skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As rightly pointed out by Mr. Hazare this is only half the battle won.

Part of the second battle should be simplifying the bureaucracy - paperwork, transparency, easily interpretable procedures that are available for general public and infrastructure to monitor the efficiency of the bureaucracy - how many cases people brought, what was the resolution time, why was it not resolved etc.

Because the above are the main reasons general public becomes willing to be participate in corruption - the arcane, unclear, irrelevant processes that lead to confusion which the bureaucracy uses for their benefit. If they attack that issue and make the bureaucracy responsible and accountable that will go long way in reducing corruption and making the general public happier.

That's the harder part though. Without it people will continue to suffer.
What do you think is criminal about it?
Effects of Malicious URL
1) Network works well in metro for me mostly, though it's a valid point that it might suffer here and there. But metros is just a smal fraction of the possabiities we - and retailers we talked with - see.

2) It won't be 20 apps, becuase there are only a few companies in the world that has sophisticated algorithms enough - many algorithms you can read about on the web are not realiable enough. So far no one has done a consumer product but hundreds of QR-based apps, I would say that this say a bit how hard it is. Anyone can craete a QR app based on some open-source libs.

3) Well, our demos show something else - ~1-2 seconds.

4) Flash. And scenario for scanning stuff in night dark is...not really a descent secenario anyway if it's that dark people have hard to see.

5) That's an assumption based on today's reality, because no viable succeedors are available yet that do more valuable things. Yet I haven't heard of anyone using QR codes more than once or twice for fun even though it been "hot" since for half a decade or more.
Advisory: Range header DoS vulnerability Apache HTTPD 1.3/2.x (CVE-2011-3192)
For those who wanna know "Who is anna hazare?" https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Anna_Hazare
The Physics of Hurricanes
Flagged for exactly this reason. He clearly wants privacy surrounding his health. Let's honor that here, at least.
Steve, thanks for personal technology so good it's ruining my life: http://www.addictionandsubtraction.com/30-day-smartphone-fas...

And yes, I'm being somewhat facetious.
Google tries to reassure TV industry it's no ogre
It's amazing to me how so many people outside Apple think Jony Ive could be a credible candidate for CEO, when no one inside Apple would believe that for a second. The only product-focused executive who would even have had a chance is Scott Forstall.

To the naive observer, Apple seems like a hardware company. But it is really a software company monetized through hardware sales, just as Google is a software company monetized through advertising. As Steve himself said, differentiation through software is the key to all of Apple's products. Ive doesn't have much experience, credibility or interest in this area.

On the other hand, Scott Forstall is the most powerful and credible software executive at Apple. More specifically: the Human Interface team that does all the HI design for iOS and Mac OS X reports to Forstall, not Ive. Ive isn't even one of the executives present at executive HI reviews, whereas Forstall is the one driving the decisions when SJ is not there. The HI team may get less outside visibility than Industrial Design but they make a much bigger difference to the experience of Apple products.

Furthermore, it's clear from watching company politics that Forstall has the ambition to go to the top (as does Phil Schiller), and Ive just doesn't have that kind of drive. Ive has the trust and affection of Steve for being an artist, and that's the main reason he is on the executive team. He hasn't had to fight for it like the other execs. Note for example that Eddy Cue (iTunes, iCloud) and Craig Federighi (Mac OS X) still aren't on the executive team, despite heading critical product lines and much bigger departments than ID.
as an iPhone to Android refugee, I'd add that android users are driven more by function rather than magic, and that probably affects the value they place on apps.
All good points here - I would only add one thing: when I did my first startup right out of college, we were constantly worried about what our "local" competitors were doing - meaning companies targeting the same market and about the same size. What we ignored, and hurt us, was the larger company entering the space. Moral of the story: focus on your start-up vs. looking at local competitors, but keep an eye on larger companies that have the potential to come into the space.
Ask HN:  Offer for talent acquisition.  Need advice.
Hello Hackers,

I'm a relative newbie to programming and the startup world. In early 2010 I launched my first product which also happens to be my first large scale programming project (I dont have a CS background). The product is a niche tool within the larger enterprise data management space. Recently a prospect has been in talks with me to basically acquire me for talent. They are actually not very interested in the IP, rather they like my experience around bigData.

This is essentially a solo operation with 0 investors. I have developed some partnerships to help me sell the product and I have a few customers (small deals) and a couple more in the pipeline.

My main motivation to even consider this opportunity is because the position they are offering me will allow me to experiment with bigger ideas in the same space (bigData) and work with more seasoned programmers. It also allows me to gracefully exit the niche category I was toiling in..

I'm torn between working within a larger organisation to try out my ideas or simply pivoting my startup into developing the larger ideas I have. I know that I may be a bit thin on information and thats because we are in the early phase of negotiating a deal. I'll try to answer your questions as much as I can.

So what do you guys think? Considering my background etc which way would you go?
This topic is going to be a fairly polarizing.

NYT perspective -
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/world/asia/28india.html?_r...

The fantastic part was the peaceful way in which the campaign ran. No violence, rioting, etc took place. Peaceful protests.
> Incompetence is a bigger problem than corruption in India. The systemic problems that face the society need ambition, will and technology.

This is the elephant in the room when it comes to India. There is just a huge amount of apathy amongst the people. A simple example is how much produce rots to waste as a result of poor transportation/refrigeration. There are so many processes crying out to be optimized.

As a US-born NRI, there are so many things that I find appalling that my family in India doesn't even notice. It's like they've been desensitized to all of these issues over the years to the point where they're not even really considered problems.

A lot of people believe the difference between India and China is that China's autocratic government allows them to modernize and improve their country much faster, but the truth is that democracy can be compatible with rapid modernization if the people are willing to work together. Even in China, the government is ruled by a large number of people - no one would say that Hu Jintao has a level of power even close to that of a dictator. The real difference is that the Chinese government has labored long and hard to improve living conditions for hundreds of millions of its citizens (though it has also brutally mistreated several million of them) while the Indian government has been sitting around twiddling its fingers.
Samsung's also been developing Enlightenment (previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495826 ).
I agree that randomness might be a bit better here, or if you could do something like randomize destination (idk didn't sign up).

That way you can send flowers to the significant someone at home one month, the office the next, or something like that.

If you randomized the date of delivery you could do something like a small thing of flowers one week but 5 weeks later a slightly larger arrangement. Along the lines of something I'm thinking of: xkcd/576 and the associated implementation that was posted on hacker news. It doesn't buy something everyday, but sometimes saves up.

But that's complicated! And you have an MVP which is exactly that, minimum. I like it a lot; I'm just not quite in the $49/month club for flowers yet.
Facebook Desktop Chat App Released For Blackberry
Hey man, try to pitch that to H&M or Armani. xD
Reposting a story form 02/2010? Why?
Water has a very complicated phase diagram. I'm not sure how high a pressure water at a core of a planetoid of that size would be, but if it's above 100GPa then it would certainly be solid (Ice X or XI). Below that pressure, it would depend on the temperature.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Phase_dia...
It could be, "When Java idioms wear you out".

Idioms, of course, vary by language, and I think Java's tend toward the excessively architected. Architecture is a fine thing at scale, but Java doesn't seem to understand that you don't want six tanks and an aircraft carrier when you're heading to the store for milk.
Understanding Quadratic Bézier Curves
IF the act is going to be the same/similar to what is mentioned here - http://www.annahazare.org/pdf/Jan%20lokpal%20bill%20by%20Exp... then I will be very disappointed.

Creating an extra-body which itself can act as the police and be outside of the parliament and be a concentration of power not elected by the democratic process would be the wrong way to go I feel.

I feel the people have good intention behind coming up with this act, but that alone doesn't mean that this law is the right thing to do. We are trying to solve the symptom and not the disease. Corruption is just the symptom created by the way our society and culture functions, we will have to fix the root cause to fix corruption. I don't think increasing punitive measures is going to curb corruption in the big scale. Corruption as a whole is weaved into our social fabric. We would need a lot more than just a law to remove it.
Even if the lokpal bill comes and goes, the impact has already gone far beyond the concept of an ombudsman.

For the first time in my memory, the urban middle class of India have been represented - as opposed to factions based on religion, caste, race and language. A new platform has been given due recognition - that of the growing, tax-paying, facebook-ing urban demographic which has never been able to dissolve its own lines of religion, caste, race and language.

This is a huge achievement in a country in which nearly every state is governed by a political party which is strictly local and more often than not ethnically and linguistically native. I am extremely optimistic that the next general elections (for the country's Prime Minister) will have corruption, infrastructure and education as some of the platforms rather than being right-wing, left-wing or secular.

I for one (as are many in India) am fearful about the lokpal - primarily because the actual people behind the Anna Hazaare campaign are "professional" non-profit organizations. I would much rather have e-governance as well as absolute and complete transparency on government functioning (for example, Estonia ??)
Have you read Lokpal bill?

First, the Lokpal deals only with the Judiciary part of the constitution while both Legislature and Executive parts will be untouched. So it's not an alternative constitution. Even within Judiciary it deals only with officials 'who are facing corruption charges'. In fact Lokpal will be weaker than an income tax officer. A corrupt Lokpal can be removed within two months by the parliament!

Second, no one is questioning the electorate system. But when it comes to an effective anti-corruption law, just saying "vote the right person in the next election" won't cut it in a country rifed with illiteracy, poverty and communism. We should be pragmatic instead of just sticking to textbook definition of democracy.

Third, Gandhian is not someone who behaves exactly like Gandhi. Anyone inspired by Gandhi's principles is a Gandhian. Nehru was called Gandhian even though he declared wars.
We just bought a house, in a peripheral part of a big urban market. Here is why:

The house was 3x our annual income (well, 2.5).

We can probably rent it for our mortgage. (This for me is the most important thing -- basically we bought the rental we would have lived in).

My job is moderately safe.

We don't expect to sell for 5 years (which is the conventional wisdom unless you are a professional and know what you are doing).

I hated our last four landlords.

We have to live somewhere.

No kids, so no worries about kid like things except in terms of n-hood value.
People with children should ignore your advice.

People with children in any state of the United States that does not yet have public school open enrollment might consider asking their legislators to enact public school open enrollment, which works well in Minnesota, Iowa, and perhaps other states. Public school open enrollment, which has been going on in Minnesota for more than twenty years, gradually encourages public school districts (which are usually local oligopolies who don't have to listen to clients very much) to compete on the basis of quality and flexibility of their programs to gain student enrollment. Public school open enrollment also decouples decisions about where to live from decisions about where to enroll children in school, which is good public policy on several grounds.

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_...

After edit: In relation to comments in other subthreads here, about the cost of paying a mortgage versus the cost of paying rent, the odd thing about the bubble economy in this town is that mortgage payments got to be MUCH higher, even at low interest rates, than prevailing rents for the same or very similar properties. It has been financially advantageous for a long while in this market to rent rather than buy, and perhaps still is for several years to come. The whole issue is fraught with public policy implications and sometimes very difficult economic assumptions.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/05/11/hous...

http://www.twincitiesrealestateblog.com/

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2010-08-11-hou...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/22/...

http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2011/2011-03...

http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2011/2011-06...
I think Eclipse is still on 3.3 or something in the main repo! The whole java thing's a bit of a mess from a 'casual user' perspective. Some packages won't work without the sun-java6 ones. Some appear to be optimised for it. There's at least one that I know of (but can't remember the name of at the mo - it's an IDE though) that refuses to install without them!

My naïve self would have thought to try and reduce the reliance on java, but of course the cost (of any type) would outweigh any potential benefit.
A corrupt Lokpal can be removed within two months by the parliament.
You are assuming that every part of the cube has the same density. Perhaps the density increases as you get to the corners.
Well said. It's better to leave things unsaid and let the reader make the logical conclusions. More salient that way.
There will be corruption as long as there are people who want to make a quick buck without working hard. We can only try to reduce and discourage it.

The problem in India is lack of development and education and poverty. As long as these issues are not addressed we will never touch the root of the problem, and will be just trying to treat the symptoms.
Ask HN: What's your favorite UI Mockup tool?
1. Raise Money
2. Recruit Talent
Inflation plays a huge role with regard to timing and compared to the average mortgage rates of other owners/landlords. If you start a 4% fixed rate mortgage today and do not move anywhere in 10 years, you don't have to cover the cost of credit for whatever the interest rate at that time is (probably higher) because you don't have to reset/move.
Well he has been "designing" right along side Steve and John for the past 13 years right? While he might be "just" an ops guy, I'd argue that as much (or more) of Apple's design brilliance comes from the willingness to embrace and invent new industrial processes rather than the radius of a curve on a design. The candy colored iMacs required inventive injection molding at the time. The Cube, Unibody Macbooks, the Air, iPad battery life, etc. As nice as the ID is, it is the willingness to invest in and incorporate new processes that makes Apple's design special.

Given that we know almost nothing about the guy except that Steve picked him as his replacement, I'd say he'll do ok:)
The Future of Flex
I haven't had a landline since 2007. Mobile phone, Internet and Skype more than meets all of my requirements.
Don't be a neeedle in a haystack
What do you think?
If the acquisition offer is enough money to matter, then take it. You wont be at the acquirer for the rest of your life, you will get a lump of money plus a steady salary while you are there, and you will learn a lot about other potential problems to solve in your space. In 2-3 years, go after your other idea with a financial cushion in the bank, a successful acquisition under your belt, and some industry tenure to make your next move better.
God Particle Fails to Show Up, Stephen Hawking May Have Won His Bet
"6. Linux makes older hardware sizzle."

No it doesn't. It might seem so because Windows "gets dirty" with time if not properly maintened (running a defragmentation, removing unused programs and residents, deleting temporary files, ... : things most people don't know/care about). So to linux credit this should be "Linux does not get as dirty as windows".

Even so-branded "minimalist" distribution make things like a pentium III seem slow as hell. X itself is simply slow. On a netbook purchased in 2009, the difference between running Win XP and running X is actually visible (greater delays when switching windows for instance).

"8. Ubuntu is totally non-geek friendly"

> When you have used for a week you might say so. But changing even minor things to one's liking quickly becomes a pain in the ass and degenerates into wizard level hackery. On other OSes you can often rely on installing a freeware and for it to work out of the box. But the 100's of ways to do the same thing on linux + packaging issues and dependency soup makes it hell there.

"10. Security is a nice warm fluffy penguin feeling"

> Greetings from myth planet ! There's no reason things are inherently more secure on linux than on Windows, for instance. For both, the major problem is security breaches in applications.
This criticism was first raised by Motl, and is dismissed by Koelman here: http://www.science20.com/comments/47263/Re_It_Bit_Whole_Sheb...
Chrome's updates have been nothing like KDE4 or Unity or Gnome3.

Also, people have also revolted against and deserted versions of Web Apps like Digg v4, so it's the experience that matters, not just change in general. There should be no need to foist updated versions of other apps just to get a version of another app.
Isn't that some sort of forced sale/racket? "call long distance or else" does not sound like good business.
Since when is a Blackberry thought of as a Desktop?
I don't think so. The user interface still looks like a dog's breakfast. When was the last time you used Linux without opening a terminal session? Installing new software can be incredibly tedious and error-prone. Drivers may not work or be installed and need to be hunted down (the author raves about how everything just worked out of the box, except of course that HP printer driver, which he had to find - not easy - and install). Windows 7 and MacOS X are ready for prime time. Linux is still an OS for hackers.
According to the Lokpal bill 'incompetence is equal to corruption'. Any failure of executing a promised act can be brought to the courts.
Your landing page is a lot better. I had opened both sites in tabs and forgot about it. Then randomly bumped into the app.net tab, was wondering what it was and remembered "Ah, HN". So I switched to the next tab and there it was: "Create an App Showcase Site in Seconds".

Nice!
Agreed. Last halloween, I dressed up in full drag as my costume and had a great time, until someone assaulted me for it in the washroom at the end of the night. He fractured my skull in 2 places, and it looked pretty bad, but in the end I was fine. It really just made me sad that that sort of hatred and judgement still exists in our place and time. My business partner is homosexual and because of his family's religious views didn't come out until he was 30. Having to hide who he was in order to be "accepted" is tragic, and really messes a person up emotionally. And others who carry such blind hatred around, it saddens me that I can heal in a week or two, but they're just broken human beings who may never get over that. One can only hope something happens to help them change...
It's a complicated problem - you're right in pointing out that part of it is education and poverty / lack of opportunities for every class of people. But again the bureaucracy is part of the problem - Government's schemes, aid doesn't reach the poor etc.

In that sense making the bureaucracy accountable, transparent is the first right step to resolve the other problems.
The bet was that the LHC would 'never' find the flying spaghetti monster particle, so while the LHC is still operational, he will have to wait to collect.
When I used to volunteer for Black Hat, we had one guy from Aruba and he helped set up the wireless access points around the conference, the same access points are also used at DefCon [1]. They are able to provide a lot of insight into the radio signals, where people are, where the most activity is, where there are blind spots and all that fun stuff.

Their gear is small, lightweight and from what I have heard from other people using it, absolutely fantastic to manage.

[1]: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/08/a-first-ever-lo/
Right, see also:

"Graesser, Person, and Magliano (1995) found that during one-on-one tutoring, when asking students "do you understand?", answering yes was not correlated with performance, while answering no was positively correlated with better performance."
[Graesser, A. C., Person, N. K., & Magliano, J. P. (1995). Collaborative dialogue patterns in naturalistic one-on-one tutoring. Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 9, pp495-522.]

"twelfth grade science students all viewed the same physics demonstration by their teacher, but they all disagreed beforehand about what they expected to happen, and afterward disagreed about what they had seen and how to explain what they saw (Roth, McRobbie, Lucas, & Boutonné, 1997).
[Roth, W.-M., McRobbie, C., Lucas, K. B., & Boutonné, S. (1997). Why do
students fail to learn from demonstrations? A social practice perspective on learning in
physics. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 34, 509-533. Retrieved from http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/45493/abstract ]

And this summary presentation by Brian Pyper:

Best Practices in Physics Demonstrations Or Oh, I thought this was just for entertainment."
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Femp.byui.edu...
That's not Ubuntus fault. I'm thinking it wouldn't be easier to fix your boot loader in Windows.
Waves of Scams and Cyber Attacks to Come With Hurricane Irene
That's the most common FUD being spread against Lokpal.
But is it going to be an all-in-one aluminium case ?

No ? Oh so it's not really apples-to-apples then.
The Indian leader Mayawati has already demanded that there should be reservation for SC/ST/OBC in Lokpal members.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Maya-seeks-reservation-for-SC-...

If this continues, I dont see JLB being any effective in rooting out corruption. It will end up being just another layer of bureocracy.

Edit:added link