skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why reviews from Tech Blogger doesn't matter
Why reviews from Tech Blogger doesn't matter to me

OK. I am a sucker for new gadgets. Every new gadget that I am really excited about gets released, I am literally crawling the web for reviews from the best tech blogger out there. After reading their reviews, I do determine if I should go to the store and check out the item before making that impulse decision to buy that gadget. At times, it is hard to get a feel of the gadget as it is sold online and you have to go by on the face value. After following the process religiously for quiet sometime, I have come to a point where I believe that the blogger, who have been reviewing the gadgets for quite a long time, never look that gadget from a user perspective, but from their own vision of what that gadget should have been.

After reading reviews and that too tons of reviews from an expert, you kind of get what the expectation of the blogger was when he was reviewing the gadget. It shows in his reviews. The sad part is that a user who has followed the blogger/reviewer for quite some time gets it and can easily identify where the reviewer is coming from. Also, today the hype surrounding a product doesn’t help. Every new tablet released that makes some noise is an “iPad killer”. Every new phone that gets released is the “mothership” phone.

Recently, I looked at the Kindle Fire and was blown away by what a device that is selling 66% cheaper than iPad can do. It is by no means an iPad killer. For me, It doesn’t even compete with an iPad in any shape of form. iPad is in its own league and I don’t see any tablet that can come close to what it offers from an user experience perspective. The blogger across the globe (Silicon Valley to be precise …that’s where most noise comes from) started ranting about the device. Most blogger, even Walt Mossberg, was critical on how the page turn on the books was a little slower than the page turn on iPad’s iBooks.

But what Kindle Fire device does is pretty simple. You buy a book reader that does few more tricks then a standard 100$ book reader does. It does videos, music, browser, apps and read books. It has limited apps from amazon’s app store that you can load for casual gaming and it costs 200$. It has Facebook and Twitter and has a great browser to get around the web. Also amazon has done a smart thing by not really locking down the device.

Obviously, a normal user would never go that route to do a “one-click” root and put an android market on it or Gmail on it. Yet, for 200$ it does satisfy what 80% of iPad owners use their iPad for. For me, it was clear Amazon created this tablet so that a user can buy products from Amazon. They don’t care about Android OS not being updated or it not being the latest OS. It really doesn’t matter to them as long as they keep that cost to less than $200 and am pretty sure, with kindle Fire 2.0 and 8.9 Kindle in the near horizon, that $200 tablet would get to $140 with living social ads!

Coming back to bloggers – I still read their reviews, but I have come to a place, where I can judge with much clarity about a product.
Toy Travels Around Using Google Maps
IOS App Review: vlock
Tagstand (YC S11)/Isobar  NFC Hackathon, Nov 30
You do not earn the right to lead by perfecting the art of following.
Sharing information in today's world
Sharing Information

When was the last time we did something great and not shared that information on social networking sites? Be it a photo or video of your kids, a picture of yourself, dogs, nature or link from a website, or videos from YouTube or Vimeo and not shared that information on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Renren, Kaixin01 or 51.com?
OK. I will take that question a little further.

When was the last time you thought about sharing the picture/video/link even before you took that action? How many of you thought about checking Facebook or other social site to see if someone has “like” your picture or your post and if yes, how many of them commented it?

I think we know the answer. I am thinking of posting this article on my blog and also thinking about putting it on Twitter and Google+ and making sure it’s public.

I understand that human beings are a social in nature and we have been sharing information from our inception. I also understand that by sharing, one really opens up about themselves to a whole new world of information.
It still amazes me how fast we have come to the concept of sharing the most intimate details about one’s life without any inhibitions. Your “Thoughts” . Be it a song, a picture or the fact that we are sharing minute details of our life, which few years back were considered TMI are now a part of sharing and no one seems to object it. Every new feature rolled in by Facebook as default or any other social network sites, pushes that boundary an inch further. There are certain things which we think today cannot be shared on these social networking sites. For e.g. my salary, my 401(K) investments and so on; but seriously, how close we are to that fact that we are living in a naked community where sharing comes first, and then the after thoughts of sharing?
I've generally come to the conclusion that open sourcing tangential software is a good cultural/social practice. Adopted broadly, it represents a gigantic time-savings for our industry, allowing us to collectively push forward to other more interesting problems than writing company-specific ci server/build system/source control system, etc.

+1, GitHub.
I'm currently debating whether to release the source to one of my dead projects, so the reasoning in this article is quite intriguing.
Yes, there's been tons of YT interfaces over the years, but for some reason I always go back to youtube.com. I didn't know about downloading the mp3. I think that'd be against YT's terms, although I would like to be able to access a vid's soundtrack and not be forced to dl the video.

The innovation is really about labeling YT vids with the correct metadata automatically, rather than manually. In fact, YT should be connecting its music and artists to Musicbrainz already upon upload. It's about connecting artists and songs on yt to their corresponding pages on MB,

In effect, there could be a browser plugin that placed a play button next to each song here that gets the right song every time: http://musicbrainz.org/release/8d0bc6d4-8700-44e8-90c8-b86c2... - you could also bookmark songs for your collection.

YT must be already catalogging its music to some extent to produce artist pages like this: http://www.youtube.com/artist/Pearl_Jam

So you could take your local mp3 collection, tag it, save as a playlist, delete all the files and then access all the music on site from YT via the playlist.

I think the best way to operate such a system without YT involvement would be to have a browser plugin that fingerprints and tags YT music vids as they're played in the browser, there'd have to be some interaction, but as a distributed effort, you'd gradually build up a yt-mb database.
Let me get this straight: It's basically a microcontroller timed 144?

Can anyone explain to a nonhardware geek?
Lobbying is a particular kind of speech directed at lawmakers. It is difficult to imagine what kind of law can ban lobbying without having some sort of even worse unanticipated side effects.

It's a category error to think of "lobbying" as a distinct thing in itself that could somehow be banned, unfortunately.
Meet Rezero, the dancing ballbot
I'm in Technology Hell
How To Bootstrap Your Business - Entrepreneur Magazine
What is the best way for someone who has been in a reasonably successful corporate job for about 10 years to get into this 'on the road' sort of consultancy. I'd love to do it, but the idea of just quitting work scares me - I've no doubt I am good enough to be a consultant in my area of expertise (which is Oracle databases), but knowing where to start is the issue. I do blog a bit, and have experimented with a few app ideas, but haven't managed to get anything serious off the ground as yet!
Agreed, almost as bad as the blank page used by some sites (like Google+ posts). In this case the workaround was the same.

In Firefox I was able to get scrolling by disabling the page style (View->Page Style->No Style). I'd imagine there's something similar in Opera.
No, I am saying that Israel runs a two tiered system of rights in the West Bank, one for Jewish Israeli settlers and one for the non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs. I believe it is wrong. Do you feel it is justified?
I think one of the main flaws in our system of government is that Congress is expected to regulate themselves. And I don't see any plausible scenario that would encourage them to outlaw a large chunk of their paycheck. Perhaps a large group of people suing several senate and house members to get a supreme court ruling? The constitution was written in a pre-industrial world where no large businesses existed yet, so it's not our founding fathers' faults, but now we're kind of stuck with an easily corruptible legislative branch.
I'm Linus as well: http://www.githire.com/user/Diablo-D3
Visualize Success if You Want to Fail
Which is why people in your position latch onto phrases like class warfare. As long as you can show one member of the class who doesn't participate you act like you've disproved the concept in general.

If you need a cite for every sweet deal lobbyists have sought just to agree that the lobbying class is getting a sweeter deal than the rest of us, you're being intentionally obtuse.
RIM Shows Off PlayBook Email And Calendar Apps
What do you think of Ireland's Propeller Seed Acceleration Fund?
The forthcoming book from the same author, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite (which is what led to the submitted article), also looks practical for HN readers.

http://www.amazon.com/Makes-Brain-Happy-Should-Opposite/dp/1...
This is awesome. Too bad I am on the east coast. Can you maybe video tape the whole thing and make each day available online?
Reading on, "Open sourcing it would mean thousands of people worldwide could use it to build interesting Git tools, creating an even more vibrant Git ecosystem."

Awesome Git bindings to Ruby are critical to the functionality of Github, but a vibrant Git ecosystem is essential to its success. Business value trumps technical implementation.

In fact, Tom also mentions the libgit2 library that Github is working on, and may even replace some of what they use Grit for today.

Another point: Zurb recently open-sourced their CSS/JS framework that they use to build all their client sites/apps with. They have spent years making it awesome. It's a major part of the material goods that they hand over at the delivery of a project. After it being opened up on Gitub, they've seen lots of great feedback, bug fixes and enhancements. I'd also bet they've seen an increase in new clients. What they wrote is awesome and now they are known to many more potential customers as being the people who know what they are doing.

Business value trumps technical implementation.
Not sure what to buy that techie in your life? Check out these ideas
That's actually a tough one! There are a lot of books about scalability (such as the O'Reilly ones, which I've read), but they don't really tell you what you probably need to know right now.

Mostly it's technology dependent...read up on caching, if you haven't already. Memcached or Redis can make a huge difference in performance.

If you let us know your software stack I'm sure there will be an expert to chime in and let you know the simplest hack to get things responding faster right now.
Tecnolog�a M�vil en el �rea de Turismo
Research paper
Well-written research paper can secure your college record if you get reliable help at a trusted website.
Sometime I wonder if it is possible to open source everything without becoming some sort of service company, like Redhat.

The only example I can think of is makerbot industries in which their core technologies are open source.
Even though I know I know a bit of Ruby and Rails, I'd love to take your course. Unfortunately, I live in Philadelphia, and I've been looking for Junior Rails Developer job for the past 5 months and haven't even got offered an interview. I'm considering putting on my resume willing to work for peanuts, because I'm passionate about working in a startup environment.
If they are on the box and you don't have your logs offloaded, they can at the very least destroy the logs, and barring your complicated key updating system which would itself require lots of careful review, probably forge anything they want. But destruction is a pretty useful capability itself.

If the logs are being offloaded off the system, then you don't need any of this either because they are already being put somewhere the hacker can't touch. (Of course if they hack that system then you're in real trouble, but that's just moving the problem around; ultimately if your hacker owns everything, you've really, really lost.)

There's no inbetween state where all this complexity solves any problem. Either you've got off-box storage and you don't need it, or you don't and you've already lost if a hacker gets root.
You don't, if you're smart.

http://chip.typepad.com/weblog/2011/08/why-cassandra-is-unfi...
Hmm, I graduated from college before the REALLY old days were over, apparently. :)

I don't mean to glorify USENET. The web based forums brought many cool new features -- you could post images that worked reliably, the Slashdot-style moderation stuff was a big boon, etc. I just meant to point out that the internet moves in cycles, and those cycles seem to lead towards newer technology and more centralized control.
Okay, what else was in it? And let's leave things like decals and paint off the list.
I'm an aficionado as far as languages go. They need to really explain the motivations in more detail.
Abbreviated version:

(1) One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys (running instances, typically including a production and one or more staging sites)

(2) Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies (e.g. GEMFILE for ruby)

(3) Store config in the environment NOT code, "A litmus test for whether an app has all config correctly factored out of the code is whether the codebase could be made open source at any moment, without compromising any credentials."

(4) Treat any service the app consumes over the network as attached resources, a 12-factor app "should be able to swap out a local MySQL database with one managed by a third party (such as Amazon RDS) without any changes to the app’s code."

(5) Strictly separate build, release, and run stages.

(6) Execute the app as one or more stateless processes. "The twelve-factor app never assumes that anything cached in memory or on disk will be available on a future request or job."

(7) Export services via port binding.
"The twelve-factor app is completely self-contained and does not rely on runtime injection of a webserver into the execution environment to create a web-facing service. The web app exports HTTP as a service by binding to a port, and listening to requests coming in on that port."

(8) Scale out via the process model.
"processes are a first class citizen... the share-nothing, horizontally partitionable nature of twelve-factor app processes means that adding more concurrency is a simple and reliable operation."

(9) Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown.
"Twelve-factor app’s processes are disposable... should strive to minimize startup time...shut down gracefully when they receive a SIGTERM signal from the process manager...should also be robust against sudden death"

(10) Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible.
"Twelve-factor app is designed for continuous deployment by keeping the gap between development and production small... resist[ing] the urge to use different backing services between development and production"

(11) Treat logs as event streams.
Twelve-factor app "never concerns itself with routing or storage of its output stream"

(12) Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes.
So...

Are these Bulldozers really as bad as I keep reading about?

A friend of mine who is very knowledgeable when it comes to hardware insists that the issues are being overblown, and that if you get the correct configuration of hardware (ram/mobo/etc) along with the right overclocking setup, these procs are just as good, as well as more future-proof. He says most benchmarking tests are more single-threaded examples of load, which the Bulldozer obviously performs worse with, despite this being a more realistic representation of the kind of load you'd find in your average desktop, especially when it comes to gaming.

Thoughts?
Amazing Kickstarter Project Twine: Cheap and Easy Internet of Things
I did the same here. I learned HTML/CSS from zero (im a mechanichal engineer).

My last page using Joomla two years later: http://guali.com.mx
Please explain to me how to type the fraction (a^2+b^2-c^2)/(2ab), which is the simple $\frac{a^2+b^2-c^2}{2ab}$ in TeX, so that the numerator appears above the denominator in HTML. Or any non-TeX layout.
Emociones y sentimientos.
Non-terminating compilation in Java
It would be in the US. What do you have to say about blakdawg's comment? Like he points out we will make it clear to buyers that we are a value added re-seller.
I have a question for the OP... Why the MIT licence, and not putting your code in the public domain? Is it the liability issues, or the attribution, or something else?

I mainly pose this question because I am choosing a licence for my projects, either the MIT/Apache licence, or public domain.
I agree, but I feel that this is part of a bigger problem - bugs are not user-friendly, but sometimes bringing in user-friendly features - like the newer, more intuitive/well-rounded version of a package - introduced bugs, which are not helpful to the user at all.

I don't feel that this is at all an artifact of distribution niches. Rather, this is a universal phenomenon of software engineering: every change (including bugfixes!) tends to introduce bugs. While bugfix changes usually (though, as many readers will know, not always) reduce the total bugginess of your product, most other changes tend to increase bugginess. So there's an inherent trade-off between on the one hand having a short development cycle, a good (for some definition of good) feature set and quick latency between the design and implementation stages, all of which can be used to make a product more user-friendly; and on the other hand having no bugs, which is also a big contributer to user-friendliness.

tl;dr: Ubuntu's customized design and up-to-date packages are not orthogonal to its bugginess; Debian's years-long testing and integration process is not orthogonal to its years-old package selection.
Why can't the labels just send mass DMCA takedown letters? Are users really uploading songs faster than they can be taken down?
You don't have any contact information listed
Love the guy and his passion for its chips, but this 144-computer chip looks like a solution in search of a problem:
what is trying to solve? How's the inter-core communication handled? On the other hand, creating weird chips like these, just because you can, is awesome and stimulating a hacker's mind.
makerbot has the distinct advantage of having open-sourced a (largely) physical product. For me at least, paying them for the bits and pieces to put their printer together would be an order of magnitude less effort than compiling and installing some software downloaded from the internet. They still offer a valuable service in manufacturing parts, and hence don't have to just sell support to make a living.
Just a simple difference I know: Do you want to force users of your code to attribute the code to yourself? Then pick MIT/Apache
This has nothing to do with a 'messy codebase'; a minimalist LaTeX installation would run perfectly well on iOS if it wasn't for the arbitrary rules that Apple imposes upon iOS.

If you want to use a 'walled garden' device like an iPad, you can't really complain when you run into artificial limitations.
I discussed this very idea with @bendycode this past summer. Kudos to you kicking it off and best of luck!

Here are some things we discussed are important for RoR devs to know. ymmv.

Effective pairing skills
Mastery of the CLI
Experience deploying to Heroku & non-heroku hosts
Git knowledge
Spec tests
Feature tests
Haml/SASS
Ajax UX/Jquery
Configuration Management
Twitter Oauth
Twitter API
Facebook Oauth
Devise & User login/sessions
File uploads and S3 storage
DelayedJob
Cron tasks
Pagination
Caching
Search Index (eg: Solr, Sphinx, etc)
API consumption
API creation/support
You seem to state that Israel not annexing the West Bank is a desirable thing from the perspective of Palestinian Arabs.

Actually real annexation is desirable. Annexing the West Bank and incorporating its Arab residents into Israel proper (the Jewish settler residents of the West Bank are already considered Israeli) would be a just solution to the issue.

Then everyone would be equal under the law and the Palestinians would have a say over the future. Many of them would like to return to their homes that they left 1948:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus

I think that either there is a two-state solution or a one-state solution (which can be annexation if you like) is okay. But the dual system of rights where Jewish settlers are privileged and non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs are under military rule is not something a modern Western state should be justifying to itself or others, and it something that people like yourself shouldn't have to wrap themselves in knots trying to "explain".
Maybe you don't mean it, but I also hear a contemptuous tone when you describe CBT as "funning" your way out of depression, or when you call Bill's CBT an enjoyable hobby.

(CBT is an enjoyable hobby, I still get mileage out of rereading Seligman's Learned Optimism (which is CBT based). But, being condescending and being factually accurate are not mutually exclusive either.)
In my case, I tend to travel for rock climbing or surfing, and it follows that if you show up at a world class climbing destination you'll naturally find that a lot of other travelling climbers have beaten you there are are also staying for the season.

After a few years of chasing rocks around the world, you start to notice that you keep running into the same people time and again. Even if you never actually talked to them when you were both on the beach in Thailand a few years back, and only said hi when camped at Ceuse (Southern France) last summer, by the time you run into them again in Kentucky you might as well introduce yourself because you'll certainly be seeing them again some time.

Over time, you tend to gather lots of friends this way. And when you come back to spend another winter on the beach in Thailand you can guarantee that at least a few old friends will be there as well.

Beyond that, most countries tend to have a few spots that attract travelers. Next time you talk to somebody who's been to Peru, ask where they went. They'll answer Lima, Huacachina, Nazca, Arequipa, Puno, and Cusco. In that order. Go to any of those places, find a comfy looking bar, walk up to a table full of scruffy looking people and ask where they're from. Next thing you know you'll have a half dozen new friends and a bunch of good stories. And if you ever go to China, you'll probably run into one of them at a similarly comfy bar in Yangshuo.
I would be willing to pay for something like this.
APRESS offering every eBook for $15 on CyberMonday
the site is practically at a standstill now! thanks for using it.

I'll be moving it to a better machine tomorrow. Should I leave it up in the meantime (even though super slow) or put up a splash page eg. "come back soon"?

anyone have any ideas/preferences?
Age dynamics in scientific creativity (paywalled)
I believe that the person you are responding to was being sarcastic.
I think the only thing Chuck is missing is a few 20-somethings hackers, bent on solving an 'impossible' problem with his chips.
Can you stream your teaching or record and post it later?