skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Death annoys me. People who can afford $300/year for a cheap cryonics membership and life insurance, and who don't sign up, annoy me. A lot of them are probably being held off by the trivial inconvenience of signing a few papers without a paid salesman to hold their hand. It therefore annoys me that cryonics is poorly marketed and that there are no paid salespeople - that no one gets a commission when you sign up for cryonics.
British Airways launches iPhone App
Mountain View, Auckland, Beijing, Copenhagen, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto

Mozilla is hiring!

http://www.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Jobs.aspx?c=qpX9Vfwa

HQ in downtown Mountain View, CA, but we have offices in Toronto, New Zealand, Paris, Tokyo and Beijing. Great benefits, extremely challenging projects (scaling web services to 400+ million users, optimizing our JS engine, making Firefox mobile fast on phones).
Closures and TCO, please.
This model also works because their customers (developers) are very technical so having a non-technical customer support would be very frustrating.
Linkbait if I've ever seen it. No announcement was actually made.
It wasn't a true "teathering" app. It was just a flashlight app that also opened up a SOCKS proxy within the app. Its very possibly that if the App also had network code for loading ads, say through iAds or AdMob, that an API scanner wouldn't notice anything unusual for a reviewer to feel concerned about.

Apple did find an app that exploited an App Store feature that you only need to type in your iTunes password once for a period of 5 minutes -- allowing you to DL multiple apps with minimum hassle. An app used its in-app content purchase to bill buyers for $200 worth on content it purchases without the user's explicit consent.

Apple may not be looking out for you in general, but they looking out for their brand, which is tied to consumer experience.
I think a lot of the problem comes down to MBA students who have zero critical thinking or problem solving ability. I see it all the time in my program - students take everything they learn verbatim and act like it is gospel. In reality, they should always be questioning what they are learning, thinking about how it might apply in the real world, and what the benefits/consequences are. For example, my Entrepreneurship class is making us write a business plan with the sole intention of gaining funding. That's nice - but at the same time I'm using it as an exercise to also see what the plan would look like as a lifestyle or small (37signals-ish) business.

Secondly, MBA programs are just now beginning to (somewhat) teach that pure profit maximization is not the only goal of a business. It will take a while for this to catch on, and not all MBA students are going to adopt this way of thinking, but there are some of us out there who do. This is happening with both social ventures and sustainability-focused businesses.
Repeated, unorganized debates online in comments, forums
Systems like Password1 solve this for me, with the added benefit that if someone manages to hack one of these sites and capture my password for it they'll have a bunch of random characters that wont work for anything else I have.

Personally I don't like OpenID for this reason among others.
Changes listed at: http://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/1.2.x/changes.txt

Also, the Clojure/core team (and many other helpful cats) are happy to help (see http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/291...)
Heading there now!
Strangely, most of the time, I find that I need to place the opposite type on constraints on myself, e.g. don't be so cheap with food and endanger my health, don't be too hardworking and sacrifice sleep, etc.
Whatever number happens to mesh with the poster's predetermined position on the matter. If they think that HFT isn't "real work"[0], they'll set the level low. If they're a free-market fetishist, they'll say the tank is indefinitely large.

Metaphors are rarely a useful approach to understanding something.

[0] An amusing position for a programmer to take, considering we make completely intangible stuff while spending hours a day sitting on our asses, but one that a lot of people on this site seem to hold.
Agree.

There's this presumption that MBAs are robots. I can tell you from experience (although mine predates the explosion of the WWW) that more than half of the people in MBA programs are robots. Having said that, isn't that true for any other degree? In the end, it's not the degree that matters, but the person.

Funny thing is that when I did my MBA, the professors were saying that MBAs in Canada (where I'm from) were nothing like the US. MBA's in Canada were taught to be middle managers, while MBAs in the US were taught to be more entrepreneurial (there's no "American dream" in Canada). When you read about the US tech gurus mocking MBAs you get the impression that's clearly not the case.

I don't think it's necessarily fair to judge people by the degree, but on the person as a whole - personality, geek level, work experience, etc.
Losses at BT's Global Services division narrow
MIT 6.046 April Fools Joke
i came here to say basically the same thing. "no support staff" is not the same as using engineers as support staff.

i was expecting more of an article on a startup of 2 cofounders who are managing things themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6100

1 week of battery duration (The original battery which is 6 years old).
Ask HN: What's Your Story?
Recently, there has been an increase in stories where people in distress have asked this community for help. The responses have been amazing, but something troubles me. Is there a way to help those who haven't or can't reached out? Further, is it possible to help people stop the situation from degrading to this level in the first place?

So, I invite you to share your stories. They need not be inspirational. They need not be stories of success. You don't need to draw conclusions from them or offer advice. Just share whatever you think that others can relate to.

P.S. - If you can't share it with your normal account please use an anonymous ID. You might lighten the loads of your shoulder and, who knows, even save a life.

[edit: I made some dyslexic errors]
If you're trying to make it perfect, you'll waste all of your time in tiny unimportant details (and you won't even manage to make something good). There are a lot of would-be writers with beautifully polished first chapters, and nothing else. Software is the same.

Likewise with making it good -- everything takes longer than estimated, and so life will likely intervene to stop you working before you even have anything working at all.

Lesson: get it working first (however badly), and evolve it from there.
Non-teaching of explicit rationality annoys me. The most fundamental, elementary, and basic concepts of rationality are not systematically explained anywhere that I know of. It is impossible to engage the average PhD in a dialogue with agreed-upon rules of reasoning because they do not know why you can't prove things about the real world by arguing about the definitions of a word, or why it's a bad idea to pick a conclusion first and then come up with arguments for it, or the Bayesian definition of evidence that forms the foundation of all belief updates in epistemic rationality, or why violating the expected utility theorem by failing to assign consistent utilities always means leaving some value on the table.

I am writing a book to solve this problem.
I got excited thinking he was going to tell us how an end-user described a database (according to their non-technical understanding). No such luck :-(
Apple could "stop" this very easily. Don't allow access to native hardware APIs through the browser via JavaScript; thus, making "webapps" inferior to "native apps" based on capabilities of interacting with the hardware.

Phonegap, FTW.
"Tribalism": a great term for what's wrong with the world today in general. I'd been fishing for a word, calling it "the team sports mentality" for lack of something more insightful and concise.
Have you thought about piano rolls ? Either paper-based ones that you draw yourself, or use software like Reason that has a piano roll for note input or display, nor sheet music. Actually, most non-classic music software has piano rolls.
360 Health: Five Benefits of Children's Yoga
I don't see why high-frequency trading contracts that spread.

If they overlap very briefly (say, across different markets) and nobody else has noticed yet, a trading program jumps in and arbs the difference. That increases the spread.
He's a designer, why doesn't he have any slides or other preparation for a TED talk? Does he put any effort into speaking English clearly? Why does he talk about that bogus lightning/primordial soup theory? Why is he attacking a straw man that we are the permanent pinnacle of evolution? Eight minutes in and he still hasn't said anything about design. I give up.
Actually it is. "app-style experience" is the easy part - but there's more examples of bad then good.

The failing is when HTML/JS needs to do 'heavy lifting' that native code does better (such as large memory based tasks, 3d rendering for now, animations, heavy math, or hooking into hardware).
"TCP

Programmers think these are streamed sequential messages, so if they send a ”message” that’s 10k long then when the receiver gets it and read from the TCP socket they get a single 10k message in reply. This only works in small messages and not on the internet, so it’s easy to see how it would seem to work that way. The reality is you can get messages of any size, and without some framing mechanism you wouldn’t know where one messages ends or beings. TCP is a streaming protocol.

UDP

Programmers think UDP sockets are single fast reliable messages that can be sent to one or more target clients. They at least know UDP has a fixed upper bound size, but they don’t get that UDP is very unreliable and that the addressing is fairly weak.

"

Writing tip: start by saying what they are, rather than what they're not. People may not have existing notions to shatter. A lot of Django documentation suffers from this too: 'before frameworks, you would have..., but not with Django' isn't relevant if you're learning to program with a framework.
Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.
It sounds to me like you are quoting verbatim something Chris Anderson might say.

Software companies in the valley have gotten along just fine charging for services and software with only giving users a token free trial. Microsoft and Oracle are doing just fine.

If you want to look at the big players on the web, there are far more public companies charging for services then there are whose main product is free. Akamai, Sales Force, Amazon, Ebay, NetFlix, Omniture (now adobe) I could go on and on.

When talking about public companies who give their primary service away for free, I can only think of 4examples with market caps over a billion: Google, Yahoo, IACI, and sometimes Monster.

There is a lot of hype about free, thanks especially to Chris Anderson's highly accessible book and influence, but if you look at the results and who really made it big (not 100 million dollar exit big, but multi billion dollar market cap big), starting with a business model where you charge your customers is the best way to achieve that.
Well, in the case of these financial programmers, they negotiated a simple percentage of the daily take. In a sense, they've negotiated themselves into the "VISA" position. Use me, and life is much easier and you make more money over all -- but I get a cut out of every transaction I helped you with.

Again, for these programmers, who are literally in the business of making money, its a great approach.
I use bitlbee to gate all of my IM networks to a single IRC channel which I then point X-Chat at. I also ocassionaly jump onto freenode to get real time support for various open source packages.
Apple starts patenting mobile app ideas
He'll have to learn how to write without insulting and alienating half his audience.
Agreed. I've seen this video here at least two times...
If Greg had started his post with a question along the lines of:

"Dear Mark, what can GNOME do to help
Canonical integrate your work & devs
with upstream?"

Rather than:

"*omfgroflcopter* you Canonical dudes
are all like soooo lame and have never
done anything for GNOME"

...then maybe his post would have translated to a measurable improvement in my reality.

As it stands all he's created is a distraction from getting code written.

sigh
It's probably more about phonetic symbolism:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119111051.ht...
Have you ever been to IKEA? I wish that they would do stand-alone cafeterias like that have in the store, but place them around the city; I would eat there all the time.

It's really good (and healthy [steamed vegetables, fish, etc.]) and really cheap; it's awesome.
... | sort -nr | head

...may save tail(1) some work.
With stocks, if you can't have control over how the company is managed, you're just playing lottery.
I believe USAA also supports check imaging - no need to physically deposit a check. take a picture / scan it from your home or office and it will be processed.
And how is it not? It's a car that, in normal use, will use no gasoline. That's a big deal now, and an even bigger deal if some sort of cap and trade/carbon tax is put into place.

But, unlike the Leaf, Tesla and other pure electrics, it is capable of driving long distances because of the gas engine.

It's the first electric car without "range anxiety".
I believe google voice does this
Ability Maps, Deaf Mayors and $1000 Strollers
Every day at work. I can't recommend any channels to you though.
Or even just physical addresses in general. I wish there was an official registry a-la-dns, people would mail things to me, and the post office would route it to me based on what that registry said. Yes, you'd have to update it, but it beats having to update my address in a half-dozen places every time I move.

There are actually a few places that deal with this - http://earthclassmail.com/ being one of them.
People take MBAs to network with other people.
We don't hav a specific pricing plan yet, that's way running beta to figure out people's usage pattern first.
I haven't read the contract, but what do you want to bet the paperwork people had to sign to get one of the EV1's excused GM from liability in the event the experimental car did something unexpected (say electrocution or a fire)?

The last thing GM would have wanted is a couple hundred of its test fleet to get in the hands of the public.

There was a known cost to destroying the failed product line and an unknown cost to support it going forward (not just liability but parts and service). They went down the fiscally sound path.
I agree, there are many of us who for our own use just have 2 or 3 servers. For customers/companies, the rates seem reasonable.
People join Facebook and Linkedin to network with other people. Oh, and they don't cost $100k+ to join.
I knew somebody would bring this up. :-)

What many people don't realize is that in the current situation, instead of paying (more) for the show/newspaper/etc, we pay for advertisements instead. When a business spends $$$ to promote their product, that money didn't fall out of the air; it's part of the price of the product they sell (much like some part of it is production cost, etc). So whenever somebody buys product X, they're also paying (a tiny fraction) for that product's advertisement.

So no, I would not be willing to pay to remove the ads from a website, since I am already paying to put them on there in the first place.

Personally, I would much rather that the price of all products would be a bit lower (i.e. minus any advertisement costs), and pay more for content that I actually want to see/watch/read, without obnoxious advertisements and commercials.

Admittedly, the current situation isn't anything like this, so if it were to happen, maybe I would actually regret it, or maybe it would have unforeseen drawbacks. (As it is, many people seem to be unwilling to pay for content...) It does seem like a fairer system though, that doesn't force consumers to read/watch things they don't want to.
This is exactly what I wanted to say, but was too lazy to type up.
I hang out on a private IRC server with about 15 folks, mostly old friends of mine working in various parts of the industry. It's primarily a place to talk about geeky topics and complain about work.
If that were true, the entire history of humanity would be wrong in general.
The N8 is a really nice phone by 2002 standards. I used to be a big fan of Nokia because they didn't clutter up their menus so badly, or if they did you could at least remember the numbers and zip through them that way. The 8890 was the peak of Nokia, and it's all been downhill from there, trumped time and time again by Ericsson and more recently Apple.
I program in Java every day and I see nothing in that list that I really cannot do without.

Structs / value types? Nice to have but you can make do with java.nio.ByteBuffer.

Concurrent PermGen sweeping? I work on a big enterprise project like the article mentions but this has never been an issue in production, only development and then only when reloading lots and lots of classes.

Unsigned equality checks would be nice but you can work around that, too.
I agree that they were missing some core features in the beginning. It has greatly improved though.

They've opened it up now so that you can design a better interface if you wish to. They've also opened it up to anyone with an email address now, and expanded on the robots and gadgets.

Now I don't use Wave that much because I don't often need the collaboration that it offers. However, if they could integrate Wave and Gmail, it would be immensely useful, especially the gadgets and robots.
Yes, the whole idea is the car is smart enough to maintain a speed. You're right about having problems in the mountains. If someone doesn't want their car to downshift, they'd just slow down by lifting and returning to the zero point. I think it would be a little better than cruise control in the mountains, but not much.
Introducing riak_core
> Options/Exit is a long time Symbian thing.

I understand this. As a potential customer, I don't care.

> they probably didn't want to change things too much.

As a potential customer, your wants are secondary to mine.
Yes, these professors have spent a good portion of their life slaving away so that now they can be at the top. These professors slaved away in hopes for a number of things: time off, freedom to research, being able to work with bright young students, etc. They weren't the only ones who had dreams or who slaved away. What about the grad student who drops out, wants to switch to a different field(a side effect of the system is overspecialization), who chooses the wrong advisor or institution? What about the bright, but poor, undergraduate who would like to have a self-study option and a small fee for tests? (Yes there is that option for some lower-level courses but is curiously absent for higher-level courses. Similarly, universities within the same state often don't accept transfer credits from each other except for a few courses.)

If people should be paid for their hard work, then a lot of people are underpaid. People though are paid for their productivity. These professors and grad students who slave away are not productive. They are not producing what our society needs. They are feeding all their work into the machine and what is the output of this "machine" that gets fed all the blood, sweat, tears, and tax payer money?

Good research and teaching?

I neglected to mention the bundling together of research and teaching. Instead of doing one or the other well, both provide excuses for mediocrity. At middle and bottom tier schools effective teaching is possible but faculty use their research as a justification for high salaries. The students learn the material outside of class mostly. There's very little in-class discussion and the only justification teachers have for their salaries is their "research". A good teacher, as far as the students are concerned, is one who gives fair and/or lenient tests and isn't a boring lecturer. The teaching part of their jobs could be replaced by a textbook, some video lectures, perhaps an online homework system, and tests at a testing center. Such a system would make a good business model if the current system wasn't so deeply rooted in our society. As I mentioned before, a college degree is a prerequisite for a lot of state jobs and is a barrier designed to prop up the system.
Yup. My company uses it amongst the devs to stay in touch. I also lurk on #nodejs.
While I have a lot of criticisms of the MBA program I was in, I was lucky to get a few important lessons that I think are useful:

1 - From my small business professor: Don't think about it, just do it. If you overanalyze your idea, you'll never start your business.

2 - Guest speaker in advertising: The customer always gets what they deserve.

3 - Economics professor: Most of the experts out there just read a couple more articles more than the next guy.

4 - Same economics professor: If you want to be rich, sail and ski. You'll make your best connections. (I don't do either, but I don't disagree with his assessment)

5 - Strategy classes: Focus on what you're good at

6 - Final Strategy Study: Learning how to work with people you want to fire but can't

Of course, everyone gets different stuff out of their program - it seemed like everyone in my cohort wanted to be a product manager at Proctor and Gamble, but that's another story.
I recall a cafe in Brussels I saw on some PBS travel show, where all the seating was long wooden benches. This is much more sociable than what I see in most US eateries.

I find that one of the Whole Foods in Houston is a good option, so long as I don't want to pig out. (The one off Wesleyan - 4004 Bellaire.) They have a couple of long tables, but not enough volume of people interested in talking. The food is top-notch, though and they have a great selection of raw foods. Kirby - the food isn't as good though okay and the customers are obnoxious. (Some of the help is pretty unconcerned too.) Westheimer & Wilcrest - I liked the store and what food there was was good, but selection was gimpy when I worked near there. The other Whole Foods in town are not worthy of the name as far as the hot-bar selections and attention to detail go.

Sometimes I've eaten at the Kirby Whole Foods and looked down the row of 2-seat tables by the window. 4 people in a row eating by themselves and reading.

(There's some weirdos at the cheese bar at the Wesleyan/Bellaire Whole foods who know a bit and give a damn about cheese -- enough to give out delightful recommendations.)
Have you tried throwing yourself at a project that's philanthropic? Go do something for other people... I think you'll find it a lot more re-energizing than sorting out how to be excited about keeping the salary-hamster-wheel spinning.
That is a very funny video. As someone who recently downgraded to the tremendously slow on iPhone 3G iOS 4, it brightened my day to realize that things could be worse.
Yep. Freenode IRC. I lurk on about 25 channels, ranging from the local Linux User's Group channel, to the #startups channel (which draws a lot of HN'ers) to the channels for several programming languages I use, etc.

IRC is definitely alive and well, especially on Freenode.
To be clear: if they terminate your use of Cloudkick, your servers keep running - they just aren't being monitored anymore.
I can't speak for tricky, but variable ratio transmissions do exist. They're called CVTs and while they're not super popular (there were some issues w/ them in the 80's), they're slowly being reintroduced to the market.