skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, the HN title is somewhat misleading, as the report is not just about 3G data, but about 3G data plans for notebooks and tablet computers.

In many European countries, the 3G data plan one has in combination with a mobile voice subscription is a lot cheaper per gigabyte.

For instance: in The Netherlands, the cheapest iPhone plan includes 150 nationwide minutes for outgoing calls (all incoming calls are free), sending 150 text messages (receiving messages is free), and unlimited 3G data at 2 Mbit/s --- for only Euro 30 ($40).
Paul Graham’s Checklist, Would You Make The Cut?
it's probably just a video of the wikileaks staff offering the person a job.
Innovation Happens When Ideas Have Sex
Hmm posted this earlier and it got no love. :(

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1562651
Anyone know if there will be true compatibility of LTE hardware on the US networks? This would finally bring real competition and put an end to this problem.
In a nutshell: Apple has been walking all over competitors with tremendous positional and legacy advantages because only they truly understood end-to-end user experience.
Is anyone else getting just a little bit sick of WikiLeaks? The basic concept of providing transparency is good, but I think they are taking things way too far.

I hadn't even thought of the issue of the Taliban being able to read the records themselves to find out who the informants are.

Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed, and I think that is the fundamental problem with Wikileaks. Some things do more harm out in the open than they would locked away.
every app asks for permissions, thats the problem. If I didn't use apps that had permissions which could possibly be exploited I would have barely any apps.

At the very least malicious apps need to be removed quickly, along with spam + scam apps.
Hacker Koan
$379 is still too expensive, all I want is the base wifi kindle with a few inches more screen area
I love the personal spam filter. I can't see the rest of the slashtags being that useful for most of the searching I do, but I can see myself getting used to it. I go to wolframalpha regularly for things I used to use google calculator for, so at least in my life there's definitely room for niche search engines.
Hey, it’s not just a concept! I thought “Great, once again some pie in the sky concept which will be reality in circa fifty years or not …“ but there are already pilot units installed which turns this from lame into awesome.
Why I hate that Henry Ford quote
A Tale of Persistence:  Finding a Needle in a Haystack
It's almost impossible for google to be able to monetize it

Can you illustrate how the google ads won't work on Google News?
I suspect transfers are archaic (inconvenient, expensive, and take several days or weeks to process) in the US because otherwise the credit card and payment processing industries would cease to exist.
Because Google News isn't Facebook, and the Facebook tradition of decrying every new version is not the way the web traditionally or efficiently works.
I don’t think the grandparent was talking about technical reasons. Publishers are miffed as is, it’s hard to imagine their wailing if Google tried to make money with News.
Paul Graham’s Checklist, Would You Make The Cut? [video]
The best thing Microsoft could do at this point is put together a Metro style touch-centric UI that is the default for Windows tablets. Give developers a quick & dirty way to port their existing applications to a touch-centric UI. It wouldn't be the most elegant solution but it would be closer to what people seem to want in a tablet.
It's not for everyone. Watch the video in the blog post I linked to, or download it and give it a try if you like. Or don't. It may just be that it's not your thing.

Personally, I've found it to be anything but a "procrastination-forming pseudo-notetaking program."
I would think that regions that have the most mobile phone users per square mile and that are the closest to major Internet hubs would have the best rates. So to me, it would make sense for 3G data to be more expensive in rural Alaska than in Queens, NY.

Then again, it might have more to do with taxation and government subsidies, as is the case with the huge difference in the pricing of gasoline worldwide. In The Netherlands, you can expect to pay $7.52 for a gallon of gasoline, while in Venezuela it costs only $0.19.

http://www.theoildrum.com/files/GasPrices.png
I started with the data from the initial version of the http://www.cofoundergoogledocs.com/

Inital traffic was from HN users, I guess. see my the initial post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058824
What Julian appears to me to be trying to do is to reduce the ability of large bureaucratic militarized organizations to dominate innocent individuals.

Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for nation states to directly the cause the death of 160 million people in the 20th century. In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on.

In this context, it really is not reasonable to argue that we would all be much safer if nobody was revealing the secrets of those who have too many secrets.
YouTube - Ticket Challenge
I have specified details of layout and had designers ignore them. The result was unusable because they did not listen. A case in point is providing a color header graphic of fixed width instead of a (faster loading) white-based background design which could scale to variable width and still look good.

Someone who provides a layout is telling the designer what they need and asking for it to be improved. You get better results this way. If a designer told me this was bad for them, I would use someone else. Saves me from getting something unusable back. That said, I think this designer is in the minority. Most are more professional and realize design needs to be contingent on tech/usability factors they may not understand. So they want information and ask questions when they see ways to improve things.
I never really used the Google contacts feature until getting an Android phone. At that point I had to spend an hour getting my contacts into a usable state; most of that time was spent clearing out nearly six years' worth of contacts that were auto-added courtesy of Gmail.
A couple of years ago Julian and his colleagues released information that swung the national election in Kenya. This must have gotten the attention of every government with something to hide (all of them). Since then, he claims to have released more confidential information than the rest of the worldwide media. Combined. The stakes are enormous. And the reality is that that puts a target on your back.

Go Julian, go.
The Search For Life in the Universe
this + augmented reality + webcam = a lot better.

If is weird, though, that a robot would be used in a context that could perfectly suited for virtual interaction. Kinda like a cartoon car with arm to control the steering wheel instead of controlling it directly,
A quickie hack just for spelling. In Firefox at least, use the following bookmarklet to make the current page as loaded "editable". Any text not matching the dictionary will get the "mispelled" marker (by default, a squiggly red underline) -- the same marker that normally appears in textbox entries under unmatched words. Note that it doesn't handle/descend into frames.

There's also an about:config setting that turns on spell-checking for single-line widgets/entries. I forget whether that needs to be on in order to aid the coverage/effectiveness of this hack. I'm thinking not.

--

Toggle document.body.contentEditable (non-recursive)

javascript:%20document.body.contentEditable=(document.body.contentEditable=='true'?'false':'true');void(0);
I love this product. People have been talking "social email" for a long time.... But this is the first implementation that gives more than it distracts.

Wrt the new code that groks auto emails, I would love to see:

- seeing that a Twitter follow email is from Twitter doesn't do much for me. If it parsec the email and told me recent tweets from the follower? That would be awesome

- opening up this kind of support (email parsing) as plugins that could be crowd sourced would be great.

Love it.

D
If there had been major revelations in the leaked data I would be more sympathetic to their cause. 5 days later it's out of the mainstream news cycle because it's not really news worthy. The leak itself is news worthy but the content mostly is not. It looks like all they managed to do was out some informants and damage the possibility of reconciliation. (not that the odds were great to start with)
> It's not a myth.

I refute your argument merely by stating the exact opposite.
The Future of Social Networking is the Surveillance State
"War is a failure of the imagination."

In an ideal world Wikileaks wouldn't be necessary, but in the world we have it helps ameliorate the damage caused by our cognitive biases.

Also, someone should really make Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning into a movie.
Donate to Zed Shaw's Mongrel2 Fund
But who decides what "has to" be exposed, and what doesn't? The problem is that there is no third party at all trustworthy enough to bear the responsibility of "filtering" through all the world's dirty laundry to just find the "morally reprehensible" parts. So, there must be some (transparent) strategy set in advance: they either release nothing (most news agencies), everything (Wikileaks), or use some other pre-defined filter that can be proven to function (i.e. they cover everything, but then push their stories to a proxy server, with a transparent and inspectable program designed to only publish the stories that match some algorithm.)
Ask HN: Best ways to get traffic to newly launched site
I just launched a site called Big Heart Baby (www.bigheartbaby.com) that sells baby clothes and donates 50% of profits to children's charities. Our initial charity partners are focusing on Autism, Children's Cancer, Child Hunger, Juvenile Diabetes, and Pediatric AIDS.

The site went live on Friday and we are, obviously, trying to increase traffic and sales as quickly as possible. So far, we have reached out to the mommy blogging/baby blogging community and have been very well received there. We're also doing facebook ads, google adwords, and distributing our press release to every publication we can think of.

What else should we be doing to drive traffic?
How do you solve a problem like Zed Shaw?
Compression algorithms are poorly suited to parallelism, because they remove everything that isn't a data dependency in the input, and parallelism is nothing but a lack of data dependencies.

The trick is to start at the largest chunk possible and go down until you find where they have left in some, uh, non-dependencies - like bzip2 which has independent x*100KB blocks, and video which (usually) has independent frames. You should be able to get 2-4 separate tasks out of that, which is good enough for CPUs.
How to Come Up With Business Ideas
> "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.

I respectfully disagree.

For one thing, a (graphic) designer can provide a variety of related services, and some of them may overlap other experts on the team, such as the user interface team or a web usability specialist.

For another thing, this presupposes that the designer is the only such expert involved in a project. For larger projects, this may well not be the case, and there may be someone setting the parameters for the overall system and then a number of designers responsible for implementing the general rules in specific areas.

> 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.

You imply a false dichotomy. I can't speak for others, but on several projects I currently work on we might outsource things like graphic design, artwork and typography to a specialist, but want to retain direct control of the overall layout and interactive elements. In one case that comes immediately to mind, that is because we have extensive knowledge of usability issues from a previous version of the software that no designer joining the project fresh would have. In another case, we have web-based access and various apps for mobile devices, and we want a consistent overall look and feel across all versions of the service, so while the designer is free to fit the branding to the natural style on each platform, they don't get to move everything around in a way that could confuse our users. These decisions are not made by amateurs, they are made by specialists whose job is to analyse hard data and make these decisions. I wouldn't ask these people to decide what kind of antialiasing to use on the web buttons, and I wouldn't ask a graphic designer without the relevant knowledge of our products to lay out the user interface.
I have to agree with you.

I think if there ever is a downfall to the Wikileak initiative, it will be due to the gloating and the drama they perpetuate.

Julian and his gang need to stop with the commentary and just release the documents. leave the opinions to be formed by the people. The twitter account is going to come back and bite them in the ass if they keep pushing commentary out.

I fully support the need for an organisation like this and having seen multiple interviews of Julian, I have to say he's the right character to lead this mission.
> In this case we have two extremely popular classics from the 1930s, generally regarded as among the best films ever made.

Just to beat a dead horse, the two films you reference were from the same year; 1939, the best year Hollywood ever had. Ever.

Other films of that year included Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz, Ninotchka, Dark Victory, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Stagecoach, Of Mice and Men, and Young Mr. Lincoln. It was the peak of the "studio system" and Hollywood never again came close to it in terms of the sheer quantity of quality that was produced that year.
I don't but only because I haven't had the chance to compare plans / prices. Anyone know of any good ones? Ideally I'd look for something where there is no contract lock in and I'd pay as I go.
This is flame war bait, but it is an issue that matters in what we as a society are going to do about the obesity problem.
Please produce a statement that I made in which I pretend he's a journalist holding a neutral point of view.
If it's not, you need to find some way to the other side of the Uncanny Valley.
Sixty to seventy years ago, the following information was kept secret by Western governments:

-How to build an atom bomb

-How to build effective radar systems to detect incoming bombers

-The fact that German and Japanese encryption codes had been compromised

-The US Navy's awareness of Japan's intention to attack Midway Island

-The fact that Patton was actually removed from command, and that his travels around Italy and north Africa were a ruse to misdirect German defenses away from Normandy

Need I go on? If some idealist decided to leak these secrets, a lot more innocent individuals would be dominated by certain nation states. State secrets are no different from any other power of the state--they can be used for good or for ill, and it's careful to ensure they're used for good, but it's foolish and suicidal to try and keep them from being used at all.
haha, and the poster of this one is "mixmax"

Talk about a coincidence (or is it??!?).
That's a cool way of looking at it! Thanks! :-)
I thought the "defensive patent" idea was less about "this idea is safe for me to use" and more about Mutually Assured Destruction (which doesn't work against Non Practicing Entities such as your typical patent troll, of course).
Because they were started by, and are still mostly (unless I'm gravely mistaken) developed only by the same people that develop for Ubuntu. If they were more autonomous, I'd be more willing to consider them "upstream".
New controller chip sets stage for color e-readers
A conspiracy in a thread about conspiracies - I'm hooked. ;)
I would guess that you were downvoted because of extreme brevity (e.g. "Iran") or because your comment trivialized the tough business of making and running something like Twitter. If that's the case, then the downvoting doesn't just mean "I disagree"; it means "I disagree, and don't think this guy is worth arguing with." It's a reply to tone as well as content.

Mind you, that's just speculation. I didn't vote on your comment. But most of the time when someone complains about a comment being downvoted "just because you disagree", there's another reason he's overlooking.
It was intelligent persistence. Persistence with a method.
The positive response to this seems down right bizarre to me.

"People could use them to go on remote vacations, he said, touring the streets of a faraway country or interacting with the locals without ever leaving their bedrooms."

This seems to be a serious suggestion. Um, so the vision of the future from Wall*E is something to aspire to? No reason to ever leave your bedroom again, for anything? Not even vacation? That's the value proposition?

Except, all the people there are in their bedrooms controlling their robots, so your robot is just interacting with the other robots there. Except, the people living there are probably controlling a robot near where you live, anyway, so your robot is probably just hanging out with other robot tourists.

For remote work arrangements, the thing that is lacking is the massive amount of information conveyed through body language. 100% of the body language of the person controlling the robot is still not conveyed. So what problem is this actually solving?

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that what we really need is one less reason to get up off our asses and move our bodies.
No need to click if you have keyboard shortcuts on. Just hit 'z.'
Not too sure if donating 50% of profits is enough of a journalism hook, but I believe this is the kind of things that have a chance of getting major PR.

Also, start blogging about child care and parenthood, build up a loyal base of audience.
This is pretty misleading. They assume that any unlimited plan = 30GB. It looks like most plans are still in the $20-$30 range, it's just that a lot of them are unlimited and counting as 30GB, or have an official cap so high that the carriers sell it knowing that on average <10% of the cap will be used.

For example, Drei in Austria is $1.31/GB. Great! Let's replace AT&T's plan for $2.62! ... Oh, that's only if we get a 15GB plan for $19.59? That's a little better, but way less better than the graph makes it appear.
Craig Venter: 'We Have Learned Nothing from the Genome'
Even I wasn't talking about technical reasons. Well there is the point that publishers would be miffed if Google tries to monetize it. But can't they work out an agreement which shares the profit. If they get a click while someone is reading your page, you get some share. Just like Google Adsense. (of course the publishers would want much greater share) Why can't that be done?
You should also edit Wikipedia even if you only use dead-tree reference sources. Indeed, if you are familiar with dead-tree reference sources, you especially should edit Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia is good practice in saying something in a verifiable, neutral point of view manner that anyone can challenge.
And conversely, make sure you aren't backing up what you don't need.
Why would we need ATMs in the future? My ideal ATM is no ATM.
So, are they tracking my comments as I write this?
I think the 8 hour battery life was an important feature for them to hit, so that is probably why the robot itself is pretty spartan.
It would really depend on the culture of the company. I live in Denver and my boss is in Texas. I think for our team makeup, a robot like this could actually be effective.
Maybe I got started on wrong foot here:
here is my analysis, hopefully non trollish

1. Their business seems to focused on analytics/data mining

2. In that case their primary requirement should be for people who have experience in distributed computing , map - reduce, data mining, visualization

3. Instead you find them talking about clojure, a language which has a very small user base and not at all used in ML / data mining.

4. This seems fishy I can name several startups identica, cellexis and other who are in nearly similar area, and you can have a look at their job requirements.

5. All above points lead me to conclude that this company is being run by people who focus too much on knowing a certain language, rather than focusing on tools of the trade. Which is un understandable.

6. It gives a feel that the company is looking for someone who can write automated sys admin scripts rather than work on acutal statistical models or interface. The latter two jobs are considered a bit more interesting than just cluster maintainace in clojure.

Regarding few points i made earlier:
1. Clojure is second class beacuse of lack of support or user group.
2. Regarding a comment by strlen on python not being used, python + hadoop streaming or python + c libraries are preffered solution in both research as well as production environments.
There are also quite a few good C++ libraries such as SNAP.

In my opinion if you are ending up working with java after using clojure it makes more sense to code in java itself. This actually describes a perfect case of creating lisp in your language of choice situation.
Online mba university
Online MBA University is nothing but bringing home the university itself. Earning an MBA degree in an online accredited university has never been so easy before. With the virtual classroom facility and online e-learning programs professionals can now easily complete the course.
"I don't know whether Guido will ever add it for, er, closure, but I do know that I have _never_ _once_ needed this keyword in hundreds of thousands of lines of real Python code I have written."

This is the blubbiest non-ironic statement I can remember reading.
This looks like it's going to be a good series. I have trouble remembering to follow up on multi-part stories. Does anyone have any good strategies or is there a HN tool for doing so?
Apple iphone 4 cases
PDair Leather Case for Apple iPhone 4 - Flip Type (Snap Button)(Black) by PDair. Buy high quality Leather Case for Apple iPhone 4
Enjoyable humor of life, conflicts, and all that....and what's more even better when well known people who put a lot work into their public projects and writings worry about people tarnishing their work and image ;-D

P.S. at the point where you're writing a title such as "how do you solve a problem like person X" its also the point where you get to brush up against the wild world of lord of the flies. good times
If You Want Something Done, Send A Startup Guy