skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did the Internet repeat the same cycle as the Industrial Age? Did cell phone uptake follow the same patterns as rotary phones?

The idea that history repeats itself is, itself, dated. Technology changes things in ways people cannot really predict. The only thing you can reliably predict is what is expensive to do today will be cheap tomorrow. What these many small startups will collectively build on top of cheap "cloud services" and "mobile devices" will change the world.
Apple's restrictive pre-installed software policy halts NTT DoCoMo iPhone deal
In case you haven't seen it, mpk has a response[1] which brings up a point I've never seen made before:

> All blood gets tested and though false negatives are still possible, most infections are statistically close enough to 100% detectable after 6 months.

This kind makes irrelevant all the outrage over them accepting blood from donors who have had wildly unsafe sex over 12 months ago. At this point it's only a matter of risk management surrounding the possibility of recent infection. You may say that in that case, it shouldn't matter if you had a same-gender sexual encounter 30 years ago, but this really just boils down to statistics, and having a same-gender sexual encounter puts you in an entirely different statistical category than people who restrict themselves to strictly heterosexual encounters.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3240432
Ask HN: Alternate email app on ipad
The default mail client on the iPad is really really badly designed. I've done some searching on both Google and the Appstore and I was unable to find any decent mail apps. There seems to be quite a demand for a proper mail app, so why is it that there is no app for this on the Appstore?
I dont think this is because of the no duplication of functionality rule since there are quite a few alternative browser apps. Would Apple allow such an app onto the Appstore?
Kazakh Hacks Twitter's 140-Character Limit with Post Mocking That Limit
Sort of, depending on what you mean by random. The article seems to imply the uniform distribution on all 52! orders, which 7 shuffles won't get you. For example, you can't reverse a deck with 7 shuffles. There are bets you can put on a deck that's been shuffled 7 times that pay better than the same bet on a uniformly selected order.
Neil Stephenson's excellent book cryptonomicon used this as a means to facilitate encrypted communication.
Reminds me of a previous thread. Stacking decks in your Texas Hold'em favor:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113299
If someone thinks "make something people want" means "pick a problem and solve it well", then it seems to me they are out of their minds. If people don't want it yet, it doesn't matter how well you make it; they don't want it. I find it very hard to believe that that interpretation is really so widespread. Maybe I'm naive.

This post has a lot of good ideas. "Why now?" is a good question. But if you have a problem with people's mistaken interpretation of a phrase, say that in your blog post about it, instead of critiquing/rejecting the phrase itself.
Steve Jobs wanted own network with unlicensed spectrum
What would be the best way to interface a 2.5" hard drive with one of these? A USB to sata controller? That seems bulky if you want to have it in one case. I'd like to find a compact way to add some storage to the device as I am interested in using it as a media player.
Walt Mossberg's Amazon Kindle Fire Review
Apache Hadoop Gets its First Update in More Than a Year
I did not get the audio one at all
At the top 10-15 law schools, more than 50% the class will get a six figure job to start, and a big fraction of the remainder will have wanted to do public service to begin with. Even just a bit below that, at some of the top 30 schools like UIUC that drops to maybe 10%. At the same time, salaries aren't distributed normally, and the next mode is somewhere in the $50k range.

Engineering is both less segregated (people at MIT aren't all making Google salaries and people at Penn State can get still top jobs) and less bimodal (the top jobs don't pay 3x as much as the median job, and even people who do poorly grades-wise can often find some sort of employment).

So if you're looking at a top engineering program like Berkeley versus doing a bullshit humanities degree followed by a top law school, you'll likely come out ahead monetarily pursuing the latter option. On the other hand going to a decent state engineering school is probably a better bet than aforementioned humanities degree and a decent state law school.

That being said, even someone who went to aforementioned state law school and is working in "small law" for $50k can make a lot of money if he can bring in business. And if you went to that big firm and can bring in business, you can get paid millions while still doing legal work. On the engineering side, you either have to go the startup route, get an MBA and go into management (which involves not being an engineer anymore), or be content hearing "we couldn't possibly pay an engineer as much as a manager!" It's changing a bit with the Google's and Facebook's of the world, but is still the basic reality for most non-software folks.
Nice, I came to the comments to see if someone knew how to calculate this.

Related question. If there are exactly 2N people who vote in a binary election (ie: for presidential candidates) and they have an even 50/50% chance of voting either way, how do I compute the odds that they will have a even split? This is a generous estimate for the probability my vote will matter.
Also need to rate limit this, so you don't have someone playing an infinite number of rounds over 5 minutes.
It has taken a while for the printers to come down the cost curve, and for materials to come up the quality curve. I was talking to the CEO of Z Corp (a $50M 3D printng company) and he gave a great example of how, for Clark's Shoes, they've been able to go from small scale looks-like prototypes, to full-size prototypes, to functional shoes, over 10 years. Apparently functional prosthetics are next.
That's a fair goal, and I believe the answer breaks down like this:

You can work for a big company that serves billions of people, claiming that you are making an impact on the world, while in reality doing nothing.

On the other hand you can start your own company, perhaps only directly impacting a few hundred people, and still accomplish the goal of maximizing your change on the world (as that was your ceiling).
I don't know, I end up reordering cards often enough when trying to figure out which card is missing, or because I just won a game of solitaire or what not.
Mobile game devs:  We launched our Android and C++ APIs today, come test them
In 6th grade I learned programming on a $100 computer with 1/1,000th the speed of this and 1/1,000,000th the memory and, yes, a BASIC interpreter.

Load DSL (Damn Small Linux) on this, get gcc set up with a decent minimal text editor, and yes I'll start them with C++ from the ground up - akin to how I started, but with industry standard tools from square 1 and more introduced as they progress.
The birthday paradox applies if you are asking about the probability that any two shuffled decks throughout history have matched each other, not the probability that a shuffled deck throughout history matches the exact deck you have in your hands today.
> My perspective on Perl is that it's like a Dremel tool.

Or, perhaps less literally, like a Swiss-Army chainsaw. http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/Swiss-Army-chainsaw.html
Centralized --> distributed seems like an overarching trend the past fifty years or so. I think this is the right direction. I'm unsure of the technical merits of Convergence, but the sentiment (moving away from a few "trusted" centralized authorities) is one I wholly support.
Coach Madison Signature Shoulder Bag Black Blue
From the perspective of a guy who loves multiplayer FPS, I think there's never been a better time to be an FPS fan. FPS games hardly ever die out entirely, and they can be played over the internet with anyone else in the world who happens to like the same FPS game. There's really a game for everyone. There's project reality and America's Army for the realistic FPS fans. For the arena, deathmatch-type games, there's Quake Live, Warsow, CPMA, and Unreal Tournament 3. For team-based games, there's Counterstrike, Team Fortress 2, and Battlefield 3. For people who like old games, you can play Doom 2, Quakeworld, and Quake 2. There are likely hundreds of FPS games that I haven't heard of, and yet have a dedicated following.
Spa Heater
> Ah, I see that you do believe that the universe came from nothing.

No, I don't and I just told you that. The question is invalid; the Universe didn't come from anything. Even the visible universe, which we know was born from the big bang, no one believes came from nothing; Big bang theory says it came from an infinitely dense energy and the bang converted some of that into matter. No where does the theory state it all came from nothing.

> You say that the universe is and that it came from nothing.

No, I did not. The rest of your rebuttal fails because you've setup a straw man to knock down while ignoring what I actually said; I expected as much.

> It's also remarkable that you posit that a first cause is an absurdity, yet then postulate that the universe has the properties of a first cause.

I did no such thing.

> I find a logical contradiction in that the universe is known to have had a beginning.

False. We know there was a big bang; we explicitly do not know that it was the beginning, or the only big bang, or that the visible universe it applies to is the only one, or that big bangs aren't cyclical. We just don't know.

> Or perhaps you think it more scientific to suppose that things can happen without a cause (e.g. universes).

No, I believe there are answers we don't yet have. You are the one that believes things happen without a cause (e.g. gods), the universe at least is known to exist undeniably.
This paper is mostly obsolete but contains this wonderful and famous comment on Algol 60: Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
I'm not a huge gamer, but there hasn't been a FPS in maybe ten years that appeals to me. There's far, far too much influence from RPG's or movies or whatnot to turn FPS games, and most other games for that matter, into some unholy combination of a Skinner box ("achievements" and other bullshit) and a participatory movie (cutscenes, voice acting). All of that is bullshit, none of that is necessary, and I don't care.

Here's all I want from an FPS:

1. Single-player mode: A succession of well-designed, non-linear levels where you run through and kill everyone. Have lots of routes through the level. Make it really wide open. Maybe have the levels all run into each other without pauses in the middle to load--MDK did it ten years ago, so no excuses. Soundtrack: thrash metal.

2. Multi-player mode: Choose from a set of well-designed, non-linear levels where you can run through and kill all your friends. Soundtrack: thrash metal.

Really, I'm not demanding anything, concept-wise, that wasn't already in Doom II. I just want it with modern technology and without all of this bullshit about flashlights and cutscenes.
You have to want to create value. As a teacher, I am amazed at how many students lack the will to create, to do the work - and they fail at great cost.
Small holes allow batteries to charge 10 times faster, last 10 times longer
Once again, the three most important rules of real estate value are demonstrated: location, location, location.
To get payers on board, you need credit, rewards, and exclusivity

That's like telling Apple of 1997 that to get consumers on board, they needed faster processors, lots of software and open hardware. Common sense doesn't led to innovation.
This is a great idea. I'm sending in mail through this. Not everyone has the luxury of literally stopping by in person, but this is a fantastic alternative.

I love this, though I've held back on commenting on SOPA until now. One of the frequent comments on SOPA I see is that the original founders behind the internet believed it should be free and unregulated. While I agree, once you introduce capitalism to the internet, as most companies have, you cannot let it be entirely unregulated. What is happening in the internet now is the same process that occurred directly after the industrial revolution - first there were completely unregulated, grievous abuses in the industry. The entertainment industry is attempting to regulate the flow of information and "capital" in the same way the government had to go "trust buster" on the industrial sectors in the last two centuries.

However, while this is all good and well, as the side video explains, they already have protocols for doing this. They don't need any more methods of stopping piracy and the like. They should shift their attention to different ways of raising capital and earning revenue. The system they have isn't working, but erring on the side of regulation instead of erring on the side of libertarianism is still erring. There needs to be a comfortable balance, and SOPA does not make such a balance - it tips the scales in favor of the entertainment industry, and that is the last sector of the United States the internet should be supervised and moderated by.
> It's not actually syntax. The language allows you to define infix operators, and they're just functions like any other ….

`<-` really is syntax: http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%3C-.
Square launches register integration
Have you seen https://squareup.com/cardcase? It looks like it leapfrogs NFC.
The first Kindle, Sony Reader, and Microsoft Zune (AKA Toshiba Gigabeat) were i.MX designs. The i.MX5 series has the same ARM Cortex-A8 core as the OMAP3 and Apple A4. Processing power isn't the factor here, but OMAP definitely is easier to fit into a design with the stacked RAM.
You left out the Call of Duty series.
I understand the project isn't actually run by Broadcom but I think the fact that Broadcom is selling them chips indicates some level of interest in what they are doing. They aren't exactly 'just another customer'.
Irrigation System Biologically Inspired by Namib Beetle
"Airdrop"is an irrigation system that extracts moisture from dry desert air. It consists of a self-powering device that pumps moisture into a network of underground pipes, where it cools and condensates (into water).
Credit card fees are passed on to the customer. They are included in the price of everything you pay. The merchant is the one saving money with Dwolla, and hopefully passing on the savings to you.
There's also Apple's new Cards app. I'm going through my cat pictures now.
Square Card Case
Understanding Your Website Visitors’ Behavior
Bell Ringers Go Digital This Season
xScope is good but not full screen. I wanted a browser which used the full height of the display.
Yes, DDG. My only complaint is that it is slower than Google, but it's worth it to me to get the results for what I actually typed the first time.
Spent a few months making a (poorly conceived) "lifestyle" app, sold one copy to a user in Egypt.

Total profit -$98, Many lessons learned ;)
Is your uncle a freelancer ?
As for me, I still have to be in the building physically for 8 hours, but getting 3 fast paced solid hours each day feels great
It depends. The one I went to, teams formed around the ideas - everyone pitched an idea, then you had to go mingle with people to get votes, then the top ten were the ideas that most people worked on.

Usually a couple of teams actually stay together for over a month, most usually fizzle after the weekend.

The one I went to tended to be a little more business-oriented than I liked (the winning team didn't write a line of code), so maybe be careful at first if that's not what you're looking for.

I think it's worth going to for at least one day. You aren't (or shouldn't be) bound to sticking with it the entire weekend.
Reality is broken--I'm a lab rat. The normal rules don't apply. Everything is pointless. I'm working on dispelling the notion I can change it and get used to nothing.
Isn't the US weird? Over here you just need to prove you will be able to afford the loan (paychecks or whatever). It's against the law to discriminate based on past financial history (though car dealers do it all the time).
Quake 2 was all about multiplayer. Q3 dropped the pretense and essentially buried single play.
Leonardo's Formula Explains Why Trees Don't Splinter
I made my own Sparks in C. They look like Sparks.

https://gist.github.com/1368661
Here's the problem: after the 2001 anthrax scare, all mail sent to Congress has become incredibly delayed (on the order of weeks) while it gets tested and radiated. What some lobbying campaigns have done to get around this is send mass faxes to congressional offices overnight. It's like having access to someone else's office printer and that person has 1/538th of control over the federal government.

The takeaway is, unless these letters are hand delivered, I doubt theyll reach their intended recipients in time.
If this is real, it's a great example of why this kind of government is way overdue.

millions of people affected by some law, 0.01

one retired guy pissed of by something minor, but that happens to live close by, 700
I have a lot of administrative crap to deal with too, I end up doing those in my 3 hour sprint along with the technical since they are easy wins and I cant deal wuth the fact that I have 8 outstanding items to do, 5 of them are non technica and can be done in 40 mins. In the past, i use to do one or two and felt like I needed a break and just ended up being bogged down with all the context switching
Wow, I actually found the link!

You can read it for yourself here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341774
"honestly, i was typing all his information to better search for him"
Those aren't exactly comparable devices to the Kindle Fire. And the i.MX5 is a relatively new device as far as I know.
Can’t Remember the Last Time You Had Sex?
Parker is arguing that in many cases, the engineer can actually have a bigger impact at the bigger company (e.g. because it leverages economies of scale and having lots of startups fragmentizes the talent pool).
This is very similar to a multithreaded memory allocator I implemented many years ago: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/streamflow/

Full paper: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/papers/ismm06.pdf I also have an incomplete extension to that paper with more algorithmic details. I can clean it up and send it to interested parties.

Source code: http://github.com/scotts/streamflow/

There's also an excellent paper recently published at PACT 2011 that is extends and improves on what we did previously, but the paper is not available anywhere yet: http://aces.snu.ac.kr/Center_for_Manycore_Programming/SFMall... I have a copy of the paper and can email it to interested people.

Edit after looking through his code: I think he has locks on the main execution path for malloc. That violates one of our design principles, which was to avoid synchronization on the main path, and to only use lock-free synchronization for most operations on the main path. (Allocations that hit the page-block allocation in our work hit a lock. The SFMalloc allocator I mention above takes those locks out and sees performance improvement.)
It's not "very small", it's just significantly below unity. In, say, physics, I'd say that somewhere around 50% of PhDs wind up, long term, in professional research positions. That's 30% in academia, and the remaining 20% in government/military/commercial research labs.
Aishwarya Rai in Seven Hills Hospital: Baby Bachchan to Aarrive Anytime
On Monday night at around 11.30 pm, Aishwarya Rai was admitted to the Seven Hills Hospital in Andheri, spokesperson of the Bachchan family told PTI. Aishwarya's father-in-law and legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan tweeted around 2am "A day of expectation .. but another day ! The Lord has his ways and they are most special .. we wait !!" Now The entire Bachchan family is awaiting the arrival of Ash and Abhishek’s baby. Bachchan has been booked four VVIP rooms on the fifth floor of the Seven Hills Hospital. The staff will be allotted special passes for security purpose. Aishwarya Rai admitted to seven hills hospital images, photos gallery, Aishwarya Rai before baby delivery pics, Aishwarya Rai at seven hills hospital stills, photos.
Work with the cool kids Culture is a weapon in 2011's hiring battle
We have a gym at work and i have felt an amazing refresh when I go gor a midday workout, but sadly it looks bad to leave work to workout during normal office hours, and the gym is too packed during lunch for my taste
New Disgusting Kids Game Could be a Best Seller
Done!

http://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html
What about the Unreal Tournament series? UT3 was released four years ago, and from what I can tell it still has decent graphics.
I disagree entirely. Here's why:

1. Social psychology shows us that, smaller, more focused groups perform better and have superior productivity to larger groups, which tend to become disorganized and derailed. (http://sgr.sagepub.com/content/40/2/247.abstract) Startups tend to have fewer employees (this is universal), and, even in hugely successful companies like Google, work is divided into highly productive nuclei of coordinated, amicable teams. This is a trend that repeats in very successful companies, and when startups pick up and start gaining more employees, though they decentralize, the "small team > big force" mentality remains.

2. If you outsource all the miscellaneous things a company needs to do to get a product out, you find that a) each of those outsourced functions is done on a much more quality level than if the company tried to do it all on its own, b) the company doing the outsourcing can focus more on its principal product. This actually spreads the wealth and improved productivity for every company involved. (http://www.industryweek.com/articles/breaking_the_rules__whe...)

I could see why Sean Parker would be a bit concerned, but, really, I think the explosion of new startups is fantastic for the overall quality of products.
Pam Anderson to Have Fun with The Virgin
Pam Anderson to Have Fun with The Virgin
When you think of Pam Anderson you probably think of Baywatch chest augmentation Playboy magazine PETA Home Development or celebrity sex videos.
It's got an SD card slot.
Code promo
Guide des réductions, code promo pour économiser jusqu'à 95% sur vos achats sur Internet. Obtenez souvent en plus les frais de port et des cadeaux gratuits.
We're using Matlab/Octave in the Stanford ML course, and it's certainly elegant but not necessarily comfortable for functional programmers. I'm reimplementing our assignments with Clojure/Incanter and am finding my code just as performant and even cleaner. In my opinion, the ML domain maps to Lisp code almost as well as AI as a whole.
While this doesn't help him get his time back, next time I'd encourage him to use rvm as the other posters have previously indicated — but instead of actually installing the massive XCode bundle (4GBs is a lot if you're using an SSD) I recommend he check out this 300MB bundle you can install which is just gcc and the other bare minimum tools you'd need to get ruby and the various gems working:

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

Also, one small gripe is that it sounds like the majority of his complaints were actually trying to get Python and Mercurial working. This isn't really the fault of OS X nor does it bog down most Rails devs working on OS X. Just some perspective!
Very nice approach for explaining the randomization! We can conclude one thing about the article, and the thing is that the perfect shuffle does not matter that much!
Hey OWS, Stop Complaining and Make Something
waste of time. review by captain obvious.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire Threatens Google More than Apple