skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if the outrage over this is part of the same trend described in the 20-somethings article ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614280 ). If kids are more sheltered, then it would make sense that it takes longer for them to "grow up" and start making decisions of their own. It could also explain why the partying and debauchery is so crazy at American colleges (the first real taste of independence), although I can't honestly say I know what its like anywhere else.
Ask HN: "Fair Use" of Magazine Logos?
Hi,

Our organization makes free software, and recently "Product X" was reviewed and given the "Editor's Choice" award by PC Magazine.

Seeing this, I placed their magazine logo linking back to the review on our download page, alongside the badges of other download awards we've been given in the past.

I was contacted barely 24 hours later by Ziff Davis Media legal, and told that my use of the logo was not Fair Use and I had to license their editor's choice award logo for $1250 per year.

I'm no lawyer, but I honestly feel that this is fair use? I'm using their logo to link back to their site - does anyone know if this is not allowed?

BTW, the PC Magazine review used our product, screenshots of our product, and more without letting us know they were doing a review let alone asking for our permission. Can someone explain the logic in this to me? And on their site, they have the screenshot of Product X alongside the "PC Magazine Editor's Choice" logo.

I'm sure anyone reading this can figure out "our organization" and "Product X" but whatever.
Really? In my current position I have hired 8 contractors over the last 3 years, and 5 employees.

Initially we tried to always hire the best developers we could get, who tended to be contractors. Several of these guys were actual core members on major projects like Rails and Prototype. The work they did was amazing, but we could never get a long term commitment and thus they never came to really understand the codebase, and it was impossible to get emergency bug fixes from them in a timely manner. Of the 8, we still use 1 because he is able to respond quickly, and because the scope of what we use him for is relatively small and well-defined.

Of the 5 fulltimers we've hired, only one didn't work out. The others are not quite as good as some of the big names, but definitely above average and able to add real value not just to the pieces of the code they work on, but the overall technical and product strategy.
"Some skeptics" is exactly what I'm talking about.

Regarding the whole climate thing -- it's a fact that the earth's temperature is rising. Whether CO2 is the primary driver is debatable, although it seems to make the most sense.

Yet in articles about the thing, you see the idea of whether the earth's temperature is rising treated as a controversy. No. It's a fact. Splitting the difference between a fact and a lie isn't "teaching the controversy", it's enabling lies.

EDIT: You're complaining about something different. They can't report every fact in every story, and they similarly didn't say anything about what various industry shills are contributing to the debate. Omitting very important facts is of course very serious - but it's a different class of screwup.

Agree very much on the "objective and savvy". Hence you'll see some georgetown douchebag who hasn't left the beltway in 20 years lecturing people about what the "heartland" thinks, because it seems to play well in the media.
while I agree to most part of the article, I'd like to see however what are the ratio's of android to iphone sales for AT&T. If iphone is a clear winner there, only thing Apple has to do is make it available for other carriers and they will own the market again. I think lot of android users in other categories don't have the option to get iPhone and so get Android (the best alternative).
first thing I noticed is that nezumi doesn't offer an iPad version
To account for the unpredictable variability of test difficulty.
They only just invented it. I'm sure it will be improved.
So, what do you do?
> I'm a programmer

Oh, who do you work for?
> Myself. I started a market research company with my best friend a year ago.

Oh, like a start up?
> Yeah, I guess you can call it that. We do some contract work on the side to pay for things.

Hows it going so far?
> Pretty good! We've tried out some things that haven't worked out and we're trying out new things. What about you, what do you do?

- At this point, 99% of people feel as if they know everything about you. So the game, you the more intelligent entrepreneur with your max hax0r people skillz, is to find something interesting about them. If you manage to do that, then you might just have a new friend, and not just another business card.
A fatal flaw of the lean startup model: not focusing enough on the market forces
I'm not sure either, but I really like it. It looks like a comfortable size for reading and watching videos. Although I've only played a couple of times briefly with an iPad, my initial reaction has always been "cool, but slightly too big for what it is".
Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616154
Agreed. It's not always easy for business founders to find a technical co-founder right off the bat. In fact, that's probably the biggest hurdle to get over for anyone coming from the business side. If all you have is an idea and no tech co-founder to share it with then the worst thing you could do is spin wheels trying to find the right partner. Better, I would say, to get the ball rolling with some freelance coders and as the product comes to an MVP 1.0 and you start showing it around and getting some traction you will find technical leads.

It's always better for a business founder to get a technical co-founder, yes, but it is not necessary to have one right from the start.
If we can measure variance inside of 33 days, and that's extrapolated over
a few millions of years, that could skew the numbers a bit.
[..]
that has a huge impact on carbon dating.

No, the effect is very extremely small and this has no impact at all. Lets suppose that:

* we measure differences of 1/1000th in decay rates (this is reasonable given the differences the article is based on)

* the average variation is 1/1000th, otherwise it would have been detected earlier.

* the halflife of C14 is 5000 years (to make calculations easy)

* we are determining the age of something 20000 years old (carbon dating is only used for ages in that order of magnitude).

* the decay formula is y = x(1/2)^(t/tau), where y is the amount of C14 you will measure after t years, tau is the halflife in years and x is the initial amount of C14 we obtained via other means.

We measure an amount of C14 that's 2^4 times smaller than current amounts and conclude that the amount of C14 was halved 4 times. If the decay rate was actually 1/1000th larger on average, then we should have conclude that 2^(-4) = 1/2^(t/5005) or t = 20020 years. In other words: the error is as large as the relative seasonal variation, which is quite small already and probably falls well within the regular error bars.
link to the guy who did the work (and posted more interesting maps): http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/08/the-top-...
The ol' "I've got a great idea for a business. All you have to do is all of the work and then we'll be rich." routine. It never gets old.
[I believe] that physics theories are just mathematical models we construct, and that it is meaningless to ask if they correspond to reality, just whether they predict observations." --Hawking

That's where I'm heading... I am slowly coming to the point, which is hard to take-in emotionally, that that’s all the justification we have for any scientific theory.
Bug report:

http://imgur.com/jAg1J.png from
http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=n8uYJzau87

In the image, there are two identical items called "The Top Idea in Your Mind".
Something's a bit funky with Inc's page. It states 2009 revenue as both $5.4 million (the current section) and $2.2 million (the previous rankings section).
Don't forget all of the other technology that makes the computers work, like the busses (e.g. PCI Express, USB, SATA/eSata), the host of technology behind the graphics processors, Immersion Lithography (immersing the lasers in fluid allows better control over the diffraction pattern, which allows finer artifacts on the silicon die... AMD developed a really clever way to do this in a high-volume fab -- I call that a pretty serious innovation), virtualization (which isn't anything new, but Intel brought to mainstream hardware and AMD followed suit)...

What it comes down to is that Apple isn't a technology company. Neither is Dell. Apple does cool stuff with other company's innovations. (Dell just does stuff with other company's innovations -- usually aimed at lowering the price instead of being cool or trendy.)
For anyone interested in a "programming book" specific perspective: http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/
You are super awesome! The saving bucks keep on passing.
I find it pretty hard to believe that this is really the most typical response. Most Mac software downloaded goes like this: Double-click to mount, drag Application into Applications folder. Two steps, usually with big arrows to make it as clear as possible. The only other use case I know is: Double-click to mount, Double-click installer, click through till you're done. And most Mac users I know (non-techies) have installed several third party applications.
Java 7 : The new try-with-resources statement
I'll have to defer to your expertise! I've got very little experience with stars. Do you suppose that if the core is rotating faster than the surface, a slower periodicity could be obtained by a beating interaction between the different angular frequencies?

Actually, we can already measure stellar neutrinos... I wonder if we've already observed this hypothetical 33 day period.
I love it - Zack I bet you'd get another nice bunch of eyeballs if you'd post a takeaway on your stats from the mention - I'd be very curious about visitors / conversions from such a strong PR piece -
To be fair, the video says September 2nd, which is next week. That's pretty close to "shutting up until they have something concrete to show". Assuming September 2nd is a launch date and not the date of the press conference where they'll announce trade show where the first estimate of the initial release date will be announced.

But, otherwise totally agreed. A little less conversation, a little more action please. I'm looking at you, pixelQi tablets.
If you're not, that's not all you do, or you do it at more than one place, I tend to think "I invest in young businesses" opens some doors and is fairly accurate whether your investment is time, energy, money, or a combination.

If you don't have the energy or the motivation to really get into it, "I am a (financial|management|technology|legal|PR)? consultant" is an easy out.
It's interesting to see how fast the basepair counts shoot up for more complex organisms. Worm: 100Mbp, fly: 160Mbp, Mouse: 3 Bbp, Human: 3 Bbp.
World Ads and Dating Service
1. Free Multilanguage Classified Ads;
2. All of your written texts in the Catalog will be understood in 37 World languages;
3. Look without Registering;
4. Place Free Advertisements;
5. A special People Search;
6. This is a Catalog where you can find a job, buy, sell and rent, give services or find a place to study. The City Guide will help you to find entertainment, shopping, restaurants and lodging
The small chance of licensing the patent later is all the incentive Kodak had for putting money into this project.
It's more like: maybe something estimated to be 20.0 million years old (with an error bar of 0.5 million years) should have been estimated to be 19.99 million years old, with the same error bar and hence the same precision, which is still 20.0 million years. And that only makes sense if we weren't talking about carbon dating, which isn't used for those timescales.
Real limitations will always restrain you, no matter how optimistic you are.
The thing about gamechanging devices is that you cant be sure if there is a market for them before they launch. The ipad, iphone, walkman all created segments which did not exist. Not to say that this Samsung gadget will prove gamechanging, but given the right attributes and user experience something like this could fly. As usual the software will make or break the device.
RankChecker is still showing me different site positions in the Yahoo and Bing search results.

Shouldn't keyword rankings be identical if Bing is powering both?
Exactly. The author argues as though our view of nanotech hasn't changed in the last 25 years, which is of course not true.
The only people who could say that are people who've never had to hire and manage programmers for a living. It's ridiculously hard.

With a technical co-founder you have someone who is presumably very talented and extremely motivated with a hearty chunk of equity and passion for the space.

Instead, these guys will be getting the worst developers, because:

1) The good developers either want to be the technical cofounder or work for a great one.

2) Startups tend to underpay developers already and employees get very little equity.

3) Non-technical people have no way of determining who is a good programmer or a bad programmer.

4) Business-people will not make a hacker culture where engineering and innovation are rewarded.

5) Unless they have many years of experience managing software projects, statistically, theirs will fail.

And the worst developers are actually WORSE than nothing because they'll end up costing more than they contribute.

Really, how could a tech business succeed when they don't value technical skill?

It just shows extreme naivete about how programming works to think they could do it without a really talented, involved and dedicated technical person. I agree with OP: give them 6 months and see if they have anything to show for it.
You just seem better off keeping your research secret for 10-15 years, and /then/ taking the patent.
I've been married for 20 years and have been through big companies, startups, and consulting.

IM(NS)HO, the most important thing between spouses is the ability to communicate. She may be supportive, loving, caring, and willing to learn, but the gap between your relative cultural awarenesses is substantial. Too substantial? I do not know, only you do.

You know how it is with your closest friends, the ones you've known forever: You say one or two words of movie dialog with just the right intonation and they smile or LOL or frown or cry with you, because they know exactly what you mean. ("Temba, at rest.")

Take that and multiply it by a Really Big Number (RBN): That is the lack of commonality in your communications. Your references to biblical exegesis, music theory, FPS or MMO, economic policy, etc., etc., etc., are all lost. You do not have that shorthand communication.

You'll make a comment, say, a literary metaphor, and she will be lost.

Multiply her loss by RBN when the two of you are out with your friends.

If, IF, the two of talk about this, and decide together that the two of you will support each other through thick and thin and work together to overcome this isolation, without ever, ever, EVER, being patronizing or condenscending, if, if, IF, then the two of you can make it work.

But it starts with that conversation. If she is sufficiently self-aware, she is aware of this gap. If she is a self-motivated learner, she will overcome it.

But the day you mess up and lord your superior cultural knowledge over her is the day you lose her. I don't think that one will be apologizable.

But then maybe none of this matters to her. Perhaps her interests lie elsewhere and she is so happy being with you while developing her own interests that this present gap will in time be fill in, covered over, by the new history the two of you share.

(As an aside, if she is a self-motivated learner, the two of you might talk very seriously about discreetly acquiring a lot of picture-book or graphic-novel versions of the Bible and classics of Western literature and science. Just a thought. But discreetly, so that others don't belittle her for learning from comic books.)

All of this assumes, of course, that she is interested in developing her own interests. If you are motivated, intellectual self-starter you will never be happy with a codependent breeder love-pet. You will want an independently minded motivated self-starter with her own interests. She doesn't have to start a startup, but she does have to start herself. And the two of you have to kickstart your kids done the right path too. That requires at least some shared culture, lest one of you lord over the other.)
Preempting Search
I'm awesome. Bam, infinite savings.
In some cases there are very good reasons. One you might not have thought of, but which another [better] article raised, was that some tablet OEMs are waiting on next generation chips from component suppliers. Others are waiting for Gingerbread. Others (e.g. Augen) are just incompetent, but I think that's a rarity.
Ignorance is not unforgivable, flaunting it as a badge of honor is.
Ask HN: Who's the most important person you've emailed and answered?
President? Big Shot CEO?, the Pope?
Quick reader!
Could Oracle's Java patent suit end with remote bricking of Android phones?
The point of the patent system is to encourage inventors to publish their inventions without fear of having the idea stolen.
This is really great. I just had to fill my Spotify queue with Iron Maiden and try to sing along. Singing is one of those skills I really regret not having, but I sing anyway.
I have an iPad and this is the first impression it gives. But the more you use it the more you realize that this is the right size for a lot of things: reading books, browsing web pages or content in applications (calendar, address book). Moreover you have a decent sized keyboard that helps you avoiding typing errors, which are quite common given that you don't feel the keys.
First Law of Sane Personal Computing
Probably not. In fact, even Google returns different results for itself sometimes, depending on the servers your search request gets routed through.
Bing uses a lot of Microsoft technologies including C# and .NET framework languages but as with many large services (or sets of services in this case) the components crawling, processing, indexing and serving content are written in a variety of languages including C, C++, etc and are managed by a myriad of tools languages that support features.
Thanks for the comment! Sharing profits is a good idea, but it's not allowed on Kickstarter as it cannot be used for investment purposes due to the fact that they use Amazon payment platform.

Good point about the dev credit. I wasn't sure if people would care much about it, but it sounds like some would and I'll move the rewards up (or lower the cost).

Thanks again!
Apparently the the drag/drop install thing is not intuitive to even technical users. I don't remember what my reaction was to this the first time I encountered it, but I'd guess it wasn't entirely positive.

There's a perfectly good system wide Installer on the Mac, but nobody uses it unless they have to, because installers suck (they ask, among other things, which drive you'd like to install the software to -- what normal user knows the answer to that question?).

A number of vendors are working to improve application downloads by distributing applications as self-extracting zipfiles that put the original archive in the trash on extractions, and making it so that if the application is launched from the downloads folder or the desktop it initially politely asks if you'd like to "install" the application. This is pretty foolproof. Even if the user declines to move it, the Application will still work from the Downloads directory or the Desktop, it just won't be as easy to find.
Hacking Your Location With Facebook Places
> is to find something interesting about them. If you manage to do that, then you might just have a new friend, and not just another business card.

Well put. From a recent NYTimes

"With the exception of his time at Oxford, Haden has spent his entire adult life as the guy everybody knows as soon as he walks into the room. His friends say Haden’s gift is that he leaves knowing everybody else’s stories.

“He has such compassion and humility,” said J. K. McKay, who caught Haden’s passes at Bishop Amat High in La Puente, Calif., east of Los Angeles, and at U.S.C., where they were coached by McKay’s father, John."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/sports/23haden.html?_r=1&#...
As Joel Spolsky said:

"Pick your core business competencies and goals, and do those in house. If you're a software company, writing excellent code is how you're going to succeed. Go ahead and outsource the company cafeteria and the CD-ROM duplication. If you're a pharmaceutical company, write software for drug research, but don't write your own accounting package. If you're a web accounting service, write your own accounting package, but don't try to create your own magazine ads. If you have customers, never outsource customer service."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html

I'm now the technical co-founder of a software company that originally outsourced the development of the software to another firm. To say it was a disaster before I arrived would be an understatement.
NASA Solves Solar Energy's Dust Problem
KM-Proxy.de &raquo; Suchergebnisse  &raquo;  Www.google.com
Yes, the proportion of US residents traveling overseas is probably lower than other developed nations. UK residents for example made 47 million[1] air trips in 2009 vs. 39 million[2] for US citizens. However the argument that fear is the primary cause is misguided. Consider:

1. If you live in the UK and you want sunny weather or a ski trip, you'll need to go elsewhere in Europe. If you live in the US, you can probably get away with a local flight.

2. It's easier to justify and amortize the time to travel to a far-off destination for Europeans who have double the number of vacation days. South Africa is a 22-30 hour trip from the US, the number of US tourists is on the low end[3]#, while US tourists to Brazil are 2nd only to tourists from neighboring Argentina[4].

[1] http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_transport/trave... p. 90

[2] http://www.tinet.ita.doc.gov/view/m-2009-O-001/index.html

[3] http://www.southafrica.net/sat/action/media/downloadFile?med...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Brazil

# Anecdotally, I notice more North American tourists in Cape Town than other nationalities, although this may have more to do with the volume of the average American voice.
It's not the ignorance in and of itself. Nobody is judging patio11 based on his (lack of) knowledge of metal singers. It's (1) the proud announcement of ignorance and (2) posting it in a message as if it contributes to the discussion. If all you can add to a conversation is "Is this something I'd have to own a TV to know about?", do us all a favor and don't click the reply button. There's no requirement that you post in every thread, and an article on A/B testing will come down the pike in just a few minutes.
To me, the interesting thing is that the entire culture of usability seems to be focused on widening this gap. Perhaps the biggest rule of user interface is "the user shouldn't have to care how it works". This extends even down into programming. You bring in a library, you look at the function specs, call a function, and if it works without you having to grok a single thing happening beneath the surface, it's resounding success. The same thing but worse happens at the application level.

Of course, good luck competing in a market where you're the only guy trying to (gasp) make the user understand what's going on. I don't even know if I expect the problem to get worse (as interfaces become more and more abstracted) or better (as users increasingly grow up with computers in their lives) as time goes on.
Pivotal Labs: Talks - Diaspora
Miss Universe 2010 contestants evening gowns (Miss Universe photos, videos)