skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did anyone else notice how Paul seemed to know exactly what to say (hardly any "umms.." or "errs...", while Robert Scoble seems not to have thought about his questions?
I'm surprised that not everyone notices that. The first time I saw a Mac in sleep mode I immediately realized that it was breathing in a relaxed manner. (It seemed so obvious I never even mentioned it to anyone, so I don't know if anyone else noticed.)

The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a similar feature but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the average respiratory rate for adults during strenuous exercise—not very indicative of something in sleep-mode.

As to why Dell didn't copy it exactly... perhaps they reviewed the patent and decided they would get in trouble?

Personally, I think we should not personify our computing hardware. It's a tool, not your friend. When my machine goes to sleep, its lights turn off. If I want to wake it from sleep, I press the power button. If it was off instead of asleep, I would press the same power button. No need for an LED to tell me what's going on.
So the video was meant to be hyperbole - but it was really an exploration of how we interact already. Go to any bus station and you'll see that exact scene, except no one is interacting with the people around them. But they are definitely all on their phones. The idea is that the move "into our devices" is inevitable so why not admit that and try to create real-world interactions that support this behavior?
George Orwell 1984

exhibit A: the two way view-screens, you never know when your being watched.

exhibit B: global tracking system, from when you come out of your mother to your grave.

We can only hope that going forward, men will resolve to behave like angels so that they will not abuse the power we are giving them with technology.
> It’s interesting how a lot of companies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right.

I think many companies see the features (windows flying around in Exposé, brightly colored window management buttons, pulsing status light, etc.) but don't understand that generally Apple doesn't just throw something in for looks and has thoroughly researched and iterated internally on a particular solution.

At the expense of sounding fanatic, generally an Apple feature looks the way it does as a result of its function. (What is the problem: make window management easy. how is that solved: make all open windows easy to see by spreading them out). When other companies attempt to copy, they look at what Apple's solution looks like, not realizing what it _does_. (e.g. Areo Flip 3D: what should it look like: windows flying all over the place. what problem does this solve: ???)
Internet Relay Chat and the Effect of Botnets on Security
I love going on explorative journeys through Wikipedia, so the app really appeals to me. Definitely a task I wish I did more often. I'd throw down a dollar or two for an app like this, but my platform of choice is Android.
An equation to predict a page's roundtrip time
Why Google Has No Game (Adam Rifkin)
Or rather, not any will to pay civil engineers enough money to keep them in the field.
Neurons are way too big to be entangled (pun intended!) with quantum physics. They act in a deterministic way.
The only thing I could gleam from that article is that atoms might have "free will". To that I say: So what?
Did you even bother to open the document? Your assertions here are simply wrong.
I think basketball would have been a better example but the point stands. If you are 5'5 and really good at sports you should play soccer instead of basketball if you want to reach the highest levels.
Fred Wilson on CEO Coaches and Mentors
But why did try to copy it at all? Why not go in another direction completely?
Looks fun, and nice job on the site design. Clean and effective. I'm looking forward to trying the app.
That's something I'd definitely be interested in. Just make sure that the connections are well-related and that I'll end up walking away with a set of nicely integrated facts. I said I'd pay $0.99 for it because it'd be a nice addition to my Reference folder and also because I can't stand iPhone app ads -- they're obtrusive and there's not much screen real estate to spare.
The moment I realized the LED was mimicking breathing (I first experienced it with a white iMac) was the moment I realized just how far Apple goes to make computers for humans. Truly personal computers. This is the kind of stuff that gets people lining up for new Apple products, not some silly brand whoring or desire to be hip and fashionable.

Admittedly, they made the LED way too bright on the earlier MBPs, such that it would distract you if you were trying to sleep in a dark room. The newer MBPs have gotten the brightness just right, however.

Also, none of this ignores the fact that Apple routinely privileges superficial aesthetics over ergonomics, utility, etc. (Magic Mouse, hard edges on MBP, glossy displays), but that rarely stops the whole package from being the best on the market.
If you want to get the ruling overturned, wait for your congress critter to park their vehicle on a public street and do the same thing, then setup a blog that shows the information online.
Excellent concept. I know I've personally lost many, many hours following random links on Wikipedia. If this app can suck in the user in the same way, I'll be hooked.

Any reason you decided to do this as an iOS App instead of a as a Web App?
Thanks for the bump. Creator here, feel free to ask me anything.
Another nice thing about that LED is that it's white (as opposed to bright green in a lot of laptops) and it's softened (meaning that you can't really point out the exact point where the LED is hiding, making the whole shape homogeneous).
Maybe you shouldn't be reading Wikileaks at all. If you can't distinguish Wikileaks from the Drudge report or Boing Boing then I'd say you're not the kind of person who would benefit from reading leaked copies of classified documents. Instead, I'd suggest you stick to articles in the New York Times or Washington Post or other major newspapers that are based on Wikileaks data. I mean, since all the big papers have been publishing articles that heavily use Wikileaks data, presumably they find WL to be somewhat trustworthy. Or do you have difficulty distinguishing between the NYT and the Drudge Report as well?
Just how many different ways can you make a light blink?
Facebook Places Designer: Any Foursquare Logo Similarities Were Not Intentional
that's one of the things I really like. It's not just the breathing timing, in fact. They could've slapped on an LED that did this behavior. But they hid it behind the body, perforated tiny holes into the body, such that when the light goes out, you can't even make out that the light exists. Beautiful.
That's where the social curating aspect of the game kicks in. Good, educational connections stays on top (on weekly basis), bad ones got flushed away. It's much like Hacker News in a sense.
Cargo cult UIs.
No enlightening needed, I already explained that "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." was up for interpretation (I wasn't complaining in my comment, I was asking a question); and also admitted that "it doesn't do me any harm to leave that bit out" (in reference to stating that I flagged something).
I really like this idea. I'm not sure how useful it would be but it would definitely be cool!
Linux: Understanding File Descriptors and IO Redirection
All I ask is that they fix this one simple issue for us devs..

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3077289/facebook-android-...
they didn't invet the blink sir... sigh
I was a little annoyed when he interrupted Paul with unnecessary laughter a couple times, but that's probably just because I want to hear everything pg has to say.
Based on your post, it appears that you don't understand how things like statistical significance work. If there is not enough data to make a prediction, you simply should not make a prediction and wait. If you ignore this and your whole business is based on the accuracy of your predictions, expect to be held accountable.

You also apparently didn't read his post I mentioned. It does not talk about just Romney. Here is the direct quote: "As for other Republicans in Massachusetts, their prospects don't figure to be much better."

Silver's whole failed business was based on what Taleb called the "Ludic fallacy" in The Black Swan.
Much faster page loads. YMMV
Well, that's probably one of the reasons they find it hard to find good people then. They've already intentionally limited their pool of talent.
Need to earn some cash to bootstrap for my startup (vittyo.com). iOS is much easier to make some food money in my opinion.

Behind the scene, the logistics is actually mostly server-based, using Cocoa just for the eye candies. So it is really easy to convert it into a web app or onto Android.
Ask HN: Subscribe to SEO Book or no?
I'd like a basic rundown on SEO techniques, the latest research and tools, etc., and I came across SEO Book (http://www.seobook.com/join/).

Has anyone used this service? Any thoughts about whether it's worth the $300/month (steep!)?
That's exactly it. Instead of copying Apple's intent, competitors instead copy the result without ever giving a moment to consider the original motivation.

This reminds me of a post by Tog or someone similarly luminary. He explained that the Mac OS submenu behavior arose from multiple iterations, refining until everything worked easily. A big part of that was letting the user move their pointer at an angle into the next submenu region. A Fitts' law consideration -- this didn't require the user to be too methodical in their movements through the menus.

Then, when Microsoft borrowed the UI, getting into submenus required the user to exactingly follow the path of the currently-highlighted menu item in order to traverse into the next. Breathe the wrong way and your whole drill-down progress just disappears. Microsoft's solution? Insert a brief delay as you hover over a drillable menu option.

Result without intent.

As it happens, this reminds me of the UI for Windows Phone 7. It's like a suit said, "Hey, go design me something that looks really modern. And hip. With sans serif fonts. Apple uses those right? They're really hip."

And we end up with a UI that looks more like a magazine layout than a tool for using your phone.
Are You Building Websites the Wrong Way?
I remember realizing that nothing on the iPhone ever, ever blinks into or out of existence. EVERYTHING transitions.

When you turn the orientation in the camera app, the little flash button and flip-camera buttons don't simple become horizontal...they fall down gently.

The damn thing never blinks.
For us up-and-comers(ie/ not CEO or founder of a startup) working at an early stage startup its a great opportunity to hopefully learn the ropes and learn much of the tools that you would need to be a successful CEO in the future.
Came here to post just that.

The other thing I liked about that Jonathan Ives bit was how he went beyond the physical aspects and talked a lot about how much effort they went into the construction process as well. No one else in the documentary even mentioned that as far as I can recall.

(Incidentally, that reminded me of this: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/smartabstractions For example, Paul Bucheit worrying about disk access times)
This! I once gave up a business after thinking it wasn't any good. A year later I checked the analytics (after I removed the front page and let the domain expire) I found that traffic picked up from articles I wrote earlier, and had been high for over right months. Of course, with no site there, they all bounced right off. D'oh!
> this article has very little to do specifically with investing after a startup exit. The article should be called "Why to invest in real estate."

Or, perhaps it should be called "A plan for generating retirement-suitable income using approximately $1mm of capital".

Oh, hey, that's what it _is_ called (modulo some aggressive rounding).

I agree with the first paragraph, though, that if it does turn out that you have $5mm, and if it does turn out that you can't secure nonrecourse debt, then it is true that you're also taking on extra risk.
This is currently the rule in a majority of US jurisdictions.

The 9th Circuit did not make a ruling. Rather, they declined to hear the case because California law is already on point and they do not wish to change the law.

I am displeased with the attorney writing the article for another reason. He wrote, "The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy." The Supreme Court articulated 4 factors to determine zone of privacy, and proximity to the home is only one of the four. United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294 (1987),

Curtliage does not mean area close to your house. It means the area that a person can readily see (sort of). If I can see your front door from the street, then you have no reasonable expectation of privacy there. If I can see your backyard when I fly over in a small airplane at a normal heigh, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy there. California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986).

I am not saying that I agree with this. All I am saying is that this is the current law and it is not new.
Why I Became an Entrepreneur (the Long Story)
Stipple Seeks to Tag the Web’s Images
The 90% failure rate is nonsense. Ignore it. Actual figures are more like 30-50% depending on what you term a 'failure'. Many include successful sell-outs in failure rates. People who have been profitable but then moved on are also usually counted as failures. Figures show long-term success is more likely if you incorporate, work on the company full time, employ someone else, be in particular sectors, etc.

One study I read had failure rates as low as 5% (defined as bankruptcies).

If in doubt, do some googling. Try 'business failure rates', 'business success rates', etc.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode15/usc_sec_15_0...

In the US, one at a time - but there could be a class of names which are confusingly similar to that name.

They either need to argue that the similarity "is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person" or dilution by blurring an "association arising from the similarity between a mark or trade name and a famous mark that impairs the distinctiveness of the famous mark".

The second (trademark dilution) only applies to famous marks (like Facebook), but can be used when the mark is only diluted, and there is no likelihood of confusion. However, "the degree of inherent or acquired distinctiveness of the famous mark" is important - and the distinctiveness isn't just in one particular market. English words are unlikely to be considered to be particularly distinctive, and 'face books' existed on paper before Facebook used the term.
sigh Totally unexpected down-modding :) At the time I left this remark the commenter had only like 3 or 4 points and I was afraid that his use of the word "fuck" was causing his pertinent info to get overlooked. So I was trying to steer people towards this salient info regarding incarceration rates. I am not in the slightest bit offended by the language :) I was afraid others might be and was trying to offset that behaviour and I get modded down to the flames of hell and those who reply to me get tons of karma.

For fuck's sake, where's the justice? Anyway, the dudes now got over 30 points so maybe my heroic effort did not go in vain. On-topic: unjustly locking up a whole swathe of your citizen's has got to be a drain on resources. Compare US incarceration rates to most Western European countries and think about the consequences for a while.
Working from home is both awesome, and horrible
Canonical have really upped their game recently. These days a fresh Ubuntu installation looks pretty slick, compared to a just few releases ago. Maybe it's not quite up to OS X standards yet, but reading the design team and Mark Shuttleworth's blogs it's clear they're thinking things through, and not just throwing bling at the screen:

Ubuntu 8.04: http://polishlinux.org/reviews/ubuntu-8-04/default.png

Ubuntu 10.10 Preview: http://design.canonical.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ambia...
Yep. Mainly because I wanted to know if I was going to have to concentrate on reading the article to disect the 6 points. Found that they were actually listed, read them, and left.
If you spend 10,000 hours playing Trivial Pursuit it's called cheating.
There is a very common fallacy committed by people outside economics in thinking that Krugman has something substantial to say in areas of economics outside of his very narrow focus of expertise. Let's say you founded a successful advertising-based Web startup from a scratch and you exited for 8 digits. People who are only vaguely familiar with technology and computers (let's say nurses, taxi drivers, high school teachers) will now think you are an expert in pretty much all matters related to starting a business and computers. However, unless you are a pompous egoist, you should realize that your opinions, even in seemingly very related matters, like running a Web store or creating an iPhone app, will likely be quite uninformed. Krugman's opinions are about economic matters much further away from his true area of expertise than your opinions about running a Web store.
Whilst I'm sure that's true on technical areas of great detail, a lot of celebrity speakers turn up and do the same talk over and over again. This is particularly true in the case of someone with a story to tell, ie, war hero, ex politician, ex founder with a big IPO, etc.

Your point stands - I was just throwing figures around.

I'm doing my first conference presentations in two months time, and I expect to take probably 40-60 hours to present two 60 minute sessions. And I don't get paid for it at all!
Better Cooking Through Chemistry
She must be their Counselor Troy :)
But I don't get it, how can they just walk in you driveway and plant a device on your car? I can find more than just privacy being violated here, they modified his car and added a device to it, how is that not illegal?
Any evidence for that?

My 2nd job was at a failed startup in the UK. Never got a single raised eye brow in any interviews I went to after that and I got a glowing reference from the CEO.

It was a massive positive for me, so not sure why you think this.
Communication around a location/event is an existing behavior. People do this all the time at conferences, meetups, sporting events etc by using a Twitter hashtag, for example.

This seems like the natural evolution of that behavior.
Nothing pisses me off more than when people say "oh, that Apple, they're just good at marketing."

The truth is that they're good at making great things that are genuinely fun to use. That kind of stuff sells itself.
Why music subscription models don't work (mog, rdio, rhapsody)
Thanks for the description of the submenus in Mac OS!

I've been using Macs exclusively for the past two years and, after starting to use Windows again last week, I couldn't really point out why the menus annoyed me so much.

And it's exactly what you describe: on Mac OS, if a submenu is open I can go in a diagonal to the sub-item I want, even if I hover another item in the menu on the way. On Windows, as soon as I'm not hovering the original parent item, the submenu disappears, so I'm constantly going back and forth to reopen the submenu.
Lenovo went to a lot of effort on the battery/charging indicator, but they just managed to make it as complicated as possible. http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=79
Well I'm in the same boat as you - living on a reduced (and uncertain) income and both SAH running the business (though it's more like 95% me, 5% her).

I should have qualified my statement - it's a luxury to stay at home and be a mother and maintain the same standard of living. Ie, having a husband with a high income.
<Cool story, bro>

A few years ago, a friend got one of the first of the x86 iMacs with integrated displays. Initially I thought it was a neat design but still didn't "get" what the big deal was about them and Apple's design ethos in general.

I picked up the small handheld remote that came with it, and frowned. "Hmm, OK, it comes with a remote media control. That's neat, but it's just one more rarely-used gadget that's going to get lost in the clutter on peoples' desks. What they should have done was, oh, I dunno, put a magnet in the side of the monitor frame to keep the remote out of the way when it's not needed, you know, like this..."

snap

"Oh."

I bought 100 shares of AAPL that night.

</Cool story, bro>
US military's top secret X-37B shuttle 'disappears' for two weeks, changes orbit
Is it really that hard for them to get warrants? I don't get all these shenanigans to avoid warrants. They should be able to easily make the case that this person was suspected of selling drugs and that the GPS data would help prove this.

I don't understand the law involved in getting and using a warrant, can someone clarify the difficulties that make it necessary to bypass it?
The court is wrong on the privacy issue. Setting that issue aside, isn't what the police did in this case an illegal act of vandalism? If you attach a bumper sticker to a police car without the knowledge and consent of the police department that owns it, that is vandalism and you can be prosecuted for it. How is this unauthorized alteration of private property any different?
If you can though, please let me know what you come up with either way.

I frequently find that some people (intelligent people mind you) struggle with this concept. I am always looking for better ways to explain it and your input might help.

In the meantime read my other response[1] to the same question in this very thread.

Thanks.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631652
The per-minute charge for cellphone minutes is intended to cover the cost of delivering the call over a radio channel, which is an expensive and limited resource. European cellular carriers will often charge the caller the full cost of the call (using a special area code which has a higher per-minute rate) and allow customers to receive calls without using up their own money.

This was tried in the United States with area codes 500 and 533. It didn't take off, probably because callers didn't like the cost of a call being unpredictable (carriers could set a different call cost for each 500-NXX block).
A search warrant is needed to inspect an area that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy for. If you don't have a REP, no warrant is needed.

To partake in life we expect people to walk on our property - mailman, paperboy, UPS guy, electric company. Because we freely allow access to our property to these things we cannot claim "privacy!!!!" when it involves the police.

The key here is that the device is on the car, not in it. Search warrant would be needed to put the GPS in the car, or put a microphone in the car. Outside of your car, no REP.

Regarding modification, the court is going to balance police needs and the modification. Placing a magnet to the underside of your car is not considered a substantial modification to the court. Sure, if the cops replaced your rear axle with a GPS equipped rear axl you probably have a good argument. But something as simple as a magnetic GPS on your quarter panel isn't going to get any sympathy from the judge.
Dev Machine Setup Scripts
is breathing light really a requirement? I would prefer faster and cheaper computers. IMHO I find Apple computers to be equivalent of SUV's. You can get a descent laptop at nearly 20-30% cheaper from Dell/HP/ASUS.

Maybe only Americans can afford such frivolity. The difference in price between a good Dell laptop and Apple one is same as wage for 1-2 months for a middle class person in most parts of the worlds.