skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. Actually I have avoided paying for any software on MAC OS X because I 've been able to find almost always its equivalent for free elsewhere, including the iWorks (which sells for around $70)

So, it might be the right time for Apple to lower its own MAC OS X software such as the iWorks, from around $70 to $7. Only then may I personally consider buying it from Mac App Store.
It is not possible to completely remove social machinations (and other human shortcomings) from any human endeavor, not even the scientific method. Currently, science dismisses the idea that vaccines play any role in autism while not really having a solid explanation for what supposedly does cause it. I am always enormously skeptical of any claims that "we are absolutely certain X is not it and not even a factor though we have no clue whatsoever what is going on". To me, that smacks of social bias of the worst kind.

Let's just say I have less faith in the objectivity of the scientific community than you have and an alternate method for judging what looked like sound advice has, so far, gotten me better results than anything condoned by conventional medicine ever did. Should it fail me, I will reconsider my options. My judgment of these things is rooted in a 10 year track record of steady forward progress against supposedly impossible odds, not celebrity endorsements of things you and I apparently would both agree are hooey.

Peace.
I'm pessimistic about that. YMMV. (Note, I'm not saying you're wrong and I did upmod you. I'm just disclosing my pessimism.)

Facebook's basic play is to build a lot of value into their network by bringing as many people in as possible, make some pocket change in the process, then eventually figure out how to milk the surplus value which will certainly be a large amount of value. My skepticism lies mostly in the execution of that second step; I'm totally unconvinced there's an ad bonanza large enough to fund this. Maybe there is. I think somebody's going to actually have to sell something and it's not clear to me what will work on the promised scale. That or they're going to have to raise the barrier of entry and if they do that they'll trigger the open internet competition in a heartbeat, competition already coming together and will be ready to go when that happens. The act of squeezing the surplus value of the network is the exact same act that will create their decentralized open competition.

But hey, who knows. Sometimes you get MySpace, sometimes you get Google. You tend to only be able to definitely tell them apart in hindsight.
I'm a little disturbed at how much material they have to draw from less than 24 hours into the existence of the Mac App Store.
Reg Braithwaite: Why I Write Concept Software
I read it . . . loved parts of it . . . and simultaneously thought it was most random book ever.

He does give a disclaimer at the beginning, where he says the book is not meant to be read from beginning to end. When looked at that way, the work is somewhat more coherent.

I bought the Kindle version, and when reading on the iPad, this work really comes into its own: it's more of a collection of linked content than a book proper. The chapter notes are important, and the links to YouTube and content on his website are useful. One the iPad, I can access that content quickly and then return to where I was reading.

I will say that whatever the flaws in this work, Tim Ferris has changed two important aspects of my life forever with his two books: how I work, and now how I eat.
It does not mesh well with how I would act in the real world.
Tumblr’s Bold Strategy: User Generated Content, After A Fashion
USvsTHEM also allows you to send and receive debate challenges with Twitter, which is a neat convenience.
Their growth rate in new users can't be expected to continue but their growth rate in revenue might be justified. Clearly Goldman thinks their plan for revenue is quite good and they expect Facebook's revenue to greatly increase while maintaining a sufficient profit margin. I expect we've only seen the beginning of their revenue growth.
Mac App Store: Buy once, install everywhere
I've often wondered why these "talent acquisitions" rarely include a clear strategy to upsell existing customers to the new service when it launches. I see the logic in shutting down a free service, but would it have hurt to add a paragraph at the end of that email to discuss options to continue the service with a paid plan, or alternatives to use in the meantime?
The author(ess in this case), while a good writer in form has some very strange ideas about the world and sweeping generalisations that border on misandry (at least IMHO). For example:

MEN, SO THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom goes, tend to desire more than women are willing to give them sexually. The granting of sex is the most powerful weapon women possess in their struggle with men.

I would certainly say that western women these days are more sexually adventurous and willing to initiate than say a decade or two ago. There is much broader recognition that women get horny too, and some women hornier than some men. I'm actually pretty offended about the use of sex as a weapon. If you're in a relationship where you're using sex as a weapon, that relationship is inherently unhealthy. Sex should be something that's fun, that's shared with someone/thing/people/animals, not used as a weapon.

Yet in each new sexual negotiation a woman has with a man, she not only spends down that capital, she begins at a disadvantage, because the potential losses are always greater for her.

I'm not entirely sure what she means by capital although I imply that the 'weapon' has inherent value, and that by presumably imitating acts seen in pornography (I don't know, I'm clutching at straws to parse her comment) that she's somehow reducing that capital?

A failed or even successful single encounter can be life-altering.

For either sex and for either partner if not both, surely?

Whatever “social construct” you might impose upon the whole matter, nature imposes much more rigorous consequences on women than on men.

And the legal system (and society in general) imposes much more rigorous consequences on men than on women. I'm not saying that one way is worse than another but it affects both in different ways.

In conclusion I perceive the author as either a woman with generalised views that are incorrect, a feminist or a downright misandrist. It's an interesting article, but much of the opinion spouted is not applicable in many cases.
Are you aware of any USB->RS485 converters that cost less than $30?
I've read most of the book and it's an entertaining read at worst and full of fitness tips you may use at best.

You just have to glance around America to see that whatever the media spews at us about health isn't working. I say, good for him for trying to hack away at the medical / weight loss / media / diet establishment.
A common design pattern flaw is only hashing the first x characters of the password and storing the result during sign up but then hashing the entire password on log in which results in a miss-match during authentication.

If you use long passwords try removing the last character and seeing if you can still log in to your favorite website - on many you probably can.
He's doing statistical arbitrage.
Salesforce.com acquires DimDim
Nothing related to libido and sexual performance is easily testable for an individual. Libido and sexual performance are strongly affected by psychological factors as well as physical ones.
> For example it quickly became apparent that a unibody Macbook was worth more than one that wasn’t a unibody.

Then that's just another variable. Not intuition like the author claims. Intuition would be in recognizing the important variables.
Worldwide bird and marine deaths remain unexplained
I'm writing this comment on a laptop elevated to a better eye level by four Yellow Pages.
Better with age? I used iTunes years ago and just last week had to install it to resolve an issue with my girlfriends iPod. Not much has changed as far as I can tell and it still pisses me off to use. (Not bashing Apple, discussing your comment "not always with v1. Apple UIs generally get better with age.)
>The actual problem the whole idea is solving is a revolutionary improvement.

Last I checked, this was a solved problem in Ubuntu. What makes it revolutionary now that Apple's done it?
Apple is a startup now?
Design for developers: Making your Frontend Suck Less
> "The vast majority of erotica writers AND readers are female."

In the dead tree form, yes. In the online form? I'd beg to differ. Take a look at the popular erotic literature aggregators on the internet, look at the most popular authors (or hell, just all authors) and you will find the vast majority of them to be male (or at least, reportedly male).

Admittedly, this is a self-selected population, and doesn't indicate the preferences of all men, but the image of the erotica scene as mostly women with a few male stragglers is incredibly out of touch. And since when is ehow an authoritative source about anything? ;)

> "Maybe the fact that most men prefer the plotless hardcore scenes found on the various you- and -tube sites"

Look at the -tube sites again. And also look at the porn torrent aggregators. They're dominated by amateur porn, which by a landslide excludes the extremely exploitative/degrading stuff that the article concentrates on.

Now that the production, distribution, and consumption of pornography has been taken out of the hands of the old Porn Kings, and democratized to a large extent, IMHO we have found the real preferences of people, and it indicates that by and large we don't want the exploitative, degrading porn.
Just ok? why not great?
I've been reading it and it's nowhere near that bad. I can summarise it in two sentences, but he has a point in that most people seem content to just live the same routine day in and day out, too lazy/fearful/inert to seek some excitement.
Video: Fundamentals for Great jQuery Development
also known as "No Ping"
No. Foil.

Metal is not microwave kryptonite, it is the bouncer to the mighty power of NUCLEONIC ENERGY! ... But only where the foil is.

Say you're cooking a piece of salmon, you've got a comma shaped profile with a VERY thin edge and a much thicker body. You can cook the entire thing until the thin edge is almost done, then fold foil only around that part of the salmon. Microwaves will not reflect off and be absorbed by the exposed food instead.

As long as something in the microwave is exposed that can absorb the waves sufficently, no harm will come to you or the microwave.
The first statement is trivially provable by looking at how well the popularity of treatments correlates with corporate marketing budgets, e.g. the list on page 2 here: http://www.erowid.org/general/newsletter/erowid_newsletter18...

Why would doctors be so eager to prescribe Lexapro as late as 2009 even though they knew that the manufacturer had faked the science behind it, for which it was later fined over 300 million dollars? Especially since the drug was unambiguously shown to be no more effective than previous generic versions of the drug, which were only a fraction of the price? Obviously because they are getting most of their information from the marketing campaigns and not the science, plus the massive amounts of bribes and kickbacks. There are tons of examples like this.

As for the second statement, if doctors aren't up to date on the research about any given condition, then it shouldn't be that difficult to learn more about your doctor about any given condition. Almost all of the academic research in medicine is written for a lay audience, unlike in physics or continental philosophy where you really can't understand it unless you're an expert. Plus there are tons of other resources to help you make sense of the research, everything from wikipedia to academic search engines that show you which papers are cited by which other papers.
I don't rule out current scientific literature. I just keep in mind that it has its own biases and that view informs my interpretation and use of it.

For example, I am not aware of any studies concerning making dietary changes to control inflammation in people with CF. However, I am aware of many drug studies that show that controlling inflammation in people with CF does reduce incidence of infection. Those studies are generally conducted by drug companies, whose agenda is to develop products to sell (in this case, drugs). The detail that reducing inflammation in people with CF also reduces infection is useful information to me. The fact that they only seem to study which drugs can be useful in this regard while apparently completely ignoring diet and lifestyle is something I view as inherent bias in the source.

I am not a drug company with an agenda to develop a product and/or find a good reason to sell high doses of an existing product to very ill people. I am an individual who was once extremely ill and wanted to suffer less. (I had no goal of "getting well" initially. I just wanted to take less medication and be less miserable.) So I parse out which pieces of such studies are useful neutral information and which pieces smack of bias and agenda. "Reduce inflammation to reduce infection" is valuable information. "Take boatloads of our drugs (such high doses they have to run liver tests and closely monitor you)" smacks of agenda and bias and, frankly, callous disregard for my welfare in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Peace.
Hackers find new way to cheat on Wall Street -- to everyone's peril
"I dabble."
Does anyone know if Qik ran out of money? Most of their funding was from 2008 - just wondering if that heated the need to exit.
I don't know why commentary has taken this bizarre turn lately of expressing predictions 5,10, or even 15 years in the future in the present tense.

Sure, the mobile OS market has crazy momentum right now and may well end up obsoleting the entire PC industry. However, that hasn't happened yet. The PC industry is still bigger, people developing PC apps are still making much more money.

This is not the end of the PC era, at best it's the prelude to the beginning of the end.
Whilst I won't attack it quite so strongly(!), I must admit I got bored and didn't finish reading the last third.

The writing style was a bit too full on and did verge off into ranting.
That is the most uninformed comment on this discussion.
Facebook Roadblock
Did you try any of the stuff in the book?
I did not feel sad as much as disgusted that, through our politicians, we have:
A) made illegal the most effective treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder : MDMA
B) continue to support the primary generator of new PTSD cases: war

A) You're going to have to do better than The Times, MSNBC, and a pro-psychedelic-legalization think tank to say MDMA is the most effective treatment. I'm not closed-minded to the idea that psychedelic drugs have positive psychiatric applications or that they should be legalized, but there's a lot of literature about treatments overall, and you've offered no comparative studies measuring the difference between MDMA and, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy.

B) The stereotypical PTSD case is a returning war veteran. If you hadn't noticed, though, wars also tend to kill people and destroy things, and the added weight of PTSD among veterans doesn't change the essential moral calculus that much. Participating in the Vietnam War wouldn't have become a good idea if it wasn't for PTSD, and participating in the Second World War doesn't become a bad idea just because of PTSD.

But there's also no quantification of whether warfare is indeed the primary generator of PTSD cases; it's hard to find reliable statistics about it, but I would bet that most PTSD sufferers in the US are victims of sexual abuse rather than war veterans, since it's probably far, far more common for an American to be raped or sexually assaulted than for an American to join the military, go overseas, and actually participate in combat. Of course, rape isn't something we talk about much.
FreeBSD now supports the Playstation 3
Recurly integrates MailChimp to auto-update email lists
Nice post. Here are a few more:

Small business owners are always concerned about revenue. Always. They know there are 2 ways to solve almost any small business problem: (a) Work like hell on 42 different things, or (b) Add sales. Find a way to show them new orders and you will get their attention.

Small business owners often feel like they must defeat someone else in order to win (whether it's true or not). Always leave a little wiggle room in price or terms so that they can enjoy the feeling of a victorious negotiation.

Small business owners appreciate simplicity. Confuse them with technology or jargon and they will move on to something they understand better.

Small business owners understand the importance of other people in their business. Show them that you do too and that will go a long way toward your credibility.

Every small business owner has a few pet peeves that drive them nuts. It might be the outrageous cost of something or how difficult it is to get something done. Discover and solve these things and you could go far.

Small business owners are especially sensitive to bullshit. If you're a poser, save yourself the trouble and move along.

Small business owners often have a bigger "real mission" for being in business. Find out what that is and help them achieve it. They will really appreciate you for that.
I have been a couchsurfer for years and love the commmunity. airbnb seems to be exactly like couchsurfing except you have to pay to surf somebody's couch.

Comparing airbnb and couchsurfing experience would be a great exercise in understanding the altruism and economics of the internet and online communities.
So it seems that Facebook is generating significant profits, unless something funky went on in the last few months, so why take such a large investment?
Ahh, I think I smell what you're shoveling, the intrinsic motivation is missing for the gym because, well, all you get is sweaty.
Have you looked into jquery mobile? Still in alpha, but a nice toolkit for building mobile apps that run in the browser but look and feel like a native app.

http://jquerymobile.com
We know exactly why he got so many good reviews on Amazon. He sent early copies of the book to a ton of people and asked them to review it on Amazon.

This isn't an unusual practice I don't think, as in everything Ferris is just more successful than most at exploiting borderline unethical behavior.
I'd love to see Octopart add precise component outlines to its database, with an API so that a component can be added to a board layout or schematic directly from the Octopart meta-catalog. This would make Octopart even more awesome.
I sell downloadable Mac software. My conversion rate is 1-2%.
One of the most intellectually lazy book reviews I've ever read. All snark, no substance.
Have you tried advertising on Facebook?

It's pretty easy. You can select your target audience by gender, location, age group, and interest(s), and then select if you want to pay per impression or per click.

It is a good system (just as easy to use as Google's) and it gives good results. I've tried it, and that's why I'm bullish on them.

(It's worth noting that advertising has funded newspapers for hundreds of years, television for 50 years, and Google for 10 years and is proven to work in those cases. I shouldn't have to say it, but apparently some people continue to doubt that advertising is a reasonable funding model at all, regardless of the specifics of Facebook)

Another way to look at it: Do you think Yahoo or Facebook is more relevant to the average user, and what is the trend for each one, and what is the likely trend for advertising spend on each platform? (Note that Yahoo is currently worth $22 billion)
Recent Services Interruptions
Why does Apple permanently want the 3 digit security code on the back of my credit card? Shouldn't that be asked for at the time of each payment transaction?
That's actually a really easy question. We look at people's bedroom behavior. There's a whole scientific field on this sort of thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexology

Alfred Kinsey, for example, got his fame by scientifically studying what's normal in bedrooms, and publishing this information.
Advertising is a reasonable funding model, but when the expectations are unreasonable, then people will question whether advertising can be an unreasonable funding model, in the sense of positive returns.
Reflection on the Mac App Store
I completely agree. I of course don't actually know how much, but most of the women I know don't seem to enjoy technology or math any less than I do. I was mainly responding to the way billpaetzke's comment that men and women may be "hard-wired to enjoy different types of work" jumped to the easier conclusion.
The surprising usefulness of sloppy arithmetic
The worst part about the 4-hour body is how inconsistent Ferriss is. Are you support to take PAGG 3x a day? Why does he only take it once or twice when he details his hour-by-hour schedule?

The second worst part about the 4-hour body is how much bullshit he fills the pages with. His section on jumping higher (for me, a major selling point of the book) is totally worthless and difficult-to-follow. (A few black and white diagrams did not do it for me... I would have preferred a workout routine.) Mostly he just spends the pages waxing poetic about some sexy ex-NFL gym trainer, and then he talks about how he set the one-day record at his gym for improving vertical leap.

The third is that it's just very difficult to distill any practical information from the book. Man, I just want ONE workout plan, ONE meal plan, and they don't want to think about the rest of it. In order to properly synthesize the 4HB you'd have to do a lot of research, bring a healthy sense of skepticism, and basically spend a lot of time. I don't want to think! I want someone trustworthy to tell me SAFE things I can do that will more or less bring me results.

But it motivated me to buy a caliper, and measure regularly, so I guess that's pretty good. And maybe I'll start stocking up on Brazil nuts.

P.S. I am vegan.
This whole discussion is suffering from a crippling lack of statistics. Contrary to what the author of the article may think, you really can't build an indictment of male sexuality based entirely on personal anecdotes and cherry-picked internet porn.
Dimdim acquired by salesforce
Nothing about the fact that the J-20 looks like the F-22 implies cyber-espionage. If I were trying to build a stealth fighter, the first thing I'd do is look at pictures of it and make something that looks similar. (Since aviation week, or whoever, was able to tell what the angles of the J-20 are, I assume China would have no problem figuring out the shape of the F-22 from the numerous pictures available.) Even if you just knew the idea of shaping the plane to deflect radar signals, you'd probably end up with something similar. I expect that the really important stuff is in things not in the pictures: materials to use, paint to use, paints not to use, how to make non-radar-reflective joints/weapons/mounts, how to get good aerodynamics with all those sharp edges, etc.
I hope we'll end up with something open, but I have my doubts. There are still many closed systems that indicate that it may not happen:

* Apple released their closed Mac Store today after 25+ years of a open system, to add to their many closed systems. Apple have shown several times they will block apps. they don't like.

* We've had 35+ years of games consoles, on which the games are tightly controlled by the supplier of the console. Microsoft have already indicated they will not allow certain types of games in to use Kinect.

* 100+ years after the invention of the Telephone we have Skype, which is controlled by a single company.

* Whilst Email is open. Microsoft, Google or Yahoo control so much of the market they can and do effectively stop you talking to your customers by marking your mails as spam and making it hard to appeal (e.g. previous spammer on your IP)
Chicago-based SingleHop Launching Cascade Platform Via midVentures