skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been on a tour of a chamber like that recently, and the blue material in the spikes has roughly the rigidity of cardboard. The material is reinforced by metal wires, however. Even though the wires are not very thick (you could bend them with your hands easily), I would imagine you would hurt yourself quite badly if you fell onto them.

In fact, the whole chamber is shaped like a cube, and the measurements must be made in the middle of the cube. In the chamber I visited, the "floor" was made of a wire mesh suspended at mid-height inside the cube, so there it was impossible to fall.
Brilliant, eh?
> Where are the testers?

He was sitting in the chair, didn't you see him? ;)
Non-rechargeable 1.5v batteries only start at 1.5v. As you use them up, the voltage drops, going down to about 1v just before the battery poops out. The curve is not linear.

These batteries are down to 1.2v around 30-50% of the way through their life.

The rechargeable batteries start around 1.2v, but their discharge curve is much more level. They stay near 1.2v right up to the end.

If a device has trouble with rechargeable batteries because of the voltage, that device is also going to have problems with non-rechargeables, as the non-rechargeables spend at least half their service life below 1.2v.

There are some good graphs showing discharge curves here: http://www.powerstream.com/AA-tests.htm

The rechargeable batteries can confuse battery meters on some devices, though. If the device assumes non-rechargeable batteries, and then tries to estimate remaining battery by comparing the voltage to a typical non-rechanrgeable discharge curve, and you put rechargeable batteries in, the device is going to think they are starting out at 50-80%, and then is going to think they are draining very very slowly.
I read it different. Last start-up was b2b, and his former company was one of this first clients. This time (b2c) much easier to attract interest. I bit its an apples to oranges comparison though.
I'm perpetually getting absorbed into things and forgetting other things in my near-term mental queue. So I use a script or utility to pop up a dialog after the passing of a time value I specify. I don't need to add a topic qualifier; the reminder is enough to jog my memory and get me out of my seat.

A calendar doesn't help for these items; it has to be in my face. And the other way around, I don't need the clutter of a calendar entry to remind me to e.g. get up in five minutes and check the pot on the stove.

Hmm... This is probably too low tech, but I was running the electric kettle and then forgetting to go back and pour the hot water. I found that by resting a bunch of metal measuring spoons against its power lever, which pops up when it's done, I hear a metal "jangle" and am reminded.

I guess there are larger schemes of organizing one's day, but sometimes little hacks like these provide more immediate results and satisfaction. And, for me at least, therefore end up being more effective.

Oh, also, there was a blog entry circulating widely a while back titled "Do It [F-ing] Now!". That's kind of useful, too. In lieu of a concrete alternative, "now" is always the perfect time.

I guess another way of putting it might be, "Hacks are beautiful, because they are real time." If they are taking away significantly from your other work, either they are getting away from you, or they need to be qualified as (sub)projects of their own.
Depends what you do your PhD in.

Biology probably has the best balance between "attractive" and "sane" you're going to find.
Obama Reaction On BP Test Results In Gulf Of Mexico
It's only inevitable if you assume that our economic system is right and immutable. Personally when it creates gaps as big as it does between rich and poor I dispute that's the case.

Don't get me wrong, we need to encourage risk takers and wealth creators but how many sports teams or super yachts does one man really need as just reward for his efforts? Particularly in the case of Paul Allen when many will dispute that the actions of the company who made his wealth were in the best interests of the industry.
It's comical. I call home when I leave work. We might talk for five or ten minutes as I drive. This requires two or three calls, due to the drops -- on a major freeway with five bars of reception.

My family and friends have similar issues. A couple don't have it so bad because they're on the West Side, where AT&T seems to have built more towers -- gotta keep Beverly Hills & the movie studios happy, you know.

Oddly, we have little trouble with 3G data. I can stream podcasts and use Google maps simultaneously. It's the calls that are the issue.
This is a bit old, wasnt this posted here before?

BTW, they need a new Adwords consultant. Box.net doesnt spend anything near that much per conversion and we probably advertised on the same keywords they tested.
What do you think it would have been called? Conference Room K7?
When I saw Metaweb in the headline what immediately sprang to mind was the excellent wikipedia they maintained for Neal Stephensons's "The Baroque Cycle". It was called Quicksilver wiki.

I myself learned about it from Stephenson himself during a presentation he did for the book in the now defunct Cody's Books in Berkeley. After 2-3 years of active growth the Quicksilver wiki disappeared from metaweb's site. I was wondering if Google will restore the wiki too?

Metaweb briefly mentioned at the end of this article in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(novel)
Sol Survivor, is it worth a purchase?
This is a review of a new indie turret defense game Sol Survivor. Sol Survivor is one of the first professionally done turret defense games, that allows for multiplayer. If you want to find out more check out the review.
100% high-tech except for the rubber bands to hold the phones to stuff.

Edit: point being that sometimes simple things are the best inventions.
It was probably just called the 'anechoic chamber', which is the correct technical term.
A major problem is testing new teaching methods in classrooms is risky and oftentimes extremely expensive, and much more so if the method doesn't quite worked out as planned. Instead of taking such a risk, school districts would more than likely pick up inexperienced teachers and have them do nothing but follow textbooks to the word, which is pretty much what's been happening the past few years.

Not having teachers at all simply doesn't work since many schools do more babysitting than teaching (or at least that was my experience with high school). For teacher-less teaching to work, you'd have to assume at least 9/10 students are self-motivated and are willing to do work without someone breathing down their back and, really, it's not going to happen.
37 Signals did take some VC money.
Akalsey, that's a perfect use case for CardMunch.

A little back story:
One of our alpha user complained about this so much that we decided to delay our schedule to re-write CardMunch. We spent bulk of that time re-writing, and replicating the entire Apple address book framework.

What that enabled us to do is to create a completely separate address book from your personal address book. All of your business cards can go to either address books, and to switch between the two, it's just flip of a button. You won't have to worry about random business contact popping up in your personal address book.

I know it sounds a bit salesy, but the feature is really awesome. I'm glad we decided to implement it. I have about 800 contacts in my CardMunch address book for testing purposes, I would hate to put these in my personal address book.
So, from a scientific point of view, the conclusion is: their model of the real world is wrong.

It wouldn't suprise me, I've never seen so many blue spikes in one place ;)
Ha, you are lucky.

Danish schools have maps so old the Soviet Union is still on them (they are still in process of facing them out).

3 Years ago my school still had a couple of 386s for the kids to play on (they did also have a few more modern computers, but still)
Rooting isn't impossible on the Droid X, it's just annoyingly difficult. If someone wanted to distribute malware ROM images, they just need to wait for the root to be accomplished by someone else. There's no real protection.

If it's Verizon that's behind this to "protect the network" it's starting to sound like we're heading for another "Carterfone Decision":

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Modem#The_Car...

The Nokia N900 doesn't make life difficult for users. To root it you just download and run 'rootsh'. Done. The network hasn't exploded simply because it's easy to root and update ROMs.
"Testing performance in the field.

Apple engineers tested iPhone 4 in a variety of scenarios, environments, and conditions in order to gauge performance. They spent thousands of hours in cities in the U.S. and throughout the world testing iPhone 4 call quality, dropped-call performance, call origination and termination, and in-service time. They tested iPhone 4 while stationary, at high and low speeds, and in urban, dense urban, and highway environments. In low-coverage areas and good-coverage areas, during peak and off-peak hours iPhone 4 was field-tested in nearly every possible coverage scenario across different vendor and carrier equipment all over the world."
I'm not taking sides on whether or not this is a design flaw, but once you have a PR debacle you pretty much have to take some action to deal with it. Imagine if Toyota was just saying "actually no, the 'acceleration problem' with our cars is not statistically significant in comparison to other cars after controlling for demographic variables like the age of the driver".
I think the criticism is interesting. Many social apps I use are approaching their limits as to how much data can they show. My IM contact list is very, very long and my Gwibber feed scrolls too quickly most of the time.

An that is on a vertical monitor. On a phone, it would be much more delicate.
Apple's insanely cool - but useless - antenna testing lab.
Founders at work: Interview with Steve Wozniak
This is great, maybe the system will completely disintegrate when 50% of the teachers retire in 5 years. Then we can figure out something worthwhile for kids to with 12 years of their youth.
if timing is so critical to these attacks, it seems adding a tiny variable (on the order of a millisecond) in response times would completely prevent this
Symptom checking online is a huge mistake, I agree.

It's fascinating to think about the role of an "official, correct diagnosis" into the psychological aspect of the suffering.

The most uncomfortable suggestions are those that are accompanied by not reassuring stamp of authority. What, go to Costa Rica and eat fresh fruit and swim and learn to surf? That's crazy, what I need is a pill... etc.

It's not just health but the experience of feeling/being healthy/unhealthy that is profoundly important.

It's rather humbling how complex the human body (below and above the neck)!
No it doesn't. It is a relatively cheap way for Apple to show they "care" and appease the people who have issues with the design.

I'm not saying if the design is good or bad, but there are tons of instances in history of companies doing things to alleviate minor issues that had the potential to turn into massive PR cases and create much greater losses over the long-term.
Does Black Hat "pull" a random talk each year just to advertise and build hype?
SproutCore Founder Leaves Apple to Build HTML5 iPad Apps
I'm curious if you could post about your diet and exercise habits...
Why does wikipedia even care if someone is notable or not? If someone went to the trouble to create a page about someone else, aren't they "notable" enough to have a page? This reeks of editorial bias.
Another important quality for a sticky idea is a cool name. Intriguing names is one of the qualities that makes TV Tropes so addictive.
Slightly OT, but from reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect:

"Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. "

I find myself wondering -- how do you (formally) test someone on their humor ability?
It never ceases to amaze how little Wikipedia understands Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia to the end user (at least from my own personal experience and how I've seen other people use it) is to be able look up anything of any importance and get a quick overview of it.

Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.

I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem to make a difference.
We know the reasoning, but we think it is poor reasoning. If a user doesn't want the app and can't get rid of it, then now they have something against the Nascar brand. That isn't good advertising.
Page says "Even though I'm quite aware of who he is as a programmer, he doesn't meet our standards for inclusion." I'm just curious about their standards for inclusion, any ideas?
What you've described, almost across the board is the problem of teacher's unions. Their mission is to help teachers. And in some cases, this also helps students, e.g., teacher's unions do a great job of ensuring teachers have safe working conditions. But in many instances it hurts students.

Probably the best thing they can do is move away from a seniority based system. Give the principal a lot more leeway in how teachers get assigned/paid. And make the school extremely accountable for performance.

Of course, the teacher's unions, which are run by senior teachers, won't go for this. I think we're kind of stuck with the situation we have, for better or wose.
They did, but even so that is hardly a scientific test, or an optimal way to evaluate all the various designs that they also tried.
I wonder how many hack poets or writers are on Wikipedia that have less of an influence or body of work than programmers they have rejected.
I think it makes perfect sense. If one allows articles that have little interest, you'll pretty soon end up with a massive amount of articles that very few people are interested in reading, and even worse: articles that nobody is interested in maintaining.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and should as such have relatively high standards as opposed to the rest of the web.
As much as I like the idea of centralizing all of that, unless it's on my own machine; I don't like the idea of making Big Bro's work any easier.
Steve Who?
There is a bit of a bias toward hard-science oriented solutions... I suggested a 6 month tropical vacation in the last thread and it was modded down.

I'm an atheist but surely prayer (in its highest form) can be equivalent to mindfulness meditation ?
He seems to be notable enough to be considered a "reliable source" for several other articles ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Steve+Yeg...
The EVO has the problem too. I have to go somewhere with a lower signal like a parking garage, but I can do it by covering the antenna just like the EVO manual says not to do (page 169):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/32516924/Sprint-HTC-EVO-User-Manua...
I've said this before, but if Wikipedia ever fails, it will be because of their tendency to delete articles that other people find relevant; a competitor that doesn't insult its users by deleting their articles capriciously (and that includes a decent search function) would actually have a chance at the throne.
Thanks for the feedback! Responses below.

> iPhone 4 low-res picture issue

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of how it would impact the new retina display. It looks decent on my 3GS, but I guess I'll have to find a friend with an iPhone 4 to see how it looks on that and find ways to make it look better.

> The two buttons at the bottom seem out of place

I agree with this, and I'm not sure how to best maintain the look of the app, while still having navigation icons that people are accustomed to. I'm looking into this.

> History of transactions, IOUs, email to contacts

Great ideas. I'll add them to future versions.
Fluid Services (Using streaming to improve SOA performance)
Actually, the quote is "None-notable programmer" :)
I think the theory is that without notability, there won't be enough interested editors to maintain a consensus on the article's "NPOV."

For varying definitions of consensus and neutral point of view, of course.
Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't know that.
Your audio on that video sucks. Seriously. I almost gave up on your pitch. Also, rethink the text superimposed on the whiteboard--I didn't see it until after it was gone.

It took me well into the video to figure out what the project actually was. Being on HN, my context was immediately "this is a startup". When I saw the donate button, my first reaction was "Why should I donate to a startup?" It took me a long time to figure out that you were actually a non-commercial OSS project.

I know you probably put a lot of thought into your huge tagline (which is great!) but consider adding the words "open-source" in there to maybe kick me out of startup mode.
I think the real debate is what it means to be a notable programmer. The criteria for inclusion in the list is debatable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers

Discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AList_of_programmers
For years I've had this theory that spondees make for more memorable names. One of my dreams is to have a lab so I can test things like this.
It's not just the immediate impact of deletion either. I don't bother trying to add to Wikipedia anymore, because I know if I can't meet some ill-defined criteria of notability within about 5 minutes, the article will be gone. Wikipedia really does not seem to do very much to encourage involvement, especially when it comes to adding to the site.
Shareholders of customers. Ambiguous grammar.
Well, the featured article today is "Degrassi: The Next Generation", so I guess I know where their priorities are.
Not necessarily. As they've shown, lots of phones do this. They shipped the phone with the problems because that's what everybody else does.
The Dunning-Kruger effect actually started to become known on the web in 2006 that is when I read it on Damn Interesting: http://www.damninteresting.com/unskilled-and-unaware-of-it

I think recently though it hit internet pop status.

Sounds like a case of the The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon
I am tempted to delete the article on my home town and in the discussion page put non-notable city doesn't meet inclusion criteria as the reason.
Well said.

Gatekeepers focus on the gate. The garden it keeps? Not so interesting.
I'm not sure what to think of Ms. Roston. She reminds me a bit too much of a rather bright but ultimately toxic narcissist I came to know too well, some years ago. Regardless, I find this particular entry -- on its own and without knowing much about Ferriss or the merits of her criticism with respect to him -- interesting and well written.
"For every problem there is always a solution
that is simple, obvious, and wrong." -- Mark Twain

I'm not an expert, but I know several people who are. Apparently the literature explains clearly why this most obvious of fixes is, as Twain predicts, wrong. The simple jitter that you can add is dealt with by statistical techniques.

As I say, I'm not an expert, but if you google this it should give you references to papers that discuss the issues.
You know what I'd like to see them do? Have a "growing storage" like gmail, as an incentive to sign up right now (so your dropbox storage starts growing right away), and as a conversation piece to improve the viral nature (one more hook to tell people: "so it syncs all your files, and the amount of storage you have is always growing like Gmail).
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Apple Computer
We do what we must
because we can.
From the "Paint your data" section:

And it's all hosted on YOUR computer, so there's no chance we can use it for evil or marketing!
Yeah, I think like many Wikipedia policies it's a useful pragmatic policy. How it's applied to specific cases is always worth looking at, but in principle, a ton of articles with no real interest or citeable sources lead to low-quality stuff. If a Coca-Cola PR person were to insert a bunch of advertising fluff in their article, people would notice almost immediately and fix it. But if your corner barber shop writes an article about themselves with a bunch of advertising fluff, without a notability policy it might stay there for a long time, because nobody cares enough or has any information they can use to improve the article. I mean what would it even mean to have a good article about your corner barber shop? Would you base it on personal observation, or do independent interviews with the owner or something? Unless it's gotten some degree of attention for something, and gotten written up somewhere, it seems like a good idea to just decide there's not enough there to write a Wikipedia article on it.

(There really are a bunch of really small businesses trying to insert ad blurbs into Wikipedia, so it's not a purely hypothetical problem. Minor academics pasting their CVs and bio blurbs into Wikipedia is another issue.)
Isn't there a syndrome that describes people who try to exert as much control/authority over a small but unimportant aspect of life?
D could have saved us from the horrors of C++, but it dropped the ball.

http://www.jfbillingsley.com/blog/?p=53

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911858
Honestly, who is Steve Yegge? I've only heard of him because articles from his blog are occasionally posted here. His blog doesn't give any biographical details as far as I can tell, and I tried to look him up on wikipedia to see what he's actually done, but he doesn't have an article.

Can anyone explain why he's notable (apart from the old "I've heard of him therefore..." argument)? Not being combative, just curious.
They could automate this: if an article would not be read for a given amount of time by a given number of users, it could be automatically deleted. This would be much more objective than what they are doing now.
Yea, it would be better to allow the <noscript_within> tag to include a list of HTML tags to ignore or allow.
But that is exactly the error - Wikipedia is no more an encyclopedia than nytimes.com is a newspaper. You cannot ship a 200 page newspaper or a 2000 volume encyclopedia, for entirely practical reasons having to do with physics.

It is therefore sensible to assume limit what you put into the encyclopedia, but since the same limit does not apply to the online edition of wikipedia, it does not make sense to apply it there.
I haven't really found that, and I've added hundreds of articles. I think one of my articles has ever been deleted (on an internet meme), and two or three others were nominated for deletion but consensus was to keep them. If you write an article in a neutral tone that sounds like an encyclopedia article, with good sources that you cite to back up the statements it makes, it'll rarely run into problems.

If you write articles purely in certain controversial areas, like recent internet memes, I can see running into a lot of problems. But the vast majority of areas don't really have any rampant deletion. I've written articles on mathematical formulas, on prominent computer scientists, on important physics books, on 18th-century politicians, on famous paintings, on well-known children's toys, and on varieties of cheese, among other things, and never gotten any problems with any of them.