skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Move over Apple, my tablet cost $10

I just bought a Moleskine, sure it can't do fancy videos, and it can't really surf the web, but neither can the hacked Nook for $200. And with a small hack I can even read books from Amazon on this device! I just print them out and glue them between the Moleskine's pages.

Of course, there's always cheaper hardware with less functions - but why make this a wsj article?
What do you consider architecture astronaut nonsense?
I think your perspective on what's broken is an issue.

It's one thing to say "everybody else is crappy, we can be crappy too." I agree, that's bad. Doing better can be a great differentiator.

It's another thing to realize "the input we receive is broken, our output will be too". Garbage in, garbage out.

Square, having decided they are going to be in the business of reading magnetic stripes, cannot make those magnetic stripes any more secure than they already are (not). They could maybe do better/right by being in a different business, but they can't do the business they are in any better.
It comes down to what Square are trying to do, if they want to be "another credit card reader device" then this isn't a security hole.

On the other hand if they want to take the PayPal approach and build a secure payment brand which says "we're a securer way to pay because the end merchant never sees your credit card details", then it is a security hole, because it means you can't trust the Square brand to act as a layer between you and the merchant.
I had an article published about MySQL tuning a while ago:

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2011/02/10/understanding-d...

Always tune for your workload. Be sure to index your damn tables. And yes, measure.
Amazon EC2 Adds Change Instance Type and Shutdown Behavior
My dream domain parking page
Here's some more about the RTGs:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html

They used to provide about 470W, now it is down to the mid-200s.
Austrian economics states that preference drives economic decisions, is behavioral economics supposed to be an offshoot? Is behavior not a resultant of our preference for a desired outcome?
> Problem solved.

Not really. You can achieve similar dubious goals with various other techonologies that are not so readily disabled, or that are usually implemented independent of the browser itself anyway (e.g., "Flash cookies").
Very cool. Curiously, in my projects past and present I can either recognise Chris or Steve in me, depending on the project. There are projects where it feels like I'm running into a wall to build even a prototype, but once it's built (either with help from others or by raw determination) it's clear sailing to tidy it up and extend it. Yet other functioning prototypes that were built in a frenzy have languished in this embryonic state for a while until I figured out how to structure them for production.

I think it's related to whether the project lends itself to top-down or bottom-up design. At some point I seem to hit a barrier in the middle. This usually only happens on "hard" projects and even then I inevitably overcome it eventually, sometimes with pair programming, but it's damn annoying. Having Steve or Chris around would be damn handy.
How Much Will Consumers Pay for Tablets?
Friday the 13th, 2029 - NASA Science
There are two dangers here:

1. This actually does lead to a breach of card numbers, in which case Square will face penalties from Visa/MC/Amex - those penalties can be huge because they are calculated based upon the number of cards that were compromised (check out Heartland's breach last year).

2. Verifone is able to convince Visa/MC/Amex that Square is not PCI compliant and that they should fine Square out of existence (it's not a legal thing, it's at Visa/MC's discretion).

#1 is somewhat likely, on Android moreso than Iphone, there have been android viruses before.

#2 isn't that likely, unless there is actually a breach and it ends up costing Visa and Mastercard money, Square is strategic to Visa and Mastercard because it gives them access to an entirely new customer base (that Verifone hasn't had any luck with).

1. Customers don't give a shit. We hand our cards over into insecure situations all the time without thinking twice.

2. Businesses don't care either - they only care about PCI and security when either their acquirer (in this case Square, which won't do it) or Visa/MC start fining them or threaten to shut them down.
> If people really cared that much about cookies, the market would have responded accordingly and there wouldn't be any need for this kind of regulation at all.

That's naive.

For one thing, most people are not technically knowledgeable and don't understand the extent to which they are being tracked.

For another, even those who would care about such issues can't spend their entire lives becoming experts in every ethical, legal, regulatory and financial field that might affect them. It simply isn't humanly possible, which is one reason we have laws crafted by specialists but applying to everyone.

Your argument only makes any sense if everyone knows about what's going on, understands the implications, and still doesn't care.
Senate passes patent bill, but kills limits on damages
> I particularly dislike the names Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu and would like to see them all go.

Most of the *buntu projects aren't Canonical projects. They are independent spins, tailored for a specific user base. The tools to do this are readily available, and you could make your own Bilbanubuntu distro, and it would be just as official as many of the others.
Now imagine taking those two out of the corporate environment and putting them into a start up, working as co-founders. This is what I dream about...
I think WebOS will be like Steam is on PCs or like the Apple App store is on Mac based computers. In this case the purchasing and updating of apps will be consistent and easy to maintain, however they will still run side by side Photoshop and Games.

WebOS apps will run on WebTops to compete with ChromeTops on the netbook side, but those apps will also run on the desktop.

A key difference between WebTops and WebOS apps and Chrome apps will be the "Touch to Share" feature that will allow you to wirelessly share data between paired devices. This will make it really easy to have a phone, watch, TV, netbook, tablet and PC and share data between them.

I bet you will even be able to configure a home network by using some sort of "Touch to Share" configuration stone.

Only WebOS apps will have this feature and you may need special HP hardware to allow that functionality to work. With 100 million devices using "Touch To Share" next year, I hope we have a click-wheel level UX experiance to Rival Apple.
My pedantry detector is working spot on, however.
I've been observing SEO for several years, and out of all the things I've learned as a technologist, SEO is the most frustrating. It's consistently murky and unpalatable to me as a programmer because of it's lack of logic. And as far as pointing out how it works, I'm not happy with the state of affairs. I've simply decided that I'm going to talk frankly about how I understand it. Maybe you guys can straighten me out. I see so much posturing on SEO -- even by the guys who claim to be "shooting straight" that it's discouraging.

The problem you have is that you are trying to describe a system that has no specification. That is, there is no testable definition of "best content" that is repeatable and applicable to all users. After all, this was google's entire schtick -- the reason everybody thought it was cool was because they managed to hack the problem better than anybody else had up until then. But there is no solution. It's not that kind of problem.

One of the reasons SEO drives me nuts is that the concepts we are so used to in programming, "black box", "answer", "best content", "user", etc -- don't really have firm meanings in the way we would like them to. Yes, it would be awesome if there was a little magic box that told me what to do (or gave me all the answers) but -- and this is important -- even if there was, it wouldn't be a black box. We live in a digital age. Anything that can be put into code is instantly commoditized.

There is another assumption here that is equally slippery (aside from the fuzzy nature of all the adjectives and the impossibility of making the system opaque), and that is the idea that somehow one can determine content quality mechanically. That's like saying you can pick the "best" painting at an art show by using some kind of hand-held scanner and an image-processing algorithm. Content is about people interacting with people -- it's not deterministic. We are not machines.

We keep wanting Search Engines to work like the library: go to the card catalog, pick a topic, find authoritative sources. But they keep working like the dance hall: show up with your best suit, make some friends, and work the crowd, become popular. That's frustrating. But as one SEO expert told me in a recent interview[1], if you don't use social signals (popularity), how else would you do it? This is the way we've been judging content since 3 guys sat around in a cave looking at mammoth drawings.

[1](If you have time, you might want to listen to the interview. I tried to touch on this exact subject because I know how touchy an issue SEO is: http://www.hn-books.com/Books/SEOMoz.htm#the_video )
Not if Mom and Pop's grandkid gave them an iPhone for christmas and all they have to do is plug in a tiny reader
Tablet + pen = 2 hands busy, you've lost most of your comfort and mobility advantage compared to a netbook user.

There are tablet PCs which accept both pen and finger input.

And you pretty much need a Wacom-style digitizer in order to register pen strokes with the precision and pressure sensitivity required of art or handwriting applications.
Initially, TeX wasn't meant to be scriptable. It was Guy Steele who convinced Knuth to make TeX an extensible fully programmable language.

So if it wasn't for Guy Steele, we wouldn't have e.g. LaTeX written in TeX macros, but perhaps as a pre-processor.
Thats a big problem though. We really shouldn't be asking practicing doctors to perform under a lack of sleep like we currently do. The problem is that we have too few doctors (in the US) and part of that problem is the fact that we weed out potential doctors who can't function well without sleep or who don't want a job where they are run ragged.

EDIT: Applied s/two/too
I think the theory is that once you've fully slept off your sleep debt (which I've heard can be up to 40 hours) you are no longer able to sleep much more than your natural sleep requirement, bored or not.
Canadians use the Internet more than anyone else in the world
The app store effect on pricing will be coming to ebooks. With e-books being way overpriced (sometimes more than the print version), this has to be a good thing for consumers and authors - at least to an extent.
Big Data and Maybe M&A Dreams Drive Fusion-io IPO
Clickable:

http://alphalab.org/
Last I looked some of the thinkpads (15") on lenovo's website had an option for 1920 by something.
Could one of these ("nuclear batteries") be used to power one of those exoskeletons from Lockheed or Raytheon?
Cognitive dissonance of realizing a lowly engineer (you know, something those immigrants do) can make more than an attorney. Apparently he wasn't paying attention during the last 20 years.
Your post is one unsubstantiated claim after another.

Just because you fund your content through ads, that doesn't mean someone else can't use a different model. Sorry to be brutal, but if you can't find a viable alternative model when ads aren't cutting it any longer, maybe your content simply isn't worth that much and losing your site isn't a great loss to anyone else.

Moreover, just because you associate ads with tracking, that doesn't mean everyone else does. The most lucrative advertising deals I know about are between sites catering to particular interest groups and advertisers who also cater to those groups and make a direct agreement with the site. It takes actual work to set this up, but can be very lucrative for all concerned, particularly without any middleman ad network taking a big cut of any money changing hands. Many models from classic sponsorship deals to modern product placement approaches are based on this idea.

> All that will happen is that the tracking networks will switch to browser fingerprinting making tracking harder to control and more opaque.

That's probably going to be illegal, too.

In any case, browser fingerprinting is becoming a hot topic for all the wrong reasons. I expect near-future browsers will basically kill it as a technique anyway.
Wow, 230K miles! I thought Kia would be one of those brands that broke hopelessly after 50-100K miles.

Did you do anything special beyond regular maintenance? Any big surgeries?
Not the most convincing spokesperson for that issue.

"CEOs of all major banks don't see a mortgage bubble!"
This is a good point. The real security flaw is in the credit card itself, not the device reading it.
VeriFone vs. Square: Much Exaggeration - and Some Truth
Yes. I had a great working relationship with a UX designer. This is how it is supposed to work - a give and take, and complementing each other's strengths.

Alan Cooper would have you think that the hacker cannot overrule the designer, but in a respectful relationship with equals it can work well.

Alas I didn't realize how good I had it until it was over.

Ok, this is starting to sound like a tv drama.
Phishing with Google
When will Voyager encounter the machine planet and become self-aware, though?
Go to bed at the same time every day. Even on the weekends I go to bed early and wake up at about 6:30. Which I never thought would be the case, but it is. It's actually really peaceful and nice being up that early on a Saturday.
I'm nearly certain that the vast, vast majority of living economists would agree that preferences drive economic decisions.
The last part is the really sad thing. We have the technology to do it right now, but because credit cards are everywhere and better stuff isn't, there's no motion toward improvement.

The fundamental problem is that the credit card system works by requiring the customer to provide the merchant with all of the credentials necessary to make a transaction. We could have inexpensive devices that receive payment details, display them on cheap LCDs, and digitally sign them if the user confirms. Such a device would be about as complex as a pocket calculator, and as secure as any application of digital signatures. Nobody is moving on them because of the chicken/egg problem.
Is there a reason every recent post on this guy's blog has been posted on HN?
From the Wikipedia article (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Literate_prog...):

The first published literate programming environment was WEB, introduced by Donald Knuth in 1981 for his TeX typesetting system; it uses Pascal as its underlying programming language and TeX for typesetting of the documentation.

That is delicious. He programmed in a way that would generate both the documentation for TeX (in TeX) and the source code for TeX (in Pascal). Compiling the source code generates a program that can process that TeX documentation.

In other words, the documentation is an integral part of the source code, and the compiled source code is an integral tool in producing the documentation.
You don't have to support IE. Just like an iPhone developer doesn't have to support Android. Or an OS X developer doesn't have to support Windows. You give up some market share, but it's a standard tradeoff == more work vs more revenue?

There's nothing to be sad about, it's a decision we make everyday. If IE is so painful that the revenue is not worth it, then don't do it. We currently don't support OS X. I'm not sad when Apple ships a new version of OS X. I just know that the 10% of the market that they own is one that we won't support. I'm fine with that, and have been for a while now.
I remember indy500 back in the heydays of DOS.
What they need to do is make "Nested Labels" and "Hide Read Labels" work nicely together.

Also for "Nested Labels", enabling a label count of the sub-labels in the main label would be great. Where did "Hide Read Labels" go?
Try Times New Roman (\usepackage{times}) with the MathTime Pro 2 fonts from PCTeX (http://www.pctex.com/mtpro2.html), designed by Michael Spivak of the Differential Geometry books fame.

The MathTime fonts aren't free, but they are not expensive for a one-time cost, and they are worth the money. I bought them specifically to use on my dissertation even though I was a poor graduate student at the time. ;-)
A Python Function Timing Decorator (using coroutines)
The Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies
StumbleUpon Stumbles Onto $17M From Accel & Others
I am a 3rd year in medical school, and firmly believe that sleep deprivation is a terrible weeding process. If a doctor is sleep deprived I do not want them touching me with a ten foot pole. They make enough mistakes as it is! Sure you argue that they limit work hours, but I can tell you first hand that these limits are only paid lip service to, and I routinely see residents work 80+ (sometimes 90+) hours a week. Oh and the max shift is 16 hours now so calculate out how you get to 80+ hours. You can't report your program because they will lose accreditation and you'd have to go somewhere else to get this scam of being 'board certified', and you can't really threaten because your program can find a reason to dispose of you. real big catch-22.

(just for kicks, if you worked 10hour days for 7 days a week that is only 70 hour work week... doctors work at least 12 hour days, and usually 16 hour days to get to the full 80 hours!)

Oh and as far as weeding out?

Most 'weeding' out happens first and second year of medical school. In my class alone about 10% of the class failed first year exams, and they were forced to repeat or retake the whole year. (which SUCKS when you just paid $37,000 for a year of school that meant nothing). Then Second year weeding happens again with STEP1 licensing exam:

"Overall pass rates for first time USMLE Step 1 test takers are: 92% for U.S. M.D. medical school graduates, 81% for U.S. D.O. osteopathic medical school graduates, and 73% for international medical school graduates" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Medical_Licensing...

Fail a year or a board exams? You pretty much can only be a psychiatrist or family doctor with little or no hope of every specializing.
Reduce startup costs and risks with Akamai
My username was 100% unique from 1991, when I first started using it, until some time around 2005. (At least according to veronica, then altavista, and now google.)

In the last 5 years, enough other people have picked it up that the only front-page Google search that is actually me is the HN link.

Draw what conclusions you will, but I think that as more of the world's population gets online, the uniqueness of the name alone is going to be more and more questionable. But tie it to a domain/site/location, and then you have something.
Ask HN: Help me choose (and appraise) domain name
I am programmer and I don't have experience in domain name business(how to set price for domain,business side not technical,etc.). I own few domain names (5x 5L) and while I am working on my startup it's time to choose domain name and to sell other domains. If anyone have few minutes to take a look and help me to decide how worth and brandable these names are(I am not native english speaker) I would be very grateful for your input and advice.

Email me: hnsee (at) live.com and I will show you domains. Thanks
New molecular robot can be programmed to follow instructions
An Entrepreneurial Life: From Red Sox Nation To MLB Analytics Start Up
> If all you want is transportation

I might not want a Kia but I certainly don't want to bother with a BMW. I need transportation more than I need to make a fashion statement. So far, nobody is making a tablet for me -- a nice affordable Honda.
In Groupon’s $6 Billion Wake, a Fleet of Start-Ups
On one hand, I feel like these are all just excuses, but then I have to ask myself the question: outside of FaceTime, what use cases do I see for the camera on my iPad? I'm certainly not going to walk around snapping photos with something the size of a small dinner tray. I'm even struggling with the concept that I'd even use the camera for FaceTime. I've got ready access to video chat on my iPhone and laptop through Skype, yet I rarely use it outside of introductions. I get the whole "see your kids" thing, but in most contexts, I just don't want to see the person.

The only use case I have much interest in is the virtual overlay possibilities. I've used a couple of demo apps on my iPhone, and while it's cool, the screen is too small to capture much of field of view. I'm hoping the iPad will remedy this a bit.

This is all speaking from my own perspective. Everyone is different, so priorities will vary. I definitely acknowledge that to the person that really wants a camera, all this sounds like a bunch of excuses.
Well, since you've realized it now, what are you going to do about it? :)
He's publishing online; of course he wants eyeballs. But not many people know that the Nook can do double duty as an entry level tablet, with access to the full Android market. Given the cheaper price, I'd say this is a worthwhile article, in the sense that it will probably steer certain people away from overpaying for designer tech they don't need.
Jacques used to be a very prolific and popular contributor to HN, but left for reasons detailed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161427

Many HNers follow his blog (which tends to be of consistently high quality) and/or twitter stream.

HN profile: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm
I hope they add the ability to re-order labels soon. Either that, or Sparrow adds some ability to re-order labels and slightly better label integration.
Elixir: Simple Object Orientation and charming syntax on top of Erlang
Continue running my company, probably.
This is one of the classic signs it's a bubble right? (when people in the industry claim it's not)
Maybe this is because I do not have an MBA but I'm completely confused why a well known (near household) name brand with a .com domain name would switch to o.co, which no common person would even recognize as a web address if they saw it without context.
Having worked with many so-called "Mom and Pop" POS systems, I can tell you that it is just not that simple. Most "Mom and Pop" shops are already using integrated hardware/software solutions. How is their iPhone going to transfer transactions into the Accounts Receivable software that is tightly integrated into their register system? There's a lot more to it than just capturing a transaction.
Google Job Page from 1998
Windows Phone: Still no update
sigh

Techcrunch of course being completely ignorant of the world outside of the US seem to have missed JustEat, a European startup in the same space. GrubHub turned over $85 million last year, JustEat does that kind of volume every month.

I understand how Techcrunch might miss smaller startups, but missing one that has close to a billion dollar annual turnover?
Sooo geeky :)
I totally agree that for video/audio players, Flash is a good technology (if hardware support is enabled and Flash is properly sandboxed). Flash is platform independant, needs no pre-installed codecs and can be easily blocked. None of this is true for any native audio/video tag.
He's a guy who contributed greatly to the HN community. His blog posts have consistently been featured on HN, but even more so lately since he "retired" from HN and isn't doing nearly as much posting here.

Further, there are other people who's every bog post makes front page here. It's how we roll. Stick around for a couple months, and you'll see it. There are also cycles and waves of people, topics, etc.
Kinect Confirmed As Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device
So, they have a month or two to actually ship, or we'll know it's all PR puffery, including this particular quote.