skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does the 3G radio really add an extra $400? ... If phones weren't subsidized, the list prices would be quite different.

No doubt it does not cost an extra $400, but don't make the mistake of assuming that in the absence of long-term contracts suddenly all prices will be based solely on production cost. See software for example. Does Photoshop really cost Adobe $X00 more than Photoshop Lite? No, they're both free. Companies will charge what they can, sometimes with highly varied pricing for products of similar cost, especially when the marginal cost of production is low but the cost of R&D is high. This is the price discrimination necessary to run a successful business.
In my mind, 'Groupware' is just an old term for the following functions:

- shared calendars (with scheduling, availability & conflict resolution)
- global, shared address books
- server-side email

Unfortunately the most popular options for the average company to utilise these functions is restricted to using closed source solutions where you manage a server yourself (Microsoft Exchange) or closed source solutions where another company manages the server for you (Gmail and Google Calendar).

Its a shame that more open protocols and servers haven't taken off in this space and provide competition. However as many companies have previously tried and failed to deliver a viable product its unlikely anyone else will step up to provide such a solution.
Hilarious Video: Relational Database Vs NoSQL Fanbois
The only piece that I would add to this article is the concept of a daily morning scrum. For virtual teams this can be accomplished via Campfire. For those who don't know about a daily scrum, the idea is that you take 5-15 minutes (the shorter the time the better) first thing in the morning and everybody goes through briefly 1) What they did yesterday 2) What they're working on today 3) Anyone they need to sit down with to help them become unblocked / discuss a feature with. Doing so every morning is a great way to keep everyone on the same page and provides a good balance between autonomous time and keeping everyone on the same page.

Doing this meeting while standing helps to keep the meeting short and to the point, and if you find yourself engaging in discussion about a particular feature / item / issue..."take it offline". Don't use everyone's time to discuss something that should be discussed at a later time when everyone else could be in flow.
Acne Myths
The URL to the landing page ... ?

The advice might vary according to the specifics of your idea.
http://www.pdflib.com/products/tet/

TET provides precise metrics for the text, such as the position on the page, glyph widths, and text direction. Specific areas on the page can be excluded or included in the text extraction, e.g. to ignore headers and footers or margins.
Good point, except some (many) simply do not make any means of contact possible beyond public twittering, and others don't respond :)

Many of the speakers are already promoting this themselves (which is great), but as this is the first event, I'm looking for as many ways as possible to spread the word. The ones I can reach out to I've made efforts to and will continue to do so.

Thanks for the feedback/input.
NewsCred is always looking for great Information Retrieval engineers (part time or full time). If you love Solr/Lucene, drop me an email! More here: http://platform.newscred.com/jobs.
It's not a myth or legend. I look up to great people that moved our species forward. Here is where I learned some of this 'crap':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

And, the rest is from Steve Wozinack's autobiography...

Steve is a polarizing figure with a vision that unites spirituality with technology. That's why Apple keeps attracting more and more attention...
That's good, because the proposed business plan is apparently isomorphic to "become Starbucks". And that's a pretty crowded niche already.
FYI. I have updated the post with an image describing my customer's feature development process.
It is a little disturbing that the "code" of a patent (the claims) only takes about 30 seconds to read and the rest of the ream of paper is just comments and/or obfuscation. (Most likely the latter.)
One programmer and three CXX's already? and they haven't made a dime yet??? All their MBA training has taught them is how to profit off the sweat of others.
From the business side of things: remember to sell benefits, not features.
Erroneous profile data.
www.HiveReader.com
yeah, I think its very hard to defend against missiles.

I've always thought they should prove that it will work in a realistic physics-based simulation before spending billions on these systems. But they seem to have some value against relatively crude missiles. Plus their value as a bargaining chip, although that depends on how smart the adversary is.
Who Will Own The Living Room? Apple, Google, Sony or Microsoft?
Though recently it has been the smartphone market that has garnered the most attention in the tech world, the arrival of a revamped – if slightly disappointing – Apple TV is a reminder that the living room is the next big play for digital transformation.
Seems a little silly to compare the 9.7" iPad to the 5" Dell Streak as though they were equal devices. He mentions the Streak has a camera and a phone but fails to mention it's nearly half the size?
That's interesting.

Given that it was an issue with a non-terminating binary representation, what would be the way to handle this, without somehow resetting the clock (restart or otherwise)?

Obviously, you could, in a modern system, have more memory and be able to store more bits of the number, but there would still be a limit that you would run into after some amount of time that would cause similar problems.
Always normalize a relational database. Denormalize caches.
"Except, of course, I didn't buy a lot of books."

I guess that explains why the author views books as entirely dispensable aspects of a bookstore.

If the future of bookstores is becoming coffeehouses, then, by definition, bookstores have no future.
Hah - I doubt it. With titles like this, I think they rather read the print version of Fortune magazine monthly.
ultimately, it is the responsibility of the integrator to test their systems, including the software. And they have the source code for everything. Its like Apple X 100.
Oracle Hires Mark Hurd As Co-President
That depends on if you see it as a craft or maximizing revenue (seating capacity, turn over, etc.). I think the gist is that you can get lost on the business side but at the end it comes down to a compelling culinary experience. At least that's how I interpret.
Seems like a few different sizes of hole saws could be used to open the back of the drawers. They really hacked it up by cutting it the way they did.
Sure. They'll charge what they can. If phones were sold at list price without a contract, they'd have a price set by the market and not solely by backroom negotiations. I'd expect a contractless iPhone 4 to run a ~$150 premium over the iPod Touch, similar to the way the 3G iPad adds about $150 to the Wifi-only iPad. Certainly not $400.
I avoid it because I know too many people who normally are very interesting and intelligent; people I enjoy talking with, most of the time, who seem to turn into raving lunatics whenever their pet political topic is brought up.

now, it's quite possible that I'm the politically crazy one here... but that's not my point. My point is that political conversations, at least for me, simply aren't productive or interesting. this is a realm governed by unpleasant emotions and group identity.
TweetRight - Chrome Extension Using context menu apis
Ask HN: Would the site benefit from footnote parsing?
There's a great number of comments that make good use of footnotes[1] to eliminate the visual clutter that pasted links cause within the body of their text. I think footnote parsing would bump usability up a notch.

I found a grease-monkey script[2] for parsing footnotes in Paul Graham's articles, but I need to modify it slightly to get it to work per-comment. I'm thinking simply hyperlinking the original footnote anchor to the target destination (if one exists) would suffice.

Most comments are obviously not that long, but some screens (on net-books and handhelds) are small enough to require scrolling. If executed properly, and widely used by commenters, it might work well for quickly opening a link without jumping to the bottom of a comment, and for easily revealing context of the links in footnotes.

Grease-monkey is great, but Mobile Safari and Opera Mini don't support user-scripts. If a server-side solution would be a better idea, would the regular BBCODE-style hyperlinks with custom anchor text be a better solution? Let me know what do you think.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667285

[2] http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/6954
You can read more here: http://blog.arpitnext.com/tweetright
Check the source out from subversion, as described here:

http://code.google.com/p/ai-contest/source/checkout
They all got perma-banned I believe, hence the popup.
Seems like the standard 'blog' (or at least blogspot) format.
I don't suppose the Omni folks might complain about the name?

http://www.omnigroup.com/
Do you mean the website or the actual app? We're in the process of making it universal but so far it looks great on the iPhone as well.

Will post iPhone/iPod Touch screenshots soon.
It also seems that the text submissions would benefit from the regular hyperlink parsing available in comments :-)
Apple Spent $1 Million on Google Ads
Amen brother.
I think it's great to start (design) high-level tests in human language - in a chart, in a spreadsheet, in lines or paragraphs. Of course, in Cucumber you use structured English in a slightly inflexible way.

But the code should be something that you can walk through when you are running tests. This is what Cucumber is not great at. You want tests that tell a story, but the code is all in a phrasebook.

After some initial experience with Cucumber, I think I will switch to an old-school low-tech approach that I've used many times -- design in conversational English steps, convert those lines to comments, and write code in-between (in this case, using Steak). The flexibility seems like a much bigger advantage than the automation Cucumber provides.
Say what you will about his interactions with people, but "not knowledgeable or good at what he does" is an unfair characterization.

I find his hook.io project (http://hook.io/about.html) particularly interesting, and the BDD testing app he was building for Node Knockout has a lot of potential as well.
you mean assume what they would fill in? most users are lazy. always assume they are willing to put in the minimal amount of effort to get past your friction points (signup)
I think category theory could be the maths for software engineers to the mechanical engineers calculus. Once you get past the arrows and weird Greek nomenclature you realize its just algebra. It seems a reasonable compromise to using formal logic whose cost is simply not worth it in most all cases. Still most presentations are very academic and neither presented in the way that a busy engineer can easily grasp and use. I've been trying to simultaneously learn and break it down to a much simpler core for my self that can be used without thinking - kind of like how engineers use physics - but still serve as a strong scaffolding of support when attacking a problem. Progress is tough though.
It would probably be pretty confusing, especially considering most people don't read much text on the page(like the text that might say "Correct this...")
The figurehead gets the glory. As a RULE.

Lance Armstrong is the Man Who Went to the Moon. We remember him, Buzz Aldrin, and the Presidents who got us there. Nobody else- not a one of the architects and engineers or anybody else.
Meta HN: Why is this account banned? (access_denied)
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=access_denied

I looked through the submissions and comments history, and saw no reason why this person would be banned.

I'm a little disturbed by how opaque the process is. Someone tell the poor guy nobody can see his comments/submissions.
Lance Armstrong rode his bike to the moon?
There is always some truth in effective marketing; like all good lies, it uses truth in the service of falsehood.
interesting idea IF (big IF) the average book reader was as much of an early adopter as the average HN reader/technophile w/a kindle. There are still millions of people who rely on printed books. Kindles may be selling well, but not as well as we'd like to think. What about people shifting their book buying to places like walmart and target where they get cheaper prices and only sift through the top 100 books out?

I read more on my ipad now than I do books, but still buy physical books from time to time. There are lots of situations where I can't use a digital reader (the beach for instance).

but the author's idea could work, in 2020. In the meantime how does the store support their costs and leases on physical spaces off of ever declining physical good sales?

I'd like to see bookstores turn more into community (for profit) spaces. Teach stuff, sell more coffee around these workshops/gatherings.
Any Ideas HN? Know This Man? Can You Tell Him Who He Is?
If there is any community who can think of the perfect hack to solve this man's problem, it's this group.
Collection of bits are put to truly horrible uses in the name of efficiency.
Why entrepreneurs don't need to be tech-heads
How do any differences in the business model cause or justify bad design/integration in either their web experience or software products? Duplicating popular software in higher volume isn't a burden on design, is it? I fail to see why popularity should be an excuse for mediocrity.

The distribution methods and relationships with customers differ a great deal, but both companies develop software, some of it very similar in purpose, and both also sell hardware. The problems outlined in the email were not related to problems integrating with others' hardware, so lack of ability to integrate with that isn't an excuse (this time).

I think it is the ice cream comparison that's the unfair one. Software sold in volume is a high margin business. With 80% market share there is neither the justification nor the excuse for the sort of blunders outlined in the email. Unlike ice cream, there are no physical ingredients to cut corners with. It's doubtful that things that compromised quality saved them any money at all. What resource did they lack?

It's not as if they were a hardware business operating on razor-thin margins to get market share and cutting corners to break even. They've got revenue, they've got cash, they've got many talented engineers. They spent about 9 times as much as Apple on R&D in 2007, about 7 times as much in 2009. Considering how often Apple has major OS updates, and introducing new/updated hardware designs, it seems like MS isn't producing as much fruit for the R&D money. Did I miss something?

R&D From the 10K filings with SEC

Microsoft USD 9 billion in 2009
https://investor.shareholder.com/msft/EdgarDetail.asp?
CIK=789019&FID=1193125-09-158735&SID=09-00

Apple USD 1.3 billion in 2009
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?
item=UGFyZW50SUQ9MTg1OTB8Q2hpbGRJRD0tMXxUeXBlPTM=&t=1
Could be if OmniTweet ever gets popular enough.

For the record it is named after the Chrome feature omnibox not Omni Group: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/dev/experimental.om...

Edit: I have also never been particularly happy with the name so will probably change it regardless.
Is there any evidence to suggest that "the hub" is anything but a unicorn that consumer products journalists write about and manufacturer product managers get tricked in to believing?
And more pointedly, who remembers the name of the astronaught who stayed up in the command module?

I think his name was Collins, but I was a science/history buff as a kid. I can't even remember his first name.
Well, the $2550 total price for that platform is never the less shocking. And those are 2008's prices, today it shall come out even cheaper.

In other words, If I was thinking of giving my imaginary startup team (5) iPads as a bonus, I now have a better thing to do with the $2.5K, right?
If there is any community who can think of the perfect hack to solve this man's problem, it's this group.

Long story short, he suffers from amnesia, cannot remember who he is. They're trying a bunch of really interesting new technology, but have not found out in over 6 years time.
Wait, you've never seen these emails?

And I checked the FAQ and didn't see anything about a 1% unsub rate resulting in account suspension or anything. Maybe I missed it? Care to point it out?
I agree, but that's one reason I disagree with the original post, because the two blend together in fairly complex ways. Sometimes, thinking about things, mapping out possibilities, comparing alternatives, etc., without doing any of them, is itself productive. For example, Alonzo Church mostly theorized about what computers could do, came up with a bunch of thought experiments, proved some things impossible, discussed why other things would be possible, etc., but never really got on with the business of actually making computers do much of anything. But that's fine, because his main contribution was precisely the thinking & talking--- giving us a better understanding of what computers could do, not actually making computers do any of them, was his thing.

You could phrase it as "productive talkers", whose talking is important, versus "unproductive talkers", whose talking is just hot air, but that starts to get close to being a tautology: the bad kind of talking is bad.
Anyone who gets the majority of their books on Kindle has some pretty shallow reading habits. I have about 4000 nonfiction books, and at least 60 percent of them are not even available for Kindle. And from the descriptions of Kindle's graphics, at least half of the remainder would be a waste to get on Kindle.
Human DNA is a "robust language." Everything is encoded redundantly, and most features "express" through multiple small, additive gates (e.g. changing one bit of your DNA will never take your hair all the way from blonde to black, only make it slightly lighter or darker.) We could make a programming language that works similarly, though it would likely be very unintuitive.
when Oracle bought Sun many analysts speculated that Oracle will sell Sun Hardware Division, of course even more analysts speculated the obvious which is, Oracle is taking a dive into the hardware business

When I read this all i was thinking was, Mark Hurd seems like a hardware guy, Oracle really wants to get this hardware business right!
Relevant:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

I'd guess that the closer your study pattern follows this optimal spaced repetition pattern, the faster and better you learn stuff. This is related to the result on mixing things up during each study session.
Prophet of the Real: An Interview with William Gibson
So, these billions of events were the result of a flash game developer using Playtomic analytics for their game. The game, PiTSi [1], has over 40 million installs using Conduits toolbar app. Conduit is ranked #32 on Alexa and offers thousands of browser games. The author of this article and I are both surprised that we've never heard of Conduit. Is it unheard of to most of you?

[1]http://apps.conduit.com/Conduit-and-baconOppenheim-PiTSi-app...
Another example: everyone knows the name of the lead singer of a band - rarely do they know who the rhythm guitarist, bassist, or drummer were.
Apparently, I play chess worse than a pseudo-random 1012-byte JS chess bot. Burn...
I don't know how to tell you this, but...I think you meant Neil Armstrong.
16GB iPhone: A$ 859.00 (http://store.apple.com/au/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph...)

8GB iPod Touch: A$289 (http://www.apple.com/au/ipodtouch/)
I can't endorse putting developers and customers directly together. In my experience, customers view developers as something between magicians and freaks. Many will not take seriously a developer in sandals, shorts and a a T-shirt with some kind of geeky slogan.

Developers on the other hand, often lack the patience and tact to work directly with people who don't understand technology at their level. They tend to divert the conversation to the "interesting" problems that they want to work on and conveniently don't discuss the details of all the reports that the system needs to produce.

When developers and customers get together, they talk past each other because they're almost speaking different languages. Or they get sidetracked on minutia and lose sight of the larger goals.

There is definitely a place for a person who can be comfortable in a business suit talking to customers, understanding their needs and priorities in their terms, and then translating that into user stories (often with developer assistance) back at the office.
Whether writing a blog is "doing" depends on the blog (obviously, I suppose).

But this kind of moots the original point. Human beings are social animal who communicate with language. By that token, the leaders and creators in human society use language to accomplish things, to "do". So most doers and the most effective doers are talkers along with those who are less effective - "just talking".

Mentioning "doing instead of talking" can sound good though - it be can effective talking in some circumstances.
In other countries where unlocked phones are regularly sold, the retail price for an iPhone 4 is roughly between $1,200 and $1,400.
"You may gladly spend $229 to get a hot media player [8 GB iPod Touch], thinking it's a deal compared with the highest-priced version and not blink that you could instead buy an [16 GB] iPhone 4 at the lower price of $199 with more features."

The author writes off any remaining credibility with this line. $199 is the price of the iPhone with a service contract. After paying for one month of service you will have easily spent more than $229. It's hard to take any of this seriously considering this was the foundation of the argument for this first half of the article!
[List 2] 1000 Hackable Websites Using Sql Injection
I think Apple should sell Apple TV bundle in a real TV under a reasonable price. It's function doesn't seem mainstream enough to be sold separately.

A real TV with some new unconventional features might make it though
Would he be known as a "doer" if he were known to have renovated his house and lost weight?
These seem interesting... not a great read but maybe I'll reference them at random on my phone on the go.
Texas( various cities including a few big ones like Dallas).
Reviewers claim Duke Nukem Forever 'is real and playable'
A friend of mine operated a pledging type service for donations, and he said in a conversation that less technologically sophisticated users definitely had higher willingness to pay. What's your evidence?

I define a power user as someone with technological sophistication. For example, one of the features Matt Cutts mentions is filtering your mail using regular expressions. That requires technological sophistication.

Being more comfortable with computers, technologically sophisticated users are more likely to google around to find free or cheap alternatives to a product they see. Thus, companies in a market with technologically sophisticated users compete more on the basis of price and less on the basis of advertising than other companies. This makes it harder for these companies to make a profit.

It's true that technologically sophisticated users will be more likely to see the merits in Matt Cutts' startup idea. But that's a defect, not a feature.
That's called "recruitment". If you start weight training, your effective strength will go up fairly quickly for the first few weeks as your recruitment goes up; then it levels off (and at this point most people give up on training) as further recruitment slows and actual enlargement of the muscle fibers begins.