skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Players Have Spoken & The Numbers Dont Lie / Plus A Mafia Wars Poll
T-Mobile Sidekick 4G Landing April 20th For $99.99
According to T-Mobile USA’s tweet, the Sidekick 4G will be available to U.S customers on April 20th for $99.99 with a new two-year contract, after $50 mail-in rebate. Powered by a 1GHz Cortex A8 Samsung’s Hummingbird processor, the Samsung’s Sidekick 4G runs on Android 2.2 Froyo with a custom UI (user interface).
Innovation isn't necessarily inventing something new, it can just as well be taking something existing and making it better. Pagerank, adwords and gmail are examples of this. They all took something existing and made it much much better.
"Google needs to give designers power" -- often asserted, to the point where it is now an expected comment in any thread about Google's failings.

I want to see someone spend their time finding evidence to support that assertion, rather than working on their way of typing as an authority.
They do pay more! That's the point!
Nowadays changing email address is really difficult. (At least in my case) Because you are already in everyone's address book with your existing email.

This is why your "public" email address(es) should really be something you control. It's worth buying your own domain name if just for this reason. Then you can switch backend providers without having to worry about giving everyone you know your new email address.
Mapreduce in search (presentation)
Definitely. It was easily three months before I learned about apropos. Otherwise it was menus and C-h k.
Apple To Release iOS 4.3.2 In The Next Two Weeks
According to the news we got that Apple is now working on another iOS 4.3.x release: iOS 4.3.2. By the source, this firmware update will be include a few enhancements, address security issues, and it will also fix several bugs that have affected users. As expected the software update for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
Be aware that all mail deliveries in Norway (who you send the mail to, and receive the mail from) will be surveilled and available to law enforcement by court order.
Obviously most of you are from the US, and are already used to these kind of shenaningans, but just thought that I should warn you, as the mail servers for this service will most probably be located in Norway.
Read more about it here:
http://www.tnp.no/2233-controversial-data-storage-directive-...
Why is it that "design" sites have the worst design? Yes, please be sure to destroy the page margins, and set a min width on the page so that I have to scroll horizontally to read the end of lines. Classic.
Gmail was 1GB to start out, and people thought that was enormous.
I'm not actually sure, I clicked the mark my location link out of curiosity, but my city has not been marked.

For something thats supposed to be collecting information from willing participants it's a bit unclear.

I actually run ubuntu server on a linode server, it's not clear how I would go about adding that, for example.
Merc interviews Matt Cutts
Agreed. If Google's incredibly talented and distributed employee base can pull their networks in to whatever their new social initiatives are, it's a huge aset to them in the battle with Facebook and everybody else for "who owns social". Tying everybody's bonus to this encourages each individual employee and team to think creatively about how they can help. It's a strong signal that "this is our top priority and yes we really mean it".

Which doesn't mean it will work, of course; see ScottBurson's points above. But from a strategy perspective it's a classic way to align priorities around the critical corporate goal.
So are you arguing in favor of an annual tax charge that's a fixed number of dollars, in lieu of percentage-based taxes? That's possible to argue for, but seems like an unusual proposal. As far as I can tell, there's broad consensus from libertarians to liberals that taxes should in some way be proportional, whether it's proportional to income or consumption or property owned. A Forbes-style flat tax, for example, still starts from the assumption that everyone should pay a certain percentage of their income in taxes. The FairTax proposals start from a consumption-based flat tax, and progressify it a little with a fixed dollar rebate.
Graphical muusic
Fascinating. And interesting to see that the UK conducted some explosions on US territory too. And that there have been over 2,000 nuclear explosions to date. The tests go crazy in the late 50's, then again in the 70's through about 1993 after which hardly any take place.
You cannot explain obese babies by saying they don't get enough exercise.

Also, you're recommending solutions before you understand the problem. Did Americans suddenly lose all self-control in 1980? And if they did, why?

Getting more exercise, and eating more green vegetables and less sugar is clearly a good idea, but the central mystery - why do people get fat - remains unexplained. We should unravel it.
> Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other.

The complete ingredients list for my cup of Quaker Oats from 2011 is "100% Whole Rolled Oats". (Yes, you can buy flavored oatmeal packets that contain other things, but your claim is different.) That's what you get in the big round tubs.

What, exactly, is different about 1914's oatmeal?

Note - saying "they've added lots of stuff" isn't an answer unless you can show that "100%" is wrong. ("Rolled" is a mechanical crushing process and doesn't imply that anything was removed or added.)
I too use Emacs mostly as a standalone but turn the chrome off. But the chrome is useful for a beginner.
Considering that Facebook has comparable (potential) privacy issues, I don't think people are avoiding Google because of such concerns. Its simply a matter of superior execution from Facebook on social.
Because at the time the standard was 4MB. Gmail has raised the bar permanently.
i'm not familiar with the rules proposed in december, was this in reference to the proposal that google and verizon drew up?
I'm mostly familiar with the US, but whether more government services are available to lower- or higher-income people is an interesting question that I don't think could be answered without running some numbers. There are things like food stamps only available to the poor, but there are large swaths of subsidies, research programs, business grants, etc. that would be difficult to qualify for if you were dirt-poor.
I remember then that they had to put up a sign: "Don't be evil, please take 1"
If you are in the USA, you are overpaying for bandwidth by about $700/month or so.
Some Interesting Core Java Interview questions
Why should I care what percentage the millionaire pays? Because if they pay a lower percentage, then I have to pay a higher percentage (or receive less well-funded public services). Unlike those millionaires who have reached the stage of simply keeping score, it also significantly affects my ability to buy things I want.

I also fundamentally disagree that I get more in absolute terms from the government than the millionaire, even if the millionaire has never asked for a handout or used a publicly funded service in his life. The millionaire couldn't buy stabilisation of the banking system[1], free access to markets, protection of his physical and intellectual property, effective enforcement of contracts and all the other benefits which have enabled him to maximise the returns of his ability and efforts - their removal would cost most millionaires far more than 17% of their annual income.

They are beneficial to me too, but not to the tune of several million pounds a year (or not yet anyway :-)

[1]Stability is relative. Unless he happened to be a gold miner, he would be earning less from a smaller economy if every transaction were backed by gold.
Things have changed quite a bit since 2004. The competition back then only offered a few mb.
Show HN: Podcasts for .NET
I’m in my car quite a bit 5-6 days a week and like to listen to podcasts. I couldn’t find a centralized repository of .NET podcasts so I hacked one together from scratch and learned the basics of ASP.NET MVC in the process.
Excellent app. I've always been a "pour boiling water into mug with prepackaged tea bag in it" kind of guy, your app might convince me to discover the finer side of tea.

Just a minor issue I noticed: in iPad's Safari the video is stretched (it extends beyond the bounds of the background book) and as it plays your site constantly flickers and reloads itself.

screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/EQyRU.png
I had been using fastmail for years too, but recently switched to gmail ironically.

10+ years ago I payed a small fee for life time account with them, and they very were good, but they just never made any improvements to their service and gmail just got better and better to the point it seemed ridiculous to keep using fastmail.
The Learning Curve of Sisyphus never ends....
I saw a UK based study a while back which said that 30% of students were in the top 10% of their class at some stage during their school life, but weren't in the top 10% when they finished school.

The idea of a fixed pool of "A" students is a false one.

That said I think that we should be teaching all students most of the topics he mentioned.
Getting the FCC to make carriers play fair is a slow road to improvement and it's filled with potholes. I'd be more inclined to support regulation changes intended to make starting a new carrier easier.

Mark my words: Any net neutrality bill will benefit the existing carriers, and stifle telecom startups.
Paypal Is About To Get A Bruising From Facebook And Square
Well, in some cases a modern signal chain has more headroom. The fact that the average loudness of a remaster is higher than the original doesn't tell you anything about the dynamic range.
'So, you disapprove of my English country life in the 18th century? Honour must be satisfied!' said Rachel Lady Castlewood.

They met on the grounds of The battle of Blenheim for the duel.

A shot rang out! A figure fell!

The end. Am I in?

Also - a very good short story involving duelling is at

http://miraclejones.blogspot.com/

This guy is a hella writter.
Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing.

It's often said that Google's weakness is the human side, and I agree, but what's not clear is whether Facebook is so culturally different. Much of what I hear about Facebook indicates a hacker culture that is not dissimilar to Google's engineering culture in this respect, i.e. not necessarily "softer" in the way you describe. Do Facebook emphasize "human factors experts"?

There are people here who have worked at both companies. I'd like to hear some comparisons on this point.
LTO5, 2 copies. I'm archiving TBs of video in a Final Cut Server environment this way. My 2 cents.
You're confusing dynamic range compression with digital file compression. Totally different things. The only thing they have in common is that they make something smaller.
Good thing it has them for comments!
Know what world thinks about you –Whatiswrongwith.me
No, of course not. I was being metaphorical. However, yesterday when I opened a box of flour that I'd ordered from the internet, I realised that it made me feel kinda snobby. Why do I order flour off the internet? Protein content. Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour#Flour_type_numbers

There's a lot more to flour production than the milling. Or the bleaching. We think of flour as just being "ground wheat" -- turns out, there's plenty of kinds you never see, which have a greater nutritional value than what your standard preprepared-from-grains prepackaged food item is made from. Think of it as the difference between the coffee you buy in the supermarket in tins and the beans you pick up at Intelligentsia or Peets. Prepackaged foods are optimized for profit to the manufacturer, using the cheapest available ingredients.

What are your sources of grains? Specifically, if you taped a USDA Food Pyramid graphic to your refrigerator and kept track of how many servings of each as per those recommendations are you consuming a day? Remember that one sandwich is two servings of grain. (I am NOT endorsing the USDA food pyramid. Just using it as a reference point.) You might even get Mr Taubes to admit that not all grains are equal.

As for extending prepackaged foods with fillers, look for ingredients on the label such as carboxymethyl cellulose, carageenan, guar gum, xanthan gum, agar, pectin or maltodextrin. These things are called stabilizers, thickening agents and bulking agents by the food industry. They are cheap, and some of them are not entirely bad for you, as they contain indigestible fibers, but for the most part, they are nutritionally empty. Real, good food that is made the proper way doesn't need to be thickened, bulked up or stabilized.

As a would-have-been pastry chef and baker, this is a topic somewhat dear to my heart. It's somewhat suspicious that I lived on bread, yogurt, cheese and pasta in CH for 19 months and still lost 65lbs. My hunch -- and it's only a hunch -- is that there's something in our food here in the US that's partly to blame.

Also, my great-grandmother would have used groats, not steamed, rolled quick-cooking oats. With no sugar.
I think there is plenty of space for Google to be more "social" without building a Facebook. FB is a form of aggregating and extracting value from tenuous social relationships that would be too much work otherwise. Google needs to make the same within their space - which is search, mail for end users and ads for content/service providers.

Going head-on Facebook is stupid. The one who succeeds will not have invented a better Facebook - will have invented the next social thing, whatever that is.
What is the size of the social gaming industry?
I think it's implied the article author has to deal with a much simpler analysis than whatever is needed to manage Google. It's therefore implied the article is based on faulty/incomplete information.
Actor Oriented Programming, Fault Tolerance and OTP
Wired article with more details: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/6/japanese-artis...
The data set referenced in the credits: http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Publ...
Once you discover a handful of useful commands/features, you'll appreciate it more. These a few of my favorites:

* Unlimited undo/redo - C-_

* Incremental search forwards/backwards - C-s/C-r

* Macros - C-x ( C-x )

* Query-Replace: M-%

* "Hippie" Expand - M-/

* M-x tetris -- Actually has an enjoyable game of Tetris.
One-hour Project: really fast timer
It's taken me all four years of college to realize that my productivity and interest usually tail off after about an hour of distraction-free work. Lacking time to do a weekend project, I threw something together in under an hour.

Your turn to make something marginally useful in http://quicktick.me/1h

(Also: http://quicktick.me/3h1m4s, http://quicktick.me/5:14, http://quicktick.me/111:22:33, count up by not specifying a duration.)
After a lecture and doing several examples I a majority of my college algebra students couldn't do this problem.

You have a house that you bought for $120,000. You sell the house for $173,000 and the real estate commission is 6%. As the seller of the house you have to pay the real estate commission. The real estate commission is an expense and is not counted as part of your profit from the sale of the house. You have to pay a tax of 30% on the profit from the sale of the house. How much tax is paid?

They just couldn't grasp that the real estate commission was not part of their profit. I got the impression that the students believe that the real estate commission is not an expense.

I do believe that a large percentage of society does not understand interest.
This article reinforces the cost arguments that libertarian types have made for years against expanded subway/rail. Not even counting the regulatory hurdles buses are easier to get "moving."
This is probably one of the scariest things I've ever seen. Does anybody know what became of this test sites? Are they restricted, what are the radiation levels etc ...
//are rotated between management and worker, and no one is getting promoted vertically.

While that's true, i think his original point was that the alpha males will choose decisions that favour themselves....Introspective motivational awareness is hardly a profitable trait in our current society* (*-whatever i have seen is constrained to indian IT)
Probably never. Why would I want this? It doesn't look more portable than my iPad already is.
Could turn out to be a Gmail competitor, but they'll need a better domain for it than myopera.com.
If I can take an opposite view, I think this article on design is far from useful. It is stuffed with unproven generalizations (like, why the hell should plain edges be "boring"? why should we "adjust opacity"?). Better read Jacob Nielsen on this.
I've always kind of wished web browsers had a built-in split-pane feature so I can keep one tab always open within the window.
Coding a tunnel animation in 75 pixels
From the outside it looks like the US political scene is a complete and ridiculous mess right now, led by the Republican Congress.
I've just recently spoken with my friends, and I know for a fact that it atleast takes a month from point of checkin to review/test/stage/production. If you disagree, I think what you are talking about, is probably an exception and not the norm.

Being secretive about release cycles is pointless stealth.
Fujifilm A100 Digital Camera: pause your happy moment
I know on HN this is the part we focus on (the net) but based on the republican plans for the future of the federal government (which do have a real chance of happening) this would be the least you have to worry about. It's pretty much going to be every person for themselves because government is going to be a fraction of what it was and states, therefore residents will receive a fraction of the funding you are used to.

Not just the net, everything from roads, education, healthcare, prisons is going to become radically privatized.
Can you integrate and partner with a internet tea seller?

I know nothing about tea, but I know I could appreciate it. If you made it even easier for me to get good tea, I think that'd be a great feature. In addition, your app would know what I'd ordered, and you could leverage that info. Definitely not a MVP feature, but definitely one that I think could be useful and profitable.

As it stands, it's a great looking app and I think it's a great example of finding a niche and creating something compelling to serve it.

Edit: I just noticed the adagio teas coupon on your site. While this may be a simple affiliate link, maybe you've already begun trying to forge a partnership with them whereby you could offer in-app purchasing of their products (or a selected subset). Hopefully so!
Does the power strip work? Given the ubiquity of 3G coverage, I don't mind lacking wifi that much anymore.
Another freedom lost in the land of the free.
I don't know if this answers your question, but Zuckerberg often answers in questions that machine-driven data is often not good enough, and there needs to be core social elements in a technology to delivery quality data for many applications.

What that means in practice, who knows, but with Google's engineer-heavy focus, I would venture to guess that Google at least is (and has been) heavily focused on a machine-driven philosophy.
One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves
It looks like South America and Antarctica are the only two continents free of blasts.
Anyone share the same perspective? As someone who's only casually seen the project, I'm curious to know what EEs think.
This article is stupid and misinformative in a multitude of ways. Maybe there was a grain of truth somewhere in there among the technical inaccuracies, but the whole "Loudness Wars" meme rode in on a wave of ignorant populist sentiment.

It smacks of the kind of BS that people repeat in relation to analogue synthesizers and "the vinyl sound". It has a certain aesthetic appeal but falls apart upon any technically informed examination.
the title is very accurate
Ruby and the power of gems
How much of an incentive is a 25% bonus modifier? I can imagine people (who presumably are already paid well) ignoring the incentive entirely, and continuing to work on more interesting projects.

Additionally, many people will be in positions entirely irrelevant to social: This includes non-engineers, perhaps sales, and people working at lower levels of the engineering stack (i.e. people working on large scale filesystems, racking servers, the chef...). These people are more likely to be alienated or more simply confused, rather than encouraged in the long run.
The Rode Podcaster is certainly good. Streets ahead of the Blue Snowball I had. It's what Andrew Warner uses on Mixergy too.
Facebook is complicated for the average user. At least based on questions I get about it.
I spent a semester in Oz in college. It forever changed the way I think about parallelism, to the point where it's not uncommon for me to implement a very rough equivalent of dataflow variables in other languages.

Some of its concepts do show up, though; Futures in Java, Qt, and I believe .NET are a very crude analog of dataflow variables (crude largely because they don't support Prolog-style unification like all Oz variables do).
Just wrote this up and I would like to know what you guys think about it! :)
It seems like the Page move is a step in the right direction. The article takes that premise as an assumption, and then goes on to argue that Page's first few leadership plays won't be a panacea against Google's problems, which I think is missing the point, that they're taking a good first step, at the cost of saying that it won't solve all of their problems.
That video made the cold war look like a hot war.
zoom in a bit. russia and canada both have a handful of servers scattered around
Expected Value of A Programming Language Startup
How do we estimate the value of "owning" a new programming language? Treating the project of inventing and implementing a de novo programming language + IDE support + standard libraries as a startup, what might we expect to gain?

Is the value of inventing a language like Go greater for Google than it would be for a lone developer with only his blog and HN to increase his mindshare?

If you go back and look at the generative programming movement, a la Czarnecki, the idea was that language-based programming was going to become an industrial standard. Paul Graham also espouses a form of language-based programming when enumerating the virtues of Lisp.

How to classifity a DSL embedded in Lisp compared to a full-fledged language + ecosystem like Scala, which also borrowed much of its foundations from Java?
This is not the insider view you're hoping for, but I think Zuckerberg is a different kind of hacker from Page and Brin. He seems to have a much better instinct for UX and for what users want. I'd wager, based admittedly on little evidence, that he has much more of an artist's soul. Page and Brin seem much more like pure engineers.