skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Give it 20 years, they'll come around to your point of view eventually.

At least they're interested, that's a beginning.

Apathy is a much bigger problem than being still an uncritical consumer.

I remember the first time I had first hand knowledge of an event that was covered by the media, and how much my personal, eye-witness experience deviated from what I read in the newspaper and saw on TV the next day.

It was a moment of absolute amazement, and then I suddenly realized I'd probably been duped to a greater or lesser extent for years about any number of things.
Noble Advertising Concept Banned By Facebook
I also wondered ... is there no firmware to download and flash on your device? We have a nexus in the lab and I would love to try froyo out.

With Apple, you always get the new versions/betas the same day they are announced and can play around with them.

Could also smb. help me, I'm new to Android and I'm just wondering how easy is it to flash my custom firmware on a google nexus (bought over the web store)??
For medical devices, $20k might get a small team to prototype stage. There are a few "simple" medical devices that were developed to prototype level with minimal cash.

I work on EEG systems, and the prototype and related equipment costs less than $10k.

From what I've read, more than a few YC-backed companies get funding soon after demo day.
I read all books in order as well.

I prefer e-readers (Sony Reader, Kindle DX, iPad) because I read at the speed of about one airport novel per hour, meaning I need five books for a cross country flight. It's easier to carry these electronically, and I keep a backlog of 50 - 70 books available to read.

For computer books, such as the jQuery Cookbook I purchased yesterday from O'Reilly in this sale, I will also read each one from cover to cover. With that reading I form a visual spatial memory of where in the book I can find any information I need.

My memory is not eidetic. I can't read the actual words, and I don't remember every page number. But I do know about how deep in the book, left or right page, and where on the page to look, so I can usually find a needed reference within a half dozen page turns.

With e-readers, this is fuzzier. The "where in the book" depends on the progress bar, and there's no left or right to halve the search, so takes at least 10 - 20 page turns instead. These page turns are SLOOOOOW.

On the iPad, page turns are many times faster. So, finding reference material in a thick reference book that I cognitively mapped on the iPad is commensurately faster.
Dogma and religion go hand-in-hand, it's disturbing that this is still the case today.

For instance, the roman catholic churches stand on on condoms is absolutely irresponsible and causes a lot of trouble for a lot of people every year.

The only thing they'd have to do is to be able to admit they were wrong all along, wipe some of that dogmatic slate clean, but that's too high a price to pay for them, because it will lead people to wonder about what else they might be wrong about.
Do you think Apple would come at us?
It's been one week, and a copy cat site ipadcasestore.org has ranked much better than us. I'm quite annoyed!
David Foster Wallace on Life and Work
"c², or the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) times itself, which equals 34,700,983,524."

Does that number actually tell anyone anything?
Why would you need a partner for a simple affiliate site like this?
Here in Europe, unlocked pre-paid phones are the standard. When you go on vacation, the first thing you do is drop into a mobile phone shop and pick up a new SIM for whatever country you happen to be in this week.

When I moved back to England from Spain, I walked into a store, paid 5 pounds, and received a SIM with 5 pounds credit on it. The whole operation took upwards of a minute and a half.

It's just so simple, straightforward, and cheap this way. It's amazing that people in the US tolerate it any other way. Especially since you can walk into any T-Mobile or ATT store today and get a prepaid SIM for any unlocked handset.
Coda looks promising. Seems like something straight from Apple HQ.
Some interesting facts about the Chinese writing system:

* The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no anagrams, and no Morse code! To get around the last problem, The Chinese have devised a system where each word was assigned a number, e.g. "Person" was 0086 [The Mother Tongue]

Massive statistical tests in the past two decades have repeatedly demonstrated that 1,000 characters cover approximately 90% of symbols in typical texts, 2400 cover 99%, 3,800 cover 99.9%. Based on the study of other logographic systems (Mayan writing, Egyptian hieroglyphs), it seems that there's an upper limit on the number of unique forms that can be tolerated in a script. For most people, this value seems to be in the range 2000-2500.

* A Chinese character is generally confused with a word, the assumption being that Sinitic language are exclusively monosyllabic. This is not true. In modern Mandarin the average length of a word is almost exactly two syllables.

* The Chinese writing system is very well suited to writing Classical Chinese but ill-equipped to record the vernaculars (local dialects/languages) of which there are many in China. Consequently, to write Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Shanghainese, it is necessary to invent characters or resort to romanization.

The source is The World's Writing Systems by Oxford University Press. I recommend this book to everyone who's interested in these matters.

[Edit] In case you're wondering, Chinese has palindromes, but not the letter-based ones like we're used to. Hofstadter in Le Ton beau de Marot relates an anecdote with a Chinese professor. Prof. Wu first shows them a famous Chinese palindrome: Ye luo tian luo ye (At leaves-fall season, fall the leaves). In turn, H shows him the quintessential Panama palindrome, but Prof. Wu has difficulty understanding it because he was reading it word by word (p. 143)
There was a HN thread a few months ago regarding a cofounder wish list. Here's a link to the Google Spreadsheet that was created http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgCvDTyBjHdOdDFfMENq...
I believe the difficulty you refer to is caused by the inadequacy of the script to address Chines vernaculars, like Cantonese. Written Cantonese has many characters that would be alien to a monolingual Mandarin speaker.
The program does, but the software you download does not.

Microsoft comes out with new ISV programs about as often as new versions of Visual Studio. As long as you join the latest one every few years, you'll always have an up-to-date set of developer tools.

So all that's left is server costs, which as I mentioned above come to a little over $1k/box.
If you are buying something by weight, bring a scale with you.

To prevent people from stalling or from providing poor service, find something to threaten them with. Examples that I find myself saying frequently: "Let me talk to your boss", "I will report you to the authorities", "If you don't follow through on your end of the bargain, I'm going to take you to court."

A similar tactic: when bargaining, pull out the money that you're willing to pay, say "I'm willing to give you this much for that item, if you don't accept it, I'm leaving" - and then leave if they don't immediately accept. Usually you will have what you want at the given price within the minute.
Verizon was screwing me even worse. $35/mo for a single phone with 100 minutes; my regular usage was about 50 minutes per month. The month my son was born, the bill came to something like $150 for about 300 minutes used. Net result: over the last year, I paid about $500 for less than a thousand minutes.

I recently switched to Tracfone (affiliated with Net10, and targeted at even lower usage). So far I've been quite pleased with call quality, though I haven't left the neighborhood yet.
I plan on expanding quite a bit. Setting up a huge network of sites, expanding on features, working out the best ways of marketing and SEO.
These articles never take into account the cost of laying fiber, equipment, etc, etc to move those bits. The US has some incredibly sparse population in certain areas. Compare to the population densities of Europe/Asia.

Of course, my father, living on a farm 18 miles from the closest grocery store just had fiber turned up (connected).

There are many gov't programs set up to pay for this. Check you bill sometime (cell, phone, internet) those taxes go to equal access, etc.

Obama and congress have an additional program to subsidize broadband to under served areas. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/More-Details-On-Obama-6-B...

And yes, we are mapping are fiber, trying to figure out where it all is. The gov't wants to find out how much capacity is out there so they have a base to figure out the improvement in capacity.

*Disclosure: I work for a telecom (of sorts).
I'm pretty sure that's not why the Catholic church isn't going to promote condoms, Jacques. In the meantime: don't go to the Pope for medical advice. He's not a doctor.
I also wonder what the overbuild in the late 90's/early 00's did to the broadband market.
Fake Call: Free And Valuable iPhone App “Download Here”
That is indeed a valid counter-argument. I guess you'd have to quantify the proportion of its exports that are price-insensitive to be sure. I'd be interested to know if anyone has a rough idea?
What sounds more frustrating is that the availability of the new OS depends on your phone manufacturer
Neat! Yes, that sort of thing I can see it work for, but it had better be very simple and not have to pass too many regulatory tests and clinical trials or you'd be talking about different quantities of cash pretty soon.
"Backronym"? That's obviously a postmanteau :-)
Thanks for the great feedback buro9 , I couldn't explain it better than that.

there's still lot of feeds indeed, actually much more than what you can see now, but they are organize in categories, so you just choose what you really like. The healthcare category has more than 1326 Blogs listed there, and those blogs are the most relevant blogs in their areas, the Advertising category has 1500+ Blogs

The search can help you find what you are looking for.
*The voting interface looks clunky indeed , I'm working on it as well as the broken links.

Now some additional features:

1) any publisher can submit his feeds here: http://www.gmbhnews.com/addsite
eventually yes...they have to defend their trademark or they'll lose it.

Here you can see a bunch of domains that they fought for:

http://www.udrpsearch.com/index.php?query=apple&search=p...

Granted for each one of those, there are probably hundreds of domains flying below apple's radar...but if you get big, you can expect them to sue.
I had the opposite problem at a student intern gig. I hadn't experienced smart pointers before, and was double freeing memory accidentally. The fun part was that the unit tests for my code always worked. It was always someone else's code which appeared to break inconsistently after my change ;)

You live, you learn. We picked it up remarkably quickly in the end, basically because the company had their process working right: clean codebase, solid testing, and regular code reviews.
My browser is 'clean', there are no extensions or plug-ins installed besides the 'closed tabs button' and greasemonkey.

Welcome to HN by the way.
And then there's Dashan (Mark Roswell) who studied Chinese in Canada for four years and then went to China. Within a year he was appearing on Chinese television and now is a huge superstar performing xiansheng, which is an oral comedic tradition that even native speakers find pretty frickin difficult. I'd love to know how he managed to learn Chinese so well, so quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashan.
Woof Social Networking on The Office
> "Others have achieved something similar by having an independent authority build and maintain the network and then leasing access to all and sundry."

Brigham City, Utah (about an hour north of Salt Lake) recently voted for this in their community. The city is building fiber to every home, and broadband providers can compete for customers while leasing the infrastructure from the city.
DLL Hell
Hi megamark16, the site is mostly what buro9 said, and if you are a blogger, you can easily port your content to mobile devices from here: http://www.gmbhnews.com/addsite . And with the site, you can read the latest news from your mobile phone.
It's not that he's not promoting them, he's actively condemning their use, besides that, there are large numbers of people that will follow his advice against the advice of their doctor.

The pope should not be handing out medical advice precisely because he is not a doctor, but that does not seem to stop him.

Real damage is done by this dogmatic stance.
Maybe it's just me, but I like to compare shipped products, not demos and announcements.

This is it right here. What can I buy? What is reality? Talk is cheap.

Its way better to talk about what you've done (even if it was a while ago) than to talk about what you will (never) do.
I'm prepared to think we're safe, for at least quite a while. I imagine they would allow you to move before having to give it up as well. They seem to mainly be after direct names e.g. iPod Nano, or Airport, etc.
Thanks for the compliment. It's the result of an programmer marrying an ag major and trying to find a career they can enjoy together. We couldn't find one so had to create one.
Ok, so I've found this rip of a site: http://ipadcasestore.org. What should I do? I know we bought the theme, but they ripped the concept, the filtering, the theme, etc. This sucks! (Also, they're ranking for our keyword - Which we had for about a week, then Google dropped us from all major keywords).
So, waiting until a lull in the press cycle and then making a big announcement is a hostile PR move? What would a polite PR move look like?

Google staged a major Android conference and made a major release. Of course there is more Android news this week than iPad news.

Google timed their conference and their release to avoid Apple's big April and May releases, and to avoid WWDC and Apple's (presumably forthcoming) big June release. This isn't particularly hostile or non-hostile; it's a basic law of PR physics. The influential tech reporters are human beings that can only be in one place at one time.

(It may be an even more fundamental law of physics: There is only one Moscone Center.)

Finally, since I'm not trying to sell page views I'm free to point out, once again, that selling smartphones is not a zero-sum game. I doubt that Google's efforts to mention Apple and Apple's products in every other sentence is particularly bad for Apple. By elevating Apple to the level of "the industry standard which we all must compare ourselves to", Google buys attention for themselves, but they also ensure that even more people will pay attention to Apple's next move. It's really kind of a win-win. The ones who aren't winning here are Microsoft, RIM, and HP/Palm: The unmentioned ones.
Not sure about a game engine (editor?) but one has to be a lot more careful with using stock icons for a typical desktop app than they would with a web app.

It's easier to retrofit an icon set into a website (where you’re expected to come up with your own aesthetic) than it is to retrofit it in a desktop app (where you’re expected to follow certain metaphors and not deviate your appearance too much from the rest of the system).

I’ve been seeing a lot more OSX apps lately use the icons from Icon Drawer (http://www.icondrawer.com/). While they look fabulous in their own right, IMHO they do not fit with the rest of the aesthetics set by OSX (look at the Concentrate and CallitADay apps for examples).
Regarding the pastel colours:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/
What’s prepaid got to do with the phone you use?

In theory, nothing, but for those concerned about comitting to spending more than $5-10 a month on phone service (that is, the prepaid target market), spending $100-150 for a phone seems unlikely. And, in fact, I bought $10-15 phones repeatedly, about one a year on average, for the ~7 years I used prepaid-only. That was mostly with Virgin Mobile, though, which has no SIM, being a CDMA network.
> it works for multiple books

FYI: Looks like ordering multiple books created issues getting delivery of yesterday's purchases. I also lost the discount after checkout. Today's order pricing isn't what was reflected at checkout.

Today the two titles I bought in two orders are listed as "registered" under the registered books area.

Order status on both orders reflects "BOOKED", but shipped is 0, download link is not active, and the books are not listed in the downloads section.

One purchase shows the discount, the other reflects full price without discount.

An email to O'Reilly auto-responded with this:

> Thank you for contacting O'Reilly Media Customer Service. We are experiencing a very heavy volume of orders due to our recent promotion. This is affecting the delivery and access of your electronic media. Please be patient and keep checking your account.

TL;DR: Buyers should double-check orders to see what was actually charged.
That stuff always piss me of, but I have to wonder if it would result in a better conversion rate...
For extra points, strip the window borders and go full-screen, that's certainly going to get your visitors attention.

And since they can no longer see the url you can be sure they'll visit again.
It was known at the time that correlation is not causation. That is a classic example of taking dietary advice from the incompetent.
Why pay for QA when you can use unwitting customers as guinea pigs?
I love the irony that Flash doesn't come preinstalled on Windows or Linux, but only on Mac OS X
T-Mobile is actually really great in this regard (I also use them, now), since once you need a data plan, you can just use their month-to-month plans without a contract. My month-to-month is ~$90, for unlimited voice/text/3G-data.

But my impression remains that if you buy a "prepaid phone", it will probably be very low quality.
Great paper, and a tough problem (for one thing, sparse positive samples in training data).
You have my interest peaked though regarding the magnitude, and I really support your idea for an experiment.

Writing style apparently is not as easy to distinguish as we thought it was:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592

and a follow-up:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203836

So the previously mentioned 'but we'll recognize people by their writing style if we obscure their ids' probably does not hold water.
You keep repeating "hostile" like I used that word in my comment. I didn't.
Oh that is harsh! What douche bags!
In other words, take the world's best higher education system, flawed though it may be, and smash it.

No thanks.

To take the above points:

1. Down time is useful for, oh, things like co-ops.... It's also part of the research university way of doing things, which 7 wants to abolish.

2. Some places like MIT let you test out of many/most classes; if appropriate, you can take the final and that counts, whatever the result.

3. "Mandatory, off-topic courses" are all part of the ideal of a liberal vs. vocational education. While I feel that's been mostly perverted into modern liberal/radical indoctrination and note that outside of MIT and Caltech the reverse doesn't hold (as of the late '80s the math "requirement" at Harvard was proving you could do algebra), I strongly believe there's value to it and would prefer reform to abolishing the concept if that looks at all practical.

4. From my science, CS, programming and sysadmin background I can't comment on this one.

5. Offline is an increasingly interesting option, but I think we're a long way from it being a substitute for good versions of the real thing (a involved student body, people with a clue doing the teaching, etc.; plus there's the issue that US broadband is a less than ideal platform to attempt this from).

6. Co-op is again vocational in focus, and one wonders if the author is aware that taking all this too far will be eating our seed corn by not producing the next generation of academics.

7. In my and my friends experience, a real world class researcher who's also serious about undergraduate education (if not always entirely competent in doing it) is vastly superior to mid-tier school professor who's research is nothing to write home about and who envies his betters. At the "bottom", the community colleges and their one step about 4 year equivalents where the professors are their to teach with no pretenses about doing serious research can provide some truly excellent education in well established areas.

But with the following caveats:

In the case of those needing post-graduate education (e.g. for those fields where a Ph.D. is the minimal level of education), the single most important thing is that those doing the graduate school admissions to know who's recommending a student.

In new fields like CS where we don't agree on which end is up, the results are likely to be very mediocre. E.g. do you want to go to a Javaschool or one which will teach you the foundations that will allow you to learn the languages and paradigms de jour as needed?

Bottom line: fix what's broken rather breaking everything and starting from scratch. There's going to serious leverage here as the US higher education bubble starts popping and I suggest ruthless use of that.
I used my last 100 Euro phone (my trusty old Sony Ericcson T630) for more than three years. That’s about 2.5 Euro per month. You get a solid phone that doesn’t look stupid and that seems totally worth it (those phones are also not locked which means you can change prepaid providers at a moments notice).
what I would do in your position is start a site called skinz.com or something along those lines.

And use the ipad site as a way to direct traffic to it. i.e. in the footer list "a skinz company". Also setup a newsletter and add a subscribe to newsletter button prominently on your site. This way you'll have a way to contact your users when Apple hits you(and if you get big, they will). Then you just tell them to come to your skinz.com/apple-ipad-skins website and instead of losing all your traffic, you'll lose just half.
Deepwater Horizon: the American Chernobyl?
Froyo looks like a great update, but I'm not clear on why it's the game-changer/straw that breaks the iPhone's back that everybody seems to think it is. Is there something I'm missing here?
At least one.
How Google’s Open Sourcing of VP8 Harms the Open Web
You've got me coming around a bit on that. But I haven't yet seen a comment where I felt I was getting bad legal advice or an insincere 'fail early, often' or anything similar. I could see it useful in say a discussion of operating a site at massive scale when the poster's sys admin skills were limited to a WP blog.

But usually in those cases people qualify what they're saying with, 'I worked on x and we did y'. I think you have to qualify what you're saying in that way. It's presumptuous to assume people know who you are. My background is marketing and PR (as an entrepreneur) so I usually qualify PR-related advice with a note of my experience. If people don't I usually assume they're regurgitating what someone else told them.

Anyway it's moot for me because I never check people's bios.

I don't know who any of those people are other than pg. I'm ok with that because again I'm really only interested in what they have to say. If Mr Z is on his 11th startup and is worth 23 gazillion dollars I would expect that will come through in his perspective on the industry. I hope it would at least.

Don't worry, if I could do it over again I would skip college. I wish I would have raised 1/5 of the money I had to for college and started a business. I would have learned more, faster and would probably be retired already.