skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't care how much you pay me, you'll never be able to recreate the incredibly satisfying feeling I get when demonstrating mastery within my community of peers.

On SO people's desire to "demonstrate mastery" can often turn into "make people think I'm awesome at any cost". I have ~500 points, so am not a total SO rookie, but quickly stopped answering any questions because you can be guaranteed someone with a worse answer will get voted up if they get it in first and make it sound authoritative.

Admittedly, this seems to have gotten better in the last few months from the threads I've seen, but early on I made a laundry list of totally erroneous "best answers" and it was just depressing.

Writing awesome content on your own site and getting links from Reddit, Hacker News, and the like is far more rewarding in the end than plumping up someone else's content site, if you have the faculties, time and resources to do so.
We will have to find a way to force hacker monthly #n to include hacker monthly #n itself. This way they will have to come up with some kind of quine.
" There is no alternative platform, despite what others may say about Android, it’s immature and their app store(s) are a wild west nightmare."

Silly Apple fanboy. He's whining that there's no approval on the Android market in a blog post dedicated to complaining about the approval in the App Store.

I also wonder what "immature" is. Probably another way of saying "I don't know anything but I don't like it, so I'll make some stuff up"
The real problem is the App Store Guidelines make no mention of "no widget/desktop apps". And initially, the application was approved. Then, Apple changed their minds (without updating the guidelines or providing any route to fix the problem) and suddenly this app removed on them.

It would be like if drinking Coca Cola suddenly became illegal to drink, but the laws were not updated to let citizens know. So you're on a hot summer's day, drinking your cool refreshing Coke like you always do, suddenly you're arrested and the cop won't even explain why (but he says he thought your Coke looked especially delicious). It's a little bit outrageous.
I agree that Lorem ipsum shouldn't be used as a replacement for instructions but it does have its place in prototyping.

Lorem ipsum is tremendously useful as placeholders for content types such of sample blog posts, sample description etc. These content are irrelevant to the web developer.
Good catch :-) I hoped somebody would notice it...

We know about merging. One step at a time...
I would assume you would be banned if/when they figure it out.
The farthest I go into "social networking" is Reddit and HN. That being said, why dont they, or anyone, just glue together the popular social networks in a portal-type page?

Flickr for photo sharing, Twitter for status updates, etc. Isn't that a distributed network? You might not own your data, but at least no third party owns ALL your data. I am dumbfounded by the idea of seeds, and what that is buying you. If I request a page from someone on Diaspora, whatever was in that page is now on my pc (somewhere). It has been said many times, but if you dont want it out there, dont put it out there (and this is why I dont do "social networks").

Someone please correct my misunderstandings
And using the word 'fanboy' is professional?
By that definition, so are Android developers.

Firstly, the platform vendor - Google - can and does ship competing products for free (turn by turn navigation anyone?).

Secondly even though Android is free you still rely on the manufacturers to ship it on actual phones. They could all jump ship for Windows Phone 7 leaving you with no platform (go with it, it's a thought expermient).

I understand that this is a 7 year old article and that Tim Bray has undergone a road to Damascus conversion to Android Apps over the web, but even if you accept his original conclusion that you are only not a sharecropper if you run your own web stack, it doesn't really afford you much extra security. Google could come along and release a competitor to your product and give it away for free.

In summary: we're almost all sharecroppers because the definition is so wide and even those who aren't face a similarly large but different risk meaning that being a sharecropper isn't necessarily much worse, if worse at all.

Dumb app store rejections still suck mightily though :)
> The plaintiffs, property owners on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, accused the industrial companies of spewing greenhouse gases into the air and helping to cause global warming, rising waters, hurricanes and all manner of other natural disasters.

I thought the latest guess was that the warming mostly happens near the poles, thus reducing temperature differentials, thus leading to milder weather?
I think SO and reddit are "ads done right".

I don't particularly agree on SO, but on Reddit - totally. I frequently click on the ads there because advertisers seem to make the effort to make them fit into the gamut of typical Reddit links (because most advertisers are Reddit users, I guess). The "open source" ads on SO are good, but there needs to be more of a "users are the advertisers" revolution going on across the Web.
I realize it wasn't listed in the rules, but when Apple comes knocking on your door and gives you a reason for the rejection, and blatantly tells you "NO WIDGETS!", it shouldn't be hard to realize that the damn "nice things you can put on your photos" are what have to be removed.
You can still do the same sorts of things with another app in OSX I think the name of the app is candy or something like that. Just googled it. It's called candybar

here's the link

http://www.panic.com/candybar/
A decentralized model would not be able to do this.
Man, no merge capabilities is a bummer. I was rooting through the menu items and help viewer in vain.
Wonderful, hilarious and I can't get back to work.

I bet those videos caused the loss of productivity in the IBM mainframe division that allowed personal computers to take over the desktop...
I wish he'd elaborate on that in a future post. Even if his reasons turn out to be idiotic, it's still an important thing to understand why developers like him are hesitant to move to the platform.
I prefer having unobtrusive ads for everyone. I'm not a "no ads" person, just a "ads should not get in the way of the content."

The worst thing for me right now is that when there's a question, there's an ad located right where the header should be.
I'd be more interested to hear about what they're actually working on. Judging by their twitter stream the only thing they've actually done is redesign their web site. 200k well spent.
The interesting thing about NYC is that Manhattan is not aligned perfectly North-South; it's actually oriented about 30° to the east from the meridian.

In other words, the most northern parts of the island are also the most eastern, so it currently fits the pattern quite well.
Note that to see this behaviour on other search engines, you may need to use US locations. Yahoo and Bing don't seem to recognize stockholm as a location.
Chrome Keeps Gaining, IE Keeps Losing, Firefox Is Flat
'The question you need to ask, "Is there any fundamental reason why a 'Web app' can't do everything a native app can?" The answer is no.'

I'm not sure that "no" is as clear as it seems. There are lots of things that are technically possible, but don't gain any traction in the market because of their inherent shortcomings. It depends upon which "fundamentals" you're looking at. Are we talking technology fundamentals or experience fundamentals. From the experience perspective, I feel inclined to side with Steve Jobs on the notion that cross-platform software represents a lowest common denominator approach to UX.

For all the flack that SJ is taking over his stance on Flash, his open letter on the topic re-solidified his software philosophy. SJ -- and by proxy, Apple -- believe that in order to deliver the best software experience possible, one must control the software ecosystem from end-to-end. However, there is a dichotomy within Apple that few people have come to terms with. When it comes to the web, Apple is "open". It's about the only place that they could truly be called such, but they are, none the less. Jobs' comments in his open letter spell it out in words, and their continued commitment to WebKit shows it in action.

The problem with discussing experience fundamentals is that objectivity remains out of reach. Some people prefer a tiled, line-mode display to a bitmap GUI. I'm fine with that. Why wouldn't I be? What's aggravating is when any one individual foists their preferences upon the masses. I prefer the experience that Apple has managed to deliver, and that means giving up some ground on things like software freedom. That's my choice to make, and the author here is bending over backwards to paint a false picture of Apple, Safari, and the web in general, just so we can all bite our nails over some Apple-controlled future. It's just ridiculous.
I guess you could get banned, but there are so many 'clone' apps out there it would be kinda hard for them to find out.

I was just wondering if it would be cost effective, since the rules seem to be arbitrary you might get more lenient reviewers and get through more often with more accts.
> I don't think any woman in the world would date a guy with a colostomy bag.

I think I'd want to be pretty damned certain before I gave up something I valued, let alone my life.

Have you ever changed your mind about something important before? Wondered how the hell you could believe what you did a year ago? I have, over and over. Everyone has - most people get the chance to realise they were foolish.

Out there somewhere, right now, there is someone who is already there, and who would be glad to be able to show you whatever it is they know and you don't. Go find that person. Speak to someone who knows from experience. You have all the time in the world for your project once you've found that person.

In the meantime, spare me 21 minutes and watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.h...
You, like most everyone else, are not qualified to judge your future happiness.
I didn't know that mathematical equations could be patented. I'm pretty sure they can't in the UK.
Glad to have explained it. I was just trying to say that, like the DoD, you may be required to protect the system from the outsiders.

I was talking about the foreseeable future tough, maybe we will just evolve as very conscious responsible beings.
JavaScript: The Evil Parts from JSConf 2010
Increasingly their users are going to be using Macs and Android, and I really do expect Linux distros to start to see an upswing as data becomes accessible on more and more devices.
I know you won't answer this, but do you think it will come to Kaleidoscope faster than it's come to Versions? (how long has Versions been out? 2 years?) Or, when it comes to Kaleidoscope, will you use that functionality in Versions?
ANNOUNCEMENT: Commercial Users of Functional Programming - Michigan
A few of us that are interested in the practical commercial application of functional programming ideas are meeting to discuss our common interests and learn from each other. We're organizing under the umbrella of the Commercial Users of Functional Programming organization (http://cufp.org). If you're interested, we're meeting June 24 @ 7 pm at the Troy Community Center in Troy, MI. More details here for those who are interested:

http://sites.google.com/site/cufpxmichigan/

Please feel free to forward this to others if you know other users who might be interested. If you or someone you know has worked on a commercial project in any of these languages:

CLisp/Clojure

Erlang

Haskell

Scala

OCaml/F#

or if you'd like to learn any of these languages we'd like to meet you. Further, if you know of anyone who would be willing to share their experience with commercial use of a functional language, we would like to have speakers present their experience with various commercial development scenarios at upcoming meetings. And, of course, if you're interested in learning more about FP, please feel free to join us.
> What happens when there is enough computing power in it to replace an entry level laptop?

They release a new one with half the CPU power that's slightly thinner and lighter and has room for more battery?
sigh So far, you've done little more than compare with a completely different form of measurement. Nice timing on that.

Here you might find a chart that shows the differences between IQ ranges. You might notice how you could be 10+/- and manage to find yourself in a completely different range: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_reference_chart

And finally, to "back up my claim", check out a few other criticisms of IQ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Criticism...

A personal favorite: A 2006 paper argues that mainstream contemporary test analysis does not reflect substantial recent developments in the field and "bears an uncanny resemblance to the psychometric state of the art as it existed in the 1950s."

In other words: fooey.

Successful 90 average entrepreneurs invent, evolve and innovate while there are 110+ middle-aged "geniuses" living in parent's basements. Of course, the opposite is also true.

An IQ test doesn't reflect who you'll be, if you'll be successful or if you'll change the world.

"There is often a stark gap between the abilities of the gifted individual and his or her actual accomplishments. Many gifted students will perform extremely well on standardized or reasoning tests, only to fail a class exam."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Underac...

IQ test is more of a religion than science. Like any religious person, you might allow your belief to overstate purpose.
What hurdles need to be cleared before this can be done? I know that CCD and Camera based barcode readers can read a barcode off of a screen so how hard would it be to generate a unique barcode for each card in your wallet and just scan your cell phone if you wanted to make a purchase somewhere?
Limiting by whether or not a user has spent 30 seconds creating a HN account seems pointless.

Maybe only show emails to users with 25 karma or more?
I like Gerd Gigerenzer's book Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You

http://www.amazon.com/Calculated-Risks-Know-Numbers-Deceive/...

for readable training in rational thinking. Interestingly, Gigerenzer's more recent books have focused more on strategies for using standard human thought processes, which may not be strictly rational, to reach correct decisions. I haven't read those books yet as closely as I have read Calculated Risks.
I didn't get all 25 at once, but I could come up with the melody to the the ones I did know immediately. How does the mind do that? It amazes me that I have some kind of mp3 player in my head that can recall parts of a song I haven't heard in years just by seeing the title.
Personally, I prefer raw elisp to calc.
Looks amazing. Ordered mine, can't wait to see it in person.
There wasn't a good explanation in the article. Anyone want to break it down for the layman? I get that the power company can record variances in load and time stamp them, but how does that signature have anything related to a recording made on a battery powered device?
Web App Strategy: Why Market Research is Important and Doing It For Free
The Adams Theory of Content Value
Am I being naive when I say that I bet the programmers working on gcc could be expected to know how to use constructers and destructors properly?
I actually put my KeePass database in a public directory on my Dropbox. This lets me keep my password DB in sync not only across my desktop systems, but also the iPhone version of KeePass.
Except that by then you have already spent time and, possibly, money on developing said widget.
The problem with phrases like "Leading Provider" isn't just that they're too marketese, but that they're obviously false. They destroy your credibility before the game even begins.

Moral of the story: Just speak English and tell the truth. A concept so revolutionary, it just may work.

Great post, Jason. You put a label (early adopters) on the demographic many of us should be pursuing. Thank you.
Maybe it's about revenue. Compare the revenue of top App Store to top Market apps.
The process definitely has a lot of randomness, but this is a lot harder to do in practice then you think. Specifically, because you supply bank account information with every account, so now you're also creating several bank accounts. And there are a lot of other factors that would make it a major nuisance.
Let me further expand on the problem here. the author says, and I quote:

"They refused to be pinned down to an exact reason, simply stating that they were doing a cull of any applications that presented widgets to the user."

And then she says she doesn't understand what she would have to take out of the app to have it re-approved.

So then, she goes on to say, and I quote:

"Our app is a beautiful photo frame with a few nice things you can put over your photos."

I take this as: you can use their app to make your iPad into a digital photo frame. Since the whole screen is taken up by the photo app, I'm sure that as a feature, the developers added the ability to add "nice things" to a layer on top of the frame, such as a clock, or speech balloons, or SOMETHING which Apple may consider the equivalent of a widget.
Adobe Unveils Digital Viewer Technology for Magazines
One thing they've done to reduce the "fastest gun" problem is disable accepting an answer within a certain time frame after a question is posted. Also, answers with the same vote count are randomly displayed rather than ordered by order of posting.
Omnibus-response to previous comments:

- The ability to intercept and modify requests is indeed missing. We've had some proposals for how to add that to our APIs, but nothing concrete yet.

- We're working on the ability to manipulate the cookie store: http://src.chromium.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=chromium.git;a=...

- The browser cache isn't something we've ever even thought about before. Thanks for bringing it up.
Thanks. Buying the print issue. MagCloud is an awesome service, btw.
Marginally.
Maybe. We'll see how much revenue they get now that their app's only venue is Cydia.
Without merging, I don't see Kaleidoscope as a legitimate competitor to Changesapp, except in image comparison. Still, I'm glad to see the competition.

(This is one place where Mac devs could also benefit from looking at Beyond Compare or ExamDiff Pro on the Windows side; they're great tools themselves.)
As someone with a very deep understanding of at least one of the platforms, I would argue that the differences are primarily technical. That is, there are technical barriers to doing bad things on iPhone (APIs are much more limited in scope) that don't exist on Android.

Of course, it's easy to link to private APIs on iPhone, but the app submission process has a totally automated system that verifies that you don't.
This is very poor rational to support this level of usury. There are two components at hand: equity and wages. Employee equity could be increased (much better distribution) and most likely would have only positive benefits. If wages were to increase, how does this destroy international trade? Certainly, wages could be increased by some amount and the main effect would be less goods sold at a higher price with a net at similar levels as today. There are some arguments to be made for how high the wage level can raise in what period of time. But up it should go.
Now if only some company will get their act together and actually let me buy one. It feels like I've been seeing demo's of these devices since the dawn of creation.
I'm not interest whether or not this is a copy of something already in place, it looks like a neat little app. Anyway, honestly, the 'buy - go to the store' button at the end of the page was a bit unexpected..
I had to buy it, after reading through the PDF. I'll be keeping up with these, for sure.

I wish that, somehow, an article of new content could perhaps be in each issue. If there were a magazine like this with original content, or at least half original... I don't even know how to express how overjoyed I'd be.

Like someone in this thread put, "the old Wired". But really, much better.

Keep up the amazing work, please! And let us know if you're interested in help.
Flaccid lede. A very flat and not particularly informative article.
From what I've heard, very few engineers were using Windows in the first place. This mostly affected sales people.
Introduction to Android Operating system
Google in China, tweeter in Iran and Facebook here have shown three very different responses to local requests for censorship. All three of these have done what they believe to be in the best interests of their business.

As individuals, we don't always do what is in our own personal best interest. We choose to execute what we percieve to be our social responsibilities and we do so, at least in part because the society at large expects this of us. Shouldn't we expect corporates to carry a little bit of social responsibility?

When companies act this way, they further reinforce preference falsification and put local movements for social change years behind. Now the moderate Muslim in Pakistan will find it even more difficult to publicly express her views and this will push the tipping point for a more moderate Islam in Pakistan by quite a few years.
Yeah opening several bank account would be a huge nuisance.

Oh well just a thought.
How to make newspaper pay walls work (in principle)
Pay palls could work, if newspaper companies follow a couple of basic ideals.
No. There is no evidence that Windows 7 is less secure than Mac OS X Snow Leopard --- at least, not clear evidence (we could certainly spend a few days tit-for-tat'ing about this disclosure or that, but it wouldn't amount to a coherent argument).
Creating a HyperCard for the iPhone/iPad using HTML 5
I haven't had this problem. TrueCrypt encrypts each block independently, and Dropbox has typically been pretty good at just updating the deltas.

The biggest problem I've had storing TrueCrypt volumes in Dropbox has been forgetting to unmount the volume when I move from one system to another, resulting in unsynced changes and lots of conflict files.

One solution is to store your entire Dropbox directory within a TrueCrypt volume, but this is a bit cumbersome as you'd need to create a separate TrueCrypt volume on each system, and ensure that you have the volume mounted before running Dropbox (although this can easily be worked around with a launch script).
Build your own (site-specific) social graph
Thoughts and rambling on the X protocol
yeah good question. wild stab in the dark, but the image sharpening could be a technique using time-averaged signal positions. E.g a telescope mirror is not optically perfect and subject to tiny movements (wind, rain, ground tremors etc), not to mention of course light being refracted by the atmosphere. so what you do is observe a signal over time to get a statistical fix on its actual, real position. This may well involve Fourier-Transforms where you transform from "time space" to "space space" (not very well worded). I have a feeling Fourier transforms are used a lot in signal transmission and analysis.
Yes, the Subversion app that still doesn't provide a merge capability despite users' requests for it year after year.

Kaleidoscope does look beautiful (not unlike Versions), but given Sofa's track record I wouldn't hold out much hope for support after the initial release.
You're right. Frankly I think rates of alcoholism among native populations from the 1600s to today would be the best measure of this idea. This would need to be compared to other subjugated demographic groups, perhaps in other areas of the world at the same time period or similar cultural circumstance.
This is pretty emblematic of all the Apple apologists out there: stating that everything is fine for everybody, just because it's fine for them.

Until they fall into the hole themselves.