skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly how many possible styles are there for a handheld LCD device with a touchscreen as its primary / only input?

Certainly more than one. Just as not every smartphone has to look like an iPhone, not every tablet has to look like an iPad. Even something as simple as rounding the corners differently[1][2] seems to have eluded or been intentionally ignored by the Galaxy Tab's designers. Just as there are limits on practical designs, there are limits of those limits, and we benefit when companies push those limits in a way that Samsung (it is argued) is not presently doing with the Tab.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samsung_Omnia_7.jpg

[2]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_Phone_Marketplace.... (a Samsung Focus)
That's been there for a while - I'd prefer if they would silently update the browser in the background and active it on the next restart, just as Chrome does.

I hate being told that Firefox 5.0 or 6.0 is out, only to find out that there are barely any major changes in this seemingly major version. If you want to release more often and make it a more seemless process, the app should stop announcing each new version like a major release.
I absolutely love Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders and have listened to every one of them, many two or three times.

The two podcasts that have really spoken to me are both on negotiations. "Secret to Successful Negotiations" and "The Art of Negotiation".
Holy shit the code is clean. Good job dude. I'm impressed by your .SCSS too. Good quality dev right here.
Did I miss something? Microsoft is not a small competitor in this field: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/who-is-win...

Yes, Android is rocking it, and so is iOS.. but 10% of the mobile smartphone market is nothing to sneeze at. And those are old numbers.
AWS launches GovCloud, A secure region for Government Agencies/Contractors
Rails 3 Asset Pipeline & Google Closure
Thanks! I've been happy with how simple vows-bdd has made construction of my integration tests.

One big benefit of expresso are its helpers. While it's not difficult to supplement Vows with similar functions, Vows still doesn't have a built-in approach for pre-test bootstrapping.
Why not Samsung... Didn't Apotheker say something to the effect that they had already discussed it with them?
An additional wrinkle is that oftentimes it can take a while to set up the mechanics of payment with a first-time client. So even if there is goodwill on both sides and a willingness to pay an initial deposit, you might not see the money until you've done quite a lot of work.

Since a lot of contract work is time-sensitive, waiting for payment to clear before starting work or handing over an initial milestone might not be an option. There's a tension between the desire to make a good impression on a first-time client and the desire to make sure they're not taking you for a ride.

Fortunately there are often warning signs when a client is going to be particularly difficult, and there are far more decent clients than unsavory ones.
Love BugHerd. Been using it for my company now, love the fact that I can POINT and tell what my developers should work on.

Good luck!
Expanding the Cloud - The AWS GovCloud (US) Region
My current job is similar to this, which I am glad because it shows that they trust the developers to get their shit done.

Now, it is easy to abuse, but everyone knows who is abusing it because the results of that person are not much. When not being in the office, it compounds that impression even more because others are working hard and notice when Bob is not around for a whole week and comes back with no commits.

I have also found out that I am more productive when working from home and in the very early morning (3am - 8am). Combining the two increases my productivity even more.
I'd be way more interested in those statistics over time? A degree has mostly always meant more money/better job eligibility, but is that now a smaller gap compared to years past.
"Supercomputers, the fastest of the fast, run Linux almost exclusively."

And it's so disappointing. Consider the Blue Gene series. Great new architecture, custom networks, custom hardware. Initially, they put Linux on the I/O nodes and a custom kernel on the compute nodes, because you want a minimum of OS noise (see the FTQ benchmark for more info on this). But everyone clamored for Linux on compute nodes--so now we boot this enormous Linux kernel on each compute node. Plan 9 was ported (I did some of it), but nobody wanted it because it wasn't Linux.

I'm of the opinion that no group in the world is as set-in-their-ways and reactionary as the supercomputing application developers. If it can't run Linux and Fortran 77, they don't want it.
What do people search services know about you?
India against corruption: A million mutinies erupt across India
Nice trick using a proxied netcat command to forward ssh connections through a server. Was not aware of that, and I spend a lot of time running through a front ssh server, thanks!
While I concur that not watching TV is a decent solution, please don't insult the population. Is mainstream content dumbed down? Certainly. Should people find a way to entertain themselves without passive consumption? Absolutely. But let's not get on a high horse.
I've been using httpbin.org for a week or so now - really like it
The Venture Capitalists are Coming
It boils down to judgement of character. The standard fare of working 9-to-5 is open to abuse as well if HN or the like is not blocked.
I think he is rather downplaying the problem, horse or no horse.
Apple may have manipulated images
http://www.slashgear.com/euro-galaxy-tab-10-1-injunction-diluted-only-german-sales-blocked-16172101/
We have some people who leave early and say they will work from home later in the evening. They get their stuff done on schedule, so there are no complaints or suspicious looks.

If they are getting their stuff done, why does it matter how many hours they worked? If their stuff is too easy and they are finishing tasks quickly, a good lead engineer/manager will give them more work to keep the team in balance.
The Reddit Incident
If the deadbeat client was using his work, he had recourse. It might take forever to chase his money down, but it's much easier to shut a site down.

By releasing the code under a permissive license, he gave up that recourse. His client's right to use the code is now a grey area. Technically, he has the same recourse in court as he did before; contracts. But he's severed the connection between that and the deployment of his code.

I'm not expressing nerdly outrage at how he did it. I'm simply suggesting a tactical refinement for the next person who decides to dump dox to Github when a client doesn't pay.
Forty London startups pitch for investment in gruelling demo day
Morning Radar: HasOffers to double staff; Mega Startup Weekend; Swype; and more
Entity theory dictates a separation of business and owner (or person, to be less specific) so as to protect one entity from the actions of the other.

Personally getting pissed off for someone for being a dick? That's fine. Using the business to basically get revenge on them for being a dick? Not fine. You're not there to punish customers for being pissed off.

Guys aren't gonna get very far if they have a paddy with every irate customer that comes along. And everyone who's been in a customer-facing job knows they far outnumber the pleasant folk.

And you know what? I bet the dispute wouldn't even have occurred if the CS rep just said something like 'sorry, we cannot discuss the details of other clients' accounts'.
I can only echo the first comment. Sales people certainly don't deserve any respect if they are emailing people out of the blue all of the time.

In the article itself, it mentions that a "no I'm not interested" reply will just lead to them following up with a host of benefits - so why would I bother replying in the first place? If I were to say I'm not interested, I would mean it.
This is a great thing to keep in mind before any of you think of writing an outraged blog post when a client doesn't honor Net+30 on your first invoice cycle. Clients usually don't.
A lot of people would like to live on Mars, given the chance. Meanwhile, people are growing richer and technology is advancing. It's fairly likely that at some point there will be a point where people can pay their own way to creating a Martian colony.
Indeed, it actually sounds like what police work should be in the first place.

Road gets burgled ever week at the same time.

Perhaps we should stake it out?

Revolutionary, the police discover common sense!
The point, though, is that I want it on (and working) because it's fast. hg is responsible for the majority of my ssh connections.
Never mind that this specific example isn't that practical (assuming you're not one of those people who has their TV on in the background all the time), it is a nice example of arduino-ing your TV…

IIRC, close captioning isn't transmitted in this manner with systems other than NTSC (PAL -> Teletext?).
OS X Lion v10.7.1 is out
Europe's hottest startup capitals: Tel Aviv
Yep - Chrome is where I got the idea from. It's a great feature I wanted to see made system wide. Looking forward to everyone's feedback.
Server-less javascript maps using HTML5 canvas
I prefer iOS myself, but there are reasons other than Google's sponsorship at work here. Apple is dead set against allowing user-created or downloaded code to run (other than JavaScript). That means that tools like AppInventor just aren't as practical for iOS (sure, every student could fork over $99 to become a developer, but...). In fact, Apple pulled the Scratch port from the App Store some time ago (Scratch is a similar visual programming language, also from MIT). I understand Apple's reasons for exercising tight control over distribution, and even agree with them to a large degree. It would be nice, though, if you were at least allowed to download code to your own phone without being a registered developer. That would definitely make iOS more student-friendly.

What I'd really like to see is the ability to distribute apps to a limited number of devices (similar to the current ad hoc provisioning), so students could play around with networked apps. Apple could still require a registered dev account before allowing stuff in the App Store for distribution to the general public.
Its easy to see this as a personal issue - I am tired of spam, I don't want to be bothered by salespeople.

But the article is a suggestion for a corporate response. The issues change. A responsible relationship with potential business partners becomes more important than satisfying personal whims about what is spam and what amounts to too many sales attempts.
Is it, really? According to GitHub's commit history, there were 297 commits made since onnv_147, so ~1 commit/day. Prior to the fork, OpenSolaris was getting ~10 commits/day.

To put this into perspective, there were over 8000 commits made to OpenBSD in the same time-frame. I won't even try to compare this with FreeBSD or Linux...

Don't get me wrong, I love the effort, but at the same time I feel like there wasn't any real progress made since the project's inception.
UBUNTU GMAIL NOTIFIER GMAILWATCHER
An incentive is a device to motivate employees. This is not what they are trying to do. They did not start with the problem, "How can we motivate our employees?"

Incentive to work better is not the only motivation that an employer may have to share money with an employee. Generosity is another motivation, for example.

Only Jason knows his true motivations, but if he says it's not an incentive, there is nothing inconsistent or logically wrong with that.
Call me shallow or insensitive, but _why's "poignant guide to Ruby" never did much for me. It was certainly whimsical I suppose.
You don't see the entropy I've described? What, exactly, is "insulting" about the observation?

I didn't grow up around much money. We weren't poor, because my mom worked her ass off. But most people around me were.

They reproduce endlessly, these poor, because poverty, religion and ignorance of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers. Financial literacy isn't taught in schools – schools, which, thanks to all this reproduction, are packed to the gills with students who don't focus all that well because they have miserable home lives. They don't learn how to learn.

They grow up, work way more jobs than any human being should have to bear at once, entirely robbed of the time needed to broaden their mind and their skills. And this is if they're lucky, and didn't get sucked into gang violence or drug abuse.

In aggregate? The population gets dumber because what other outcome can there be from this reality? This is nothing to do with being on a high horse. This is observing that most TV is shit because so much of the population that exists to consume it hasn't had the opportunities to desire anything better.
I think you're missing the point here. He isn't actually suggesting this is the best possible solution to the problem. He's just showing off a cool hack and giving it a little backstory for fun.
It's reflected in (my reading of) Microsoft's statement.

Sales figures are retrospective; this section of their 10-K is forward looking.

Also, if you define the market to include smartphones and tablets, I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't have 85% market share. The open question is whether that broader definition represents the future of "the computer market" or whether it should remain a separate category.

Of course, you're welcome to your own interpretation - lots of people read it very differently than I did.
From the post:

So, when asked why their friends account was suspended we
told them “Our terms are very clear. Your friend should
not have opened a fraudulent dispute.” We then sent a DM
to the individual who asked, saying the following: “Please
mind your own business. Your friends account, and PayPal
dispute has nothing to do with you.” Of course, as a hosting
provider we cannot discuss the details of another
account and its status with others. *Because of this
message, we were informed that they would be canceling
their accounts due to our “unprofessional-ism”.*

That would be this tweet: https://twitter.com/#!/berfarah/status/103287153043316737

After much continued pushing from these users, we then
responded (rather sarcastically I might add) with the
following: “Fantastic. Perhaps you can sign up with a
hosting provider who doesn’t take privacy seriously then. Enjoy.”

https://twitter.com/#!/berfarah/status/103288360088514560

https://twitter.com/#!/berfarah/status/103289173687013376

So, cue more pushing and baiting on Twitter and we then
come to the conclusion that this situation is obviously
some attempt for these users to attack us for reasons
unknown, and we decide to end our business relationship with them.

"Go fuck yourself." https://twitter.com/#!/berfarah/status/103291760972795904

So This*'s account of the story doesn't explain at all why both accounts were suspended, which is what triggered berfarah's outrage (and "Go fuck yourself" comment): https://twitter.com/#!/berfarah/status/103290311161290752
You tell me: http://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/samsung_...
Democracy Now Interview with Member of Anonymous On BART Censorship
Yes, it is. http://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/samsung_...
Here is an article with a bit more background http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2011/0816/...
Indeed, I found this true in rural South Africa.
Almost everyone carried a "dumb" phone since obviously, cell access is vastly desirable over landline in those sorts of areas.
Additionally, it would often behoove local groups to team up and get a small solar generator. Both for the savings (even a small panel could provide much of their daily energy use) as well as for increased self-reliance from the "grid" (or, more like the "wire", if there was one).
Steven Degutis is apparently unaware of Clozure Common Lisp which makes Mac development easier and more fun. Or Embedded Common Lisp which makes iOS development easier and more fun.

Neither CCL nor ECL seem any deader than usual :-)
I thought the article was a little low on content; found this one somewhat better written and more informative: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/37877/?a=f

Will probably be visiting Kenya shortly, so I'm definitely going to have a look at how 'mobile' is being used over there!
Amazon announces AWS GovCloud for U.S. government agencies
They tried to make their cookies undeletable. Why would they do something like that? The fuss is that it's a bad, dishonest, skeezy thing to do. Kissmetrics has shown that they are not an honest company, they're a dishonest one that will disregard the privacy concerns of their user's visitors.
Never mind that "passive" is a rather vague term here and that we're posting this on a news aggregator site. There's certainly no destrier in the room.
Just don't post shortened links on HN. It's nice that you want click analytics for your post, but nobody wants that but you.

Here's where that bit.ly link heads to: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/official-kissmetrics-response-to...
I wouldn't rely on a $3/month web host for my one and only copy, that's my point.
c.f. My entire childhood.
Horsemaning A Forced Meme? A day in the life of Meme Research
In the original Reddit post, the client explicitly said that he was not provided access to full backups, and the backups he was provided access to were database only and damaged. The company's Twitter account also posted these tweets when asked about their incorrect WhoIs information

http://twitter.com/#!/thiswebhost/statuses/10354110805063270... http://twitter.com/#!/thiswebhost/statuses/10354195936432947...

That is, whatever way you look at it, unprofessional and inappropriate. This company is clearly run by ether a 15 year old in his bedroom or someone who really shouldn't be in business, or both
This is not news. Evercookie has been doing this for years, and it's just as easy to defeat as it was years ago.

http://samy.pl/evercookie/
Dash takes shape for 11.10 Unity
بيير دي فيرما
A classic optical illusion brought to life
> That's true, but imagine your employees started working only as many hours as they felt they were being paid for.

Why would that be a problem, as long as what they feel they're being paid for matches their actual productive output?

> If the employee feels underpaid, they should renegotiate or, failing that, leave.

The situation you talk about does not necessarily mean they're underpaid. If they do the job they're paid for in half a week, why could they not have all their afternoons with their children, or working at the gym, or going to the beach? Or have 4.5 days weekends? Working 60, 70 or 80 hours a week is not a goal in and of itself, and money is not necessarily the main sticking point and the only valuable result of a job, and if you feel they don't work enough you should renegotiate.
And remember that all water must be treated. So the real question is, why is sewage different than all of the other contaminants that get in fresh water?
Flash mob robs 7-11 in less than 60 seconds
S&P Downgrades Planet Earth and Humanity
Terraforming Venus you'd need to figure out how to make a planet rotate 1000km/hr faster. Terraforming Mars you'd need to add mass equal to another planet at least the same size.
thanks for the background story, Guelo.

People's protests all over the country should send a clear signal to the government. Corruption/bribery even in obtaining basis services has been a pest for way too long.. It's time for it to stop now.

Social media has played a nice role by allowing protesters to share news and coordinate.
Pierre de Fermat
Pierre de Fermat ,
Pierre de Fermat ,
Pierre de Fermat ,
Pierre de Fermat , http://www.psdmate.com/2011/08/16/pierre-de-fermat/
We've turned away work from clients who can't deal with our requirement to get at least a token retainer up front. It becomes easier and easier to say no to these clients (even during lean times). After having done this for years, you think back to all the times when something goes wrong on the project and the client uses your invoice as leverage to do something stupid. Having a retainer means that payment of your invoices is not optional for them.
Net net, entrance to exit inclusive, _why has been a win for the Ruby community; an asset, even in his absence.

Respectfully, and notably like myself, I can't see comparable contributions from Steve Abatangle. I looked. Maybe I missed them; if so, I'm sorry.

If I didn't, though, let me suggest that you be more cautious about attributing "hissy fits" to people who clearly bent over backwards to help other people, just because they removed their own web pages without warning you first.
I don't know if Vienna is the same, but when I was in Italy and Spain, I had to explicitly ask for tap water. If I just asked for water, they would bring me bottled water of some kind.
If you hire someone, you are paying them to make you money, not necessarily to give full effort. If that employee is netting you a loss (don't forget opportunity cost) whether from incompetence and/or incompatibility, you let them go. Otherwise, you keep them. You can only incentivize them to be more productive if they're not putting forth "full effort", and in my experience, it requires a balanced laxness/strictness of scheduling, among other factors, such as bonuses, raises, interesting work, etc. But since you already accounted for opportunity cost in your hiring considerations, you've already made the best hire you could. The fact that an employee puts forth 20% effort shouldn't be a source of frustration; your only real consideration should be your next profit-maximizing move.
The problem isn't just contagion theory: it's percentages.

We know that the treatment process doesn't remove everything (witness the taste of tap water in various cities).

Purification rates are generally stated as percentages, suggesting that the dirtier the input, the dirtier the output (GIGO)

Searching for "waste water treatment effectiveness" yields interesting articles about failures - for instance: http://www.cabq.gov/progress/public-infrastructure/dcc-18/in... which indicates that upstream failures treating the waste water increase health risks and treatment costs of water users downstream - why should it matter without the GIGO principle above?

How sure are you that the treatment systems remove 100% of the micro-organisms? 100% of the chemical hazards? All the time?

There's definitely room for concern, even on the purely scientific/engineering side, though advocates say that the treated waste water is the cleaner water source.
I think the public is much more accepting of desalinized ocean water than they are of reclaimed municipal water.

It would be hard to justify the expense, increased energy usage, and damage to marine life that comes with desalination. It makes sense in places like Israel and Saudi Arabia, but in California there are more economical and environmentally friendly options.
Just to add a +1, we're also totally OK with paying half upfront and half on delivery. Milestones are fine too if that's what vendors prefer, but I think 50/50 is easiest.

Once we've worked together, I'm happy to pay 100% upfront for anything < $2k. Its an easy (~free) way to improve the relationship. I recommend it to anyone who contracts out.

On the other side, we usually ask for 50% from new clients, but will let it drop if there's a good contract in place and/or we've worked together a bit. Much more concerned with getting paid than cashflow.

Agree that big companies are never going to pay upfront, it will be net 30 at best, take it or leave it. But never do anything on net 30 without a purchase order (PO). It can take a while (months, damn the invoice date) but you'll get paid eventually.