skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the vast majority of top-level comments on that item considered the information dubious or were holding out for independent confirmation; I don't think HN leapt to a conclusion. My comment, one of the less obvious, was more from a good-idea perspective instead of assuming the story was true -- I had not decided yet.

Overall in that item I think HN did better than you imply, unless you mean the upvotes the item received.
Okay, but Facebook isn't really going head-to-head with everyone else shipping the stock version of Android with a slightly different coat of paint, so I don't think it's a huge deal if they're a few months behind.

Also, while there have been some performance optimizations in the latest builds of Android, from a feature perspective there hasn't been that much (NFC is the biggest one in Gingerbread). So even working on the previous release doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.
From his blog:

"My criteria for considering an app for this list is that it either requires Android 3.0 or have its user interface be specifically designed for a tablet experience. I didn’t count games or existing Android apps that are just upconverted to take advantage of the existing screen real estate. While it is a marginally better experience than trying to run an iPhone app on an iPad, I’m not counting it given that Apple doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands of iPhone exclusive apps in its 65,000 iPad app count."

So "native" seems to refer to having a redesigned UI, and if your UI naturally scales (displaying or taking pictures, showing video, 3D or vector based games, webpages, maps etc.) then that's not "native" by this definition.

Seems like a "no pain no gain" approach, if your app just works on multiple resolutions than that counts as a demerit for the OS, rather than as a good thing.

There also seems to be widespread ignorance about the pre-Xoom and pre-Honeycomb tablets that are out there. They're only for hobbyists since they don't ship with the Google Market, but people have been using them, and debugging their apps on them for many months.
Thankfully, it looked to be very few people. His article was written--and his tests were conducted--just about as poorly as they could have been. It was a huge show, and HN caught on quickly as far as I can tell.
As much as people online complain about fragmentation, there is no evidence (yet) that the general consumer cares that much. "Google experience" devices are not outselling the customized devices.

People need to tone down the rhetoric, in my opinion. Android already is being "taken seriously". Let's not make small problems out to be big problems. Android doesn't have any big problems, as it's being adopted by manufacturers and consumers at a rapid pace.
I'm not ready to go the full distance to Steve's conclusion either. I love Steve's work, but he has a tendency to over-generalize, systematize, and the regurgitate whatever he's been absorbing. It's a great habit, and it helps tremendously to advance the conversation along, but it can lead folks to believe there's a lot more surety in his conclusions than there actually is. Great structure and descriptions are a key part of finding a solution, but they are not a solution in themselves.

If we agree that art plays a huge role here, then the next logical question is: how do you teach people to be a good artist?

I'm not a guy who believes you are just "born with it". I think a vast amount of stuff can be ingrained into just about anybody. But I don't think this general problem has been adequately solved by anybody in any artistic field, must less entrepreneurship.

The cool thing is that it gives us a lot of places and communities to turn to in order to look at how various inculcation systems work.
It's a vicious cycle. If I felt that the platform had a future, I would devote some of my .NET abilities towards developing for it. But I don't, so I don't bother.

Just like with the Zune, Microsoft came too late to the party with a reasonably good product that no one cared about.
I think it's funny that the article mentions that there needs to be more hardware with Honeycomb to have more apps. Sorry but if hw like the iPad is built well enough and with enough hw options, then that's enough of a reason to build apps for it, in advance of any sales.

Google is always playing the catchup game, being slow and patient and then storming the market with new devices whenever they feel ready.
I think you could write a kernel in Rust (though you'd need to add unsafe pointers, direct calls, and possibly other stuff to the language), it's just not a goal of the project. There's no reason why I wouldn't accept patches to the language that would help in that effort as long as they didn't wildly conflict with the main goals of the project.
Good. It's always bothered me that Verizon can take an Android phone and make a bunch of money by whoring it out to Microsoft and anyone else who will pay to have their crapware permanently installed. Carriers and manufacturers have ruined just about every Android phone they've gotten their hands on. Android is really becoming a nice OS, and it deserves better.
The title means "Advice about Testing" - it does not mean "How to test advice you're given."
I've met some guys who were pretty fit in encryption topics / key management etc on whole corporations. And it actually works, so you rarely hear about that. Quite some skills are needed to master that actually.
Apple isn't a hardware vendor: it isn't building its strategy off continually trying to get people to switch to the "latest and greatest." Instead, it's focusing on making it's money off the app store / itunes platform, and doing that makes it more important to keep their existing customers happy and on the phones they've already bought. That's why you see them being so consistent about upgrades, etc and support for the older units than other manufacturers.

Continual planned obsolescence is great for hardware sales but tends to make your customers feel a little sour about the product they bought from you last year. If you really want them to be loyal, buying apps and staying with the brand, it seems like a better plan to keep them happy through as much of the product cycle as possible by reducing hardware churn and focusing on software upgrades you can use for marketing but also distribute to your existing base.
Hey - I know this is trivial, but I just find it takes away from the clarity of the code when you must terminate lines with a semicolon.

It's obviously very useful to use ';' in the scenario you mention, I think a good comparison is F# which doesn't force semicolons but does permit usage like that. I guess, e.g.:-

foo
bar
baz

implies foo |> ignore; bar |> ignore; baz

Oh, and just to make it very clear, I am talking about something really rather petty, I do not mean to do down rust in any serious way - I'm a wannabe-language designer myself, so major respect to you guys :)
This is highly debatable. I have been coding in the finance, airline and manufacturing industry since '99. Not once have any advanced (read above HS algebra) mathematical concepts been necessary.

My experience has been that the advance math stuff is the edge case in software development. The bulk of it is crud, business logic, parsing and I/O.
Agreed, mostly.

> The first virtue of an approximation is that it captures the qualitative character of a problem, after that, it's a matter of adding an increasing number of decimal places of quantitative accuracy.

Unless the approximate model diverges from the actual process in extreme cases, such as very high, very low values.

One thing comes to my mind, if only slightly related: `Reciprocity failure' [1], an effect in photography, where the usual model of relationship between shutter speed (exposure time), photo material sensitivity and lightness of the scene photographed diverges from reality for extreme values.

In such cases, increasing precision of the model isn't just a numerical task (variable precision, iteration count, etc.).

----

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(photography)#Recip...
There was a brief period in history when recorded music was a money-printing business. Record once, sell over and over again around the world.

That period is over. The fact that the music industry is arguing over where and how you should be allowed to listen to a piece of digital music you paid for is the height of absurdity. Music is, by its very nature, a shared experience. It has always been thus throughout history. All of these arguments about "licensing", whether it's on the radio, streaming services, or in a cloud locker should be seen as what they are: a cash grab.

I personally and sincerely hope that record labels die out completely - I would not miss them one bit.
It doesn't really matter if it was ethical or not, it is a picture that will offend people and sounds like a good topic for pundits on 24-hour news networks to argue over. If you are a CEO, don't do this stuff.
It is indeed inspiring to see other countries behave intelligently on this matter. Here in Norway the struggle is still going, I was out in the streets demonstrating yesterday. I really hope our politicians are beginning to fathom what is at stake here and veto the law. It doesn't look very good right now though, especially considering that the largest and second largest parties (Labour Party and the conservative party) are both in favor. The fact that Norway has yet to veto a single law pushed on us from the EFTA doesn't help either.
>With technology I meant "electronic technology". One big solar flare, and all our devices break down due to EM. I'm not so much worried about it, but it's still an interesting question what would happen to human civilization.

In that case I agree and it's an interesting question for sure.

>I'm not sure what you mean about the internet being "replaced". Unless we find an fundamentally different information unit to transfer (qubits?), the international packet-switched network is pretty much it.

See that's the attitude I'm talking about; so many people aren't willing to consider the possibility that there's a better way. "Replaced" was the wrong word to use- TV or the internet won't ever be replaced, but something else will come along that will divert some or all of our attention away from it.
So... show of hands from hackers who have trouble networking? Got probs? GitBax.
The laptop story yesterday led me to learn about CarrierIQ on my cell phone, which was equally disturbing. Maybe the laptop was a false alarm, but my Samsung cell phone did indeed have a keylogger on it. So I'm not inclined to cut them a lot of slack right now.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11763089
More like "Godaddy competitor tries to capitalize on PR stumble with thinly veiled promotional campaign"
I don't think being behind matters that much. People online complain about version numbers; general consumers don't know. Amazon can release a phone running 2.3 loaded with Amazon Appstore, Cloud Player, tighter Facebook integration, and an overhauled UI (A good one) and consumers will eat it up.
They didn't. Instead, a harried customer support person answered a confusing question with a nondescript answer. One could paraphrase it as: "Well, Mister Caller, I have no idea what software you are talking about, but if there is any such software on the system, it would be to make sure the system is running properly."
Personally, I prefer not to have my conversations with other people on such platforms persisting beyond the conversation - the reason I hate twitter and Facebook (with some other reasons of course). I prefer IRC or specialized communities like HN or SO and the like, interaction on these doesn't hurt.
Nook Color to Get Apps, Flash Support
Given the number of articles about NAS tech (new and old) I fail to see how what Amazon is offering is in any way different--- but then I'm not a lawyer. I firmly hope that Amazon takes this to court so that the issue of ownership can be established more clearly. Even if they were to lose, that would at least provide a target for legislative change.
MeeGo 1.2 Tablet UX Developer Preview released (including source code)
I wonder if this is a response to the drift in osnews.com
Seems Nokia was more than justified in choosing WP7 against Android
You apparently think that

> One is apt to recite drill and kill and learning to learn and then proceed to avoiding teaching things that they think are too hard. (Which is apparently everything.)

is somehow comparable to

> The other is fond of standardized testing at every opportunity as a way to force the first group to actually teach something. (Usually with pretty ridiculous tests.)

I don't. The former is, crudely put, evil, while the latter is, at the same granularity, stupid.

These stupid are not a huge problem. They're skeptical of being conned because that's what everyone tries to do to them, but they're open to what works so long as it actually works.

> In the end outraged parents forced teachers back to the 3 Rs, and New Math became nothing more than a bad memory.

And they were absolutely correct to do so because New Math, as delivered, was a sham.

Intentions matter far less than results.
Check Out the Best Energy Use Chart Ever
Ask HN: Review MsgMe.at, now without the Facebook requirement
Following feedback from a Show HN yesterday, I've added "standard" sign up/sign in (as opposed to requiring Facebook) and thought I'd ask for reviews again.

MsgMe.at is meant to be an ultra-simple, no frills reminder email (and SMS as soon as I can afford it) service -- let me know what you think!

http://msgme.at (clickable below)
Maybe they cut the scene where the other village were wearing Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl XLV Champions t-shirts. A tacky hat still blocks the sun better than no hat.
Clickable: http://msgme.at
Some of Google's apps are going to be tricky to clone, though, particularly ones like Maps, Navigation, Goggles, and possibly YouTube, which rely in essential ways on Google's back-end services.

How much of a big deal this is would depend on what market segment they're going after, but mapping and location services are awfully handy across the board, and available on pretty cheap phones at this point.
How to disrupt an industry:

There are hundreds and hundreds of tiny industries that technology seems to have forgotten (I work in one of them). There is a forklift dealership that I pass on my way to lunch every few days, what type of computing infrastructure do you think they have? What type of information do you think they give to their customers?

I bet there is a lot of carbon-copy paper, and filing cabinets involved. If they're really advanced, I bet there's an old IBM baby mainframe sitting in a closet somewhere with some twinax terminals connected to it.

Here's a company that's throwing really really expensive "I need this" (a forklift isn't a luxury) equipment around. I'd bet you that they've got money to spend on tech, they just don't know how.

Howabout office automation? Do you know how many times I get pitched by "office solutions specialists" who have no idea what they're doing, or talking about? There is definitely some space for somebody who Knows What They're Doing™ to get my money.

Do you know how terrible inventory management systems are? Pardon the language, but fucking horrible.

I think a lot of tech people forget that there a whole world out there that barely even knows that silicon valley exists. There are thousands and thousands of small business that will pay large dollars for things, and for these people (who are usually stuck in the technological late-80s/early-90s), being "disruptive" is what most programmers think is normal.
NASA Systems Are Still Too Vulnerable to Attack
I have to ask... does the name Vi come from where I think it does? If so... that is awesome, and then I would have to ask is there a improved version of her named Vim?
No, KY. We have Skyline here too (though I'm not a fan!)
Tell HN: Selling my domain name userna.me
The original idea for this domain name was to create a site like card.ly that was geared towards tech professionals and software developers. But grander things came in to my field of view.

the domain name is userna.me
There was a longish discussion on the bitc language development list on exactly this issue. I think this is the first message: http://www.mail-archive.com/bitc-dev@coyotos.org/msg02389.ht.... Looks like they ended up with automatic insertion:
http://www.bitc-lang.org/docs/bitc/spec.html#layout
Would you also said (in 1998 and in 2000) that Windows 98 and Windows ME did not have any big problems, as they were adopted by at a rapid pace?
Great news... but what's with the SL folder? The report does not say what SL folder contains on a new laptop.
Anyway, pretty dumb to check for viruses by folder name.
Google Settles With FTC Over Privacy Lapse With Google Buzz
Ah...I guess I should have read the faqs, too!
Dear Anonymous AAAI Reviewer
Thank you for your time and valuable comments.

We're particularly grateful for your unfair characterisation of our paper as a reinvention of prior work. I very much enjoyed reading through the two references given in support of this argument -- despite neither one having much of anything to do with the technique you've supposedly been reviewing for the past 6 weeks.

Thank you also for claiming that our paper amounts to a bunch of code hacks and contains no theoretical contribution. Did you perchance miss the 2 pages of theorems and proofs we give in support of our work? I guess they're must have escaped your eagle eyes as you raced toward the conclusion. Just like the page and a half of results showing an order of magnitude improvement over the current state of the art. Clearly inconsequential next to the "large" 30% improvement yielded by your favourite technique -- which you went out of your way to point out to us.

-----

sigh

The above is obviously a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal, but I'd like to use it as a diving board into a more serious issue: namely that submitting papers to CS conferences is a crapshoot. I know I'm not alone when I say I've had bad reviews come back from obviously inexpert individuals who have failed to understand the basic problem at hand -- much less the contribution they're supposed to be opining on.

When submitting to a conference, I usually take the time to look at who is on the Program Comittee. If I see names I know I'm more likely to submit there. However, more often than not, paper reviewing gets farmed out by these genuine experts onto unwitting PhD students who are simply not yet in a position to offer up a fair assessment.

Which brings me to my question: what's the point of being a committee member if all you're going to do is shirk your responsibilities?
This is just an invite from a friend, if you refer someone you get extra space added to your account
They are talking about video metadata. I really can't see what the problem is. Does Google have a private API they use for Android phones? Did Apple pay for it so that YouTube is featured on iPhones. Does Microsoft want this data for free?
New Service Provides Ghost Writers for Websites
HN had many skeptical comments right off the bat. I guess simply publicizing this story before its confirmed is bad, but it's also how you shine light on an issue - in this case, clearing Samsung of any wrongdoing.

Reddit fared much worse, IMO, in that people continued to upvote the wrong story after the truth was out. The correction has been posted but isn't anywhere near the front page.
video didn't play on my ipad

youtube version:
http://m.youtube.com/index?#/watch?v=6O4vdxJz6tE
Show HN: DealPage - Aggregation of all Group Buying Daily Deal Sites
What does a table for three look like? A triangle doesn't have very much room for food. Not trying to shoot you down, just trying to keep the ideas going.
That's a good test.
I still thing there is merit to that notion.

I'd like to think of it this way: execution is the active searching of the problem space until you find a local maxima. The idea is only the starting point.

Sure, you can get lucky and find an idea that is already on a local maxima - but you wouldn't know that without verifying.

Simply thinking "what if you sold socks that didn't match?" is far from enough to prove that it's a good idea. If you gave it just five minutes you would probably come up with a hundred similar seemingly weird ideas.

Some examples:

What if TVs were not boxes but bubble-shaped?

What if cars bounced like rubber balls? Would that make them safer?

What if pants had four legs? Of different lengths.

What if shoes were glued together?

What if I had an internet connected computer in my sight of vision constantly? (This will happen, we all know that.)

What if books never ended?

What if people could grow all their food, including meat, at home, in a box like a micro oven?

I can go on like this forever. How do I know which ideas are the good ones?

By testing them in the real world - searching the problem space for a local maxima - that's the only way. And that takes execution and effort.
The Singularity Institute: $1 to prevent a Terminator situation
I try to automate tasks in a hierarchical, re-usable fashion, based on log file output, and always in a pragmatic, least-cost approach. No-one is paying me to make my life easier.

For example, I'll find myself performing tasks X, Y, and Z quite a lot. I'll find out that I have 20 minutes free and I'll figure out the most common denominator of the tasks, let's call it A, and then implement it. I'll quickly re-write the high level processes X, Y, Z and to use A and then move on with my life. The up-shot is that future tasks B, C, D, E, F can all use the now-battle-hardened procedure A, and maybe others in my company will find A useful.
Whenever companies try to innovate and expand the music listening experience, record companies are all over them. The record companies never take the first steps to improve things but are always the first to threaten legal action and get their fair share of new trends with music. Gross.
Agreed, I don't understand what all of the anger is about like in this highly opinionated and skewed Ars Technica piece: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/03/android-open...

The source will be released when Google is happy with the product. For people to be up in arms that they aren't releasing the source to an unfinished product is ridiculous. Seems like they are damned if they do, damned it they don't.
I remember when Verizon disabled Bluetooth file transfer on some of their "feature" phones, forcing users to use send a MMS or e-mail, thus inducing data charges.
I thought there were laws against that :)
As of this writing, Network World has updated the original story's title to read "Samsung keylogger could be false alarm". I guess they're not quite ready to give up.
I'm sure all the android fanboys will consider this a 'good move' since Google is doing it. When Apple does the same thing it is considered draconian and 'closed'.
Sounds like the coffeeshop down the block from me... chock full of tiny one-person tables and everyone on their laptop by themselves.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391735
Microsoft Co-Founder Hits Out at Gates
One of the comments claims that iPhone apps with art assets designed specifically for the iPhone 4 don't use them, but instead pixel double the smaller art assets for use on the iPad. Is that true?

He seems to think this is a good thing, but it means the comparison of Android scaling and iPad scaling is even less true, as on the iPad it is intentionally made to look worse than it could.
What did I say that made you think I wasn't aware of how destructive coal generate power is? I don't need to point out why people are talking so much more about nuclear power safety than coal safety over the past month or so.