skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aesthetics and UX are definitely linked; as you say, it's really hard to evaluate either until one can actually get a feel for the navigation, etc. But I think that as long as the UX is coherent, the visuals will be there.
Why couldn't Apple let flash play in the browser but just not allow flash apps into the Appstore? I think users wouldn't mind that.
Firefox can do that as well:

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Ok... that is cheating...
The push to phone functionality is initiated by the user.
Android as a platform doesn't require data wipes to update. A few handset manufacturers have chosen to go this route for certain devices but other devices such as the Nexus One preserve all user data during an update. The cloud-based syncing will certainly improve things for users migrating from one device to another.
What a pathetic overreaction. Google’s words: “[…] we’re gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely […]”. Gradually. Choice. It’s beta. There is no indication that this will ever be the default.

It’s pretty clear to me that Google sees this as a feature for the tiny minority of people who care about such things.
I thought much the same thing. Writing good documentation is hard, and the effort that must have gone into this site is impressive. My own project documentation is admittedly nowhere near this.
At least bacon is good :)
Artificial Life, Oil Spills, and Transparency
I think it's reproducible if someone building a web community wants to have a similar level of user community - but it requres doing the two things that typical web startups won't do - have paid, full-time moderators who are in the top tier of intelligent users, and don't just try and grow the site forever.

Reddit is a good example, the subreddits are often as good as any other web community, but the site as a whole is trending down to Digg-levels and worse.
Perhaps. I posted it because I came across their blog today after reading a George Monbiot editorial, and then started reading their Manifesto. This seemed more accessible as a chunk than either of those two.

Perhaps I should have submitted their most recent blog post instead: http://www.dark-mountain.net/wordpress/2010/05/19/the-need-f...

Certainly less vague. I don't necessarily agree with their conclusions (and neither does Monbiot), but it seemed like a well reasoned discussion.
It is certainly possible that Microsoft could turn around, but I doubt it: they have a huge cash reserve, yes but that is not going to make them relevant.

What would be interesting would be if they got an entire new board + CEO, Steve Ballmer isn't ready to lead and never will be.
Apple faces patent suits over iTunes Store, Safari, Mac OS X
The author makes a really good point. Personally, about 90% of the time I buy something online I just go straight to Amazon.
Futurama's love affair with Apple
Aside from the legal advantages of not talking to the cops, it can also save you from a very aggravating conversation.

I had the cops come by my apartment once. Apparently some kids were shooting airsoft guns into the neighbor's yard and endangering their kids, and they thought I knew something about it. I didn't, but the cops spent the whole time acting like they had a witness who saw me talking to the kids--and singled me out by my t-shirt and car--and were convinced I knew who they were.

They even played good cop bad cop--one of them acted friendly and sympathetic, "I know you don't want to rat out your friends", complimenting me on my music (I had Iron Maiden playing on my Pandora at the time) while the other one was a total dick and kept saying "We know you're lying". They were expert at turning around everything I tried to say--I'd say "I'm sorry, I can't help you", and they'd say, "Why can't you help us? Why can't you just tell us what you know?"

Then, of course, since they were rather intimidating they kept commenting that I was acting "avoidant" and implying that meant I knew something, when actually I was just intimidated by them. It didn't help that at the beginning they told me to keep my hands out of my pockets, which is an obvious security measure but also a power game.

To this day, I still don't know if they got a tip on me from someone who saw me and misinterpreted the situation, or if they were sweeping the whole complex and bluffing their way into making everyone think they had a specific tip on them. Or maybe they were just practicing their interrogation skills. Nothing ever came of it, but I should have known from the outset to say nothing.
Sorry if this has been mentioned, but I haven't had the chance or time to read all the comments but...It sounds like you are quitting when you hit The Dip

http://www.amazon.com/Dip-Little-Book-Teaches-Stick/dp/15918...
the colors of the close, minimize and expand aren't correct, so not entirely accurate. Still awesome
Mysterious Spiral In The Sky Of Norway
We would like to now what was that really on the sky.
I actually don't think this qualifies as Hacker News, but for the sake of clarity, they posted the following explanatory note:

>This page was removed two days ago, after one of our moderators had his email and skype hacked. His personal data was revealed. He then got scared and deleted the page, the blog and the emails. The rest of us, are now back without him after he backed out. This is another scare tactic from the Islamic extremists. We won't fall. Pictures you were unable to post on the 20th? Check the forums for interviews.

Maybe this is what Jd meant to link to, but if so, it didn't work.
Is the candidate just trying to get free PR?

Yup, you got it. Let's hope it backfires.
"It is a bit funny to recall we paid millions of dollars for this amount of memory, when today you can buy it for tens of dollars—and then put it in your pocket."

I wonder how much research could easily be delayed a couple of years until it becomes cheaper to carry out. Was it so important to do that experiment back then?

"Hector, always logical, said he never used the machine, but he knew they ran “hot”—they were known to have cooling problems. So he kept his on all the time, and used it like a space heater."

Again, it seems as if responsible use of tax payer money was not really a concern at that place...
Saving Star Wars: The Special Edition Restoration Process
The first guy is by far the most skilled and rehearsed public speaker I have ever seen in my entire life.
Also highly recommended, since at times there's more to all this than just not talking when you don't have to: http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Ex-Cop-Reveals-A...
Ha ha ha! Awesome ;)
Let's see. The Pope condemns extra-marital sex.

The Pope also condemns the use of condoms.

So, between being unfaithful with a condom and being unfaithful without a condom, a good Catholic should go with #2, the lesser of the two evils.
They seem to actually develop ideas of their own, and prototype them, which is what real inventors do.
eBay? Sam Odio's bluwiki was able to sell for a lot using eBay. That was for charity though, which might have affected it.
Sounds as if they are hoping to stay anonymous on Facebook? Maybe they should have thought it through a little bit more.
a bit hard to read but this quote at the bottom is a gem: "Technical skills are a hygiene factor for architects. You need to have them to be accepted for the job. But emotional intelligence and ability to understand organizations are the skills that define how good you really are"
I think it depends on what "without many customers and real money" means. If you don't have ANY revenue you don't have a business that can realistically grow over time. But if you have some customers and some revenue you're not doing badly and your competitors aren't really an issue. A year is not much time to build a presence on the Internet. It takes time to get organic traffic and word-of-mouth growth.

If you think the market is there keep at it. If you've learned the market isn't really there, sit down with your cofounders and hash this out with them. They will see through any attempt to keep them enthusiastic if you aren't enthusiastic. I think this is a key example of how PG is wrong on the cofounder issue (at least for bootstrapped startups). It's a lot easier to grow a small business to the point where it supports the expectations of one person than to the point where it supports the expectations of several.

If you want to sell, try making a phone call to the other CEO and arrange lunch if you can get it. Casual contact humanizes you and gives you a chance to learn more about their plans than you would otherwise.
We have looked into MIDI-OX and Midi-YOKE and we're not entirely sure how to implement it to serve our purpose, does anyone have any specific experience with these tools?
found the link for the firmware:
http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-pa...
""Technical skills are a hygiene factor for [software] architects. You need to hav them to be accepted for the job. But emotional intelligence and ability to understand organizations are the skills that define how good you really are."

The above is true in all professions.
(most) Chess engines without end-game database will play horrible endgame to the extend that a lowly IM can beat the strongest chess engine on the best consumer hardware. At least this was still true last time I was keeping tabs on Computer Chess scene. But with 4-5-6 pieces endgame its not only perfect but it also effects game quality in the middle-games, where most of the games are decided between human-comp games.

Nowadays, Computer Chess scene is not as exciting as it was 10 years ago (not because of Deep-blue). Now it has come to a stage that it is less about knowledge algorithm tweaking and more about, fine-tuning and narrowing down opening books to few sets where a particular engine is strong at and use extensive positional and book learning from previous games on those or similar lines of moves and win games.

Now when you (or GMs) play against a computer engine, you are not as much playing against an engine, but playing against a huge database that has been fine-tuned over 100,000s of games.

This is why no chess engine author will agree to an official tournament games against a top GM, without opening-book, EGTB, pos-learning, book-learning.
Regulators Are Watching Google Over Antitrust Concerns
Ahhh, so we would most likely need to write something custom for this. That's very useful info, I take it pySerial is a serial iface for Python scripts? Thank you.
"Quantum computers are not known to be able
to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time."

I don't get the blog's subtitle. Why would anyone suppose that quantum computers could solve NPC problems in polynomial time if non-quantum computers can't? The P and NP complexity classes don't have anything to do with the hardware used to perform computation. Quantum computing isn't some new model of computation, i.e. it's equivalent to Turing machines or the lambda calculus.
I was just going to chime in with this as well.

Of course they then have to be fair ;) Which if they are, that is probably going to be the base of their messaging for all of their marketing...in which case fairbooks.com is superb
Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219758
I'd love to see the same kind of advice for other countries.
And yet people still claim that "it's not a computer" ;)
I up-vote this, you are specifying what does it appears to you. I also agree with you, it is true that probably flash isn't the future from the web, but at least is part of the present.
I wonder how much research could easily be delayed a couple of years until it becomes cheaper to carry out. Was it so important to do that experiment back then?

one of the goals of academic research is to take high risks (and costs) to explore possibilities for the future (looking forward 5, 10, even 20 years). if people only invested in 'affordable' research that had direct practical applications within a 1 or 2-year window, then the likelihood of 'game-changing' breakthroughs appearing would be much lower.
Apple have already stated that iPhone OS 4 will be available for the iPod touch, though only the third-generation touch will get multitasking.

I'm not sure why you would have doubted it. How would it have made sense for Apple to exclude it from the new software release?
Nobody mentioned the unrolled linked list, a simple, useful, and often-overlooked data structure.

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

The idea is the same as a linked list, but instead of just one element in each node, it stores an entire array. This simple change fixes the two biggest problems with linked lists — memory overhead and cache efficiency. It's also easy to tweak to be more "array-like" or more "list-like" as needed.
Me too, ever since I got Amazon Prime (do you have that as well?)
Sour grapes.....

If what google wanted was to stop letting search terms show up in weblogs of sites they linked to, they could have done it plenty of other ways, cheaper and easier than rolling out SSL globally.... and they were never obligated to provide this to us in the first place.
I wonder if this is true?

From: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/chinesewriting.html

"Since Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other nonstandard varieties differ from Mandarin not just in sound but also in vocabulary and grammar, the characters cannot bridge this gap by themselves, even with their relative neutrality toward sound.7 Much of the core vocabulary of non-Mandarin Chinese has no counterpart in Mandarin and no recognized character representation. Conversely, many Mandarin terms for which characters do exist are foreign to non-Mandarin speakers. The fact that nonstandard speakers can read a text in the standard language simply means that these speakers are bilingual. They have learned written Mandarin as a second language. They know enough vocabulary and grammar to make sense of Mandarin texts, much as I know enough French words and grammar to read that language (without being able to pronounce it convincingly, much less to speak it fluently). If Chinese characters have unified the Chinese languages, then the alphabet has unified French and English.

"The characters do allow nonstandard speakers to use their own pronunciations to read Mandarin texts. So instead of acclimating to the national standard, nonstandard speakers reinforce their own speech habits and add to the vitality of their "dialect" by introducing new vocabulary from Mandarin, which they pronounce their own way by analogy. Whether alphabetic scripts should be used to provide China's non-Mandarin speakers with the means to become literate in their own language is a political question outside the scope of the present inquiry. But one thing is certain: since non-Mandarin speakers are forced anyway to learn a second language, it would make more sense from the viewpoint of those promoting unity if this bilingualism were achieved through Mandarin written in the pinyin alphabet.8 The incentive to learn the national standard, including its pronunciation, would be higher than it is today if one's ability to read depended on it. As it is now, nonstandard speakers work their way through standard texts using whatever pronunciation comes naturally, not fully learning Mandarin and not reading their own languages either."
I watched these a while ago, and based on what the second guy (the cop) has to say about him going to bat for a particularly nice iraq vet, while lying to and manipulating 'hood rats', I inferred the rule is don't talk to the cops if you're poor/black.
Sounds like you don't really need a partner now.
You have me convinced. 25% of those later exonerated by DNA evidence actually confessed to the crime? crazy.
Us users don't want google to direct us to the site with the best SEO guys on any given topic - we want them to direct us to the sites that are most likely to contain the data we are searching for.

Google's job, to stay on top of the search engine market, is to keep delivering good results to those doing searches - that's how they keep their audience, and keep selling ads.
printf will do a lot more damage than the if.

In my logging system I write the data to the buffer in the natural format (without conversion), preceded by a type-marker. Then I have a tool to unpack the data entries and format them into text.
Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning is also very good (despite being a bit older) http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html
Lamson 1.0 Released (a Python SMTP server by Zed Shaw)
I recommend not telling.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the internet, so we put a browser in your browser so you can meme while you meme
I think the article is trying to equate quantum computers with non-deterministic Turing Machines - which still looks like a matter for debate.

As for P & NP - aren't they defined in terms of decision problems that can be solved in polynomial time by deterministic and non-deterministic TMs respectively? Which is a distinction that is about as close to "the hardware used to perform computations" as it is possible to get while working with abstractions.
Looks awful on the iPad. I guess Safari Mobile still has some catching up to do with its desktop sibling.
This really gets driven home when you watch a show like "The First 48" and realize that a lot of murder cases are basically strong circumstantial evidence and a confession. Take out the confession and getting a conviction is really, really hard. With it though, the chances are very good.
More profit, Nokia has significantly more revenue. Apple only sells very high-margin phones while Nokia sells at all levels.
A real problem with various HN posts.
Actually, Facebook used to have privacy sliders exactly like this back in late 2007, early 2008. I think there were only three of them: profile, user info and pages.
"Coerced psychologically" means precisely nothing. Everyone does everything because they are coerced psychologically to do it. If you object to this particular form of psychological coercion, explain why.
I like the Git tutorial embedded within http://railstutorial.org. You learn Git, complete with best practices, while developing a webapp with Rails.

After that, read Pro Git: http://progit.org
I have heard German lawyers recommending the same thing. I suspect this might be true for any country in which you have the right to remain silent.
I have heard that they exclude the oldest iPhone from OS 4, and I thought iPod Touch would be on the same technical level as the oldest iPhones.

Why does Apple exclude the old iPhones?
Amazon Prime has shifted my buying habits to where I go there first for even small things like personal care items I would have otherwise bought at, say, Target.

I used to travel 4 days every week and so my weekends at home became extremely precious time. By buying that stuff on Amazon on Wednesdays from my hotel room, the free two day shipping meant it'd be delivered when I was working from home on Fridays. I was able to do the things I wanted to do on the weekend rather than spending time at the store doing what I needed to do.

I don't have that horrible travel schedule anymore but I still appreciate how I can just order shampoo from my mobile phone when I realize I'm running low.
It's something you should share with your children (grown or not). I have a particular interest in this subject because of "zero tolerance" policies in schools. Too often, children defer to authority -- as they've been taught by ...uh... the authorities -- and when the principal says "Write out what happened and sign it," that resulting confession is often given to the police. Cops certainly can't demand that a suspect write a confession without first advising the suspect of their rights ("You have the right to remain silent..."), but school officials -- typically government agents in their own right -- don't seem to have a problem obtaining confessions for use against their own students, even without bringing in their parents first (let alone a lawyer). Kids (and adults!) often don't understand that they are sealing their own fate when they comply with such outrageous demands.

The kids don't have a choice in this situation, do they? From what I remember, the Supreme Court has ruled that students in public schools don't have constitutional rights. If the school wants to expel the student for not talking, they can do so.
The old dude has been abstaining from sex as long as he's been celibate (so he says), and has no sense of reality on the ground, and uses his influence to discourage the use of condoms on the grounds that there are 'better solutions', which are wholly unrealistic in practice, but suit his agenda.

If you don't play the game don't mess with the rules.

The reality is: people will have sex, both inside and outside of their relationships.

'Marital Fidelity' as a concept is great, but it is about as mythical as the tooth fairy, contrary to popular belief.

http://www.truthaboutdeception.com/cheating-and-infidelity/s...

The reality is: once a virus is present in a population it will spread, even if you are 'careful', for one because even if you are monogamous your partner that you are sure is too may not be, and they have possibly (make that probably) slept with others in the past.

To willfully ignore the reality on the ground is stupid at best and criminal at worst.

In some countries in Africa there is a 20%+ rate of sero-positivity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_a...

The scientists view is to state the 'optimum' solution, to realize that reality is different and to hold up condom use as the second best solution.

Taking it out of context like that is simply silly.
Basically there are only two stories. I don't mean in Star Wars; just in general. Let's call them The Iliad and The Odyssey.

A New Hope was essentially just The Iliad In Space. So far, so good if you like that kind of thing (I personally never cared for it). The next two were basically The Odyssey. In space. Which was one more movie than was strictly justified. (I agree with the article that The Empire Strikes Back was the one good film in the series.) The three prequels probably cover about the first 10 pages of The Iliad, which was three more movies than was justified.
Given this guy's pattern of turning everything into an episode of Spy vs. Spy, I'd say odds are that some minor Australian official did in fact confiscate his passport simply because it was tattered. If they mail him a new copy in a few weeks, will that get reported?
My route standard response to law enforcement queries:

"I'm sorry Mr./Mrs/Sargent/Lt X, but I don't talk to police on material matters without counsel present."
I've seen these two videos a long time ago and they are GREAT advice. It's actually scary the kind of stuff the cop says he has done and other cops will do to you during questioning.

In the UK, where I'm originally from, the police are not allowed to lie or ask you to do anything outside of your rights and so it is total wake up call for anyone who is not used to the way the police work here in the US.

This video is also useful, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDJrQBwJpqk

However, a friend who I talked to about this did make a counter perspective... that sometimes it is worth talking to the cops in the right circumstances.

For example, if you are pulled over cos you just ran a stop sign and you have nothing illegal on you/in the car/etc then it is better just to talk to the cop and get the ticket dealt with. If you start playing the 'not going to say anything' and 'no you can't look in the car' then you are opening yourself up for a long painful experience and potentially arrest if they decide to fuck back with you and they can pin some suspicion for something on you (eg you are driving through an area that happens to be associated with drug sale, you have a LeatherMan tool you and the cop can say the knife was being carried for other intent, etc)

Cops are naturally authoritarian and can choose to make your life hell if they think you are trying to be superior or above them.