skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought 'On Writing Well' was written by William Zinsser. Amazon doesn't
list any books by Ziglar with that title.
I just wish flight attendants would stop making me turn it off for takeoff and landing.
Contacting a person over social media is obviously of limited value. If you get a Tweet from a random business, you're going to ignore it. You know they're selling you something, and you have no idea who they are. You're not even sure they're not a spammer. At best, you'll "Like" it or Retweet with the message "this looks cool!". Whatever that's worth. But the message will never leave Twitter, and it will be gone within minutes.

This is bad. As Seth Godin points out in "Purple Cow," you want other people to remark about your product. A good blog post might spawn a dozen tweets, but a great Tweet that spawns a dozen blog posts is exceedingly rare. You want to communicate in mediums that encourage others to remark: conferences, tech talks, blog posts, and even aggregators like HN or Reddit. If you see a business mentioned by several of your friends, and on HN, and know company X uses their stuff, you're going to check them out because of your natural curiosity. If you provide good source material, people will go out of their way to mention you elsewhere. After all, there are Karma points at stake! But if you try to form a conversation in a social medium, its as awkward as walking up to the person in real life and announcing, "I'm great! Don't you think so?"
Open sourcing their platforms like Acrobat and Flash would kind of make sense, but I have a hard time seeing any upside to opening up Photoshop. It's not like they can sell service and support for it, as there's an entire industry around training and books and advice. Maybe they could sell premium plug-ins, but there's already an industry around that, too.
The majority of TV programming is designed to constantly, subconsciously capture your eyes and ears. The picture changes every couple of seconds giving your eyes something new to process. The sounds (music, noises, and voice) tease you to watch what's going to happen next. This is why having a TV on "as background noise" while you try to do something else usually results in you watching more TV than getting things done.

A video on the web usually has the camera focused on one person and the screen doesn't completely change too often (if at all). Also, the speaking isn't exaggerated in any way to entice you to pay further attention. Therefore, it doesn't measure up to the levels of excitement/entertainment that your brain is already used to from TV.
Interesting, thanks. As far as I can tell, it's possible to convert PDFs to the Kindle's native format, any idea if this improves the situation?

I've noticed the PDF delay on the iPad as well, although it's not sufficient to bother me. I'm reluctant to use the illuminated screen for extended periods of reading though, especially in the evening.
It doesn't handle math formulae very well. Not sure if this is a short coming of the AZW format or what at this point. It's hard to find information on whether or not there is an easy work around.
ahh, this book looks like a wonderful primer; thank you
Apple was actually quite late to the glossy party. Side by side glossy screens are preferred by customers, at least in the short "Pepsi challenge" comparison.
In the UK there have been attempts to do this in schools. I haven't really followed it so I don't know on what scale but it is happening.

The main problem with teaching financial literacy is that you have to be literate yourself in order to teach it. Sadly, most peoples parents just don't fit the bill.
What a surprise, it's not available for Apps users.
What is the best way to copy a large amount of data between different RDBMS?
I agree - which is why MOST low-income families of four have a parent who works two minimum wage jobs, which pushes them just above the 'cant make it' threshold (hopefully).
Pffft. Complaining about TortoiseSVN? Use SmartSVN - it works in all 3 OSes, too. I know, I've had to use it in all 3 and it's nice to have that consistancy.
Why HTML5 Won't Kill Flash or Silverlight
Is Chemotherapy Effective?
Ask HN: What should I do about potential patent trouble?
====

Edit:
I thought keeping this pseudo-anonymous would make it less of a drama post. A few friends have suggested otherwise:

http://backtrackapp.com is my app. It's a location tracking app with a web front end and social features. I only built this for the realtime web component, which hasn't been implemented yet. You'll read about this (and why) below.

http://glympse.com is the app filing for the patent.

====

Dear HN,

A few weeks ago, I launched my first iPhone app. I am new to the mobile space and to ObjC, so I figured this would be good, fun exercise in building something I wanted to use myself and turning into a product. With ios4 out, the main premise behind the app seemed like a good idea, and nobody else was doing it yet. So I found a trusted friend, and we built the app and companion website in just under three weeks, part time. We waited the standard two weeks to get approved by Apple, and since then, the app has been chugging along for the past couple of weeks with a few sales here and there. We're about to start marketing the app, and we expect sales to increase.

We're also planning on updating the app with a few new substantial features. One of these features is the actual killer feature I dreamed the app up for. We decided to scrap it from the first release because the app was full featured enough, we were suffering from mild feature creep, and life was about to get in the way (I had conferences and work deadlines, and we were both moving soon).

So what's the problem? A new app has come out that does exactly what our killer feature does. Read: This app does exactly what I built my app for, except my app doesn't even do it yet. Imagine how I feel. It's getting tons of great press, with publications raving about how amazing that feature is, how nothing even comes close, how it's revolutionary in its place, and blah blah blah. That's fine, I'm disappointed at my failure to execute fast enough and be first to market, and as such losing out on press and sales, etc etc; but that's just the life of an entrepreneur: learn and move on.

I can live with all of that. The problem is that the new app's website claims they're actually patenting this feature. This I can't get over. My first instinct was to go to uspto.gov and start searching for the application so I could submit an attack on it, somehow. However.. I can't even find it.

So I'm at a loss of what to do.
My gut says to just get the update with the new feature out as soon as possible, so there's a competitor out, and just let the patent process run its course. I'm sure this is not the best thing to do. I'm not sure if it's appropriate to spend tons of time searching the patent applications for something that may or may not even be patented. I don't want to pivot away from this feature, I think my implementation of it will be much better and more attractive than this competitor. And I'm definitely nowhere near ready to roll over and play dead.

So, if you were in my shoes, how would you approach this? Is this even a problem? Or if it becomes one, should I just deal with it as it comes?
Wow, thanks a lot. I was strongly considering purchasing a DX for exactly this, after trying a Nook and finding the screen to be too small for most PDFs.
The same way you fix the problem of now knowing how to code, not knowing brain surgery, not knowing how to drive a car - buy some books and study.

I'm not trying to be sarcastic, just to point out the strangeness of it all. Most people wouldn't turn the ignition key and start trying to drive a car without taking some instructon first, but they are happy to whip out that credit card whenever the chance allows them.
That's why there are sports teams and chess club.
I have issues with the 401k system, but it's hard to beat an instant 50% return on your investment from company matching. What kind of fees are you paying?
Yeah, but remember, your Kindle is a much bigger threat to the navigation system than the 30 or 40 cell phones in people's pockets that they forgot to turn off. Plus, reading a Kindle might distract you in an emergency, which is why they don't let anyone read books or magazines during takeoff and landing either.
Competing Hypotheses - Made for the CIA. Now free to the public.
Tee-hee - it is pretty irritating. Just google 'antisocial punishment' - social punishment is the more familiar phenomenon of not rewarding cheaters, but it turns out not to be the norm in all societies. gScholar has the most 3 or papers near the top of the list.
Which books? I didn't learn to drive a car by reading books: I paid for lessons. I wouldn't learn brain surgery by reading books, I'd go to medical school.

A rephrasing of this question: what level of financial literacy can a person reasonably expect to attain by just applying "common sense", and what is the baseline level of financial literacy that we should strive for?
Correct. My first book is part of the Pragmatic Starter Kit which is aimed at people who are just starting out. There's a lot of good material in it for people who have used VCS but don't understand them well, but it starts off explaining what a repository is, what a commit is, and so on.

This book is much more concise and assumes the reader has a basic understanding of version control systems and is looking to get up-to-speed on Git.
I can vouch for this personally.

tl;dr - Financial illiteracy really is screwing some people with their pants on.

By any reasonable measure, my mom should be all set. Nothing more than a GED but she has started more than one successful business. Generally, she can drop herself into any town, open a shop for her services (dog grooming), and do great business. She's just really good at it.

She's in her 40's now and made a boatload of cash between '03 and '09, before the recession really kicked her business in the teeth. It should be no big deal -- she should have over a $100,000 saved away to smooth out a rough patch like this one.

Instead, she lost her house. Instead of keeping the nice, affordable big home she had three minutes from her shop, she increased her commute by 20 minutes in a bigger, more expensive house (with a pool!) she ended up unable to afford. Instead of saving, she bought big TV's, expensive pets, gambling and a Mercedes. Even Christmas of '09, when things were drum-tight, she was buying needless expensive gifts for people.

My mom is financially illiterate. When she should have been saving for a rainy day and setting up her retirement, she was blowing a considerable amount of money on stupid things. Worst of all, she has already been down this path – she had to declare bankruptcy back when I was a kid.

The other part that sucks: This crap gets passed on. I was financially an idiot for years. Only in the last couple of years have I gotten a frugal grip on my life, and now I get to dig out of some stupid debt decisions.
This post was so long and so scattershot that I wasn't able to keep it in my head while I read it. So I skimmed and then jumped to the conclusion.

Backstory: do most companies suffer their worst exposure from outside attackers hitting them from the Internet, or inside attackers to whom they've given access?

While most of our business is software security, our backgrounds are all in general/network security and, when schedules allow, for clients we have good relationships with, we'll do the annual penetration test as well as applications. So: we do a fair number of internal and external network pentests every year.

Here's the deal: most large companies do O.K. --- often not great, but not horrific --- on the external pen. But the internal is always a bloodbath.

Add to that virtually ever major criminal case or incident report, where, whether or not external attackers were involved, the initial compromise was abetted by an insider.

People have been questioning these "insider threat" numbers for over a decade now. I'm sure the numbers are broken. Numbers always are. But the notion that the threat is somehow less "real" than the external threat is naive, at best.

I think people like questioning the severity of insider exposure for two reasons:

(1) Security vendors and service providers make most of their money on services that address external threats (PCI assessments, network pentests, scanning, perimeter security devices).

(2) Enterprise security personnel know they have no grip whatsoever on internal controls; the most basic defenses and controls would cost tens of millions of dollars to deploy correctly at an F-1000 company; so instead of coming to grips with the risk, they'd much prefer to recast internal incidents as "black swan" events outside of their purview.
I'd actually suggest that you try out a DX and see for yourself. I think they're free to return within the first N days. Or at least see if you can find other opinions by people who read sci/tech papers.

For all I know, my friend's particular field has really heavy journal PDFs that other fields might not have. If I was reading a lot of papers, the appeal of a DX would be so great that I'd want a second opinion before ditching it.
Well, I agree that Java's bumping into some hard limits -- lack of standard accessor methods as you point out, and no reified generics are constantly annoying. I do think it's reaching the end of it 's natural life and will be looking to move to Go for the same class of problem in the future.

I guess we can just agree to disagree on the rest.
So what is this mysterious all-encompassing company then?
Startup Summify solves information overload in RSS feeds and Twitter
You are lying with statistics, albeit possibly unknowingly.

That article comes right out and says that IQ does not have an effect on life outcomes, if life outcomes are normed for educational attainment. It then goes on to say that IQ does not predict career success, if career success is measured by money and normed for career type. That's like saying air temperature has no effect on snow cover, if snow cover is corrected for season. And altitude.
Google testing voice calling in Gmail
I'm looking forward to this being rolled out to North America, which it looks like is a long ways off. This is fully USA-only right now and for the near future too.

Sure, Americans can call Canadians. But Canadians can't call Americans! What's up with that?
None of those things are scheduled so consistently and tightly that they replace an after-school sitter; they mostly make life harder for parents, not easier.
Nor Canadians. But these things will come, in time. :)
Currently not for users also outside the USA. (I initially thought it'd be for all users, but calls only to North America) This is as useful as Hulu right now :)
$140k per student? Is the school only going to stay open 1 year then?
Oh. Yes, that would seem blindingly obvious wouldn't it? OK, I'm an idiot (in my defense, i've been awake since before 4am this morning. Be gentle with me).

Isn't technology wonderful that our biggest issue is which app we have to launch to read the best that the literary world has to offer (and Dan Brown novels :-).
> ... then I would find fault with the theory that you have sufficient "observable data". That is the entire problem.

i agree, and i think then it comes down to each of our own personal opinions, unless you have some hard facts to provide (i surely don't, as you say, this is basically coffee talk for me, here).

sub-question: what do you feel like is the alternative to free will? predestination? do you feel that by disproving free will, it will lead to greater empirical evidence of god or gods (a la "god's plan")? or that proving free will somehow reduces the odds of the existence of god or gods?
$750K for Flowtown’s Social Marketing to Existing Customers
US only, again?
I agree with you that there great myths about finance. However, I do not find it fair to conclude that there is a mass belief that is all a lie.

I think people just don't think. They are fine to just stretch their finances to whatever whims them think they can handle.
Why the "Grand" Hyatt fails... but Method has us talking about soap.
I'm curious as to whether PG has any specific languages he'd bet on right now.
Careers And Marriage
Startups: The Minimum Viable Product Lifecycle
With a Kindle 2, I found that I only get the 3 weeks of battery life if I leave the radio disabled. So I only enable the radio for a few minutes when I need something. With the radio enabled continuously, battery life reduces to a few days. But the newer Kindle might be better in that regard.
Yep, can't see it either (I'm in Finland).

This would be useful for calling my own phone to find it from my apartment :) (I dont have skype open usually).
Wouldn't this improve the number of spam calls I get? It looks like there won't be any cost to the caller to place a call.
IIRC it is know as Pascal's Wager.
... but Kindle books are DRMed and iTunes music isn't.
I wouldn't worry too much about patents - it would cost them a lot more to run a suit against you than they stand to make, but obviously their willingness to patent things should be taken into account as evidence of a lack of morals in any future business with them.
I'm guessing that you've never had to use svn+ssh:// with a group of developers. The file permissions hell you get into using that with multiple users is very frustrating.

I much prefer the http:// access method, and have never had a locking problem.
> Company which did too much OSS: Sun.

s/did too much OSS/didn\'t do OSS early enough/
"So the real puzzle isn’t why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don’t choose this career."

Most women don't do this because of the social stigma, and those that don't care about the social stigma don't do it because they don't want to contract STDs--in particular, Genital Herpes which can be transmitted through skin-to-skin contact. I'm surprised that the article didn't examine the health risks of the business.

I'm certain that a high class escort is safer from health risks than someone who works on the street, but how much safer? That is information I'd be interested to learn.

That said, I have several friends--women and homosexual men--that have done and do this type of work. When they talk about it, they always say that they "love it." They do it for awhile and pay off some debt. Then they inevitably age out of it or go onto work that they find more meaningful. This article confirmed the stories they told me.
I think reading is just faster than listening.
Are You Really an Entrepreneur? (Flowchart)
Slow down now. Aren't (usable) electricity and running water both Western inventions?! I think that it's not so arrogant to suggest that if people adopt those things that they have a bit of Western in their culture.

I would equally say that we have some Chinese culture in our fireworks displays. It goes both ways. We are abandoning our non-fireworks culture to embrace theirs, just as others abandon their non-electrical culture to embrace parts of Western culture.
Fantastic, now I don't have to pay for Skype Out any more.
On the point of "Is There Anything Good About Men" - check out July's issue of "The Atlantic" <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-...;

It's similarly thought provoking, but a bit more balanced, less angry, yet a bit patronizing to men.
Hopefully it's not complete until you can use the service from a third-party SIP client.
"Coca-Cola is using Posterous for its NCAA “Dept of Fannovation” where people can come up with ideas to improve the experience of being a fan, and a chance to win $10,000."

http://ycombinator.posterous.com/posterous-s08-jumps-on-the-...
A lack of morals? That's a bit immature.
It's a classic freemium model. Their modus operandi is going to be get as many hyper-engaged users as possible, and hope to monetize by either introducing premium-type features, or gathering user data and advertising (but probably a combination of all available options).
Actually the analogy you made is very appropriate. If you do control for season and altitude, and snow cover is not correlated with temperature still, you have a problem.

But sticking with just the article. The point he makes is that its the educational attainment that people pay for, not the IQ score. Now you're saying, "But educational attainment is a product of IQ score". Possibly, but in controlling that factor you can attempt to tease out the extent at which it really is the educational attainment rather than simply the IQ.

A better way to put is that if IQ was in itself the key to life success then it wouldn't matter if you went to college or not. Rather, what the data seems to show is that those with high IQs seem to at least have the wisdom to know that educational attainment will be the key their life success. Quite possibly being tracked into by virtue of a higher IQ.

BUT the data should show that regardless of credential, higher IQ yields more success. But it doesn't show that.

Now there are a lot of factors that potentially come into play. And that was my original point. One can't look at SAT scores and then say, "those with high SAT scores do better in life", when there are so many comingling factors that complicate the equation, and are ridiculously difficult to control for in the real world.
That has half the intended effect: Convince people that their poster was pointless.

However, it doesn't discourage future posters much (they'd have to know the 'cancelled' sign was fake, and if everyone knows that, they 'cancelled' sign doesn't work any more) and it doesn't do anything to clean the poster off.

Since the intent is to keep the place clean and beautiful, leaving the poster violates that. It still has to be removed, and it's still just as hard to remove it.
Last two sentences.
Hi everyone. If you're interested in contributing code to the project, we'd love to have you. See the Developer FAQ at http://competinghypotheses.org/docs/Developer_FAQ.
I'm still waiting for Google Voice to make its debut in Canada. I think this will be a long time before this feature comes to Canada too.
I wonder what their profit angle on this is.

I'd imagine it would be to integrate voice into Gmail and Gmail into your cell phone.
It's also a more succinct variation of Caltech's honor code: "no member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the community."
I suppose google would induce costs seeing as calling phones from skype is not free. Thus, I doubt that it is a gesture of well why not. Rather, the attraction of lots of data possibly. Just imagine how much more targeted advertising would become if they can analyse actual conversations. And also new users to gmail. Millions use Skype. That means, millions do not see the google adverts when using skype.
The logistics of buying phone numbers in multiple countries, dealing with all their legal limits on how you can use phones, and legally hooking all of the magic Internet-to-Phone-System hardware has to be a bit prohibitory for international release.
Well, OK, I just chucked a few examples out there without thinking them through. In retrospect I don't think you'd learn to code much just by reading books either.

What I wanted to say was that to learn about managing your finances you need to take an active role in learning how things work - whether by reading books, going on a course, whatever.

As a base level of financial literacy I don't think people need that much to make a big difference in their lives. Teach people budgeting, how to track their spending, and a basic understanding of savings and credit interest rates/compound growth etc.

Teaching people to live within their means and use credit for "needs" instead of "wants" will be one of the hardest lessons to impart. I don't know how you'd accomplish that.
Tweetie 2 style iPhone notifications
I think now Skype has some real competitor. This is also going to add lots of value to Google Apps product.
Is this Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 9 interface?