skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And if we had to stop each time a player went down to decide if contact was made or not that would just ruin the game :P

Ehm, obviously the players would pretend less if they get punished for it. That's the idea of a working ref system...

> Current rules require the player to leave the pitch for treatment. IMO this is a much more streamlined solution. If you change that for the same initial stoppage, plus the ref requesting a review, plus a restart of the game (which may take additional seconds to sort out) it starts to add up. I fail to see how a TV replay shortens that at all.

It's not like it all has to happen in sequence. You have a crew of 20 people continuously reviewing the slow motion capture and they tell the results to the ref, who only after that decides what to do. The only difference is that instead of using the ref's eyes, you use super-eyes. A little bit slower but not significantly slower, and significantly more accurate.

> How do you define that though? Throwing themselves on the floor with no contact is, obviously, bad and should be punished. But if contact is made how do you judge whether an injury has occurred or not? It's next to impossible a decision to make. On many occasions players make the most out of it - on others the most innocent of taps can be excruciating (this is speaking as an ex-footballer in my youth :D).

Are you claiming that a ref in the field can judge this better than one looking at a slow motion video?

On TV it's often very obvious that they are faking it. But of course judging this is hard sometimes, the point is that it is way, way harder for a ref on the field to judge than for somebody looking at slow motion video.

> To me TV replay represents classic over-engineering of a problem.

It's fixing an obviously broken system.
Hey, thanks for the feedback.

OK I gotta work on that signup link.

Currently Feedlooks can import your feeds from Google Reader. I don't know how they'd feel if I constantly pulled content from their servers though.
If you've got Growl installed (and if you've had your mac longer than a day - you probably do), then you can use growlnotify to dump messages on your screen.

I use it in long running scripts (like deploys).

growlnotify -t "Deploy" -m "Complete"
Those reasons are ridiculous. Kids don't care if the game "scales". They'll play touch (American) football or half-court basketball in a concrete schoolyard or play football (soccer) in a vacant lot.
However, making, say, 80, spending time promoting them, and perhaps having a few of those be moderate successes may make this a much more viable option. I have a friend who's pursuing this option of making multiple apps (not sure he's to 80 yet, but will likely surpass that in the next year).

I agree, the chance of one app being the runaway success that affords one an early retirement is pretty remote, but the tech press loves to promote the huge success stories, and many others love to follow them.
It would be great to have it as a single pdf (or better yet, epub).

Anyone got the right tools to make it so quickly?
Well, as a blog reader, I rather like the absence of bloggers' visual glory when I read my feeds. I'm interested in articles, not in someone else's design skills. Especially since, in most readers, I can set my own CSS preferences and thus read feeds that are not only stripped off but then customized exactly how I like them.
Interesting analysis, but I'd like to see the numbers for apps that are actually maintained and marketed vs. some guy who hacked up an app and never fixed any bugs or improved it based on feedback. I suspect the number get better if you filter out the crappy unmaintained apps (but of course, this isn't an easy data set to obtain)
That's a very good idea I somehow forgot about after a while.

Will probably implement soon. Thanks!
Ask HN: security for new Win7 desktop?
I got a new Win7 desktop, promptly removed the mcaffee stuff and got M$ security essentials installed.

At times I know there are thumbdrives/cd's with viruses coming into contact with my computer. What else should I do to customize & protect it?

Thanks!
Indeed. That part was quite fascinating and puts things into perspective. Target big to win big.
Ask HN: Live Chat Support Software
I'm looking for a 1 on 1 web chat application that can be running in the background of a secretary's computer and when someone creates a chat, it alerts the secretary with a pop up of some sort. Would campfire support this?
Does the world need another programming language?
"Full Analysis" seems like a bad title for this post.

First off, in app purchases are not included. Secondly, his argument against free apps is simply that the reach is smaller than other platforms. Finally, he acknowledges that the median paid app get fewer than 1000 downloads.

The 25-50K number for development costs is way off for the median app. Something like $5K-$10K is more in line for most of the apps I'm seeing (but I work cheap), and I've done a couple small ones (probably more representative of the bottom half of the distribution) for clients in 3 days' time.
The title is linkbait. The article is about Britain's first Vintage Computer Festival. The title is based on a quote:

Andy Clark, a director and trustee of the National Museum of Computing, said the vintage machines helped to generate interest in technology: "People come along, look at them, get engaged and interested, and that's our next generation of computer scientists".

While the article is mildly interesting, the title is misleading.
You can also invert screen colors. Look in Settings / General / Accessibility --> White on Black
Why are people so concerned with this guy's personal choices to spend time flaming them or lauding them? He's not telling anyone else to do it.
Free to choose, by Milton Friedman
It seems like the expectations are very high for the App Store, so perhaps this article is just a reaction against hype.

But, don't we say that only one in ten start-ups makes it? So, as a baseline, why expect more than one in ten apps on the App Store to be profitable?
Any linux equivalent?
Heh, I suppose this tells you what OS I use. Any plans of bringing that feature over to OS X?
I still have my alpha, my apple cube, and my o2... but my trs 80 was apparently jacked. =/

ah well. I cut my unix teeth on a 386, and then an alpha. and I'm 28.
I switched my last computer to Ubuntu 13 months ago, and haven't looked back. I haven't regretted it once! Emacs and Firefox/Chrome work fine, there's finally a reasonable 64-bit version of Flash, Steam works well under WINE, and OpenOffice and GIMP are.. ahem workable.

It hasn't been all sunshine: I installed Kubuntu on a new desktop 3 months ago, and a month later had to do a complete wipe/reinstall to Ubuntu. I couldn't find the incantation to completely switch to Ubuntu using apt-get.
None of this refutes his point, which is that developing for iphone is a suboptimal use of marketing/advertising dollars. Even if you'd assume his numbers had a 100% error margin, you still couldn't get iphone apps to work.
Surveys were administered to 4 large classes of students at a major public university in California.

Hmm... This is out of UCSB. Given it's location [1] I'd sure hope their students were taking ample time for leisure.

[1] http://is.gd/cZ6WR (gmap)
>> If I showed up to your store with a lump of gold for trade, we would have to go find someone we both trusted to figure out how pure it was. That takes time and money. That inhibits commerce from taking place.

It's the same with paper. If I show up to your store with a note and tell you it's worth x amount, a third party who we both trust has to back up that that note is indeed worth that value.

You're solution, which isn't really a solution at all, is to just have the government take the place of that third party. This is replacing a free market with a coercive monopoly, and carries with it the same repercussions as any other type of anti-free-market regulation.

Now we both still agree to treat my note or gold as having x value because it is endorsed by a third party, but now we choose this third party not out of trust, but because there really isn't much of a choice.

So now that there aren't any competing currencies, innovations like the ones you mentioned will happen much slower, and since maintaining our trust is no longer needed, the criteria for ensuring that a certain paper note or gold piece actually has it's claimed value will be much less strict.

Now the currency-regulator can do things like print too many paper bills, devaluing bills individually, while putting the value of the newly printed bills right into their pocket--and without repercussion.

And I think that's only the tip of the iceberg. Regulating currency is no different than regulating telephone lines or corn.

You said "You can't have a free market if you don't have a viable marketplace to begin with", but government regulated currency isn't a viable marketplace at all, and you really can't build a free market on top of an unfree one anyways.
I was thinking about the same idea the other day and now I'm very happy that someone actually implemented it. It looks pretty slick and the overall speed is fast. Good work.

Just one small detail I noticed is that when I signed up with an email address that contained a '+', it didn't autofill that on the login screen when I clicked on the redirect url I got on email.
This just demonstrates, IMO, a misunderstanding of the game. 5 minutes may be no time in, say, American Football. In Football the game could be entirely changed in 5 minutes.

Being a man down for 5 minutes in American Football is a far far bigger disadvantage than being a man down for 5 minutes in soccer. In football it is not uncommon for a team to be a man down for half the game or more and still manage to win or at least hold on for a draw, I seriously doubt that could happen in American Football.
The name of said language being "Plankalkül". Which is the best name for a programming language. Ever.

("Plan Calculus" doesn't quite capture it)
no, not really. A foreigner has a hard time popularizing a sport.
Out of curiosity, what technologies are you using for Feedlooks?
Simple way to avoid this, have a tribunal to review matches as they do in Aussie Rules football. If a player is caught deliberately diving, ban them for life.

If everyone is wondering why the USA does not get into soccer, it is because the blatant cheating makes it a joke. It is not a real sport, and never will be, when one dive can win a game for a side, and have a player sent off. Americans have a sense of fair play, that will never accept this.

Of course, this would never get through. South American, Italian, Spanish and Greek clubs have to much sway over FIFA.
This is one area where the Japanese really have us beat. In a Japanese elevator lobby, the moment that you press the call button, you hear a gong and a light comes on next to the elevator that will be picking you up. Thus, the system instantly acknowledges your button press and provides you with information about what to do next. Very occasionally, if the system is very busy, the gong will sound again and a different light will come on (for example, if your designated car gets tied up with a slow stop), but that doesn't happen often.
You may not agree with it, but you've got to admit that's a nice lightweight hack.
I love soccer and I'd love to see more of it in North America. All the diving to the ground and "oooh my ankle" crap makes it look to people here like a sport full of unnecessary drama. If disincentives were added so diving didn't pay, the game's reputation would be much better imho.
Hi crux,

At some point it boils down to personal preference, but here's a counterpoint from a reader's perspective:

When all of my 50+ feeds look identical, sometimes it is hard for me to identify whose blog I am reading based on its title alone--"this is an interesting article, but who's this JoeDoe guy again?". By seeing the actual website I can more quickly identify the guy. I guess in this case, "a web design is worth a thousand words".

I'm not saying Feedlooks is for everyone; it sure is for me, and hopefully for many other people.

Thanks for the honest feedback though!
53 apps, according to aptitude.
The Snapper Chain optimization
Ask HN: Review my app: Mockaroo, easily add interactivity to your mockup images
After years of explaining UI designs to clients over Skype, we decided to scratch our own itch. Mockaroo is a mockup simulation tool for turning UI designs/drawings into clickable prototypes. It is geared towards designers and entreprenuers: for designers to present image-based mockups to clients and get feedback, and for entrepreneurs to test out app ideas (add links to uploaded napkin drawings!) to a chosen audience.

Check it out, I'd appreciate any feedback.

http://mockaroo.com
Demo: http://bit.ly/9cIUJv
This is just like that way in which I lost 9.9kg: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/johns-amazing-diet-secrets-revea...
Thanks that's very kind! Will look into that login issue soon.
This is quite a good idea. I'm working on a very similar idea myself, except I use the feed's main page and link the feed stories to where they are on the main page.

My criticism is largely the same, but I want to echo it so it becomes that much louder. First, an instant demo is invaluable. It teaches the user immediately what they are getting into without the login/signup cost. Also, you should let the user in right on signup (logging them in so they don't have to login in immediately after they confirm). If they don't confirm in 24 hours, gently remind them, and then in a month of no use, delete the account.

Also, I wish organization of the feeds was easier so I could read the feeds that start with the letter 'Y' much quicker than having to load 50-some feeds first.

This could go far, so hats off to you. I know from experience that this isn't easy.
Ask HN: BackendFu in private Beta, will you use it?
Don't get me wrong; I disapprove of the diving and misconduct.

But I am utterly unconvinced that in-game replays will make a difference.

In fact the main problem is the culture of footballers. Go back a few years and things are a whole lot more brighter. Men were men :D and the rules were the law. You are right; strict punishment for cheating would help fix that. Setting limits for player wages and so forth as well would be an important idea.
For me, the saving grace of Amazon's mobi format is that it's easy to strip the DRM off.

You're not alone; I asked the same question in this poll (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=87089), and that was the overwhelming response.
South Korea in 2002 is a good counterexample to this rule, if you look at club tournaments you'll see that larger teams also are constantly affected by errors.
These are the countries where football is most popular. Why shouldn't they have the most influence?

I don't know if there is such thing as a World American Football Association, but if there was, I'm sure Americans would call the shots.
I agree, there are a lot of apps that didn't take the developer more than 5 hours to put together. Earnings made by well made apps is probably much higher.
Line-item veto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto

>The line-item vetoes are usually subject to the possibility of legislative override as are traditional vetoes
here is a brief summary

Pregel defines a sequence of supersteps (execution cycles) which are executed in parallel on the entire (partitioned) graph.

The supersteps are executed by worker threads, synchronized by global synchronization points and coordinated by a master. Pregel keeps vertices and edges on the machine that performs computation and uses network only for message passing.

Within a superstep each vertex executes the same user-defined function. There is no message passing between vertices during the superstep but the vertices will recieve their messages in the next cycle only.

There are no remote reads, or shared memory concepts like locks, mutexes and semaphores - it is a "pure message passing model".

Vertex can modify its state, or that of its outgoing edges, receive messages sent to it in the previous superstep, send messages to other vertices (to be received in the next superstep) or even change the topology of the graph.

Vertex state machine has two states Active/Inactive. a vertex is activated by a message received from a previous superstep. A vertex deactivates itself by "voting to halt". When all vertices are deactivated and there are no messages in transit the algorithms terminates.

The output of Pregel program is a set of outputs emitted by vertices, could be a directed graph or a set of disconnected vertices or aggregate stats.

The authors mention Valiant's "Bulk Syncronous Parallel model" as the main inspiration behind this model (I've found only ACM link: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=79181)

----------------------

PageRank in Pregel:

class PageRankVertex

: public Vertex<double, void, double> {

public:

virtual void Compute(MessageIterator* msgs) {

if (superstep() >= 1) {

double sum = 0;

for (; !msgs->Done(); msgs->Next())

sum += msgs->Value();

MutableValue() =0.15 / NumVertices() + 0.85 sum;
}

if (superstep() < 30) {

const int64 n = GetOutEdgeIterator().size();

SendMessageToAllNeighbors(GetValue() / n);
} else {

VoteToHalt();
}
}
};
Excellent, then it looks like I guessed right :)

Thank-you for taking the time to lay out the differences.
Did you try Lunettes?
I think it means Derek no longer has to worry about earning money - he can afford to do what he wants with this time. Sounds like retirement to me!
Ah, but a Kindle book doesn't require shelf space or storage. It's not a lump of matter you have ship when moving. You can take a pile when traveling without dislocating a shoulder. Those benefits are real; for me, storage cost overwhelms the actual price of a book very quickly, at which point the DRM is a non-issue.

Of course, I'd prefer unencumbered PDF or Mobi, but a with-DRM e-book beats a physical book for me. Part of this is that I'm an urban apartment-dweller with limited shelf space. My book-buying is limited, not by the price of the book, but by not wanting to have to deal with the object.
I think that anyone who ever gave a non-rigged demo will feel a painful twinge of sympathy for the engineer in that one - "There, but for the grace of God, go I" ...

(And, yes, the "security" issue is pretty far-fetched but is factual, I remember it being raised.)
The parent post is currently at -1. I'll bet the downvoters have not made millions from their startups.

The parent poster sold FriendFeed to Facebook last year in an estimated $50MM transaction. I would take his question seriously.
Yes, because your average joe user is going to have any idea what they're doing. The simple fact of the matter is that the iPhone is made for mass consumption, and things like this would outright deter many users from using the iPhone — let alone wanting to use it.
I am not arguing anything about the risks the business owners is taking, I am saying taking a job is not the low-risk, low-reward option it used to be.

Years ago there was an implicit agreement when taking a job: work here for 40 years and you will not get rich but at least you will always have a job. That agreement is gone. Work for one company until you are in your 50's and you will be "laid-off" and replaced with a younger worker. Many people still think starting business is high risk compared to working for a company, but over the past 20 years the risks have changed and no longer makes sense to bear all the risk of losing your job with none of the commensurate up side of owning a business.
I don't care about Karma at this point in the same way people with lots of money don't care about money (that right there is a potential post). I'd rather not lose it because that means I've done something bad/not smart. Otherwise gaining karma isn't something I keep track of. My logic was:

a) I wrote the comment randomly on a Sunday night. I literally wrote what was on my mind. I kept updating it frequently as I thought of more things.

b) All of a sudden there were 200+ upvotes the next day. To me that indicated that people found the comment really useful.

c) I had more to say, wanted to polish it up, and put it on my blog in a more permanent place.

d) Submitted it since it was previously proven to be useful.
I am thinking of workarounds. What if shareholders get together and form a "holding company" with > 5% shares? The company would become the shareholder wouldn't it?
We're extracting our marketing tools out of earlier build webapps, this will be backendfu, so webapps can be build even faster. This is it for now, later more information.
The quality of a collection of cheat sheets is not based on the quantity of cheat sheets, but on their quality.
Song: Code Monkey 
Why did I have to think of HN when hearing this song for the first time?
So you don't care about the blatant cheating that can completely change the course of a game?

Well, lots of people do not like cheating, do not like deliberate diving. For me, this completely ruins the game of soccer, and I will never take it seriously as a sport. I don't tune in to see which side can game the system the best.
You have a crew of 20 people continuously reviewing the slow motion capture and they tell the results to the ref, who....

You see what I am saying about complicating things. These are just not needed as there are plenty of other fixes to try first!

Are you claiming that a ref in the field can judge this better than one looking at a slow motion video?

Well, uh, probably actually.

You keep saying "injuries" without really quantifying it. Do you mean throwing themselves on the ground and faking it (i.e. diving) or going down under a soft challenge and pretending to be hurt. The first is inexcusable (and sometimes the ref gets it wrong), the second is not on at all but it could still be a correct foul.

the point is that it is way, way harder for a ref on the field to judge than for somebody looking at slow motion video.

It doesn't matter; because it is just part and parcel of what makes up the game. End of. Football doesn't need to be Americanized (I think that term is justified, no offence intended) as far as I am concerned because we enjoy it the way it is.

There are problems, TV replays are not really the fix we are looking for.

It's fixing an obviously broken system.

Obvious to you. For those of us who love and enjoy the sport it is a terrible and badly thought out fix. No thanks :)

The takeaway is this is all part of the game WE enjoy watching/playing. Yes it is getting a little much at times. Yes there are steps we should take to knock the modern footballer into shape :P but no, TV is not the way.
Oil Execs In London Slam Obama's Drilling Ban
I have third party apps on my laptop that have links which open a page in a browser. Doesn't mean I can't delete Safari or get updates to it outside of system updates. If I delete my browser and then can't get links to open it sounds like I'd need to install a browser.

There are reasons why you wouldn't want a browser though, which at the moment you can't do.
I think the iPad is in exactly the situation that the first generation iPhone was in. When it came out, you knew that Jobs would be on stage in a year talking up the 3G version with full GPS. Some people could not wait and were willing to subsidize future iPhone development for the rest of us. Apple practically counts on that these days.

That said, how is this any different from other tech? Something better is always on the horizon. In the early- to mid-90's, PC's were going through the same thing. A 3 or 4 year old machine was totally worthless and completely obsolete. Now, the average user can at least plan to limp along for that long without too much pain. One advantage with the iPad is that, compared to desktop computers in the '90's, upgrades are a few hundred dollars instead of $1,500 - $2,000.
There are other countries where soccer is also very popular, England, Germany, France, rest of western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia.