skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html

(i) If you are an individual acting in your personal capacity, you may download and sync an App Store Product for personal, noncommercial use on any iOS Device you own or control. and it keeps going.

Fanboys coming out saying it isn't apple adding restrictions. What a joke. If I acquire an application through the app store then Apple restricts my usage.
Maybe more like a llama - still around but nowhere near as useful or in the same numbers. Llamas were like the cows of the Aztec era.
Is this right?

"Microsoft welcomes OSI open source to Win8 store, GPL blocked at the door"

link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/08/open_source_windows_...
"Kooky" is in the eye of the beholder.
This article has a valid message that basically boils down to "correlation does not imply causation." While the discussion centers around the problems with making decisions based off of aggregate statistics, the underlying theme that having a piece of data doesn't mean you know what caused it, boils down to the tried and true correlation/causation problem.

Unfortunately, I don't think the author teased these notions apart very well. He does suggest one solution to this problem, doing A/B tests. That's a fine solution where it works. However, as he mentioned it is hard to do outside of limited circumstances. At this point, more sophisticated tools are necessary.

Coming from a background in economics/econometrics, I'm acutely aware of the statistical difficulties that arise when you cannot perform controlled experiments. Here, the root of the issue seems to be endogeniety [1]. For example, in his discussion the 'Stickiness' of facebook he claims:

"Stickiness" is an aggregate number, it represents the result of the quality of the app. It's a result. It's not a cause.

I think this only gets us half way to the problem. Yes, to some extent it measures the quality of the app, but there is also a feedback loop, where stickiness increases the quality of the app. So, if you're trying to measure the effect of quality on stickiness, or vice versa, you need some way of disentangling this feedback loop.

These tools exist. If you're interested in estimating both effects jointly, you can use Two Staged Least Squares [2]. If you're just looking to estimate one side, you can use an instrumental variable approach [3]. These approaches are used all the time in economics, as the data involved is almost always messy.

I'm curious why I hear so much about A/B testing, but rarely hear about other statistical methods for assessing changes in usage patterns. Are they not being used? Am I simply looking in the wrong places? Or is A/B testing really sufficient in most cases?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogeneity_(economics)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_equations_model#Es...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable
Great! Now everybody who wants to have information about Node.js has to scroll a shit load down and search for an oddly placed menubar on the right side..

Because who would expect a menubar with vital information such as docs above the fold?

But at least it's more visually attractive then the last version.
"As for Cupertino, Apple’s Mac App Store has not seen the adoption that it would like, especially when compared to the iOS App Store."

Published the day that Apple announced the Mac App Store's 100 millionth download...
Women do have startups - they have run businesses for generations.

Women leave technology because of overt and subtle sexism and harassment; http://rachelappel.com/stats-data-and-answers-as-to-why-ther...

And there are plenty that get cut off in the "university" step of your funnel because they aren't equal there either: http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html#What%20the%20Committ...

That being said, the trend is moving towards women running both the business and the home, solo if need be: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-end-of...

Do those help?
Did you read what he said? The bad teachers just "teach the test", the good teachers are far better off without state provided standards and equal outcome mandates rendering the entire exercise pointless.
I actually like it. Threads for new version releases like that are good for discussing new features, there's often someone who is very familiar with the product and the problem domain who explains the relevant issues for the rest of us, sometimes there are interesting debates about the general problems and the future of the particular product and its competitors. These threads are often very interesting and informative and in my opinion they are much more valuable and educating than another thread denouncing patents and copyright as the ultimate evil or accusing something or someone of censorship or something like that.
New Roaming SIM Card Challenge ‘greedy’ Phone Giants’ Data Charges
Registration for PyCon 2012 Opened, Tutorials Announced
It may well be defamation. The courts should definitely look at it, after they examine the case of the NYT selling the U.S. a war. (Which one? All of them, actually.)

I know this sounds facile, but it does indicate the kind of journalism cases that the court is interested in.
Chris Dodd on his support for SOPA
> So many job adverts ask for creative people
> but on the job creativity is discouraged.

The book "disciplined minds" has a great phrase to capture this: assignable curiosity.

That's what they're looking for, not creativity.

http://www.disciplined-minds.com
The article title sensationalizes the sum of two separate findings, without arguing (except by anecdote) that the findings can be summed that way (or at all).

That is, "teachers don't like creative students" is not at all the same thing as "teachers report not liking disruptive behavior" + "creativity is positively correlated with disruptive behavior."

I strongly suspect many readers on HN:

- are creative

- were at times disruptive in school

- were nevertheless well-liked by the vast majority of their teachers
There's no way to determine if they are primarily tech workers in this group, as they seem to value their anonymity very much. (from their fb page)
>It's not just the app-store approach, it's that you cannot use the new APIs and UI system unless you are approved. Insane.

How is that worse than the app-store approach? If anything, it's a lot better because you can still run/develop programs like Steam. Try doing that on the app-store based iPad.
Tig: text-mode interface for git
The Web Design of Louis C.K.
brew install tig
cd $A_GIT_REPO
tig
Listen to that little voice inside
3 and 7 disqualify many fair and balanced "journalism" organizations as well.

Accept that the judge was BSing and this part of the decision makes much more sense.
This have been my intention, but the filesharing is becoming more and more frustrating with google. I've looked at third-party solutions to the missing webdav/drivemapping part of google docs but it doesnt seem good enough.

Also, I'll miss out on security policies which can be nice. As it looks now, we will go with a minimum active directory machine handling local filesharing and logins and gpos.

I hope I'll be able to keep away from sharepoint and exchange, but i'll just wait and see.
The Unix reader, Doug McIlroy's annotated guide to research Unix
CPU Wars Volume 1.0 - The Card Game
I know what you mean. Personally I can live in a much smaller apartment and I don't mind sharing a kitchen so much (unless the other guys are complete slops and never clean anything) but if I had a SO I wouldn't risk it.

Humans are such silly creatures...
Sticker Get You A Name In Market
I was that disruptive kid ... And I'll bet many others here were too. Now's our chance to have the last laugh!
Any kind of resources invested in Symbian (people, money, time, hardware, etc) could only have a limited return.

As you've said, it was only for phones, it was a pretty bad inflexible platform and improving it was very difficult.

However, Android and WebOS can help each other and improvements which end up going into the Linux kernel (as that's the "real OS") can be of use to ALL Linux devices.

After all, WebOS has a thinner stack above the Linux kernel. From what I've seen so far, it does a pretty good job at connecting the web to the Linux kernel and wrapping it nicely for the end user.

This means people will be able to customize it to their needs and provide patches upstream.
From what I have seen so far, WebOS is a lot easier to work with when it comes to making something cool for it. I've even thought of using it for some of my own projects and I am now confident that it will be the right stack to use for those projects.

This is what will allow a far more rapid expansion than any other OS on mobile devices and touch based appliances - flexibility.

That guy who wrote the article didn't have the slightest idea about what he was talking or what he wanted to say.
I've been using RSS for long and I don't see not using it in any near future. I use a combination of Brief (http://brief.mozdev.org/) and Google Reader.
What We Feed Our Kids in School (infographic)
Yes, I will let someone else experienced do this, I'll be buying it and setting requirements though, thats why I'm trying to get a feeling of the directions.
I guess what I'm saying is are they supposed to download and watch every single file?

No. But they could at least glance at the titles to make sure they're not firing off takedown requests for content that is quite obviously unrelated to the IP in question. Instead they're doing mindless searches for words that appear in their movie titles and submitting takedown requests automatically, which is pretty obviously an abusive practice.

If you want to use a legal mechanism to force a company remove content from a site, you should be required to put in at least the most basic good faith effort to make sure that you're actually forcing them to remove something that is your IP.

Sure, I get the whining about how it's a lot of work, but look...if enforcing your property rights is too much of a burden to be realistically achieved, then your business model is broken and you should find another type of work.
Great article, and to me it's further evidence of Lisp's greatness (a great influencer of Ruby). If your primitives are powerful enough, you should be able to build most of the language yourself from the ground up.

Wasn't it Paul Graham who said that Ruby is an acceptable Lisp?
The court is interested in cases that are brought to them. It's hard for anyone to have standing in suing the NYT for not doing enough due diligence leading up to the war(s).
2011 Predictions: Curt Hopkins
And once again, the "conservative" representatives in my state, Michelle Bachmann, John Klein, Erik Paulsen, and Chip Cravaak, vote against transparency and freedom, and the one "liberal" representative that everyone in my party was the most deathly afraid of, Keith Ellison (because he is a Muslim), votes on the side of liberty. More and more I just want to skip the Republican caucuses next year.
Only by chance, though, not by design. The ads you see don't represent the most relevant results; they represent the results provided by someone willing to pay for an ad. Given the choice, I'd prefer to see faster-loading pages and no extraneous paid listings rather than seeing a sea of ads in the hopes that one of them might prove relevant. And thanks to Adblock Plus, I have that choice.

Regarding companies who can do small-run circuit board fabrication, I highly recommend Screaming Circuits: http://www.screamingcircuits.com/ . They do both fabrication and assembly. Also check out Sunstone: http://www.sunstone.com/
Motorola Droid XYBOARD 8.2 hands-on
No, it's not right. The GPL cannot "infect" Windows, so it's actually allowed (although I suppose what MS is saying is that if you think your license can infect Windows then it's not allowed, so it all depends on your interpretation).
SF becomes first US city to top $10 minimum hourly wage
Look at the Bay Area concentration among those 17...
Fair enough. My main point is that we spend a lot of time trying to get the autopilot to function right, but it's not an easy problem where you can just throw a bunch of edge case detection code in. There are lots of physical control laws involved in a/c code that you can't break. Silly laws of physics type things.
Except for that 'tuple' after 'new', how is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397696.aspx different from what you want?
I don't think it surprises anyone, and it didn't require a 2-pages analysis.
After reading one line on her blog everybody realized she's either crazy or trying to scam.
But I don't think it justifies a $2M fine...
I can sympathize with the "downloaders" here. There is a lot of creative work that is somewhat in between things that I really like and things that I can not stand. Louis CK is one of these. I am watching his TV show most of the time, but it is nothing that I would miss if they stopped airing it or someone that I would pay to see perform live. I can understand people who download his stuff just because they have nothing better at the moment to "consume".
Observing gratuitous link-stuffing and content farming as such isn't editorializing.
Show HN: API for domain name suggestion, registration and whois info provider.
The GPL certainly is OSI approved.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

The article does not make any sense, really. Especially this line:

>“If your app includes FOSS, it must not cause any non-FOSS Microsoft software to become subject to the terms of any FOSS license.” Although Microsoft didn't name it, it's talking about GPL.

Why would a GPL'ed app cause a non-FOSS software made by MS to become subject to the GPL? Does the app using the WinRT API cause the API to go under GPL?

Distributing VLC(even if by MS) does not cause the Win32 API used heavily by VLC to go under the GPL.
Author here. Thanks for the comment. My intent wasn't really to tease apart much or even to shed any light on statistics, but just to persuade the reader that this is both a critical area for startups and an area where our intuition is for shit.

I'd like to hear more about this. Anybody else with applied knowledge out there?

Seems to me there are two problems here. The first is that we live in a world with lots of data yet little information. Understanding the limits of what we can know is important. (And I hope it didn't all come down to "correlation does not equal causation" for you. The Monty Hall problem is definitely not an example of that) The second thing is taking the pre-existing math and applying it in a useful manner. The second problem is probably much more interesting to this crowd, but I was concerned that most of us (myself included) don't recognize the first problem to the degree we should. The essay actually began as a rant against trusting too much in aggregate numbers, but at the end I was left with having to make a recommendation, and the best I could come up with -- the most practical solution that is easily explainable and implementable -- is A/B testing. Are there other options that people are using?
I'm surprised to learn Megaupload is a Kim dotcom, aka Kimble production.
Absolutely correct there about Facebook being the primary destination to find Facebook friends. Point I am trying to make is that Facebook being open to being indexed by Google also contributes to Google's growth.

Searching for most names on Google throws up first results from Facebook, which makes it one more reason why I'll search for a name on Google than the situation where Google would not have the results on the what is probably the most authoritative page for most people. Thus, in the latter case, creating a situation where I am forced to use Facebook at the cost of Google.

Edit: I think there is a popular zero sum perspective to these things, which is not necessarily true when you look at it closely.
Could you clarify GA for me? The only thing that comes to mind are "Genetic Algorithm" and "Google Analytics".
I attended German, Hungarian and US schools in K-12. In my experience, the US system is the weakest form of education and all the touchy-feely liberalism just results in a crappy education. I knew guys who were taking some idiot version of algebra in 11th grade, homework was doing multiplication on a calculator?

but you don't want them to be silent

Yes you do, most of the time.

what qualifies as 'correct' work?

Most of the time it's pretty obvious.

Btw. I agree with the OP.
First North American Website Launched at SLAC 20 Years Ago Today
I don't believe that journalists are shielded from defamation and libel laws either ... So the judge's ruling must just mean she's a lousy writer?
Precisely what I was thinking.
general assemly
The Department of Education first started 100 years previous, but then was demoted to part of the Department of the Interior, then Federal Security Agency, and then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. FEMA used to be part of Housing and Urban Development, and before then there were many different federal organizations involved in disaster management, with no clear leadership. DHS of course is made of a number of separate groups, including the Coast Guard.

In other words, it wasn't that there was nothing, but rather it was a reshuffling and reprioritizing of what was already there.
Link to the kickstarter project, http://kck.st/vvTBR9
Two new apps by Evernote: "food" and "hello"
> What services exactly does a label continue to provide, now that the internet has made it much easier for artists to self-promote? I presume that large portion of what the labels used to do can now be done very easily by the artists themselves.

Labels are VCs: they provide initial funding, connections, PR, and they ream artists. The difference between VCs and labels is that VCs make their money when the company goes public, whereas labels make their money by fleecing the artist directly and using hollywood accounting.
Great new piece on Inc by the extremely credible Josh Linkner. (He can write, too.)
> Isn't Skype — being P2P — already powered by the people?

Any closed-source computer program owned by Microsoft isn't exactly "powered by the people".
Technically this is true, but people are concerned about fairness. It seems unfair if the people who wrote the app are getting nothing while people who did "no work" are making money. (Of course, marketing is work and if it's possible to make money with just a little marketing, the upstream open source projects should be doing that themselves.)
Except that we'd be putting a price on opportunity... Sure maybe big companies would put up $100k for international talent, but anybody else that would want to immigrate for that price probably isn't doing it to work hard and make their lives better. Isn't that the appeal of the USA?

I agree we need to keep more talented foreigners in the country, but a $100k price tag isn't the right solution. How would an immigrant save up that money while studying in the US (or while in their former country)? If he/she drops out of college they wouldn't be able to stay on their student visa...

In fact, this author's suggesting we blindly accept anyone that can pay $100k. It seems to me this approach would attract more terrorists and/or criminals with those types of resources abroad than freelancing entrepreneurs.

Nevermind that this wouldn't solve the current illegal immigration problem either.
Windows Azure SDKs now Apache-licensed and on github
it's not a questionn of editorialisation; it's whether one person using bad-faith seo tactics can manipulate front-page results like cox did.
I totally agree, picking someone as a cofounder that will be taking leave for their newborn baby is insane, but I had 'lower' positions in mind when I was talking about flexibility.
Ironically, dutch mapmakers take the state to court because it intends to make mapping data public (http://www.z24.nl/economie/artikel_248410.z24/Protest_tegen_...), claiming it constitutes unfair competition.
Take care of your Co-founder more than your Girlfriend
Create - A new kind of web editing interface
A very simple Image format
What Does the #1 Spot on Hacker News Get You?
It's not obvious to me how this applies. Wouldn't most fraudulent vote counts also satisfy Benford's Law?
Legitimate? Unless it's in a text of law, it's not legitimate. I could argue that he's not a judge the same way.
Taco bell isn't Mexican food, it's Mexican food-product.
With very few exceptions, if you don't have a feed you don't survive past my first visit. I visit HN manually every day, and stackoverflow and my bank manually when I need to, and documentation sites. That's it. The web is much too large to visit sites manually, and every site is less than a drop in the bucket.
If anyone has any PyCon related questions, I'm always around to answer them!
Sketch N Draw Android App
android apps. sketch n draw app, android stuff, free android applications
I'm sure this topic is dead, but just so you know, kernel debugging for windows uses named pipes at least when VMware is involved. .NET added support for named pipes in release 3.5. Mac OS X seems to fully support pipes, too. I suspect pipes are used, but transparently by most programs that use them.
I find it intriguing that last time Any.DO was on HN [1], the feedback was pretty bad. Granted, it seemed as if the thread was deliberately bumped up.

However, the fact that Any.DO is doing very well with their distribution does mean something - like it or not. And when everyone calls them a 'generic' to-do app that will flop, it just looks like the criticism is superficial.

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3308225 (dead)
I've been telecommuting for a decade now. Before that, I grew up on a farm where everyone I was surrounded with also worked from home. Working in an office, or other away-from-home location, is a very strange concept to me.

With that said, it seems like this is something that is easily sorted by the market. If top talent want to work from remote locations, top talent will make telecommuting-friendly businesses rise to hire even more workers.

If the on-site businesses hiring B and C players, for lack of a better description, are still winning in the marketplace, perhaps it is the telecommuting that is the downfall?
Is it possible to build a comparatively fast untyped lambda calculus machine?
Side note: That site is incredibly well designed. The color scheme is aesthetically pleasing as well as fits the theme (yes, ladies=pink themed. get over it). The navigation is easy to understand and use. The text is well organized, easy to read, and well written. It is elegant in its simplicity yet completely functional. Also, another huge plus is that the social links are re-designed to fit the color scheme and are much less obnoxious (in fact not obnoxious at all).

I know this is probably totally off topic but thought it was interesting enough to mention. Kudos to the developer.
Modern Warfare 3 tops $1 bil in 16 days
Point granted, though it is also true that financial investors are interested in bringing cases. I'm still left with a bad taste in my mouth; maybe it's a gut reaction to side with the weaker party.

Or perhaps I'm just being contrarian.
IPad 3 with the Eyes of Japanese Journalists
Passions for iPhone of new generation have faded, and it’s quite a long time till new release. Apple TV is discussed a bit more actively, but also just as rumours from unverified sources. The boldest speculations are expressed concerning the forthcoming launch of iPad 3, which is expected already in spring 2012.
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find out about RF battle over the next-gen remotes!
Customer Development and Inbound Marketing in Practice: The Story of Snapshot
Hey, that's my cousin! He's working at Pixar now actually. Check out sintel on youtube if you want to see some of his other work.
Odds are 1 in 5 for undergraduate CSE applicants at the University of Washington