skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "The iPhone was based on Windows CE"

False

> "iPhone only supports email attachments, and does not support attachments to other media (like MMS)"

True for a year (2 years with AT&T)

> "The handset does not store photos or videos. Instead, every photo and video taken on the iPhone is uploaded to Microsoft's server"

False

> "There is no photo editing software for the 2007 iPhone."

Was only true for a year

> "iPhone does not currently support playing video from sites such as YouTube or Hulu"

False, iPhone always supported YouTube; Hulu is a special case due to DRM & their chosen technology stack and politics

> "iPhone has no app store and no 3rd party apps can be installed on iPhone."

Was only true for a year — but from the get-go, the iPhone supported rich mobile Web apps, even allowing them to be installed to the home screen

> "the iPhone web browser does not support Flash web applications, and there are no games for the 2007 iPhone."

True and false (though no non-web-stack games were possible for a year)

> "iPhone has no calendar or appointment application, nor any ability to sync with Outlook calendar or Google Calendar"

False

> "iPhone is unable to Instant Message (IM), or use any IM client"

False if you include browser-based chat (or AIM thru SMS)

> "There is no spelling correction or predictive text input on the iPhone."

False since day 1

> "There are no MicroSD or memory expansion slots."

True, though it offered gigabytes of storage, much more than (at list virtually) any other phone in 2007

> "iPhone will not sync or transfer contact lists from some non-Microsoft services (eg Gmail and Yahoo! Mail)"

False, you could easily import, and often sync, any contacts that you could possibly export as CSV or vCard (through Address Book or Outlook)

"Almost all" is a bit of a stretch, teaspoon; I count just under 50%.
IBM has been bleeding for a long time and they still haven't died yet.
The things I learn from talking with other parents (the smart/creative ones) and reading are usually ways to expand my possible responses to any situation, or insights into what's happening in a kid's head that we easily misinterpret. I totally agree, children can be dramatically different... but if you read books, go to workshops, etc. as ways to expand your options (rather than seeking a prescription to follow even when it feels wrong... intuition is still valuable!), you can get a lot of value.

I sat in a parents' workshop that covered how to handle the relatively-common "disaster" experience where a child throws a tantrum in the grocery store because the parent won't give them the toy or candy they wanted.

I was already opposed to any physical punishment (and I guess there's the option of leaving your cart and taking them out to the car to wait it out), and obviously giving in is bad because it teaches the kid that screaming in public works. But the other parents had tons of things I hadn't thought of, like:

respond with sympathy for the child's frustration -- they really want something they can't have -- and instead of being angry give them (within reason) space & time to express it

before the tantrum, respond to the demand by talking to the child about all the things you'd like to get, but can't

before even entering the store, have established & reasonable rules about what the child can pick out for themselves, i.e., one thing, under X euros, can't be candy if last trip they got candy

There were others as well that I forget now.. it was all food for thought, though.
...imagine if those "Microsoft-Spurned Researcher Collective" people had been a wee bit angrier.

I wouldn't expect government-level resources to be particularly useful in causing havoc -- stock-scammers and phishers and other spammers tend to do just fine, and the only reason viruses/worms are less destructive than in the DOS days is that people have better uses for them now (sending spam).
This article is really about two things - expectations and communication - and Derek makes an interesting tangential point about personal quirks without actually addressing either of those issues.

Users expect things to be a certain way. In most business situations, that's advantageous - when expectations become standard across your user base it allows you to build upon those expectations.
(Rapidly thought-up example: most users now expect underlined text on a website to be a hyperlink, which allows authors to link to external sources without specifying 'click here' all the time.)

But what if you want to be cutting edge, or do something that isn't expected? Then you need to communicate how you have changed expectations. When Derek checked into that hotel, they should have explained how the lights and taps worked (probably had written instructions for both in the room as well, although that's not much use in the dark).

Apple have been very successful inventing their own quirks. Some of that success is leveraging our expectations - it's why we call their devices 'intuitive'. Some of it is communication - see how many Apple ads (even still photographs) demonstrate the touch pad being used, to communicate to dedicated mouse-users that their expectations may go astray. And Apple aren't perfect - I had to Google how to turn off my wife's iPod because it wasn't in the instructions and didn't meet my expectations of an off switch.

A business coach I worked with once summed up business as: Business = People | People = Expectations | Expectations = Communication, so

Business equals Communication.

It's a useful framework when building any product for consumption by others.
You're kinda asking for a game that implements the DWIM instruction, but there are indeed higher-level RTSes (eg Hearts of Iron). That's not really the point of Starcraft - you might as well ask for an FPS where you order the guy around with vocal commands rather than having to aim yourself. SC2 does remove some of the busywork clicking though, which is nice.
I think the proper approach to something like this would be to build a social network and then introduce the device, not the other way round. You can't expect users to flock when the barrier to entry is the price of a device and the success of the network is questionable at best. If Facebook made a deal with a mobile device company (say HTC) and made a similar product, they'd be oodles more successful. Although the fact that our phones nowadays support apps and can browse the web makes this sort of moot anyway.
Your kid will almost certainly hit other kids no matter what you do. (At least if your kid is a boy, I'm not so sure about girls.) Of course you should punish it when it happens, but you shouldn't be surprised, and you certainly shouldn't despair that now your kid is going to grow up to be a wife-beater.

I am aware of that, and don't despair. But I'm still going to make common sense steps that reduce the odds of that.

As it turns out, by the time I went to school I was well-behaved enough that I never got detention. I can't give all the credit to corporal punishment for that one... or can I?

According to the statistics, you cannot give credit to corporal punishment for that. There is a great deal of variability in kids, but _on average_ corporal punishment doesn't result in better behavior. (No matter how many people personally believe otherwise for themselves.)

Out of curiosity, what punishments do you give to your kids?

Diversion. Talking to. Counting. Time outs.

Do you have a "reserve" punishment saved up that you've never had to use?

Skipping the regular Friday treat.
Did Bart Simpson pick that name. Ring, Ring. "Hello, Is Mike On Ads there?"

My Gonads,
Bart Simpson
legislative branch (declaring a law unconstitutional etc.)

That would be the Judicial branch, the legislative branch is Congress.
Any plans to open source this? I'd love to wrap it in Cocoa and use it as a notes app on my Mac.
But their software is heavily reified against that sort of thing -- a new answer is made and then it's karma would have to surpass the existing one (which the karma-inflation problem makes easier) but it also needs to get accepted in place of the existing one, screwing over the original answerer. The already-accepted answer could also be community-wiki-edited beyond recognition.

Pretending temporality doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.
I hear that Baby's peaks are about 500-600 APM
Supcom isn't really significantly higher-level than any other RTS (ie you can still control individual units), there's just more of everything.
But the problem is that only the original poster can accept answers, and a newly added (and correct) answer may be pushed so far down the list of answers, it could take a needlessly long time to overcome the currently highest upvoted solution.

Ideally, a user could report something as out of date, or the ranking algorithm would degrade the value of an answer as it ages (which would be a problem for ageless Q/A situations like traditional computer science questions).
...which is why you have a slave. Master corrupt? Promote the slave to master, get it its own slave.

Repairing a corrupted database, even a relational database, often takes too long for a production app.
And I get wrist pain from doing C-x b a hundred times per day!
Clustered durability. You can request, per-write, "don't return until this data has been persisted to N other servers," with N chosen per-write.

So if you're running master/slave and choose N to be 1, you're durable (at the two server level). Run 5-replica sets and choose N to be 3 or 4, and you're basically guaranteed durability. One of your nodes goes down hard and bad things happen? You have four additional clones of it sitting and waiting to be copied.

This is actually more durable in cases of extreme hardware failure like, say, your RAID controller going out. However, it requires that you spend more on hardware. So do several other things Mongo does, like using a lot of RAM and disk to get faster writes, so that's in keeping with a lot of their other design decisions.

It's not perfect for every project, but it's a great choice for most of the same projects where you'd use Mongo in the first place.
There's a blog post where the MongoDB people explain why they haven't prioritised single server durability:

http://blog.mongodb.org/post/381927266/what-about-durability

Basically: (a) for real single server durability you need to turn off hardware buffering or have a battery-backed RAID controller to ensure your write really hit disk; (b) this won't help you if your disks fail, and this failure mode is as likely as any other; and (c) for some applications, the delay required to replay a transaction log in unacceptable--you need 100% uptime.

I am thinking though, that the fact that MongoDB writes to files at all is somewhat misleading, and that they may as well say that all your data is loaded into virtual memory. (Since they make no guarantees that the database files will be consistent except in the case of a controlled shutdown. Neither does MySQL, they point out, but I think in practice MySQL database files will be easier to recover from, since their structure is presumably more regular.)
I wouldn't say a game that sold 10 million units and has a thriving professional competitive scene 10 years after release is "misguided" just because you don't like it.
I agree with everything but your comment about Sharepoint. Nothing can ever make that painless.
Write, execute, and share Python data analysis scripts within your browser
There weren't many penises, until it got posted to Hacker News... Some iterations from the past days: http://twitpic.com/photos/mrdoob
Ask HN: Best way to integrate blog with a Rails app?
I've heard that having domain.com/blog is better than blog.domain.com for SEO purposes -- any tips for doing this when domain.com is a Rails app?

FWIW, I'm using Moonshine, Capistrano and the Rackspace Cloud -- bonus points for tips that help me easily manage this with the same tools.
Eh. Yes and no. The Mongo guys are very, very upfront about this. Check their web site. There are good workarounds, they just require spending a bit more on hardware.
Wozniak 2.0 wanted
Hey all,

I’m a 23 yo economics graduate looking for a hacker partner to make a startup in the Silicon Valley. I have established ties with the venture capital community and they are ready to support my project. I also have ideas about the future technology, so now I need someone to help me bring them to life. If you’re interested, please contact me at klimchitsky@gmail.com. If you’ve got ideas of your own or even a technology to commercialize, you‘re more than welcome as well. If you’re not interested, please, forward this message to anybody who might be interested or just put it on any mailing lists that you consider relevant.

Best,
PK

P. S. People from any part of the world are welcome, there is Skype anyway! But readiness to move to the Valley finally is needed here.
The folks coming down on Derek might do well to read Donald Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things, which speaks directly to this issue. It's important to remember that the purpose of design is not simply to dazzle the beholder, or make people think, but to make useful things usable. It's easy for designers to forget this, especially the avant-garde sort who fall in love with their own creative spirit, tend to win the accolades for their "radical" ideas. In fact, Norman's book introduced me to one of my favorite design epithets:

"It probably won an award."
So you run naked during the time of the master rebuild? — The only sensible solution is to run two slaves at least, IMHO. — I haven't looked, but do you promote that?
Ideas may be worthless, but public failure is embarrassing as hell.
Those will be meaningless for anyone who hasn't watched a lot of pro Starcraft already. It took me six months before I felt comfortable watching games without english commentary.

I'd suggest starting with the Gom TV tournaments, which have commentary geared towards those new to Korean Starcraft:

http://www.gomtv.net/classics3/vod/

After that, I'd suggest violetak, which does pretty good sports-style commentary, or Day9, who does really in-depth analysis (although he's starting to focus almost exclusively on SC2).

violetak: http://www.youtube.com/user/VioleTAK

Day9: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=104...
Or MS is next in line after Nokia and Sony, on the downward spiral. Seemingly-invincible companies go under all the time. It doesn't have to be one big explosion, but death by a thousand cuts.
finally, someone made a penis drawing app
Starcraft II gamers forced to use real names in Blizzard forums
But Wii = Whee.
This is not a valid document according to http://validator.w3.org/.

I suggest you run it through and see for yourself.

As a design/technology exercise, this is interesting, but it is not usable in any real-world application.
SF - more tickets, higher fines but said not to be for revenue-raising
How do you modify the buckets? Do you have to tweak a config file and push it out to your servers?
Hmmm, has Microsoft "rarely invented anything that mattered"?
They were highly regarded in their niches. If you needed a computer to edit photos or to assemble a print publication, a Mac would be your obvious choice. In the PowePC era, it was the fastest computer you could buy that ran off-th-shelf productivity software and many found their way into labs as instrument controllers. Considering the size of their lineup, a couple lemons (pun intended) were to be expected. Still, considering how many models were made, I saw more bad computers coming from PC makers.

And, until the arrival of NT4, PC GUIs had little to no advantage over what Apple was offering. Windows was ugly and crash-prone. In retrospect, NT4 was also very crash prone, probably because MS moved graphics drivers onto kernel space. Windows only became more acceptable (some would prefer "less offensive") visually with the NeXT-like visuals of 95.
Nope. I think the article understates this but there is a difference between APM and EAPM. eAPM (Effective APM) is probably what he was getting at.

Semi-pros can have APMs of 200-700, with 70% of their actions being actions like spamming multiple right clicks. So their EAPM may be from 60-210 only, most in the bottom range.

Real pros have 60% or more of their clicks as unit/selection group selection, etc so they're a lot more useful.

In battles, some pros even peak up to 500-600 APM. So that may be an EAPM of 300-360 or more.

There's a vast level of skill difference between the top pros and semi-pros.
The problem with Microsoft isn't a lack of bright talent. It's "Who's Next?" People are jockeying for political positions, not concentrating on products. Ballmer won't be there forever and everyone wants to be the next Ballmer. If Steve Jobs passed away tomorrow, there could be similar jockeying at Apple -- we've already seen how product introductions lacking Jobs have been split up among several people. We don't know how many of those people got the idea from that experience that they could be "the next Jobs."

Jobs also once criticized company leadership in general (someone else can go find this), stating that what happens after a founder leaves is that a marketing person ascends to the top -- and he pointed to Ballmer as an example. It's interesting to note that Palm began to sink also when a marketing person was leading it -- Ed Colligan.
See also http://norvig.com/ngrams/ for Python. Random-restart hillclimbing instead of Metropolis.
But they'll be bitten by this. The Android team are clearly not smart enough to understand why people like the iPhone.

"One obvious downside of external application storage is that the software installed on the SD card will only be available when the card is mounted on the device. If you plug your phone into your computer and enable USB mass storage mode, for example, the software installed on the SD card will not be accessible. Due to this limitation, Google's developer documentation warns that long-running software like background services, live wallpapers, and widgets should not allow SD installation."

Can you imagine explaining this to end users? "Well, if you install to the SD card to get more storage, you can't use this app when your phone is plugged into your computer." This is just... stupid.
Any company that has empire-itis, yes. But there's hope that some companies can escape that disease.
Simply put. the most useful article on hacker news...ever. I bow in envy to the 300+ apm people.
closed beta

Wait, what?
Ask HN: Should I accept an unpaid internship?
I recently finished my freshman year of college (quarter system = late start/end). I have an opportunity to work unpaid for a medium-sized IT company, Coradiant Inc., in the Bay area. They are willing to cover travel costs and I can make arrangements with minimal living expenses. However, this would require postponing projects I had planned to start this summer (not all of them programs - I'm eager to start learning quantum mech, for example), and having no income doesn't help with student loans.

My assessment so far is that the internship is more resume-friendly and will probably bring positive recommendations later, but an independent project summer will allow me to learn things that are more important/useful to me.

How valuable are internship experiences to entrepreneurs, compared to executing your own projects? Are there any other factors that should weigh into this decision?
You should visit http://niceemails.com. Nice Emails is the premiere marketplace for purchasing Premium Email and E-card Templates.
I've tried to post this as a comment on the blog, but it's not showing up (moderated?):

-----------

Full disclosure: I work for 10gen.

You strategically posted this when my air conditioning was broken, so here are a few thoughts before I go find somewhere cooler. Since CouchDB is "not a competitor" to MongoDB, it's nice of you to put all this time into a public service.

> MongoDB, <b>by default</b>, doesn’t actually have a response for writes.

Whoopsy, got your emphasis wrong there. We did this to make MongoDB look good in stupid benchmarks (http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/2009/06/29/couchdb-vs...).

Seriously, though, this "unchecked" type of write is just supposed to be for stuff like analytics or sensor data, when you're getting a zillion a second and don't really care some get lost if the server crashes. <b>You can do an insert that not only waits for a database response, but waits for N slaves (user configurable) to have replicated that insert.</b> Note that this is very similar to Cassandra's "write to multiple nodes" promise. You can also fsync after every write.

> MongoDB writes to a mem-mapped file and lets the kernel fsync it whenever
> the kernel feels like it.

fsyncs are configurable. You can fsync once a second, never, or after every single insert, remove, and update if you wish.

> When you look at MongoDB more critically I don’t see how you could actually
> justify using it for anything resembling the traditional role of a database.

This is because you assume you'll run it on single server. MongoDB's documentation clearly, repeatedly, and earnestly tells people to run MongoDB on multiple servers.

Also, as another commenter mentioned, full single-server durability is scheduled for the fall.

> Stories like this (http://www.korokithakis.net/node/119) are dubious not
> because they expose a few bugs in MongoDB but because they show inherent
> architectural problems you cannot overcome long term without something
> append-only.

Stories "like this" show that MongoDB doesn't work for everyone, particularly people who give no specifics about their architecture, setup, what happened, or anything else. Isn't it irritating how people will write, "MongoDB lost my data" or "CouchDB is really slow" and provide no specifics?

That's not to say that things never go wrong, MongoDB is definitely not perfect and has lots of room for improvement. I hope that users with questions and problems will contact us on the list, our wiki, the bug tracker, or IRC (or, heck, write a snarky blog post). Anything to contact the community and let us try to help. I wish every person who tried MongoDB had a great experience with it.

Lots of users, hopefully most, love MongoDB and are using it happily and successfully in production.
Yeah, but it seems like you rarely want to be radical when it comes to consumer focused web UX design, whereas when it comes to development itself, it could be justified a lot more often, because people are really dealing with tools for hours a day. So bringing up a dev example just seems weird.
How to get on a panel, though? Maybe I could be the token irrelevant person?
Is it still part of Java 7 release?
[Edit: steveplace beat me to it. I'll leave this comment around for the reference.]

Abolishing the gold standard is not "equivalent" to "seizing of all gold". Both things just happened concurrently:

http://www.greatdepressiononline.com/gold-and-the-great-depr...

First, in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the U.S. Government, under the Gold Confiscation Act, confiscated gold money from its citizens and replaced it with paper Federal Reserve Notes. It became illegal for individuals to own gold, except for small quantities that coin collectors and dental practitioners could hold. This alone eliminated the public’s capacity to hold government inflation of the money supply in check; they could no longer redeem inflated paper money for gold.
Right now, yes. Deploys happen frequently enough and are sufficiently fast that I can get something disabled globally in under 30 seconds. The next iteration of this stuff I'm building now; goals are standalone library, more DRY, and some kind of simple web UI where I can do the global enable/disable actions. I'll likely stick to manipulating buckets in config files for the foreseeable future; it's being able to mass-enable/disable that I need to refine.