skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, Microsoft did kill Netscape Navigator. Only conflict within Microsoft between those who wanted to protect the revenue streams from Windows and Office against web apps and those who wanted keep on improving Internet Explorer even if the improvements erode those revenue streams allowed competing browsers to get the beachhead they have now.
Why is the domain of this submission listed as google.com?
I can see the headlines now...

"Cheating Husbands and Wives (CHAW) lobbies for ban of Anybots. Claim sanctity of their marriages at stake."
Ask HN: Why doesn't google give an alternative to select old google news?  
The new version is -repulsive- why cant i choose the old version
Just some information about the accuracy of our eye-tracking software - people have been curious, so I thought I'd share it with the community.

Feedback appreciated, as always!
If not the 'worst evar', this has been a summer when supposedly safe "pre-sold" properties like Robin Hood and Prince of Persia fell flat - critically and commercially. With so many licensed films coming down the pipe, that has to put the fear of god into a few movie executives.
You're right, I did have the wrong scale, and should have realized. I believe this plot to be correct. Black is binomial, red is normal, both for the difference in conversion rates.

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/6691/binnormdifflikelihoo...

The normal approximation seems reasonable, and so a t-test shouldn't cause problems. I made a plot of the relative error of the normal approximation; the tails are indeed too fat. In particular, there's a bump to the left of 0, so a t-test would slightly overestimate p.

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/6691/binnormdifflikelihoo...
Apple? Yahoo?
If my car is seen leaving the scene of an accident, can I be sued for damages because the car is registered to me even though everyone in the family uses it?

It seems they need SOMETHING that ties it to me. What if it was my sister? Or my mother? They have evidence that links me to the crime but the same evidence links several other people to the same degree. Is that really a "preponderance of evidence"?

It seems at most they could use the IP to get a search warrant and look through the computers to try to find some actual evidence.

Besides, is it really a crime to download a movie when they don't know if any of it was actually saved? Just because the bits were sent down the pipe doesn't mean that I received them. It's as if someone reading a book to me makes me liable for copyright infringement on the presumption that I must have been writing down what was read.
1) You are putting words in my mouth. I never said that. My stance on this is that if the new problems aren't bigger than the problems we have now of having about 150k people die each day, mostly after long periods of suffering, affecting whole families and losing humanity lots of knowledge and expertise, draining our resources into losing battles against diseases that are fatal, then we should do this. Everybody's already in favor of curing other diseases, so why not those of aging? It is also not up to us to decide for everybody that this shouldn't be developed (you can make a personal choice to refuse such therapies of you want - and we might have to chose between low birth rates or high death rates), just like if the creators of hygiene, antibiotics, better crops, vaccines, or whatever had decided that they shouldn't do what they did because "it might have bad consequences". Our current world is very different from the world a thousand years ago, and I'd rather live now. Maybe in a 100 years we'll look back and think that it was such a waste that young people died at 80, like we now think that dying at 40 is terrible (but it was common once upon a time).

2) Please be specific about what you think is "stupendously bad engineering". Thanks.
Pretty, but what about blind people?
On the left side with the relatively new array of options I choose discussions and under I choose latest to find where people are talking about my industry (and what they are saying).
Fixation? Cryonics involves cryoprotectant and vitrification at liquid nitrogen temperatures, not plastination, and the last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope. Also, think in terms of the brain being carefully examined on the molecular level by nanotech for tiny hints in the process of being restored to its exact old state, not in terms of trying to warm people up using present-day technology and hoping they pop back to life. The whole point of cryonics is to wait until technology advances to the point of being able to restore you so long as the necessary information is physically there in any form.
Besides leaked databases and PI tools this is one I learned of in the past month:

There are various reverse caller databases floating around. I forget the name of the database but there was a talk at HOPE 2010 less than a month ago about abusing VOIP providers and caller ID spoofing to scan through and map large blocks of cellphone numbers at a time. Apparently there are wholesale resellers of caller ID lookup databases and some cellphone companies are more than happy to associate the name on the account with individual cellphone entries in their reverse databases.

With such a system if you know what possible area codes/exchanges they might be in and what their name is you had very good odds of finding AT&T and T-Mobile customers. Verizon wasn't really discussed.

Of course social engineering the number from you might be a lot easier the first time... ;)
Not if u set your settings to stay logged in. Like yahoo mail or gmail, each time you go there, you are already logged in. The difference here is that, you would not need further navigation once you are constantly logged in.
I agree that the tone of the article smacks of entitlement, but the "don't" list actually does cover some big pain points I think a lot of designers are familiar with. I just think the article doesn't explain them very well.

"Here, I made a layout for you": Unless you really believe you are as good as the designer you're hiring, it doesn't make sense for you to actually do any designing yourself. Guidance, yes; clear specifications and limits, yes; a concrete design, no. If you could do that, you wouldn't need to hire anyone. It's like hiring a photographer and telling him, "Here, I set everything up. You just push the shutter button." Obviously you're the customer, but you're not getting much bang for your buck if you insist that the primary design be done by an amateur. It's trouble for me and it usually does mean a worse product for you (not out of spite, but because I'm hobbled by an ill-thought-out design that the client drew up in 10 minutes on a napkin and insisted be followed exactly).

"How much does X cost?": This isn't about having an open-ended budget. It's about providing a clear specification. Asking for a budget without any kind of specification is asking for disappointment later on. For example, a business owner asked how much a blog would cost. I gave a relatively low number to set up WordPress and do a simple theme. After further questioning, it turned out that when he said "blog" he meant something more like "Facebook competitor." Even better is "How much does a website cost?"

"I want to show this to my <spouse/friend/child>": This isn't unreasonable, but you shouldn't treat any one person as "the public's opinion." Unfortunately, many people do. For example, I worked with a guy whose wife thought it would be awesome to put pictures of her poodle all over a business website because the dog was so cute. Everyone else who saw a design with the dog was completely perplexed by it, but she loved it.
Just think of it as taking "Release early" and "Iterate" to the next level. In this case, your iteration involved executing on an idea, building a business out of it, then selling. You've been there, done that. Now you're equipped with lessons you've learned from your first iteration, and are ready to start your next. And you're not even 30!

It's certainly a better problem than, say, wondering if you can actually build something that will allow you to quit your boring day job.

Good luck!
Well, I'm sure there's some economics laureate out there who says that the secret to efficiency begins with comparative advantage.
a further piece of advice. don't let perfectionism keep you from writing. don't be afraid to make mistakes and contradict yourself. getting it all out on paper will help you form a more coherent picture of your own opinions.
A toolbar would be a good addition.
I'd love to see the tech in Microsoft's Kinect combined with this concept - it's already in the mass market, just need something to translate the movements (transmit video/audio) to a 'robot' on the other end.

These robots really need an LCD screen to show the face of the remote user though. I think we naturally attribute traits to the robot itself, not who's controlling it, and that's the weird part. Have the user's face appear and it's just "Oh, it's Bob. Hi Bob!"; (conceptual) problem solved.
Canada!

Do you get prepaid data?
Sadly only data and no explanations. I would especially like to know why the price is so ridiculously high in France. From my very superficial knowledge about the French phone market I always assumed that it must be very similar to the German phone market (I’m from Germany) which has among the lowest prices.

My hypothesis for the low prices in Germany? Fierce competition.
I don't consider the parent a troll comment, but I could be wrong. KQueue, Finding out what annoys a group of people is an excellent way to collaborate and list all things that "need fixing". Some of these things, as you may have seen in this list, are things that other collaborators can fix (or work on fixing). I think polls like this should be a quarterly occurrence here.

You may be right that the question is common on Reddit, but probably for a completely different reason: people like to vent, and the OP wanted karma. [although reddit does have: http://www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis/ ]
shouldn't it also be set up so that different algorithms can be swapped in? I think its pretty accepted at this point that different application scenarios perform better with differently tuned schedulers..
Why would they? I suppose their data suggest that most users like it.
With every change there are the loud few that disprove and eventually get over it. They re-added the two-column view option if you prefer that.
I think it misses the mark. What I want from an ATM is a machine that dispenses cash and takes deposits 24/7 with minimal fuss. Modern ATMs that automatically count deposited cash and read deposited checks perform this role remarkably well. I don't want a full-fledged electronic banking kiosk, if I need to do anything other than a withdrawal or deposit then I'd vastly prefer to be able to do that using online banking on the web.
I think you mean _price_.
Assuming that not everybody can be telecommuting from a remote location, then one role for this sort of a robot would be in letting remote managerial types check up on the workers who ARE working "on site" (not telecommuting). Of course, just having mounted cameras at the workplace could do this, but if you have a very large or complex facility layout, or simply don't want to have a large number of cameras, then a roving robot may be nice. I suspect the unit price will have to come down by an order of magnitude or more before they become competitive enough with the stationary camera alternative.
You can, and probably 99% of trademarked brands are dictionary words, but not when the word means generically what your product does and you try to use just that word as your mark. You can't trademark "Computer", but you can trademark "Apple Computer" or "Dell Computer", etc.

Telepresence is a recently made-up word, so it's plausible that one could register it as a mark...but defending the mark would be difficult.
Video is private.
The Longest Photographic Exposures in History
I've often heard an argument for pay dating sites over free ones is that the people on the pay sites are more serious about it. On sites like OkCupid, you can run into people who are just basically trolling profiles (or just in it for the quizzes). It's a lot less likely on ones you have to pay to participate in.
You can of course define single line lambdas inline, and I think those are quite attractive, but when you want to get multiline lambdas you get in quite a sticky situation with Python. For a simple example, see the top answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1233448/no-multiline-lamb...

In order to make it work Python would have to introduce a scope-blocking structure like braces, parens, or an 'endlambda', all of which I think are steps in the wrong direction, especially given Python's great feature of semantic whitespace. I'll take a clean function defined above over braces.

I do know of a way to hack a multi-line Lambda with existing syntax, though, but I have no guarantees about it. I don't think I've used it in serious code, since it's just real ugly.

k = lambda x: eval(compile("""
print x
y = 4
print x + y
x = 8
print x
""", '', 'exec'))

x = 5
k(2)
# 2
# 6
# 8
print x
# 5
''I suppose their data suggest that most users like it.''

i would really like to know if this is really true - do you have any data or you are just -supposing-
> It's hard to make something that is both water-tight and has great air circulation.

I don't see how that's true - washer driers circulate fluids with the aim to get maximum interaction between the fluid and the clothing. In one instance that fluid is washing water and in the other it is hot air. They seem very similar things to me.
You can turn on gmail-style hotkeys for Google search:

http://www.google.com/experimental/
It is amazing how quickly you can shift a debate if you get people to agree that a "cookie" is really a "tracker file."
There's something you should know about google news.

It's almost impossible for google to be able to monetize it. Because to do so would open up more cans of worms than they'd like to deal with. This makes google news a second class citizen so they are more likely to make unpopular changes for selfish corporate reasons than they would with other services.
At first I thought that it was because of the extra demand in the US (being more developed that most of the world), but the same data being offered for as little as ~$0.50 just confounds me. It's probably just the effects of a monopoly at work, although it would be interesting to see more data and analysis.
This comment resonates with me especially well today.

I've been attempting to work with GWT and the serialization issues are entertaining (did you implement IsSerializable? is there a no-arg constructor? Do all of the classes your class depend on have the same? Did you remember to recompile the GWT/JS code to update the serialization white list? etc.).

It makes me appreciate more playing with Erlang a while back and shooting data around being so simple.
Yep - this feels like fear mongering. 234 files, oh my!
You could make it an electric project these days, and teach environmental friendliness from an early age.

All of the big problems with electric cars (range, battery weight/cost, lack of charging stations, charging time, etc.) aren't present in a go-cart, so solving the technical problems is much easier.
Write if you really have something to say, rather than when you must write something out of habit or inertia. ^_^
No, closures are created when functions are passed or returned and there are free variables used in such a function.

He did neither pass a function nor return one.

The function itself is not a closure. The closure is an object that bundles a function and an actual set of bindings.
If you don't have a fairly good idea of what your market looks like, you shouldn't be spending money yet. I sometimes wonder if "pivot" is too strong of a term. If you are making 180 degree "pivots" after you've ramped up development, you are in trouble.

On the other hand, if you are making those kinds of corrections before spending money, then start making 10-20 degree pivots after you've started spending some money, you'll be OK.

By the time you want to SCALE (and really spend some money), your pivots are 2-3 degree, which really means things like messaging/marketing tweaks, fine tuning for your buyer personas, etc.

I think of it like a system moving towards a steady state. It may bounce around for while, but whole time it moves towards the steady state and the oscillations decrease each time.

Pivoting and customer development are synonymous. The whole point of pivoting is to change the direction of your efforts based on what your (potential) customers are telling you.
Thank you, I appreciate it! The portfolio is actually a bit outdated now, I've done some better work that I need to put on there soon.
Extending this ridiculous logic to its absurd extreme, clearly we must conclude that Louis Armstrong and Jimmy Hendrix came from socioeconomically privileged families because they managed to get access to expensive musical instruments when they were kids.
Anywhere minor modifications to the firmware could cause serious injury, it makes sense to restrict access to the firmware, because the firmware is a very small part of a hardware system that has been well-tested for safety. This makes the car and the microwave off limits.

iPod classic, it's not going to hurt anyone if you screw with the firmware, you should be free to tinker to your heart's content. There are also enough obvious deficiencies (lack of support for a variety of codecs) which can be improved.

Same with a TV, the Kindle, the Drobo.
Before the iPhone 3G came out, it was impossible to find reasonable data plans here in Canada. The only options were $30/50MB plans intended for Blackberries.

What a difference two years make. I picked up my iPhone 4 this morning - 32 GB, for $40 less than the same model in the US. (3 year plan, unfortunately, but eligible for full upgrades in < 2 years) The data plans provide 6 GB/month for $30, with tethering included free and a $10-20 option to share the quota with a 3G iPad.

What changed between 2008 and today is that the iPhone is now available from all three major Canadian telcos, whereas Americans are still stuck with AT&T.
Unfortunately, my blogs all start off sounding like a PBS narrator and end up sounding like Colonel Kurtz.
Gmail is great and I've been using it since 2005 but the lack of OS integration (no mail notifications) is a pain especially on my work Linux setup with 6 virtual desktop. So I constantly check my email and most of the times there are no new ones ... I configured Thunderbird today to work with Gmail and I'm very happy (and Mail on my mac at home). Will see how that work out.
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Isn't that exactly what Crowley did with FourSquare after selling Dodgeball to Google?
No I don't have their inside data, it's just that they A/B test everything, they were testing variations of this design for months.
http://google.com/search?q=sunset+in+paris - this will even tell you when the sun isn't going to set or rise in extreme latitudes.
I'm glad they've fixed that. It took me like 5 minutes to find the compose button the first time I used Gmail.
I think this is a great concept, and I think they have applied some great improvements, but I to admit many of these features that are novel in Europe I've had since I moved to the US 2 years ago.

My Wells Fargo ATMs give me customized short-cuts, touch-screens, cheque scanning, cash depositing and a bunch of other features. It's not quite as integrated as this, but it's nowhere near the sad state of cash machines in the UK.
And the C-130 since 1956, in pretty much continuous production the whole time as well.

Grew up about 5 miles from the plant in Marietta Ga.
It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. Big encrypted files called Insurance, twittering about being followed by government agents, sensationalizing the things they post...

I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks.

I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/mystique, and their credibility and ethical standing is suffering as a result, which could be dangerous for the "open leak repository" movement.
I hate the new design as well and stopped using it (haven't found a replacement yet, and for now just read my local news via Google Alerts), but I don't think there is anything that Google does by just supposing.
But wait, I'm still on the AT&T unlimited plan. Does this mean my 3G cost is <DIVIDE BY ZERO ERROR>?
Fat Americans Should Not Get Handicap Spots
Funny thing about paywalls is that they require even more intrusive tracking.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1562939
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Or what the pinboard.in people did after leaving delicious?
Stuff my dad and I made:

Downhill racer painted to look like the General Lee. The go cart idea famousactress suggested is great, but costly. A downhill racer costs maybe 50 bucks, or a trip to the dump or polling your friends and family for parts (old lawn mower or bikes for wheels, for example).

Tree house in the woods behind our house.

A boat. Sort of. It wouldn't float, because my friend Steven and I put thousands of nails in it...Some sort of decoration or something.

Wooden deck (this was for my mom, but it was a useful learning experience, and kids don't mind doing work, if it's kept light-hearted and easy going and they get to hang out with their dad while he's being awesome)

Numerous electronics projects using various kits from Radio Shack. Eventually ended up with a 200-in-1 kit, that I saw on reddit a few weeks ago is still in production. The radio transmitters were always the most exciting for me, though extremely complex, especially if you want to be able to hear it all over the neighborhood (you need an amp and an antenna to really break federal law properly).

Numerous computer projects. Mostly repairing old ones that we'd bought at garage sales and then reselling them.

Numerous car projects, including fixing and doing oil changes and such on my own car when I got old enough to have one.

All of these things led to me having a pretty severe DIY attitude...maybe too much so. I try to fix and build just about everything myself. This week, for example, I specced out what it would cost to take a box truck and turn it into the perfect motorhome ($29000, including a late model 17' medium duty diesel box truck with attic, and mostly new interior parts; about $9k less if most of the RV parts can be obtained through salvage sources, in case anyone is wondering).
I agree! If you say:

x = 5

I think there should be a "var x" either locally or globally -- SOMEWHERE -- and actually there should be a compile error if "var x" is missing.
Or combine it with a Simple Note account and have sync to all your nv installations as well as Simple Note on iOS and other platforms as well.

It works rather flawlessly.
I've investigated this possibilty and found that OpenFire (Jabber server) is very easy to work with. You can control user account centrally, and create rooms and assign who can access which rooms, from a web GUI. I've yet to see an IRC server that easy.
I read once that John Doer likes saying "no conflict, no interest" to describe what (among other things) he looks for in investments.