skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use pomodoro.app on my Mac, the timer function on my iPhone, and may download a dedicated iPhone app at somepoint.

I personally don't currently use the history feature of pomodoro (what previous tasks were, how many were completed, etc.). Just defining a task, focusing for 25 minutes, and tracking break time are the things most important to me.

I'd ideally like to have many pomodoro "time jars", which track how many pomodoros I complete for a particular larger goal over some time period. When the time jar is full, for some personal definition of full, you've completed the goal. Haven't found a good app for this, so pointers would be appreciated. Might hack up something simple for the iPhone this summer...

To the commenter about time optimization wasting time, if that's all you do instead of Actually Working, sure. But to never profile your work flow, and never experiment with new methods... not only is that boring, it's inefficient over the long term. My personal productivity philosophy definitely includes a meta step for reflection and experimentation http://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/productivity/
I thought this was a thread about a competitor to the iPad, no?

Does nobody subscribe to capitalist market theory anymore these days? sigh

There will soon be many competitors to the iPad. These competitors, unable to compete solely on features or polish (read: quality), will most likely compete on price -- i.e. Hyundai vs. Honda. Competition of this nature can drive down prices on the entire market. It's clear that Apple makes considerable profit on each iPad ( https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/04/how_much_does_it_cos... ) so they have quite a bit of room to maneuver on price in order to put pressure on the market -- i.e. if they make it harder to compete on price, then competitors will have to compete on other differentiable areas, like features or marketing, and very few competitors will be able to do so. A $100 price drop, while eating into profit, is still a profitable price for the device.

In addition, Apple has shown a willingness in the past to cut prices ( https://www.macworld.com/article/59838/2007/09/iphonepricecu... http://www.tuaw.com/2009/10/20/macbook-pro-sees-a-price-drop... etc. etc. etc.) either due to market forces or simply because component prices fell, which was the case with the original iPhone I believe (Samsung dropped prices significantly on the memory components used in the device).

Finally, prior to launch, Apple indicated that it could be "nimble" about iPad pricing should if flounder in the market or come under heavy competition ( http://www.techdigest.tv/2010/02/apple_to_lower.html ). See the point above about profitability. The market is extremely open right now and it's Apple's to own and dominate. 2 Million iPads, while a lot, is only a fraction of the potential market. Apple needs to absolutely dominate the market now, and make it that much harder for competitors to move in. They'll either have to iterate with the next version of the device soon, and include obvious features people want, like USB, SD Card slots and a Camera. Or they'll have to cut prices. Considering that the original device pointedly omitted such obvious I/O capabilities, it appears the philosophy will not be to release a new version with those minor modifications. So price seems to be the other logical conclusion.

Common, it's not that hard. Sometimes I swear I feel like I'm speaking moon language.
Coltan - used in all kinds of electronics, helps finance conflict in the Congo
Heck, I'm not even sure I can find just the display for these prices.
No, your example isn't abuse. It's undesirable - I'd certainly like it if no one were starving to death, but the guy improving her situation is not the problem.
Wikileaks has been around for less than 3 years. So when I say "long time ago" you have to take it as a figure of speech. I did say I lost respect for them, but I didn't say I lost respect for them as a result of their release of any particular information. I lost respect since they started to claim that they have more than a million documents (2007) waiting to be released, but they can't release it because of lack of funds, specifically for infrastructure costs and had to close the site down. Which they later expanded into legal fees, their website (when they were shut down) showed that their legal fees is being paid by other non-profit organizations and most lawyers are working pro-bono (since they opened up the site I can't find the page or the piece of information). For the love of me I don't understand how they can have an operative cost of €600,000 per year. They never addressed the specifics of their costs.

More WTF, they listed some members in their advisory boards (including Noam Chomsky), who didn't even know that they were members of wikileaks advisory board. [1]

There are quite a few things about wiki-leaks that doesn't make sense or add up, and perhaps the nature of their work creates some discrepancies in information about their work, but that shouldn't take away anything from some of the valuable leaks that came from wikileaks.

Two rules I try to apply in my life.

1) Be skeptical of anyone and everyone. Everyone is biased and everyone has a motive. "Who watches the watchmen"?

2) Don't put anyone in unrealistic moral standard. Avoid "herofication" of individuals or an organization. Humans are fallible.

[1] http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/04/wikileaks-julian-ass...
Beautiful design, Jason.
I don't think being locked down to a specific FPGA is as big a deal as you think. In professional circles, FPGA choice is mostly a matter of your company being an Altera shop or a Xilinx shop, and which FPGA they've used in the past. For large customers, FPGA companies work quite closely with their customers so things like support and availability of parts at the quantity required means far more than exactly what features are in where. For many hobbyists, typically what matters is what peripherals ship with the cheapest dev kit as much as how many LUTs and memory blocks are on the chip.

But, on the flip side, some of the most annoying and agonizing decisions that you end up making over a lifecycle of a project is whether to upgrade to the newer / newest releases of various software. As you guys undoubtedly know, setting up these software is not trivial, and getting it to a point where a reasonable workflow exists can be pretty damn painful. And with every upgrade, you might get a nice compilation and synthesis speed upgrade coupled with a memory bug here and configuration but there. Something that some people might have a use for, is ability to target not just across different chips, but different versions of the software, not as a chip selection utility, but more as a tool selection utility might make a little more sense, where you provide fine control over exactly which version of tools are being used, as well as commonly used knobs for configuring the various parameters of place and route & synthesis options (of which there are plenty)

Even with that, though, I don't know if this is a service that a lot of people will find useful. As sybreon points out, IP cores are a huge part of FPGA development flow and I don't really see a way to easily handle that aspect of things. Many of the IP cores spit out encrypted HDL and I think pretty much every tool vendor has a different format that they can handle. Also, a lot of people are pretty tied to their simulator of choice, with libraries and custom TCL scripts to massage things just right, and I'd imagine it'd be difficult to move things like that over (though I did not go through the signup process to try things out myself).

I've been out of FPGA arena for couple of years now, but I think places to focus within the FPGA marketplace, especially in areas where people will pay real $$, is in testing and verification. Back in the days, many people used FPGA like they would a software compiler - try few lines of code, hit compile, check it out, rinse and repeat. With the increasing complexity of the designs due to ever increasing gate count, trying to develop like that doesn't work so well. If you could, for instance, take in a verilog or vhdl module, do some simple analysis to figure out input / output ports and the sensitivity list, and beat the crap out of it (using both user-defined data set and random / smart / fuzz sets), you might have something there...
Sugru is available for pre order now
We had a Corewars competition in college back in... uh, I'm feeling old.
Career Progression from Zero to Hero
Digg is Deadd
The Top 25 of most shared Youtube Videos on Twitter
Google Chrome OS to Launch in Autumn
Well, it is listed on the page ( http://code.google.com/intl/fr/events/io/2010/sessions/go-pr... ), but the video will be uploaded friday, according to http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/coming-soon-videos-fr...
> In a world, where there is only apple devices, Flash indeed has outlived its usefulness because there is no need for multi platform rich application/content development/authoring when there is only one platform left.

If that is indeed Jobs' view, why is Apple putting so much effort into advancing open multiplatform technologies like HTML5 and WebGL? Surely if there was only one platform left, then everyone could write 3D content specifically for the iPhone OS. There wouldn't be a need for anyone to use WebGL, so why are they wasting their effort in implementing it in WebKit?

Here's another explanation. Jobs believes that in 2-3 years time, browsers and mobile CPUs will have advanced to the point where HTML5 is equivalent to Flash in most scenarios. So why bother wasting engineering resources on trying to get Flash working acceptably on the iPhone when the technology may be obsolete within a few years? Why not just get those engineers to instead work on improving JS performance in Mobile Safari?
Yes, really.

-- Please read my statement on OpenBSD again, the keyword is "even" which implies I view the security of this os rather highly.
Hmm bubbles/titles on syntax sounds like a good idea, thanks!

I suppose if you want a super-language, you would have a language which starts from very simple constructs and one straight-forward way to define new syntax and semantics to fit a given problem, within that language itself; so that for any given problem, someone can read the solution, and if they don't know the syntax/semantics, they can read the definition which is in turn written in this really simple language. Lisp is mostly ideal for this.
what about the argument that someone could have used my unsecured wireless network to download copyrighted material with my IP address without my knowledge?

While most people protect their wireless, I know many mom and pops who still have no clue how to do any of that stuff and could be victims of their neighbor's crimes.
Yes, that is a good defense and, if true, should be brought up if you are accused.
Lego printer
New York City Continues To Boost Tech Start-Up Scene
Intercepting TOR traffic is trivial, it's not really a hack. They could have just run a TOR exit node of their own, and seen what came through unencrypted. The point of TOR is not to keep the traffic private (you use end-to-end encryption for that), it's to obscure the sender.
> It's not because it was built in China so it's cheap.

The problems start when they are designed in China.
AT&T axes unlimited data, unveils tethering price
This is taken from Founders At Work, which you should buy (it's great!):

Bookbook - Schacter never came up with a name for this, but it's basically an XML file on your website where you would provide a feed and other people would do this and create a central crossing engine that would say, "You have this book and he wants that book, and you are not that far from each other."

Loaf - a fully distributed social network (no central server whatsoever ... yes, that does sounds like Diaspora). Uses email as a carrier, a bloom filter, and it basically tells people you talked to about other people you corresponded with 'in an encrypted and compressed way'.

Memepool - which was a blog of links (before people knew what blogs were, this was in 1998). So basically an editor with reader submissions - a link at the bottom saying "Send us an email. Give us good links."

Muxway - 2001, 'which was a lot like del.icio.us'. Only it was single player - Schacter could save links, and those links were public, and that was that.

GeoURL - http://geourl.org/

Reversible - a failed version of del.icio.us. It was 'different in a few key ways that made it fail.'
I think I've missed the point because there isn't really a point.

The author talks about a hypothetical Doctor but doesn't really seem to know much about medicine. The author asks "what is disease" but doesn't bother to do any real work to answer that question.

To answer your second question, a linguistic analysis of the word disease would look vaguely like the author's "What is a disease?" section, except it would involve real observation about how the word is used and in what contexts. The result is that rather than throwing your hands up in the air saying "it's meaningless to talk about whether something deserves to be a disease" you can say something like: "In a medical context, disease means this' in a research context, disease means this, in a casual context, there are two broad groups of people for whom disease means two different things" Armed with this more accurate language, you can start talking about actual concrete examples and explore more detailed and relevant hypothetical examples.
Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education
Hello!

I'm thinking of an idea of a social networking education website. Many online educational projects such as Youtube EDU, iTunes U or Academic Earth have great content but lack social networking features. I believe the "social" part is very important in the process of learning things when you can interact with classmates and instructors, ask questions and get answers. So that not only you can browse and watch education materials, but also the community will play an important role in the learning process.

Do you know any websites that already offer these features?

There are good examples of the execution of this idea for particular areas like italki.com for english learning or www.jamplay.com for guitar playing. But I'm thinking bigger, so it'd be for fundamental university disciplines like computer science or mathematics.

I don't want to build another useless social network, I'm more on the way to research what is already available, how existent solutions can be enhanced.
Moodle.com
It does take some inspiration from the game of life, but if you look closer, the similarity is more visual than anything else. The relation to and foraging simulations is a lot closer.
Look for New outstanding Middle School Research Paper Topics
Writing on middle school research paper topics is the simplest form of writing. However, it might seem a tough task for middle school students. These students are benefited by learning how to select topics for their research papers. This will make it easier when selecting topics of more complex nature.
Form letters are, essentially, "half-read once and then weighed weekly to produce a report for $POLITICIAN", according to my brother, who used to be in constituent services.

Themes which come up frequently in non-form phone calls and letters, on the other hand, have a surprising amount of impact. The Republicans, for example, got a huge amount of negative feedback regarding immigration policy during the last election cycle, and more than one politician mentioned the depth and intensity of that (not always in a positive way) in signaling changes in their stance on it.

P.S. If you ever have a severe problem with the government and don't know where to turn, document everything, then call your Congressman's office.
http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/monsterid
Clearly George is doing it wrong, no matter what industry he's in. I've met a few contracters like this. They really want a full time job, but are taking contract positions in the meantime. They just done get how contracting works.
A Complete Collection of Chrome Extensions for Designers
Google Chrome is probably the fastest growing web browser at this day. Here is a stunning collection of 20 useful Google Chrome extensions for Web Designers this week. Enjoy.
It might give us the hope and belief that we are able to deal with the real issues in the next 20 to 50 years. You don't hear "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we do X" anymore, because most people today don't remember that we were once able to send a man to the moon. They don't have that expectation that anything is possible if we just focus intently on it and decide to get it done.
On css triangles and jaggy edges
Current WYSIWIG editors use contenteditable or some other browser-inbuilt rich text control, with varying results. Aloha uses parts of the browsers control, but does its own selection handling, cursor handling, and formatting control. The new Google Docs editor, from what I've read, does everything manually, including layouting and rendering the cursor. So it's reimplementing RichText controls in HTML+JS.
Similar with my uni car parking, the fine would only be like 5 times maybe, the problem is that they end up targeting you if you always park without a permit so while it would be cheaper if you got caught a normal amount of times you end up getting caught a heap of times in a row.
Although the myth of the super-contrator is popular, in my experience most contractors are glorified temp labor with poor to average hourly rates.
This seems like an obvious sign to me that iPhone 4 will not be AT&T exclusive. The June 7th timing makes it pretty obvious that AT&T is trying to pull in as many subscribers as possible before the news breaks.
What a depressing image you paint. Even worse, I'm sure lots of people go that way, in both big cities and poverty-stricken areas.
Sources of Capital - Hedge Funds
I was thinking more that the people actually concerned with their privacy might not want to submit their name and email address on some random site. So the the number of pledges could under represent the people that actually want to quit (or did quit).

But, yeah, it's far more likely that most people just don't care.
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Israeli reporter
Steve Jobs: The iPad Concept Came BEFORE the iPhone
AT&T Gives Up on the iPad 3G Unlimited Data Plan
New Protocol Attempts to Standardize Sharing
The HORRIBLE point facing FPGA creation is the tools just don't tell you when you've accidentally made silly circuits.

There should be much better errors/warnings letting you know when you've written VHDL/Verilog that doesn't turn into standard logic gates and systems, when you've done things that have easy to identify race conditions, and when you've written things that just don't make sense.

After working with computer code compilers, and analyzers like lint and clang, it is still sad to look at the errors (and lack of errors) coming out of VHDL/Verilog tool chains and not see something even 2 orders of magnitude of useful as far as toolchain output. WAY too much Field application engineer time is spent on junior engineering problems that can't be effectively delegated due to this insufficient machine error checking.

I mean, half the time you generate something that will simulate differently than run in real life, that's OBVIOUS from the code structure. But no, the toolchain doesn't identify that, bench checking the specification to the VHDL is the only way to find that (or a code review by another engineer).

So TLDR: Make VHDL or Verilog spit out REAL errors and warnings when used somewhat incorrectly, or likely incorrectly. Bring the tools up to the standard of sequential coding tools, or even more in that direction instead of the morass it still is today for hardware specification languages.
Barely a month and they kill this plan? This was a large part of the reason I decided to buy a 3G iPad. Isn't it past time for Apple to dump ATT?
Perhaps because "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we do X" is a pretty terrible argument for most problems.

For most analogous engineering projects (e.g. going to Mars) the answer is "because it costs too much".
What about the situations where the 300 or 200 lender made the loans first though?
A Windowsless one where one can shrug and go "meh, works for me on Linux" for a change
In fairness, we don't actually know everything there is to know about the guy so maybe he gives 99% of his income away to charity. If he is 'doing good' in some unrelated way then maybe he feels this patent silliness is the best way to maximize his income so he can do good with it.
Never thought I'd say it, but I'm gonna miss Rogers when I go to the states - $30 for 6 GB + free tethering.
It's not a bad idea; might be tough to monetize
If you subtract the 4.61% using IE6 from the IE total score then IE and Mozilla have almost exactly equal share in Europe 38.71 vs 38.61%.
Shouldn't OSX run most tools written for unix/linux?
My ticket gets checked less then monthly and I commute to work daily. The monthly ticket costs at least 50€, the penalty is 40€. From a mathematical point of view, it makes no sense to buy a ticket.

There are a couple of caveats. When I don't have a ticket, e.g. because I forgot my wallet, I'm on a constant lookout and the train ride becomes really stressful. If you get caught several times they might press charges against you, so it is not feasible to go without ticket on a regular basis anyway. And last but not least, I'm using a service, so I pay for it.
Social Startup Labs event in London
So I'm grandfathered in. What happens when I upgrade to the next iPhone? 2GB is a damn joke. I hate that tethering is a hardware capability that I rent from them - not willing to do that.
Thief of Memory Stalks a Colombian Family
When you chose to use an OSS project, you choose to follow the license, sure.

But what Jobs said - 'we put it in open source' - implies that it KHTML wasn't already OSS.
"I'll tell you a secret: I actually started on tablet first." Had idea of a multitouch display that you could type on. "About six months later they called me in and showed me this prototype display." This was in the early 2000s. Gave it to one of Apple's early UI folks who got inertia scrolling and other things working. Jobs thought "My god, we can build a phone out of this. And I put the tablet on the shelf because the phone was more important. When we got our wind back and thought we could do something else, we took the tablet back off the shelf."

Their degree of secrecy is pretty amazing. I can't help but think, when reading this passage, about how silly it is for the iPhone "dev team" (the jailbreaking community) to talk as if they planted the seed, in Apple's mind, of releasing a native SDK — as if that neuron had never fired within the walls of Apple. I think it's hard for people to imagine remaining so tight-lipped about plans of immense scope.
Disclaimer: My girlfriend is one of the main organisers...

The event is interesting for bringing together social business models, technologies and the familiar lean startup practices.

It's quite ambitious in what it's trying to do and, being a believer in the "it's the people that make the event", it'd be awesome to see fellow HN'ers there.

I'm also surprised that "Social Business" doesn't get much coverage on HN? After seeing various Grameen social businesses first-hand in Bangladesh, I'm convinced that it's a key part of our future economy and would like to see more on the topic.
Aside from the Maccas bit, the article was pretty interesting, although this as well as others seem to only focus on successful "be different" companies. Or maybe it's the pessimist in me that thinks if I tried it, it'd fail miserably.
Where? They seem to endorse the New Yorker article; linking to it on their front page.
Vgo Telepresence Bot Revealed: A Whole Remote-Working Day of Battery
Yes, of course that's what I meant. The images from the Valdez spill truly document the tragedy. I don't feel like the same thing is happening with the gulf spill.