skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By observing the fluidity of Long Island Sound, though, you can be sure that no one has dumped ice-nine into the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly the existence of a single functioning production iPhone 4 proves that there's no fundamental design flaw in the frame-as-antenna idea.

I've also had no reception problems with my iPhone 4, despite trying everything I've read about or can think of to provoke them. Licking fingertips, grasping the phone in a position no human would ever use, sitting in my bathtub where I'd surrounded by several layers of metal lath, etc., etc.: I can get the indicated signal strength to drop somewhat (but not consistently), but I have never been unable to make a call during these experiments.

I am forced to conclude one of three things:

1. Message-board habitués are very loudly complaining about a tiny or nonexistent problem with an Apple product. This would be strange, because normally you can take all criticism of Apple and its products entirely at face value, and people never swarm out of the woodwork to complain about the performance of Apple products they don't own. Insert sarcasm punctuation mark here.

2. There is a design flaw, but it's a subtle one that results in a higher-than-expected rate of manufacturing defects, causing some people's phones to have more reception problems than one would normally expect.

3. The iPhone 4 performs about as well as every other mobile phone, which means: less than perfectly. Hype about the antenna means that this is resulting in an inordinate amount of public complaining.

Or, most likely: all three of those.
If you'd like to play around with what the Calais API provides, I've just added support for it on http://apiplayground.org

Paste in the text from a newspaper article, for example, and it'll show you tables of some of the entities that are extracted.

If you're interested in seeing what the back-end that services the API calls looks like (Node.js, so that it doesn't block), take a look here:

http://github.com/jashkenas/api-playground/blob/master/src/a...
The World Of Hippies
Hippies = PARTY ALL THE TIME (NO WORRIES)! Here are some retro and some DeviantArt photos of hippies. Enjoy watching!
Ask HN: Unique URL authentication
I read a post not long ago how posterous only requires you to send an email(with the users first post) to create an account.

I admired the simplicity (from the users perspective) and pondered the ways we could just stop asking people for information and just use our apps.

And I believe, for a great many apps, the bare minimum you need is an email.

Which brings me to my question, why bother asking the user to login, why not email them a unique, random, url (a https one of course) that once clicked authenticates them. The idea being that only the user would have access to it(or anyone with access to that email account).

Stupid idea? Any obvious holes I'm missing?
Linus resolves to apply a strict policy over merging changes
More like "single touch". Only one finger ever enters the water. The original link, http://taichi.s372.xrea.com/minamo_en.html , is entitled "Touch Screen Interface on Water Surface", and doesn't assert multitouch at all, only mentions it at the bottom as part of what the creator is working on.
Open Calacanis has been around for some time as well and now is trying to evolve into a pro poker player. He's especially interesting when he's trying to deny Mahalo spamming techniques and pretending to delete his facebook account.
editors that can be accessed from the shell, via ssh
List of theorems
Thanks for the recommendations, everyone. I don't have a math-heavy background, so Econ has always seemed formidable and daunting to study. I'm sensitive to the political agendas of name-brand economists and theories and just never really knew where to begin.

One text that hasn't come up here, but has in my offline discussions, is Foundations Of Economics: A Beginner's Companion by Yanis Varoufakis. Any opinions on that?
Nintendo makes money on their hardware; the DS and the Wii were never sold under cost.

Sony definitely loses money on every console.

Don't know about MS.
How would decreasing marginal utility apply? (Trying to understand the concept)
It doesn't list the Banach-Tarski Theorem, because that result in sufficiently counter-intuitive as to be called a paradox, even though it isn't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox
How did they get their hands on Apple's code?
Hey Eiso,

So yeah what I am about to say here assumes that "find a new home" = reinvent the idea/ Breathe new life into it.

You know there is a saying about how one doesn't pour new wine into old bottles.. they put it in new ones! Even so, I think that what you guys did when twitter startups began to heat up was awesome! It was an opportunity and you took advantage of it. However.. I think the general problem here is that your missing the vitality incentive factor.. aired with a chicken and egg problem (the whole brands advertising won't really happen with out the people.. then in turn the charities won't get anything.)

So the solution is simple.. It all comes down to what you believe in. Whatever it is that you believe in for this.. the idea needs to mature to give proper incentives for people to take part.. also it should have ample virality included (you had that going with the @twollars thing.) problem is i don't think people may have clearly understood why they were doing it.. and then furthermore.. how much are the charities getting for the effort of tweeting that out.

What I think about the way things should have worked out is something to the tune of.. Business --> Users --> Charities
instead of your current model deal (Users <--- Business --> Charity).. which also looks kind fuzzy it should be easier to grasp.

So my point is if it were something like Businesses sponsor the process with their products (like free service/software/products) let's say per month.. then users pay to be part of the process.. in which their money goes to charities. then at the end of every cycle users win products from the businesses that participated. Now the only thing left would be to find out a systematic way to get twollars involved for instance you can have a set number of charities that are in the event for that month.. in which different prizes are available from the business sponsors and one could @twollars to a specific charity to spread awareness? to be honest the most difficult part of it seems to be the implementation of the @twollars making that meaningful devoid of money/incentive will be difficult..

Furthermore you have to give incentive giving out more twollars.. it just does'nt seem convincing enough to me unless you add some means of tracking twollar karma on your website through various means and then using the karma (gained by spreading awarness/activity/positivity) to get rewards from the business sponsors.

/end wall of text

What exactly where you thinking about?
The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner - http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic-Th...
Fuck you iOS dev team
I'd bet on a competitor without deep pockets unseating them.
A large part of AT&T's perception problem seems to have to do with their congestion, not their RF performance, in a few places.

This might be one of those situations where more information would be useful. The ideal solution would be to charge a higher price (e.g. a 'minute multiplier' — show this next to the signal strength indicator) for traffic in congested conditions — but this would present marketing problems, Mobile-phone pricing is already opaque enough, and people would rightly be suspicious that the introduction of such a congestion charge would soon result in interesting re-defintions of 'congestion'.

You might be able to get much the same effect by simply showing the user the current local network condition, by turning the signal indicator into a signal-and-congestion indicator. You'd see the signal strength as a measure of the radio conditions, and some kind of indicator that reflected the ability of the network to handle calls at that moment.

I'm assuming, with no particular knowledge of the matter, that the congestion problems with mobile-phone networks are like nearly all other such problems: extremely fleeting. You might be unable to make a call for about five minutes out of an hour; but if that's the five minutes during which you want to make a call, not only are you frustrated because you can only discover the situation through what amounts to black-box analysis, but the phone company gets no goodwill from you for the performance of the network during the other fifty-five minutes.
Cool idea. It will require the user to have access to their mail right then and there, i.e. maybe they're on a public machine and don't use GMail. Another thing you could do is skip the registration altogether. Let the user into your app using a single big button on the home page. Then, once they've interacted with your app, progressively ask them for the vital info you need. You walk the wire for a few minutes where a user could leave without registering, but I'm sure the upside in conversion rate would be worth it. I've just (literally yesterday) launched a different kind of contact management app at https://szpil.com that has an experiment going with this (one-click button, deferred registration).
As alluded to in another comment, how about your favourite CLI editor accessed via SSH. There are a few web-based SSH clients out there, such as Ajaxterm, Anyterm, WebShell, GotoSSH, etc.
Why do you believe most Viagra sales are primarily recreational?
What could kill Facebook would be a solution that respects people's privacy needs and doesn't try to change people in this respect. This is obviously only one piece of the solution, but Facebook are setting themselves up for this market entrypoint / wedge (recall Friendster's war on Fakesters).

Facebook is trying to change people rather than serve their needs.
Yes, but what if you have no presence at all in that extremely big market?

In addition to the big ones, there are dozens of smaller companies with the cash and the experience in drug development that would jump at the opportunity to cure type 1 diabetes. Unless the risks vastly outweigh the rewards, which seems to have been the case here.
The "slant" in this book is that he is pro-free market and anti-central planning. He states that the free market is the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. The book explains why this is so with many varied examples.
Going Through Walls or Around Them
"As Mac OS X Snow Leopard was never meant to be installed on this hardware, any drivers that work now, may need workarounds later. There are absolutely no guarantees when it comes to this stuff- but that's what makes it fun."

I guess it has to be the fun part, because these aren't that much cheaper than a Mac mini (which won't come bundled with the same headaches).
My bad, I thought she was a CNN journalist. I don't normally watch CNN. If they only brought her on to make that one claim though, shouldn't they have fact checked it first?
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2009/01/fan-death-is-real.htm...
Another idea I'm mulling over is using a person's real name for signing in together with their password to provide enough entropy, then enforcing that the password be long enough etc. so that the name/password combination gives you something unique enough to authenticate with. The reasoning behind this being that typing your real name in is somehow more personal, more gratifying and more memorable than typing a username/email. Another slant on this is that people have more than one email address which the authentication mechanism could take into account. The final idea is allowing any of: real name/email(s)/id as a username. Although name is great for interface use, id/email are better for programmatic use.
Or imag ine a crash-only busi ness that goes bank rupt every four years as part of its busi ness plan. Every part of the enter prise is designed to scat ter and re-form, so the busi ness can with stand even an exis ten tial cri sis. It’s a fero cious com peti tor because it fears nothing.

Is that a startup or a terrorist cell?

In a way, the traditional edit-compile-test-debug cycle is a "deploy-only" development style. The "continuous integration" part of extreme programming is taking that even further.
First, thanks for building the demo tool!

If you'd like to see the really interesting stuff that OpenCalais extracts head over to http://viewer.opencalais.com. OpenCalais goes well beyond entities and extracts relevant facts and events as well. Entities are just what's in the news - events are what's happening.
I once read (in maybe 2003) that Bill Gates stopped his limo downtown in some slum and was boasting to some rough 'homeys' about being the richest man in the world. His PA told him to get back in the car as he was in danger.

I just wish I could find the original story but it's gone offline now.
Boulder is nice. I live by Horsetooth Reservoir up north in Fort Collins and love it. It's cheap and I'm surrounded by Horsetooth Mountain, Lory State Park, and Roosevelt National Forest/Rocky Mountain National Park.
That makes more sense alright, but I still think it would make a lot more sense if * was bound to the type.
Love is a fallacy
When you look at XBox as a business, it still have quite a long way to go. The amount of money sunk into the business is just astronomical. It may be profitable now on a Q by Q basis, but it will take years to pay the bill and there is no guarantee they can stay profitable as they invest in the next generation.

As for XBox Live, it is an impressive service, but the numbers may not tell the whole story. The article cites 23M XBox subscribers, but doesn't say whether these are paying (gold) or free members. I wonder what that mix is.
I might recommend some behavioral finance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics. Predictably Irrational is good.
Summary:

Max Shulman's short story Love Is A Fallacy recounts the efforts of a college student to educate his love interest, Polly, so she can be a fit wife, hostess, and mother. The education of Polly involves explaining the most common types of fallacies: Dicto Simpliciter, Hasty Generalization, Post Hoc, Contradictory Premises, Ad Misericordiam, False Analogy, Hypothesis Contrary to Fact, and Poisoning the Well. These fallacies demonstrate an improper use of reasoning, but the narrator discovers Polly turns from his Galatea to his Monster by using his logic lessons against his pleas for love. The fallacy that is most interesting in the story is the one known as Hypothesis Contrary to Fact, which demonstrates how guilty the narrator is of misusing logic to win Polly. Examples from Love Is A Fallacy will be used to demonstrate this.
> Second, you seem to suggest that the non-math side of the divide ("human language") is necessarily not truth seeking and that any attempt to point out a fallacy in such a context is pointless.

That's a straw man. He said: "it's probably impossible to structure any kind of discussion without introducing [a fallacy]". Because you can't avoid fallacies doesn't mean that pointing to (some of) them is pointless.

I think you agree with Daniel more than you realize.
This is something OKCupid do in their emails. They have "Log in instantly" with a url that contains a unique hash.

Even if you are not into dating, do check their site out... They actually have all sorts of nice stuff on their site - their labs section and blog are also very interesting if you like stats and data/analysis.
A few sites do do this. The one that springsto mind is okcupid - if you click a link in their mails it logs you in.
I was planning to do this anyway, as the user goes through the app, get a nibble of information each time. But with only using an email, it instantly creates an account for them.

Sending a login link also gives them something to keep. And if they come back years later(after just using) it should be easy for them to re-authenticate.
What, no geography?

* The largest freshwater lake (by surface area) is not lake Superior, but lake Michigan-Huron.

* North America contains more than three countries (I'm lookin' at you, Jon Stewart!), including St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
the overhead of of generic call will grow linearly with the number of methods

As far as I know, no. I could be wrong, but I think how it works is this: each method is added to a map for that multimethod. When dispatching, the dispatch function is applied to the arguments and the result is used as the key into the map of methods. I'm pretty sure that the compiler could optimise the lookup too, though I don't know if Clojure does or not.

Thats just what I would do if I wrote Clojure - I don't actually know how Clojure manages it in real life (and am too lazy to check).

Yeah. I've always wished that languages like C++ had two things: multimethods and ML-style pattern matching (well, three things - I guess you'd want ML-style parametric types to go with the pattern matching).
Stross: Gadget Patrol: iPad, a month on
A view from the bridge essay
Writing an essay based on Arthur Miller’s famous play “A view from the Bridge” requires students to reader the play and have an in depth understanding of it. With this you will be able to explore its various themes and select a good topic and write your essay.
Demo HN: Using NLP to process Twitter feeds. Released beta site, need feedback
The payment part is clean, its a few clicks and your done, it happens in another window and you go back and continue watching from where you left off.

It works by looking at how much content they has watched then after a set time (which the publisher decides) they get paused and asked to pay, so only once they are hooked on it are they asked to pay.

I use the system with great success on my doc site :http://www.documentary-film.net/ and before implementing the concept there the site was always in trouble as the bandwidth costs were so high and if I placed the content behind a pay wall sales went to zero. As soon as I introduced this concept the sales went up by 90%, so I know the system works.

The problem is I thought it was a great idea but so far the response has been pretty light and I'm just thinking is it worth continuing to push along or should I just try something else?
Facebook gives you utility the first time you use it. It gets better as you figure it out and your friends join. So your marginal utility is increasing. But then after a while, all things being equal (i.e. Facebook makes no upgrades), your marginal utility must at some point start to decrease in accordance with the law of diminishing returns. It's like eating an ice cream. Maybe you have another ice cream and then another but at some point you're going to get sick. In Facebook's case, there's only so much Facebooking you can do before you start getting bored. Unless Facebook manage to keep launching new features, improving things to counteract this. And doing that is no easy task. As your user base grows, your software has to become even more and more addictive to compensate. I think there's more a problem with diminishing marginal utility with Facebook than there is with Amazon or Google or Apple or maybe even Twitter since the latter seem to serve a more direct, simpler, more basic need.
Not really a post, just a rant lacking any real details.
While I can't really disagree with you, I don't think it's crazy to think that there are many influential people and organizations that have a strong interest in seeing that we avoid potential cures for common diseases. As such, I don't think this type of reaction is necessarily based largely in ignorance.

Then again, I'm largely ignorant on this subject so I'm certainly not making any accusations in this case.
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I don't think it has any holes, but it could be inconvenient if they clear their cookies or want to use your site from a different computer. Instead of remembering one of their standard passwords, they have to dig through their email to find the link you sent them just to use your site.
I suppose now the cat's out of the bag.
Top online dating
This is a growing trend, and I love it. The concept is "lazy registration", and it makes perfect sense.

I think most sign-up forms are designed out of fear - fear of spammers and fear of people quitting the software. Forcing a user to fill out pages and pages of info isn't going to make them more loyal to your site, it just annoys them. It also won't stop spammers - they are just as creative as you are.

So let the user use your site (perhaps flagging changes such as comments as pending) but send them a link to authorize their site. Once they've done that, their changes go live and they can fill in the info you need of them. By doing an action (such as commenting), they have proven they are interested and they are much more likely to want to finish the registration process.

Edit: On second read-through, I see you might be talking about replacing a login with a URL permanently. I don't like this idea as much as it's a lot easier for me to remember my username/password than I am a unique URL (that's complex enough to not be easily guessable). If you don't want to manage the login process, use an openID provider (and Facebook connect, Google Login, etc).
Tanks are still driven this way. Never thought of it as reins.
Hence the visceral hatred of corporations from some quarters - a corporation is a mirror of society. People may say they want mom'n'pop stores, but they shop at Walmart, for example. How people choose to spend their own money reveals the truth about what they believe. Some don't like that being held up for the world to see.
Handstand.

(Or fingers.)
Ask HN: Desk Recommendations for a Home Office
Hi HN,

I just moved into a new house and I'm in need of a new desk for my home office. This isn't my primary office - I have a day job - but my home office is where I'll do most of my writing and freelance work.

What model desk or brand do you recommend for a home office?
One issue I can think of is that this exposes your users to email phishing attacks by training them to click a URL in an email. I know Facebook has had this effect on me. I have come close to clicking on phishing URLs because I get so many legit Facebook emails with links that I let my guard down.
Right, "the people who are concerned about this sort of thing" and push that agenda on the wiki page. Next to misconceptions like Columbus proving the world was round and that the daddy-longlegs is the deadliest spider, arguments about about how precisely to simplify elementary education of the scientific method are rather out of place.

Seriously, is it worth piling on concepts like peer review and publication to education of the scientific method? Peer review and publication are specific contemporary terms used by professional scientists. If you're a regular person and want to learn something, for example, how a particular feature of a programming library works, or how much load your servers can handle, or how spellcasting works in your favorite MMO, it's far more useful to understand the so-called 'rigid' scientific method than it is to understand peer review and scientific journals. It's not a "misconception."
I'm using a Das Keyboard Ultimate (http://www.daskeyboard.com/).

It's a nice keyboard but very, very loud. I can see myself switching to an Apple Keyboard sometime soon.
The site is largely an experiment. If useful I'll make sure it stays up. I'm mainly interested in using Natural Language Processing techniques to determine relevant content in order to filter through social streams. As a heavy twitter user and developer, I'm scratching my own itch.
Thanks for this. So you're recommending econometrics as a start? Is that Bayesian or Frequentist?