skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I can never tell if TechCrunch is being devious to get page views or just lacks journalistic integrity

While it's easy to blame Techcrunch, I think Apple's the one being capricious and totally inconsistent, just like with app approvals earlier.

Readability's App was rejected because it was a subscription without IAP. Then Jobs says SAAS apps are exempt, but no one knows what the difference is and Apple won't define it. Readability thinks it's a SAAS.Everyone is confused what rule applies since when and you're blaming Techcrunch for what, reporting on how confusing things are? Maybe you can tell us what Apple's policy is and what is being enforced now?

And now these App updates are approved. It looks like Apple's first picking on the small guys to try to shake 30% out of the big guys. I don't think that's because it's afraid of legal repurcussions. I think it's because it knows its users would be pissed if really popular apps go missing. Regardless of what Gruber or other people opine, iDevices need apps to get sold. There are a bunch of people who bought iPads and iPhones to read Kindle books and watch Netflix movies. If Amazon or Netflix call Apple's bluff, it would be interesting to see what happens. I think both sides are not going to make the first move though, it's blame-game time come June.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents

Look at how many accidents there have been since 1961. That's in the world, total. Only a few of those actually resulted in radiation being released to the environment. Nuclear power is unbelievably safe. Think about what it would take to replace the amount of nuclear energy being produced in the world now. Just a guess of course, but I think the butterfly effects of getting rid of nuclear power would be even worse than if there were some sort of catastrophic failure in Japan right now. It's not as simple as "nuclear energy in an accident would be catastrophic, let's replace it with clean alternatives". There are many many other factors at play.
Solved that years ago, just need the money to get a chauffeur
(I know the excerpt is from the book, but I feel compelled to respond).

No, they're just different. Better in some ways, worse in others.

If I had to summarize Japan in one word, it would be 'harmony', or 'Wa' (和). People here don't rock the boat, and don't want to upset the status quo. The few that do find themselves more often than not pushed to the bottom of society.

Because of this, kids go through twelve years of indoctrination, where they learn to think, speak, and act like a unit. They emerge from this into a four-year vacation (university) where very little is asked of them, after which it's expected that you will either become a researcher, or put on a suit and become a salaryman.

The Japanese system is great in times of crisis.

It sucks if you want to start a company, or if you've got a startup and want to hire employees.
Very interesting. The is a good solution for lots of things
What I am saying is that the lack of looting has nothing to do with the Yakuza.
>Not that someone wouldn't have eventually stolen it though. Japan is only nearly Utopian.

Let's be careful with the orientalism. The suicide rate[1][2] is one thing that personally bothers me.

Japan is fundamentally different from the West, and this has its advantages and disadvantages.

[1]: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_count...

[2]: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_OECD_...
If you do a search through HN, you'll find some really good recommendations.

Read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled By Randomness is also good) if you want to peer into the mind of an investor.

Read Hesse's Siddhartha if you're thinking along the lines of culture/religion/philosophy.

Read a few Ayn Rand books if you like libertarianism and don't really care to relate to the characters.

Read We by Yevgheny Zamyatin if you want an interesting allegory that metaphorically compares heaven to a dystopian dictatorship.

Read Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins if you're very interested in the sciences.

I remember Sebastian Marshall recommending Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa -- I'd recommend it too. It's pretty good, and I was especially interested since I've been doing marshal arts for over 10 years now.

And read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! no matter how you think. It's fantastic.

EDIT: More Books!

I read these when I was in elementary school, but they still hold their value:

The Giver by Lois Lowry if you want more dystopias.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery if you're feeling especially playful.
Was surprised at same types of thing the first time I visited. I believe this question is answered by this new york times article below about Japanese lost and founds. I've asked my friends about the phenomena and they attribute it to a sense of duty/routine - normally nobody even thinks twice about turning in a lost item.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEED71131F...
>How do you know they are? Your baseless speculations does not mean it is true.

Because they are?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870465770457615...
I've measured on large sites (millions of unique users) IE6 is less than 4% of traffic. So I don't understand why people still hold it up as a problem. No one cares about it anymore, even serious eCommerce sites have given up on that 4%.

IE9 being stable means a large number of users will upgrade. This allows creating web applications with far more capabilities than was possible previously with a large group receiving the best experience. IE7/8 can survive the same content with progressive enhancement, feature detects, shims and so forth.

The reality is IE9 greatly improves the browser landscape. Its a step forward. Sure it might not be as good as Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Opera by a web developers or power users standards and it may not be updated as often. But the average windows user does not care about your opinion. None of the available browsers are "modern" either. All have serious bugs and braindead behavior in some way or another.
Creating a system that people have to actively circumvent? (the admin responded "need more conference rooms" regarding the location of the meetings across the street, which is reasonable provided that they're implementing the lobbyist transparency measures there).

Anyways, yes, creating a system that people have to actively circumvent is progress. Any meeting in the white house has toe be disclosed, and staffers have to use tricks in order to not disclose a meeting. As compared to before, where no meeting was disclosed, ever, and there was nothing wrong with that (and no gotcha articles, either!).

Oh, and #3 is basically a nonpoint what with the overly vague "40 officials" and total lack of comparisons or context. I clicked through and one of the first names was Tom Vilsack, who spent 30 years as a politician and then a couple as a lobbyist in between gigs. Another was a lobbyist from the ACLU, which really does not match up with most people's definitions of "lobbyist" as far as being paid a lot of money and having an expense account.
There's plenty of graffiti, just not in plain sight. Look in the alleys.

Regarding the trash, there's two forces at work. One is that there's a rich naturalist tradition here. Japanese love nature, which is why you see so many people enjoying the parks here. Littering goes against that tradition, and the second force at work is that Japanese people really don't buck tradition.
DHS: We Have the Authority to Routinely Strip-Search Air Travelers
You trust corporates more than you trust the government?

At least the government is in theory suppose to look after your best interests, corporations have no such requirement. Either way the best solution is maintaining strict privacy laws with monitoring and oversight by the free press and well funded and respected organisations such as a better funded EFF.
When you change the pricing you basically destroy the cost structure that the previous company was built on and thus it cant survive anymore.

One example is the whole "long-distance plans" business of telephone carriers. Once skype and other voip companies made it essentially free to call long distance - that whole business of charging exorbitantly for long distance for landlines disappeared.

Basically if a business exists because its able to charge 10x for a service and if you can start charging 1x for the same service, then the previous business will not be able to survive in its present state as, usually, it only knows how to make a profit on a price of 10x. Any less and its facing huge losses.
Not sure how all REST folk feel, but Roy doesn't have any problem with using the convention of file extensions to indicate resources with different formats. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/1396...
Ran across this site today which looks to have some of the inspiration from the original Rolodex.

http://momentumdesignlab.com/themes/momentum/logo.png
North 3
This seems like a mighty convenient "bug" given that HTML frameworks like jQuerry Mobile are just starting to be able to deliver a native-app-like user experience.
The thought process is probably more like: Why would you vandalize the machine? All of the people that use this machine would be upset. I don't want to upset all those people.
Man, you guys are just busting out with the exotism in this here thread. "People there carry honor in their blood"...
My favorite thing about dr chrono is that these guys aren't the usual YC young kids.
Platform Tracks Dangers to World's Historic Sites
I've heard this argument a few times. As someone that's not new to Ruby but hasn't touched Java, can you elaborate as to what these awesome Java libraries are?
No, about 1,500 years of influence by Chinese poetry, and assimilation took a long time. I don't know enough about it to say if it really is bad, but I do know that Norman England produced some excellent poetry -- chiefly Chaucer, and that was only 300 years after William.
If you want a book full of examples check out The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen.

He explains the idea of disruptive innovation through a series of examples.

A great example is CDs vs MP3s. A cd cost about $10. It was replaced with something that cost $1 - spawning new ecosystems.
Ask HN: Does anyone want to know the results of a print and online NYT article?
My company, Irrational Design (www.irrationaldesign.com), got featured in the small business section of the New York Times two weeks ago, both in print and online and then had a follow-up piece last week.

I was thinking about writing up something about the effects that the article had, but wasn't sure if anyone would care or what exactly people would be curious about.

So I thought it might make more sense to just ask here whether anyone would like some detailed info about the effect of the article. Happy to share anything. Graphs, numbers, whatever.
No, he means the period in the 2nd AOL logo.
Very true! I hadn't even thought of that.
Why are you collecting people's emails rather than having a simple thread to ask and answer questions?
I'm glad to hear it. I'm totally cool with throwing you a few bucks (may I recommend the Pinboard.in model?)
I was recently given this book by a doctor friend its absolutely brilliant and should appeal to any hacker

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
That's why they have 'women only' cars now.

As a slightly amusing story, a very Japanese-looking American ladyfriend of mine used to live here. She's ex-military, and more than a bit of a redneck, but you couldn't tell by just looking at her.

So, one day she's on the train, and some guy cops a feel. Women here more often than not don't react to it, but ex-Navy chicks are a different story.

Mr. Pervert got decked, cursed out in English, and arrested at the next station.
Benchmarking view performance in CouchDB
You're right. I have a history of personal projects that I've started and never finished. I think the problem is that since I had a day job during that time, it was easy for me to lose focus. I've since quit my day job and I've been working full-time on my new projects (not related to twitter, but I did gain some good experience and reusable libraries with that project).

It's one of the problem you face if you have a startup and a day job. At least when I would get home from my job, it was very difficult to switch gears to my own projects..and my code ended up unfocused and scattered.
DrChrono is offering these terms

>DrChrono’s pricing model ranges from a free base offer including storage for 1,000 patients and one doctor login to a premium offer including 10 staff logins and unlimited patient record storage for $199 per month. Setting up medical billing costs quite a bit, which is why they charge for the premium versions of the app. Kivatinos also notes that most doctors pay upwards of $50,000 for a similar electronic system.

The bigger question is, will Drchrono be forced to pay Apple the 30% in app subscription fee from June 30?
You need them.

1- They validate the market you are in. If they are doing great, and you are not, you have potential right in front of your nose. ie, if they landed that customer, you can land a similar too, right?

2- They will keep you thinking on the next move, the next change, and the next product you should be doing. Sometimes you will release first and sometimes they will. Dont be a follower, try to lead.

3- Love them. Dont hate them. If you are doing well and they are too, its all good. Its just a business and you are both doing great. If you are not doing great and they are, dont hate them, read #1 again.

Hope it helps.
Also, if you loot, you're ostracized. You will forever be remembered by your community and friends as a thief.

It's very, very hard to form a new group of friends, if you have no existing connections to leverage.
Ouch, but yes, indeed.
Results | Golf Betting Tipster
Ask HN: Should bad software design be punishable as a crime?
Should a developer/engineer be punished with a fine or jail for developing bad software(highly exploitable)?
Ouch, I should have checked those resources more carefully.
Review our startup; promepi - an online newspaper personalized to you
Speed dating done right - Chatroulette Love Song
I'll admit, not the perfect site for this, but I think you might appreciate it.
Two books that changed my way of thinking about business are,

Small Giants and The Responsible Entrepreneur.

I read them when I was young, so more than changing me, they have me a direction and a basis on what to focus. I read some chapters now and then...
Clarify Customers Questions First
I agree that the issues you mention are important, but unless these requirements are spelled out in a contract, there is definitely no basis for legal liability, and any attempt to establish one is guaranteed to be a disaster. Caveat emptor! The alternatives are much worse.
Interesting! Could you share urls to the non-games you made using unity?
MongoDB interactive tutorial
LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman explains the brave new world of data
Interesting ideas. Will add this to my doc :)
Well, he has a better record on openness than his predecessors and everyone else in both 2008 primaries with a couple exceptions (Kucinich and maybe Ron Paul).

I mean, he did get into office and immediately push a bunch of initiatives regarding openness. Maybe it didn't go as far as you or I would want but even slowing the descent is an improvement.
I find it extremely interesting (and by that I mean suspicious) that the Siemens astroturf post "Why I am not worried about Japan's Nuclear Reactors" has been migrated from a quote-unquote "personal" WordPress blog onto a quasi-official MIT website that was suspiciously purchased Sunday evening. Not only that, the text of the post has been so dramatically altered that it no longer says anything about not being worried, or how the concrete containment will prevent anything from possibly going wrong.

This entire thing smells like a huge PR stunt from a company (Siemens) that recently donated money to MIT and has a huge economic interest in preventing any bad publicity about nuclear power from appearing in the media.

I actually find it shameful that HN can be so easily duped by this obviously doctored information.

See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319278 when this "news" was posted Sunday.
Lucene and the Java Topology Suite are libs we use that were unparalleled in completeness for our problem domain.
Donate to Japan designer tee - by Wharton Japan Club
If you're interested in such things, I highly recommend R. Stanley's "To Fool a Glass Eye," which covers a wide variety of camouflage strategies.
Clear trends:

* Southern Europe/Mediterranean/Levantine countries - low suicide rates.

* English-speaking/Northern countries/former Communist block in Eastern Europe/Developed Asian countries - high suicide rates.

Seems to be related to amount of daylight, climate, stress and competition.
Tldr of the tldr: practice does NOT make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
Great explanation and practical sample of javascript features + HTML5's local storage.

The only thing missing was converting the dictionary data into a trie. ;-)
I know what content negotiation is; I've never seen it done right. The theory is all beautiful but in practice content negotiation never seems to work right because you never get two people to agree very well on what things are. Another manifestation of the usual semantic classification problem.

It has a dubious track record in X as well. X has been able to do content negotiation for decades for the clipboard but even now it's still spotty and buggy, and that's with everything actually running on the same system. It looks easy. Heck, it looks very easy. It isn't. I can't even tell you exactly why it isn't as easy as it looks (beyond the semantic thing I mentioned above), but the state of the world is pretty clear.
I think Japan is a bit more unique geographically in this context. Sure there were people in England that long ago (and same for Greece too) but Japan has been isolated by more water, and their gene pool has remained more or less the same. They know their history and it's all their own. Citing 30,000 years as I did was just a bit in jest and probably an exaggeration.
Ok, just to be clear, since when did Chinese start looting in earthquakes? I admit there are prices gouging in the 2008 earthquake, but looting?
So I read that, and the first thing that jumped out to me from the quotes: "The so-called civilized world can learn much from the stoic Japanese."

If you don't consider Japan part of the "civilized world" you have probably not updated your social mores since WW2 and should reconsider that before commenting further.
If you use an IDE like eclipse and a method isn't defined, one of the auto-correct options will be to create a placeholder method stub for it, and it will flag it with a //TODO stub to keep track of autogenerated ones. Not quite as automated, but it's pretty convenient.
I'd suspect that TeX is mostly used in academic departments where UNIX has been the de facto operating environment for a long time (e.g. engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics) and there is a well-established "command line" culture. In more Windows-centric departments, MS Word is ubiquitous. If the Equation Editor functionality in Word isn't sufficient to do what you need, then MathType (the professional version, sold separately) is generally adequate to get the job done. If you need more control than what MS Word can offer, then you generally go with InDesign instead.
1. "SELECT * FROM Users WHERE Username=\"" + $username + "\" AND Password=\"" + $password + "\""

2. Don't allow changing usernames, unlikely to allow changing passwords

3. Indexes? What are indexes?
Don't have the link handy, but just today I read that Greenlight is not yet profitable, but is on its way to be so. Consider that the fiber that's now in the ground is a really long term investment: it can last for at least the next 20 years and maybe even longer.
At the same time, we must ask: Why so much looting in Haiti and New Orleans?
I'm a ruby developer (mainly web apps), but definitely getting more interested in mobile apps (so java and objective-c) as well as the benefits of node.js

I think for a kid I would almost definitely start exploring mobile apps. There's a lot more room for creativity there, with the touch screen interface, location aware apps, spatially aware apps (with the gyroscope), etc.
How do you figure out what the right set of users? In my opinion, the niche I fill is that of people who want to share photos privately with specific groups, but that could be anyone.

I've honed in on friends and family right now to be beta testers (and classmates) but I just want to make sure that I'm engaging them the right way, so that they can become repeat, engaged users.
Lookwork, the visual aggregator
Bad juju to post something that is widely read about how you promoted hundreds of thousands of times the illegal distribution of a book.
Have you had trouble changing the UI? I haven't tried ShareKit but the website highlights "Customizable UI" as one of the main features.
It strikes me as a theory with very poor explanatory power. We've seen many crises in the US as well, and Katrina was an exception. There have been a couple of others within my lifetime, but it's not politically correct to point out what similarities they may have. (I suppose I should point out this isn't a veiled reference to race, it's actually 100% cultural, but it's still not politically correct to discuss.) It is true in the US we always have to be at least a bit worried about looting, we can't quite completely write it off, but in general it doesn't happen, and we do have a very loose society by comparison to Japan's. Whatever the determining factor is, that is not it, at least not directly.
Qik technologies should flow to Skype platforms
From my understanding, you're describing (edit: something like) Series FF (i.e. what Founders Fund issues) there-- the founder's institute stuff has certain additional voting rights attached in additional to liquidity provisions.

From Scott Walker's blog: http://walkercorporatelaw.com/startup-issues/ask-the-attorne...
http://venturebeat.com/2010/03/01/ask-the-attorney-what-the-...
So, help me understand this please.

Two hours of practice a day is optimal. And a 35-40 hour workweek for information workers is optimal (from other sources, not the Ericsson study.)

I assume that if one deliberately practices, there is less willpower left to work, reducing the effective workweek by about 10 hours to 25-30. That is not sustainable for a normal person. The exception would be if the skill practiced used different parts of the body and mind than the work. For example, practicing basketball while working a programming job.

Do I have that right?
That gallery drove me so nuts that I compiled all of the pictures side by side and put them into an easy to view (and very fast) format. You can view them all here: http://static.cdn-tdupree.com/japan-tsunami/japan-tsunami-be...
He means that the oldstyle companies are making 10$ from X, and you will make 1$ from X and still be profitable. If you do, you will disrupt the oldstyle companies.
I think these sorts of occurrences have very strong group effects. If a few people start looting, soon many others will follow, even if they wouldn't really start otherwise. It may be that, in the case of Katrina, there just happened to be those few people who would start the looting.
Clarification, not bungling the actual scans, but bungling tests of the scanners, and by bungling tests of the scanners; not testing incorrectly, but omitting a single critical step.

Standard procedure is to take ten consecutive measures and then average the results (sum and divide). Their test staff have simply missed the final step on that list.

Raises competence questions, yes, but nothing to get bent out of shape about in terms of real world effects in isolation.