skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Weird, I've started getting more spam in my inbox than ever before. My gmail used to be entirely clean, and now I get a few messages daily that sneak past the filter.
To me, that's the critical distinction. A Motorola Atrix (http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and...) is a "PC" to me. An iPhone in a dock with a keyboard isn't, even though they're very comparable otherwise.
Any chance HN readers would get beta invites sooner?
I have Razer mouse (Copperhead, blue LEDs ftw). I'm just saying that Razer is probably not motivated to nix their mice line and go pure-button or touchscreen. They will be more than happy to sell you their mice with their mini lappies.
You could use the same logic to justify many crimes. And spam is more than annoying, it wastes time and energy. A lot of energy: 33 Terawatt-hour in 2008 alone, acording to McAffee. See:
http://img.en25.com/Web/McAfee/CarbonFootprint_12pg_web_REV_...
The thing is, they changed the spec after the PR 1.2 Nokia update that enabled WebGL was released in June or July. In August WebGLFloatArray was renamed to Float32Array because the low-level typed array specification was broken out of WebGL and turned into a separate proposed standard, for example.

So any demos you can run might be old ones that wouldn't run in the current beta browsers!
Psyleron - Princeton Mind-Matter Interaction Research
One idea I had during my internship with Cloudkick this summer was an "Intern at a Startup" program, vaguely modeled on YC's "Work at a Startup".

Basically a bunch of startups would have their interns make a short presentation about interning at a startup. When the interns return to school they go around and present to any classes or groups that they can, and generally do their best to recruit more interns for the sponsoring startups.
"media coverage encouraged large segments of the British public to wrongly challenge the balance of medical opinion."

This study came out in 1998, and the media coverage didn't peak until late 2005. The vast majority of those in the anti-vaccine movement had never even read the original article, and only gave it credence because of the lack of transparency. In between when the study was released and when the media hype peaked:

* The largest companies in the world were going bankrupt because the government was encouraging them to use fraudulent mark-to-market accounting methods

* The government prevented any investigation into 9/11 for over a year, and then stonewalled and lied to the investigating committee once it was finally formed.

* The government lied about the safety of the air at ground zero.

* The government lied about Iraq having WMDs and being connected to 9/11, and started a war based on these lies.

Even if it was scientifically unjustified to believe that vaccines caused autism based on one study, there was nothing unreasonable about parents avoiding the vaccinations once they heard that the government was once again lying.

You don't get to claim that people should trust you if you are constantly lying to them. What happened with regards to falling vaccination rates was completely reasonable and predictable given the circumstances, whether scientifically justifiable or not. And it was only after an epic government fuckup of 7+ years that the issue went from being a fringe concern to a mainstream panic.

In that environment, whether medical professionals or the NHS were for or against the treatments was really not pertinent at all.
The problem is see with this is the people who are not familiar w/ the concept of an MVP. There are people who's idea of MVP is vastly different than your own. They basically will push for more and more and cannot imagine releasing a product w/o X feature and you will get scope creep. For some projects I think just sitting down and getting to the MVP feature doc will cost $1K.

I've built projects for people where they 'ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE' this feature and I try to tell them. They never listen, I do it, we launch and nobody cares. A huge part of this business I think will be education on the whole lean startup etc etc.
Remove bogus websites using Google Custom Search
I forked that project and made it compile down to a Mako template (I use pylons). https://github.com/raineri/MakoHaml
:)
Traffic Squeezer - Lossless Compression Analysis
A Quick Guide to Surviving Departmental Politics
No, but IIRC, there is one for blogspot/blogger.
Other things that the App Store lacks (again):

- A wishlist or a very simple way to mark apps that you are willing to buy in the near future.

- Price tags on every product. Not just the one's you haven't purchased. As I already have the iWork suite installed, I can't read the prices of those articles.

- Good autocomplete. The app store universe is a finite one, not a chaotic infinite one such as the entire web. Therefore, the autocomplete should respond accordingly. Terms that are actually app names should have some visual cue.

- A prominent search box. To be fair, they have the search box in the conventional place. However, being discovery on the the priorities of the store, search should be more visible.

- And let's not talk about recommendations. If Amazon is a tiger in terms of targeted recomendations, Apple's App Store is not more than a snail.
I'm probably an edge case, since I've dropped out of college twice because it just wasn't doing it for me. I plan on finishing because I want the piece of paper, but honestly there's no social aspect that you can't get elsewhere in some other capability. Then again I've never had a 'shell' to be ejected from, so I basically graduated from school with the plan of making something out of my life and have fun while doing it. In college I felt I was missing a whole lot of 'real life' and the fun was much to uninspiring for my taste. It felt like highschool, but with less retarded classmates to be honest.

Going to college is a good thing, but it certainly is not a prerequisite to achieve an amount of knowledge that gets you ready for the 'real wold', nor does it provide a cultural & social benefit to everyone. In any case, people here dismiss college because the ratio of cost to benefit is seriously close to rock bottom, and will probably have very little impact on your career after the starting years.
You make a fair point; everyone has to do their own cost/benefit analysis. I just wanted to challenge the chronic devaluation of some of college's intangible benefits. Some life experiences are worth more than money, and I've heard more than a few older folks refer to the best things in their lives as: 1. Kids, 2. Marriage, 3. College.
Google already has reading level data per domain (append &tbs=rl:1 to any site search)

Why not apply that reading level algorithm to users gmail data and public social network profiles, estimate the users IQ, and then those at the top of the pile are given "result burrying" moderator privileges.

Confirmed user accounts (cell phone verification) combined with other algorithms, such as profile age and activity, could make spamming sufficiently complex to de-incenvize all but the most illicit spammers.

Users at the bottom of the IQ pile (non-logged in users based on past search data and geo-location socio-economic status) don't even get the option to bury results. Which, by the way I think is more like 20% of US internet users than 99%.
Funny, but I bet this is exactly the way flat earthers argued earlier in history - "Everyone knows the Earth is flat! Unless you're a trained natural philosopher, keep your mouth shut!" Questioning 'facts' is only natural, and right. You should only take as fact that which you are ready to accept - what you've verified, however inexpertly, on your own.
Hard Core: What Porn's Ubiquity Says About Men and Women
I would never use Facebook for the same things as LinkedIn. For me, Facebook is strictly for personal contacts, and I keep my professional ones on LinkedIn. Even if Facebook were to branch out into a similar territory as LinkedIn, I wouldn't participate if it tied my Facebook info whatever they did.
iTunes is multi-window -- double-click any playlist to see. Even if it weren't, you don't want it to quit when you close its last window, you want the music to play on.

The distinction is arbitrary, though. There are plenty of single-window apps I'd like to stay running.
Some of Intel's Atoms run at 2W or less. A year ago I built an Atom-based nettop whose total power drain is something like 4W.
Is there some sort of network of solo entrepreneurs in San Francisco that get together to ask/answer questions and share experience? Last day at my job is today, I've filed incorporation papers, I've never done this before and I have a bunch of questions.
I have an HP mini110 that runs Windows 7 32-bit. I got it as a gift this Christmas and I remember thinking "oh boy, let's see how this thing runs". But it does just fine. I mean it's no speed demon, but for the limited purpose of the form factor, it's perfectly fine. I have to admit I was surprised that it works so well. I kinda expected Windows to be a hog on that hardware (1GB RAM fixed, with no upgrade path), but it really isn't. Even the 5400RPM HDD seems to chug along well, contrary to my prior experiences with laptops running slower hard drives. I would have preferred an SSD though. And the battery life is insanely good.

For ~$350 or so, it's a really good device.
Yeah I noticed it too late to edit the post. I'm on the 30th hour of a coding marathon and I'm starting to feel my neurons burning up and leaving me numb as hell. You can easily spot places where my train of thought kind of crashed into a wall. Oh well, c'est la vie.
I imagine as Quora gains more publicity and wider usage then the quality of questions and answers will go down. I hope not though.
Its like a modification of classic communist propaganda graphic design. Orange, yellow, and black, the star, strong font styling. Kind of weird way to design a blog.
Speed matters and google gets it
Hip Hop Invented Modern Music Economics
Hey, you're already a little bit of the way there with stuff like AirPlay.

Please excuse my Mac Fanboyism, but it is really freakin' cool to just be sitting on the couch, pull out your phone and bam tune-age.
There's a difference between spartan design and bad usability. This blogpost is about the usability of the design, not how attractive or fancy the design is.
The line

"If these ARM-based rivals can succeed in the market with their chips, they could break Intel’s near-monopoly on Windows PCs. And if Microsoft can do it, Apple probably can too."

Has me shaking my head. Apple already basically is doing that. I suppose you have to dumb tech news down in some cases, but still.
I do not, nor shall I ever have an FB account. I have a linkedin account and I find it very valuable from a professional perspective - I can keep track of all the people I used to work with and what companies they are at.

I don't need to spend time on the site daily, or even weekly, all my interactions with real friends are through in person meetups, dinner, email IM and phone conversations.

any of the people I know, professionally, I am only interested in their professional persona - not their pets, relationship status, pictures of friends etc...

Further, I don't want to share anything more than my professional persona gratis de defacto with the world.

Let me ask you, ar you younger than 27?
Looks too much like the iTunes icon in the dock. Should've gone with a different color. In iOS, iTunes is purple and the App Store is blue.
Check again - this isn't independent OLED key screens like the Optimus was/is. It's a single, plain LCD underneath some hard plastic keys with a window in the right place.
To say nothing of the fact that if one graduates with a large student debt, taking below market salary on the small chance that you might break even on employee stock options is irrational unto itself.
Outsourced Day Trading
375,000 Facebook Users May Die This Year. What Do We Do With Their Stuff?
I highly doubt that that Apple will remove dragable windows. Their iPad-ification of applications is the full-screen mode that can be toggled.

More likely: a bar-wide drag handler that takes precedence over widget clicking.
That's too bad. I spend A LOT of time on that website, and all of the visual cues I had come to expect are now gone, leaving me feeling lost.
VLC doesn't have a great "library" feature, so that's a nogo for me

I really wish VLC had this kind of thing. I know there's an add-ons type architecture, but I've never seen anything for it to handle libraries, sadly. Does anyone know of anything like this, or anyone working on this? I'd be quite happy to donate funds to encourage its development.

As a side note, for folks looking for a lightweight Windows alternative, foobar2000 has been wonderful for me. Low memory usage, extremely customizable UI but sensible defaults, extensible, and automatically adds files with no hassle or slowdown.
I'm all for being skeptical of the government getting control of the internet, but you quickly lost me with your communism vs. capitalism rant. We don't need hyperbole here.
Yes, I think you're right. As a colorblind dude, the colors work well for me, but I wonder how they look to the color-ungimped.
PC++.
why do you need an I7 in the first place ? I think it is because of two reasons: high-perf single threaded applications and high-perf multi threaded applications.

The first is stuff like games : in fact some of the biggest consumers of the top-end CPUs are enthusiasts for games. Which is why these processors have all the nice overclocking features built in. Photoshop is another target market, but it is slowly moving towards multi-threaded.
Where games are concerned, I see that games from 1999 are still the most popular selling games http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ewzoa/1999_game_stil... (Minecraft anyone?) . Plus gaming is changing towards newer haptic stuff - and this is without going into the argument that PC gaming is dead.

The second is stuff like rendering, compilation, etc. : stuff that distributed computing already addresses. There are already startups that are doing PAAS on ARM powered low-power servers.

nVidia has announced a desktop version of the ARM architecture, coupled with its graphic engine. In this world, I seriously think that X86 is losing its relevance.
Just use Google SearchWiki.

Oh, yeah – they pulled it.
Good autocomplete. The app store universe is a finite one, not a chaotic infinite one such as the entire web. Therefore, the autocomplete should respond accordingly. Terms that are actually app names should have some visual cue.

Agreed. If Google can do autocomplete with Google Instant against the entire internet, then the ability to do it against the "more than a thousand apps" that are in the app store should be entirely within Apple's reach.
UI issue: Why do I need to come up with yet another username? I've never understood why websites don't just let username == email with an optional alias. I understand that OpenID or ClickPass might not be worth implementing but in my view, this username thing has got to stop. To this end, I refuse to sign up for any service that requires me to login via username (other than email). It's too bad too, because this looks very cool.
However, the store feels very snappy, which is a welcome change from the iTunes Store being very slow even on a Core i7 machine.
even poor people have too much to eat (look at obesity rates)

oh, this argument again.

consider for a second why they become obese in the first place?
Microsoft’s Ballmer Sidesteps Questions About RIM, Nokia Acquisitions
Thanks for the information - amazing what they've gotten accomplished already with the Kinect.

I found this thread to be a pretty good summary of Kinect progress into 3d-scanning.

http://groups.google.com/group/makerbot/browse_thread/thread...
This sucks for consumers and shouldn't be allowed, why can't we have effective antitrust enforcement?
I selected languages based primarily on the range and depth of programming concepts that they use. So, PHP because it's relatively straightforward, but not Javascript because of its use of closures. Even though a beginner doesn't need to learn closures in Javascript, it's likely that they'll encounter them before long, and lots of experienced programmers have had to spend effort trying to get their head around them.

But, you're right, PHP does have a bad reputation in programming circles.

> hard to debug.

True, but there are ways to remedy this. My primary development environment is a PBG4; since I'm doing lots of Javascript/PHP work these days (and hating most of it), I have MAMP set up for a local development environment, with MacGDBp for debugging, and a couple of bash scripts that let me rsync between my laptop and various servers. With MacGDBp, I can step through PHP code, set breakpoints, examine variables, the usual debuggery stuff.

There are Windows equivalents for all of these tools.
Moving the goalpost. The blog post says that it affects your current performance, not your future performance.
Most projects do just use straight JavaScript which is a big problem. JavaScript does all the wrong things by default. "for in" loops and "==" comparisons are a couple big offenders, that often appear to do the right thing (but fail later in unexpected ways). Any of these compilers worth their salt will limit their output to properly formed loops and comparisons and otherwise cross-browser compatible code, etc, saving you from a great deal of pain.
Wow...I knew him at Princeton in a passing sense, we were in the same computer graphics class and he advised my group for another class. He was without a doubt a brilliant guy.
Another one: https://github.com/riffm/mint
That's what I've thought for awhile, too. As far as enabling technology, we're pretty much already there, with phones such as HTC's EVO 4G that can output HDMI. Add some VRAM and you'll have desktop resolutions. There's probably already half a dozen devices at CES that do that right now.

On the UI side, there's some more work to be done. I haven't yet seen anything that comes close to transitioning between the very different worlds of direct-touch smartphone interfaces and decoupled desktop interfaces. The broadening of handheld interfaces into tablet form factors as well as the gradual introduction of mobile UI elements and paradigms into desktop UIs, though, should ultimately bridge the gap.
Multiple Linux Users on 1 Amazon EC2 Instance
Agreed in principle, but readability still matters a great deal for debugging. There's vastly more browser tool support for JS (e.g. Firebug) than for languages targeting JS. These tools get harder to take advantage of as one's compiled JS gets less readable.

Sometimes I think the holy grail for what we do would be a Slime-like REPL in the web browser that speaks Parenscript, maps to source code, and had full debugging support. In the meantime, though, things like Firebug are indispensable.
GLU - LinkedIn's deployment automation platform
Which brings up another point: I think that if anything is going to threaten Google in the coming years, it'll be the quality of their social graph. Gmail gives them a lot of data, but if my inbox is any indication a lot of it is somewhat ambiguous. Aside from that their social apps haven't done too well (in most places).

Facebook, on the other hand, has developed a system where nearly every user activity creates a new easily processed and meaningful connection between users or out to the web itself. And those connections are probably closer to representations of some kind of trust than "I email that person a lot".

Anyway, I'm not saying the sky is falling for Google, just that search appears to be changing for the first time in awhile.
How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed
We'll probably still be using some sort of device that involves tapping keys with our fingers. But I'd be very surprised if that device is anything like current keyboards.

(And then there's the small chance that brain-computer interfaces will allow us to type with our minds, but I'm not betting on that.)
I get the feeling everything not aimed at professionals is going to begin moving toward the single-window and full-screen experiences. Likely in a slow march as opposed to all-at-once, but it seems inevitable to me.

Regular people never really took advantage of the MDI anyway. (Not that I blame them, overlapping windows made a mess of everything.)
And risk alienating large businesses who want business critical legacy apps supported? I don't think so. It wouldn't make sense for Microsoft.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I don't have the figures to back this up, but I'd imagine most of Apple's revenue from Macs comes from the home, rather than a business environment. It's easier to convince a home user to upgrade to the latest and shiniest version than it is to convince a cautious and conservative IT department.
Motorola Atrix 4G, HD multimedia dock, and laptop dock hands-on -- Engadget
We've been heading in that direction for some time, but it's only because of the increasing complexity of our devices.

Televisions, radios, cars, and home appliances are all devices that are harder to tinker with today than when they were first invented. Computer hardware, for the most part (outside of hobby kits) is all magic black boxes plugged into each other. Something wrong with your video card? There's not much you can do about it.

Luckily, the hobby/amateur market in computer hardware/software (and other hobbies, like cars) is still alive and kicking. IMO though, corporations seem to like taking steps to make that sort of work harder (e.g., utilizing encryption to ensure "blessed" hardware/software can only be used).
Twitter Blog: Celebrating a New Year with a New Tweet Record
Except long-elusive battery breakthroughs.
Ask HN: Music Processing Pipeline?
I had the thought today that music effects processing has a model similar to a functional programming or a unix pipeline. (inputs passed through filters or transforms).

Does anyone know of a library that would allow one to compose music in this paradigm?

What I'm thinking of is something that would let you define a sequence that represents the notes, and then send them through/apply effects to that sequence before they are output.

example:
given a forward pipe operator |> in Haskell or Ocaml/F#: f |> x = x f (similar to a Unix | in operation)

where notes are represented somehow textually as a sequence (maybe letter and number for octave?)
something like:

[4a, 4b, 4c, 3g#, 3d, 4a, 4f] |> high_pass_filter |> phaser |> output

I have no idea if this exists, but think it might be an interesting way to compose music. If anyone knows of library/application/language that works something like this, I'd be interested to hear.
Yes intel is a great company.
but it has:

1. intel has a certain business model that probably requires some level of monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic control on the market(with 80% profit margins).

2. it's strength is within the x86. maybe x86 can't be competitive with ARM on power/performance ? time would tell.

3. is not perfect. has already failed in the ARM market(sold it's ARM unit) , and probably failed in the GPU .

4. performance: in today's world , where things like memory accesses, cache sizes and multi-core connectivity are very important to performance , intel has some contenders in those areas, for example IBM(CPU+DRAM manufacturing on the same die, optical connectivity), tilera(64 core chip, with claimed better performance then intel at an older process node).

5. performance: it might just be that for consumer parts that require multicore (math intensive apps), a gpu is prefered, and a 4 core cpu is enough.

6.ARM biggest advantage is it's open business model , that leads to a very large cooperative ecosystem both at the hardware and software levels.

And if microsoft is serious about the ARM move, intel has just lost a large part of it's biggest competitive advantage.

So i wouldn't be so sure about intel's bright future.