skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made this comment/question in the other thread about iPhone 4 letter, but I'll paste here:

"i'm wondering why bars are not equally the same height across. the quantity alone should be enough (1 vs 5) to convey strength. with the height being variable, it seems to make things seem worst in the worst possible way -- 5 will still be 5, but when its a 1, because the height is so much shorter, it seems worst than 1. what is the upside to variable height when you already have variable width in terms of number of bars? it's not as if there's an algorithm that determines the correct height for that particular signal, as there is a (faulty?) algorithm to determine the correct width (bars)."
To address another concern with vertical farms, you'll need to use low-sun-requirement crops; most modern stuff optimized for quick growth with maximum solar and NPK input simply won't grow in those conditions--like expecting full voltage from a vertical photovoltaic panel.
Responding to UseTheSource feedback: search, syntax highlighting, rss, more
Ubuntu Video Tutorial: Execute .run Files
BTW OP - "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."
I really hope that things don't change and the US continues to be a location for these high value jobs. Yes, this is very hard to maintain. I couldn't agree more. The point I am trying to make is that outsourcing is a sign that the US has a high value workforce because they can make more money doing things other than working in chinese style factories, which are very low value add jobs. All the consequences you list are correct, and I don't want them to happen, but tariffs are not going to lock in our current high standard of living.
Like Algebra or Set Theory. Old technology indeed...

Oh that's right, you don't need silly things like Algebra or Calculus when you go NoSQL.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hause011/code/SQLexample.txt -

"solid provable framework"

but I digress....
"Six Thinking Hats" seems to be on Alan Kaye's list of favorite books: http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
This is because right now, ~50% of the range = 5 bars. See: http://fscked.co.uk/post/754590440/this-infographic-hopefull...
True. But it was probably accompanied with many other copies of itself. Also the truck arriving at the store likely delivered more cargo per mile driven than a UPS/FedEx/Mail equivalent. Those services are more expensive ($/gasoline/packaging/...) than just shipping a truck full of toothpaste to a distribution center and then hundreds of tubes to a multitude of stores because of the piecemeal fashion in which they pick up and drop off at the ends of their networks.
This is why: http://fscked.co.uk/post/754590440/update-i-have-a-followup-...
Yep, they effectively made the signal strength meter useless in that update so that users would psychologically feel that they had a good connection even though AT&T's network was terrible in places.

When your phone shows 5 bars yet you still get dropped calls, distorted sound, etc, you know there is a problem with the signal strength meter.

They might as well have just made it 1 bar, either you have signal or you don't. But there may be something about the placebo effect, or maybe illiterate tech reviewers would actually write "my iPhone has more bars!1!1!11!1!"
To be clear, it's not my argument. I'm just trying to clarify what argument the author is making.
Anecdote: For most of his adult life, my grandfather, a now-retired apple farmer, slept 5-6 hours a night, but supplemented this with 20 minute naps after lunch (which was a huge hot meal) and dinner (which was more like a lunch). Never have I seen him as exhausted as I am after my 3rd cup of coffee and 8 hours of sleep a night. And I have a desk job!
Go to the casino, bet it all on black (50/50 for $2000), then bet it all on red (25% for $4000), then bet on 1st 3rd 1-12 (8.33%), you'll end up with $2000 to play sic-bo with. Good luck!
Where does evolution by natural selection fit into that xkcd:Purity sketch?
Actually, I think they didn't think the bar algorithm was shit when they implemented it. They just changed what "5 bars" meant: "~100% reception" vs "good enough reception for all uses".
Actually, the people I've heard about this non-issue the most from are Android evangelists and Apple haters that are looking for any reason possible to trash Apple. So it might make sense to compare it to their beloved Nexus One in a head to head comparison.
Disturbing list. An evolutionary biologist friend would have said that these are species to be celebrated because they are successful--and success is survival.

Personally, I would have thought that homo sapiens would be on the list and number one.
Nokia EVP's blog response to closing of Symbian-Guru.com
READY TO CHANGE Your CAREER ?, Jobs, MLM - Work from Home, Jobs in Bangalore
Tried Silversun Pickups and just get directed back to the initial search page. No error messages, no "artist not found", just the front page.

Really should have some kind of "artist not found" message, that's just confusing UI
Is it better to be right more often, or to assume the best of anyone you meet?
Link Grammar Parser: http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/

I used Michael Granger's excellent Ruby binding: http://repo.deveiate.org/LinkParser/file/3e46194ad8d6
My take is the N1 wasn't disruptive to the carrier controlled/subsidized model because in the US, you had two separate N1 models that effectively only worked on one carrier (unless you found EDGE data service to be acceptable).

An unlocked N1 sold for the T-Mobile 3G band can't be used with full functionality on AT&T, and vice versa. You can't buy an N1 and still have the flexibility to choose a carrier who meets your needs at that particular time.
And in 2 or 3 years' time, you'll break even!
Actually, in formal areas of academia (like math, where I studied), there can be considerable use of intuition even after a 'proof' goes out.

I would say this is a good thing, as there are also many cases where a 'proof' is later shown to have holes, areas where everyone made an assumption and didn't realize it.

A good example of this involves limits; for many years mathematicians proved a number of interesting results using infinitesimal limits. It was many decades before a mathematician (Riemann? Maybe?) noted that you can't assume that all the limits in an equation approach their number at the same rate.

This was a super smart thing to notice, and junked a huge number of 'proofs' that had all relied unobtrusively on this idea. All that to say, good theoreticians spend a lot of time wondering if an idea makes sense to them or not.
Standard mass production should bring the cost way down. As for theft, just make sure they are free for anyone that wants to have one, the biggest cost for a big program will be the planting labor. But it will not solve global warming in the period of any politician so it's unlikely to be funded at the level really needed.
My intention, mainly, was to show that PHP is not only Apache + modphp.

Yes, I will open source the framework shortly. I need to write some documentation and perhaps a getting started tutorial.
I have no java (programming) experience, and it took me ~45 s:

#apt-get install closure

#closure

user=> (+ 2 2)

4

Most of that 45 s was waiting for apt-get.

Now it's not going to be this easy on platforms that don't have such nice package management (e.g. Windows). Furthermore, Raphael_Amiard makes a good point that there's a lot more infrastructure that has to go into web application development (or any other kind of application development, for that matter) than computing the sum of 2 and 2.

Nonetheless, it just doesn't seem that hard. At worst, put a "clojure /path/to/project.lisp" in rc.local or equivalent.

(Caveat: my web development experience consists entirely of a couple of toy projects I ran on my laptop for my own amusement. Take all this with a grain of salt.)

EDITed for formatting.
Clojure (or any functional language) doesn't have a tiny fraction of the libraries/frameworks/documentation that PHP does. Design a language that only the top 25% of the programmers in the world are smart enough to use and you'll get 2% of the infrastructure blub languages have.

The challenge is to prove that those smart programmers working in that smart language are still more productive than the average programmers that started with the problem 75% solved out of the gate. For basically solved problems like CRUD webapps you won't be able to do this. For harder problems like scheduling air travel you might but then you're working in a problem domain too difficult for at least 3/4 of the working programmers today so you're in an even smaller niche.
PHP works well as a DSL for web applications; I recently switched from PHP to Python + Pylons and am noticing significant differences in workflow. So significant that I can see, precisely, why PHP is so dominant. Python's features as a language completely overthrow those of PHP, though - I have no reason to go back.

I've had my eye on Scheme as a potential web application environment for a year now. Maybe I'll make the jump soon, Racket (PLT-Scheme) looks like it would beat CL + Weblocks in maturity.
At a former employer we all got trained on this and used it for a few weeks before reverting to our old bad habits :)

I generally approach these kinds of methods with some skepticism - it is a bit 7-habits-ish - but one thing I did like about this one was that you could look at it as "design patterns for productive meetings", in that you could ask yourself what the goal of the meeting was and work from there to identify the right way to structure it. However I definitely attended too many meetings where the goal ended up being following the 6TH plan to the death rather than reaching a real goal.
I was thinking about buying an iPhone 4.0 when I qualify for an upgrade later this month, but given all of the issues with the antenna doesn't it seem like they're going to release an upgraded version of the hardware in a relatively short peroid of time?
The last slide on http://www.groasis.com/page/uk/principle.php seems particularly odd in an idealistic sense:

With the waterboxx we can transform most of the deserts into forests

Deserts are an obvious harsh climate, to humans who live in, uh, more temperate zones in urban areas, but they are not completely barren to the point they need to be "saved". All one needs to do is watch the popular Planet Earth series to see that. Reforestation should be concentrated on in those areas that are having trouble recovering after we've explicitly removed all the trees, not areas that never had trees to begin with.
my pleasure!

you could always add #ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_pComments to the css, it's a shame css can't do wildcards
A simple petri-dish tweak that accelerates bacterial growth & detection [video]
What Do Cell Phone Signal Strength Bars Mean? - Steven Den Beste
It seems wrong to subsidize a $100K sports car with a tax credit.
To those who will only read the headline: The "Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4" says "...we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong."

This headline reads like they were inflating on purpose.
I'm surprised that anyone considers this explanation reasonable. The real problem people are seeing with the iPhone 4 is measured in throttled bandwidth and dropped calls, not bars of signal.

Using a speed test app, I measure 2-2.3mbs 3G downline bandwidth with the phone sitting on my desk. Holding it gently in my left hand, the speed test drops to 0 and eventually fails. I can also reproduce that data transfer failure by lightly touching the left and bottom sides with two fingers.

This focus on the displayed signal strength is somewhat insulting misdirection.
Any info on when Blekko.com will go live
startup from creators of topix and ODP - I hoppe it murdes Gogles a*s
Hey all, puzzle poser from the Povray thread here. If you want a somewhat trickier version, try giving the last five digits of the case where you have 100 nested loops (instead of just four). It requires a very different, but oddly satisfying approach.
Possibly. But the point isn't about breaking even it's about having lettuce that isn't washed in pesticides and fertilizer. Which for me is priceless.
the antenna issue seems like it indeed is software and really a non-issue. the "feature" to show 50% of signals as 5 bars was introduced in OS 2.1 update back in '08. Here is a graphic to showcase that: http://fscked.co.uk/post/754590440/this-infographic-hopefull...

The fix is to undo that hard-coded reality distortion field into AT&T's recommended formula. In this case, AT&T isn't the bad guy as it seems like apple was trying to show their phones had better signal by misrepresenting the strength.

The other, IMHO bigger, issue is the proximity sensor. To me, that's a NEW issue, and needs to be addressed (hopefully by software patch), since I've had issues with 100% of my calls.
Yes, my iPhone 4 essentially mutes immediately when you tap the gap. That's presumably a big drop in SNR, enough to silence the call, but for a brief tap, the call is not dropped. Note: the bars drop with a much greater delay, so there seems to be some kind of time averaging going on.

It's not a huge deal to me, but changing antenna execution (if not design) fundamentally, seems to have been quite a rash move, when suddenly the phone acquires a new behavior that other phones don't have.
IPad and Kindle Reading Speeds
"I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C." Well you have to remember more of the Unix Wars of the 80s. AT&T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix. The main thing that stopped that was showing that many of the code segments shared by BSD Unix and SysV Unix were due to AT&T lifting code from BSD (not the other way around). Plus in that era people started removing the C compiler from Unix distros as it was "too valuable" to give away. A very different world than now.
Is there any evidence either way on whether the proximity sensors problems are hardware or software in nature, and if they're hardware problems whether they can be worked around in software?
#7: Exactly. There is no 80-20 rule for enterprise software. If you don't meet 100% of the requirements, it isn't a replacement for their current system. You can't compromise on functionality for the sake of usability or elegance; every item on the spec sheet has to be included.
I believe losing 24dB of signal strength is roughly ten times worse than losing 17dB. As I understand it, there is no other phone out there with this level of signal attenuation problem.
NB: I am not a signalology expert and only vaguely understand decibels.
not sure why the downvote. backup source is: http://fscked.co.uk/post/754590440/this-infographic-hopefull...

the RDF was put in back in '08 via OS 2.1 update to "improve the accuracy of the 3G signal".
Farmer's apartments in China
Maybe I'm missing something, but if the problem is just the software that displays the number of bars, why does the iPhone 4 drop more bars than other iPhones which are running the same software?

It seems like there's still a problem with the antenna design that was just made more obvious by the software.
MVC and Purity
This never happens.
1. Employers do not have the incentive and time to educate employees in the first place.
2. Employees, most of the mediocre ones, do not want to learn more, do more or work more. Because, the process is always about practicing and working.
A device for Twitter for the developing world...
I've started a new project and I would like to get the HN community's thoughts.

I'm creating a device for using Twitter that:

1) is totally self-contained,
2) uses solar / hand crank power, and
3) uses satellites for connectivity (so it can be used anywhere on Earth).

The device will take different form factors, i.e. one version will be a tablet, one will be a large, free standing unit that a crowd could congregate around, etc.

I'm going to give these devices to people who live in the developing world, and who do not have access to Twitter, the internet, or to the "global conversation."

My intent is to circumvent poverty, lack of technical infrastructure, and government control by giving anyone, anywhere, the ability to communicate on Twitter.

This is a not-for-profit project (it's going to be based out of a large university in Chicago).

I'm hoping that people will use the device for social, political, and practical, bi-directional communication.

The devices will run a custom Twitter client with normal client functionality.

However, we will also route (and translate) all applicable messages to communities of people who have agreed to help with the project, i.e. farming questions in Africa will be routed to a collection of farmers and agriculture PhD's; political issues will be sent to a collection of people at the United Nations, etc.

The basic idea is to open lines of communication into societies where there are none, and in doing so, increase cultural understanding and encourage peace.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
@jkarp
Earn money Online through Affiliate Marketing
I've always noted it as Sigma_loop, since it's basically the busy-beaver function for a programming language with no recursion and in which the bounds of every loop must stay fixed throughout the loop.
Effect of holding an iPhone 4 (png)
I flagged this article because to me the requirement for a HN submission should be that it makes the reader a smarter or better person. This does neither.

Let me be clear that I don’t approve of what Goldman Sachs did. But there’s no moral lesson to be learned here for the rest of us. Unless you’re really suggesting that people need to be told it’s wrong to inflate the cost of food sold to starving people.

On the other end of the spectrum the article doesn’t suggest anything that we as HN readers can do to prevent this in the future. If this very same article was posted but had less emphasis on “Goldman Sachs is evil” and more emphasis on how we as citizens can prevent such things from happening I’d consider it appropriate. But the author only makes one suggestion to rectify the solution and it essentially boils down to “shout louder that lobbyists are bad.”

So in the end I don’t think this is really HN material. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with sharing it in other venues but the stated purpose of HN is to stimulate intellectual thought and debate and this just doesn’t do that.
Actually, Andy is suggesting the same thing, cheapen job creation in the US, although he would do it through inflation, which is always more politically popular than deflation (except among people who live off their accrued wealth).

Tariffs on chinese goods would up the cost of those goods to slightly higher than what US-made goods could be sold for.

This will create jobs in America as companies create factories here.

There will be more jobs, and more money in the economy.

On the downside, everything just got a lot more expensive, maybe 50% more.

This is inflation. People don't notice it as much as they notice a 33% to 50% wage cut, especially since the most discontented members of society, the un and under-employed are no longer un(der)employed.
Sounds a bit backwards to me in some respects.

Some companies ask, "What product can we build with this technology?"

Good companies ask, "What technology does this product need?"

Great companies ask, "What product will this customer buy?"
Fixed Gear Bikes 
Mission Bicycle is a customized bicycle shop located on Valencia Street in San Francisco
From what I've seen, on the right hand side, the groove is effectively 'fake' - designed to create a symmetrical look. One part of the rim is small (3G), and the other is larger, (WiFi) and has the 'fake groove'.
It would be if you don't RTFA.
Apple put the algorithm in place via OS 2.1 update back in '08. http://www.newsoxy.com/technology/apple-iphone/article11156....

If you don't remember, back then every blogger was saying things like "my signal has improved drastically with this update!!11!!1one".

This is what the graphical representation of that update was:
http://fscked.co.uk/post/754590440/this-infographic-hopefull...

As you can see, over 50% = 5 bars. AT&T's recommendation = more accuracy and less reality distortion.

Next update, you should see OS 2.1's 3g signal update reversed to what it used to be.
Well batteries are much much heavier and would likely be in the centre of the car for weight distribution, and you need to make the electrical connection. Changing a tyre during a race just takes a speed gun and one nut.
They actually did the opposite, they didn't change 1 bar to display 5, but 5 bars to display less.
It'd be more efficient to tax bad things like carbon emissions than to subsidize good things like electric cars. If you've been paying attention to our political discourse lately, you already know how low the chances are of an effective version of that policy getting implemented.
The ratio of sales vs how many browse may be an indication on how well the iPad and android phones are suited for browsing.
Maybe they can also invent a new symbol you can learn which indicates that it doesn't matter how you put the batteries in.
I don't know what that means.

Apple has claimed not touching the black gap or using a case helps. Random people online seem to think that sticky tape or nail polish can fix the problem. Anand seems to think some thin layer of diamond would do the job too.

Are you saying it wouldn't work? And if not could you explain why not, and what would be needed?
I think you've nicely proved the point about why political stories are not so welcome on HN. They soon lead to ad hominem attacks like "some wall street casino fundamentalists didn't like it" and "extremist political positions".
I imagined the signal to UI representation would be a fairly standard algorithm. I'm surprised this issue didn't come up in their testing.

EDIT: then again, I really don't know how complicated this can be. It just seems like there have been enough phones released that did (perceivably) display the bars correctly that this should be a non-issue.
Seems like Apple put the algorithm in place via OS 2.1 update back in '08. http://www.newsoxy.com/technology/apple-iphone/article11156....

If you don't remember, back then every blogger was saying things like "my signal has improved drastically with this update!!11!!1one".

AT&T's recommendation = more accuracy and less reality distortion. (Look at the graph Gruber linked to for what iPhone 4 currently uses for algorithm -- ~50% = 5 bars: http://fscked.co.uk/post/754590440/this-infographic-hopefull...)

Next update, you should see OS 2.1's 3g signal update reversed to what it used to be. Let's hope they fix the bigger (read: REAL) issue related to the proximity sensor that actually kills calls.
There's a psychological condition known as "depressive realism" which seems relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism , http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr05/realism.aspx , http://www.slate.com/id/2129377
Finally, can we all accept that it's bars and not reception we were ever talking about. Every single iPhone 4 user has had their phone for less than a month.

So return it already, don't sue.
Right on. MRIs need liquid helium to cool their superconducting magnet, and they need to be topped up every so often, to accommodate boil-off. It's getting pricier to do so, increasing the cost of an already expensive apparatus.
Ask HN: What is a good espresso machine?
Mine gave up the ghost today. And who knows caffeine better than HN?
It was flamebait and inaccurate. There are much more well-researched and reasoned articles on the topic, feel free to submit one of those and I'm sure it will have a much higher chance of survival.
This is more or less what I wanted to allude to with the social process of proof. The number of things that are actually rigorously formally proven is surprisingly small IMHO.