skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder is part of their failure is from listening to people's reason, such as focusing on the nitty gritty features (see emoji, typing with one hand and so on) rather than on the big picture of the device and how it fits into one's lifestyle.

It's known that humans are ultimately emotional beings, they think with their feelings regardless of how rational they believe they are. The iPhone is the ultimate user experience, titillating the senses and the emotions more than any PDA out there with 1000s of convenience features. It's similar to BMW, Steve Jobs' source of inspiration for his marketing strategies. You want the device on a primal level, it's sexy, it's a status symbol, the release of every iPhone is a cultural event, a celebration of incredible UX.

I never ever get that emotional involvement when looking at the latest super-souped-up swiss-knife phone from Japan.
You could run it through Calibre, looks like most of it should convert cleanly (not tons of diagrams/graphics).
Bug: Using the iPad, it capitalizes the first letter of the word so http://skimthat.com turns into Http://skimthat.com. Your system doesn't see the lowercase http:// it's expecting and adds the prefix again causing the invalid url http://Http://skimthat.com

Solution: Create a string that contains a lowercase version of the url to do the http:// check or ignore case with regex.
The 48 Japanese Schoolgirls Aiming to Take Over the World
Perhaps true in the US but not so in Europe. My 16-year old cousin in Denmark (the worlds most FB connected country in the world, 3M users out of 5M population) told me that it's basically impossible to have a social life without being on Facebook (at her age).

Facebook also caters very much to US culture. E.g. In middle school and high school you move between different classrooms so you make lots of different friends that way. In Denmark you sit with the same 20-30 kids every day for 10 years. It's a very different type of social conditioning.

So - if you're the outlier in the class who isn't connected and the party invites go out on FB, guess what? You have volunteered to get ostracized.
CHMag ClubHACK Magazine's Issue 21 (October) released
Try compiling it. You won't get far.

Current binary to C decompilers are not sufficient to reproduce and modify moderately complex software. They just make analysis easier, because it's more like reading pseudocode.
Negotiating to Yes 10 Steps to Getting What You Want in a Business Deal
I agree that deleting data is probably difficult from a data integrity standpoint. However, unless being able to delete data is made a priority the situation is not going to improve. It's a more general problem and certainly not specific to Facebook but unless there is some motivator I don't think a whole lot of engineering effort is going to be put in to it by anyone.

From a technology standpoint it seems it's more desirable to just keep throwing storage at the problem and spend time working on ways to store and manage even more data. Data is valuable after all, so the incentive is there to accumulate and process as much of it as possible. That's exactly why we need some form of external stimulus (eg: laws) to force people to work on the problem of how can we be getting rid of data when we need to without breaking everything.
With my decidedly limited knowledge of Japanese tech out outside of videogames and some phones,

I would say Shigeru is about as close as Japan has to a Steve Jobs
I don't want your blog platform. I want my Blogger blog (yes, Blogger) to match my website, even if it's not perfect, without spending 3 hours pulling my hair out. That, I would pay for.

By the way, I'm just getting a spinny right now, so I can't comment furhter. Will try again after the HN effect is gone.
I liked this, but found it hard to retain my interest after the first lessons until I found the 'problems' section. I tend to learn way better when actively working on a problem and having to go look things up and learn them to advance, so I look forward to seeing more problems here.
Sony's network problems will haunt them for years. I think they're done in the game industry. Microsoft is lacking in innovation in every single category I can think of.

This would be the perfect time for Nintendo to crush them both.
Clearly this is an opportunity for a startup helping startups that write books for startups.
I couldn't get this to work with any website I tried. It just sits on the "Loading… This shouldn’t take long." screen.

Can someone suggest a url to try?
The Back Story for the $300 Million Button
As the author of the post, I find it particularly productive. ;)
Ask HN: python vs. php for web projects
Hi all,

My co-founder and I are working on several web projects, fishing for a new startup idea.

We've made our first prototype using django/python and we're working on our second using cake/php.

We'd like to stick to one language and/or framework. My co-founder and I are now disagreeing as to which language and which framework to move forward using.

We're pretty new to building production sites from scratch, so my question to the community is:

what are the advantages/disadvantages to using python vs. php vs. django vs. cake-php vs. other?

Thanks!
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Avoiding the "will it solve the perceived problem" aspect that many of these reviews focused on, it doesn't really scream "good business model" to me. It's not particularly novel (it's an anonymous re-mailer with phone numbers instead of email addresses). It's not solving a problem that can't be solved many other ways already (internal school district systems, email lists, teacher blogs, written notes on the whiteboard). One of its primary sales points (protects teachers by restricting direct contact info) is only a tiny aspect of a more general problem (inappropriate communication/contact between students/teachers). Its primary sales point offers protection from a legal liability (possessing information that could be abused) but doesn't secure that information effectively (phone numbers aren't treated by most people as "strictly private information" and therefore are easily obtained from many sources). I don't see how it will be monetized effectively as neither students nor teachers are likely to pay for it (my opinion only) and it would be difficult to offer ads given that the user interface that both parties interact with is basically a text message. Technologically, it's not exactly a hard concept to duplicate now that you've presented the idea, and therefore you have a risk of competitors without the benefit of a significant "first to market" advantage. Texting is popular because it's simple. I'm not sure how much you can enhance the service beyond hiding the number. That leaves me wondering where your growth and customer loyalty will come from.

If you're still reading :) It's an interesting idea, it's a nice design, it's focused on a single problem, and congrats on shipping it! I'm not saying these things to discourage you, but I think you should be sure that you have considered issues like these.

Good luck!
Is a car stereo head unit a product or a feature?
"Dropbox" is becoming a verb. They need to keep that up, so people ask if their device has Dropbox, or more appropriately (if incorrectly), ask if it "can Dropbox?"

It is a feature, a service, but so is Netflix, and Dropbox isn't encumbered by movie studios. They just have the neat "whoa this is almost magic" part.
The malaise comes not from the absolute position of Japanese companies in the world, but from the direction they're headed in.

There was a great article in the Economist a while back about this:

http://www.economist.com/node/14793432

Since this article was published, the situation has gotten worse. The earthquake sure didn't help, but the situation wasn't good even before that. Sure, 10% or something of the parts that go into the iPhone are developed by Japanese specialized parts manufacturers, who have skills that no-one else in the world can match. But if you look more closely, you'll see that these industries are hollowing out -- there isn't enough interest from younger generations to keep the mom&pop shops going in the long run.

The problem which many have mentioned here and elsewhere is that while Japan is unrivalled in craftsmanship ("monozukuri") -- making physical things -- exactly the opposite is true when it comes to "unphysical" things like software. That's why Japanese mobile phones have such utterly terrible interfaces, as someone else pointed out here. There is very little respect given to that side of the design process, and that's not going to change without a major shift of consciousness.
I'm working on the replies to those emails! A few people are having troubles with the Order Confirmation email, which is where the download link is.

You shouldn't have to create an account to get the download link. It should be in the Order Confirmation email (which is separate from the PayPal receipt email).

Working on replying via email right now....
You should get an email with a link - it took a couple minutes for me to get mine. Then my link didn't work but Joanna was very helpful over email - if you are having trouble just drop her a line.
This seems like pretty much the same thing as the passwords-over-ssh thing from a few years ago. The timing between keypresses is almost as good as the keypresses themselves. And you can get those via an accelerometer on a nearyby smartphone, or you can watch the packetstrem as they tap away on their ssh connection.

Back channels are fun.
Totally would! Fire me off an email at joanna AT copyhackers DOT com. Very happy to chat.
Box.net's dropbox-like sync program for desktops is a paid account only feature too. And your limited to small file sizes. It guts the usefulness of that 50GB.
There is a brute force solution, you get equations in eight variables (the matrix entries) which you can solve. Not elegant, but it works.

Also, WLOG (without loss of generality) the top left entry of C and D is either 0 or 1, because you can multiply either matrix by any number other than 0 without changing whether the equation is true.
That's very good. How exactly did you make the switch? Did you start to participate in an open source project? Did you just start learning it on your own and then gt hired somewhere? I'm very interested in hearing aboout how you made the switch.
There's got to be some shenanigans going on when the iPhone 4s shot of the city looks better than the 5DMKII, an essentially $3000 camera.
I recommend graduating on-time with the CS Minor, taking the job you have in-hand, and then going back to part-time school for a CS Masters. The point of the CS Major is to get the first job which you have already landed. You should be looking at positioning yourself for your second job. Assuming your first job at least 5 years, your next employer will be focused on your professional experience and any graduate degrees -- not your undergraduate degree. Therefore, I would take the job, and then go back to school part-time for my CS masters which will be far more impressive to your second employer.

(I suggest getting your masters assuming that you would like to complete your academic study of computer science. If you're interest is purely career driven, then you can likely skip the masters all together.)
The reason the stock fell is because the expected results were built into the price. So when the numbers didn't meet the market's expectations, the price adjusted accordingly.

The expectations have nothing to do with where they were last year. Rather, they're built on forecasts of how the market (and Apple) think they will do in the future.
We actually are working on this. We're relying on PayPal's security where the credit card information comes into play. Where my site is concerned - the sales side of it with only your address taken - we are working on it.... PayPal's already got this covered off, of course.
We now have an effective vaccine for Malaria
I feel like:

Interpreter in C: an implementation.
Interpreter in Python: an exercise.
I just sent an email to Joanna, and she responded within a few minutes offering to personally email me the ebooks. Now that's what I call customer service!
Someone else emailed me about this typo! So embarrassing. Will correct. Thanks for letting me know...
One thing he didn't mention that I've noticed is that many Japanese companies, particularly in the consumer electronics space but in other industries as well, maintain completely separate product lines outside Japan vs. what they sell here. This is (or was) especially striking with phones where you simply couldn't buy made-for-Japan mobile phones outside Japan, and likewise you couldn't find non-Japanese phones in Japan. This is why it was such a shock that the iPhone was a success here, and the entire emerging smartphone market caught Docomo and AU completely flat-footed.

There is a particularly irritating component of Japanese nationalism which holds that Japanese are unique, as in physiologically unique, among the world's population (down to having different immune systems, in fact). In seems natural for a Japanese company that it would essentially have to act as two companies, one for exported products and another for domestic ones. It's very inefficient. It's also remarkably stupid as the iPhone demonstrates - what sells anywhere else will also sell here, and vice versa (I would always get comments on my phone when I went overseas and had to tell people the model was only available in Japan, to their disappointment).

Contrast this with most other large manufacturers where they will have more-or-less the same products globally, with some localization.

Actually the solution for Japan is rather obvious and I suspect many know it: stop acting as though you're an alien race crash-landed on planet Earth a thousand years ago. Start treating the global market the same as the domestic one, and Japanese the same as Korean, Swedish, Canadian, whatever. This will be a hard lesson for the Japanese national psyche to digest, and I don't know that they're up for it. It's entirely plausible they'll spend the next 50 years making stunning breakthroughs in the fields of (nursing home) robotics and new delivery mechanisms for god-awful Japanese broadcast television.
I think it probably belongs here because of what it portends for Facebook's future plans with project spartan and not for its actual content..
Hard to believe, but hope this turns out to be true. Would represent meaningful progress for the world.
BlackBerry outage causes 40% decrease in traffic accidents
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Agreed. Clinical trials look very promising!
http://www.youtube.com/v/cpPABLW6F_A

(Not taking sides here, just pointing out some people conflate economics and war.)
What Every Student Entrepreneur Needs to Know to Succeed (3) Know Something
Cheers for including Scratch (a graphical programming language aimed at kids). Scratch is worth playing with, if only to witness the potential (and drawbacks) of graphical programming languages. Now back to my LabVIEW code...
Kinect Makes Learning Playful with Sesame Street and National Geographic
Developers: Are You RAD, Agile or Chaotic?
Nano - HEXBUG
If the average user karma is periodically raised, and downvoting privileges are somewhat based upon this, then over time does it become more difficult to become an influential member?
U.S. Small Business? Internet Marketing Outlook for 2010
But really, there is no lens cover, and these things are shoved into a pocket with keys and coins and lint. How is it any phone can take good pictures (as to win contests, and our imaginations.)

Why do so many (most) high end smartphones have no lens covers? It's the first think I would add to a smartphone I design, and yet, I am obviously completely wrong.
Overcoming Anxiety after Quitting Smoking
To make sure they stay in business? I think a lot of people are more than happy to pay for useful services just to keep them in business. As long as the utility is larger than the price charged transactions will be made.

One website I'm familiar with has a freemium product, lots of users there pay just to support the site, even if they never actually use the premium bits.
Interesting. This ought to be really easy to correlate with market penetration data/cellular base station data.
So there is a way to synchronize data creation and data updates, but not data deletion? Really?
It's a feature of a car when you buy it, it's a product when you upgrade the crappy unit that came with the car for something a bit nicer.
Passwords usually aren't sent letter-by-letter as far as I'm aware. Although that's mostly because doing so would make the server side much more complicated than it needs to be.

These sort of attacks are very interesting though. Information introduces all sorts of regularities into the environment and as long as they aren't big enough to disrupt functionality most people never even think about them... For that matter, people seem to have a general problem with thinking about "outside-the-box applications" (probably not the best way to phrase that).
I would use raw php, or codeigniter if a framework is needed. nod.js looks promising
How xbox 360 escaped the ring-of-death is baffling to me. I guess the $1billion hit they took to extend warranties either really spoke to consumers, or people just don't care if they have a 1 in 3 (or was it 1 in 4?) change of getting a dud.
Your Guide to Salary Requirements in an Interview
I was criticizing the law (or at least an example of how a law is being applied) that you used as an example, because it seems to be that it goes far beyond just protecting personal privacy.

You seem to be stating in response that the law must be followed while it is in place. I'm unsure what your driving point is as I wasn't even advocating civil disobedience of said law.
Let me explain why secure boot/trusted computing matters for me personally.

More of my life is conducted on a computer than ever. My family photos, banking transactions, files are all stored on a computer. Meanwhile, Flash and Adobe Reader installs security updates on a regular rhythm. I need my PC to be secure from drive-by downloads.

Getting linux to run is a secondary issue, as much as I value software freedom.
Oracle updates Java to stop SSL-chewing BEAST
I know people who do this on $1000+ training courses. It's priced into their business. The refund rates aren't as high as you'd think :-)

I do it too but only on small things. I haven't done a single refund yet over several hundred sales.

Other than increasing the likelihood of a sale, the benefit of offering a guarantee like this is you get less flack from your payment provider (since they can see you'll refund if anyone's dissatisfied) and you can avoid nearly all chargebacks. If someone doesn't want to pay, they'll find a way to get around it anyway, so you might as well make it frictionless.
Google's Icecream Sandwich Event Live
the problem with writing copy is that a lot of companies that do it suck at it. I wrote my own copy, ran with it. Then decided to do it "right" and hire a professional to do it for me. Well the copy I got was pretty average, to a point where I felt my own copy was better.

I think part of it, is that when you do the job yourself, you can revisit it time and time again to polish it. Hiring someone just gets you that first rough draft, that might be better than your own rough draft, but is subpar, since the person didn't spend the time to perfect it.
It's funny how it goes just like a standard blog post for several paragraphs and then.. BAM, it does a complete 180 into a sales pitch. Quite striking and rather effective!
Batch process creating new users
This is so true. Example: My iphone died recently, so while waiting for the 4s to come out I used a 3-4 year old Sony Ericson lying around the office. It has so many buzzword features! It even has dedicated media playback buttons on the outside! Yet how do you call someone? It takes 6 button presses. Press down > click on first name > Call > Voice Call/Video Call/PushTalk > No Message/Create Message > Call/Call with ID/Call with no ID/Country code

That's insane. It is like no one ever tried to make a phone call with their phone when designing it.

Don't get me started on the text editing screen. It is a modal text area that flips between movement within the whole text and movement within the single word you are editing. I love Vim, and I still hate this text entry method.

This whole topic has been covered many times before, but its roots are various and you could write a book on the subject of why most firms (both japanese and non) are just so horrible at consumer software interface design.

Some people suggest that it is just that the Japanese firms were only really good at hardware, but that rings false. I've seen a lot of really horribly designed Japanese computers and mobile phones before the iPhone came out, even just judging the hardware by itself on simplicity and reliability.
Use the one at http://www.youtube.com/android instead. It's better.
Explicit is better than implicit. I think keeping a bit of the verbose helps people know what's going on. That knowledge is infinitely valuable when debugging certain problems or creating solutions that work well.
So, I'm going to make a statement that I think is important for anyone reading anything on the internet.

WHAT IS THE PROOF! (also known as 'consider the author', 'read the article', etc)

Now I can't say with certainty that any of these claims are false or true, but it occurs to me that a lot of these claims are based on what facebook MIGHT be doing with your data. I decided to take a look at the complaint and attachments for the shadow profiles case, I don't see any evidence that these shadow profiles exist, just that there is the possibility that they exist.

And for those that will inevitably say that proof isn't necessary, that means you don't trust facebook. If thats the case, there is nothing they can do to prove to you what they're doing is legitimate short of open sourcing their entire stack (and even then, you must trust that what they're running == the source they give you). So either trust that what they're saying is true, find evidence that they're doing something they aren't supposed to, or stop using the service entirely.
Everything unencoded is unicode in 3 isn't it?
Amazing dedication to work on something for 24 years.
And why use fibonacci numbers, instead of say, multiply by 1.6?
Not so shocking, actually. The 5D is a pro camera, and you're expected to pull the RAW data into Lightroom and manually tweak and tune the final product. Its output is optimized for this workflow: minimum processing in-camera, maximum options later.

The iPhone's software, on the other hand, is doing some auto-adjustment before the file hits the SD card. It's optimized for a decent photo without any manual steps.

Also, notice the distortion in the iPhone photo: the buildings "lean" towards each other. The Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 is a _nice_ piece of glass, and is worth every penny of its $1500 asking price.

tl;dr: Take the 5D shot (in RAW, hopefully) and let a pro have a shot at it in Lightroom. That's a fair comparison.
Tough choice. Pay tax or better consumer laws.
How Heart Rate Zones Help You To Train.
Google, Samsung unveil Ice Cream Sandwich-powered Galaxy Nexus
Good to know there is at least one country where you'll be safe from that.

Well, until it gets so cheap that there's no way to know whose glasses or contacts are recording and compiling information about you as part of their lifelog. This sort of thing is like the tide coming in: legislation against it can only ultimately be effective by severe restrictions on allowed technologies for the people of the country.
That's exactly what I mean. Design, all aspects. Software and UX is one thing. Hardware has followed a boring linear progression with no real innovation other than bigger screens and faster cpus, more ram, video acceleration... if it weren't for the miniaturization aspect no one would care.

My 3DS is more impressive.