unwanted applications that were previously added will still need to be removed manually."

http://www.macworld.com/article/151087/2010/05/facebook_addi...
Fashion does have a use; the goal is to send social signals about status and group. While most people go way overboard and just follow along religiously, you too are in fact using fashion to socially signal like-minded people!
Yes, but many four-legged animals can walk mere minutes after having been born, and this is a more valid comparison for the task facing a four-legged robot.
There certainly was a way for apps to do this. I had removed all third-party apps a few months ago (after allowing only a couple), but logged in a few weeks ago to find two third-party apps that I hadn't authorized.

It may have been a bug, and it may be different now, but there was certainly a period of time that apps could add themselves without my explicit permission.
Much of the XML may be generated stuff?
Does this include the kernel, which would be C?
Actually, the arrow keys can substitute for the WASD keys.

WASD is just easier to use one-handed with the spacebar.
This article reads more like an attack on any researcher outside the traditional scientific establishment than anything else.

It occurs to me that a skeptic should not predicate his skepticism on someone's background or how "crazy" they are. A skeptic ought to thoroughly consider something solely on its merits.

Consider, for a moment, that instead of saying that cranks are usually antisocial we said that cranks are usually black. Supposing that is true, would it be fair to say we should be more skeptical of black scientists? Of course not.

This is just prejudiced trash.
Well, Google can receive a huge chunk of that for free, add their contribution, and give that result away. It's still a great thing, but let's not forget credit for the shoulders they are standing on.

I'd be interested to know the numbers for the parts that are unique to Android, as well as how much has been added to parts that are not unique...
Also, iBooks has in-app purchasing, the Kindle app forces you to quit the app and launch your browser to shop for books. It's not the end of the world, but is a substandard user experience.

I don't have any inside info on this, but rumor has it that not only does Apple want their 30% cut for using their in-app purchasing service, but also that you are not permitted to implement your own, hence Amazon's between a rock and a hard place. Either give Apple 30% of all e-book revenue or provide a substandard experience to users.

All in all, seems like old Amazon is getting a pretty raw deal.
LoseThos is 120,000 LOC. Is that here nor there? I donno. Is more good? In school our grade was based on how short... on a curve.

What do you think of the fact LoseThos is 120,000 including the compiler and demos. I don't know what Android does, so I can't really comment.

Quoting a high value might be good for intimidation and to impress customers. I think most incentives are to quote high. I'm marketing LoseThos as simple and clean and unintimidating. Low's way better, all things being equal, right, if open source?
Generating malleable terrain by kriging
According to Wikipedia the full linux 2.6 kernel tree is now around 12 million LOC. So I'd be guessing a good chunk of the 2.8 million lines of C in Android is the kernel. It'd really depend on how many lines the "core" parts of the kernel take up (not that much, I bet) but also how much is left in the Android tree even if it's not really used or even compiled in.

I'm also interested to know what makes up all that XML, though.
You're right. I assumed canvas but it's just document elements and Flash for sound.
FWIW, I'd be really interested to see this reorganised as LOC per component.
For fun, pick up a copy of "A New Kind of Science" and infer Wolfram's crackpot index solely from the one book. Is he a crackpot? An outsider genius? A man who gets many things right but stumbles from time to time?
I haven't developed a production app with MVC 2 yet but I've tested it for use in my organization and I've played around with RoR. Given that experience I'd put forth the following points...

Pros:

1. Despite what RoR fans claim I think you can get things done faster in ASP.NET MVC 2 (if you use Visual Studio). All the usability enhancements combined with technology like WCF simply help you get things done faster (though there's a down side to this advantage in the cons)

2. On the above note I still think C# is a vastly superior language especially now that it's essentially "borrowed" the best parts of Python

Cons:

1. The main reason to go with a MVC framework is ease of testing and the RoR community is far more robust and hence offers far more testing options

2. (Related to Pros #1) Using Microsoft technology like WCF creates performance woes. I would question using it on a really high performance site

3. You really need to buy Microsoft servers. I haven't even tested MVC 2 on Mono but MVC 1 was spotty and not officially supported

4. Support is minimal on the Internet. Again this boils down to there being far, far more Ruby developers (Let's face it ASP.NET MVC is a subset of the already smaller ASP.NET developer community)

I don't know if that helps but those are my initial thoughts.
Another feed:

http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:46245.asx?bkup=...
If people make their profile public, then yes their updates will be made public.
Are you talking specifically about the Express editions? Visual Studio has had plugin support for awhile. Resharper comes to mind immediately, among others.
That helps a lot.
Write famous essays after you have ascertained all the facts
There are many ways in which you can write your famous essay. It can discuss the lives of famous people, events, things etc. Regardless of which type selected to discuss your essay should be unbiased. These types of essays do not require students to provide their opinions, therefore, write accordingly.
It's really a question of profit.

Why would developing an app for app store in XYZ jurisdiction be any different than the US?

If you have a single convenience store in the US it's probably the same business decision in Australia.

Everything that makes Australia "small" and unique provides niches that will never be filled by American iPhone devs, for example I'm sure there is money to be made in the Australian trucking sector which appears to me to be very different than in almost every other country.
I don't think that's a rumor. I think it's pretty well grounded in fact that Apple is the reason you can't buy Kindle books inside the Kindle apps on iPad and iPhone.

And it's definitely a raw deal. No question about that.
I quit Facebook before they were uncool.
Mathemagician Martin Gardner dies
He's channeling my favorite PG essay.

"When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked what they saw. I really wanted to know. And I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording."
http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
That's from the time that the whole web industry, including Apple, was fighting against the MPEG-LA terms. Something I find amusing every time I hear it claimed that they'd never do anything crazy with web licence rates in 5 years time.
If a large company has a statistically noticeable pattern of not hiring minorities, though, they'll likely get sued for that, instead--- especially if anyone's actually said anything in a discoverable memo like, "I'm hiring someone that can't sue me if they don't work out".

(Smaller companies, of course, can get away with pretty much whatever they want as far as hiring decisions go, as long as they don't say something stupid in public, because their number of hires isn't enough for anyone to conclude a strong pattern.)
When you are right about something, people tend to eventually share your point of view. Don't give up.
The main reason is population size.

For bricks and mortar retail (or most industries), costs scale with population size: a larger country requires more stores.

For apps, there is one relatively fixed development cost, no matter how many customers you have access to. It costs roughly the same to build the app whether you've got potential customers numbering 1 million or 100 million, so you're likely to get a lot less bang for your buck in a smaller geographic market.
That's one long blog post! It could be summarized by saying the general public doesn't know or care about the Facebook issues, so we technorati should stick around to help them understand better how the are getting screwed.
You are absolutely wrong. Google makes money on every web search performed on any device. The point of Android is to get users to do search through Google and make the platform ubiquitous, and right now they're making money hand over fist with that.
Same thing with Chrome. Chrome OS device will default to Google Search, GMail, and many services where they make money directly. It's brilliant, and it's working.
"We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want."

Apart from all the personal information that Facebook doesn't allow you to hide from non-friends, non-Facebook members, and search engines.
I couldn't agree more. But then again there will be enough participants anyway I think.

See you there ;)
I sometimes ended up juggling eight or so projects at the last day job. Finally I learned to take the advice of older and wiser employees (at my company and elsewhere), and started using my manager as a firewall.

"I would be thrilled to native check that translation for you. Please route the order through my boss. You know how it goes, I'm only twenty seven, nobody here expects me to be able to manage my own time." "Boss, you're going to get a request from Tokyo to use me for a translation project. If you approve it, $PRIORITY_PROJECT will slip two days late. Your call."
This guy is really channeling PG (see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374008)

"I disagree here with Yoda, who said there is no try. There is try."
http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

Update: Wait, the two were published around the same time. Never mind.
Surprisingly, Pyongyang looks pretty bright.

One could argue that North Korea is safer than (say) Thailand now, but I still wonder why go there if you aren't a researcher or spy.
Good point. The raw data published by them may have been cherry picked.
> "Patrick, do you work nude?"

Who knows what kind of a career that might have led to...

Missed opportunity if you ask me!

I take it you answered truthfully.
Miss Wellington, couldn't do that in Auckland.

I tried for around 2 years, got too frustrating just not being able to get around without bumming lifts or using the very spotty bus/train coverage.

CBD rents of $400-500 p.w. also suck the big one, for something not that great either.
It should be pretty easy: keep track of the ancestry of each object and kill off any family tree that's expanding too quickly if the server gets overloaded.
A couple of things:

1. I don't want to gamble again that Facebook will "do better". They've shown many times they actually want to share my personal information in unexpected ways under the cover of ever increasingly-confusing settings pages. Thanks, but I'm done with this crap.

2. From the post: I do not believe that the tech elites who are publicly leaving Facebook will affect on the company’s numbers

Us alone will not affect the numbers but we take people with us. We tell our friends and family to close their accounts.
The last one will never happen, since it's the government that defines "just".
He seems to be claiming that it was mainly his age, which would be less permissible. In particular, as far as terminating him goes (as opposed to merely changing him to a different role), the reason Google gave that they couldn't find him any future role in the company was that he was a bad "cultural fit" for the company, which is a lot more vague and questionable-sounding than saying he was a "substandard engineer" or anything more performance-oriented like that. Reid is more or less alleging that "not a cultural fit" is a euphemism for "old guy", and he claims he has some statistics to back that up, showing that Google fired old people disproportionately often.
Free Psp Music Video Downloads
<quote>
My wife asserted her rightful place in the hierarchy later that evening, and took it upstairs to the bedroom to relax while watching TV. Tap, tap, tap. Occasionally, she showed me something interesting she found online. And smiling
</quote>

Does anyone else find this degrading to women! Like if his wife suddenly discovered technology or the internet! Really !!! C'mon

Imagine if the story were told the other way around, the wife brings the iPad home.

Wife: I brought the new iPad home, I was reluctant for a while, after all, I already have an iPod touch, an iPhone and 3 laptops, one for the kids, one for me and the old laptop i left for my husby to surf the net every now and then.

Wife: But i decide, what the heck, one more gadget wont harm us. So I bought the iPad home.
My husband and kids, gathered around me like mosquitos around a light bulb, or starving africans around a USAid shipment of food, my husby grabbed the iPad and started poking it, like an ape poking a new object he just discovered in the jungle or ... well you get the idea! I hope

When i see such stories, I think of apes
We use silverback every week, and it's a joy to use. Once we've run 10 or so test we queue up all the videos, watch them back to back, cringing every time somebody trying to search in a tags box etc, making a list of the screw ups and tally marking every time we see them. Painful, but amazing feedback.
Tell HN: The Internet needs context menus
Last week I switched from the Apple/MobileMe/iPhone ecosystem to an everything Google ecosystem. I have since been using Google's webapps, most notably the mail, calendar and reader.

The biggest difference to native apps I noticed is that there are no right-click context menus. I am conditioned to right-click on objects that I want to do stuff with. I think this is a very useful und powerful convention and I regularly get frustrated when it doesn't work in webapps.

Is there a reason that so few webapps implement context menus? Am I the only one who misses them? Is there a solution?
SQL to create histograms
There's nothing really complicated about it, but I didn't find a good example online anywhere, so when I figured it out, it was time to share it
Project Locker is a good free svn/git provider with private repositories. It also has trac for bug tracking, but I didn't use that much. The site isn't too pretty but you can't beat free!

http://www.projectlocker.com
Although these are important real-world cases, I think this kind of high-throughput file processing mostly benchmarks something other than the core language design. More or less: 1) how good are the I/O libraries and string-processing libraries?; and 2) how obvious is it which ones to use, and how to use them, for peak performance in your use case? As he noted, he got a 4x speedup in Scala by just shuffling around his use of the Scala library functions, so this sort of benchmarking is quite sensitive to seemingly minor choices.

This kind of I/O benchmarking is also more sensitive than most to the particular choice of hardware. Results might come out totally differently on a different kind of hard drive, 32-bit v. 64-bit, different OS or filesystem, etc.

The various entries in the Wide Finder competition give a good overview of the kinds of tricks that can make a difference when you throw another wrench in the works by combining high-throughput I/O with multiprocessing (some of the tweaks aren't multiprocessing-specific, though): http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/20/Wide-Finde...
Why is yellow the 'hottest'? That sort of goes against every other map of this type, no? Also, it seems to be in need of some calibration. The Alps get lots of tourists, but Venice gets way more. Oodles of them.

That said, I love the concept and the clever use of public data to make a guess about something else.
I'd like to know what this has to do with "touristiness". Were only photos used that were tagged eg "vacation"? Germany is a land of spammers and contribution-freaks (as in "I must add an photo here, I will be the first") but I highly doubt it is such a popular holiday destination.
That's just white-hat social engineering.
There is a Tim Hortons app in Canada, we have roughly similar densities, 2.9/3.4 per km^2

Would you rather build an app for the US market, or Liberia, yet Liberia has a higher population density.

It sounds like you want to build store finders, to me this would mostly be boilerplate with a few images and a different location db for each store.

Build one store finder and then go shop rates around that reflect the fact that they are all the same. Heck it could mostly be done in HTML which means you can do a jqTouch app instead of Cocoa Touch.

Is there something about Australian businesses or addressing that would make abstracting these details impossible?
Yes, exactly. The power of Lisp's 'syntax' is that anything expressible as an s-expr can be written in Lisp. This is not the case with other languages, even though they are all parsed into s-exprs. The parser simply can't produce certain s-exprs.

*Actually, I'm not 100% sure that this is true - it would be more accurate to say that I am not aware of any other language that can be used to produce an arbitrary s-expr, but that such may indeed exist. If anyone can correct me on this point it would be much appreciated :-)
As could be expected, this just benchmarks the implementation. For instance, Perl has lots of object creation while C uses a fast state-machine-like approach.

Don't get me wrong - I really like C - but I'm not even sure that it would still be faster than Perl if you switched implementations.
His copy paste fu is strong
Beware the Sticky Middle
Agreed. Computer vision is a steep challenge and will limit autonomy. The derivatives of these types of devices will likely be deployed as drones in the meantime.
Let me ask a possibly unpopular question because the answer is not immediately obvious to me:

Why are there laws against age discrimination?

For example, if I want to fill my company with pretty young women, competent or otherwise, why should the law prohibit me from doing so?
Awesome game. My theory of computation professor is noted in the credits of the game. Great professor, and a very interesting application of everything he taught us.
Other items, some with comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1371335

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1371637

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372045

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372976

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373809
Hotel Hint Middle East - Djerba Plaza Hotel
Thanks for this - I particularly appreciate the information. Here are some other items, some with comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1371335

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1371637

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372045

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372976

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374007
Duplicate of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1371335

Other submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372045

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372976

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373809

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374007
Http://www.officialbay.com/mens-shox-nz-shoes-silver-gold-p-28229.html
Google could rewrite the android license agreement, but that would make the platform less appealing. HTC would stay in the game but it's questionable whether the slackers like Sony Ericsson would.
The awful truth about Android is that while Apple and Google know software, none of the people Google is partnering with, handset makers or telecoms, do. None of them understand what it takes to make high-quality, defect free software, or what 3rd party developers need from a platform, or what end-users expect from software. I can tell you that having sold to and consulted for them, and having family members who've worked for them, the telecoms are particularly clueless about these things. Hence we have them selling new smartphone with Android 1.5, in spite of the damage this does to the android development world.
Can you elaborate on the difference between 1 years of experience 10 times, and 10 years of experience? I don't follow. Do you mean 10 separate one-year projects in different technologies?
Isn't this kind of obvious ?
That this is usability testing unfortunately says more about usability than it says about the usage of this.

Most startups don't do usability testing because it would be quite pointless. There is a world of difference between a user and a customer. Usability testing is for refinement not for innovation.

I have worked with more than a hundred startups and there absolutely no correlation between success of the product/service and usability testing.

Usability testing pre launch is nothing but a placebo effect. In 5 years it will be death and for very good reasons.