skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Due the generally-scummy nature of the majority of in-app purchasing apps I've run across, I've personally disabled in-app purchasing. I also generally recommend the same to others (particularly those with children), and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.

I would absolutely rather buy a separate paid version than pay in-app to upgrade a 'lite' version.
These awesome new services are threat to the current monopoly providers, who are in league with the city and protected from competition by city laws. I guarantee that that many jurisdictions will attempt to outlaw, control, or license these services. They will claim the need for "safety regulations" or similar. And a lot of cities do restrict private car and bus services-- try setting up a regular bus route in your hometown. Where I live, the major Dulles Airport even limits outbound cab service to a single provider!

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/2920/time-to-ground...
7 Negative Outcomes From Hurrying Your Internet Marketing Efforts
They're clever people. You'd think they could come up with a clever way to solve their customer service problem.

Maybe it would have to be clever for them to want to bother with it.
Craig Venter’s Genetic Typo
It doesn't need to start with 'can':

Dominican't Republic, Vatican't City, and of course Can'tartica - a whole continent where most services are unavailable.
Likely not but it still makes sense to give a chance to all the few talented people however many there are to actually create something instead of manage other less talented souls. Better for productivity and happiness IMHO!
That was because crypto tools are deemed to be military goods which are restricted on export from various countries, notably the U.S.A (so this was not 'Hello from France' but 'Hello from outside the US'): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...
I imagine this can happen anywhere, US or otherwise.
Jobs would probably think in the lines of:

"If you're not willing to break the law, you're not passionate enough"
> Do Indian children have their major chosen for them via parents, tests, or administrators?

Parents. Their future job is usually decided for them before they're even born. The number of people who go into a particular profession because they enjoy it is exceedingly small.
"Skirting" was a poor choice of word on my part. I didn't mean to imply they were doing anything unethical or borderline.

I simply wanted to point out that regulating cab companies and selling expensive permits is a source of city revenue. If an innovative new business disrupts that revenue, it may quickly find itself the subject of new regulation.

Now, if their success is based on efficient routing algorithms and higher-class service, then they have nothing to worry about. If it's based on the fact that they don't have one of the cab companies' major expenses, then they're at significant risk of being regulated out of profitability.
Think about that question for a few moments, and tell me the last time you ran across something in this world that was not negotiable.
Lawmakers do pay attention, existing monopoly arrangements are deals for specific companies and/or unions that support them. You are assuming that lawmakers always have the broad community's best interest at heart.
...further underscoring the shockingly poor quality of the applicants.
Engineers Can't Win in Local (or Social)
"Topology-agnostic programming" has been the norm on Wall Street for over a decade now; Tibco calls it "subject based" networking, I think?

I also think it's kind of a misfeature, and that in the real world it tends to devolve to "hub and spoke client/server with lots more failure modes".
They typically take a test. The choice of majors is pretty broad for those who place first. They end up taking CS, EE and other popular majors. Those who placed in the 2000+ ranks get to pick from an increasingly smaller pool.

By the time they get to assigning spots for those who placed 5000 and above, you are probably left with textiles, metallurgy and some other arcane fields.
An amazing startup idea generator
We knew that Seeing Interactive didn't say anything about us, so we started searching for a name that really spoke to what we were doing.

In looking through a lot of our internal documents and wiki we found the phrase "own local" a lot--as in, we want to help newspapers own their local markets again. We were hooked and began negotiations for the domain name immediately.
Seems to fit the playbook at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2369445 a teensy bit, but not the one at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405198.
The Falcon XX is planned to have a 140 metric ton to LEO capacity, but that comes later, for when we need to ship cargo to Mars colony without requiring a space station stop.

http://news.discovery.com/space/will-a-commercial-flight-be-...
Its included in the tution!
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/court-battle-o...
Note: Story is about Canada not the US.
Frankly I think its rather hard to fail in a US university course.
Minible is a simple way to collaborate on content for a website  
Just released a new web app to allow web designers to work with clients to get copy and content for a website.
The following paragraph:

>To date, only a handful of small studies have looked at short sleepers—in part because they're hard to find. They rarely go to sleep clinics and don't think they have a disorder.

While I think it's over-diagnosed, ADD is an excellent example here. When it was first getting attention, people being diagnosed were rarities. That skyrocketed when more people were watching for it. Similarly, stress, nervous, and depression disorders once actual treatments appeared, and there was a reason to get diagnosed and treated.
Apple and Google to merge iOS and Android together
Didn't mean it couldn't be Google. Just that its something they need to work on and whoever figures it out will get a pretty big spot in the history books
Not even smaller operating units, it just sounds like things will be organized according to product rather than function. Other HN articles recently have mentioned how Google has a bunch of centralized organizations that report all the way to the top and are not responsible to any product group (Launch, Site Reliability, UX, Product Management, etc).

What's different about Android is not that Andy Rubin has an engineering background; many of Google's senior managers do, even in the big functional orgs. What's different is that Android is a product unit which largely does not depend on these external functional teams and has all its resources built in.
Optimizing Cache Performance on Posterous
Apple to Toyota: Ditch the iPhone Jailbreak Theme
Is there a way of eating that has been shown to increase lifespan?
Linus Torvalds' popular comment is dissected here (http://warp.povusers.org/OpenLetters/ResponseToTorvalds.html):

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C."

You know the clip I'd like to see: Linus vs Stroustrup, discussing the pros and cons of C++. The hotheaded hacker against the calm language developer. Who'd win?
Actually AFAIK Microsoft is organized in business units (Windows, XBox, etc.)
It reminds me of the great lengths people will go to defend the honor of their favorite sports team.

Once people put their identity into something, they'll do and say crazy things to strengthen that.
Part of the problem is a social and cultural system where due to the success of IT industry, every parent wants to see their kid become an engineer. Many of the engineering colleges do not even take minimum tests for admission and you can buy seats on so called management quota. Even in premier institutes like IITs, NITs etc 30% of seats are reserved under SC/ST caste based quota scheme. It is no wonder that majority of people who are graduating are not employable. The article is well sourced but ignored some of the social and political issues in India which are the root of the problem along with a dysfunctional government.
Norwegian Parlament passes Data Retention Directive
The basic problem is that instead of focusing on improving one's skill set, the focus is more on hacking the system; getting that job or admission into a college. I have seen how resumes were photocopied from a standard template with only personal details changed. Also most of the answers were canned and memorized based on what the interviewers would like to hear. I am not sure if this happens across the globe,perhaps someone can comment.
Also most of the engineering entrance exams test on math, physics and chemistry. A lot of the graduates come from areas where the standard of english teaching is not very high, which explains why they may have poor comprehension.
I hope this doesn't create a Microsoft like situation where its very difficult for departments to work together.
Seriously? What company doesn't have major failures? Not ones doing anything interesting.

Should we have never had the Space Shuttle program because a couple of them crashed?
That's a STRONG price signal that will bring more cabs into the marketplace at peak times. $500 fares won't happen often or for very long-- I'd fire up my own ride and pick you up for $250!
I find it fascinating entertainment when people post "news" such as this with no informal or parenthetical citing, other than "An Apple Spokesperson said."
For that matter, I could be an apple spokesperson, and say whatever I wanted in the name of Apple with no basis or backing.
We're usually all about sharing, but we have a few important puzzle pieces coming out in the next few weeks and I'd hate to spoil the surprise.
Well cheating was pretty rampant where I studied computer engineering, and I would guess that it isn't much different elsewhere. More important, though is that kids in America aren't learning any more that kids in India, albeit there are probably more students in technical degrees in India. Look here, though: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_la...
Google's new cloud-based Android Music app leaks out
>200 gallon, 60 pound

Is it 4 score hogshead moons per gross of firkin?
You need that sleep for your body to repair and build itself up. What you'll find though is as your growth slows down (or if you shift to endurance work) the amount of repair your body needs to recover at night drops, your fitness has shot up, and the more fit you are the less you need of everything.

(except potentially food. You are a little more efficient at processing food, but if you develop a large amount of muscle you need a lot of food to maintain it)
Pancakes (Rebecca Black - Friday Parody)
It's okay if the Justice Department has the back of your entire industry.
I believe CAN-SPAM has provisions against that, but several vendors have standardized on storing the suppression files as a list of md5s. Of course that is not bulletproof (the source space is small, especially among the big mail providers) but at the moment it seems to have shifted the economics favorably.
Thanks for the shout-out Sachin! Minor detail, but important: CarWoo! doesn't handle CPO yet, only new (current model-year) cars.
Android Music 3.0 Leak
Yeah, SpaceX is super-cool. I was just curious how it compared with the most powerful rocket ever built.
Thanks for the guidance, however when one is commenting on the content of my post such in such a way to make it seem as though I am spreading FUD when they have failed to do even the most cursory check on the claim themselves, it is quite ok to point that out.

If we are going to try an impose some sort of posting etiquette here on HN such as reminding me to discuss content rather than commentors then I suggest we remind people to make attempts to look into things themselves before hitting the down arrow and asking for sources of information that should be readily available to anyone staying abreast of the details surrounding the topic at hand via a simple google search.
> Having less volition intuitively explains a lack of passion, but I'm not convinced that it does a great job explaining a lack of competence -- passion can be replaced by discipline and social pressure.

Yes, my point was that it would be of note for people discussing the Indian education system to keep in mind the way people go about choosing their subjects. I didn't say that it was the primary cause or even directly contributing to the lack of competence.
OSI? Really? http://pablotron.org/files/7_layer_burrito.html
I guess the question that I always have in this case is "why do you care". You can't upload an update to your app. It's your problem, not Google's. They don't need the money from your app. The Marketplace exists to have something, not to have something good. It's a checkbox for people thinking of licensing Android, which is where Google actually "makes money".

The problem that people have is that Google matters more to them than they matter to Google.
Multi-user realtime heatmap using nodejs
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378110
Would have been funnier if it were posted 4 days ago =)
Twitter unveils a new homepage, with a focus on interests
If Google wants to put engineers completely in charge, more power to them, but they need to change the interview process. Fewer questions about Red/Black and Splay Trees, and more questions along the lines of "How do you make a web store that your mother would want to use?"

The search business makes money through purely engineering talent, but Google's next big opportunity may not. When we achieve a degree of success, we tend to think our path to success is the one that works the best in the general case.

It will be interesting to see how the less bureaucratic and more autonomous engineering units will function. I hope some great products and businesses are made, but it could just end up fostering lots of technical masturbation like Google Wave.
As stated above, most colleges in India do not allow you to pick subjects and customize your course. Thus, all you chose is a 'major' (the degree) and the rest (the subjects and curriculum) has been chosen for you by the college.

Most of the times a student's major is selected for him/her with the following preference:

1. What's available in the most reputed college nearby.
2. What the parents perceive to be the best degree to pursue (usually engineers/doctors followed by other streams based on the general consensus of their friends/peers/relatives).

Children almost never decide their own focus - at least they never did say about ten years ago. Children here make the first choice of their courses to study in High School when they are 16. That's almost too young to decide what you want to be.

You can be certain that almost every Indian student who took Biology in their High School tried to be a doctor and every student who had Maths and Physics took the exams for entrance to Engineering colleges.

That's why we see Indian engineers have a very skewed quality to quantity ratio - many of them never wanted to be engineers in the first place!

This can mostly be attributed to our parents growing up in an (almost) socialist republic where doctors and engineers were the best career avenues after the government. However, things are changing slowly and parents are being very liberal with the career choices of their kids and getting them to explore different options.
DC actually does not cap the number of cabs (only the price they can charge) so there's pretty good supply here too. But I would definitely use Uber at peak times, though, like New Years or late-night or when it is raining.
Correct - and I am not making claims either way, though I guess I could be more clear -- the fact is that the radiation is too high to recover - either the bodies themselves are too dangerous, or the surrounding environment is too dangerous. Either way -- recovery of more than 1000 bodies is hampered by radiation.
> Parents. Their future job is usually decided for them before they're even born.

This is patently untrue. Parents usually have high expectations of stable, well-earning jobs, but in no way decide before they are even born. It might apply to the minority of businessmen who insist that their children carry on the "family business", but even that is rare.
Just because something can happen anywhere does not mean that they happen to the same degree. India has a corruption perception index of 3.3 (out of 10) in 2010. Below even countries like China and Columbia. The effect on education is just one ramification of corruption. It is overly dismissive to make the claim that 'well corruption happens everywhere'
Fixed cab fares are a response to passengers' effective inability to negotiate cab fares. In general, while transport regulations benefit the incumbents to some degree by raising the barrier to entry (rather shockingly in the case of NYC taxi medallions), they are generally supported by the public for reasons of safety.

There hasn't actually been a "broad increase in crime over the past fifty years" in the US; consider http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nccrimn.htm which shows that, in North Carolina, violent crime in general has nearly doubled over that time, and robbery has increased by a factor of six, but murder rates have halved. A similar trend is seen in San Diego http://www.sandiego.gov/police/stats/ — violent crime has quadrupled, robbery has barely doubled, and murder has halved. Furthermore, these overall trends have been far from monotonic; the crime peak in 1990–1992 is far worse than anything we've seen over the last 20 years.

And there are lots of countries where low-tech hitchhiking is very much alive, and crime is much higher in most of them than in the US.

I think the real reason for the change is economic: as people in the US got much richer, they preferred the safety of private cars, airplanes, and other public transport, to the cost savings of hitchhiking.

Regardless, that's a problem of information. You want to know if the person you're riding with has a record of trying to rob or rape previous drivers or passengers, or even leering at their tits.
It is refreshing to see judges questioning the nature of the charges and exposing the fact that current copyright laws weren't really developed with file-sharing in mind.

One of the judges immediately jumps in and says that Congress could have made an exception, but didn't. Harrow points out that perhaps it didn't because the result would naturally be absurd: the idea that someone sitting at home, listening to music, would suddenly be liable for billions of dollars, doesn't make any sense.

Even worse, the RIAA has not (to my knowledge) provided any evidence that Tenenbaum actually distributed the works, only that he made them available by participating in a BitTorrent swarm.
That's pretty fast for hunt-and-peck using your index fingers only.
NYC is unique in the US.
Bashing Microsoft 'like kicking a puppy,' says Linux Foundation chief
Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims.
"I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore," Zemlin said. "They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy."
Show HN: Android Virtualization on ARM (Our MVP)
This is our MVP (built in ~2 years): http://vimeo.com/21889466

We run virtualized instances of Android/Linux operating systems on multicore ARM processors. What you see in the demo is in similar caliber of what VMWare has today.

I am the founder, 29, we are a small team. I would welcome any feedback, suggestions, improvements ... perhaps suggestions on who to approach. There may be people or companies which we didn't think of.

I will be in Mountain View from 10th April onwards and happy to meet anyone interested in the technology. (also looking for housing in the MV area).
oops yeah i knew that. i'll clarify in the post that carwoo is if you decide to go with the "all new" buying option.
Startup Sales Hiring: When Should You Hire Your First Salesperson?
I meant that it's likely to challenge some presumption held by nearly every reader. I enjoy honest analysis when it says: Side A is wrong and Side B is wrong, the answer lies elsewhere.

Everyone is angry at first because their sacred cow has been tossed on the grill, but in the end we reconcile and have a great cookout.
Thanks, so happy to hear that you're enjoying our service!
Startup Profile - Proxomo (1 API to rule them all?)
Apple focuses on design/usability but its not designer driven. It is more of "product" driven sort.
I'd like to ditto this; the linked article is very speculative, and without a G-employee response, it seems rather foolhardy to extend said speculation.
"First you need a buzzword,

Then a second and a third,

Pick at least two industries you'll revolutionize.

Find yourself an engineer,

Feed him pizza, buy him beer,

Give him just a fraction of a fraction of the pie.

Need a good domain name,

Must be cheap, can't be lame,

Something cool like Flickr, Meebo, WikiYou, Mahalo, Bebo,

'Telephone' without the 't',

'Digg' but with a triple 'g',

Make your elevator pitch,

Code it up and flip the switch!"

--The Richter Scales, "Here Comes Another Bubble"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
I suspect the problem with studying "long sleepers" is that the number of people who need, say, 12 hours of sleep "legitimately" is dominated by the number of people who need 12 hours of sleep due to a health issue, making them hard to identify and study. I've done the 12+ hours of sleep thing when I was a teenager, and only much later did I learn the health issue it was trying to tell me about.
Parents choose based on what they think is the safest option for their kids. To put the blame entirely on them will not be fair. One of the most interesting things I find about the American way of life is, people start taking up jobs from a very young age. IMO this helps them explore options and also discover their own interests and even aptitude for a particular line of work.
Also in the Indian way of life hobbies always come second to academics.
I'm frankly shocked Toyota wanted anything to do with such a horribly ugly theme in the first place.
The table here doesn't give cost comparisons for the other launch vehicles, but in the press conference Elon Musk said that the Delta IV Heavy costs roughly 3x the Falcon Heavy, meaning that the FH is approximately 6x cheaper in $/lb to low earth orbit.

The figures quoted on the page work out to $1,070 per lb to LEO. That's less than $200k to lift the mass of a 180lb human.
Barring all ethical issues aside, while most are just "use whatever other readily available storage", I enjoyed this hack of a storage method:

"Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out"
Thank you for posting that link! I didn't know the background.

You probably could get Octave running on rooted Android without too much pain.
Haha, nooooo. GEO will actually probably be the major market for the Falcon Heavy. I suspect specs weren't in there due to the fact that they would be heavily dependent on the performance of the upper stage, which I think is still being developed. I think the current estimate of GTO capacity for Falcon Heavy is 19,500kg.

Which ironically would make the Falcon Heavy the best choice for launching a lot of the most secretive NRO payloads (due to bloated satellite size). For servicing the commercial satellite market it's likely that a lot of launches would be 2 or 3 comm-sats at once.