skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same for me, except I like it :) Amazon was my third-biggest money sink last year (under IKEA and American Airlines).

But it's OK, because I buy everything from Amazon, and it saves me a lot of time and money. I never would have thought about buying laundry detergent online and having it shipped overnight. But it ends up being cheaper than buying it at the grocery store, and I don't have to carry it home.

I'm not convinced Amazon makes any money off of me, but that's really not my problem :)
I haven't read the Verlinde paper, but wanted to mention one of the papers it apparently builds on. That's Ted Jacobson's remarkable paper showing that gravity is a consequence of (1) thermodynamics and (2) the black hole entropy law. The paper is http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9504004

Sabine Hossenfelder has some useful comments on Verlinde's work here: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2010/03/gravity-is-entropy-...
It's section 6.5, "Regex string generation". Page 272: "Given a regex, how can one generate a list of all the strings matched by the regex?"
Why doesn't Google (or anyone for that matter) showcase developers who are making good money with Android apps? There are tons of iPhone cases of independent devs making some pretty serious money. I have only heard of one for Android that got any publicity and it was for an app to remind you where you parked in a lot (and it was only like $300/day while it was a featured app in the market).

You would think Google would have a vested interest in publishing success stories.
Your school email address should still be valid.
This article has already been posted like 128 times, except without the spin cycle. Flagged.
A "reboot" generally takes the form of violent revolution or war. Softer reboots happen (at least nominally) every 4-8 years as we get new administrations in place.

Legislation and policy can get better over time, incrementally. It feels short-sighted to throw everything out because of (admittedly ugly) decisions like this one.
Your phone calls aren't point-to-point encrypted, either.
If I can suffer through Southwest's unnecessary dinning reward emails, I can suffer through manually deleting these emails.

I'm just glad there's this provision:

"The automatic renewal provisions in the Amazon Prime Terms & Conditions (which would require you to pay for Amazon Prime) do not apply to this membership, even if we decide to extend the free Amazon Prime offer beyond one year."

So they can't charge me behind my back ^_^
According to Solzhenitsyn a quarter of the population of Leningrad were arrested in and around 1937. Apparently this turned out to be a conservative estimate.

If this is so, your numbers cannot be correct.

And yes, the Holodomor counts too.
Roger Ebert : Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too)

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/04/30/why-i-hate-3-d-and-you-sh...
I'm off to tell FB I'm a drop.io dev that lives in Texas!
Why do people insist on writing like this? The first sentence is the only piece of information in this article. The rest is filler, mindless regurgitation for people who just woke up from a 30-year coma combined with random predictions based on nothing.
Dude, if you're going to make racist comments like that you're supposed to disguise them with some sort of parochial appeal for the good of the local economy, not just "anywhere in the Western World". Know the game.
Taranis: unmanned stealth jet that will hit targets in another continent
There are equivalents to many testing tools:

rspec: I'd argue doctest does the same thing, but without being clever consultantware. I've seen passing mentions to similar things in Python.

cucumber: http://lettuce.it/

factory_girl: I can't keep up with data fixture libraries, but there's quite a few

machinist: I don't quite understand it. It seems like a mocking library to me? There's a half dozen of those at least...

shoulda: Seems like Cucumber? I don't get this one either. Just a bunch of comparison helpers for your testing?

passenger: as in mod_passenger? Technically it supports Python. mod_wsgi is very similar.

haml: there's a bunch of more-or-less direct ports.

webrat: Twill, WebTest, zope.browser are a couple.

There's a lot of testing tools in Python; this list is very out of date, but at least shows some of them: http://pycheesecake.org/wiki/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy
I imagine this could be seen by looking at adoption rates in other countries where there isn't exclusivity.

Another data point is how many people are held back by carrier quality. AT&T should be great quality wise for at least 80% of America - so if someone really wanted an iPhone, I feel that most would have switched already.
Yes, scribd is great now. I used to hate it. I recently Googled the Blueprint CSS cheat sheet and...not bad, Scribd! No Flash!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12850249/Blueprint-CSS-framework-v...
I posted the tweet because it contains the discount code.
No, not end-to-end, but they are encrypted between your phone and the cell tower.

It's considerably more secure than an open wifi network.
Crappy display, battery, software and user experience have been been the rule, not the exception, in mobile phones from the very beginning.
I found the initial attitude that non-games are at a disadvantage to practical apps kind of strange. My understanding (which may be confirmed soon if my iOS project pans out) is that game apps tend to have less staying power financially than utilities and the like. Serious apps can get away with charging more, are less concerned about "hit driven" chart effects, and can continue to get income after release if the product fills a niche. The games in the charts that Apple makes available in the store are all "hits" and mask the reality that most games are lucky to make over than a thousand dollars or so.

I'm still taking the gamble myself, though. My last paycheck job was in a government agency, and I wanted something more modern to put on my resume, even if my project fails. Though I do still think I have a chance. My design is kind of unique, will match with search terms than have limited competition despite my expectations, and should fit the casual gaming crowd that the iPad brought to market with the "virtual board game" concept recently. My 2nd project will be more practical, regardless...
How to read research papers
Well, if I were Conde Nast, I might have an issue with just making it non-profit after spending a bunch to acquire it. Lotta people loosing jobs in the media space, and it would be difficult to convince me that a site with 280 million page views should just be written off. There's got to be a way to balance community needs with revenue generation.
Researchers use robot to determine how human strangers develop trust
I would like this too, but I'm not sure I can justify this desire in any rational way. The reasons I hear against manufacturing in China are that the workers are slaves that make no money, and that the quality is inferior.

But big companies seem to have the QC down; I have lots of well-made stuff from China. I cringe at the thought that all my IKEA furniture is made in China, but it was all perfectly manufactured and has held up wonderfully for many years. Good design + good QA means you can get good product out of China. (There is lots of poorly-made stuff from China, but it's poorly-made because it's rock-bottom cheap, not merely cheap. Rock-bottom cheap stuff made anywhere is crap.)

The next issue is the labor one. I ask myself, how would pulling all manufacturing out of China help the Chinese people? $1/day buys more food than $0/day, right? So would manufacturing stuff outside of China help the overall human condition? Would it help me? What's the advantage here?

Just a small data point: the $4 made-in-China shirts I buy at Target seem to be better stitched than the average $20 made-in-America shirts I buy from American Apparel. I have had a lot of the AA shirts just completely unravel in the first wash. I always get an apology and a replacement, but I've never had a cheap Target T-shirt do this. So China is not automatically worse, although I do prefer the American-made product for other reasons.
If you have a Gmail account you can ad an "+Amazon"- or whatever- to then end. This allows you to easily categorize these emails, just in-case you do want to put them in the trash or use some other filter. Example: firstname.lastname+AMAZON@gmail.com

On a side note, you can also remove any periods(.) from an email. Example: firstname.lastname@gmail.com becomes firstnamelastname@gmail.com. I think this was done to help cut back on phishing and scamming, but I don't really know why.
This article reiterates a fundamental point that object stores quite clearly present less friction during development than relational stores. This is plainly true: your domain object is meant to model the domain, and if you can store it directly that is the best you can hope for. There's a reason there's a whole topic of study and research called "Object-relational impedence mismatch" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mis...)

However I think ORMs are too quickly dismissed. In the simplest case, an ORM can appear to be a key-value store at the API level. Of course that is a gross abuse of a relational store, but there's no reason it can't be done. Additionally, the author fails to note that an intelligent ORM can provide a caching layer that improves performance over raw SQL. A more detailed examination of the various patterns to resolve the impedence mismatch, such as active record versus data mapper, ORM caching strategies, and how those compare to a key-value store solution, I think would be a valuable topic of discussion.
Bit of a tangent, but have you gone to Come out and Play?
http://www.comeoutandplay.org/
Does anyone think they're trying to figure out IPv6 to make this work over 3G?
Perhaps this is based on labor policies, and not race. From the comment, there's not enough to distinguish one motivation from the other. Jump to conclusions much?
Considering that Zuck gave something like 15% of Facebook to Eduardo Saverin in exchange for his a few thousand dollars of his bar mitzvah money, this contract isn't entirely impossible. (Albeit it's very unlikely to be legitimate.)
Checkout this post in our series on How to Sell Ads Online.

http://www.trafficspaces.com/blog/2010/01/13/how-to-sell-ads...

It talks about setting up an auction instead of a fixed price. It is an efficient way to find the market price for your ad space.
This proposal is operationally stupid and morally dubious.

From an operational/supply-chain standpoint:

Manufacturing happens in the Pearl River Delta in China for two reasons: speed and cost. The cost is not so much a function of the cheap labour as the proximity to component suppliers and abundance of manufacturing expertise. It's easy to build electronics around Shenzhen for the same reason that it's easy to build a tech start-up in the Valley. Everything you need is around the corner.

For Apple, one must remember that everything they build is composed of components sourced in south-east China. As a result, US-based manufacturing would be ludicrously inefficient. Hugely increased costs, greater inventory stockpiles, completely needless carbon emissions, and lost flexibility. It's like proposing RAM on a USB stick. It's so inefficient as to be nonsensical.

Even if that were not the case, Apple specialize in what they're good at: implementing great software, and designing wonderful hardware to accompany it. It would be go entirely against the grain of Apple's culture of doing a small number of things well to start a huge manufacturing arm. If they wanted to increase the good they do for the US, there are vastly better ways they could go about it.

Next, even if Apple actually thought it was a good idea, they would be unable to pull it off without a lot of trial, error, and screw-ups. Foxconn is the Apple of manufacturing, and they're used by every major consumer electronics company for good reason. Apple are great at what they do after twenty years of experience, and appreciate the importance of truly knowing a problem-space. Manufacturing expertise is neither simple nor free.

Lastly, stepping aside from these operational concerns, the moral case is weak. Why do the inhabitants of Detroit deserve jobs more than those of the cities around Shenzhen? I've been to the Chinese factories that Apple uses. People like their jobs. The conditions are good. I've also seen the conditions that people who don't have jobs at Apple factories live in.

China is taking people out of poverty faster than any civilization ever has before. Is funding innovation centers in Detroit really a better moral cause? I don't want to turn this into a political discussion, but I believe that the goal of bringing manufacturing jobs to the US is at least not an obviously great one.
Maybe true, but it's Skype's call to make not yours.
The cost to manufacture the iPhone is around $190 and final assembly is only 5-7% of that. Apple gets $600 for them. Apple's genius designers and engineers are creating the lion's share of economic value, not factory workers.

And having been to many OEM factories in southern China and Taiwan, you have to put their labor in context - workers pour in to work and are making several times more money than their parents did - the generational difference is massive. Imagine making 10x more than your parents. They have job fairs with hundreds of thousands of people wanting to work, its not forced. There is a wide spread air of excitement and opportunity all over south east Asia.

Apple tapping these eager to work people gives them more capital to reinvest in the 1000x more valuable jobs in Cupertino, this in turn employs a lot more people and business in America.
I have always wondered whether technical books are lucrative for the author. Obviously, a buyer of a book helps the author get a royalty. So that includes library purchases as well... But, if that is the only source of revenue for the author, writing a book would be a thankless task (as far as tech books are concerned, not mega-blockbusters like the DaVinci code that can earn great revenue via book sales and also the movie optioning). So why would a person write a technical book if the financial return is not good?
Prime is an extremely smart program. You WILL end up spending more money at Amazon, but it's OK because their prices are great and you end up saving an incredible amount of time. You have to be careful to use it efficiently (and not "shop"/browse and accumulate too much stuff), though. I've bought thousands of dollars worth of stuff over the past few years--electronics, books, toothpaste, vitamins, and even oatmeal--and haven't been to Bed Bath and Beyond / Walmart / etc. in ages.

This means I can do enjoyable things on the weekend instead of running errands.
I bet a lot of other companies wish they had this problem.
Follow Hacker News from the console (Python)
Who owns user-generated content?
True, but laches is is important. Given that I'm not a lawyer...

FB must show laches applies, but this should be easy. It requires showing knowledge (obviously that existed, as Ceglia knows he had a contract), unreasonable delay (FB isn't hard to find), and prejudice (delay avoidably made the problem worse).

Probably Ceglia just wants to be paid to go away.

Edit: on reflection, all of that applies to Facebook, the company. Ceglia is also suing Zuckerberg as an individual, presumably for 84% of the value of his stake. I'm less sure of how that claim would fare - it's just as late, but is it prejudicial to Zuckerberg's interests? (Just wondering from a purely theoretical standpoint.)
Amazon must know that tons of alums still have .edu email addresses. Perhaps this program is also a form of price discrimination for Prime? Those willing to cheat the system are less likely to pay $80/year than those who won't?
I predict that 'real' 3D movies will go the way 3D sound did years back. 'Fake' 3D will die out as the camera technology gets cheaper.

When Dolby surround first came onto the scene audiences were wowed by the immersiveness that the surround sound added to movies.

Studios responded by 'faking' 3D sound for movies originally recorded only in stereo.
These didn't sound anywhere near as good as true surround sound and audiences weren't impressed.

Eventually the equipment needed to shoot a movie in surround sound became cheap enough that every production could take advantage of it.

I think we're seeing the cycle repeat itself.

Lets not forget that when colour film first came out studios attempted to add colour to existing B&W films, this didn't work too well but eventually colour film became cheap enough that they all used it.
I know I'm just like most of the people commenting here, but this is an incredible deal. Over the last three semesters, I've saved so much money on textbooks. In fact, more than half of the books I've purchased new on Amazon were a few dollars cheaper than the used textbooks in my student store. Go take advantage of this if you can! :-)
Why did he bring the Macbook Air thing up in the first place? I'm still letting it play in the background to get past it because skipping past it isn't working.
Robots. This is going to be the decade of robots. Carnegie Mellon is a world leader, and Pittsburgh should benefit from the boom. Just Google and see what you come up with. I found a few:

http://www.seegrid.com/seegridoffices.html

http://kotaku.com/5577771/intel-inside-your-mind-serving-you... - Intel Lab in Pittsburgh

http://www.pittsburghroboticssociety.org/
The iPad (and iPhone 4) use a new type of screen with IPS technology. [1] I find it to be much nicer on the eyes than a regular display. It also works really well in direct sunlight, as long as you don't reflect the sun directly into your eyes. Sort of like reading a glossy magazine outdoors.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT_LCD#In-plane_switching_.28I...
Ask HN: Anyone going to TiE Atlanta Entrepreneurial Summit this saturday?
Just curious to see if any HN'ers are going and wanna meetup? I still haven't signed up and am debating if I should.

http://www.tesatlanta.com/summit_details.html
Skype sold it's soul to Verizon with their crippled Verizon mobile app.
It's with skype primarily - and certainly not with android, but with the "android experience" I.e. in this case, upgrading my phone means LESS features.
I wonder if this wasn't the real problem:

"Now I just needed to build the backend, which wouldn’t take much because the idea I had was built off of existing technology"
The Terms state: "We may ask you to furnish documentation supporting your eligibility. If you do not provide documentation indicating that you meet the eligibility requirements above, you may be required to reimburse us for benefits you received as a result of your Amazon Student membership."

If they call you on it, you may be on the hook for full shipping charges for everything you ordered. Not clear what would happen if you don't pony up but banishment from Amazon would be slightly painful for me, at least.
Amazon claims that email is not a valid .edu address. It says the same for my roommate's email.

We both go to Northwestern University where the student email addresses are Google Apps emails @u.northwestern.edu.
Very good article, I myself have found the "NoSQL" label pointless, when you label something you normally tell what it is, instead of what it's not.
See, this is just the kind of twist you wouldn't be able to sell in fiction. It's just as implausible as WWII!
If the ORM layer is providing a caching layer on top of the RDBMS, that caching layer is effectively a non-relational store for the data. If that works better, why not use it as the primary store?
Not to mention toothpaste, shoes, 5 pounds of raisins, Planet Earth, shampoo, window blinds, workout clothes, and all of my Christmas gifts.
DNA Sample from Son Leads to Arrest of Alleged Serial Killer Father
"To that end, consider the following scenario.

Apple announces tomorrow that they’ve purchased a dormant facility in Detroit with plans to turn it into a high-end technology incubator. They’ll produce both internal prototypes and limited-run consumer goods. They’ll hire 500 workers and offer them comprehensive training and full benefits.

Who wouldn’t be excited by that?"

Apple?
Wow, having read that I'm genuinely horrified. You work 6 days a week. Why? You're an employee. Seriously even if you weren't theres more important things in life. I can understand where you're coming from but believe me, it's not that the founders are abusing you, it's that you're abusing yourself.

Seriously, go out, enjoy yourself. Live.
No Agenda in the morning!
Yes.

Do you know something about labour policies in, say, Taiwan, Japan or South Korea that I don't?
Not necessarily - you could store a resultset based on the query and parameters, and if the same query and parameters come within a certain amount of time, you return the whole resultset from the cache. In this scenario, the resultset could contain a filtered list, aggregate functions, etc, that are more difficult to replicate in a key-value store.
Oops, I picked the wrong area. I was misremembering a reference to the Ukraine. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa for more details.

In particular note that the claim that the Nazis were attacking first to head off a counter-attack is a claim the Germans made during WW II. However there is little evidence for this, and Stalin's instructions to his generals in December of 1940 suggests that the Soviet Union knew it would eventually be invaded, thought it would easily be ready in 4 years, and was trying to put the invasion off for at least 2. When the invasion came in May they were caught unprepared and by surprise.
>It triumphed over other query languages not because it was particularly great (though it was easier to read), but because it was standard.

Isn't that a tautology?
I wonder if the rapid fragmentation of the Android OS might degrade the Android experience and its public perception. If so I suspect that Android might become commiditized and therefore vulnerable in a way that Apple's experience is not.
Also check out thestartupdigest.com the NYC is compiled by Carter Cleveland who started art.sy
This is cool. This, Google Voice and Sipdroid on my Desire (which lets you route all calls, automatically, to the SIP provider of you choice, either on Wi-Fi only or 3G as well) makes me feel good about the future of telephony.
Sam Odio "...came forward about the Macbook Air" http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2010/03/confession-i-was-one-who...
Persistence?
From my understanding of smart cards, I don't see how this is possible.

Communication between the card and the reader is typically done using encryption with a Diffie-Hellman key exchange with a man-in-the-middle resistant protocol. You would need to attack whatever encryption algorithm is being used, which is non-trivial even with physical access. You would need to either perform differential power analysis attack or a timing attack or attack a weakness in the algorithm.

Seeing as how one of the primary purposes of smart cards was to eliminate skimming and similar attacks, I can't fathom why any reader would ever be created that didn't support session encryption. Why use a chip if it's basically the same as a magnetic stripe? I'll plead ignorance on the workings of the European debit system as I'm Canadian and we're just getting smart cards now.

Does anyone have a better source than the linked article?

EDIT: Nevermind, apparently the security was broken a while ago:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/nopin/oakl...
The pattern behind self-deception : Michael Shermer
Yes, I know the background story, I'm just wondering why he brought it up in the first place and dragged it out. That story is pretty old as it is.