skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google's always approached design as an objective engineering challenge and less as an artistic endeavor. As a result, their designs are minimalist, utilitarian, and functional, but they sometimes seem to give up the ghost when they attempt to build complex or unique software like Buzz or Wave that could benefit badly from someone with a passion for aesthetics and UX.

Regarding Android, I'm encouraged by news that Google picked up WebOS's lead designer, (as reported here: http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/05/27/palm-loses-their-lead...) as WebOS is often lauded as an intuitive and innovative user interface in a manner Android simply isn't.

When Douglas Bowman (Google's former lead designer) left the organization, he cited, among other things, a fastidious, over-engineered, design-by-committee-and-hard-numbers approach that drove him crazy. He mentioned an example where Google had A/B tested 41 shades of blue to determine which to go with. That's demonstrative of the greater issue their culture seems to suffer from: if you want to bring about creative or subjective change, you often need objective facts and figures—metrics lacking by artistic design's very nature.

I wrote briefly about Google's methods in a bit of a rant on Facebook's whiplash-inducing approach to design here: http://www.htmlist.com/design/google-vs-facebook-interface-d..., but in the end, it comes down to balance. I have high hopes for Android 3.0 because I'm hoping that they just shipped with what they had and told themselves they'd worry about making it pretty later. Later is now, evidently, and it will be really interesting to see what Google does in this next round, especially if they've removed the handcuffs and decided to trust their designers.
Nu: Lisp on Objective C. (think Clojure for Cocoa)
Complex, Multicellular Life from Over Two Billion Years Ago Discovered
My work in progress: Footprint Analytics
Very much incomplete, the blog is the main part (I probably should've linked to that). It's just going to be a collection of what I've learned, but hopefully geared towards people without a technical background.
That's true if and only if, by "short term" you mean 15 years in nominal terms, and 20 years in real terms.

That's from history (1929 to 1944-49). Perhaps this time it might take longer.
What exactly do you find amazing in it?
While only slightly off-topic, I find myself more in need of curated information than raw data in my sidebar research.

For instance, I searched for a while for a nearly complete dictionary of English verbs and their corresponding conjugations. My friend entitled this a "declension-ary."
> Diversification to me is like shooting a shotgun. Most stocks are profitable(they'd be delisted otherwise) so the scattershot(shotgun shot) is a nice way to handle that, and that is diversification.

That's not true. Continuous loss is not a ground for delisting. Going below a certain per-stock value (e.g. $1 or $0.01 depending on trading value) is, and that can be fixed by a so called "reverse split", without making the stock any more valuable.
Gates actually donated more to his foundation -- he donated his time. I believe that if Gates stayed Microsoft's CEO -- Microsoft would be more successful company and delivered more to the society.
I'm ADD, and I found it to be helpful during a period when I was sitting regularly.

I prefer just vipassana, watching the breath and watching thoughts as they arise and fade. No chanting or 'OMMM'.

An interesting book is "Zen and the Brain" by an emeritus professor of neurology, published by MIT Press. The author started doing zen while in Japan in the late 60s. Over about 1000 pages, he tries to come up with testable hypotheses explaining the phenomena and results of long-term meditation practice.

It's very detailed and dense. There are a few chapters that describe his subjective experiences, but the rest is pretty scientific. There are few illustrations, it's a massive block of text.
I'm moving from native iPhone to web apps for mobile. The tools will catch up to flash rapidly. The browsers will kick themselves into line, so its viable to have one code base. But most of all... Javascript is just less verbose than Objective-C, and you go straight to market, bypassing appstore/signing madness.

I don't think its iOS4 specific, once you have geo-location + offline + appdata + GPU graphics you've got the killer features you need, so why go native?

WebGL will happen, theyll have to support it & its easy to do so. Now I guess you might want to do AI in-game as the device gets more powerful, and write effects shaders for rich games.. But a lot of that can be deferred to server-side, so I think even for 3D games it will soon make more sense to go web app.

What apple have is slickness and consistency... but I think the slickness of web on Android will approach that asymptotically. The web dev platform is more scaleable, less pain, and wont go away.

What is missing is a good appstore + billing system for web apps [and google will probably be there in a year]. I think it needs to support a SaaS model where I rent a group of apps at a discount on a yearly basis. That way you have people invest more effort over time, innovate, and reach beyond the iFart apps.
I still cannot fathom how this is a purely a software issue, but if Apple releases a patch that solves the problem I will be very impressed.
Follow this discussion:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcpgt/

On both reddit and lambda-the-ultimate; it has all the important stuff. Also there's the shootout stuff already posted as a reply to you. And you can download LuaJIT2 and experiment yourself.
Interesting stuff but I'm wondering why you guys chose to do this in the Tenderloin?

In terms of the premise of 'not wanting to move somewhere noisy', noise is the least of your worries if you are moving to the Tenderloin. And most people living there don't hav a choice.

I would have thought more context could be put on this data if it was about an area people chose to live in (but is noisy/industrial, like SoMa).
My first piece of advice to vim n00bs is simple. Use vimtutor until you can cruise through the entire thing without reference. When I was learning vim I would go as far as I could doing the exercises. If I forgot something I would start all over again from the beginning. Do this over the course of a week and you will begin learning quickly. My second piece of advice is to use vim for everything.
Being overly pedantic, I wanted to note that

(a) Most dictionaries are also declension-aries,

(b) I really like your word declension-ary,

and (c) Declension is what you do to nouns and is analogous to conjugation of verbs, which I think is what you are looking for :-)
I frequently hear that, at the very least, a degree shows that you can finish something. If it's true that smart hackers can give themselves a better-than-university education for the price of the books alone, and they discover this fact early in their college careers, wouldn't finishing actually be a negative indication -- a susceptibility to sunk costs? I know the case can be made that college's real education is social, but it seems like you could get that part cheaper by hanging out around other hackers.
This discussion is already far more interesting and entertaining than iPhone signal strength.
A fully LINQified RayTracer
Product UPC code data. It's much more difficult than it should be to disambiguate a UPC code to a product name.
Now imagine having to do all this for all 50 states. Ugh.

Looking at the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, it doesn't seem very hard at all. It seems like you don't have to bother with any tables yourself; you just connect to a service provider to calculate the tax for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project
http://funsizebytes.com/post/745721120/instructions-from-my-...

A Nokia manual has instructions on how not to hold your Nokia phone.

Specifically they refer to the antenna at the bottom of the phone.

Anyway, Apple clearly screwed the pooch on this, and should just give every buyer a free bumper-thing. They sell the things for $29 but they can't conceivably cost more than pennies to manufacture.
I think its more like 5months. I do get it.. they are driving amazing innovation, and exceptional polish that everyone else will have to copy. But they will catch up, because its fundamentally about engineering - its better when you decouple hardware and software.

Most people wont pay for the difference of that extra level of superb integration that Apple offer.. the gap will close as there is so much volume and competition in the mobile and tablet space.

I actually think we are close to optimizing the mobile form factor.

What other hw features could you have on these devices.. [natural spoken language translation in realtime?] its all software from here on up.
This would be HN material if he wrote something substantial about it, but as it stands... this is not particularly newsworthy.
Fabulis gets Approval from Geocities Founder
Try the 20 oz Rattleware frothing pitcher. I tried five different frothing pitchers and none of them made very good foam except the 20 oz Rattleware, the 12 oz and 32 oz Rattleware do not make good foam for me either. It always amazes me and I think my technique is improving but I always go back to the 20 oz Rattleware. Only makes enough for 2-3 cappuccinos but then the DeLonghi is only good for 2-3 espressos at a time.
Comparison of programming languages
Hmm, this style of fully declarative programming with one big query expression starts looking like a revival of Prolog-style programming in a new context. Interesting.
The quote is dealing exactly with the problem we are witnessing. Internet is a vibrant bazaar of ideas and products and services. It runs: so they will tax it. Stage one is being negotiated. Probably not in our lifetime, but in our children's, the third stage will be accomplished.

P.S. Please I want to see a quote from JFK or even Obama Himself on why it is good to strap an industry. But best place to find a quote like that would be in the Lenin Library.
Apple already won consumer mobile market, while Google with its Android will dominate emerging so-called enterprise one.

If you want to write some module or extention for your corporate system for mobile devices - Android is the obvious choice.

The history repeats itself, Google will be to Apple what Redhat was to Sun, Data General, SCO, and other now dead UNIX vendors. It just a matter of a time.
I've always thought Dasher (project at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ ) was interesting. It's intended for people with disabilities, but maybe it could be adapted for program text entry?
The guy spent his entire life accumulating massive amounts of wealth, spent virtually none of it, and is now using it to make the world a better place. What don't you find amazing about that?
I liked their founder and creative director in "Jekyll" and "Bloody Sunday."
Quick hacker poll: what services are you thinking of building with this API?
I'd like someone to take a bunch of recently deceased human brains and apply very small amounts of voltage to the individual neurons while the brain is in some sort of Magnetoencephalography device (SQUID, SERF, Whatever).

Then average all of the samples together, shotgun the results (ala shotgun sequencing), and produce an overall average model of the relative capacitance between all the neurons in the human brain.

I'm sure it's a hopelessly naive idea, but man would it be cool to emulate an entire human brain, even if it was in 1/1000 or 1/100000 time.
How can you say that 10 years working on the internet means that you are giving more back to the ecosystem than you are taking?? There is no correlation.

The dude didn't even say if his computer systems were running solely on wind power.
Short revisit satellite imagery for outdoor fire detection.
This seems to be a common theme lately, as there are several articles about this, lots of software and the minimalism/uncluttering self-help niche has reached astronomic heights (which is probably somewhat ironic).

Similarly, people complain about the huge number of workday hours lost to Facebook browsing or people playing flash games or simply solitaire.

I'm a bit cautious about drawing too many conclusions there. I think we've always been very easy to distract, any excuse was okay. We just have more and easier excuses right now, especially at places where just a few years ago, you couldn't be as easily distracted. At home, with friends calling, books in your library, a TV, your spouse, kids, etc, distraction was common place, and as you didn't feel like you were losing productivity, nobody really complained.

That's one of the reasons why people were forced into cubicles -- minimize potentials for distracting interaction. Now graphical computer interfaces, the internet and mobile phones made it possible for you to waste enough time, while sitting perfectly still. No wonder that a lot of journalists complain about that. Just a few years ago, they were sitting in front of typewriters (or DOS machines with XyWrite), where focus was no problem. Now it's not that easy anymore.

But is forcibly blocking this really the ultimate solution? /etc/hosts, Freedom, cubicles, log cabins, monasteries… Don't we just fight a symptom that we should tackle otherwise? There's probably some evolutionary reason why we're prone to this ("There, a sabretooth tiger!"), but only to a certain point. I think above that, you want to be distracted and thus easily give in to temptation.

It's like when we were kids. Cleaning up your room, then your neighbor throws pebbles against your window? Off you go! But when you're all centered on playing with your Legos, your Mom has trouble getting you to dinner.

Maybe we shouldn't try as much to be monks, but set out to change our lives to contain more Legos.
Instead of cereal, some of these families should eat real food for breakfast.
Interesting idea. Extending this, I would like to see comparisons between different brains. Some people are more intelligent than others in different ways, so perhaps by examining the relative differences, we can see how different people think differently.
"Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased – not a reduced – flow of revenues to the federal government."

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 17, 1963, annual budget message to the Congress, fiscal year 1964
Ghetto Testing: Avoiding products nobody wants
I think your inflating how useful having it in a database is. The context comes from reading/viewing the content. A database isn't automatically going to fix that. If you need information about "Lupus" (yeah I know it's never lupus) and it's about Tom your new patient. And you know you getting either an email or SMS from Greg the specialist on the way to the office and all you have to do is hit the search button and type in Lupus, Tom and Greg to get that information then your phone has just made your life easier.

The context space is much smaller on a device like a phone and it's quite possible to craft a query that finds what you need faster than finding the app, opening it finding the search option then typing it in.

On my Android phone I love the search feature. It's a lot like having quicksilver on my phone. A single button that gets me access to everything.
I remember California's alleged market reforms where it was illegal to make long term contracts. When it blew up in our faces back around the turn of the century, I remember former governor Pete Wilson saying he knew there were problems but he figured they'd be fixed after they passed. It didn't happen until after the disastrous contrived shortage thanks to the power it gave companies like Enron.

Ram it through, get it on the resume and leave the mess to those that follow.
The Candlemakers' Petition
I would love to have a complete tax filings for the US. Something like an anonymous list of people with revenue (with type) and taxes paid. It would very interesting to do some data mining and do some simulations of different tax strategies.
I've wanted for a while to see a heatmap of the price of icecream trucks or hotdog vendors in Toronto in the summer.

Transit-related data would be interesting too. Where people are travelling to/from, and how they do so.

I'm not sure what I'd do with either data set, but my sense of curiosity would have fun with them.
The post office can't even stop delivering mail on Saturday without an act of Congress. The wheels of bureaucracy continue to turn despite whatever signals the market sends.
Nice find! For those looking for a good demo: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/images/newdasher.g...

Still... Great for firehose text entry, but doesn't address the sort of text manipulation for which vim/emacs have become so popular.
I think Readability has raised my standards of what I consider 'readable'. I find myself using it all the time now as well. I've also noticed that I skim less with it. I'll be honest though, I struggled to finish this article. I'm not sure if it was due to my attention span or because it just wasn't that engaging.
Do Android users buy even a tenth of the apps that iOS users do? If simply having the greatest number of handsets in circulation supporting a particular platform equalled victory, Java-based feature phones or Symbian handsets would have trounced the iPhone years ago.
Whenever someone gets something removed from their body at a research hospital, it gets put into a glass jar and stuck somewhere in the basement. It would be cool to sequence all of the dna in tissue along with the phenotype data (what is the tissue, what's wrong with it, why was it removed, etc) and put the data somewhere publicly accessible. I believe there are already pushes to do this but they are mired in academic and hospital bureaucracy.
I'd love to see open historical weather data by geography. It's definitely available but not that easy to get.
Ask your lawyer about Family Limited Partnerships. Don't own anything yourself. It's better for tax and estate reasons. And agree up front how assets are split if their ever is a divorce.
WOW.

I've been using Vim for over a year and had no idea about this.

Holy crap, that's awesome.

My only regret is that I have but one upvote to give!

I always used to do F(lvf)hc rather than ci)
I'm also interested in helping you out as a skilled developer - please contact me on gmail at ansari.daniel.
> The truth is, family courts are highly biased against men

Does anyone know about a study supporting this claim? Not that I'd be surprised, but confirmation bias can be a bitch...
A full dump of Wal-Mart's product inventory by store id and location updated in real-time
If you haven't already you need to check out the StockTwits community. They tend to be more traders (short term) than investors (longer term), but a lot of their discipline and decision making process will apply regardless of the time frame.

There can be a bit of noise, but I think there's a recommended stream of quality posters you may want to start with.

Personally I lean more towards the trading timeframes. Mostly use options to limit risk and sell time premium. Actually had a fantastic day on Friday with a position in SPY (S&P 500 ETF) and AAPL (yes that Aaple). Made ~20% in 24hrs and ~9% in 4hrs respectively. By no means happens all the time, but nice when it does.

Either way, very successful investing or trading is a buttload of work. Stay on it and you'll get better over time. Good luck!
The Western notion of "thinner and younger" also papers over a lot of the primate realities. I know quite a few women who when I first met were completely unremarkable if not downright unattractive, who over time became as attractive as any other.

And being more conventionally attractive would not increase my eventual attraction to them, just as the vast majority of conventionally attractive women are not so at all after a very short time.
At least add LuaJIT to the chart

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...
I'm still a vim newbie, but something I find helpful is using ctrl-{ to go back to normal mode (instead of escape), as I find it a faster and more natural motion.
I don't think the "clojure for cocoa" description is apt.

1. All the examples I saw on the git tutorials we're basically just imperative programming with parentheses instead of ObjC's brackets (actually some of the examples remind me more of Smalltalk).

2. Clojure seems to be finding a niche in the web app world, whereas Nu is targeted at Cocoa app programming, i.e. end-user GUI apps.
I've looked for similar things, and been unable to find them.

For people like us who need these things, but don't want to do it alone their should be a sort of Wikipedia/Digg like distributed lexical database.

Everyone contributes data as it's acquired, and it is then verified by the users with a simple up/down vote for each child node.

The data could even be automatically acquired, and just manually verified as it is utilized.

Still an overwhelming task, but I think it would be worth it given all the fields that overlap with Natural Language Processing these days.
Flagged because Dustin Curtis is not Hacker News
That would be fun. Especially when cross referenced with other data sets.

Things like 'Condom sales rise, when house is a rerun.'
Couldn't help but have mental images of a human junk-food pacman, chasing trucks.
Not suggesting that there are many good active funds, but the ones with long-term managers are worth at least some research -- you don't have to beat the benchmark each year to be a long-term success.
When I was there, this was true, and probably still is. I did an MIT EECS MEng and I'll be honest with you: its probably not worth it if you dont land a TAship or RAship that covers all costs.

Getting into the MEng program is not done by application and decision, its purely 'decided' by your ugrad GPA. The theses dont have any sort of committee, just your advisor signing off. Many advisors cant/wont pay for your tuition unless you are the Bomb so the key is if you can get a TAship, just keep doing that. 1.5 to 2 years later, write a 40 page LaTeX paper about something and you get an MEng

Personally, I did it because you get to polish off your ugrad degree with a bunch of fantastic grad classes and if you play it right, the whole thing is free and comes with a stipend. its a bit more education and lets you stick around but I wouldn't say its thought of as a way to boost income or job status.
There is so much data in government that could be useful for everybody. Just a quick brainstorm produced this:

I would like to see easy access to data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (and all relevant organisations from around the world), and to be able to have this linked directly to products.

You could then take use your phone to take a picture of a bar code while in a store and an app would check this against the above data for historical information about the vendor.

In the US and UK I see some effort being made with the new government portals to download data, I just wish this practice would be come more common around the world.
I don't understand your first sentence.
TV listings and ratings data for the last 20 years.

No idea what I'd do with it, but I'd find something to reference it against.
Shouldn't this be better executed with JS on this iPad days?
Therac 25!