skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting piece though weirdly doesn't mention Apple (at least as of right now, maybe he'll update?). Plus for Apple is access to more customers for iPhone though right now T-Mobile 3G network is incompatible with GSM/3G version of iPhone. Downside is greater bargaining power of AT&T and Verizon as carrier space consolidates.

But with regards to Google, it seems kind of silly to suggest tiny, market-share losing T-Mobile was all that stood between the carriers hijacking Android and nirvana. Google's biggest bargaining chip with carriers is the inclusion of very popular Google Android services like mapping, voice to text etc. And Verizon and AT&T seem pretty high on Android to prevent Apple from gaining too much sway.

Lots more to come on this one...
[IndexedDB] Design Flaws: Not Stateless, Not Treating Objects As Opaque
IndexedDB needs to be good for more than just HTML 5 todo list demos.
Wait, Canada has 7 mobile providers? And we get 3?
We're working on this: http://www.jaxified.com/. Right now we're focused on blogs since it's easy to see new content, but we're working on adding support for static sites as well.
Pretty sure T-Mobile's 3G HSPA+ network runs on spectrum frequencies that are incompatible with AT&T iPhone. Definitely not the same as AT&T's. For example, the GSM-based Nexus S sold in the US works as a voice phone on AT&T or T-Mobile but can only do 3G data on T-Mobile.
I thought research showed that men were capable of maintaining more (as in quantity) "shallow" relationships, while women were able to keep a higher number of deeper relationships.
Heterosexual AIDS in America, swine flu, global warming, avian flu, over population, acid rain, Y2K, ...

The hysteria just doesn't stop. Time passes and things move on as if they never happened. The news is entertainment, without it being dramatic, it doesn't sell. When have these major scares ever been right?
Twitter:
http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...

LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-count?url=http://news.ycom...

These APIs are marked private (as opposed to Facebook's) so use at your own risk.
I got a copy of Heads First! introduction to software programming, and it started out with Python first.

It appears that python is the easy to learn..but Ruby seems to be the common lang that most web startup use these days.

Will i be at a disadvantage if I choose to start with Python first?
All I did was interpret the XKCD chart. Your relativations are pretty irrelevant, if by accident I happen to stand in that highly radiated spot. It seems significant to me that such spots existed 50km away from the plant. The XKCD chart does not say anything about the isotopes involved, so you seem to have some additional information that was not in the XKCD chart. Then I have to say sorry, but maybe the XKCD chart is not as convincing as the wannabe-geeks would like to believe.

Likewise with the "link to cancer risk" - the XKCD chart does not say anything about eating bananas or whatever. It says "dosis x was linked to increased cancer risk" and "50km away the radiation was a twentieth of that dosis".

Outdoors/indoors - yeah, so what if I talk a walk with my dog every day? I don't see your point? It isn't so bad because we can always find ways around it? If mushrooms are poisoned, we just don't eat mushrooms? If radiation is outside, we just don't go outside? If water is poisoned, we just buy bottled water from elsewhere? I don't want to live like that - I strive to live in a relatively carefree environment, thank you very much.

Where I live, I don't run danger to accidentally run into a highly toxic spot on the map. Maybe we have chemical plants, but there are fences and warning signals around them. There are no warning signals for leaked poison from a nuclear accident.
AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile will test antitrust law
Right. It's not the best situation to have one or the other. More would be great in an ideal world, but we have this right now and until you or I can deploy a wide wireless GSM network for a few grand nothing will change.

I was commenting on your point that it's not that big of a deal for AT&T to acquire T-Mobile. It is a big deal because, why it may not be easy (or in fact possible) to stick a third carrier in the middle of this in a completely hypothetical scenario, combining the two carriers in a real life, AT&T just announced it was planning on doing just that scenario is not good for consumers. It is worse than the already less than ideal situation we have right now.
Does this mean I will now have an additional array of cell towers to boost my otherwise crappy reception? Will this result in load balancing for AT&T's overwhelmed 3G network?
Apples are relatively nutrient poor with respect to their fructose/sugar content.

There is an offshoot of the Paleo crowd which generally eschews fruit. For example:

http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/
I have not used dynamic languages enough to know what I say before for sure, but this is my current understanding:

>> No one has ever argued that dynamic languages are more expressive than static languages. This is impossible, as long as we're considering Turing-complete languages.

As I think you note in your last sentence, "expressive" here is not meant to imply whether something can be expressed in the language or not. It's rather about being able to express the concept in the language in a way that is no more or less complex than the concept itself, and expresses no more or less than the concept itself. So the Turing-complete argument does not really apply. (John McCarthy in fact had to say the same thing about Tuning-machines themselves -- that while they help to understand limits of any machine, for AI programs they are at too low a level to help real humans build new insights into AI beyond understanding those limits.)

>> Users of dynamic languages simple trade runtime efficiency for compile-time efficiency. What's wrong with that?

1. A program is run more times than it is compiled (hopefully). So the goal is really to make the effective combination of the two more efficient in a given usage scenario. On the other hand, with a dynamic typed language, if N seconds are shoved away from compilation, at least N seconds will be added to run-time.

2. The bigger issue I have is that dynamic languages often turn compile-time "errors" into run-time errors. Run-time errors take longer to detect and correct and the process of doing so is bound to see less automation. This is not to say of course that dynamic typing is always an issue.
The article did not say that at all. It says that fear harms people, it did not say that radiation does not harm people.

The cigarette comparison is extremely silly, as most people actually choose to not smoke cigarettes out of concern for their health.
Really need some experienced attorneys and former regulators to weight in on this critical question but Dean Takahashi at least gives it a start. Consumer advocates, like CFA's Mark Cooper, have smart things to quote and always oppose these deals but they do not often prevail in Washington.
I left AT&T for T-Mobile years ago, because AT&T's customer service is terrible while T-Mobile's is excellent. I won't give AT&T my money ever again, but my choices keep narrowing.

I doubt that I'm alone, which means that Verizon could easily "not lose" contrary to the title of the thread.
Yeah. That's where he's wrong. Existing AT&T customers are going to come out far ahead from this deal.
Also, probably goes without saying, but this method includes JSONP support: http://graph.facebook.com/http://news.ycombinator.com/?callb...
It's a shortcut for http://graph.facebook.com/?id=abc

Looks like fb made opengraph pages first class citizens on their namespace, should be interesting to see what else they get soon,

You can also do http://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://news.ycombinator.com,h...

To lookup multiple urls at the same time.
I posted a stand-alone follow-up post to this comment:

Read: http://geekfactor.charrington.com/2011/03/use-admin-template...

Discuss: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347559
Yuri Lifshits made an entertaining presentation at yesterday's SHDH with data from graph.facebook.com. Link: http://ediscope.labs.yahoo.net/.
Is it james altucher day on HN? Anyone else find it odd that he's hitting the front page repeatedly today with marginal content?
This is kind of the trick with Apple's stuff...historically they've definitely been willing to blast forward without making backward-compatibility all that easy. The only problem with the Leopard scenario is that it is the last possible upgrade for PowerPC-only Macs, which is an unusually early end-of-life compared to Macs before it.

Somehow I have managed to keep a program working from Mac OS X 10.3.9 onwards (an OS that is PowerPC-only without support for universal binaries). And this accomplishment has required a lot of creativity, to put it mildly. As Alfred's author says, simply choosing the latest OS makes it a lot easier to do cool stuff; I can't easily use Core Animation or other newer technologies. Also, Xcode 4 has finally give up on me completely, so I use Xcode 3.x.

If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd almost think it was designed obsolescence, since there are times I swear I could support another entire OS revision if not for just 1 or 2 missing APIs. From this point of view, open-source has a big theoretical advantage because a couple of missing APIs are technically easy to back-port (but Apple has no reason to spend time on this).

I am glad we at least have Objective-C now, though. There are pretty powerful ways to check at runtime if almost anything will work before you use it, which allows for rather flexible binaries. There have been various ways to do this for C++ APIs beforehand, but Objective-C is much cleaner in this area.
+-------+ +--------------------------------+
| Start | | Learn how to read a flowchart. |
+-------+ +--------------------------------+
| / ^
V / |
+---------+ / +-------------------+
| COUNTER | / | Add 1 to COUNTER. |
| = 1 | / +-------------------+
+---------+ / ^
| / +----+
| / | no |
V V +----+
+--------------+ |
| Can you read | +----+ +-----------------+
| a flowchart? |--| no |-->| Is COUNTER > 3? |
+--------------+ +----+ +-----------------+
| |
+-----+ +-----+
| yes | | yes |
+-----+ +-----+
| |
V V
+-----------------+ +-------------+
| Proceed to | | Open a |
| Gabriel's chart | | restaurant. |
+-----------------+ +-------------+
Oh come on, it's _not_ about having people "remember who slighted them".

It's about not being a dick.

Most people understand this just fine - you don't be a dick to the CEO or the Venture Capitalist because you're not a dick. You don't be a dick to the waitress or the janitor because you're not a dick. It's pretty easy.

_Some_ people though, have to work hard at not being a dick to the investors 'cause there's something in it for them, and don't bother working hard at not being a dick to waitresses. The only reason they have any trouble with it is because they _are_ dicks.

And as the article and a lot of these comments point out, other people _do_ notice.
I packaged a few of the private ones with this weekend project: http://sharedcount.com Unfortunately, only Facebook does URL normalization for you, so dumb things like trailing slashes have a big effect on the count.
That is not what the XKCD chart seems to imply. It implies that in some spots the daily radiation was a twentieth of a level linked to increased cancer risk. So presumably after 20 days you would have reached a level that increased your cancer risk - if you live there, it seems likely that you'll be there 20 days.

Yes, maybe the higher levels did not persist in one spot for for twenty days (we don't know). I don't find that very comforting, it still seems like a russian roulette style of living (there may be 20 days of higher exposure or not - you can not know unless you start carrying a radiation meter at all times).

Btw according to the chart, a cross country flight is only a 150th fraction of the radiation at those spots 50km from Fukushima. Few people fly that often.
When I see posts such as this, I wonder what problems were encountered that required engagement with customer service, and what the expectations were. If the expectations were unreasonable, customer service is certain to get a bad rep.

I've never had problems with AT&T's service which I use for two landlines, an iPhone and an iPad. I've had the landlines, and made changes to them, for over ten years. I've had multiple T1s with them over the years as well.
list it on http://hntrades.com
Add the domain to facebook.com/insights and then you can download an excel spreadsheet with the daily totals, just sum these to get the total shares/likes for a domain
Basically, it was a site with a medium amount of paid users. Probably 10-20k daily uniques. However, the nature and diversity of the data behind this site required thousands of tables and tens of thousands of stored procedures.

Since these queries were built over ~10 years with the expectation of being able to join any of the thousands of tables, it would now be a tremendous undertaking to perform any sort of sharding or other ways of distributing load (other than master-slave replication, which was used widely).

It's been a struggle to keep hardware up to pace with the desired growth of the company. Even with a dedicated data center and top of the line hardware, doubling their user base would probably require a significant architectural undertaking.

Had the site been designed to support an arbitrary amount of distributed database servers from day one, it would now be trivial to grow horizontally.
Yet Another Japan Reactor Post (from a PhD in Nuclear Engineering)
I am pretty sure the Carnegie Mellon remark was just saying that a CMU CS graduate would have learned this already. Which is true, since the blog author (Bob Harper) teaches a course there which covers this very topic!
Windows 98 Embraces the Web [1997]
http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/ :)

Even http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/http://g... has a few shares.
Haskell's Data.Typeable kind of does this. (http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Data-...). It does not feel like python though…
Facebook: http://www.businessinsider.com/googler-turns-down-500000-cas...
It doesn't matter if they were right it matters if it moves ads.

I bet you could do pretty well right now selling fallout shelter kits and nuclear emergency preparedness kits.

The conversion on those ads should be just about insane right now.

It doesn't really matter though on a personal level all you need to do is turn off the news. 99% of it has absolutely no effect on you.

Global Financial Meltdown? Number of things I can do to mitigate it? None.
Nuclear Meltdown in Japan? Number of things I can do about it? None. (Ok, I chipped for the redcross, but I'm not moving to Japan to help out, so it's effectively none)
Stop worrying, and start living life. Go out and have beers with a friend. Talk to people and build a meaningful friendship. It will all have a much greater impact on your life than whatever is on the news.
So does this mean all of the hacked iPhones on T-Mobile are now legit?
What is SXE?
I wrote this up based on the response to my comment on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346350.

tptacek - "The 'Admin' templates on Theme Forest are really kind of blowing my mind right now. Every front-end-challenged web app developer on HN should know about this."

edenm - "WOW! If anyone hasn't seen these, seriously, check them out."
Cubist.
Learnings from having Mailchimp ask me to kindly leave.
Free Online Pakistani Newspapers
Ask HN: Going free to cut costs/get users?
A client of mine has a niche dating site that has been up and running for about a year. It's gotten a good amount of signups and press exposure, but has been having trouble converting people to paid customers (probably a chicken-and-egg problem).

He's running the site on his day job salary, so he's thinking about making it completely free for a few months to cut down on costs (PayPal Pro, Recurly, etc.) and try to get the user count up, while allowing me to focus on non billing-related things like making the site better, tighter Facebook integration (I just switched it over to the Facebook Registration Tool for signups), and refactoring code.

We think the possibility of spammers taking over the site shouldn't be too much of a problem, since we've cut spam significantly by using CloudFlare and other services, and we plan on rate limiting people who haven't been verified by Facebook, so are there any other foreseeable pitfalls to doing this?
No sarcasm at all. What is the problem the author has? The problem is he is unable to hire a senior iPhone developer with a deep and broad skill set.

What is his analysis of the problem? His analysis is that recruiters are to blame.

Recruiters are not the problem. The salary is. The recruiter that changed his ad gave him free information about what the problem is.

The flaw in this article complaining about recruiters being responsible for his problems is that recruiters are not responsible for his problem. His problem is that his offered salary is not even close to be in line with what he would need to offer to attract the candidate the ad indicates they require.

Not sarcasm. Common sense.
Picasso actually worked in a number of styles — Cubism being an early one.
> Unfortunately, only Facebook does URL normalization for you, so dumb things like trailing slashes have a big effect on the count.

Is that true?

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...
Hmmm it is funny that Apple isn't mentioned, given its influence in the hardware side.

A general suspicion has been that Apple will open up the iPhone to other carriers with the next rev. I wonder if this will impact that plan at all (if it exists).

Now, they don't need to expand the carrier offering to increase the customer base. But, it's a greater customer base entirely within AT&T. But, AT&T will now — presumably — have better coverage. But, AT&T is already strongly disliked as a brand, and this doesn't change that. And so on…

I would think that Apple is at best wary of the merger, since, like the rest of the hardware providers, the increased bargaining power of the carriers is a problem.
Also known as the "Swanson's (CEO) waiter test" -

A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2006-04-1...
T-Mobile's phones operate on a different frequency than AT&T. I don't see them merging the two networks. Chances are that T-Mobile's network will be put in maintenance mode, with any new customers receiving phones on AT&T's frequencies, until the LTE transition is complete and AT&T can shut down the T-Mobile network. It may be a boon for existing T-Mobile customers, who will presumably be able to use multi-band GSM phones on AT&T without roaming fees.
That page contains a lot of spam/content farm links at the bottom of the html source code. Just an interesting detail.
Tools like this are meant to streamline and speed up your design process rather than specifically increase your sales or conversion rate. One wouldn't ask that about an IDE, for instance, or a photo editing program.
I stand corrected. Twitter used to suck at URL normalization, but it looks like they must have fixed it. But, Delicious and Digg both are a pain.
how is this relevant?
Wind, Mobilicity etc are all new (they popped in existence after our AWS auction), and only have limited coverage (outside of their coverage area, they all have sharage agreements with one of the big three). For example, Wind only services a few of the major cities, but the moment you leave Wind's towers range, you're switched over the Roger's network and are charged hilarious fees.

And our Big Three (Bell, Rogers, and Telus) are even worse than youres. It's beyond ridiculous.
> people don't want to pay $500 up front for a phone, even though they're paying more down the line.

As far as I can tell, T-Mobile is (was?) the only major US carrier to even offer the option of buying a phone up front and then getting a month-to-month plan that costs less than the equivalent 2-year contract. That is what I use and all told it is going to save me about $200 over two years vs. a subsidy based plan. But if hypothetically my monthly rate were the same as what it would be on a 2-year contract, as it would be on AT&T, why wouldn't I take advantage of the subsidized phones (apart from lock-in)?

OK, there are prepaid plans, but the choice of phones (especially smartphones) is limited compared to what's available on postpaid.
> I was hoping LTE would help alleviate this problem as it seemed to be on the road map for 3 out of 4 of the carriers (all but Sprint).

Based on the auction maps, T-Mobile USA had virtually no LTE/700 spectrum space. So AT&T acquiring T-Mo should not change the mix on LTE/700.

The wild card is Frontier, which won the auction for the 'E' block for a large part of the US CONUS. Frontier is somehow interconnected with Dish/Echostar. See the maps here ..

http://www.cellularmaps.com/700_auction.shtml
Present several case studies of companies/products that you wish to emulate.
"... Like war, everything in startups is life or death ..."

I appreciate the enthusiasm & romanticism of the story, but don't for a minute confuse working in a Startup and a real "life & death" situation. Things have to be done perfectly, freeze, screw up or make a mistake and you end up with a corpse instead of a person. Why not say it, "as it is" - a relatively safe, exciting creative job where you get to make your own decisions, create things, have fun and maybe make some money.
On an unrelated note, apparently I missed the Earbits post a few days ago, so I thought I'd check it out. First thing it told me was:

WTF?
You need Adobe Flash to stream music...
We thought you knew this, but apparently you need reminding.

That's a little too "bootcamp", isn't it?
Investing in the Apocalypse
It's a test of the flagging system.
Opinions on REST
Does anybody know where I can get reliable information about Fukushima's current state and future risks? I know the Fukushima reactor is different from Chernobyl and that Fukushima has 3 containment barriers, but it would seem that they've been damaged or destroyed. What would happen now if they can't get the reactor under control, and it melts down? Many articles linked from HN say Fukushima is an example of nuclear technology done right, yet the media is continuing to spew stories such as that the reactor will explode if they don't get it under control in 48 hours. I don't know who to believe.
It upsets me that the media can post all of these lies. Sell their headlines, then just move on without an apology to the millions that are currently scared out of their minds.
"Males and females attend college at an almost even rate."

This isn't true. In 2008 it was 57% female/43% male and steadily growing more lopsided. [1]

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2010/section1/indicator07.as...
The same piece of news on the Telegraph: "Libya: British forces fire missiles at Gaddafi"

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianoce...
"You might be surprised to know that one out of five doctors in private practices uses an iPad already"

That's a vague statement, are they using them at work, or do doctors simply have a propensity for neat personal technology?
I bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around. I'll be watching you.
Very nice, thanks for sharing. Bit of constructive feedback, the fact that the text box deletes itself as soon as you click in it is hella annoying,
I would think one decaying event is one blip, and higher readings indicate more decaying events. A single particle can not decay very often and hence can not result in a spike.