skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The BBC is, quite rightly, a public service - and is unique in its ability to remain relatively impartial and free from commercial pressures.

This is the idea but in practice doesn't pan out. The government has to approve changes in the UK TV license fees so you find the BBC makes attempts to mollify the sitting government to get its funding increased.

> Now we have a conservative win

Not exactly. The Conservatives have a minority in the House of Commons in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. I wouldn't exactly say the Lib Dems are partial to any such leanings you may attribute to the Conservatives regarding the media.

> Maybe I'm being a bit cynical

To be fair, I think you're being both cynical and a little biased. Just look at your language of "at the expense of public services". That's not exactly accurate. The Conservative philosophy is traditionally one of smaller government and lower taxes so many such services are paid for in a more "user pays" kind of system.

> However, if the BBC is crippled (as it potentially will be)

Anything may "potentially" happen. Nothing has happened here other than conservative publications have supported a conservative Prime Minister. Nothing new there.

I would also say that Murdoch's profits in the UK largely come from BSkyB and tabloids such as the Sun rather than the Times.
There is more genetic diversity among the different African native groups than there is among the rest of the world. The majority of “black” Americans have the genetic equivalent of at least one white great-grandparent. So what were you trying to prove about genetics, again?
I wonder what my future grandson can teach me (50 years later).
Microsoft changed IronPython, IronRuby and DLR licenses to Apache 2
Previously they were released with the Microsoft Permissive License.

http://ironpython.codeplex.com/license

http://ironruby.codeplex.com/license

http://dlr.codeplex.com/license
"Everyday programming" doesn't necessarily use Perl, and it rarely uses prerelease programming languages.

Perl 6 has brought parsers (I guess we should call them "grammars" in analogy to "regular expressions") to certain parts of the (shrinking) Perl community, but the everyday programming in general hasn't been lit aflame. Perl was influential enough to get regexes (in one form or another) into nearly every language in popular use today.
+1 for Speedy J haha, thought I was the only one. Old stuff like G-Spot especially
IMHO Facebook make a colossal mistake when they opened up the service to the entire world.

Now that they've let the genie out of the bottle, there's no going back. With 500 million users, every feature they add is a monstrous engineering challenge and every change they make is an impossible political challenge, guaranteed to piss off a major portion of it's users.

How do you market to 500 million people? How do you govern a sytem with that many users in any meaningful way.. you can't. There's nothing you can offer that many people except for lowest common denominator stuff like advertising.

The biggest challenge in business is finding a market you can clearly define, that can be reached easily. Had Facebook stayed "closed" and only available to college students, that's exactly what they would have had.

Imagine the possibilities.. Facebook would have been a right of passage for freshman students.. you go to college, you get a facebook account. College students and their families are some of the richest people on the planet.. just imagine what you could have offered them?

If a college social network is the primary product.. what are the related products, information, services and media? Dating, food, moving, insurance, travel (spring break!), textbooks, banking, car rentals, housing, used goods, career counseling, job searching, recruiting, training, social events, clubs.. the list is endless.

But with a market of everyone.. which products do you offer? When you picture "everyone" do you have an image of a person in your head? Of course not.. but "college student".. ahh you know immediately what to offer them.

Imagine how many companies would beg to offer their services and products on a college-only facebook network?

That's how you compete.. find a specific niche you can clearly define and build deep relationships with your customers.
I find that I'm very addicted to writing code when it's just you and your language of choice.

The difficulties in motivation start when I hit something 3rd party that I don't know very well.

There was a productivity tip on HN a while back about how you should always walk away with something incomplete so that it's easy to come back to. You know exactly what you need to do next.

But when coming back to programming means spending another hour or so reading documentation and playing with settings until it works, things get a lot more difficult I find.
Special-purpose computers create a lot of clutter and confusion. Life before smart phones was pretty lame: you had a phone, a media player, a camera, a notepad, a GPS device.... Well, actually, you didn't have that stuff, especially when you needed it, because you left it at home rather than have a bunch of devices banging around in your pockets. Special-purpose computers are actually becoming less and less common as general-purpose devices like smart phones and tablets displace them from the mobile space.

What we need is not special-purpose computers but general-purpose computers specialized by form factor, running applications that are optimized for the form factor and its style of interaction. Sometimes you want to sit down and type a ten-page report or reply to dozens of emails. Sometimes you want to lounge on the sofa and watch YouTube videos. Sometimes you want to lounge on the sofa with someone and watch a movie on a big screen with a big sound system, and you want your hands free for other activities.

I know that sounds really dumb and non-visionary because it describes exactly what we have now, but what the heck. It's a beautiful world. I also know that by saying "It's a beautiful word" I'm destroying any usability credibility I might have, because actually all normal people are suffering terribly, but again I say, what the heck.
What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory - in pdf
It's not that I like speech recognition, it's just the only other option that is even close to a keyboard that I can think of besides a direct brain to machine link.
I'm always fascinated how people can see things so differently. Seems like @pvg missed my attentions for posting this link. Others understood the post and that is why it got 82 votes. I'm not saying @pvg is wrong...he has some good points...but some of his points leave me scratching my head..but i don't want to get into a debate over it.
Again, if your grandfather is happy with the iPad, who am I to argue with it. I just don't understand why you compare it to outdated technology (this also always irks me about Apple). At the moment, UMTS routers seem to be all the rage, so you could have attached that "old PC" to a router, too. Of course having to manually change the phone connector is unbearable - I last did that maybe 12 years ago... Even twelve years ago there where cheap boxes available that would switch the phone line automatically between modem and phone.

I am not very knowledgeable about skype. I thought since the iPad doesn't have a camera, skype would be impossible (at least skype with a picture, which is a hit with the granddaughters). Also I wasn't sure, can you attach a digital camera and get images off it onto the iPad?

Anyway, I suppose it is all great - until you get those flash christmass cards...
Well, I can understand how one might find Jonathan Mann to be snooty & stuck-up. I don't know much about him, but it appears he has already led an extraordinary life. I thought his song was amusing.

The article wasn't about him or his song, though, and I don't think he is employed by, or represents Apple. Apparently they thought it was amusing too.

I only linked to it because there is deep wisdom in the chorus that could have saved Farhad Manjoo a lot of typing.
Or how much advertising and promotion it takes to make a successful pop song.
Ahem, I notice most people here wrote lots of text for their posts. Is that the effect of Provigil?
You could try to get it featured on http://bigappshow.com/
Check the FAQ. It has the same noise level as a wind tower, which is already pretty quiet, but at a higher frequency and higher up, so the sound will dissipate more.
Make sure you understand the topic of your music essay first
Music can bring can bring joy to the artist and the listener both. Writing a paper on music needs an understanding of music and knowledge of the music. There are so many topics coming under the umbrella of music that can be used for writing interesting papers on music.
I have similar experience on the iPhone 3GS right after I start some GPS-using application (like TomTom). It is sometimes really terrible in the first 10-15 minutes. Though after that, it becomes quite accurate. Often also earlier. Also it is often better when I start it already when being outside of the car and not when being in the car.

I guess that it searches each time for new satellite signals if the last usage of GPS was too long ago.
Didn't mean it in a bad way - just some people don't know what they are missing if they don't use computers, so they don't make that much of an effort.
thanks for spotting this, we fixed it
Didn't someone say it take 10 years to develop great software?
To be fair the macs have a second button now but you need to enable it I think. (though it might be enabled out of the box I cannot recall) if you want to use another mouse with more than one button you are certainly able to and it will work as you expect it to. But if you cannot do any of that the context menu is only a ctrl+click away.
I tried logging on to HN and adding the weblink. Was using Firefox on OSX.
I checked it out and you've got slick graphics, a decent description and a video - that's a good start. From here I'd try and get some interest on the toucharcade forums and see if you can leverage that into a review.

From a potential customer point of view, the idea is interesting, but I don't quite see that it would lead to an interesting game - and the video didn't really change my mind. It seems like at its base is a simple and quite slow game and each level some minor thing is different. It didn't look hard, or exciting. If it gets action packed or tricky in later levels maybe you could put one of those levels in the video.
Monitors have power buttons and desktops have little reason to use anywhere even close to 300W when idle - or do you leave 3D games running when you're computer is not in use? Anyway, since we're talking about your grandfather here, his computer really doesn't need to be all that powerful, to theres plenty of opportunities to keep power usage way way down.

Having said that, I completely understand your argument and agree that an iPad which is always connected on a 3g data plan, can be carried around and beeps when messages arrive really is easier and more old-person friendly.
That's pretty cool (I'm coming in with 23 credits, so it sounds like I could be in a similar situation).

I'm actually taking a philosophy class that I'm really excited about. "Knowledge and Reality" which came highly recommended to me. Maybe I'll really like it and take a minor in philosophy. Currently I'm planning to dual major in EE and CS and maybe triple major with the addition of Math. Definitely not as varied as you, but we'll see. :)
Make an iPad version and sell it for $2.99-$4.99.
AFAIK you might be in the minority of 401k investors, as far as investment choice/freedom and fees goes.

In my experiences the choices have mostly come down to "you can pick one of these 12 funds".
"Few people exclude their basic name and picture information from public search"

True or conjecture?
Sure. I'm just saying that I can't see it ever replacing the keyboard, while your comment kinda sounds like thats what you were suggesting.
There will be a backlash.
That is exactly our story. My grandfather also has very strong hands due to having worked a lifetime. But clicking (especially double clicking) never came easy to him. His Navi did, however (after a stumbling start as you mentioned).

I did show my grandfather the iPad ads on my Macbook and he instantly liked the idea. I'm sure yours will, too. I would be glad to hear about his impressions when the time comes^
But isn't it widely known that the current Apple severely compartmentalizes information? (In the general sense of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Informa...). So maybe he meant that?

(Granted, almost every time I read a crunch article I regret it, and I only read the bit pertaining to your comment of this one.)
Nice, what's the sound track?
Home-made ARAD designed to home in on the device's frequency, sure it's a narrow beam, but there are ways around that.
The iPhone’s built-in Maps.app absolutely culls the GPS hardware to save battery life. Developers can (and do) change the default value for the CLLocationAccuracy method as referenced here:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/iPad/index.html#do...
The best places for generating (conventional) wind power in the US are the prairie states, and the best places for generating solar power are in the Southwest. But since both of these regions are sparsely populated, there isn’t very much grid infrastructure there—there is enough to bring power to the people who do live there, but not enough to handle taking power from a power plant to population centers farther away.

Also, if a substantial portion of our power supply is going to come from intermittently available sources, then the switching technology in the grid is going to have to be a little more sophisticated.
I'm not an iPhone developer either, but I can't find anything in the docs that would seem to allow you to set a sampling rate. What you do is tell the OS that you want location data, and give it a desired accuracy (AccuracyBestForNavigation, AccuracyBest, AccuracyNearestTenMeters, AccuracyHundredMeters, AccuracyKilometer, AccuracyThreeKilometers) and the OS decides when to give you updates. It could be that Motion-X isn't using an appropriate resolution, but I'm somewhat dubious that that's the case, given its intended purpose would need sampling at more than a 30-foot resolution.

Relevant docs: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/User...
I used Run Keeper for the iPhone and it gave the same results as MotionX, which is why I continued using just one of them to collect data (and then write up the blog post). There's nothing to say, though, that both programs may just be crap...
Bill Gates' School Crusade
Thanks very much for your words of encouragement. If you were willing, we'd love to speak to you about your experience with your father's web page. Feel free to email me at brett [dot] huneycutt [at] gmail
Let me know if you need help with rotating those screenshots. It is really easy with The Gimp.
Why do you want to make a new social network?

If you goal is to make money, then ignore this comment.

If your goal is to make something better than facebook, you want to ask yourself, why you want to reinvent the wheel? Unless you have some great idea. Don't.

Check out Diaspora, maybe it's better for you to work on that when it comes out. They have some good ideas. You can also look around other open source SNS.
The conversion should take place before filtering, so it has to be in the texturing hardware. There is no need for sRGB specific sampling opcodes because sRGB is considered a property of the texture, not of the way you sample it.
If everything goes well, he won't have to teach you much at all. That's the exciting thing about the direction the iPad is bringing computing; it's very capable, but at the same time, there's not that much to learn.
Wouldn't automatic recognition be a little bit against the psychology of those reward programs? I thought the point was to make you work in exchange for cheaper coffee. The mental effort in doing the work should also fix it in your mind that you can get cheaper coffee by going to place x. If you don't do anything, nothing will register?

In the end, I will prefer the cafe with the hot waitress anyway.
IPad Personality Clash: Elites vs. Geeks
I wouldn't be surprised if this clip was circulated internally at Apple and within the creative agency responsible for FaceTime during that campaign's concept stage. This approach is classic Apple, i.e. highlight and focus on the benefits instead of the features.
Josh James did the same thing. He would go to a client site and read and read on a particular subject. And when they said 'oh that's a stupid idea' - he'd be like 'well, Coke doesn't think so'.

If you have 60 minutes, this talk is inspiring.

http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james-december...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164483
The nature of programming jobs is usually not to know in advance everything you have to do. You just need to know how to figure out what to do.
Jasic: A complete BASIC interpreter in one Java file
YouTube clobbers my Internet on upload. Anyone else?
I have noticed that every time my g/f uploads a video to YouTube using their current uploader that my internet connection gets completely degraded, as though it's using everything it can grab.

By degraded I mean my 10Megabit up / 1megabit down and average 50ms ping through speedtest.net gets clobbered to 1.8ish megabit up / 0.4megabit down with pings of 300ms (or see http://www.pingtest.net/result/20606910.png)

My question to all you HN'ers is have you noticed problems like this? Is there any way to contact Google and tell them about this directly?
I'm 20 (almost 21), have about three years of real world experience, one in the niche I'm working in (Rails), and I started freelancing via elance a little over a month ago. I've made, so far, $2350 working 20 or so hours a week, and I've already started getting contacted for work instead of actively seeking it. I also made an extra grand through a personal contact, but those may or may not be an option for you. Freelancing isn't hard, and the barrier to entry is surprisingly low.

I'm honest with clients, and that may or may not have helped me succeed. I have yet to make a promise I was unable to deliver. Make sure you give yourself a little bit of breathing room. If something is probably going to take me a week, I'll tell the client it will take me a week and a half. It might be easy to promise you'll have something done by some date to please the client, but I'd rather have a few repeat clients than a ton of people I've only worked with once.

I'm not charging a lot ($25/hour, which I'll probably raise soon), but I'm still charging double or triple what some foreign providers are charging. I don't know where you're from, but if you're a native English speaker (bonus if you're in the US), you have an advantage already. The people I've worked with are willing to pay extra to have people in a similar timezone that natively speak English.

It's not all roses, though. Some people expect you to work for pennies, or they grossly underestimate what goes into building something. You just have to walk away from those clients. You'll also see a lot of people wanting x for y built, where x is some popular social network and y is some (apparently) under served market. You might have some issue building something you know is likely going to fail, but they're usually happy to pay.

Some people suggest becoming a master of some niche field. Doing so will apparently cause people to seek you out. That might work, but, honestly, I've found it to be unnecessary. I'm already in the top 5% of Rails providers on elance, and I'm not the most experienced Rails developer. Again, the barrier to entry is surprisingly low.

It also makes me feel better to go through a freelancing site. Fixed price jobs on elance, for instance, are usually escrow type where the client sends the funds into escrow and elance hangs on to them until they mark the job complete. At least, that way, you know that the client is good for it.

Edit: To expand on my argument that you don't need to be a master of some niche, I will suggest that you target a niche, even if you aren't a master at it. You'll compete a lot less being a Rails developer than a Ruby developer. It seems me to you'll also have better luck if you pick something that hasn't been commoditized by overseas companies (say, picking Ruby or Python over Java or PHP).
Get on forums like macrumors.com and post a few promo codes. Sites like that are also great for feedback too.
Based on my humble knowledge on machine learning, the "concept" of auto-detecting a person's identity based on her/his facebook pictures would be very far from accurate. And accuracy seems to be the key value proposition in this case. Maybe I'm missing something?
Beware - major generalizations of "geeks" lay within that article.

I consider myself an "independent geek" in the basic sense that the article portrays it, up until it says such geeks find the iPad uninteresting because it's a) not the first tablet computer and b) is basically a "giant iPhone."

Perhaps I'm weird for appreciating aesthetics and user interfaces, but I'm willing to overlook openness, open source, and "hackability" for certain devices if I get significant value from them. I don't want to hack my washing machine, car, TV, or iPad. They have specific uses and I want them to be attractive, easy to use, and suited to purpose.

The iPad, to me, is an appliance, not a computer. Let Apple dictate the UI and app experience however much they want, as long as I can come back to my regular computer and still have access to any software and OS of my choice. The iPad is a mere magazine to my workstation's printing press.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense. I guess that's my own fault for not doing enough research before commenting.
I think this just highlights exactly what I hate about iTunes... app discovery is really freaking hard.

That being said, I guess app discovery is about as hard as website discovery. I mean there isn't really a way to find out about a cool site till everyone starts talking about it and/or recommending it to you.

I just wish there were ways to recommend apps, or a "magazine" style site which would break down the best apps of the month or something.

There's like 4 startup ideas in this comment. Pick one and help change my life. Please.
Manpacks is hilarious, super well done, and the undies are good too. I can't wait for them to start sending me shampoo, soap and all that stuff in my manpack. I hate shopping.
Yeah, I work @ justin.tv
I highly and wholeheartedly disagree with this. Yes, there are a number of projects on elance that are only concerned with price, but I've managed to pick up a few good clients via elance who were willing to pay a higher fee for quality work. My suggestion: don't apply to the jobs that say their budget is $5-10/hr for 3-6 mos.
The trend of online tech lately is disturbing. So much of what you are and what you do and who you know is being mined, cross-correlated, modeled and projected to make it easier and easier for the people that want to incentivize your behavior. You don't have to be a conspiracy freak to find this creepy.

Can't we find ways to make technology empowering instead? To foster creativity and direct human interaction? I'll admit that things like Meetup etc can in some cases bring people together but the drive to monetize every nook and cranny of our online interactions seems to taint everything.
Can anyone recommend an html5 3d engine? Is pre3d currently the best?
Squarespace Raises $38.5M
Cold Case Seasons 1-7 DVD Box Set on www.boxsetoffer.com