skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The world would be a better place with only one (and simple) calendar. Go ahead, propose one.

A hobby of mine is thinking up "better" ways to do things that I know will never be implemented because the current way is good enough and the barriers to change are huge. My personal favorites are a combination of a new calendar, new lat/long system, and new set of timezones.

The calendar has eight months of 28 days and four months of 35 days (so that every month has an exact number of weeks, so that a given day of the month is always the same day of the week). The first day of the year exists outside of the months (month zero, day one), and would colloquially be "new year's day." When a leap day is needed, it is added as an extra day at the end of the year (month thirteen, day one), and would colloquially be "leap day." The order of the months would be short-long-short-short-long-short-etc (so that each season has one long and two short months).

Whenever I'm in a situation where I can't keep myself engaged by reading or conversation (e.g. waiting in line with no wireless signal), I amuse myself by dreaming up crap like this.
"The American Atlas (the work under debate) divides Indiana into 345 different areas"

And the timezone file in question does not, unless I am very much mistaken. So even if we stipulate your point, which I don't, it wouldn't apply because the timezone isn't a copy of that aspect, and again, you can't copyright facts. Even if the timezone file used the same divisions, what would be protected is the Atlas' textual description of them, their textual history, whatever cute anecdotes are written up, not the fact of existence of 345 different areas in Indiana which have at some point had some sort of time zone difference.

You can take whatever facts in the world you like from whatever source, write them up in your own words, and the original author of the facts has zero copyright claim on your words. Copyright protects expressions, not facts. If you're managed to stretch your definition of copyright to the point that it says you can actually own facts, you have, by definition, in fact exceeded the domain of copyright. Nobody owns those 345 different areas of Indiana, only the words creatively used to describe them.
I have used swype to text with my non dominant hand, swaying back and forth in the subway with full accuracy. Without it I honestly feel like I don't have a keyboard installed.

I keep waiting for it to exit beta and show up in the market. This acquisition, while good for Swype, makes me feel like that is just not going to happen. I expect licenses and bundling with phones. I hope I'm wrong.
I wish more people knew this. I learned this first hand. You must watch what your lawyers are doing. Its in their interest to drum up billable hours pursuing stuff like this. It may not be at all in your business's interest to let it happen.
Pixar has a big tribute up now:

http://imgur.com/IH2nl
Remember when Steve Jobs prank-called Starbucks?
Jailbreak iPhone 4 ios 4.2 - A Reliable and Safe Method Revealed
Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker launching Airtime
Small gloves?
The first "computer" Woz made (and sold, I suppose) was the Apple I, which was actually a kit, just the motherboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I

The first computer Woz made was the Apple II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II, which had no mouse or GUI, but could do graphics, which were mostly used by games. I suppose many programs for it used a TUI, a la VisiCalc.
Steve Jobs Tribute - Here's to the crazy ones
99% of corporate executives and celebrities are underwhelming in actuality. You find yourself saying, "I could do that" or at least, "I know someone who could do his job". And you know what? Most of the time, that sense is right. The people on the top of society's heap are generally not more interesting or talented than the average HN poster-- possibly less so.

Steve Jobs is not in that category. His combination of vision, discipline, and courage is unusual.
Sadly, I've got below average sized hands. I can't even reach all the way across my Palm Pre. Even holding a iphone is just a touch uncomfortable. One of the things that's kept me off the device. You can't please everyone.
Wow. For a second there, I thought that said Skype.
... yes, actually, that sounds like they would think about.

"Median hand comfort" vs "maximum screen real estate" is probably something they at least toyed with.
Well, the story might well be completely made up, but the chances are higher that it was made up about Sony not Apple. Probably around the time of when the first Walkman was released.

Let's not forget that early Apple was modelled after Sony of the time. Also, under the context of Japanese culture the kind of attitude displayed by the 'boss' in the story is less striking or unusual.
We did appear in TC in Sept 08 but nothing on the order of the GigaOm writeup.
High-skill slaves have a strong presence in history. Romans bought Greek slaves for their literacy, and the Ottoman Empire had slaves who managed to work in substantially high-skill intellectual jobs, but were still slaves.
In some ways 'ship spinning' in eve was the iphone equivalent of dragging a screen past its boundary and watching it snap back in place.

Dragging the camera (with a mouse down, move and release) would cause it to rotate around the player's ship until some artificial 'drag' decided the spin should slow to a stop. It was one of those innocent and functionally useless UI features, that is surprisingly satisfying to preform.
Working for him in a mentor/protege context with mutual respect and trust would have been (despite the immense difficulty and enormous high expectations) a great opportunity. Working for him as just a regular VP? Not as much. Probably not worth the stress.
Correction: testifying against, not for.
The Oatmeal pays tribute to Steve Jobs
It is just too obvious that saving lives are more important than making a product prettier. However, I think the best way to less evil for this world is not always that sending your money to Africa, but rather that everybody should work hard for truth_good_beauty.

Apple makes beautiful product and provide nice educational resources to this world, Steve worked hard for this with all his life. So he is far more than "a god to consumers" to me.
Therefore, a port of the original Portal to the web would be more feasible than a port of Team Fortress 2.
The Archive Team made a mirror of the files in question:

http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-2011...
Google Standout Tag Gives Credit Where Its Due
Internal Projects - What are the good ones
He's a vegetarian for most of his life.
http://clintlaskowski.com/tag/ohio-scientific/
Corporate fund-raising up 31.2% to P210B in 7 months
Using an entity-component system for Android game development
Videos from this year's Startup Bootcamp at MIT are now online.
Check out what an amazing job they did of restoring what is, as far as I can tell, the original:

http://i.imgur.com/s2uRg.jpg
Somewhat amusingly the site is down and we’re left to guess what exactly is 3.5 inches in length ...?
"So they weren't slaves like blacks in the US south, but they could have still been slaves."

Relationships are complicated, maybe its best not to put labels on things.

In all seriousness though, regardless of what their specific status was, most societies where people are building things like pyramids tend to be pretty messed up.
Charging for things forces you to be better. That's the right kind of pressure.
How does Woz saying that Steve Jobs was incredibly kind, sync up with the statment on Jobs' Wikipedia page that Jobs stole thousands of dollars from Woz when they were both at Atari [1]?

Is there something more to this story?

[1] search for $700 on Jobs' wikipedia page
Too bad we gave up on that.
I had assumed it was some nostalgia about floppy disks. Turns out this guy just holds his phone wrong.
Most of the arguments here are that "well my thumbs can reach far past the iPhone screen".

That's not what he's arguing. I can reach the pedals of my car with the seat all the way back, too, but I'll probably plow into someone as a result.

He's arguing that it's not comfortable to do so, and I agree. Stretching my thumb across the iPhone screen (top-left / top right) is as close to uncomfortable as I'd like to be. When my thumb is over there, the phone arches forward because of the position of my index finger, almost moving the phone out of my hand. Any larger of a screen and it'll go flying.

Whether or not Apple decided on the original screen size because of this, it was a good decision to not increase the size of the screen with the 4S.
I definitely liked the personality that came through the writing. "On the other end of the scale, I think Black Swan is a terrific film, but I’d sooner pull my nails out than watch it again." - well said and a good illustration of the value of the dual scale.
Apparently I can't :(

From kickstarter guidelines (http://www.kickstarter.com/proposals/guidelines):

My project does not incorporate charity or cause funding. Examples of prohibited use include raising money for the Red Cross, funding an awareness campaign, funding a scholarship, or donating a portion of funds raised on Kickstarter to a charity or cause.
3.5" I consider too small. Even for my little 12 year old sister I plan on buying a 3.7" Motorola Defy+ soon. I wouldn't get anything less than 4" for myself, and my next device is probably going to be a 4.3" one unless the Nexus Prime is just too awesome to pass up.
Thanks a bunch, it is right on. On Monday I actually gave my notice, but there have been lots of conversation with management trying to convince me to stay. Next week I will make a final decision.
Ironically, this is something that is really bad about the iPad, while 7 inch Android tablets are much better. I recently wrote something about this, should you care: http://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/1111
Verizon wins first battle in network neutrality fight
Not to mention the minutes spent marveling after reading comments that say the article claims 3.5 inches is the perfect length
A curated channel of Steve Jobs videos
Too slow to accept.
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Hacker News Front Page Snapshot from Last Night
You can check http://www.chemdoodle.com/ under webcomponent. That might be what you are looking for.
In the best way possible, I hope you're wrong too. But that's clearly where the money is, and from this FAQ it sounds like there are some technical pains-in-the-asses with developing and supporting an app like this, which I can certainly understand:

http://beta.swype.com/android/faq/
I have found the best way to test usability and watch "real world" user flow is to put the product in the hands of someone who is not tech savvy (girlfriend, wife, mom, drunk friend, etc) and watch them interact with your app. Sometimes I may choose to give them a brief overview of what the app sets out to accomplish, other times I let them figure it out themselves. There's many ways to skin a cat but I find this to be the simplest and most effective.
Is this a twist on the No True Scotsman?

Surely Apple would have done that on purpose!
FWIW, Apple has added a movable split keyboard to the iPad in iOS 5.
Obviously there's no reason for anyone to gripe, since the status quo is serving us all so well.
The app or the hardware?
Nuance already sells a Swype like keyboard in the Market as FlexT9, bundling is not their only business model.

PS: what you describe is precisely Swype's business model.
I was refuting his anecdotal claim with mine - I meant this to illustrate the futility of using anecdotal evidence, but the words didn't convey the sentiment as well as I intended.

I fully understand there is most likely some of normal distribution of sizes, but that's a fact that the author seems to have largely ignored as well.

On an unrelated note, the site seems to be down.
server down?
The idea that he went for a walk in the grass. That's the idea you have a problem with. What the fuck dude.
Having used Swype, Flex T9, and Dragon Natural Speaking, this buyout bothers me.

And that's because while Swype really seems to get what customer support is all about, Nuance itself is still into customer support circa 1998. Email support with automated wizards. A terrible "knowledge base". Seemingly no phone support. No forums. No wiki.

It's honestly shocking how terrible and corporate focused Nuance's customer support is, given the nature of many of the customers of Dragon Naturally Speaking.

I wish the folks at Swype the best, once I started using it, I became unable to use tap tap touchscreen keyboards.

On the other hand, I do find a comment from a Verizon salesman I was speaking to interesting. And it matches my own experience. Really fast typers or texters want a physical keyboard. The problem I have with Swype is that after Swyping a sentence or two, I have to look at what is being input because salad cookies wrong easily diction mumble bad. Elephant.

I picked up Flex T9 because I got an Android tablet not supported by Swype, and Flex T9 is very good at swyping. But it is not nearly as good as Swype and it is basically impossible to talk to Nuance about the problems. And unlike Swype, there have been no updates.

So this could be a terrific marriage, especially if Siri technology trickles into Swype and Nuance pulls its head out of its butt and figures out what customer support is circa 2012.

But boy, their support website is so awful, it's hard to imagine.
Not to diminish the genius of Woz, but it should be pointed out that in a design book (I think it was The Design of Everyday Things) his CORE universal remote was singled out for harsh criticism because of its overly complex UI.

Based on this, there may be some truth in the idea that he lacked some UX finesse.
Open Letter to All Websites Selling Products
How to Randomly change Wallpaper picture in Mac OS X every few minutes?
I will leave some money/shares on the table quitting now, but luckily I can survive without salary for quite a while.

I think you're completely right about trying causes that inspire or move me, otherwise we can live an entire life without having the impact that we once dreamed of. It requires courage and a lot of hard work - especially for those that do while still working.
Make, Hackaday, adafruit
This was the first time I have seen the entire front page consisting of articles on one topic. The snapshot is from 11pm PDT, and it is from a site that archives the Hacker News front page.
Ask HN: Why do we praise companies who raise capital?
I've seen so many stories on here recently of company X raising $Y in capital. People are instantly blown away and think that the company is instantly valuable. Why do we praise companies who only raise money but have no clear business model or are extremely unprofitable?
Thats a interesting point bardley ... but why iPad wven iPhone would have been sufficient for checking emails and responding to them . Isn't it ?

I agree with you thought that Kindle Fire provides lot of contents items :)
I'm getting a 500 error. Could it be the HN effect? Cached:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jXZtssY...
Cloning - Human Cloning - Why So Taboo?
Delicious Surf: A Web Browser For Better Bookmarking
Partly what you say is true.

But I'd say iTunes (music store) was disruptive. It changed how the music industry operated.

The iphone changed how we 'use' phones more than it changed the 'phone industry'. In fact, on writing that, I think that captures what Apple does best, it 'disrupts' how people perceive and use a product, that may in-turn distrupt an industry, but that is a consequence, not the goal (for Apple).
Hong Kong, China
Interesting post even though I'd admit that I'm not a huge fan of "I'd watch it again". For instance, some movies are really hard (huge drama, etc.), or particularly long, or even have a huge punch at the end. These movies would have a "rewatchability" really poor.

One might also watch a very simple movie.. nothing extraordinary that you wouldn't necessarily watch again; that doesn't mean it's not a good movie to watch for the first time.

Personally, I think the best factor to "guess" if I would watch a movie would be to anonymously analyse a huge set of data and find people who like the same stuff as I do. So, he likes x,y,z (as I do) and hate a,b,c as I do, good.. we mostly like the same stuff. Now, he really enjoyed K; I'd probably also like it.
I imagine that timr thinks it is.
If anyone hasn't seen it, the documentary The Pixar Story is on Netflix Instant. It's a great documentary that features a few interviews with Steve Jobs and tells of the rise of Pixar.
A number of years ago I was fascinated by and read through every story on http://folklore.org which covers the period in time around the creation of the original Macintosh.

It appears to be down/overloaded right now, but the Internet Archive seems to have most of it cached. Start with story #1: http://web.archive.org/web/20101214055008/http://folklore.or...
"The long s survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus."

Did not know that.
Is Pinterest Competitive with Tumblr?
Cool!

http://www.jisaacstone.com/hacktivity/?hn=jisaacstone

Doesn't seem to like this one though
(Note: This is different than what Amazon does with the "People who bought this item also bought these items".)
Don't forget, there are many reasons why American businesses are so successful. Most of those reasons have nothing to do with government intervention or bully politics. You may disagree, but there's a very strong argument that movies and music of the quality that comes out of America would be impossible without such strong global copyright enforcement. Every time you consume a movie, you're the direct benefactor of a massive global economy and copyright system that can fund content costing tens of millions of dollars to produce and give it to you for $10. If getting everything for free is more important to you, then only consume open source content.

America doesn't want to force Sweden to obey copyrights just because Microsoft needs Swedish business, it does so because Sweden backing pirates sets a standard for the rest of the world that could very easily lead to a global breakdown of copyright law and less high quality content for everybody, whether they can afford it or not.
I'd be happy to have "marginally better", at least as a start.
My Sensation has a 4.3" screen and I have no issues navigating it. I had a Nexus One prior to that, and its 3.7" screen likewise felt fine.

I'd be willing to bet that the iPhone's original screen size was dictated more by battery concerns than the average mobile thumb length of tea drinkers in the midwest or whatever crazy metric people want to use. Bigger screens use exponentially more energy. Once that size was decided, Apple's basically stuck with it, since iPhone apps use absolute layouts and are designed for a 3:2 screen. You can't just scale the app to the new aspect ratio without stretching assets (squares become rectangles, circles become ellipses), and iPhone apps are designed against a specific aspect ratio.

Increasing a 3:2 screen to 4.3" would make the screen 2.4" wide; the iPhone's screen is currently 1.9" wide, and the Sensation/SGS II have 2.1" wide screens, by comparison. If you think the SGS is hard to use, a 3:2 screen of the same size would be downright intolerable.
Global Parity Initiative interactive global economic stats map
One thing that movie ratings don't take into account, including this one, is: what am I in the mood for? I'd like to type into netflix, "I'm in the mood for James Bond meets Spirited Away", have it perhaps give me a few yes/no choices, and make recommendations based on that.
From the Marin Independent Journal, the paper of the Ed Catmull's home: "Some people put marketing at the top of ... the success for the business," Catmull added. "What he did was he made the quality of what he was working on the most important thing."

http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_19051009?source=most_vie...
No. They'll contact you if you're a potential match. http://www.marrow.org/Registry_Members/A_Possible_Match/When...
I would like that quote more if it read

> Therefore all innovation

because I think progress can still happen in a world that does not adapt to change, but innovation cannot.
Steve Jobs: “I wanted my kids to know me"
English is a living language, you can always try and revive it. It might give your resume a certain je ne sais qua ;)
The Future is Recruitment Solutions Software
I've thought about this problem a lot and I'm glad to see there is a site out there trying to tackle this problem. For me, I always thought about movies in terms of investment with 4 options, "I'd buy it", "I'd rent it", "I'd watch it for free", "I'd avoid it". I think dollars speak louder then opinions. The problem is that nowadays in the world of streaming video, this scale gets completely trashed as the friction to invest in a movie is lowered considerably.

I do like the idea of production value vs replay value, I remember when I saw Passion of the Christ I told a friend it was an amazing movie i never want to see again.
To add to this point, it's not comfortable for the majority of users. If you look at a normal distribution of users, they want to cover some sort of number and I'd wager that this screen size is hitting that number.

EDIT: Spelling. I don't know why I mentioned "normal" either.Apple simply wants to cover a majority of users.
5 Essential Software For Online App Development
Rumor is that the Prime will have a 4.65 inch screen. Why stop there? The Galaxy Note is 5.3 inches.

Android handsets are becoming ridiculous. We spent all this time trying to make things small, but in an effort to differentiate themselves, manufacturers started making things huge again.

Most of the high end phones would not even fit comfortably in my jeans pockets.
I think this is what he meant: http://bookcoverarchive.com/images/books/jane_eyre.large.jpg
there is no room for satire on HN.
Wear a Black Turtleneck for Steve Jobs Day and help Pancreatic Cancer Research
Use a Secured Credit Card for Bad Credit or New Credit
Fortunately, there is a credit card for bad credit, there are quite a handful of them out

there, in fact. These cards are particularly different from cards available to good credit

individuals because they have special features which enable the card’s software to directly

and indirectly assist the handler. The bad credit individual will have a variety of options

in choosing a credit card for bad credit. First of all, there is the pre-paid card which is

also called the secured card. This type of card is fairly similar to ordinary cards, except

that the limit is much, much lower
Nuance bought ShapeWriter a year ago, and took it off Android market. A few months later they started selling it as FlexT9, but a year later it's still blocked outside the USA. I'm almost ready to flash Cyanogenmod on my Nexus just so I can use Market Enabler to buy it in Canada. I'm not exactly optimistic about this development.
Startup School spreadsheet finding or posting a place to stay in the Bay Area
He was a visionary. He foresaw his own death, and started wrapping things up back in August.
I drew the diagrams from my perspective, holding the phone in my palm, and extending my thumb over the screen. I don't think I have particularly large or small hands. If you hold the phone further out in your fingers, you can extend your thumb farther, but the phone is less stable in your hand. The instability is where the "annoyance" comes from, when I'm using the Galaxy S II.
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Because the math is simple.
Why You Should Have Bought Apple Stock, Not Products 7 Years Ago
Another one: http://dave-gallagher.net/pics/hn_ipad.png
I think they wanted a 7x return on investment. But you are right, I don't see the value either... unless they have some seriously good language models built in 50 languages and the patents surrounding their interface, models, etc.