skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because at least a Blu Ray disc is a standard that is playable by a wide range of devices and vendors. You're right that Apple and Amazon aren't dying any time soon, so I should've said I don't want a single vendor determining how I play their videos.
Reminds me of https://secure.logmein.com/welcome/visualization/fullscreen (try moving the mouse around).
Surround Yourself with Passionate People
Your mom has an iPad
The locations names in Israel are phonetic translations and not their English names (e.g. Yerushalayim translates to Jerusalem) wonder how they got it?
From what I know, Oman isn't that rich, just a little more well off than most of the developing world. GDP per capita US = 46k, Singapore = 36.5k, Qatar = 70k, Oman = 16k.
Won't YouTube, live stream etc gladly take on the distribution part of the equation if CNN etc were to consider going towards unlimited streaming?
Slownet: most Americans get less than 4Mbps
When I see people doing something harmful to themselves and others, because of religion, I'm tempted to preach the message of Void.
Using FF4 on Hacker News main page gives me a popup saying TypeError: a.textContent is undefined.
CrowdFlower raises $7M to crowd-source freelance work
The post you're replying to argues that Muslim immigration has raised fertility rates, and your numbers confirm that opinion. Even the falling Muslim fertility rates, after 15 years, that you mention are far above the "native" rates (2.9 as opposed to 1.7 in Holland, and you call the idea that Muslims raise fertility rates "horseshit"?!). The rates that you cite for Germany show a Muslim population that, even after 40 years, is growing at a rate of 20+% per generation, whereas the "native" population is declining.

To this decades-old immigration that is still growing strong, we must add recent immigrants, who are much more religious and have much higher fertility rates.
You are probably right that the performance analysis and comparison was rather incomplete. But in the end, the reduction of bytes and files to load significantly improved the performance in repeated tests.
If flash crashes, it only crashes out one tab. That's the killer feature for me with chrome.
wladimir: Up-sample/filter/down-sample is the standard way of doing it, and any other way will just be an optimization of that transformation.
Call for startup: Easy domain editing
Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and new Galaxy Tab 10.1 hands-on
FF4 add on collection selected by Mozilla https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla...
In JavaScript, curly brace placement matters: An example
The point isn't that AJE is free of all biases, but that it sometimes presents news and opinions that are otherwise not present, and are at most only as biased as what's already available on MSM.
Just because Chrome does that doesn't mean Firefox must do exactly the same.

Merging location bar and search bar doesn't mean you can't give URL higher priority or that you must query search suggestion every key stroke.
I had that thought as well, then realised that it's probably making sense, if Coder Stack is tracking metrics like they say they are (I get all my POF news from HN, for example).

Ven diagrammatically, I'm sure if you had a group that was unhappy with their personal life and a group unhappy with their job, there would probably be a big overlap.
CNN international is also very different from CNN USA.

CNN international seems to be reading AP press releases. CNN USA is mostly just anchors reading twitter, with the occasional story about how racist and violent the tea party is.
Why So Many Women Choose to Wear Ankle Booties
Right, that post however doesn't seem to make a very good conclusion from the numbers presented. I've replied to it in more detail.
Art Schools Online
Every tag I've submitted so far has caused an error.
Try resizing your browser and see why one should be careful with CSS Shadows.
I've always used less than a gig so I never had to pay. I hope they never do start turning the cranks cause I'd definitely start paying if they forced me to.
Complaining about mainstream media on mainstream media would be fine. Complaining about mainstream media on alternate media pollutes the alternate media with the problems of the mainstream.
I may be missing something, but character encoding menu is right there when you click Firefox button. 9nth entry from the top for me.
To make it easier to grab the window and move it. You can maximize the window, and since you can't move it anymore once it's maximized, the tabs will move to the right of the Firefox button.

This doesn't work on Linux, due to window manager issues. Perhaps Firefox can do something like Chrome does as a workaround, although Chrome's workaround is awfully heavyweight (it basically reimplements all the functions of the WM).
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

--Randall Munroe
Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Rumored To Sell $500M in Facebook Stock
I don't know if I'm alone in this but I actually have a more positive view on nuclear power now than before Fukushima.

I grew up in Sweden not that far from Chernobyl. I have been taught that a nuclear disaster equals instant doom over a massive area.

Now I'm learning that even after having an earthquake equal to 30'000 Hiroshima bombs go off nearby and a 16 meter Tsunami wash over it, a somewhat old nuclear plant still doesn't do any more harm than what can be cleaned up - and it's only local damage.

I also learn that the confirmed deaths in cancer from Chernobyl was far fewer than I had thought.

Not even when the media writes about terrorism have I seen such a wide gap between what's on the front page and what the experts are saying.

At the same time we keep feeding oil money to crazy dictators. This is insane! We need more nuclear power, now! Let's just hope the damage done by mainstream media doesn't stop nuclear expansion.

That would be a true disaster.
Others feel differently and are compelled to share just to get access since they like the concept enough. We did think about it quite a bit, which is why we removed the 'share to get bumped up in the queue based on your referrals' to 'just the act of telling your friends makes you important to us, and you're marked as a VIP in the db'.

Anyway, email+hn@domain.com gets you access today without having to share.
Firefox has had plugin isolation for Flash since 3.6.4 on Windows, and Firefox 4 brings that to all platforms.
I have no idea how but I am somehow catching them with my puny little 10$ indoor antenna. I think some station in Fairfax, VA is broadcasting them along with NHK (Japanese), Russia Today, DW, and may be a Chinese language channel.
IBM100 - Icons of Progress
this should be shipped on be default.

edit: "this" appears to be as yet undefined. Unless ... can someone point me to whatever "maximize" is?

edit: FF4 does not behave as you describe on my WinXP box at work.
Right, but isn't that almost diametrically opposed to what the patent system is supposed to do? It's supposed to encourage innovation, but extracting maximum wealth from the process seems like it would be detrimental.

Patent lawyers don't use the patent system, they misuse it.
Falling, but still much higher than the 'native'. Also, the increased fertility rates of the second-generation immigrants are absorbed by these statistics into e.g. "Dutch-born", which skews the comparison.
Pretty sure these correlations aren't statistically important. N events will give a deviation of ~sqrt(N) - which for N = 6000 is > 1%. Therefore seeing that 12% of Microsoft people buy Capri Sun but only 10% of Googlers is pretty meaningless.

Furthermore, we don't know how many items the test was against, leading to only those items that had large discrepancies being reported.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#The_file_drawe...
>the way things are done in practice under X these days anyway

Sans the round tripping, which was the main point of this project.

>Did you see the big thread on the mailing list about "Finishing the network protocol"?

Yea I saw that thread, it was just about the protocol they're using. Has nothing to do with X-style network transparency.
Roger wilco.
Well, maybe it was a really good thatcher but certainly not very skilled in running thatching projects and hence is punished by the market and driven out of the business. There are several ways how he could have avoided the situation or softened its impact:

1) Spend a bit of time and energy to assess the damage first, maybe charging a small fee. Essentially, as I understand, the owner had a choice of re-thatching the roof or opting for tiles instead as a substitute. The decision would depend on the economic expediency and the information provided as part of the initial assessment would have had value to the home owner in its own right.

2) Once the contract is signed it's not a matter of choice for the thatcher whether to continue with repairs on own expense, it a legal matter that can be in-forced by the cottage owner through court.

3) The thatcher could have bought professional indemnity insurance to delegate the risk to a third party.

4) The thatcher could have signed the contract on time and materials basis, explicitly leaving the risk of additional work with the cottage owner. In this case it would only be right for the thatcher to let someone else assess the damage for the customer to avoid the conflict of interests.

5) Finally the thatcher could have done the work on project basis charging more for the risk he takes and then hope that over a series of engagements he will still be able to make profit. As a variation he could have specified a contingency within his initial estimate agreeing with the customer that the contingency can only be exercised based on customer discretion should additional work becomes apparent upon stripping.

The problem here is lack of generic project management skills and experience on the thatcher's side and specifically estimation, contract and risk management.
Angel investing 101: The iPhone app version
It seems to me that the specialist that's most needed is the "full stack programmer"

It used to be like this, back in the day. When I started doing Java professionally (1996, yes really) anyone who did Java did all of Java and could reasonably be working on a GUI one day, a network server the next, databases, native code, compiler internals...

Fast forward to say 2001 and the game has changed, now there are specialists, I did JDBC and Swing and never touched mobile edition, and barely touched EJBs, etc etc. It just got too big. Greybeards I know tell me stories like that on the Mac, System 6 was the last MacOS where one person could hold the entire thing in his or her head. Come System 7 you had to specialize.

Maybe nowadays you can be full-stack in something relatively simple, e.g. LAMP but even then, the L is Linux and the guys who do both LAMP websites and Linux kernel hacking you could probably count on one hand.
How Sharing Data Can Make Experiences Rock (a Comcast case study)
DotCloud (YC S10) gets $10M to redefine cloud openness
ok good to hear they already have presence. As for no cable network would carry them is different thing. Sounds more like a business process, decision or selling strategy that is probably not as stellar as we would like to see from Al Jazira. If they have a good market, good news (which I am not disagreeing) and good strategy and sales folks, I don't see any reason why they won't be able to go thru any network. Do they give any reason or claim or blame why they are not being carried by any cable/dish network? America is free market economy. It is foolish to blame anyone or anything for someone's failure. Maybe their strategy is wrong. Maybe their market research is wrong. Maybe they are assuming a lot or maybe their assumption is wrong.

I wouldn't get into the technicality of "a land" or "the land". We all get emotional and stuff and there is nothing wrong with that but behind all that if you think quietly you will know it is "the land" of free thinking and tolerant people. I am a Muslim and I can say it from my heart that I am a better Muslim (compared to where and how I was 20 or so years ago) because I live in this country. I can practice my religion the way I want. There is no freakN social pressure. Yes I am sure there are people who don't like me because of my religion or other things. That's not the mainstream America. Those type of people exist anywhere on earth. Can you or I control that? No. So I don't worry about it. My job is to "try" to do the best in life. Seriously, I have been to many different countries and lived and grew with so many different nationals. I still say there is no place on earth I would raise my kids and call it home beside this country, the US.

My friend, you have to read the history of the world and then when you learn the American history you would be wowed by the creation of this country and it's systems. You would appreciate it more. Even an average American, in my opinion, don't fully appreciate meaning of freedom and how this country was formed. Founding of this country was a huge huge turning point for human civilization. That's a fact. Don't try to portray America with what you see on Fox or what Fox or other news org try to tell you. America is lot bigger and richer than that.
And, on TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/22/angel-trivia-daily-tests-yo...
> but saying nothing will certainly have no effect.

Of course it will. Don't consume it.
For my usual desktop tasks, all the 'data I care about' is on my very own hard drive. Also, processing power of my laptop is good enough to not need any 'special hardware' or 'more memory' than I have. That is why I asked why Mr. John Desktoe Ubuntu-user would want to have network transparency. (I realize that this might be different for some bigger installation, but most (Linux-) people just run Ubuntu locally on their Laptops)
They were blind sided by a DDOS attack followed by a 0-day exploit on their walkers which, through privilege escalation, resulted in the moon base being compromised. People just didn't take security seriously enough.

The CEO of HBGary Imperial has since resigned.
What are lag switches
A lag switch is a device which is used to create time lags or delays into the flow of data traffic. Lag switches are often used for the less noble purpose of cheating in online games.
I will be sure to let him know!
The 16 GB iPhone 4 is €659 with €15 per month for 12 months plan on Vodafone in Greece. I understand that the size of the respective markets is vastly different and that strategically sacrificing margins for market share is more justified for the Indian market, but my point is that higher prices than the US is not unique to India situation.
Why would a rarely used use case be a first-class citizen at the expense of the use case that is used in nearly all cases?
What sort of features did the Indian TV have?
Not just yet, the force is still strong with me. But with this latest announcement of Amazon, a great disturbance of the force could be felt :-)
Man, look at all those one-star reviews for Angry Brids. "My device doesn't have enough space for this app!" "Amazon won't refund my money for some book I bought!" "AT&T doesn't allow side-loading!"

How does any of this relate to the actual app? Someone should be reading these reviews and deleting them, because developers don't want reviews that have nothing to do with ther app making their 5-star app a 3-star app.

Remind me to never give anyone anything for free. They will just whine about it. Better to charge them $10,000 for the app, then charge them for a $500/hour consultant to work around the bugs. They'll whine about it, but then I would be able to afford enough alcohol to not care.

(And no, I have no Android apps. But I just can't get excited about writing one when I see how dumb the average user is.)
Do your wife and kids eat at Google regularly too?
> But IAMAP,

Gah, that should be IANAP. (Too late to edit it.)
I honestly don't understand your point. Humanity is not in danger of dying out from lack of fertility, Dutch (etc.) culture/genetic stock is not in danger of dying out from lack of fertility, and an argument from eugenetics is both dangerous and likely to be moot when genetic tinkering becomes widely accepted in a couple of generations.

(Also, e.g. country-level wealth is extremely non-adaptive according to your criterion. You may want to reconsider it.)
"Boxer" Makes Playing Old PC Games on Macs a Snap
I'm of the opinion that as man understands more about the world and how to actually control it (through science and technology) that his reliance or use for religion will fall.

It'd be interesting to see a study on that, because I think uncertainty (about anything) ... is a space in the human psyche that is filled by Religion.
This argument is just surreal. Are you claiming that the two are related? Why are fertility rates low in other countries not on the list as well? And in many countries, it's even lower. You never explicitly link the two together but you seem to be making some sort of implication that the trend of low fertility rates, which is more than anything related to the economical development of a particular country, is related to the lack of religiousness in the particular country.
It reminds me of Google Fight (http://www.googlefight.com/), which, back in the day, was sometimes useful to settle some spelling disputes :) (now, Google does this for me)

However, I'm not quite sure what to try HashtagBattle with.
I think the biggest impediments to F# adoption:

to somebody not already a C#'er is the cost of Visual Studio: You really want that concurrency profiler, which I think is only in the Ultimate SKU (for which MS is giving away licenses in Bizspark, dreamSpark).

And a fair number of Csharpers I've met recently (admittedly a small sample) will tell you FP and the parallel/concurrent libs in C# are good enough: TPL, the .NET 5 Async lib (Basically they'll tell you about all the C# stuff in Petricek's book, without looking into what F# can do for them.
I am so glad they got rid of the link preview in the URL bar (like they had in the RCs) and instead put in on the bottom left.

Usually, I have tabs open that change their title when something happens (e.g. Gmail Inbox(1), or Facebook), and those catch my attention from the corner of my eye. However, having the URL preview when hovering over a link go into the URL bar on top also catches my attention, and distracts me from my current workflow.
You do know about arxiv.org, right? This is the de facto place for preprints in all of the fields that I know of, and is pretty much removing the need for publications altogether. But it is definitely limited from a technology perspective. Search is poor, subscription types are limited, no comments or rankings (though many would argue that these last two are undesirable, at least on the original site), etc. Would be nice if you could provide a front end to the arXiv, but the amount of data on there is insane and you will need some hardcore computing power to keep up. You could start with the cs papers first, though.
Does it finally store passwords in Keychain?
Feel free to watch our launch party here: http://air.mozilla.com/
Religion is an institutional and social thing, not just a set of "spiritual" beliefs.
> Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising

Those programs don't actually make raising kids cheaper. They just time-shift the payments, much like a loan would do.

Remember, govt programs are paid for by taxes. Those parents are being taxed.

Oh, and if we're going to argue for using govt money to buy kids, shouldn't we put the process out for bid? I'm sure that we could get high-quality kids for less from other suppliers.
> The browser's way faster;

That's awesome. Maybe I can go back to using firefox instead of chrome.
Passionate about reading, love having the books that i love so dearly all in one place with relevant stats and reviews that i can share with others. Also, i find that i enjoy talking to others about my favorite books and goodreads is a great way of connecting those dots. it helps that they have a high quality app.

happy to discuss in greater detail if you want.
Building A Remote Call Center With JavaScript
I looked at the paper (already kindly linked by bartonfink, but here it is again: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375). I think there's considerably less to it than meets the eye.

The authors have a very simple model of the dynamics of religious adherence, which amounts to saying: people convert from one (ir)religious position to another in numbers proportional to some function of (1) the fraction of the population currently adhering to each position and (2) some measure of how attractive each position is. They assume that #2 is constant over time. They choose a particular (reasonably plausible) form for the dependency on #1. They have a couple of free parameters, which they adjust to make their predictions fit reality as well as possible. They plot a few graphs, which show their predictions fitting tolerably well.

They observe, quite rightly, that their analysis implies that on not-terribly-long timescales whichever position is more attractive will dominate completely. They fail to observe that since at present neither religion (any, or all collectively) nor irreligion is completely dominant anywhere, the attractivenesses must in fact be varying over time, and that future changes to that parameter make an enormous difference to their model’s predictions. They fail to consider the possibility that their model (even if generally adequate) may break down badly for small-minority positions. (If so, its predictions about extinction of any position could be very wrong.) They fail to consider that differences in personality, experiences, etc., may render (ir)religion differently attractive to different people, which could entirely change their model’s predictions near the edges. (That is, once it starts predicting that either religion or irreligion will go extinct or nearly so. That is, exactly the situation the headline describes.)

They do (and frankly this is the only interesting bit) consider the effect of clustering effects: a person’s conversion probability may depend not on the overall popularity of the "old" and "new" positions but on their local popularity: people are affected more by their friends, family, neighbours, colleagues, etc. They find that provided people aren’t completely isolated this doesn’t make a huge difference to the overall prediction of the model.

I don't think the paper gives much more reason to anticipate the extinction of religion than we already had. (Opinions vary as to how much that is...)
I don't think SO Rep is really a good candidate for "the one number to rule them all" when it comes to hiring. As much as we'd like it if everyone used SO, they don't. A great majority of the users of SO never gain enough reputation to distinguish them from each other based solely on rep. You can look at the reputation distribution for SO at http://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/week/stackoverflow in the sidebar under Total Reputation. Even if we say that having 200+ rep is the signal, that's only 41K people in the world.

So if someone decides on using SO Reputation alone to qualify candidates, they can't effectively solve the primary problem of sourcing those candidates.
China Calls Google's Gmail Accusations 'Unacceptable'
I like this idea a lot. For now there is http://science.io/source/10/arxiv, or http://science.io/source/3/arxiv-cs for just CS.
Anonymous chat service HowRandom pivots to enforce real-name policy
Why The Killer Tablet App Is The Browser
ironically this article is blocked from within china...
Neat, although it would be interesting to see the effect of having dots persist for more than one refresh, and perhaps fade over a few secs. I think it would look much smoother. Nice job though!
I wrote a Python lib for this:
https://github.com/EA2D/pingdom-python

It just supports checks for now, but the framework is there for other resources to be quickly added.