skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not in your "movement" - it's not my responsibility to provide the evidence just because I'm the first person to bother saying citation needed on a broad, unsubstantiated claim like that.
Gruber is not objective. It's as simple as that.
Everything he writes is opinion, not journalism... he isn't even TRYING to be objective.

That said, he's got a decent track record for being right. He rarely posts untrue rumours, and his analysis is insightful, if biased.
Congrats on sticking with it and following your dreams. Inspiring!
Is this really a whole HN post asking why people like a blog?

There's no "question" to "ask HN" about Gruber's "objectivity". He isn't objective. Nobody reads him for the objective take on Apple. They read him because he writes well on a subject they're interested in.

Flagged, of course.
Hmmm, how effective is aluminum foil in blocking the RFID? Despite having "RF" in the name, the signal is primarily magnetic induction.

One google hit says "helps a lot, but doesn't prevent": http://www.omniscienceisbliss.org/rfid.html Note that the picture of the reader and the unshielded read distance (18") indications it is the long distance version.

I'll have to experiment at work tomorrow. ;-)
Well sure, but it sounds like it would require a lot of storage.
I have heard a lot of negative comments about Detroit in my life but had not seen anything like this before. It is not too different from pictures of cities abandoned near Chernobyl because the high radiation makes them no longer habitable -- only people still live in Detroit. The city still exists.

It also makes it all the more clear that buildings are the way they are only so long as living humans make active use of them and, thus, routinely maintain them. I think I and most people tend to think of buildings as being more static and permanent than they really are. Our cities/structures are imbued with life only as long as people imbue them with such, not because of the buildings that were once built there.
Well, now we don't.
Am I missing something?
"as seeing a shortcut e.g instead of spending 10 hours trying to solve a problem, a "creative" person could do it in two using a different approach"

OP didn't say anything to that effect, so I have to go with the words the OP used.

Also, you're strawmanning persistence and dedication.
Electromagnetic signals are attenuated exponentially in metals with a frequency dependent decay constant called the skin depth. The formula is given in this wikipedia page :

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

If you know what frequency RFID uses and the thickness of the foil you can easily calculate how much attenuation you'd get.
You might be interested this in this article: http://www.steverubel.com/instapaper-20-turns-every-rss-feed...
> After the mockup is complete, it gets turned into a template and then everyone works on that.

You should re-read the article, unless you're simply asserting that is the One True Way of doing it.
http://QuickPrez.com
Share and comment documents in real time with your website visitors.
Easy to implement ideas are easy to copy, but that doesn't necessarily mean the value of the idea will tend to zero. See Woot, Groupon, Craigslist, etc. There are network effects and first mover advantages that help the first to implement an idea and gain traction.
I would say your strategy follows my point. In your case, the ideas that are often simple to state aren't valuable. The value is all in the execution.
Not for a key, no. But it's a great design when what you want is low cost ID tags which don't require their own power source and which essentially work like barcodes that you can scan without line of sight.
Actually, if we treat "ideas" as more than just the starting notion, but the myriad small decisions and vision of user behavior, and we look at the ecosystems of
Startups, then "potentially good ideas" look a lot more scarce. The crowdfunding landscape is a great example. The "good idea" isn't about needing crowdfunding for x, it includes all of the decisions about incentives that make them work (or not). When the world is full of startups bouncing over really working through a problem and their vision of a solution - which is happening more and more in my experienc - it's not a straw man to make an argument that dismissing the value of ideas weakens the startup ecosystem
Which of my assumptions makes him arrogant for doing anything?

I'm guessing the second one is what you mean.

Let's also assume that anything he believes is true is because he has thought about it and is confident that he is correct.

he is arrogant for making such a ridiculous prediction in the first place. He is pretending to know the buying preferences of millions of people along with the performance of every designer in the future that could make an android.

You suppose that to think about something (note here that I only said that he had thought about it, and considered himself to be right), and be confident in your own mind that you're right, you need to have perfect evidence on every variable. I disagree. On his blog, Gruber acts as a pundit, and that is expected of the material he writes, he's not presenting what he says as scientific fact.
Voted up.

Crucial point: Google is not consumer-centric. Google is advertiser-centric platform in the guise of consumer-centric one.

Google's value to the advertiser is purely a side effet of the number of consumer eyeballs that it can call its own.
Dude, WordPress needs a rewrite.
> I want to reduce the number of clients or simultaneous projects to TWO at most.

So, true. The thing most people don't realize about freelancing is that juggling projects is a massive context switch. And, it is very bad, to continue the juggling metaphor, to drop a client deliverable while juggling clients.
In other words, you'll get the closed-forum information... just 90 minutes later on Twitter, not real-time video.
Cool Study on Cultural Prejudices in Business
The Remote Desktop issue is actually fixed as of CUDA 3.2 if you have a Tesla card that is only doing compute (e.g., you're not running a Tesla C2050 as a display card).

full disclosure: I work on the CUDA driver stack and the dedicated compute driver for Vista/Win7 is my baby :)
I think people are more likely to link WP7 to Windows Mobile than to Windows 7 and I don't know many people who have good memories about WinMo.
Yes. Fanfiction is an artificial term imposed on us by our current IP regime. It is not a natural kind and simply refers to normal literary practices that run afoul of current laws. Why isn't Shakespeare's _Othello_ fanfiction of Cinthio's short story? Because there was no copyright to run afoul of, and so it was 'only' a retelling or adaptation.
Yes, but I'll only remain in their inventory insofar as their secondary product, the one I use, remains the best.
You have a good point.

I often wonder why the software and internet businesses seem so strongly winner take all, where the winner is most typically not the first but the best (in a sense measured by the market) to execute an idea (ie. Microsoft, Google, Facebook). It seems like the classical economic view of competitive markets is becoming more and more of a fantasy world.
why haven't you built XYZ and sold it for many millions already?

I have 3 exits, one to Hotels.com and one to TUI travel. I am a bad example for that one. None of the companies we built where revolutionary just a good team with good timing.
Actually, it is a plugin made by Google, so they must know there's a need...
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhn...
"It is impossible to have enough staff to watch the two million people we have locked up in the country at this time,” he said. “In a perfect world, yes, we would find all the phones. But this isn’t a perfect world."

Yes, but wouldn't these cellphones be perfect targets for DoD developed Electronic intelligence equipment? We should be able to localize cellphones within prison and kill access from the phone's MAC address. Better yet, the authorities could get a warrant (since the cellphone within prison boundaries is a Federal offense now) and start monitoring the communications.

I'd rather the Homeland Security folks would spend multi-millions on such a program instead of spending it on Rapiscan.
look mate, I've never met you and I have no idea what you're really like, but in your comment here and linked post you come across as quite a dick; one of those people who feels the need to publicly humiliate others in order to demonstrate their superiority
How much $$$ did you make?
Incorporating and legalities is not an excuse.
Yes, the end user benefits from refactoring code. Good code is easier to maintain and has fewer bugs. That means faster updates and fewer failures. I can't imagine a user that doesn't want that.
Idea being, that if you want to automatically follow updates of a source (to be just like RSS and not manual), you have to "Like" or "Follow" them on Facebook and Twitter respectively, and then they know who's reading, no matter how many no-script and private mode you apply. FB and Twitter on the other hand shares who else you are liking or following so there you go. With RSS they have no such information.
Right. I try to define and track atleast one metric that gauges how sticky and useful my products are. For Braintrust, I track # of edits, for Tout, I track # of emails sent.
This isn't the first thing I've seen that Google devs really just didn't get. I think it's from the rapid expansion that Google has done. They get people working on things that aren't really their area of expertise because they wanted to try something in their 20% time.

In this case, it's obvious that we've got server people working on mobile code. Future hardware will resolve these inefficiencies? UGH. That's definitely someone from the server world speaking.
I don't think a financial incentive for leakers would be a good thing. Wikileaks works fine without offering anyone money.
I think this is a case of having a very vocal minority[1]. I do see this a lot on various online sites. And when people profess something loudly and repeatedly, others have a tendency to associate that opinion with a majority opinion.

[1] http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/07/loudest-voice-majority-opin...
No, this is not asking why. It's a rhetorical point.

Right now, my takeaway from this is, "Oh, Apple is so amazingly awesome, that a few flights missed is nothing! Haha, some people are taking this seriously hahaha!"

That is 100% against everything I've read in HN about running a company : The customer is king. You do EVERYTHING you can to fix it. You don't sit around and agree with trivializing pundits. This post by Gruber posits complacency by large companies, which is everything that startups are not about.

Feel free to flag, but I think this post if offensive to startup sensibilities.
> And, yet, a lack of copyright didn't appear to stop people from creating works before copyright existed. And maybe there's more important things for a culture than profit

Well. In those days "copying" wasnt all that easy either
Quick rule of thumb: if it's on AppleInsider, it's probably speculative bullshit. Doubly so if it's written by Daniel Eran Dilger, whose articles usually are in the following form:

Recent news item
+ A bunch of tangentially related, usually revisionist details about Apple's history
+ Some tangentially related, laughably biased, usually revisionist shots at Microsoft/Google
+ (Sometimes) An insane, impossible-to-read graph/chart
= Unsubstantiated conclusion that reads like a wish list for what Daniel wants Apple to do, not what the evidence shows.

He recently wrote an article explaining that he thinks Apple is going to port Cocoa to Windows and release a Windows app store: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/11/12/when-will-apple-rel...
I repeat: "…the RubyGems developers have never been unwilling to take patches that make them better citizens."

Code talks. Provide a patch and I'm sure they'll take it, because it's a good step forward. If you do make such a patch, you'll need to consider what should happen if the user is running "gem install" without appropriate privileges or if the user is running on a system where there's no bin/ or sbin/ differentiation (e.g., Windows).
More fully-featured, modern Lisps, pulleezz
If everyone agrees that cell phones in prisons are a bad thing, when why not use jammers to stop the signal? A small cell phone jammer can be gotten for ~$130, and it probably wouldn't take many to blanket a prison. This would lead to issues with communication between the inside and outside, of course, but a mixture of land lines and VOIP would make it pretty easy for guards to continue as normal.
That's getting at my point. The parent seems to be implying that copyright is forced on creators at the expense of other means of protection that would be more beneficial to them. I just don't think that's the case - there's not actually anything forcing creators to copyright their work, but they do so anyways because it actually is the most appealing of the available options.
That doesn't address the problem if contraband is still coming in.
China joins the patent trolls
do it with the intent of making less

... Initially.
Yes. If you've tried it, you may agree that bzr is to git as Ubuntu is to Debian.
Making sense of anomalies and trends
In a sane prison system, they'd probably support having inmates playing Farmville rather than other things they could be doing. Sure, they could theoretically be doing drug deals or other criminal enterprises, but the Gotti-types already do that type of thing, and 99% of people in jail just aren't important enough for that.

But politicians get elected and "prison contractors" get rich by making prison conditions worse and less effective.
Same old warning against becoming an "architecture astronaut". Look, I understand you got burned and you want to share. However, I'm getting a teeny little bit tired of people who -- out of good intentions -- make it sound like architecture (and clean code and whatnot) isn't important at all.

There's a reason you should pay attention to the state of your codebase. Or rather, there should be a reason for it, one that is better than the intellectual equivalent of wanking. If you're trying to make your code "beautiful" just because you've heard that it's good to keep it "clean" and to "follow every coding standard you've ever heard of", then you're wasting your time.

However, if you're refactoring your code because you found yourself doing the same thing for the 10th time (with small differences), then it's time well spent. If you're spending a bit of effort to structure your code in a way that will help you avoid shooting yourself in the foot (because you've been there and done that and it's no fun at all), then it's effort well spent. And guess what? That's what architecture is all about.

Your users don’t care about architecture, they only care if your app works.

Architecture is what keeps your app working over time.
From the article, at least some people think it won't work: “It’s illegal, plain and simple,” said Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association. He cited the Communications Act of 1934, which prohibits the blocking of radio signals — or, in this case, cellphone signals — from authorized users.
Quick 'sort of ceaser salad'

Half a teaspoon of dijon mustard (the dark stuff, not the yellow squeezy hotdog stuff)

Half teaspoon of mayonaise

Teaspoon of olive oil

Teaspoon of lemon juice

Shake and pour on lettuce
Well, yes - if I could have downvoted that one more, I would have. It was in incredibly poor taste.
Persistence may guarantee a certain quantity of output and that may allow for a higher statistical chance of 'wins', but it's not a must-have habit to be highly creative. Compare the histories and creative methodologies of Edison (known for persistence) versus Tesla (mad, but more creative scientist) - I'd rather be Tesla creative than Edison creative. What a lot of creative people that appear incredibly persistent have in common are lifestyles that are driven by curiosity. Leonardo Da Vinci is perhaps the most creative genius to have walked the planet but it wasn't the habit of persistence that set him apart - it was his curiosity. He produced like crazy but he was famously known as a flake in the day (for not finishing stuff). He didn't care about output - he was driven by his questions, his curiosity. Curiosity driven people don't stop because they intrinsically need to find the answers, they can't help it - it's a form of persistence. I'd rather have a insatiably curious person working on developing ideas than a persistent workaholic.
Besides the reasons users benefit from good code, if your code is open source and you want anyone else to contribute it better be decent.
That was in the Philippines. Totally different.
I think this is a good thing. If China had the Amazon one-click patent, the entire system would have been overturned in the US Supreme Court. When you consider what's happened with pharmaceutical patents in other countries, it's not unprecedented.
PSP Keys Hacked
125KHz => 0.024mm skin depth

Looks like typical aluminum foil is thicker than that. The box in our kitchen doesn't say how thick it is, but the Wikipedia page indicates it is likely thicker than 0.025mm since it needs to be thicker than that to be impermeable to oxygen and water.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_foil#Properties
Did PG fake start Hacker News?
On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets
Summary: He might be willing to "donate" $100 to Khan Academy (not you) if you spend several hours producing a high quality educational video for him on specific linear algebra topics he doesn't understand, and he reviews your videos and finds them to be completely to his satisfaction, according to criteria he will not specify.

It's a very insulting offer rather that inspiring as he no doubt hopes. $100 for an instructional video is nothing. $100,000 per video might get you some nice PBS style ones. In between is the realm of hope to get something good. Wanting custom lectures tailored to your private needs though, and payment is contingent on if he feels like it? Sheesh.

I suggest instead depositing the $5000 prize money in trust, establishing clear criteria for winning, and then empanel impartial and qualified judges to choose winners according to the established criteria. For the 10 best videos there will be a $500 prize each, and maybe an extra $1000 for the top one overall. The prize must be awarded no matter what, even if they only get 10 videos total that are not as great as they would hope. The credibility that comes from actually awarding the prizes will improve the quality of entries of the next round.

As it is, the terms are so wishy washy that most likely the $5000 will never be awarded and a lot of people will waste a lot of time and then be frustrated to find a whiney person explain why nothing was really worthy of his precious prize money.

Another way to structure it would be to award grants of production equipment and software for video and virtual blackboard work to assist talented teachers in producing videos. These could be granted to the most promising 20 videos, with the hope that they would come back to enter phase 2 of the competition where they produce things with their new pedagogic gear.
It seems that, once again, the best position is somewhere in the middle, rather than on either extreme.
I'm talking out of my hat here a bit because I haven't actually worked with Android yet but it sounds to me that these problems might be related to the choice of Java as the core programming environment. I doubt that was a decision made by somebody working on a 20% project.
Hacking: Art or Science?
Powershell gives you direct access to all .NET components and the ability to run C# [or any other CLR language] directly from the command line and in your scripts.

YMMV.
School is not where most Americans learn most of their science
Should we teach our kids math?
Sleep in. Not that big of a deal.
Google has technical ability to stay on top of spammers, but may not have enough incentives in the short term for ads revenue or lack of competition. Also, their foray into mobile platforms, social networks, and TVs etc comes with huge opportunity cost - at the end of day, the top guys can only have limited attention.
You only have to read the HTML source if your browser doesn't show you the feed button next to the address bar. That was kind of the author's point.

In fact, I'd bet that part of the reason many people don't use the address bar feed button is because the practice of having links to feeds is so common, and anything on the page is automatically more obvious than something out in the browser chrome.
Why do you think D&D calls hobbits halflings, and ents treants? TSR has a vexed history with Tolkien's estate.
Save MySQL?
Yes, clicking "Report spam" in the Chrome extension goes to our official spam report page and autopopulates the spam report form with that result.
I agree with you. Lee should donate the $5000 to Strang and be done with it. If they are not to his satisfaction, it is up to him to specify what he doesn't like about these world class lectures from a renowned expert teacher.
There are proposal that make it possible for nodes to not have to download all that files.

However, it's ain't much of a problem as long as HD keep in pace with Moore's Law.
I'm guessing he just linked from one of his essays and it took off from there.
Came here to write something like that, but you said it better than I could. Soon, I'm going look again at people continuing a 1yo rewrite of some codebase, which noone {is willing / knows how to} touch... 2nd rewrite actually. You don't need to worry about the traffic and conversion rates when your application cannot be changed in any way and works only because it cannot stop.
What if your business is based on architecture? What if your customers are developers who care about a rock solid foundation?
Florida in July is not a good idea. It is hot, really unbearable to be outside.

In case you want to come anyways in Orlando there is:

wakeboarding at the OWC,
indoor sky diving tunnel,
The theme parks (They will be seriously packed in July)

Tampa is an hour away there is: Bush Gardens theme park, the Florida Aquarium, a couple parasailing spots (google for the names of shops)

Miami is three hours away from Tampa. There is the Miami Aquarium and parasailing. Dave and Busters is right across from the Ft. Lauderdale airport they have a wooden rollercoaster.
I'm assuming it has to do with the protectionism of lunch sales in the cafeteria as well as administration wanting to keep a strong grip over all activities in the school. Schools are ridiculously controlling over even the smallest minutiae, nevermind free-enterprise involving students within the cafeteria. I remember many getting suspended for fights or other things that occurred in the neighborhood outside of school and school hours.
That's untrue. I haven't used Windows as my primary workstation in over two years (and it was an XP system then) and I can hop onto a Win7 box and interact using most of the same commands I internalized administrating Windows 3.11 boxes on LanMan networks in the mid-90s.

The real problem is that Windows skills generally are only transferrable to other versions of Windows whereas Unix command line tools - be they GNU or BSD - are. And even that's not entirely true. If there's a Windows command-line tool that you learn about and like I guarantee you it's based on a Unix command-line tool that has a man entry.
5 Valuable Tips You Need to Know as an Entrepreneur
Right good architecture is transparent things seem intuitive but yet not cumbersome. A good deal of standards and conventions can eliminate a fair amount of "architectural" code. When I see managers and factories everywhere is a project I know that it has the signature mark of being "architected" and usually find a good deal of gold-plating that need not be in the project.
fwiw this is a year old.
Stay safe Install Rootkit Hunter on Linux and FreeBSD