skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All that's necessary, I think, is the political will to move forward in the right direction. I would argue that large infrastructure projects in telecommunication and energy, and shifting education goals towards an information economy and away from it's Taylorist origins are most important to be able to compete in the future.

These are matter of regulatory issues, not spending. For example, it is difficult to build nuclear power plants in this country. There is a serious lack of competition in the telcom market probably because of regulations favoring big corporations. On the other hand, it seem that we're seeing competition between wireless operators.

Our education system also suffer from poor incentives. Teachers have little incentives to teach better, and tests are inadequate. Political forces are disallowing us to make the proper changes to the institution so it will be quite difficult to shift toward the information economy.
PZ Myers has a fair bit of credibility. After years of helping deal with torrents of nonsense, I'm prepared to cut the guy a little slack on the snark front.

Also I think the key word in
"it is not always valid in either direction to judge"
is "always".
Would you feel wrong incorporating the fact that someone had submitted a resume in badly formatted handwriting as part of your assessment of their application?
Here's a rubric for evaluating stories like this. First, think back to news stories from 2007. Everybody's house is going to keep going up in value forever. Wall Street is an obvious place to go if you're smart and ambitious and want an easy way to make a lot of money. Is America ready for a black president?

However wrong-headed that seems now, however enormous a failure of imagination or refusal to pay attention to what's actually going on in the world, that's how stupid this article will look after whatever big thing happens next starts happening.

None of which is to say that the world isn't changing. But Time is a business that sells magazines, and a very effective way to do that is to spin anxieties common among its audience into a narrative and then feed that narrative back to them in an authoritative way.
I hate when apps request a review like this. It's worse when they ask repeatedly.
It's the track record that is really a huge barrier to entry now - cost/price be damned.

Scenario 1 - Upstart company A which is new to the market comes up with a new great hardware/software combo tablet or mobile PDA which kicks some serious ass. Few people may trust that they'll be 'able to make a go of it' because they're so small. Self-fulfilling prophecy, and that company may indeed have a hard go of it. They're unknown - why should anyone trust them.

Scenario B - the Androids and MS and other 'established' players. They've had a couple years to establish track records, and they stink. Unknown upgrade paths from various vendors - mobile phone companies selling 1.6 Android devices in mid 2010 with no plan to even attempt upgrades, but locking people in to 2 year contracts, for example. MS' Zune being dropped after a couple years, and the "PlaysForSure" debacle a couple years before that. Why trust any of these vendors with your data/apps/music/money when Apple has a much stronger track record of being around and offering decent backwards compatibility (compared to the competition)?

I honestly think people would really be willing to pay even more than Apple prices for devices if there was any hope of the company staying the course with their decisions and not dropping products lines 18 months in the future. People were lining up in droves to pay $699 for the original iPhone - no carrier subsidy - because of the track record Apple has at delivering a good experience. Honestly, really, I don't see anyone else in the CE/mobile space with that sort of loyalty any more. I also do remember people camping out at stores to get Windows 95 - MS did have that sort of cred at one point, but they've lost it and it'll take a lot of work to get it back.
It would have made more sense if it was not a country-specific clone of anything, i.e. if it really was a "next big thing", not a regional adaptation of what's big in the U.S.
It's not only not a healthy trend, but it's a counterproductive one for you. You're at the stage in which working more is not going to help the startup, due to burnout, and the only sensible option is to work less.
Yet American government is wasting billions on TSA chasing imaginary bombs on grandmas flying to Peoria. We should be pouring everything into cancer research. Imagine the economic boom from a cure (or series of cures), let alone the benefit to humanity!
Hm? Those pics (and their backup) would consume disk space and bandwidth. Obviously the huge majority of ppl prefers to see some ads instead of paying the cloud expenses.
I just want to note that article's main point is that generic machine learning fails.

Why?

"The Netflix prize is a good example: the last 10% reduction in RMSE wasn’t due to more powerful generic algorithms, but rather due to some very clever thinking about the structure of the problem; observations like “people who rate a whole slew of movies at one time tend to be rating movies they saw a long time ago” from BellKor."

That's kind of hand-wavy in the sense that you haven't produced the factor which prevents a generic machine learning algorithm from "being very clever" or determining the specific useful observation. Sure, there's an intuition we have about this but that's it.

And that is kind of inevitable - if we could get an exact measure of why current machine learning algorithms fail, we could probably build new one that succeeded.
If both were true, then USA is in trouble for Iraq for much more than creating a computer virus with intent.
What's wrong with clicking no thanks?
There's also http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10596 where an Israeli general supposedly is given credit for the attack which make it sound like it's a pretty "open secret"
"Make a tablet, the exact shape and size and weight of an iPad, make it $50-100 cheaper all around, toss in a regular 'ol USB slot and an SD card and you'll probably have a hit. none of the present, weirdly shaped and overly priced Android tablets have any appeal to me whatsoever"

Spot on. The touchPad has the potential to come closest to this (no SD card but I think it's got a micro USB slot). If this was priced at, say, $349, or even better, $299 - wifi only - there'd be a small stampede. Make it developer friendly - easy to install custom apps on - this would be a massive hit. Sadly, this will likely never happen.
The App store is only one of the ways that Apple builds out its network advantage.

Facetime; developer ecosystem; having complementary products like computers, ipod, Mobile.Me means that every customer Apple captures has a higher lifetime value than a Xoom customer to Motorola.
Appirater defaults to asking only once, and not until two weeks of steady usage. This helps get better reviews since people who use the app a lot tend to like it. In addition, developers have full control over when to display the prompt to avoid interrupting certain tasks.
which leaves you back to your desk working :-(
If the developer implement it the right way, choosing 'no thanks' will stop asking for reviewing. In addition if it's implemented the right way it will ask once in a while rather than every time.
I have implemented such request to review in different applications in the AppStore but so far the result is pretty mixed: some app got a few extra reviews, but others none with apps being the same quality.
as the posterous spokesperson alludes to in the comments, he is probably better off elsewhere.

i totally get the gripe, and i do sympathize, but it's a free service and at the end of the day it's not something that shows up on the radar screen for a large majority of their users..
It depends on your target audience and the expectations your design gives user; some ideas will work in some situations, others will work in others, but there is no general solution. Some ideas:

1. Content belongs to the group; once a user is out of the group, they can't get to it, even if they contributed it themselves. Possibly good if your app will have a corporate focus (former employees losing access to confidential company materials even if they created them is the norm).
2. Users own content, but grant irrevocable rights to access and modify the content to the group. The rights persist even after the user has been removed.
3. Creating users own content, and can always get to it, even after they are removed. Users can grant groups rights to access content. This permission can be revoked even after the user has left the group, at which point the group can no longer access the content. Revocation of rights is a separate action to deletion from the group.
4. Content is associated with the creator, and when the creator is deleted from the group, their content is assumed to be uninteresting and so is no longer part of the group. Perhaps good if you have big groups, and expect spammers to try to join; deleting users from groups is an anti-spam measure.

Note that users could save content outside of your site if they wanted to; if you really needed to, you could fingerprint all images and detect if they were later re-uploaded with a different purported creator.

Whatever you do, you should make sure to make users agree to grant you a license to do what you want to do - UGC may be copyrighted by the user, and if you don't let them retract content from groups they are no longer in, for example, you had better have ensured they agreed to grant you an irrevocable license. Getting an experienced lawyer to check the language would be a good idea.
> What happens when you compete with low-prices, but are burdened by the high-cost structure of a legacy airline, such as Delta? Song was disbanded in 2006, after considerable losses.

Actually, Qantas in Australia did pretty with Jetstar. They avoided cannibalization of existing customers by running from non-mainstream airports, being a lot stricter with check-in times (trading time for money), having cheaper flight staff, and doing most of their businesses online.
> Oracle does jack shit for Open Source software, including the Linux kernel.

I think that's a bit of an overstatement. http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/
Step 3 is: Don't put obtrusive ads on top of your content every other minute and call it a feature. Ahem #dickbar
I'm surprised its not because of that ridiculous floating toolbar.
Just because the US has been breaking and ignoring international law, and it's own law, and covering up for Israel's crimes, doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to point it out every time it happens.
The nook color is on sale for $200 and runs honeycomb. Same basic specs as the galaxy tab. Obviously not something the NYT could recommend, but any HN reader should find it easy to set up.
The article had absolutely no new content, this has been the rumor for months, discussed in numerous articles and blogs, and is the obvious speculation that would occur to anyone. HMMM - Someone attacked Iran's nuclear program? Gosh, now who would want to do an awful thing like that!

Lacking is any evidence or any reason to be writing a new article stating the same thing one more time.
Ask HN: Choosing a developer on Rent-a-coder?
I'm dipping my toe into the water of outsourcing some code. I'd appreciate any tips, suggestions and recommendations on how to navigate the various rent-a-coder sites.
When using Mac OS X, no matter what you do, there's always a menu bar at the top of the screen. Until recently, all Mac OS X apps had window chrome, even when the application window was maximized. IOS doesn't have any of that -- there are specific situations in which you are presented with a modal dialog or a menu, but they aren't GUI elements that are always onscreen.

Then there's the pointing. In iOS, you can't just point -- to touch is to point+click.
Nope, they haven't burned bridges, they're just not as advertising themselves like for instance, some distro's of linux are doing that.

FreeBSD is mostly consisting of people who value technical merit over anything else.
Writing from the developers side, this type of functionality is extremely useful. Many products are review driven, and getting reviews is not easy. Reviews tend to fuel traffic and demand especially in the App store context.

But as a user, I strongly dislike being spammed. Here, what seems nice is that it waits until 30 days use before asking and only asks once per version, which is good for multiple reasons. (I'd likely personally keep it to once ever though)
Google just needs a halo.

Which probably just means acquiring talent and company once someone else starts to hit it big.
Hand Drawn Computer Game
I would say it's an issue of both regulation, and proper allocation of funding. Along with a series of other concerns.
The issue is that generic machine learning algorithms work ok enough as black boxes, but to squeeze top performance out of them you need to do feature engineering, architecture/model structure futzing, method selection, etc, and in practice there are far too many of these meta-hyperparameters to tune with cross-validation or something similar.

While the generic ML tools work really well, it takes domain knowledge to find the best way of applying them to the problem at hand, specially since it almost never fits into the classification/regression from IID training training data model that most algorithms are designed based on. At first this might seem counter-intuitive to you, but I've seen dramatic reductions in the error rate just from picking good features or a reasonable model structure in a way that's not easy to automate. And while deep learning or structure learning tries to address these problems, there are issues with nonconvexity and really long training times that make these algorithms unrealistic in many situations (and, consequently, make them underperform simpler methods with clever domain engineering).
SEO is not a viable marketing strategy, because it is not a strategy at all. It is a traffic generation tactic which can be useful and often isn't.
Easy to say when you have the balls to express that in public which others can only express through anonymous downvotes.
If the app is useful to you and it is free and not inundating you with ads, a positive review is the least you could do in return. It seems reasonable.
Both I and they used NetBeans.
Yikes! I can foresee potential pitfalls when one loses track of the cap and the Sharpie!
38 for arkanoid. The bubble game was 26.
Have you tried Watir? I'm not sure if it'll solve your performance issue, but it's been at least twice as fast as Selenium for me.
http://www.manhattan.edu -- Manhattan College
I don't understand why these distinctions make any difference? Fundamentally - I think the core elements are very similar - the differences are necessary due to the constraints of mobile devices. Perhaps implementation differs - but I don't see how this makes my point less true.

Are you stating that we actually are making use of interfaces which are groundbreaking (in a similar way to those presented in the article)?
I think until we can get beyond this situation where any sort of modification to the status quo suggested by one side is viewed as an assault on the fundamental way of life by the other, we're in trouble. Right now American politics is essentially a battle of marketing teams, not of ideas, and this is strangling our ability to move forward and to compete.

I mean right now we have people arguing against large infrastructure projects on the basis that they are socialism, or some other vague but evil -ism.
So do you have any idea where the solution is going to come from? I really like your analysis of the current situation.
Anyone have thoughts on Tumblr versus Posterous? Any recommendations?
Dealing with Internet Trolls - the Cognitive Therapy Approach
The best point made in the article is that the danger to the United States comes from its track record of success:

"Mancur Olson . . . was prompted by what he thought was a strange paradox after World War II. Britain, having won the war, slipped into deep stagnation, while Germany, the loser, grew powerfully year after year. . . .

"Olson concluded that, paradoxically, it was success that hurt Britain, while failure helped Germany. British society grew comfortable, complacent and rigid, and its economic and political arrangements became ever more elaborate and costly, focused on distribution rather than growth. . . . The system became sclerotic, and over time, the economic engine of the world turned creaky and sluggish.

"Germany, by contrast, was almost entirely destroyed by World War II. That gave it a chance not just to rebuild its physical infrastructure but also to revise its antiquated arrangements and institutions . . . with a more modern frame of mind."

On the other hand, Britain is arguably not very far behind Germany even today, as Britain later had opportunities to learn from failure. Definitely a country that learns to embrace learning from failure (even the relative failure of not always being the best, while still being quite good by world standards) is a country that can keep making progress. I'm not counting out the United States yet as a country that can learn to do better, especially because the United States is still very receptive to immigrants from all over the world who feel an urgency about bettering their lives.
You're using a hosted blogging service. And you're surprised that they want to drive traffic to the version of the content that they're hosting? I agree with their comments: You're better off somewhere else.
My problem with this approach to people is that it fails to recognize that some people enjoy being an asshole.
From experience:

Be extremely articulate on what you want regarding features, implementation language, how/where the core should run and so forth.

Don't accept offers to work outside of the RAC structure until you have a good working relationship with a particular developer.

Communicate frequently, at least every other day on progress and updates.

Test EVERYTHING.

If at all possible, have some comparison site in mind. It's easier for someone to code something like Y, vs. creating an entirely new concept from scratch.
A long review of the social network that digresses into the hacker sensibility
Very nice. I'm not familiar with the game, but I spent a couple of days in the real Carcassonne and it is amazing. If you can find a hotel room in the city walls it is well worth it.
Some game developers unhappy with Apple, Nintendo
I've seen a few commenters remarking that SEO is a zero-sum game. I hope to refute this to some extent.

Yes, there is only so much room at the top for any given keyword like 'buy Viagra'. Also, there is only so much room in the market for a product like Viagra. (I'm using Viagra because of it's infamous relationship to search engine spam.)

This is true of any market. You have market share, and you have your slice of the pie. Most marketers, entrepreneurs, and economists have gotten past this concept with the acceptance of creating value, or the 'growing pie'. But somehow, the general sentiment towards SEO doesn't make the connection. After all, if you're not in the top few rankings on the SERPs, you're not getting clicks. It makes apparent sense that there is only room for 3-4 'winners' for a given keyword.

The problem with this is that good SEO involves a traffic strategy that goes beyond the single most obvious keyword. There is an unlimited supply of keywords to choose from. Maybe 'buy Viagra' is too lofty a keyword to search for, but 3 minutes of brainstorming could produce other avenues to attract traffic. SEO isn't just the process of optimizing for a keyword, it's in choosing the most relevant keywords to capture the market, including the unrealized market.

If you are marketing your startup based on your competitive advantages or differentiating factors, then there is room to differentiate and win with your SEO. It's time for an example:

Lets say there is only one type of car in the world. There is also a global car market of say, 100 million cars annually. To the casual observer, any new car maker would be competing in a zero-sum game. The only way to sell cars is to take car sales away from the one type of car maker. If you're selling the exact same car, then you have doomed your business. What about a different car? How about a 2 door car. Maybe it gets better gas mileage. Now you have your competitive advantage. Your marketing strategy is now to emphasize how you are different. Some portion of the car market will want your different car. They may even specifically look for a '2 door car', which your one competitor doesn't offer. Imagine an SEO strategy for this new car. You would probably pick keywords that emphasize your differentiating factors ('2 door car', for example). Why would your competitor be optimizing for '2 door car'? You've expanded the market for cars, and similarly have found an uncompetitive set of keywords.

My point in all of this is to say that while from an extremely narrow point of view, SEO could be considered a zero-sum game, but when you broaden your perspective it becomes evident that it's no different than any marketing for a business. In business it's possible to discover and meet new customers without taking away your competitor's customers, and similarly you can optimize and win on keywords without a ranking arms race with the other competitors. Optimize based on your competitive advantages and differentiating factors and you'll do well. If you don't have any such advantages, you've got bigger problems than poor SEO.
UnHacking Social Media
Ever since Windows renamed some UI (Programs and Features etc) and made some other things harder to reach (System etc) I largely use the search interface to get to what I want in the Control Panel and associated settings tools.
Nice example, very quick and simple and well worth people setting up while they're still prelaunch. I'd also recommend starting to add in your meta tags and ensure you're submitted to search engines, meanwhile tracking with some more generic web analytics tool such as google analytics. Campaign monitor is great, but even on your landing page it can be worth while to measure conversion.
Again, do you have any actual evidence that what you are saying is true?
This applies, not just to games but apps in general.

One train of thought is that the App Store is lowering the value of software.

The other train of thought is that App Store is making it easier for indie developers to get seen.
On a serious note. Brokers are very hardworking. They may not be the most tech savvy people, but they most certainly are not lazy.

They do not have it easy, and technology is changing so fast, I think they'll have to as well.
What do you purport Israel's crimes to be?
I'm not sure what's so difficult about publicly discussing pull requests.
Thanks. Voting does seem to be the next logical step.