skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Um. Okay. All that proves is that Verizon has better coverage in the middle of Nebraska. My speculation is that the reason there hasn't been an enormous outcry about the iPhone antenna issue from the general public is that maybe AT&T is actually doing a pretty good job of covering the majority of their customers and so they don't even notice. The fact that there's areas where other companies have better coverage hardly disproves that.
Default assumption for whom?

For a scientist, or someone working with real world data, this should never be the default assumption.

Besides, in the paragraph with the arithmetic he explicitly talks about significant figures. In context, the answer is unambiguously 7 .
Yo dawg, I heard you like maths so I put a function in yo function so you can derive while you derive
Perhaps "What's harder than a web browser?" would have been a better question. I think it's pretty interesting. We take browsers for granted. Yet they deal with immense complexity.
As obliquely pointed out in the comments, there are ways around that, e.g. http://www.rot13.com/?text=ubfgvat%20gur%20ercbfvgbel%20lbhe...). For that matter, it would be hard to find this if you don't put your name on your resume and create a new Github account...
No, it has no effect. The votes on this issue appear to be based on political alignment, not content or logic. This does not bode well for HN.
"And you can't charge for it anymore." - great point.
No, he didn't:

UPDATE: The last line in the email exchange was actually not said by Mr. Jobs; rather it was by “Tom.” We corrected it as soon as we were made aware.
Google already has had a soft entrance to the hotel business through Google Maps:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/03/experiment-to-sho...
These types of comparisons seem to be better for checkbox style decision-making. It's something I can put onto a spreadsheet for a manager whose decision-making process will be "Scala has 5 check marks, F# has 6. F# it is!"
The "magic spot" "problem" does not affect the Edge band for this particular user, in this particular location, on this particular day, in this particular phase of the moon.

Antenna design is black magic on the best of days. When you mix in all the variables at play across three million phone users around the country you get lots of irreproducible results.

What I find myself wondering is: Sure, closely coupling a big bag of saltwater (e.g. me) to the phone may [1] tend to reduce the antenna efficiency relative to leaving the phone alone on a table. But can I strap the iPhone into some sort of specially-designed case that's designed to increase the antenna efficiency?

[1] EDIT: This word used to be "will", but having just read Anandtech's fun analysis of this "problem", I am reminded that what giveth in one waveband taketh away in another: Anand improved his WiFi signal power under certain conditions by gripping the phone.
This is great. If the teachers turn out to be good this will become a pretty nifty resource for learning. I hope it turn out to be like Khan Academy but with a lot more teachers.
And where does this "need" come from?
I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine.

We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com, put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights".

Many of our customers have something similar, but it's not always on the front page.
Yea, kayak doesn't do that at all.
Good read! I've been meaning to give F# a try were it not for the other projects I've been juggling in my spare time. Have any HN developers taken it out for a spin?
They Make Apps' slider-based alternative to CAPTCHA
any recommendations re loadbalancers?
You can count on that.
Can't say much about Edge, but I assume that the upload speeds are mostly unaffected because that is mostly transmitted data from the phone (though it would be interesting to see if the phone is cranking up the transmit power when the antenna is shorted)
This just changed, with one excuse being that the old system doesn't really work in the mobile space. See e.g.: http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/07/01/korea.no.longe...
Faulty title; the quote was from "Tom", not from Jobs:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/07/01/exclusive-conversa...
...whatever effects they've had have become part of society

Your comment seems to imply that the effects are complete. I'd disagree with that.

I'd say access to pornography has changed dramatically in recent years. Anyone with an internet connection can find porn in relative anonymity and I don't think we've seen the full effects of it yet.

children will get desensitized to the typical types of sex early on

As children become more sexually aware, they'll probably turn to the 'net to learn more. I suspect their expectations of what is 'normal' will be set by what they find there. I don't think it's just desensitisation that will take place.
It also isn't a "location based application that lets you casually hookup with your friends" that used to be acquired in droves 2005-2008. This is a serious and existing, profitable business with a serious and scalable technology platform and experienced talent. Not just ambitious and smart college kids getting a slightly higher hiring bonus (not that there's anything wrong with that).

The critical infrastructure pieces (where GC is an issue) are already in C++. The front-end is already in Java. A full scale re-write will be a dumb thing to do. It's not going to be difficult to have Common Lisp FFI to hook the ITA middleware into Google's infrastructure instead of ITA's.

The software that ITA developers that makes them different from the rest (I am guessing lots of these are heuristic solutions to NP complete problems) is exactly the sweet spot for Common Lisp, where it provides a significant advantage over other languages even for large groups of programmers. While I will enjoy writing a web app in Common Lisp much more so than writing a web app in Java (less boiler plate, interesting language compensates for a mundane task) I doubt there are going to be great advantages to doing the more routine development in CL for a large corporation.
I love the BP&P series, but this one makes me sad. There isn't much to learn here other than that these guys won the app-store lottery.
This is a good strategic move against Microsoft. If IBM lends its credibility to the Firefox cause, other companies will be more willing to get rid of IE, especially IE6.
Is it slow and clunky on real hardware, or is that just because I'm running it in qemu? (menuet64)
that's what's got me confused...
While we're talking about Feynman, I think most people here could relate to his perspective on uninterrupted time, and the avoidance of administrative work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y08g3OXAA14&NR=1
E Ink prototyping kits
The first thing I did after reading this comment was check your profile creation date and your karma. To each his own, but I was totally unimpressed with this site.

I judge "start-ups" (really a Web app) in this case by a few metrics, but the first test is always this: does this start-up solve a problem? I don't think it does. Anyone who wants to create a top ten list can do it from any blogging platform and several other sites that do exactly what this one does.
It's fun hitting milestones like that. Good work.
I used to be addicted to Counter-Strike and after a while i decided to delete it because i wanted to spend more time developing. It took some discipline, but i managed to completely delete it. After a few months, while being very stressed and in need of some entertainment, i decided to install the game again. Turns out i didn't really enjoy it anymore, so i once again deleted the game and i haven't touched it ever since.
stupid mode

Opens up more questions than it answers. It seems when trees die, they become earth or even oil. How come they don't completely dissolve into air again? And if they don't completely dissolve into air, how come all the CO2 is not bound in the earth yet (trees pluck it out of the air, then die and bind it to the ground)? There would have to be bacteria or something that converts soil into air (CO2), but then, why don't they dissolve everything?
Most of that stuff has to do with improvements in the hardware. The original Macintosh's GUI was somewhat limited by the hardware.

CPU: Remember Cringely's story of how before Apple fired him, the last thing he did was to implement an animation of flies buzzing around the trashcan to indicate that it was full, which took 30% of the CPU. And it's a lot easier to do transparency and perspective transforms if you have a GPU to run them on.

Pre-emptive multitasking: pre-emptive multitasking takes up very little code (you just need an interrupt handler that saves one set of registers and restores another set) but it's more error-prone to program on than cooperative multitasking. Its usefulness is that no task can hang the whole computer. But on a machine without an MMU, like the original Mac, any task programmed in an unsafe language can crash the whole computer, so that's worthless. Even preemptive-multitasking OSes that use the MMU effectively (with locks, facilities for limited shared memory, message queues, and so on) can be quite small.

Oberon was a system more or less contemporary with the Mac with hierarchical file management, networking, hypertext, networked file transfer, and a GUI (although obviously not an FTP client, a Web browser, or transparency and perspective transforms) that was similar in size.

So why are our other systems so much more code? Here are some of my guesses.

• You can always do something better (faster, in a more general way, with better error reporting, covering that last little detail of the CSS standard, whatever) in 10× the code. So people do.

• In big and old systems, in order to keep communication overhead to a manageable level, people duplicate code — either because they don't know it already exists, or because they don't understand the code that depends on it well enough not to break it when they change what it depends on, or just because changing the interface is so much work. (In theory, you could migrate all Motif applications to use GTK, with enough work on them.) I'm not saying this is justifiable in systems of merely a few million lines of code, but in systems like Debian, up in the billions of lines, it's unavoidable.

• Big and old systems also have lots of code of minimal utility. Do you know about Xdmcp? Your X server does. How about X resource parsing? Lots of your programs are still linked with Xt. How about the xbm file format, to say nothing of three quarters of the formats supported by netpbm and ImageMagick? Handling for printing teletypes that can't erase? Handling of terminals with no lowercase? Hardware-accelerated non-antialiased rendering of polygons? Video cards that have separate palettes for the red, green, and blue color channels ("DirectColor")? Xcms? Have you ever looked at the random crap in terminfo? Did you know that Microsoft Windows machines still have fields in struct sockaddr_in for IMP numbers, in case you're on the ARPANet? And when was the last time you needed magnetic tape handling programs? Did you know Emacs still comes with notes on how to port Mocklisp to it?
Push a Button and Watch it Work vs. Just Work Hard - Mobtown Labs
It's the best one - and I've tried them all (afaik).
Exactly.

It occurs to me that this is a good way to run a startup too. Figure out what your core competency is and do that. But on the fringes, keep exploring other opportunities and see what may come of them.
"RISOTTO IS NOT THAT HARD

IF YOU THINK IT IS HARD THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU

RISOTTO REQUIRES BOTH PATIENCE AND RICE

IF YOU HAVE NEITHER GO TO HELL"

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/10/3/151357/469

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2010/3/2/135644/4983
They're just front-loading and automating the 1st pass of candidate screening (normally something that might be done in a phone screen). I think this is perfectly legitimate.

For anyone who is seriously applying for a position this isn't a significantly greater burden compared to the normal multi-stage application process at any other company. For people who are just blanket spamming their tarted up resume to anyone and everyone hoping for a lucky hit, this is a lot more work in comparison. But I think that's a feature not a bug.
Jumpstart Credit Card processing (Free PDF book by LetsFreckle)
Exactly. Create a new account and don't put anything identifiable on the resume if you are worried about it. You can just correspond to them via the built in github messaging.
Some people can leverage karma points into employment. It usually is a decent proxy for determining that someone is a known and valuable member of a community, which counts for a lot.
Groupon now in Local Papers. Have old media just shot themselves again?
Movie Domain Seized by ICE
I have seen this many times but it never gets old. I wish the Feynman style of teaching and explaining our amazing world were more available. His physics lectures are now available but kids would be extremely anxious to learn if teachers made basic science as fun as Feynman did. He was smart to tune his way of talking so his audience would understand no matter their level of knowledge (i.e. "jiggly motion" describing heated atoms).

I am hoping that the internet and such things as OpenCourseware will allow college professors, teachers and more to become stars of teaching because they know how to communicate and make it fun.

These people should be compensated much more and be seen by many more people such as MIT's Walter Lewin, Feynman and many many others hidden in the fold of our current traditional education systems.
From my limited experience interviewing candidates, at a "large, Redmond, WA based software development company", I observed almost no correlation between resumes and talent. I've seen good people with relatively poor resumes, and bad people with otherwise very promising resumes. As a hiring tool I think the resume is damned near useless.
I've used Sinatra for a couple of small webapps. It's great if you're building something that's essentially a tiny webservice. For anything with a more extensive UI or significant database I prefer Rails/Django because most of the grunt work is already done for you in the bigger frameworks.
In my original reply to you, I agreed that loans in fractional reserve banking are inflation:

Well, when people loan more than they have, which banks in the US are allowed to do.

But loans aren't the problem, or the source of the inflation. The inflation happens separately from the loan; the loan is just a shell game to hide what's going on.
Ask HN: Why was the Posterous Thread Killed?
Some HN users might be operating under the impression that it was killed for being highly critical of a YC company. Just wanted to give the responsible mods a chance to clarify.

The link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479028
Trees do dissolve. Forest fires are the most elegant way -- the reaction liberates much of the carbon and all of the oxygen into gasses including CO2, and the cycle is complete.

Bacteria that break down the rotting remains of a dead tree also consume the energy stored in the cellulose and release gasses like carbon dioxide and methane. At some point the remains don't contain bonds with easily freed energy and you have regular old dirt. If they had a way to break down the dirt further they would, but the cost is too high.
nor "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100628 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.6.6"
Cars with wings may be just around the corner
Twitter Phisher
It's neat that it can be done, but I'd have to be pretty desperate to save some battery juice to use any of these in practice.
Interesting. I'd just been searching earlier to see if anyone had created a green only ereader for OLED displays. I was wondering how good green-only text displayed since there had been talk about the Nexus One pentile matrix being sub-optimal for b/w text.
You're getting a lot of feedback on the product... I'm going to give you some feedback on the site itself. I'm not a designer, but there's a few things that stood out to me when I clicked on your website.

First, there's too much text. The text is overpowering me.
I forget where, but there was an article/blog post a week or so that I read, which effectively said:

1. Assume your readers can't read

2. Assume even if they can read, they won't.

This means that ideally your site should be almost self explanatory. Diagrams > Words if you need to choose. If you can illustrate to me how it works, you're doing way better than having me read it.

Next, your choice of color is bad. Nothing really stands out except "by trying apps on your iPhone". That is to say:

"Earn money" doesn't stand out. Login doesn't stand out, and neither does Register...

Next, in the "Get paid to try apps" paragraph, the color scheme isn't "crisp", it's a bit hard to read IMO.

"Are you a developer?" Why yes I am! But holy-moly, that font is fine and i'm not even at the fine print yet!
Don't try to squeeze so much text onto your website :)

Next thing that stood out to me, is the >> Login/Register buttons. They have this odd white color to them on the left side and the top sides. It makes them feel like they were poorly photoshopped, and even though it's tiny (pixel wise), it's super noticable to me

Finally, you really have no "call to action". I arrive to your page, and I don't know where to click next. This is mostly because your Register button blends in with everything else. I'd probably make the registration red here to contrast with everything else (others may disagree, but I think the color needs to change).
Forget about the login button. your battle is against people clicking the back button when they first arrive. If they register, you've essentially got them to buy in. They'll find where to login :) (you can put it in the corner, or anywhere else really).

I hope this is useful, good luck! :)

edit: cleaned up my thoughts a little bit...
It's 7.2. Without context (and he gives none for the expression) everyone (including me as a scientist) must assume abstract numbers. What's more, we know he's not using measurements because there are no units...
That's an interesting list. A lot of automatic code simplifications that I want :)
Author Christopher Hitchens diagnosed with cancer
I am a fan of simple code-writing challenges after having seen the results: a lot of bad code...
Actually, are you sure you're not thinking of speed or other performance issues? Many of the earlier phones (particularly my old Hero) found Sense to be a better UI if they could run it at full speed, but used stock as it was faster.
The more you learn about the iPhone 4 the suckier the iPad first generation seems. You would have assumed that it was at least the iPhone 4 with a bigger screen, but they must have been really trying to hit a price point.
Did nobody else see the flaw in this?

The GitHub forks are public. If you wanted to, you could just look through ~30 forks and see what their commits/code look like. It would be fairly easy to find the "best" solution and work from there.

Furthermore, having your resume public gives you a better idea of how qualified you are in comparison to your peers that are applying for the same role.

Seems slightly fishy to me.
My hypothesis: humans who visit Hacker News masturbate even more often.
No one seems to have pointed out that, strictly speaking, this isn't plagiarism, unless, of course, some of this moron's writers actually do plagiarize the essays they send him.
Beyond that, Tap Tap is itself a platform for selling music. I'm surprised they don't allow people to buy albums within the app, honestly, because I've purchased at least three albums because I first heard the song on Tap Tap (the iPad version, in my case).

I imagine it's mostly licensing issues and the fact that this would set up Tap Tap as a competitor to iTunes, which would surely get them booted out of the App Store.

It's best to think of Tap Tap as an entertainment factory, which (I'm guessing) is why Disney is so interested in it. They now have a direct line to quickly growing platforms (iPhone and iPad).
Kick Starter Film Festival, July 9th, Brooklyn
This (and other creative implementations) works because it's not mainstream. I'd imagine once it becomes big, spammers will find a way to defeat it.

As far as I know, different CAPTCHAs have different degrees of effectiveness. Google's is among one of the best.
I be dammed if I can remember his name now, but there was a famous mathematician, who used to travel around to different universities, sleeping there and working on papers with the other professors.

So yeah, it is possible.
Ditto. The link title should have indicated that this was marginally NSFW. I guess this comes up too rarely on HN for there to be any policy or convention about it.
I've only used F#; have looked at Scala a bit but haven't used it. I find F# feels fairly natural and pleasant if you know C# and like ML-like languages. I've mostly treated it as a nicer C# rather than a true functional language, though; features like sequence expressions (generate an anonymous IEnumerable with yields without having to declare and define a function etc.) and object expressions (generate an instance of an anonymous class that inherits from some interface) let you write imperative code in a more "value-oriented" fashion and with less ceremony. Algebraic data types and pattern-matching are also nice to have, of course.
My impression is that Scala is much more conceptually interesting.
Ask HN: What does $2000 in Web design/development buy you these days?
I have a couple of features that I'm interested in adding to my Web application, and I've also re-designed a few page elements. If I had $10,000 lying around I'd walk up to the office of my local Web development agency, but alas that is not the case - I'm a college student, and I'm broke.

Provided that I provide very detailed spec documents and mock-ups, is it realistic to expect that a custom search feature, social networking/profile features, and a few static pages will cost me more than $2000?

I know most designers/developers charge $60+ hourly, so my question is really, "How long does it take to implement these features?"
> Can someone check the quality of what they receive from a developer without being a developer?

That's the QA team right there. And the ones I work with are very good at it!
The Crockford article is great, since it is free, short, and well written javascript. Unlike the 1973 paper it gets the ideas from... which is behind a paywall, long, and uses a 1973 language called "(l,(i,(s,(p))))".

The article's goals are noble, but in this one spot, we seem to be flirting with flaunting one's ignorance and thinking it wit.

Anyhow, here's a slicker way of doing it. Grab an ANTLR grammar for ecmascript. A quick Google for "ANTLR ecmascript grammar" yields:

http://www.antlr.org/grammar/1153976512034/ecmascriptA3.g

In addition, there is a (somewhat buggy) Python target for ANTLR 3 which is probably good enough for a project like this.

http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/Antlr3PythonTarget

Voila, a way to generate a parser in Python.
Also, if you wanted to particularly target that site's slider for spamming, it isn't hard to do.

"Although a checkbox "check here if you are not a bot" might serve to distinguish between humans and computers, it is not a CAPTCHA because it relies on the fact that an attacker has not spent effort to break that specific form. (Such 'check here' methods are very easy to defeat.) Instead, CAPTCHAs rely on difficult problems in artificial intelligence. In the short term, this has the benefit of distinguishing humans from computers. In the long term, it creates an incentive to advance the state of AI, which the originators of the term view as a benefit in its own right."

(from wikipedia)