skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a garden path sentence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
That's really only because English is hard to parse, in other languages this is unambiguous.
France, U.S. Have Highest Depression Rates in World, Study Suggests
I really don't feel like it is my place to mention the name. I wasn't involved. I know one of the other developers who didn't get paid took it to the investors (he happened to be friends with one of the better known ones). What the outcome was I do not know.
> Why would they drop Paul Graham's name into this empty story?

Paul Graham waded into it by posting on HN[1] with a statement that directly contradicts the victim's version of events. It's relevant, and TechCrunch covering it should come as no surprise to anyone.

> I know AirBnB has made a lot of people angry with their business tactics, but how are they responsible for this crime?

Per PG's post: "Airbnb has been offering to fix it..." Whether or not they're legally responsible, they've got a PR problem on their hands.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822721
The Fine Art of Dwarf Fortress (about the ascii portraits in the NYT article)
The main exceptions to this are Flash cookies. These are shared between all browsers for a given user, since they're stored by the Flash plugin itself and independent of individual browsers' profile storage.
Now you have to be an insurance company to do the "right thing"? Airbnb had a chance to take care of this from the very beginning and we wouldn't even be talking about this right now if they had. That's the point.
Help HN: Facing problem with attention.
Hello HN,
I am having problem with attention while reading some stuff. Some time I read superficially and response accordingly. It is a big problem for me as It seems I am not having proper concentration.

Is that normal and happened other people as well.

Please suggest how I can improve my self.

Big Thanks in advance.
IV games the USPTO to build its empire on questionable patents
A bit boring, but Google comes to mind.
Little girls pageant dresses
Instawallet introduces instant bitcoin payments (zero confirmations)
Here is something I don't understand.

San Francisco is a tiny city (heck, I've walked from one end to the other; it's just 7 miles x 7 miles, or 11km x 11km for the rest of you). Most of the principles in this sad tale live in San Francisco. HOW HARD IS IT TO JUST WALK OVER AND MEET THIS PERSON?? Instead of relying on PR and telephones and email and blogs; just walk over, give her a hug, talk to her and treat her right! Put a human touch on all this interaction, people! It's not like she's living in Podunk, Nebraska (no offense to Nebraskans) and out of reach. She's living right here!

Close your laptops. Put down your iPhones. Just meet her in person and solve her problems. I am willing to bet that a face-2-face with the principles will solve more problems than all the articles in TC, blog posts, etc.
This just smacks of corruption. Sweet legal corruption.

He was in a position to be able to purchase the rights to drill. He does not have to necessarily have to exercise those rights that he purchased.

Moreover, he is leasing those rights! It is in the governments best interests to have someone pay for the right to take a non-renewable resource and then not decide to use it!!!

Since there is a lot of talk about patents and copyright here, let's do a simple example. If I purchase the rights to 'Happy Birthday', can't I just not enforce the copyright? Will I be prosecuted if I don't sue every child getting sung 'Happy Birthday'?

If I purchase Lodsys' supposed patents and decide to not sue every indy developer out there, will I be persecuted for it?

Sexual orientation? You've got the right either way! If you go princess or bear is the government going to break down your door?

If you lease land for logging and your company decides it's not fiscally feasible to log this year, are you going to be thrown in jail.

No. No. No. No.

It's too bad his defense was hampered by the judge.

His only crime was trying to get in the way of the revolving door system of public property being given away to private interests. That's a big no-no.
A Photo Its Own Background Make In Photoshop
A Photo Its Own Background Make In Photoshop,In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn how to use a photo as its own background In Adobe Photoshop tutorial.
Whether or not you think this is tremendously important, it is.

We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of authority.

(Almost twice as much, since a few women have managed to emerge with amazing technical superpowers from a still very sexist and sexist-tolerant society.)

For a very long time I had faith in how far we had progressed in sexual equality in American culture. But very many experiences over the past many years have convinced me overwhelmingly of how very far American culture still needs to go before every girl and woman has a level playing field at EVERY STAGE of educational and professional opportunity.

This is extremely important for every single one of you. If you're an American male programmer or engineer or scientist today, keep in mind always that almost half of your potential awesome colleagues or awesome employees aren't there working with you because they faced obstacles you might never have imagined.

Please, everyone, make it better and treat every single person the same way in every way from now on.
> Just cause someone else does it doesn't mean that you should do it.

The same is true for the advice in this article. Our testing, combined with legal requirements, has shown that we get the best results when fields are split apart and match the paper version of the form we are digitizing exactly.

> If you need to match against another data provider, e.g. government database, then you should tell you users that. Tell them that you can't continue unless they "enter their name the same as it's in their passport".

We can't ask the user to "enter their name the same as it's in their passport" for a number of reasons including: we don't know what type of identity documents they have, foreign identity documents may contain name information in a different format than stored by the US government, it could be considered discriminatory.

The data is submitted to the government long after the users involvement with the process is complete. There's no way to have it checked in real time or while the user is still present. The government provides no useful feedback about what information collected was incorrect. We are simply directed to have the user contact one of several government agencies. Getting it right the first time is extremely important, trying to combine fields and break them out on the back end can lead to negative consequences for our users and liability for our clients if done improperly.

> I assume you users are interested in your service, so they will want to enter the correct information.

The users don't have much of a choice and when they were doing this process on paper they would routinely get it wrong. Making the electronic data collection process as error free as possible is much more important than a few seconds saved by unifying form fields. Especially if incorrectly processing those unified form fields may have negative consequences for the user as it can in our case.
Is there any good Internet resource for studying Statistics?
I'm going back to university this September and I picked up a course which has some prerequisites

Mathematics & Statistics (Sci): Sample space, events, conditional probability, independence of events, Bayes' Theorem. Basic combinatorial probability, random variables, discrete and continuous univariate and multivariate distributions. Independence of random variables. Inequalities, weak law of large numbers, central limit theorem.

I've studied statistics many years ago but as I don't use it in my work I completely forgot all of it. Since there're still a month before September, I think I should make some preparation for my study if I don't want to drop the course. So is there any good Internet studying resources that I can use to refresh my statistic knowledge? (I thought about buying textbooks, but they are really expensive)
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Huh. He said "need done" instead of "need to be done". I wonder if he's originally from Pittsburgh?
i call bullsh1t on that.. havent seen airbnb do anything about this 'unique situation' that isn't contradicted at every turn...
The only thing I know for sure is it took me about 4 hours to write a concept Android app that used an existing app the market (barcode scanner) which I could interact with via intents. It was free and I can install the APK on devices without using the market. I don't really know what more I could ask for.

Well that's not true, the other thing I know for sure is Objective C makes me dry heave.
This is interesting because I, having no knowledge of the Android market but a lot of knowledge of development in general, would give the exact opposite advice! In general I think it's agreed that the best thing to do is release, and then tweak.

If the Android Market punishes people that do this then I think that's a very real problem with the market that will directly lead to poorer quality software.
Confirmed: AT&T Will Begin Throttling Unlimited Data Plans
"Garden path sentences are less common in spoken communication because the prosodic qualities of speech (such as the stress and the tone of voice) often serve to resolve ambiguities in the written text."

Another random and crazy thought: people have experimented with textual and graphical programming languages -- I wonder what an aural programming language would be like? It's almost certainly impractical, but the idea is intriguing nonetheless.

Maybe slightly more practical would be some kind of aural complement to conventional sight-based programming systems...
Thanks for the info. I have used this method on small scale projects where I provide web hosting, and it worked then. At any rate you're spot-on on having everything in writing before a non-payment should escalate to draconian measures.
Geo Locate a MAC with Microsoft Live API
Value does not exist except as what the customer perceives value to be.
Can you expand, a bit?

Arbitration can be of a lower standard. The arbitrator will probably be a lawyer, but not a judge. And standards of evidence can be much lower.

I doubt that there are many arbitration companies siding with someone just to get repeat business. That might depend on the scale of business though. For two small businesses, I can't see how it would be a big deal. If a company the size of IBM nominates an arbitrator, I might be suspicious.
Any thoughts on whether the stronger version of this bias, against anyone who has ever been unemployed in their lives, is still prevalent? It used to be common advice to make sure to hide or have excuses for any 'gaps' in your CV's work history, lest a potential employer realize that you had ever been unemployed. Is that still the case?
I think that too often form UX airs on the side of simplicity and that unified text fields are a pleasant counter to the bulk of forms. Re-checking this comments this morning led me to check out what kind of variations a developer might want to anticipate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_(geography)#Current_add...

It can be tough to determine the point at which this will yield seriously diminishing returns in terms of development time as the domain of users goes international.

I realize the following question is fringe-related at best, but does anyone else like to have fun with the company field instead of (appropriately) leaving it blank? Thanks to me my friend now gets ThinkGeek catalogs for the 'his' company: "pornography inside"
> being a non-Java developer

I'm a Java developer and I don't know, either. I suspect the expertise you're looking for might be described as an "Android developer" ;)
The word "is" is overloaded pretty hard...
Start here: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
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The release and tweak model works well for web apps -- today. Because there is no real review model for web apps.

Mobile apps are a lot more like movies. Opening weekend means a LOT. If you are weak out the gate, you'll have bad reviews. When you update, no one will care, because not many people will buy the updated app because of all the one-star reviews.

The only time this doesn't apply is if you a huge built in userbase like Facebook, where even with bad reviews, people will still get the updated version of the app.
I can easily imagine they are done for. Not because of the PR backlash, but because what they are doing is already quasi-illegal in a lot of places and one juicy story like this that the media, lawyers and politicians can jump on is just about all it will take to eventually remove the "quasi" part.
What if I specifically don't want you on my website if you won't let me track you? You're using technology to circumvent me (adblock), why can't I use technology to circumvent your wishes (evercookie et. al.)?
You might be interested in reading the comments from previous times this story has been submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408813 : 88 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439742

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2233443

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2305491 : 42 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807824
Plus1center.com - Fully Outsourced Google Plus One Business, Huge Profit Margins
I've been doing this with SelfControl for a long time. Really useful application

http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/
One might say that being evil is hurting the company more, especially when knowledgeable employees quit rather than being associated with such actions. People who push back on such things actually care about the company they joined, not the company it has become.
I prefer using and making software for iOS over Android but I think you're right. Cocoa programming requires a lot of up front knowledge about their design patterns and tools. It's no small undertaking for someone to learn about KVO, delegate pattern (so simple but confuses people for some reason, I think it's the name), MVC, and then add actions and outlets, resizing masks, and all the other unique things to Xcode/IB that people have to learn.

Once you know Cocoa and Xcode iOS development is faster and more fun than Android development but it's no small learning curve. It's worth it for the fast turnaround of using the simulator compared to Android where both the emulator and device are slow, you're looking at 5-10x as long to launch your app compared to the iOS simulator. Plus ObjC > Java if you ask me, but I'm a masochist who likes both C and dynamic languages. Individual statements are verbose in Cocoa but I'd have to look at how much boilerplate is caused by the Java straight jacket to speculate on which is ultimately more verbose.

You also have to be willing to put with some crusty stuff. Nothing compared to OS X programming but it still feels old next to Java's APIs. Two good examples are string manipulation and interacting w/ the filesystem, so verbose on iOS but pretty good in Java.
You don't think that the downvotes are due to your tone, or the fact that you're not really adding anything to the conversation? I enjoy insulting people who don't believe in climate change as much as anyone, but never in the context of trying to present my research (note that you claim that your first paragraph is the result of your research) and never on HN, since it adds nothing to the conversation and weakens arguments. Complaining about being downvoted and insulting anyone who downvotes you also tends to be a good way to get downvoted - adds nothing to the conversation, doesn't make people think that you're a level-headed person they should listen to.

EDIT: And your comment is now in the positive. Which lets me point out that a really standard pattern on HN is for comments to be downvoted before being upvoted - since the first people who get to comments tend to be those who blindly downvote anything they dislike, and are then followed by the ones who actually look at comments. Complaining and freaking out about it can only make it worse.
It is easier to hide by claiming to be freelancing which is gappy by nature however there are always questions about what you did while freelancing so I suspect the bias still exists. Having said that, a lot more work is purely short-term so having gaps is not the black mark that it used to be.
I don't quite agree with that. One advantage I see for using SQLite is that you CAN use it as an SQL database for administrative purposes: You can quickly import/export the data from or into another SQL database, you can quickly generate an ad hoc report, etc.

So to me, the SQLite use case is often where the PRIMARY purpose of a database could be served nearly as well with fopen(), but where it's likely that there will be SECONDARY uses for which having a convenient universal access method would be useful.

I've even considered writing an external table plugin for SQLite to facilitate diagnostics and reporting of a complex ad-hoc file format I designed so I could get those benefits with a custom data structure; unfortunately, doing that seems somewhat complex in SQLite.
A novelty account? Just to join the schadenfreude pile-on? How cowardly.
wow, this awesome!!! Thanks!!!
Now hiring in tech? Pony up the perks
Google gets into the CDN business
So don't tell the story in the first place IMO. Go all and prevent these guys from doing wrong by the next developer and all the community to decide on a COA re: company's actions or...don't. We all know that we can get screwed for doing business.
ha ha ha, good luck with that.

remember when the US tried to do something similar with the Clipper chip in the 90s? good times.
I worked on an Android app for about 2 months together with some experienced Android developers. Most things, like displaying dialogs, storing things to the Db, etc. worked quite well and I really came to like intents. However, I completely agree with the authors criticism of the implementation of asynchronous calls. We implemented in app purchase functionality for our app and it was a huge pain. Google provides lots of documentation around this. However it's very convoluted and looking at their example IAP app makes you wonder if they had some contest going on to achieve the highest number Gang of 4 design patterns per lines of code. That massively distracted from what the example was supposed to teach you. We ended up spending around 2 weeks to get a solidly tested implementation of IAP working and get all edge cases covered. My main complaint about this is, that we weren't doing anything fancy and 99% of the code we had to write was not specific to our application. Something that just takes our vendor information and one callback for the success case and one for the error case would have totally done the job. I am sure there are hundreds of dev teams out there writing the exact same code as we did. Many of those probably are not testing their code or even just copying Google's example, without understanding what's going on. This is a huge waste of everyone's resources and will probably lead to many buggy apps.
I understand that Google wants to allow for the flexibility to cover 99.9% of all use cases. However, they could still have offered a simple library method for the 99% case and have allowed the other 1% to write their own thing. Now everyone has to write their own solution.
I hope someone will open source their IAP solution. If not, I actually might do it, since it's just crazy right now.
Alaska, actually. Where did I say that in the article?
You Have An Idea For A Startup- This Is What You Should Do First
Progeny.
Go purchase a Schaum's book - they're under $15, have tons of questions, and cover the basics. You can use Wikipedia (seriously, it's very solid) to review concepts, then work through a few question in the reader.

Example: http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-Statistics-Murray-Spie... -- $8.65
Structural Prototypes: A Framework for Statically-Typed OO+FP [PDF]
There are a hundred usability reasons why sharing text in images sucks, so here's a transcript (I've taken a couple of minor liberties for the sake of clarity):

The Computer Girls
By Lois Mandel

A trainee gets $8,000 a year . . . a girl “senior systems analyst” gets $20,000—and up! Maybe it’s time to investigate . . . .

Ann Richardson, IBM systems engineer, designs a bridge via computer. Above (left) she checks her facts with fellow systems engineer, Marvin V. Fuchs. Right, she feeds facts into the computer. Below, Ann demonstrates on a viewing screen how her facts designed the bridge, and makes changes with a “light pen.”

Twenty years ago, a girl could be a secretary, a school teacher . . . maybe a librarian, a social worker or a nurse. If she was really ambitious, she could go into the professions and compete with men . . . usually working harder and longer to earn less pay for the same job.

Now have come the big, dazzling computers—and a whole new kind of work for women: programming. Telling the miracle machines what to do and how to do it. Anything from predicting the weather to sending out billing notices from the local department store.

And if it doesn’t sound like woman’s work—well, it just is.

(“I had this idea I’d be standing at a big machine and pressing buttons all day long,” says a girl who programs for a Los Angeles bank. “I couldn’t have been further off the track. I figure out how the computer can solve a problem, and then instruct the machine to do it.”

“It’s just like planning a dinner,” explains Dr. Grace Hopper, now a staff scientist in systems programming for Univac. (She helped develop the first electronic digital computer, the Eniac, in 1946.) “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.”

What she’s talking about is apititude—the one most important quality a girl needs to become a programmer. She also needs a keen, logical mind. And if that zeroes out the old Billie Burke-Gracie Allen image of femininity, it’s about time, because this is the age of the Computer Girls. There are twenty thousand of them in the United (cont. on page 54)
Wouldn't say it sucks, but it comes with the territory when working for a big multi-national organization.
That means no HTTPS, no online banking, no secure communication.

I say that law has zero chance of surviving, or if it goes through it will be shut down within a month until some high profile politician's private emails get leaked.
My current employer said that they did not like to even offer interviews to anyone who was currently unemployed because there was probably a reason for it and they didn't want people that couldn't keep a job.
Eminem, is that you?
Thanks for the information. I try not to post anything that is meaningless. In that comment, I had asked a genuine question after the word "LOL". that LOL was there because I found the prior comment funny. I will take care from now. Thanks once again!
Previous stories on why unemployment is so much higher this time around focus on the types of jobs that were lost: secretaries, planners, and other logistical middlemen who kept their jobs even after computer programs were advanced enough to do their work. When the economy tanked, these well-liked employees were the logical ones to be cut when a company's bottom-line was concerned.

Unfortunately, it's these kinds of occupations that likely have the least opportunity for freelance gigs.
Study: Dumb People Use Internet Explorer
Is the AirBnB situation a gift?