skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do not think that iOS' weakness versus Android would be based on its quality But on reach. The iPhone is on a single form of Phone while Android is available on various forms of phones.

Android will be to Phones what Windows is to PCs (personal computers).

Its added advantage is Google is more open than Microsoft will ever be.

One more thing, Android competes favorable with iOS. Much better that Windows does with OSX
They're all sensible abstractions of the way we think, but to judge the problems developed by this framework as the root of all dissatisfaction is to take it too seriously. To pass off this conviction as truth is then dishonest. By this model, we're clearly dishonest all the time, but the author does a disservice to the reader through the holier than thou rhetoric.

Postmodern angst isn't the introduction of new ideas on the global scale, just a particular rehashing of them that has resonated with consumerist America for the last 50 years. Perhaps it's safest to say there are many outlooks on human suffering, but any and all ways of saying them are insufficiently precise to have claims of solutions be anything more than delusion.

So now, I'll apologize beforehand should I misspeak, but I believe the heart of the study of meditation is wrapped up in just doing meditation because talking about it only occludes one's understanding of the practice. With that in hand, I find the article even more disingenuous. Whatever happened to good old koans? Just because they're tricky doesn't mean they were an accident.

Shut up and meditate. Or exercise. Or backpack. Or go dancing.
Probably, but also BaseCamp has fallen incredibly behind MS Project in terms of features. Apple doesn't compete on features they compete on profit margin. When Google has something that will convince people to stop paying Apple's margins then I'd start worrying about iPhone's viability as a platform.

If you want to develop on a platform where people are willing to pay premium prices for premium products then you have nothing to worry about with Froyo.
I don't completely agree with you on the fruit side, as I think most of your vitamins should come from fresh fruits, but the rest puts the basics in nicely!
There are also web applications where hjkl work as well, like Gmail and Google Reader.
Yes, and they are not going to be taking the gifted program entrance exams in the first place...
Idea: Don't sell it. You are profitable. Hire a geek, let him learn the framework and do custom development for you. Take a part, for example, if he bills $120/hour you take $20/hour. You'll also make passive money selling licenses.
Hire a customer support person if you don't have time to do it yourself. You can hire it remotely; but I prefer that the developer is hired locally.

HN, please comment on my idea, as I don't have any real-life experience.
Question to you Kindle folks; it is possible to view 3rd party books that aren't bought from the Amazon online store?

What about scanned PDF? DJVUs? Postscript? and how good is HTML support (images?)
There's good arguments to be made both ways but you're doing a lot of speculation/editorializing about the future instead of addressing more specific examples of how you think iOS is falling behind in a more concrete way. I don't think that's a good approach to get substantive opinions. Besides this cloud-to-device feature, which sounds a lot like Apple's Push notifications to me, can you cite a few more examples? You mention Gingerbread is going to address fragmentation but Google has stated <2.2 will remain in use for lower end/legacy devices. How does that solve fragmentation anytime soon? If Gingerbread is coming out in October there is a pretty good chance 50% (at least) of Android devices won't even have 2.2 by then.
Yeah, but when you meet this: http://github.com/sorccu/cufon

It's a no-brainer.
Here's a system I'm sure most of us would like to have: http://i.imgur.com/AEt79.png

I didn't just go for the most expensive parts either, it would have easily been > $20k if I had. I'm sure we all can imagine a certain bank balance at which we wouldn't think much before buying such a system.
Yes, but how does this apply to intangible goods and services? I hope they're not planning on taxing that.

It also seems like something that would be very difficult to implement and enforce, you know, considering the whole no-boundaries thing.
Those features obviously don't appeal to the general user: they appeal to the developers. The developers are ultimately responsible for creating apps which speak to the general user. The iPhone without apps would at most be 50% of what it is now. Cool features to developers attract developers, and they in turn purify those raw features in to cool easily understandable applications. Cloud to phone Apis is not meant to be a marketing point for your mother.
Right now we're in a bear market which I see lasting for a loooong time aka the Japenese Nikki market where it didn't go anywhere for a while (also known as the lost decade).

I'd recommend putting most of your money in a safer place like low risk bonds just get past inflation instead of losing it in the market. You can allocate maybe at most 10 to 20% in some ETF funds of your choosing though just to have some stock market exposure.
How about a text editor that just obey your will? That would obviously be the ideal thing to do. The problem is, it's not yet possible.

But we still can try to approach it. You can train to type so fast that your fingers move at thought speed. You can use a keyboard layout and a text editor that helps you do that.

If you type and edit lots of text, the worth of advanced editors is obvious: the various short-cuts they let you use makes you faster. Because of that, whatever you do with it is easier. Because of that, you do more.

Learning to properly use a good editor is a bit like learning to touch-type. Slow at first, but the rewards (better comfort and greater speed) makes you wonder why you didn't do that earlier.
Design Thinking: A Useful Myth
Is this content really within HN's bailiwick?
Produce stuff - with computers, it's all virtual. Biology extends into the material world.

Also maybe cure diseases.
I see "consumer" used in place of "citizen" all over the place where it shouldn't be and frankly, I find it a little disingenuous that you're even arguing this point.

Obama: "And we created hospital report cards, so that every consumer could see things like the ratio of nurses to patients"

Americans/Westerners are widely seen, referred to, treated as, and labelled as "consumers" the world over. This is common parlance. This is accepted. "Citizen" is becoming synonymous with "consumer" and this is a Very Bad Thing. You're welcome to disagree, and if so, I'm welcome to tell you that I think our education system has failed you.

Do a search in any political speech database for these two words and you'll find they are interchangeable.
The Burford guy starts out hysterical and continues hysterical.

I think it's bad policy for the CEO to respond personally to the most crazy and unreasonable of customers. Much better to just let them rant on the web rather than giving them a big platform and bringing yourself down to their level.
As a developer I think you're obsessed with features. Whereas users don't necessarily want those features. Apple's bet is that users will reject the platform with more features in favor of the platform that works better.

Let's take your examples. When most people search their phone they're looking for information in either mail, contacts, or SMS messages. They don't want the data from the other hundred programs on their phone cluttering up the important results from those areas. So in this case Apple's stance is actually an advantage for the users.

On the cloud to device API it is nice but it's not like you can't accomplish the same goal simply by polling. So while this is an area where android is superior I don't think it's a feature that makes that much of a difference.

All that said the greatest argument against android winning because of features is the fact that they've always had more features than iOS. I mean if multitasking wasn't a big enough feature to woo users to android than I don't think something like cloud to device messaging is going to do it.
Nothing is irrevocable. This reminds me of the people telling "AMD/Intel/nVidia is doomed" when competitor happens to release a bit better product. AMD did manage to get a profitable quarter after being unprofitable for many many years.
I also remember similar predictions from the late 1980s. I think the bottom line is that prognostications of doom sell much better than more conservative predictions with caveats and margins of error added. Scaremongering is more likely to result in increases in funding, career promotion, magazine/journal articles, impassioned speeches by celebrities, etc.
Searchable full-text databases of political speeches. I've done it. You'll find both words used all over the place, with roughly the same meaning.
I can only speak from a more physical engineering (ME) persspective but the best way to become better at problem solving is by solving problems. To add to that you must also continue to solve harder and harder problems to improve at a steady pace.
You hope? You really hope for gov't to restraint itself? Good luck with that!
I disabled the arrow keys when I started getting serious about vim last year. To give you an idea of how much it helps: when I openned my vimrc to copy this out, I was surprised that these lines were not commented out...
Why is the developer page behind a log-in wall?
Unfortunately, unless I can rebind those keys, such short-cuts are totally irrelevant for people who actually care about comfort and speed: H, J, K, and L are not aligned at all in my ergonomic layout.
Java needs an environment that can generate, parse and rearrange Java code in a way that vimscript just isn't suited for. Even in Emacs it's a Herculean effort to make the editor understand Java at a deep enough level. Generally, if the language you're using co-evolved with a particular editor, use that editor, not vim. (That's not limited to Java.)

On the other hand, C as a language grew up alongside vi, as well as the Unix environment it leverages so well. Languages with a nice REPL, like Python and Ruby, also are concise and flexible enough that any text editor will do; the languages are meant to work well enough with minimal editing capabilities. In those cases, vim is still great, because it's optimized for rearranging text of any kind.
Smartphones have enormous potential to supplement and even substitute PCs for everyday uses of non geeks. (Plumbers, store owners, salesmen, lawyers, accountants, doctors etc. etc.) Searchable app data will be important to make this happen. There is nothing frivolous about a feature that allows users to, for example, quickly access one of dozens of customer profiles.
During the Cold War, the US Government had two sets of calculations for the effects of nuclear arms (at least according to my dad, who worked for some time studying tactical nuclear weapons in the Marine Corps). The calculations for American losses were a worst case scenario--in other words, they were a generous overestimate of how much death and destruction nuclear weapons could inflict on American targets. The calculations for enemy losses were also a worst case scenario--in this case, a generous underestimate of how much we could kill and destroy by nuking them. The difference between these figures was often tremendous, and yet both figures remain very legitimate planning tools for the business of nuclear warfare.

If Moynihan's figures were intended to serve as a similar worst case scenario for climate change, they were not off by much--the increase in CO2 concentration was off by less than a factor of 2, and the measurements for temperature and sea level were just over an order of magnitude off (reasonable if you take worst-case scenarios for both CO2 concentration and the effects of higher CO2 concentration).

Incidentally, some factors, such as glacial melting, seem to be progressing faster than contemporary global warming estimates have predicted.
"However, you also need a healthy ecosystem of consumers who love the product, and at the end of the day, I really think most developers will go to the platform where they can reach the widest audience."

This is exactly what I was thinking. It is an interesting question- do consumers follow developers or do developers follow consumers? It seems that those agreeing with the OP would argue the former while those disagreeing would argue the latter.
$200k/year is probably pushing the amount that would be worth trying somewhere like flippa.com, but I have seen a few businesses in that range there.

Bizbuysell.com has a lot of businesses more in that ballpark, and if you want to be a little more proactive in selling it you could talk to a business broker about selling it.
Why do you state that when the article linked clearly says: "The cause of the accident was not determined, although Buckminster Fuller reported that the accident was due to the actions of another vehicle that had been following the Dymaxion closely.".

It's a pity investors bailed on the project, it seems like it was well ahead of its time, prototype failures are usually experienced behind the scenes, not in front of an audience that large and I think that they investors probably were on the money pulling out because of public perception, even if they blamed the tech, it was not the wheels that had anything to do with this, but more likely a lack of reinforcement of the main structure of the car.

As for flywheels: http://afstrinity.com/ that company (a merger of American Flywheels and Trinity Power) is probably right at the cutting edge.

Anything storing a significant amount of energy is prone to accidents, from batteries to rocks on the tops of mountains.

Flywheels are one of the few technologies that can store signficant amounts of energy and can be engineered to fail with relative grace, as opposed to say a fuel tank blowing up. Another strategy is to use many relatively small flywheels in parallel, each in their own containment vessel.

This also helps with some other engineering difficulties involving flywheels. Flywheels are ancient tech, at least 50 years old but probably much older, and if you count them as storage devices in a purely mechanical context as well then you can go back in to history quite a bit, about a thousand years.
The strength of Bayesian filters is that they tailor to individuals, i.e., everyone can have a different model. An open source "well-trained" one is trivial to subvert.
That guy is no more an idiot than anyone who's ever looked longingly at a Ferrari, or a super highend stereo system, or a supercomputer, i.e. most men.

or a Gucci purse, or those 50k shoes, or that massive engagement ring. Or that yacht, or that swimming suit which gives 0.05% less drag than your current, or that $500-per-plate restaurant. i.e., most PEOPLE. Why the separation of sex?

It's just middle-class trying to imitate rich-class. It happens in every culture, to every kind of person, except those intentionally keeping themselves separate from it.
MIT OpenCourseWare - ocw.mit.edu - has a lot of engineering courses.
A non-obvious dup of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479687
API pages look really informative. Looking forward to seeing what cool features will be added to other apps.

@jrnkntl
I can also recommend icloud.com/mobile for the iPad. It's Read-only but it feels really nice. You can upload using Drop-on-Window using Chrome or Firefox.
Even if typosquatting was legal (which I agree, it shouldn't be) the arrogance here is that he wants to register half of the identified typo domains "to prove value of his services"

That also monopolizes himself in that industry. The company concerned can't say "right ok, yes this is an issue but we'd like to work with our own people on this" because he's already bought half of the domains and can presumably now turn them over to the company's rival.

Articles in the SeattlePI are not worth the paper they're printed on. (and if you don't get that reference, SeattlePI was the first traditional newspaper in US to shut down print operations go totally online)
if it is truly passive why in the hell would you want to sell it?

There's passive(stock dividends) and passive(almost no ongoing maintenance), those are two entirely different things, one doesn't require any thought, one does.
As much as I dislike Apple as a company and love the idea of the Android, I think Apple has totally nailed the concept of the handheld as a sweet and sexy little unit that the average person can take great pleasure in using. It's got very little to do with "features" and everything to do with the experience. So yeah, Android might have features that make the average geek go weak at the knees but Google, at least so far, hasn't shown the ability to get past the engineering and into the joy of the interface. I'm hoping that Gingerbread will get there, but it takes a supreme focus to do good UI. Apple's got it, Google needs to get it.
Does iOS provide some special support for high-resolution screens that Android doesn't? If not, then that's a hardware feature that any rival could easily pick up. Remember how Motorola Droid first upped the ante on screen resolution at the end of last year.
Nice find. If I could, I would vote this up. This is a very unconventional method of assessment. I would like to have an idea of infections in the teams which lost. Nonetheless, the research is very ingenious in itself.
I understand that you think you are right. I do. But you're clearly a software person (as are most people here), just like me, and we see the world as simple and properly abstracted. The reality here is that this is not a simple problem, and will never become one: there are just too many variables.

Here's an example that might be simpler to relate to: audio. The power of sound is measured in watts (as any stereo will advertise). If someone were to make a noise measurement tool, they might display the level in watts. This would be wrong because we don't perceive sound linearly, and "a little more" would actually display as much more particularly at higher decibels.

But even reporting volume in decibels does not reflect how "loud" something is. We perceive loudness in a complex manner, and even at low volume a person yelling can sound loud. This is why pop music and commercials are louder at the same volume[1].

Now imagine that we will create a display of 5 bars that will show how loud something is. We would start with the logarithm of power (dB) because thats pretty easy. But now people put their hand over the device and it still sounds loud, even though our display shows it to be half as loud. Is this a broken system? Not really - just a complicated one.

So please, I understand that you do not understand. But try to understand that this is complicated, and Apple actually has some idea what they are doing.

[1 | http://www.propellerheads.se/substance/discovering-reason/in...]
Ah, fair enough.

Generally, you want to stay out of insert mode as much as possible (memorize most of the movement commands and use them), use splits liberally (if you have a big monitor) and use generic awesome plugins such as: NERDTree, surround.vim, snipmate, taglist.vim, etc. Use a complete mode that works with your language of choice or a third-party one that gives more. Omnicomplete is a good place to start and it's built in.

Check out the vim sub-reddit, vimcasts.org, and the Daily Vim blog. There is a wealth of information in those places.

Shoot me an email (see profile) if you want more specific guidance. I initially planned to type stuff out here but remembered how awful the formatting is.
Bad bad bad for me.

But I notice anything in my environment that changes.

Hmmm ... will users feel like they are in less control of it? That would be generally bad, I would think. Then again, Google is big on empirical testing so maybe most people like this or accept it or whatever.
Brought to you by Marak Squires:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1448309

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrkDqh9ZVog
Visit the (previous) target site of those MS/hotmail domains. I haven't seen a JS Ok/Cancel dialog for a long time, offering me a DVD (free shipping!).

I can only imagine how funny this is for Granny, after mistyping the address to reach out to her mails..
Yes, the kindle will read any unencrypted mobipocket files just fine. The PDF support isn't as good on the 6" kindle as on the DX though, since there is no way for it to reflow. Don't think PS is supported, and never heard of djvu.
Retina Display is shipping. You can't argue against that with a hypothetical.
Well, in all fairness, he also has a community of 700.

Problem is, there are a zillion of these out there. If he's not getting some revenue from it right now it's unlikely to be worth much to a generic investor.
Has there ever been reasonable research done for the whole "paleo diet" hullabaloo? I know that nutritional science generally is a bit patchwork (hard to do rigorous long-time studies), but isn't the cave man diet still a bit of a fringe topic? Last time I checked this, it seems that the general opinion was that it's eating too much that's most of the problem, not eating the wrong stuff (gross simplification, of course).

That's my main problem with nutritional advice, once it goes beyond "don't eat too much": Not enough scientists. If the author of your specific diet is a doctor or dietist at all, it's mostly the work/opinion of a singular person.

I sometimes despair at the continuing growth of the self-help section(s)…
For Many, a Grad-School Stint Doesn't Pay Off in Job Market
So does Berkeley - in fact Berkeley seems to have more core-engineering courses on the web and iTunes-u than anyone else.
It's mostly the physical goods that seems the most wasteful to me, so I'd be happy to limit it to that. The way we currently have it set up, stuff gets cross-shipped: there are stockpiles of widgets in both A and B, but due to the sales tax weirdness, the person in A orders theirs from B, and the person in B orders theirs from A, resulting in things being flown back and forth across the country for no real reason. It also ends up being somewhat regressive, because well-off people buying expensive things are much more likely to order them off the internet than poor people buying cheaper things are--- so poor people pay their local sales tax, and well-off people avoid it.

It's also logistically a bit easier to do it with physical goods, because you're necessarily shipping to an actual address.
I know several people who have taken up meditation and they each have changed significantly through their experiences. Perhaps it's more useful to compare someone who meditates to their former selves rather than some nebulous concept of an "average" person.
FaceTime is an open protocol

It may be open, but that doesn't guarantee adoption...to date, only the iPhone 4 makes use of it, whereas Fring and Qik already operate on multiple platforms. If Facetime does manage to catch on and other manufacturers adopt it, then the iPhone loses that competitive advantage, since there will be plenty of Android, Symbian, and Windows phones that use it. The other OSes have the advantage of being able to use other standards as well (because Apple will not allow an app that competes with Facetime in its app store).
Can anyone sum up what I can do with this API? I have some guesses, but there's no summary of what the capabilities are, and I don't want to parse through the 10+ page "getting started" guide to figure it out...