skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What makes you say that MeeGo Harmattan is definitely ahead of Android. I do not think so. I also do not think that it's enough for MeeGo to be better in terms of usability, performance and polish.

For instance, I hate Android's built-in browser. The UI sucks. But the native apps for the online services I use, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype and Flickr -- are kick-ass. This happened slowly and for a looong time people complained how poor the experience is on Android with those apps. Heck, Flickr wasn't even available for Android 4 months ago.

But now they are. And I also replaced the browser with Firefox Mobile, which is very resource-hungry, but has a pretty sweet UI and syncs everything with my desktop.

I can do that because Android is freaking popular. And even in regards of polish and user-experience, Android 2.3 gets pretty close to my ideal and while iOS is still better, I prefer Android for a whole bunch of other reasons.

I AM pretty sad that MeeGo failed to get the traction and resources needed. Competition is good, but Nokia needed to do SOMETHING because they were clearly failing to deliver. I also think picking Windows Mobile was the dumbest move they could make, but whatever.
I would contend that if you're having code readability issues, it'd be better to fix it by sprucing up your whitespace and comments, instead of saying "Well, let's chunk it into more functions" and have method(), which returns method1(), which returns method2(), which returns method3()...

Chunking for the sake of itself doesn't seem like a viable strategy to me.
Two main points:

1. Google is moving the AOSP away from kernel.org servers to Google servers.

2. The source code for Ice Cream Sandwich will be available "once it’s available on devices".
I'm loving Khan Academy since I saw a post by John Resig about their practice framework. Math is so much more fun and interesting since I started using Khan Academy.
Thanks for posting my tribute to Steve!

If anyone's interested in the source:
At a prompt, type CATALOG to see a list of files, LOAD FILENAME then LIST to view a program's source code. RUN to run it.

CTRL-S to pause. Reset button or CTRL-C to break out of a running program.

There's also an easter egg. :)
JQuery Mobile 1.0RC2 Released
Women in Gaming: Why it Works
Startup Ideas We'd Be Willing To Pay For
Well, you would probably want the person to know you are out of office/on vacation/not checking email, not that you have a full inbox.
This and the fact that Jos, the Museo designer, has always been very web-oriented and paid a lot of attention to the rasterization issues. His fonts are all really well hinted to begin with, and then there is Typekit's conditional .ps serving on top of that.
WebOS lacked proper push and more capable hardware. Also, on global markets, Palm was a miniature company. I don't know if they even sold WebOS devices overseas. Android sell well because of multitude of devices and very cheap prices, not because it's good or popular.
I wonder how this will impact on the legality of sites such as thepiratebay in Canada.

It won't. There's two reasons for this: First, the SCC isn't bound by its previous decisions; constitutionally this is formalized as the "living tree doctrine" which states that the constitution can grow to take meanings never imagined by its authors or by earlier court rulings. Second, the current court is highly activist; I've heard several lawyers comment that it seems to start by deciding the outcome it wants and then work backwards to attempt to find a tenuous legal interpretation to justify it. I think it's very unlikely that the SCC would be inclined to twist the law for the benefit of thepiratebay.

(IANAL, these are my personal opinions, and I don't want to be sued by the Supreme Court for libel.)
I think this got a lot of attention because a lot of people here have a ton of email but ultimately this doesn't seem like a solution to that problem.
You might not, and I might not, but some people will. Like a lot of things in modern society it's all about the margins. The effects of such a small increase aren't flashy or obvious, but they're still real.
Is it odd that any tense of the word "ship" does not appear in this article?
This is the only metric that matters. Ability to achieve. Everything else is a tool.
I wish articles like this would namespace their assertions by telling us what they mean by "good" or "bad", so we could avoid the perennial echo chamber debate that goes like this:

A: GOOD MEANS SHIPPING AND PLEASING YOUR CUSTOMERS
B: NO YOU FOOL! GOOD MEANS WRITING CLEAR CODE THAT OTHER HACKERS CAN READ
C: NO YOU FOOLS! GOOD IS A HAPPY MEDIUM BETWEEN BOTH OF THOSE THINGS
D: DEBATE IS HARD, LET'S GO SHOPPING!

God forbid we agree on what words mean before we talk about them...
How Samsung Designed Its New Galaxy Nexus To Skirt Apple's IP
Budgeting a project
I was recently asked about how to budget a project and how to start the design phase of development by a non-tech guy. I thought the conversation was worth a blog post...
Looks like it has a touchscreen and you can set exposure using the touchscreen.

There is no focusing and so, there is no refocusing. You do all that in software.
http://cl.ly/2h2K2B3M2p0H2i1z2O2c
http://cl.ly/3z28333n3w230e2S1U0Z
http://cl.ly/2T232H1r2M3g2w0g1G0N
http://cl.ly/140F2R1U291J3v2m1y0Z
Need Free Leads For MLM?
Because using messages you already have access to a lot Siri's understanding. 3rd party access could be very problematic if you consider that Siri would have to understand also several way to say the same things, otherwise it would become just simple keyword recognition.
Google Test Analytics - Now in Open Source
I love when people ask "what does your IQ score measure". The only thing it can possibly measure is your ability to perform an IQ test. Now you can ask the question "What does your IQ score strongly correlate with", but I'm pretty sure as it stands 'intelligence' is not well defined enough assign it a quantitative value (or even know if one can be defined).

I used to hate standardized tests (and still somewhat do in principle) but when you can show that a test score correlates to performance it does make sense to assist in making decision when there are very large sets of data to process (like college applications). It turns out that SATs do correlate somewhat to freshman year performance. It doesn't really matter if it's for the right reason, if you have thousands of similar applicants it makes sense to use that data point if there are no other options. This is the logic of machine learning too: I don't really care why 2 variables correlate, if they do it can help me make decisions.

The issue for me is that I have yet to see anything interesting about what IQ really correlates to. Pretending it is a test that measures intelligence is completely asinine if you take 2 minutes to think about what that claim means.
"Hey, FuzzyDulop, we're a day before deadline but I've been thinking, we could do SUPER BRILLIANT IDEA THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING and it'd be amazing! What do you think?"

...

"You can forget about your deadline if you want that in, boss."

* skip forward a week *

"Hey, FuzzyDunlop, we're a day before deadline but..."
EBay Inc. Reports Strong Third Quarter 2011 Results
La fiesta del consumo nos esta destruyendo...
What's happening inside those shrouded Apple stores
It certainly has an area cost, but its not going to contribute to power consumption when its not turned on. Power gating is a pretty well developed technique these days, and on the high Vt processes that everyone but NVidia uses you could probably make due with just clock gating for something as tiny as an A7.
I am hoping to see some cool hacks be created using this. I imagine that with a few pictures from different angles, you might be able to make a nice 3D model with pictures taken with the camera. I'm sure that folks will come up with other cool things.
I would love the ability to set the basic colors - specifically background color (including transparent).

For now at least, I find it more useful embedded on my site than in email.
You need a receiver in the phone that can phase track, which costs 50x as much as the simple GPS chip they fit.

You also need either a lot of storage locally or a fast data link between the base station and the rover - phones actually have both of these but they cost money
His name is Robert Paulsen...
An interesting idea, but one I'd disagree with almost completely. Email works extremely well for me because I can receive it regardless of my availability, and respond to it when I have time. Your blog post notes that email interactions don't match real life; I agree, but I'd consider that a feature. I can easily solve the "important people" problem by using filters to call attention to email from those people, but I'd only need to do that if I couldn't keep up with email in the first place; currently I can see at a glance who my email comes from, and optionally cherry-pick mails to respond to first. Otherwise, to the extent email becomes more like real-life interactions, it becomes less useful to me.
iirc it was the XOR patent, here is one part of that story:

http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.html

I'm not sure if that was all there was to it and possibly there is room in there for a 'microsoft mole' somehow, but a single mole on the board of directors would be just a way to get information out, you can't destroy a company in a straightforward way.

And such a mole would have to be compensated very well indeed to survive the breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits that would be leveled at him/her if it ever came out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary

It's no joke to be accused of stuff like that.
Score: 5, Insightful
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Just like all things, both nature and nurture are strong factors. Certainly genetics play a factor in IQ, just as they do with other personality traits such as extroversion, or physical traits, such as height. Set in stone would be a huge exaggeration of genetic causation, but people will have certain propensities from birth.
GPS is already better than 2m with the use of Wide Areas Augmentation Systems such as WAAS or EGNOS. This is already widely supported by chipsets.
EBay Q3 Revenue Up 32 Percent To $3 Billion; Net Income Up 18 Percent To $628M
You have a coin which is weighted, so it comes up heads 70% of the time and tails only 30%. Or worse yet, perhaps you don't even know what frequency it comes up heads.

Given such a coin, and nothing else, how can you simulate a fair single coin flip?
It's not that people deny it exists, or discount it all together - it's just a terrible indicator or measurement of one's capabilities. Measurements should be accountable. A few cups of coffee or a bad sleep shouldn't matter if IQ is as reliable as some like to believe.

Since it is used to judge one's abilities, it's hardly fair to use it as a practical measurement, just as BMI is impractical to use for judging a body builder's fat percentage.

Anecdotally, medication which I take for ADHD/PI doesn't permanently alter my brain's chemistry, yet my IQ takes a noticeable dive without it.
"Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ?"

I suspect that people who ask about IQs say more about themselves than an IQ number says about any particular individual.
Why Google Will Never Really Eliminate Webspam
9mm HD – Android Game
s/window/wealth holder's window/

It is often argued that the 'breaking windows' scenario is a fallacy because the capital redirected to fix the window would be used for something more productive, which is only true assuming a company or individual is utilizing this excess capital. So, you have to break windows where people are holding capital, ie: the owner of the window is wealthy. If you break a window at the local pizza joint that is barely breaking even, you probably get a negative return (unless the new window is somehow superior to the old window...).

People who are wealthy or think they are going to be wealthy don't really like this approach, obviously, but unlike an individual who benefits from holding assets, the economy requires a constant, sometimes increasing, flow of economic activity (you get paid, you pay for goods and services, your money keep circulating, etc.).
Great point. That's why theres a line underneath "unbearable" that says "please only send if it's urgent."

Also to your point, I'm not sure if this is a good product for workplace email exchanges. In that setting you're sort of forced to send things to people wether you want to or not.
I find the lagginess of the stock browser infuriating on my Nexus S. On graphics-heavy pages it can become almost unusable. Pages with mainly text are generally fine. But here's the thing, Opera Mobile on the same phone and on the same laggy pages is smooth as silk. It has remained snappy and responsive no matter how hard I've tried to make it choke.

Kudos to Opera. I would like to ask: has anyone else observed this? If not, could you give it a whirl and see how it compares?

Only downside is that it takes a while to load and seems to lose its state when switching away. Still, it's a much better experience than the stock WebKit browser.

So the question on my mind is, how does Opera do it? Is the WebKit browser simply failing to use GPU acceleration? Why? Clearly Android as a platform can do responsive, non-laggy UX because it's right there in Opera. And yet the WebKit browser lets us, and the many apps that exploit it, down.

Is it purely that GPU support hasn't been baked in yet because of lack of handset support? Or is it something more fundamentally problematic in Android?

One final tangential observation: OS X suffered from similar poor performance when it was first released. I clearly remember the tech press scoffing and ridiculing it in comparison to Windows XP and OS9. But it matured, helped by ever improving hardware, and grew into a great OS known for its style and snap. Is Google treading a similar path?
The term "Job Creator" is a clever-as-in-clever-bastard way of re-framing the discussion. "Job Creators" become their own privileged class of people who have the secret knowledge of how to Create Jobs. Also, the term "Creator" implies a certain deity-like status, as if only they have the power to create jobs from the void.

I much prefer "employer."
Kill The Euro, Win A Prize
It's that the option is enabled by default if you have Siri active. It's not obvious, and frankly, should be fixed.
I love the Khan academy, it is one of the best things that came out of the internet to date.

But I really wished that they would allow me to sign up with them and them alone without having to use either google or facebook to log in, that's a really bad mistake on their part imo.
Calling RIM viable is a stretch. They were steadily losing marketshare before the new iPhone (the first on all US carriers) and ICS phones were launched. We may easily see iOS 6 and the iPad 3 before BBX sees the light of day - I'm skeptical that a company with a 4 P/E ratio can survive the year they're about to have.

Better to be in Nokia's position and have a complete, focused operating system relaunch before the year end. Nokia will have a line of interesting, desirable products before the end of 2011 and RIM will be in serious danger of a buyout/reorganization.
My friend Eric's courteous.ly (featured on lifehacker and mashable a few months back) does something similar except it uses rolling data points to determine what "normal" is for you, as opposed to a single absolute scale for everyone. The advantage of Smoke Signal is that it has a real-time meter as opposed to making a recipient click on a link to get the status of your inbox.
Steve Jobs was working on his next product the day before his death
I found the "Alternative careers" hilarious.

My version:

Your code sucks.
Alternative careers: "Do you want fries with that?"

OP's version:

1. Inability to determine the order of program execution
Alternative careers: Electrician, Plumber, Architect, Civil engineer

2. Insufficient ability to think abstractly
Alternative careers: Contract negotiator, Method actor

3. Collyer Brothers syndrome
Alternative careers: Antique dealer, Bag lady

4. Dysfunctional sense of causality
Alternative careers: Playing the slot machines in Vegas

5. Indifference to outcomes
Alternative careers: Debt collection, Telemarketing

So the real test of a good programmer is one who can write a routine that crawls the source code of a bad programmer and tells them what they should really be doing.
The question is how can you use a biased coin to reproduce an unbiased coin flip.

In this article, they give the example of a coin that flips heads 70% of the time. Their method was to flip the coin twice. They only considered cases where heads was flipped once and tails was flipped once because these cases both had a 21% chance of happening. So both cases have the same chance of occurring. In order to differentiate between the two cases, you consider the first coin flip to be your result. So heads than tails is the same as getting a heads and tails than heads is the same as getting a tails.
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I don't need duplicated functionality - I need an actual Instagram app. It's not so much the photosharing/editing, it's sharing pictures on their network with my Instagram friends.
Does anyone know if you can refocus on the camera screen itself? Is it touch screen?

Oh come on, you only had to read the first paragraph of the linked article!
This is AWESOME!!!! Exactly the location functionality I was looking for to support a new app I'm building
Can't agree with you more about Nokia picking up Windows Mobile. They should have gone with Android customized it to their liking (just like what Amazon did with kindle fire), taken advantage of already existing apps and ramp up from there just like what Samsung is doing right now. A big transition to a nascent mobile platform slows them down further, they seem to be heading towards the same fate as Palm.
I really do not care about enterprises. I want to reach my servers securely via OpenVPN.
I have IPv6 and IPv4 through my ISP (TimeWarner) - but I have to explicitly tell Google that I want an IPv6 connection with the subdomain.
Thanks a lot, I think that's exactly what's happening here.
Great phrase.
I think this is great, but I wrote up my reservations about the system here, if a little self-linkage isn't frowned upon:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/22/doubts-about-lytros-focus-l...

I can't wait to actually use one, though. From what I've heard, it's something photographers who love the old methods (like myself) sort of "get" once they've used it for a while. And of course it can live in peace alongside the Canons and Sonys of the world.
> Shouldn't you be able to "tell" Siri a passphrase to unlock?

No, because that would encourage people to vocalize their passphrases.
Support Vector Machines in R
ARM powered robot solving the rubiks cube
Awesome feedback, thx!!
Thomas Friedman had a column in the NYTimes about a week ago. While I did not agree with the specific, this quote was gold:

"We cannot bail or tax-cut our way to prosperity. We can only, as Jobs understood, invent our way there."

Measuring GDP, inflation, deflation, the unemployment rate, all of these numbers are not a reflection of quality of life. Prosperity is a quality of life issue which is solely improved (or destroyed) through technological advancement.
I thought `Whatever` was a joke, and had to go look it up on CPAN (http://search.cpan.org/~asg/Whatever-0.21/lib/Whatever.pm). Not to belabour a joke, but the examples there suggest that the map should be

map( $* ** 2 )

not

map( &_ ** 2 )
"We plan to release the source for ... Ice Cream Sandwich soon"
Why? Things seem to be going well for them (look at the article you're commenting on). There are smart web people building this system up; presumably this is something they thought hard about before implementing.
Notice how resolution isn't mentioned anywhere. It means it's low.
Sure, but firstly, you know they're tracking you (the degree of iOS tracking would be a big surprise to many) and secondly, you can disable the tracking if it bothers you (not so in iOS).
Increase it to 1024
Not the first person to bring up the domain issue, I might have to consider rebranding the site

The for sale option feature is currently in development, will hopefully launch next month!!
I believe it could be hard-coded just like the reason why I am not even 6 feet tall coding away my health while people like Shaq and Yao Ming make millions a year for being 7 feet tall.

Depressing? Yes. That's just the way life is.

What is even more depressing is that some people think you can will yourself to be smarter, and if you don't, you are just lazy.
I teach the SAT, and I have all of my students do the arithmetic exercises on Khan academy + the exercises for any subjects they have difficulty with.

It works great. Students nowadays tend to do all of their math on a calculator; they're not so great at mental math. It really holds them back on the SAT. The test's format invites calculation errors. The SAT specific videos are great, too.
The Nokia board of directors probably hired Elop because they wanted to transition to Windows Phone. Elop's job was to the bearer of bad news (to employees).
Hypothetically, would being the 8th largest individual shareholder of MSFT be large enough compensation to make a fiduciary suit an acceptable cost of doing business?
"People" do, yes. I'm not sure which ones or how to characterize them, but I'm sure there are smart people who think so just as much as dumb ones. To a certain degree though, I do think intelligence can be acquired just like skateboarding skills or anything else that can be learned.
B2BRev is working on number 2.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/yc-backed-b2brev-aims-to-be...
Why is "Performing atomic operations on the elements of a collection within a for or foreach loop" a symptom of mediocre programmer "inability to think in sets"?

How should one do that if your "thinking is sets"?
A fair coin would be one that is equally likely to land on either heads or tails when tossed - on any given toss, you have exactly a 50% chance of getting either heads or tails.

A biased coin, on the other hand, has a bias towards one side or another - e.g. you could have a coin that lands on heads 75% of the time.

The question is - if you've got a biased coin, how do you get it to behave like the fair coin?

It's probably easier to imagine a 10 sided die. You've got one with 7 sides painted red and 3 painted blue, so you've got a 70% chance of rolling red on any given roll. But you and your friend want to be able to use this die to decide who's round it is next - guess the right colour and it's the other guy's round. If you were to base this on a single role, you'd obviously both want to pick red. So what you want is to be able to use this die to create two outcomes which are both equally likely to happen.

Does that help?
I actually reached out to Eric about the idea originally but didn't hear back, so we just went ahead and built it on our own : ) The only thing I'm not crazy about w/ coutreous.ly is the stats live outside email ecosystem.

Buster Benson is doing cool things too with http://howsmyemail.com. He provided some encouragement early on.