skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I bought my last phone nearly three years ago, the selling point was that pre-installed skype app worked for free over their 3G network and skype to skype calls were free. Skype out calls were barred though. I presume this new charge only applies to iphones? If it is the case that Apple badgered them into applying a charge which some are suggesting, I presume this information will leak at some stage. Won't be good PR if true.
What a sensationalist headline.

So what if they've introduced charges? If someone else provides this for free, go there. If not, cough up!
He can't understand Haskell, it's just more aesthetically pleasing upfront, so I'd hazard a guess that the analysis is shallow.
To the extent I've studied this, which has very little to do with Woz, he doesn't pass my threshold of "techie".

Your mileage will vary and my information is woefully incomplete, but on the other hand I sure don't think he's in the league of any of the techies I cited, although I'm willing to believe he's significantly more technical than Thomas Watson, Jr. was and perhaps a bit more than Larry Ellison is (don't know much about that aspect of the latter).
There's also going to be an interesting section of the data around college towns or major research centers, e.g., Los Alamos or Niskayuna. (I realize the original author only looked at the top 50 cities.) Does Wolfram Alpha have the data to do more of this style analysis?
I find it hard to believe that the article on fractional differentiation only briefly mentions the Fourier transform. For functions on R^n with vanishing integral (or periodic functions on R^n with vanishing integral), the Fourier transform allows you to define arbitrary powers of the (positive) Laplacian by taking the Fourier transform, multiplying by |\xi|^\alpha, and then taking the inverse Fourier transform. If n=1, this process yields the fractional derivatives in the linked article.

Something else that's great is that this works on (compact or asymptotically Euclidean) manifolds, too! You can make sense of the Laplacian on these spaces, and then spectral theory lets you define its fractional powers. The theory of pseudodifferential operators lets you realize these powers fairly explicitly as oscillatory integrals.
Two ideas:

1. Mobile phone apps. With something like PhoneGap you should be able to do this relatively quickly.

2. For every new registered user, add a to-do item that they need to tell their friends about the app, giving it 5 minutes. This might work but regardless, I hope you think creatively about marketing it and getting your users to market it for you.
"Engineers at Rocketdyne, the manufacturer, estimate the total probability [of catastrophic failure] as 1/10,000. Engineers at Marshal estimate it as 1/300, while NASA management, to whom these engineers report, claims it is 1/100,000. An independent engineer consulting for NASA thought 1 or 2 per 100 a reasonable estimate."

— Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle by R.P. Feynman
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

Empirical post script (as of STS-132 2010-05-26)
Total launches 131
Failures 2
Successes 129
Failure rate: 1.5%

If you read the report, you will find that NASA declared a reliability number that the shuttle was to meet (1/100,000), and then backed into the calculations that justified that reliability number. In other words, it was top-down, rather than bottom-up. IMHO, bottom-up tends to be pessimistic, but top-down tends to be be a figment of management's imagination. In his report, Dr. Feynman pointed out that many of the calculations had reliability figures that, while not necessarily wrong, were so small as to be impossible to validate... but that was the number necessary to generate the 1/100,000 roll-up (actually, rolled-down) number.
Or, extraordinary claims require a psychological need to believe. :)
For i: Code Editor for the iPad
Oh I LOVE that book. A Modern Introduction to AI / 2e right?
The authors have such a relaxed tone and explain things so well AND they cover a huge amount of material.
Untouched is impossible: the story of Star Wars in film
I suspect that it's because 95% and 99% are familiar numbers from a statistics class, corresponding to 2 and 3 standard deviations in a normal pdf respectively.

In statistical tests, most answers have something to do with standard deviations of the normal distribution, whether it be what 'significant' results are, the error bars on a histogram or the choice of error range on a maximum likelihood fit that has no obvious correlation with normal distributions. (All of these are prevalent in the high energy physics community.)

Statistics are very often used to support 'gut' instincts like that without necessarily understanding the underlying meaning of the mathematics. Happily, it is often the case that approximating everything to a normal and using 'sigmas' is enough to get by.

(May not be the case here, but I deal with it every day at work... </rant>)
True, but take this case as an example, would that case have even the slightest chance of winning anywhere else in the world?

It's a major problem that they allow such cases in the court, but that such a case can win? That's just crazy?
The term Art has different meanings for different people, but ironically one of the core characteristics of a work of art is that it itself has different meanings for different people.

Art is the social objects that people like to own, produce, view, reproduce, etc., in order to advertise certain aspects of themselves: their taste, their wealth, their vow of poverty, their snobbery, their connection with "the real", their flights of fantasy, etc.

Art is like rational argument, but with metaphor in the place of logic.

Art is that which is perceived while in a self-consciously art-consuming mode of thought.

Art is symbols in a web of epistemology, postmodern constructs the mastering of which generates academic status.

None of these is truly correct, and there may be many more. It's up to you which judgements to use. But don't expect other people to agree with you if you put all your eggs in just one of these baskets.

Myself, I hew most closely to the metaphor as logic approach. Art, for me, has to be visceral, it has to engage the senses; as well as being interesting, engaging the intellect; as well as being emotive. It should engage at all these levels, and resonate with me, things in my experience of life, and make it richer.
I was gonna say. Haskell can be an incredibly dense language with a lot of patterns you have to know to effectively read it.

Lisp should be much less dense by comparison.
Do you really think that if their margins were a little higher they would spend the extra cash on safety improvements?
Dup of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388227 and highly recommended. Typically for our field we've forgotten a lot of what we've learned about this and original takes on problems are frequently worth checking out to avoid the bias of subsequent group think or premature optimization.
Some natural geometric shapes:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1228844/Th...

http://www.ironammonite.com/2009/12/surviving-cueva-de-los-c...
He tosses a few others languages out on very similar grounds. I confess to not finishing the article out of disgust after he did this several times.
I nominate the Chinese military shovel.
And of course the hexagon atop Saturn. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/saturn-hexagon/
He is burnt out. I passed through these phases too many times not to recognize the sign.
4) if there was one standard magazine app UI and one standard newspaper app UI, i might feel differently.

apple (or somebody else who can nail this UI) should develop these apps and start selling content like the book/itunes stores.
...that's no moon

Occam's razor wins again!
The article he pulled the graph from has those numbers

http://blog.robpitingolo.org/2010/05/where-smart-people-live...

the specific graphs being:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UnYG5zOkgEY/S_bRIxhp8CI/AAAAAAAABn...

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UnYG5zOkgEY/S_bRVVyNVmI/AAAAAAAABn...

They look like you'd expect.
To me, because he wanted to is even higher on the list.
There are actually multiple potential sources of error here. [EDIT for disambiguation: I mean error in reconstructing the image at full RGB resolution, not error in what anyone has been saying in comments here.]

1. The antialiasing filter. This behaves very much like a defocusing error.

2. Demosaicing. Exactly what this does depends on the algorithms in the camera. It doesn't necessarily look much like defocus. (For instance, on some cameras I've worked with -- not consumer ones, FWIW -- you get demosaicing artefacts that produce a sort of tartan effect.)

If the antialiasing filter is strong enough that it destroys all information in the image below the Nyquist limit for the R and B photosites, then demosaicing can in principle be perfect -- i.e., lose no information that wasn't already lost by the antialiasing filter. But (a) that ceases to be true in the presence of noise in the sensor, and of course there usually is some, and (b) an antialiasing filter that strong throws away information because then you're not really using all your green photosites. So in practice, sometimes you'll get ugly high-frequency demosaicing artefacts. Presumably designing a good demosaicing algorithm is largely about making this happen as seldom as possible for real-world images.
But they gave me their word!
I can't take this article as it presents itself. He claims directly that his favorite language is Haskell and then procedes to "admittedly subjectively" eliminate everything except that one tiny corner of the current language ecosystem. It feels a lot like putting the conclusion before the reasoning --- much like most language advocation.

I'll disclaim that I agree with him: I too love Clojure/Haskell/Clean/Scala, but I also think his argument is terrible.
I lost any trust for Skype the first time they emailed me that I had 7 days to use some credit or they would confiscate all of it. How is that not theft?
> Manned flights as a whole are meaningless. They accomplish no purpose but to generate PR for billion dollar handouts to defense contractors.

Sure, but people /do want/ to fly, and visit the moons of saturn. Well I don't know for you, but I sure want to :) It's probably the main motivation for space exploration at the individual level.
The points here about feedback are:

Would she sue if the downside is paying Google's lawyers upon likely loss?

If she's not paying for the litigation (likely), then would a lawyer take this and many other cases on contingency for the chance at one jackpot when he has to pay the house so much more for each roll of the die?

There's a strong case to be made for restricting lawsuits by this method instead of having the legal system be even more restrictive about what it lets people sue for. In the latter case, there's a tremendous pressure for capture of the court system to prevent legitimate lawsuits from ever filed. Bribing judges will frequently be a lot cheaper than paying out legitimate damages.
"The psychologist Dr Aric Sigman says that social networking sites undermine social skills and the ability to read body language. Actual physical contact benefits our wellbeing by boosting levels of the hormone oxytocin. In fact, being lonely is as bad for your health as smoking."

Aric Sigman has a previously spoken on the matter and has had most of his points debunked already, see Ben Goldacre's post here:

http://www.badscience.net/2009/02/the-evidence-aric-sigman-i...
The notion that Phobos might be hollow is not exactly new. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_%28moon%29#.22Hollow_Pho....
CloudHarmony
I was unclear about how they determined that the internal cavities were large. I get the same density if I have a rock with 30% of it's interior carved out by phasers, or if I have volcanic style (porous) rock.

Are their instruments sensitive enough to get a line graph of gravitational attraction as their sensors pass near the moon? If that were the case, you might be able to determine large voids vs porosity, but if they only get a single data point, than you wouldn't be able to.
Yeah, Droid momentum is picking up for sure. I don't think a Droid app would be too much work, so I'll probably build one.
What you're missing is that density is meaningless in a Western city. Consider a city like Tucson, which is really spread out. However, within 30 minutes I can reach 500,000 people. In Phoenix, you are 30 minutes away from at approximately 1,500,000 people.

Does that compete with NYC and SF? No. However, density undervalues western cities and overvalues dense ones. Unfortunately, there's no statistics for "people with whom you can have coffee within 20 minutes of travel."
Maybe someone here didn't know about this error ?! So it helps someone, if not you or me.
He seems to have some interesting views. From his Wikipedia page:

Hoagland has commented at great length[66][67][68] on the so-called Norway Spiral, an extraordinary display of light seen over much of northern Norway on 9 December 2009, caused by the partial failure of a Russian SLBM test flight. Hoagland draws special attention to the fact that this event occurred close to President Barack Obama's arrival in Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

On 2–3 February 2010, on the Coast to Coast AM radio show,[69] Hoagland announced that the Russian SLBM had in fact been captured by Dark Forces intent on preventing mankind's exploration of outer space. These Dark Forces, he explained, were probably headed by Nazi officers who had escaped into space after World War II. To Hoagland, this was a sufficient explanation of President Obama's desire to cancel Project Constellation, since Obama had clearly accepted that any attempt to return to the Moon would be thwarted by the superior technology of the Nazis in space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Hoagland
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.h...
Clickable links:

http://i.imgur.com/xzVJt.jpg (something I'm still working on)

http://flockengine.com/ (The header and middle part with the two phones and footer is what's been changed, the content hasn't)

http://imgur.com/KRbNx.jpg

http://imgur.com/w8S4A.jpg

http://imgur.com/DlHDb.jpg

http://imgur.com/qfhbv.jpg

http://imgur.com/KedPg.jpg
Shouldn't net neutrality prevent AT&T from charging more just because Skype uses a certain part of the internet?
Is the app store trend finally showing a crack? At some point, devices are going to discover the same thing that PCs already know - web apps are better than native software for most things. Once flash arrives for real this trend will really start setting in.
The minute I saw this I thought "this is like that Cydonia nonsense from the 90's." And whose name comes up? Richard Hoagland.

I'm sure the people at NASA who see this entry on HN are rolling there eyes as well.
That was discussed here, probably when you brought it up last time. It's the same reason that gift cards expire and properly written NDA's have time limits. Nobody wants to owe somebody something until the universe dies, especially accountants, and especially if the people to whom that debt is owed, are dead or have forgotten about it. It would be insane to carry it on your books until doomsday.
Solid design and good luck with the offer! People here at HN will definitely love to work with you.

Cheers and good luck!
Looks nice. We don't need anything right now, but I'll keep you in mind when we do in the future.

On a related note, does anyone know of a good place to find freelance designers? Not for a one-off deal (like 99designs) but good designers that would just do some hourly-type stuff when I needed designs tweaked or updated a bit?
A parser would not normally handle this kind of thing with exceptions, and any cost would only be paid once, at parse time when building a syntax tree, not at execution time. Very few languages interpret text directly, rather than interpreting trees, as the trees are far easier to work with, more efficient, etc.
That is a much more interesting article; I particularly like the graphs of predicted densities.
Really? I don't see much correlation.

Top 5 by degree density: SF, NY, Boston, Washington, Seattle

Top 5 by startup density: SF, Boston, Seattle, NY, Washington

The latter list is from http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup-centers.ht...

So, yeah, it's the same 5, but not the same order. I did find it interesting that those 5 cities all popped out on the first graph of
Degree and Population Density (by City) on the original blog post -
http://blog.robpitingolo.org/2010/05/where-smart-people-live...

So if you have a city over a certain size with a higher percentage of college grads than would be expected based on population size,
then it's likely to be a startup hub. And the more unexpected the difference, the more significant the startup activity. Except NY has less than expected college grads, so I guess at some point overall size still matters.
I'm wondering how long Skype calling in fring <http://www.fring.com>; will remain for free.
Good point. sami.samhuri@gmail.com takes me 3 seconds but might take someone else 10 seconds. Thanks for the perspective.
Submitter, what do you feel we should take away from this report? This has been pretty well covered in the news, at least here in NL. Is there anything in particular you wish to point out?
It's not theft if, when paying them money to give as credit, you agreed to use it within a certain time frame.
Thanks for the encouragement. I'd be glad to help you out with that. I usually do free minor tweaks(that usually are 10 minutes or so) for existing clients.
'Net Neutrality' doesn't exist yet. A least not officially. However if/when (probably when) it does pass it would probably prevent ATT from charging skype more to route phone calls over thier network.
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback!
Well, impossible until Lucas dies and someone else gets creative control and is willing to let the right thing happen.
Heh. Well, I think everyone works differently, and everyone finds a different "zone" in various todo apps. You know, they feel right or they don't. So us todo app developers shall not rest until every user class is accommodated :)

What's funny is that I thought I had boiled down the homepage to a succinct "sell" explaining the app. But looking at it now, I see that it definitely looks like a "features" page and not a landing page. And there is no reason I can't have an actionable form on the homepage. Still, I have a traffic driving problem, and my homepage optimization problem is secondary. But I think you guys have helped me lift the cloud I was in thinking the front page looked okay. It's actually starting to repulse me now, heh.

I know anything can be grown, and I will admit that my enthusiasm is waning, but I think it's because I'm recognizing right now that the main way I have to grow this is by just bombarding productivity/lifestyle bloggers about it. I KNOW that's necessary, and I would feel motivated about it if this was a "business". But it's not, and it's hard to drum up the fire to put on my marketing hat. I was hoping for more of a 2nd order effect from Lifehacker (e.g. smaller bloggers picking up the story and then blogging on their own) but it didn't really happen.

I think you're right that I'm wrong about todo lists being inherently private. I'd like to think of something more clever than wall-spamming, maybe achievements or levels etc, so even if you don't share, you still are playing a metagame by yourself on the site which may make it more sticky. Or keeping a history of what you've done so you can feel good about it in the afterglow. Something like that. But I do need to focus on virality, not stickiness.

Thanks for the good response!
This is just ridiculous, hopefully Google will finally resolve the issue with their shiny new API-generator that they showed off at I/O.
Five Best Computer Diagnostic Tools
This guy single handedly built a tablet that's only twice the weight of the iPad but considering the specs that's actually really good. The screen is 13", for example.

He built this himself! It's his first go at it. Imagine what he could do on his 2nd or 3rd try. If you're going to compare specs with the iPad then you should compare the engineering efforts, time, and money spent as well.
Putting Online Privacy in Perspective
I will rule out C#. C# never really took off and hardly is the Java killer that it was touted to be.

Never really took off!?!? What planet is this guy living on? Most new Windows software by companies other than well-establish C++ workhouses + all indie work is being done in C# these days.
The oil industry has always been immensely influential but I'm only aware of one point in US history when the Executive Branch was actually populated from the top down by oil industry insiders.
Fair enough. Front page (whose criticism I agree with for sure), or the entire app?
Upon seeing this I am contemplating canceling AT&T service - keeping my iphone and get a Verizon or Sprint MiFi router and use Skype to place the calls, as well use my Google VOice number to ring my skype in number. I use my GV # now anyway so I can just forward it. I dont talk on the phone that much more so text, facebook, email and twitter.

Im not sure im going to do this but it's tempting even more when skype will be able to run in the background on my 3GS when 4.0 comes out. I would save myself $10 to $20 a month doing this. THe MiFi I can carry in my wallet.
David Foster Wallace on Life and Work.com
I'm not bothered by this, because it's their funeral. There are other VoIP programs, it's not particularly difficult to write one, and with Android set to dominate open-architecture 3G phones, something else will dominate VoIP. Hopefully, something open source and using an open protocol. (SIP?)

Oh and if you bought an iPhone and can't access the cost-free VoIP solution? That'll teach you to buy locked-down hardware, you idiot[1].

1: this description does not apply to people who took an eyes-open decision to buy locked-down hardware, knowing it was locked down, realising the consequences and accepting them.
"These don't make any sense to me because there are already apps that perfectly fulfill those needs if people have them."

Obviously not. Those other apps don't offer the simplicity and UI experience that yours does. What you're offering is resonating with some people, but they want what you have right now plus more. People are telling you this, and you're just telling them to go away and use another tool? Your prerogative, but you're asking how to take this to the 'next level', and your users are already telling you how - you don't need to ask HN.
Lifehacker was not luck. It was my calculated hard launch/PR event. I didn't expect more than a one time blip. My problem is that I had no real follow-up.
Glad to hear you might be able to use it! You can reach me at support@todoneapp.com
I really like it, looks really good. :)
sortfolio.com
Not to tread on hajrice's thread, but I thought about doing a similar thread. Should we do a HN designer thread? Okay!

I`m in the process of working 60-70 hour weeks to help bootstrap my venture, which is Deka Creative. I plan on moving to Chicago the first of July to start full time. I've chosen this venture for a few reasons;

1. As a programmer and business man, I've found it extremely difficult to work with designers in the past. A good designer is not only impossible to find, they are hard to work with when you do find one. (Hajrice does good work btw)

2. I've found an awesome co-founder who not only has a skillset that compliments mine, he is the first designer I found that I can actually work with.

3. A lot of digital agencies, and creative services are out of reach for the average startup. They don't have to be.

Our website is not complete yet, due to me working all the time. However, our website http://dekacreative.com points to my co-founders portfolio of work, and he is freelancing right now until we set up shop. Feel free to hit him up in the contact form, and mention you come from hackernews.