skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously, value vs. cost pricing is key.

However, ebooks are less functional than physical books in some key ways, at least with current DRM - you can't easily lend a book (the restricted amazon form is pretty weak), and you can't resell it. Assuming "like having a nice physical object" and "convenience of carrying all my books on one device" are a wash, the lack of lending or resale should definitely make the ebook cheaper.
don't forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer
Facebook Temporarily Halts Sharing Of Mobile Phone And Address Information
Talking about Epic 4g specifically (which is a Galaxy S phone) - I updated to Sprint test release of 2.2 (DK28), converted to EXT4 from the absolutely horrific RFS and then updated to Quantum ROM. It is a lot better - lags gone, battery life improved a lot, and to your question - I also have the stock Epic UX with TouchWiz. If you want all the Sprint apps along with TW UX - There is another ROM that was recently updated - TrulyEpic 1.2.

But Samsung sucks - I am not going to buy anything they sell - even ignoring all of the rumors they have badly botched up by not updating to 2.2 for all of their US Galaxy phones for so long.
I would like a wider gap in the 5, too. Interestingly, you get your wish if you use the “vertical” badge generator.
> Several junior ministers have already walked out after it became clear that key jobs, including interior and defense, won't be changing hands. For its part, the new government has pledged to hold a full slate of elections within the next few months, saying that current ministers were still needed to maintain stability during the transition period.

You just had a revolution, guys.
Then it is a good thing that we don't know each other in real life.

People would get motion sickness watching me playing Descent.

I would turn around when moving forward just for the sake of it.
'S' on an orange background. A new logo for smashing magazine. No? I kinda like it though.
Not necessarily - groupon being on the internet and relatively 'cool' still doesn't have the public perception of a newspaper coupon.

I have used it to buy stuff at high end clothes stores (well Gap - but anything other than $3 black T shirts is high end for me!). If I ever needed more clothes I might go back to Gap, it did get me to go into a store I wouldn't have entered and was probably cheaper and more effective than them putting their name on a yacht race.
that isn't untrue, but "bulk" for a food preparation or certain services won't usually have the margins that bulk for a retail business will.
Show HN: Chalkboard, a better way to plan/spec software projects
Well, here is a thought for you: How sure are you that the next project will be just as big a hit as this one already is?

It may very well be worth milking this one for what it is worth because in my experience one hit does not guarantee a sequel.
I agree. Though the only unlocked vanilla android phones I know of are the ones from Google. Good devices, but limited selection.
Wikileaks cable gets German CEO fired over Galileo comment
It's easy to throw out opinions about this sort of thing -- "computers are no replacement for a real teacher", "the class size constraint should be relaxed", "if done well, computerized education could be a huge step forward". But without hard data about the situation in question -- details of how the program is implemented, measured outcomes from previous uses of the same courseware, etc. -- the discussion isn't very productive. The NYTimes article is disappointing in that respect: it provides little or none of the information that would help us decide whether the Florida program is a sensible adaptation to limited resources, or a sad pretense.

I've seen plenty of examples of computers in the classroom doing little good, and even doing harm (mostly in the form of distraction). In the long run, I'm optimistic that computers can revolutionize education; in the short run, I'm pessimistic about most of the efforts going on. This article doesn't tell us anything about which category the Florida program falls into; without more data or context, there's not much point in debating it.
You know- Groupon offers an incredible service to many small businesses. Particular to those with high-margins or where the marketing of lifetime value of customers makes up for the potential loss in revenue. It seems like they have put together a top notch salesforce and technical team to bring their business model to market.

But, they really need a better team helping clients make their decisions on whether to use Groupon. While this article I thought offered little in the way of a "dirty secret" and wasn't particularly different than others on the topic, it shows a PR problem endemic to Groupon. This definitely needs to be fixed to ensure the long term success of Groupon, which I guess will be include a Yelplike/Yellow Book service.
Social Advertising by the Numbers
Yelp already is one of the 45th most trafficked website in the US (Alexa). With millions of users already on the site with the intent of finding a restaurant, bar, mechanic, spa etc., adding a daily deal and leveraging their traffic makes sense. How much should groupon worry?
It’s a relatively scrappy MVP and there are a definitely going to be bugs and kinks. The user interface definitely needs improvement. Regardless, we’re just getting started and have gotten great amounts of feedback and now want to see what Hacker News will think.

Chalkboard is a project my partner Abi and I started several months ago. Chalkboard is a collaborative tool for laying out software features, user stories, and screens in a way that is organized and communicative. Abi worked in web consulting with remote teams and wanted a tool that let him easily define project requirements with clients then hand the project off to designers/developers.

Chalkboard lets you quickly define software features / user stories and then create step-by-step user flows for them. User flows are linked up to application screens that you specify and can upload mockups for.

A lot of people have suggested we integrate/tie into Balsamiq. We have been talking about this since day one but have hesitated reaching out to them until we are 100% sure that this app can become a useful product.
I'm sure my relative would appreciate her abusive ex getting his hands on her phone number. (And given past problems with third parties, I have to think this information -- speaking generally if not specifically -- is going to leak.)

You use the cell phone number as part of password recovery / identity verification (as I understand it). And then you do this?
Where was the mainstream media on that one? And thank you ArsTechnica!
Spiderman in CSS3
Do you have evidence that class size doesn't matter? It seems intuitively obvious that class size does matter. Consider a single teacher teaching 60,000 average students in a stadium sized classroom versus a single teacher in a classroom with 20 average students. It seems to me that the probability of success in the latter classroom would be significantly higher than in the former. I don't know this to be true but it seems like it should be true. I'd be interested in knowing if there is research supporting your position.
I like HTML5 as an umbrella term. HTML5 has always been all about being pragmatic instead of excruciatingly accurate.
In my day it was educational TV programs that were going to save us. For anybody old enough to remember Vax it was probably educational film strips.
Competition at the Bottom
After letting a profile languish for some time, I got pulled onto Facebook by people who insisted upon messaging me via Facebook rather than via email.

I quit and deleted the account, however, when the demands of reciprocity got not only too time consuming, but too transparent and formulaic to participate in without feeling almost ridiculous.

It is tangentially related to a scene from Fight Club-

Narrator: When people think you're dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just...

Marla Singer: - instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.

On Facebook, as with many social media sites (including Flickr), people "listen to you" to remind you that you should listen to them. They like your posts and comment on your pictures and send you happy birthdays all to ensure that you feel the obligation to do the same to them.

Life is full of that sort of reciprocity, but never could it be piled onto people with the easy lack of friction that Facebook affords.
The economics of bail bondsmen
Ruby, RVM, Rails and You - Get up and running on Ubuntu
On Hacker News, this seems self-referential.
There was a really interesting Freakonomics Podcast about NYC's "School of One" program that is a good counterpoint to what it looks like is happening in Florida.

They take an algorithmic approach to try to determine what learning style works best for a kid and continuously test for learning retention and how quickly new skills are gained.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/freakonomic...
Er, yes....?

I confess I'm surprised this is regarded as enough of a revelation to reach the front page. A relatively popular piece of hardware had an uncommon but far from unheard of variation. It's a few years before my time in the scene but I suspect it would have been advertised at least occasionally...

Let's see, other bits of tech trivia:

* Amiga ports of Linux and NetBSD also existed (somewhat later) and had reasonable market traction. BSD's Matt Dillon produced an Amiga C compiler called 'DICE'.

* Microsoft had a version of Unix called Xenix which they ran internally for many years (apparently into the early 90s). Can't find it just now but I've heard before that early versions of Windows may have been developed on Xenix machines and cross-compiled.

* Linus Torvalds' learnt computer programming on the rather obscure Sinclair QL.

* Tux wasn't really chosen as the 'Linux logo'. There was a competition to mark the release of 2.0 and it didn't win, but Linus mentioned he liked Penguins and Tux got taken up in place of the rather dull chosen entries.

Go on people, see what else you can come up with :-)
Yahoo Opens to Third-Party Authentication with Facebook/Google IDs
Social Media Networking: It’s Where Your Audience Is
Are there any information about the length of the waiting list for coupons?
"I wouldn't be surprised if the in-house development costs rivaled or exceeded..."

I wonder how much of those costs go into Sense, Motoblur, Touchwiz, etc. Shipping stock android is surely less labor-intensive.
Forget the mods, you can download and flash any stock rom you like, leaked straight from samsung: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=846913

You're right, the mods are all pretty disastrous IMO.

Also if you're worried about those leaked 'stock' roms, theyre just TAR files afaik, people on that forum regularly pull them apart and diff the binaries against those compiled from samsung's official source code which you can get here: http://opensource.samsung.com/reception/reception_main.do?me...
I got an X10 for free with upgrade over the holidays and love it. It makes me wonder if all the talk about version upgrades is mere noise. I'm relieved not to be affected by the Android SMS bug in Froyo, so will happily wait until it is fixed. Even if my phone ever sees an upgrade to Eclair, I probably won't notice with AT&T's customizations, which I like quite a bit. It's funny to hear the X10 described as a loser when I like it more than the iPhone. Oh, well, I liked XP more than Vista, too.
I don't usually complain about downvotes, but this time? They're going to have to expand horizontally to get past hot-or-not vitality, though I suppose they could just be planning growth based on discovering more cute-able animals.
You're assuming that there's a decent amount of people who both have a pressing need for an OS upgrade and wouldn't revolt at the manufacturer charging them to access what is primarily a free update from AOSP. Furthermore, once one person pays $30 for the upgrade, that image can be freely passed around the tinkering communities, so the manufacturer has an incentive for even stronger consumer-hostile DRM.

(Yes, integration takes work, but that's exactly why manufacturers need to push their modified code upstream so it can be tested/changed along with the rest of AOSP. A carrier-blessed release should take QA and some minor bugfixes instead of a horrifically large merge-and-debug.)
I have an Xbox that sees some use, and I used to be a big CS fan back 2002-2005 or so. But I've been strictly a linux user since then and I haven't played any PC games.

I'm going to be migrating to a Macbook once they update the processors and one of the things I'm most excited about is checking out the Steam platform on Mac.
Yeah, replacing all data formats with a new, dynamic, "meta" format is going to make everything simpler and more compatible.

Pass the pipe, please!
right, CI was the wrong term there, just that you're using your automated testing to make sure your deployments won't crash.

This really is the way to go for developing software, deployment should be painless. I would like to see some sort of drop-in tool you could put on your own server without having to configure all the post-commit hooks. Although, that's probably a pipe dream.
It looks like @NodeFu has a new corporate sponsor! Thanks Tropo (http://tropo.com)!
I had made a small library for Genetic Programming in Python. Have a look: http://paraschopra.com/sourcecode/GP/index.php

The problem with genetic programming is that as soon as you start a approaching a program of reasonable complexity, even small mutations start wreaking havoc to whole program logic. If we make a biological analogy, it is like evolving an elephant from an ape-like ancestor. Evolution in real world isn't so drastic.
Wow... the grass thingie on the bottom is so distracting that I almost can't read the article with it there! Thank goodness for Chrome Dev Tools. Right Click -> Inspect Element -> 'display: none;'
I'd also add The Schemer's Guide to that list: http://www.schemers.com/tsg.html

Good story about it here: http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html
I remember DICE! That was my first C compiler. I had to spend a summer mowing lawns as a teenager to get the Rom Kernel Reference Manuals.

I remember getting an updated version of DICE that supported dynamically linked libraries and just trying to get my head around the concept. Computing was so much simpler then.
yeah I freaked out when I first saw how it worked. Everyone was annoyed with me.

I don't even want to make webapps that aren't ruby with heroku around.
Thanks to everyone providing the links to all these services. I knew of some of them, but not others. Thanks!
what is your email?
Sorenson Communications. I wish I picked up more ASL while I was there, but the deaf people I worked with made it almost unnecessary to know ASL because they could read lips so well and we often had interpreters nearby.
John was and is an important figure in developing and promoting genetic programming, and came up with several of the common algorithms used, and holds several patents on the technique. BUT he was neither the inventor of GP nor of its most common form (s-expression tree-style -- what's being discussed in the blog). That honor goes to Nichael Cramer, who published the idea at ICGA in 1985.

http://homepages.sover.net/~nichael/nlc-publications/icga85/

The term "Genetic Programming" may have been coined by Hugo de Garis.

As to GP implementations. In the research world, there are probably four major ones. I'll list them in the order I think they're presently used:

1. ECJ. Java. [I wrote it, hehe].

2. OpenBEAGLE. C++.

3. EO. C++.

4. lil-gp. C. lil-gp is still quite serviceable but a bit long in the tooth now. I used lil-gp very heavily before writing ECJ, and in fact many things in ECJ were inspired by it.
ooh, pie charts!
I commented on this already in another thread that I saw first. My apology for bending the rules, just this once, by posting the same comment a second time in this active thread to make the point:

I'm sure my relative would appreciate her abusive ex getting his hands on her phone number. (And given past problems with third parties, I have to think this information -- speaking generally if not specifically -- is going to leak.)

You use the cell phone number as part of password recovery / identity verification (as I understand it). And then you do this?
I find having core peer groups (I like to call them "cronies" just for kicks) to be invaluable. We share with each other information about our businesses and challenges we face that we wouldn't share with others. We check in with one another and hold each other accountable.

I like to think of it as like being investors in each other's companies, but with no money exchanging hands, and no complicated term sheets. Each success for one of us results in more success for all of us.
It works here, but lists certain files from the system, and stops at "Documents And Settings" - no rights etc.

I had to pad the first "let" to be at the same padding as the second one
The mystery of hidden ad auctions part 1
Ask PG: Would you accept donations towards buying a monster server for HN?
HN is pretty slow again, and has been for some time now, connections timing out the rule rather than the exception when posting an article or commenting.

I can see why it's hard to scale HN using multiple servers, what with ARC not being the most cluster friendly platform, but there is a different solution, simply getting a really badass server.

I'm sure that you're not wanting for cash, but since we all use this resource and we all profit from it in various ways would you accept donations that would go to buying a server large enough to see HN through the next phase of growth?
He can't really provide the evidence because it does not exist in any meaningful manner. There is an overwhelming amount of data showing that reduced class sizes lead to better overall student performance and that smaller classes have a disproportionately large effect when used in disadvantaged/urban schools and when used very early (e.g. K-2nd grade.)
I checked it out, seems to be a decent MVP. I wouldn't focus on basamiq integration yet. Seems to be too early. There's few easy tools for mapping out agile software specs and it looks like this could be the answer. Others seem to be too tightly tied to a certain process and this looks very flexible.
Our print at Hunch HQ of this design is incredible.
the results from 1/2009-7/2009 were the product of work completed earlier
It goes now, after some changes to the other fields. I don't know where the problem actually was.
Except at this point your parents are on Facebook. They were never on MySpace/Second Life/LiveJournal/GeoCities. While some of its value is "the cool place", it's also the place a lot of my family's social events (birthday parties, etc) are announced. If my 23 year old cousin switches to HotNewSocialSite, she'd still have to be on Facebook to find out about Granddad's 90th birthday get together simply because that's how the word gets out now, for better or worse.
I would definitely be inclined to go with the Joyent service since that's where Ryan Dahl (creator of node) works.
And Heroku pretty much rules this realm.

But competitors are good!!
I own an Evo 4G (Android 2.2) and my wife owns an Epic 4G (2.1). I have noticed no difference in their usability at all, aside from a few hardware-specific quirks. I'm somewhat indifferent to the Android dot-releases, and am not seeing much in Gingerbread that I care too much about, either, aside from the improved task management.
Unfortunately, the title also infers the converse: that, by the standards set by those conducting the experiment, ugly men and women have lower IQs.

This raises the question of what people call "beautiful," "attractive," "ugly" and "unattractive" respectively: purely subjective measures which do not take into account the fact that some of the wealthiest, most successful and smartest people in the world look physically ugly, scrawny, geeky or otherwise "unattractive" by the standards the experimenters seem to have set.

Consider Bill Gates, Gandhi, Einstein, Steve Buscemi, Mick Jagger and Donald Trump. Each a genius in their respective fields, yet hardly the most perfect-looking physical specimens.

Enough evidence exists of the existence of physically unattractive, socially intelligent people with high IQs to provide sufficient data to refute the argument above.

Those conducting the experiment simply appear to have begun with an assumption and then selected only evidence which confirms the assumption, ignoring counterindicative data.

I really would not take the findings of this experiment seriously without some form of verification - for instance, a repetition of the experiment by another team in another part of the US, perhaps repetition of the experiment with other nationalities and so on.
FCC approves Comcast-NBC Deal
it's not groundbreaking, but it's something that I've slowly been getting better and better at. It seems with python at least, it's a puzzle and you gotta know about each piece to make it work.
OS-9 is and never was an "embedded Unix". It has a genealogy independent from any of the Unices. It was originally developed in assembly, as an OS on which to run BASIC09 on a Motorola 6809. BASIC09 is interesting in itself: it compiled to an intermediate byte-code, which made it very fast compared to other interpreters.

OS-9 did, however, have something called a "unix emulation shell" - which basically means an sh clone with some unix compatibility libraries to back it. Sort of like the posix libraries for Windows.
Reminds me of transformers (the Autobots insignia)
No easy way to migrate out for one of my Professors who has 16 no 17 years of meticulously foldered emails. if he hand't foldered them it would be a point and click...

I ended up installing a virtual box XP install just for Pegasus on his new 27" iMac!
Thank you!

Why is it suddenly such a big thing to delete your Facebook account. Every week it seems like there's another one of these on the frontpage and that means people are voting them there. I'd really like to understand why that is?
Everyone commenting here and on the blog post make out like it's such a huge deal.

Really? Is it? Imagine if I wrote up a big "I closed my MySpace account" post. I'd be laughed out of town. Why's closing a Facebook account such a big deal? Just because it has more users?

Good on the person for doing so, but do we all need to hold hands with them and pray? Because that what it seems like we're doing here.

Google's got just as much, probably more, info on you. Everyone uses Gmail (why, I don't know) but you don't see people writing up big "I closed my Gmail account here's why" posts. Why not? Why is everyone so comfortable with Google knowing everything about their lives in email format?

So I'm really curious: Why do these posts get voted up? Do people really think closing your Facebook account is THAT big of a deal?
Perhaps future Android devices should have universal upgradeability, and all the carrier has to do is update a table enabling the upgrade for your device - at your own risk. I'd be willing to take it.
so you need EC2 to use NodeFu? Not a dealbreaker, but I didn't get that from the splash page.
Love your ninja
Exactly. And since Google has decided not to indemnify users of WebM, it would be logical to conclude Google's lawyers believe that MPEG-LA likely has a case. Otherwise, why not really get hardware developers on board with indemnity promises?
I did SICP at the start of high school without any of these preparations and I'm not a genius. Some of the math was hard, but not too hard: just hard enough to learn a lot from it. You won't be able to read it like you read a novel, but I'd advise diving right into SICP and only using these additional materials if you really get stuck. I think you'll learn more per invested time.