skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Condescending question: What about unsophisticated and marginally intelligent people who are only capable of ploughing fields? I think you're right about moving on to more interesting problems, but I'm not sure most humans are interested in working on interesting problems.
Google is good, but…
This design is type level. Properties and primitives are not null, references used after a guard procedure are not null, other references are Maybe types. Functions are Maybe typed if they are operating on nullable references. Those types are not syntactically top level, but that's because I was considering an alteration, not a rewrite.
It would now be perfectly legal for T-Mobile to offer a service where you walk into any T-Mobile store and they unlock your iPhone for you, to use on their network.
brb. need to pee.
just read it,
most of the material should be accessible to someone with just a decent HS level (up to ~ calculus) math background.
DuckDuckGo a new password
I wrote a small rails app for this for a small community bank. We had 150k users, each user "belonged" to a branch and we had a 50 man (women really) call staff.

The branches were different in location, size and age so each had a different amount of customers assigned to it. So we setup a list of x number of answered surveys per branch.

Big Old branch needed 40, new small branch needed 10.

Call center rep logs into the system. It randomly picks a customer. They call, if the survey is answered, they mark it otherwise they click next and get a new customer to call.

We allowed for comments, and a checkbox for "would like to be called back".

As the surveys get answered, a branch got "full" and its customers stopped showing up. Once all branches were "full" they call center reps were done for the month.

Next month, the branches were all reset, and we started again, but not picking any customer we had already surveyed (or had asked not to be called, or was in the do not call list which we updated monthly).

We reset a customer so we could call on them again after 6 months had passed since their last survey.

The branch managers were given the "bad ones" and the ones that requested a call back to work out any issues. Their score affected their bonuses, so it was taken seriously.
Getting Caught Mid-Pivot: Lessons from the Imercive Postmortem
Chrome developers needs to adopt something similar to Firefox's upcoming Tab Candy feature: http://www.dotsauce.com/2010/07/23/tab-candy-firefox/

The app tabs simply do not compare.
This is one of the hardest things to learn about software and why it's so nice to work with people with similar style.

I always use semicolons in js.

I love the ternary operator on short bits of code though.

foo(something==null?somethingElse:something);
Yahoo Pipes is the closest thing I know to that.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Here's a screenshot of one of mine http://imgur.com/NLOkM.png
Finally, now I can stop worrying about a cop seeing that my iPhone is running on T-Mobile....whew!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't stop Apple from refusing to service your jailbroken iPhone does it? Big news and all, but it seems to me the issue was that Apple would make a fuss and void your warranty, not that people were getting arrested.
Why would Google do this?
The Five Steps to Open
Evolution of Photoshop: 1988 – 2009
There was recently an article on HN (sorry, can't find it ATM) about how to create a startup in China. The typical route is to create a business entity called a WFOE[1], which lets you operate your business in China as a foreigner, and has some tax/legal advantages. The gist I got out of the article and HN comments was that this can actually be very expensive and difficult; the application fee is inconsistent, and especially if you try to base the WFOE in a city like Beijing or Shanghai, in practice the cost can be in excess of $100k USD (of course the alleged nominal cost is lower).

This is from memory, so it might not be entirely accurate, but if you're considering starting a business in China you should definitely do some research into how much it will really cost to create and operate your business. There are some good resources on chinalawblog.com, and of course in the comments of HN articles about the topic.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholly_Foreign_Owned_Enterprise
Old Spice viral campaign a flop? Increases search 2000%
Insight, "StumbleUpon: Tripping Thumbs"
So let me get this square:

You shouldn't advocate illegal activity even if the legality of said activity is dubious at best?

The only reason Marijuana is illegal in the United States is due to two things: Hearst Publishing and white people's fear of brown persons.

Hearst wanted to protect their paper based publishing empire, which hemp paper directly challenged. Hearst started an anti-hemp propaganda campaign focused on race to get the ill-educated white folks to jump on board.

So to be clear, it's not illegal because it's dangerous to your health, it's illegal because it was dangerous to the paper publishing empires of yore.

And for every supposed negative health consequence, mental or otherwise, I will give you ten fold citations that state the opposite. Marijuana is very well studied, it's efficacy for a variety of things are very well documented.

So I have no problem advocating it in any forum whatsoever.
I mean I get that Groupon is a huge business. I guess the question is are domain name prices relative? If, for instance, this was a public company, and this was disclosed, I would be a pissed off shareholder. Is it better than taking the corporate jet on a family vacation? Yes. Does that make it a good business investment? Don't know. Obviously Groupon is not a public company, but it seems like you could get a much higher ROI on a quarter of million dollars invested in the primary product as opposed to domain name. Maybe not, just my 2 cents.
Middleware, Composition, and Monads
It's more that now legitimate businesses can do these things without fear of legal action. It's legal now for Google to post a custom app on the web that unlocks your iPhone and installs Google Voice. It's legal for T-Mobile to unlock your iPhone for you.

These things have existed on the grey market for a while, but legitimate businesses can't trade in such things. Now they can.
> I'm only saying they should present the information and leave their opinion out of it.

They do both. Feel free to take their complete source material and republish it with your own analysis. There is no other media organization in the world which gives you this opportunity.
Sorry, this article is kind of interesting for it's view of another industry, but as a long-time consultant I didn't see any particularly useful tips/advice. The anecdotes are fun, but they don't really tell you how to handle some of the common concerns that come up around fees.

With respect to price objections, for example, the advice seems to be "refer to their own business practices, and don't show them the wholesale price." That's not going to take you very far. The comment that "making money is not a dirty word" is valid, but doesn't tell you how to talk to your client. Better advice would be:

* Explain to the client how you arrived at your cost estimate or fee - often they just want to know that it wasn't made up out of thin air. If you tell them it represents 6 weeks of design, code, test, and deployment support, they will understand better.

* Clients are often comparing your price to what they think it would cost them if they were using an employee. But they don't have that employee (or an employee with the necessary knowledge/skills). Explain to them that it there is a cost to having your resources/skills "on tap" for when they need it.

* Always be prepared to lose a job to preserve your fees. Once you give a "discount" it will be hard to get back to full price. If you think your price is fair, be prepared to suggest that they talk to some other consultants. You should have a good idea of whether your rates are high or low compared to the competition. I have even gone so far as to suggest other companies that a client could talk to, referring to them as "the cheap option" and "the expensive option."
Show HN: GridCentric - High Performance Cloud Computing
This is this generation's version of the Vietnam war coverage, since TV reports can't be trusted anymore.
Yeh, but it wasn't valued at that when they bought it.
30 hours means 4 pages an hour. Even solving a few problems here and there, it's hard to imagine you'd proceed at a slower pace than that.

That said, I didn't see that each chapter has a bunch of extra problems at the end. These may take you extra time. I still believe that it's a few weeks project at best, not months.
Correct.

Also, what a lot of posters are forgetting is that software is involved in "real" engineering. The work BP is doing isn't happening by the seat of their pants; real numbers are being crunched, supplies are moving along the chain and simulations are running. It's not happening with slide rules and ledgers either: there are software applications enabling all this work they're doing.

A significant portion of physical engineering these days is delegated to software and it needs to engineered properly just like the rest of the system. If the software controlling a chlorine extraction process fails and vents toxic gas, the result is every bit as tragic as if a mechanical engineer had specified the wrong pipe material and that was the fault that released the gas.
Proposed draft of bill would limit the use of "precise geolocation information"
The first problem is that while jailbreaking is now legal, it is also legal for Apple to push a change that happens to break jailbroken phones. Apple doing this could create liability and/or negative publicity for any company that had sold such services on a wide scale.

The second problem is that lawyers will be trying to find a way to create the old result, and are likely to succeed. For instance Apple's restrictions against jailbreaking are almost certainly in their shrinkwrap license contract. Therefore the fact that they can't throw the copyright book at you, doesn't mean that you're necessarily legally in the clear to do it.
There's a T-Mobile store in Queens, NY that was already doing this a week ago, they had a huge banner outside that said something to the extent of 'We sell and unlock iPhones.' I remember pointing it out to a friend and wondering how it was legal but I guess now it makes sense.

If anyone wants to check it out, it's at the corner of 74th and Broadway in Jackson Heights.
What does this mean for eFuse, on the Droid x/2 phones, which is supposed to protect the system from unauthorized updates?

edit - Why was I voted down? Is it bad to ask questions? I thought others might be curious about this too. (BTW, thanks for the answer.)
HN has seen this once already duck, but thanks anyhow.

I'm giving this again in Tokyo in two weeks, at twice the length (cutting it to 25 minutes was hard). If you've got someone you want covered, feel free to leave a comment.
I have heard this often but I have to say that it has just not been my experience. One datapoint, I know, but still.
Low cost ($1k/mo) private office startup space in SoMA
Has anyone figured out how to get this to work on a multi-display configuration? I tried it and found it only affected my primary screen.
Every Afghanistan IED attack, with co-ordinates. Spreadsheet and visualised
SaaS and Cloud Computing Consultants can join GetApp.com marketplace
Review my new site, EndAnts.com, please. It's supposed to make you happier.
Nothing in this ruling (based on my relatively quick read) stops companies from implementing countermeasures. It's not illegal to make it hard to do something legal; for example, DVDs are protected by CSS, which although it's laughably easy to break, does stop you from exercising some of your fair use rights (which this ruling also recognizes).

Whether companies can implement things like eFuse or whatever is generally the realm of antitrust law, which is another ball of wax entirely.
> What people expect out of government services also rises roughly with GDP

While true, that's not a factor over a short period of time. Seriously - do you really think that our expectations of state govt changed by 20% over a couple of years?

CA's govt spending exploded with the economy because it could. We're now in trouble because we don't seem to be able to contract it the same way.
Apple has maintained for quite a while that jailbreaking your iPhone is a criminal offence.

So no, the fear was not only of a voided warranty.
Hi all,

We were inspired by our friends at AeroFS to do a little show-and-tell and solicit some feedback. Specifically, we'd like to know:

- Is it apparent what we are actually selling?

- Is it apparent how it is different from other cloud / virtualization stacks?

- What are some key things we should focus on to increase conversions (i.e. to get more people to sign up for trials etc)?

Any feedback/advice on who we should be targeting both for our current compute farm product as well as customer development for our upcoming enterprise product is also much appreciated.

Of course, any other feedback/advice is also appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Tim
It's important to remember that the legal system isn't perfect. It's just more perfect than the known alternatives.

Trial by combat was no joke. It was the process for centuries. It presumably had the virtue of resolving disputes in a manner short of war or century-long blood feud, and its obvious bias -- toward the better fighter -- was, I'm guessing, a design feature: In the absence of government police, any judicial system that didn't weigh the odds in favor of the stronger party was liable to be ignored in favor of extrajudicial violence. Why take a guy to trial rather than just stab him in a bar fight? Well, if the trial resembles a bar fight, but one in which the winner emerges with a clean reputation and clean legal record, nobody has anything to lose by going to trial.

But it literally involved losing limbs and eyes, followed in short order by either the legal rights or the life of the loser. I like the lawyer system better.
The problem isn't whether or not it should be illegal...
It's that it is actually illegal. Not just jaywalking illegal, it's possibly go to jail illegal. Some places don't really care, or it is quasi legal, but some places still care.

When I was younger, I lived in a place that cared, and a friend of mine got busted, and was poor and didn't have a lawyer who could just get him a good deal. He didn't have to go to jail, but it remained on his record and he could not go to Canada, or quite a few European countries, it showed up on a background check, limiting his employment opportunities, and so forth.

So even if the law is wrong, the fact is that it's still a crime in many (most?) places in the US to possess and use MJ, and getting caught could have a real, negative effect on your life.
I would say talk to many people while developing it - and before you start. I don't see how it could ruin anything unless you think that it's going to become some sort of addiction that you spend all your working hours doing?
What to do after an App success?
Hey guys, we just had our free simple todo app - http://bit.ly/todoApp - on the App Store go unexpectedly to the top of the charts - yielding almost 100k downloads over a week.

Has anyone had experience in successful next steps for free apps that get on a bunch of iphones?
I absolutely agree with this, it is really important to get the family to buy-in and support the decision of the dying loved one.

I lost my mother-in-law earlier this year to leukemia, and ultimately she made the choice to forego care. My husband and his two siblings provided in-home hospice care for their mother, because she wouldn't even allow any nurses or doctors in her home. This was a huge commitment, in time and also emotionally, since we basically became nurses ourselves and had to learn to perform many procedures. If we hadn't be in complete agreement and totally aware of what we were signing up for, it could have created a family rift. Instead, it brought us closer together.
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/22/iphone-can-read-word-excel-pd...

in your case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

"A slippery slope argument states that a relatively small first step inevitably leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant impact, much like an object given a small push over the edge of a slope sliding all the way to the bottom."
Dolphins playing with air bubbles
Extremely cool demo. It would be interesting to see this applied to analytics, so you could see exactly what people are doing on your site in real time. Although that would also be a bit creepy.
At first I wondered if modchips would now be legal, and CrunchGear and others are just focusing on jailbreaking iPhones because it's topical to their audience.

But, no, the wording really is zeroed in on handsets:

Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

In fact, it sounds like it's legal to jailbreak an iPhone but not an iPod touch...
It would in practice be similar to the itunes compatibility that Palm tried. It was technically cool, but in the end the cat and mouse game with apple would mean few mainstream users would actually bother and it would make little business sense.
Cute cartoon visualization of Scribd's HTML5 conversion process
Is there a list somewhere of the countries in which an unlocked iPhone will work with a prepaid sim?

I read on Fred Wilson's blog that it works in the UK (and presumably the rest of Western Europe). I am specifically wondering about Australia and Japan.

Can I buy an iPhone 4 in the USA, get it unlocked in Queens, and use it in Australia with a sim?

Edit - I'm mostly wondering if the radio in the US version of the phone supports the networks in .au and .jp.
When do you people in the US start to learn about integrals?

Is it expected that a first-year undergraduate student already has the knowledge to understand the book?

I don't have the required "prerequisites" as the GP puts it to understand the book, but I should :( and it might shame me into studying a bit :) (then again, I probably won't)
Richard Branson: 'They' Have a Lot to Answer For
Modal dialog boxes make me sad/depressed/angry.
Mind your own business!

It's none of your business how I choose to code my own projects.

If we're on the same project together, we can discuss it and decide on a style that works for everyone.

When I contribute to an OpenSource project, I adopt whatever style they have defined.

For my own projects, I have personally opted out of using unnecessary semicolons and brackets unless they improve maintainability or readability. But you don't have to know or care about that.
If anyone won the war in Iraq, it was Iran. The surge only "worked" because Iran allowed it to work. In case the U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear facilities, you can count on losing Iraq once again.

Yon takes good photos, and he provides some interesting stories at the tactical level. But he's kind of completely clueless about the grand plan. He's nothing more than a "useful idiot", cheering for a campaign from which he gains very little.
I work in the mining industry and this is huge. Great news. Global warming is a complete scam anyway. The planet naturally goes through cycles of hot/cold. To think in the microscopic amount of time that humanity has been industrialized, that we could actually affect the climate of our planet, is ludicrous.
Thanks, feedback noted. In today's instant click -> results environment, a popup that doesn't yield gratifying change would totally cause frustration build up. I'll work on eliminating all of them ... :)
The original encrypted video is not useful to anybody unless you are trying to determine who the source is.

If you don't trust Wikileaks to not have tampered with the video they released, then why would you trust them if they provide something which they claim is the original encrypted version?
It's very, very easy to reset your iPhone to it's default state, you simply plug it in to your computer, and click "Restore" in iTunes. Apple doesn't have to know anything :-) I think you would have to be very silly to send a jailbroken iPhone to Apple to be serviced if Apple claim it's "illegal" to do so.
I don't know about Chinese or Korean communities but a lot of the indians that you mention primarily come through via family ties.

One person gets here (alone or family) and files for immigration papers for their immediate relatives, starts working here (usually at an establishment of a relative or a person from the same community), makes enough money, transitions to setting up a new business and the someone else takes their place at the previous establishment. That's how the motels and 7/11,Dunkin etc. chains are run ..

This book had a nice description of this phenomenon.
http://www.amazon.com/Dhandho-Investor-Value-Method-Returns/...
Is the speed of hiring and firing programmers really that much of an option? I know that Germany has some rather old-fashioned laws about that, so it's hard to get rid of someone fast. But when we're talking about the usual startup fare, the legal ramifications and a few months of pay are probably the least of your problems.

Or to put it another way, if it isn't a problem, it's likely that your product sucks.
McGill prof creates first accurate digital map of world’s rivers
I'm an American running a company in Beijing. I may email you some time.

You have some things right and are too optimistic about some things. There are certainly freedoms here that you do not enjoy in the West - at the same time, relationship maintenance is an extremely time-consuming and expensive, never-ending process.

Whenever you brush up with a bureaucratic organization, the experience can be hellish. I own, for example, a ~600 USD receipt-printing machine (fapiao machine) because the gov't forced me to buy it for my business. I also need to buy a new one every 5 years.

Trust is a huge issue. You need a Chinese partner, or you're going to get your ass kicked. You need a Chinese partner you really trust (I recommend you consider finding a Chinese wife), or you're going to get your ass kicked. I know very few successful entrepreneurs who built their businesses here who do not have a Chinese spouse.

I hope you're not building a business where IP is an important competitive advantage. Your code is not safe - safety lies in creating smaller products that are approximately as easy to copy from scratch as to steal. Alternatively, a good business model is one that uses very simple tech but makes heavy use of sales and relationships (for example, a Groupon clone).

Good luck, and remember that people eat people here.
I thought ripping DVDs for education was covered under the TEACH act.
starkfist, you'd need to get a prepaid microsim, which I'd imagine is not too common. Or, you could cut up a regular sim.
Here's a startup idea right here - I just tried to post this myself.

You've got a spec from Jason Santa Maria - is anyone going to go create? :)
Ask HN: Advice on traveling in Japan?
Hey HN:

I'll be going to Tokyo with my girlfriend and a friend for the next week. This will be my first time outside of America, though my partner has significant travel experience. What advice would you have to make my experience the best one possible?

Also, if anyone in Japan wants to meet up, send me an email.
According to an attorney on Twitter, although it's now legal to jailbreak an iPhone, Apple can still state it's a violation of their warranty and deny service -- as recently seen with someone who jailbreaked their iPad (which heated up) and was denied service: http://snurl.com/zv7gc