skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can we put the "design = looks pretty" chestnut to bed already?

Thinking a technical co-founder is going to bring the same skillset as a design co-founder, plus coding, is unrealistic as best.
Latest Version (iOS Support)
Hmm ... is this still an issue with dual core Android phones ? I have two Android phones, Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Nexus and both are as smooth as butter. Both feel faster than my first gen Ipad.
As the article says, Accounting rules say inventories are to be valued at the “lowest of cost or market”, not price.

The scandal is that any company would have over one year of inventory in the modern just-in-time manufacturing age.
Charles Stross has pointed out that interstellar travel is probably prohibitively expensive, so any marks left by other civilizations might have been purely local. How many marks have we left? You'd have to do a pretty thorough search of the other planets and moons to find our various landers - hell, it wasn't until last year that anyone took recent pictures of the American moon landing sight, right? A Japanese satellite, if I remember correctly.

Here's a gedankenexperiment for you. Hire a pilot to fly you from Dallas to El Paso. As you're flying over the panhandle, jump out with a parachute. What are the odds that you'll see signs of civilization? I've made that drive before, and if it weren't for the road that I was on, I'd have sworn the planet didn't even have any vertebrates on it.

Obviously my argument is founded on a current understanding of physics, and I'd love to sound like an idiot tomorrow with the invention of cheap interstellar flight and an ansible.
Whentotweet.com - Twitter analytics for the masses
Writing programs that prove proofs is fun.
Thanks for the link! I remember reading that study somewhere. A salient part of the article:

"This is what economists call "the commuting paradox." Most people travel long distances with the idea that they'll accept the burden for something better, be it a house, salary, or school. They presume the trade-off is worth the agony. But studies show that commuters are on average much less satisfied with their lives than noncommuters. A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, say economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich's Institute for Empirical Research in Economics. People usually overestimate the value of the things they'll obtain by commuting -- more money, more material goods, more prestige -- and underestimate the benefit of what they are losing: social connections, hobbies, and health. "Commuting is a stress that doesn't pay off," says Stutzer."
You do realize that not all of India, especially its politicians, are involved in call center activities, correct? I hope you also realize that life in India doesn't revolve around call centers, even though that's the most contact with India many westerners have.
http://linkpeek.com/screenshot-news-and-updates

LinkPeek.com Apology

Mon Dec 5 16:59:32 EST 2011

I am truly sorry for the grotesque and disgusting imagery posted on our site this morning.

I left the "most recent" image on the website even though multiple people warned me about the possible misuse. I blame only myself.

I lost my lunch today. My nerves are all messed up. I have worked on the LinkPeek software for the past 6 months.

The thought that LinkPeek was used as a weapon against my peers makes me sick.

I feel exploited, I feel embarrassed, I feel ashamed and I have only myself to blame. This is a nightmare and I have no way to fix it.

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life; Today is the worse day of my life.

I don't expect many will read this, but truly I am sorry.

-Russell
Agreed.

And thanks! Looks like you have a cool operation running, with some similarities to ours. How long have you been doing it?
Facebook-driven start-up Peazie snares Adventure Capital funding
Fruit Ninja app maker joins $3 million Government scheme
I disagree here based on interacting with someone who owns an ipad v1. When this person tried out my samsung honeycomb tablet, she thought it was slower "computer" that hers, even though she's doesn't know the specs of my "dual-core" honeycomb tablet.
Hotmail co-founder unveils new venture
LuaJIT is written with security in mind. LuaJIT 2.x had permanent write-protection enabled for the generated machine code in the first release, i.e. before anyone else did so.

I do not see how maintainability could somehow have an inverse relation to the engine speed. IMHO the LuaJIT code base is significantly more maintainable than the Mozilla code base.

Related: Fate of Unladen Swallow and TraceMonkey predicted about two years ago, in February 2010: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/azibq/a_rant_ab...
Fair enough. In college, my Calculus II course, taught by a different professor, was terrible. To the credit of the department and administration, they did not keep her around (I forget her formal title, but she was essentially on trial).

I had some good, dedicated and effective high school teachers (although they were perhaps the minority). Unfortunately, as I recall and/or experienced it, the math department was not particularly strong.
Seems to me that behaving ethically would solve a lot of problems (or at least not cause them in the first place).

This guy pretty much just wrote the lawsuit for his opposition.
I'd normally agree, but this has touched on my gripe with Siri from the moment that it was announced - Apple has the best marketing team on the planet, and they're selling people a product that they can't deliver. Siri really isn't a super AI. It's not a Star Trek computer, able to infer intent and reason enough to fill in the gaps in what you didn't say, and respond in perfectly-inflected English, yet that's what Apple's marketers are playing it up as. This is immediately obvious in the anthromorphization of Siri as "she" - a person, a gendered, thinking entity.

There was an awful lot of brouhaha over the past week or so about Siri being "anti-feminist" because it failed to produce results for certain womens' health terms, and because it fails to understand terms in colloquial/contextual senses, rather than in literal senses. The reason this was even an issue is because people have believed that they're being sold a thinking assistant, so failures to locate politicized terms are viewed as intentional censorship rather technological failure. One person writing about it was offended that Siri couldn't determine context for a given query despite her "obviously female voice". Where did that expectation come from?

We, as technologists, understand that Siri is a voice recognition system married to a search engine and integrated with the phone's calendar system. The vast majority of the population doesn't. They expect it's just "Apple magic" that's going to sell them what they've been watching on Star Trek and CSI for the last 20 years. The product doesn't live up to that - and it can't. I don't think it's wrong for people to be disappointed by it. The fault - and triumph - lies with Apple's marketing department. They've done a bang-up job selling the feature.

By comparison, Android's voice recognition performs pretty similarly to Siri in terms of practical usage, but it's neither hyped by the marketers, nor made into the crux of the marketing campaign for various Android phones. The result is that people don't buy Android for voice recognition features, and they aren't disappointed when the voice recognition features don't work flawlessly.

Apple's marketing department could sell ice to an eskimo. Doesn't mean the eskimo shouldn't be disappointed after the fact.
Data.gov to be Open Sourced for World-Wide Deployment
I also did a write up on this called "Mapping the monkeysphere" that you may find helpful: http://blog.cdleary.com/2011/06/mapping-the-monkeysphere/
The obvious answer is to see if you can get the data from somewhere else. If its proprietary information to their app, then you may be stuck there. If that's the case, I'd ask yourself whether its something you should really build. Let's assume you do, since it would be cool, and you're happy making it a non-commercial product to be able to keep using the API—if you can add other features/connections/data sources that make a commercial offering compelling and less dependent on a single source of information that in all likelihood will want to cut you off, then you may be able to make it work, and might be an attractive acquisition for the company whose data you want to use.

But i'd make sure you don't invest too terribly much in the effort. As Fred Wilson has pointed out, never fill holes in someone else's product.
Thanks very much for this link. I find these tests really interesting. I work as a Maths teacher in the UK. The 8th Grade Maths test, question 34, caused a lot of debate in the evening Maths class I have just taught (we had some of the questions up on the projector as a novelty).

How old would most 8th Grade students be? And how long would they have to complete the test?

Multiple choice questions are not widely used within the exam system in the UK. There are 'Skills for Life' qualifications aimed at adults who missed out at school in Literacy and Numeracy that are MCQ based. The link below will take you to some practice tests (both pdf paper based and tests designed to be completed on screen). What do you think of those?

http://www.move-on.org.uk/practicetestsResults.asp
How about "mother", "no" sounding so similar in multitude of completely different languages?

How many languages are we talking about. The Indo-European languages cover most of Eurasia excluding the far east. They are similar because they are related.

I imagine other large language families on other continents are also related. How similar are "mother" and "no" or "yes" in languages which share no relation? Aboriginal and Spanish? Basque and Japanese? Bantu and Inuit? The click language of the bushmen and Mandarin Chinese? Etc..
I have it working pretty well on a nexus s, with the echo canceler enabled, and the auto detect option.

Also, talkatone is supposedly coming out with an android alpha in the next 7-10 days.
or you could make the small changes that would allow your game to be marketed and displayed in real outlets.
Perhaps you're not looking for an explanation as to why people rejected this game, but for the sake of being obvious you can sum it up in one word: immature.

This is soon to be 2012. Your proposition is from a time long since passed probably in the Reagan-Thatcher years, times and attitudes have moved on. It's no longer acceptable to promote this kind of lifestyle, and that's pretty much why "everyone" has rejected this.

You probably will sell out of your 2000 copies, but all I can say is learn why people rejected this and move on. You clearly have some skill, but no humility.

Best of luck with your next project, I hope it's more mature.
Haha, we would never release such a tool. :)

Since we didn't submit the link we had no say over the title.
Maybe the answer to the Fermi paradox is somehow "the singularity". As an intelligent species arises, the amount of time between the emergence of intelligence and a singularity that utterly transforms it into something we would never detect is a blink of the eye geologically. So quickly that it's as if they don't exist to each other.
The innovation is making them actually worth buying.
Easy Java Persistence (EJP) Vs. Hibernate/JPA - EJP Is A Whole Lot Faster
Great idea. My one issue with it is that it seems kind of difficult to use. Ideally, using this would consist of passing the files I wanted a style guide generated for to KSS and it would take care of the rest.

I'm definitely going to keep my eye on this project over the next few weeks. Something like this is badly needed and I can't wait to see where KSS goes.
Has anybody used this and compared it to LiveView?

http://www.zambetti.com/projects/liveview/
>I laughed to think that HUMAN'S analysis of whether a dolphin is intelligent is whether WE can understand their language.

>Using that logic, it seems my dog is more intelligent than me: He can understand some of my language as well as his own, whereas I can only understand my own.

That's a false equivalence, as well as untrue.

It takes intentional effort on our part for a dog to learn even a small subset of our vocabulary. When dogs learn our language, they only learn the few words that we make an effort to teach them, and these typically correspond directly to an action we demand of them in exchange for a reward. Dogs cannot pass this knowledge amongst themselves, each dog has to be taught by a human individually.

Dogs have made no specific effort to teach me, at least none that they managed to make recognizable to me, yet I can tell when they are excited, hurt, angry, &c, but mostly because a subset of body language and vocal attitude are instinctive or socially universal to most mammals (shouting and sharp poses convey aggression, for example).

I believe I understand more dog body language than dogs understand human body language. There is no human equivalent of a wagging tail, yet I understand that. There is no dog equivalent of a pointing finger, and they do not understand it: dogs will look at your finger instead of where you point.
Our initial thought was to focus on consumer demographic statistics for small/med size companies to use when evaluating consumer habits and trends. Currently, that information is all over the place in different reports costing up to $5K a piece. We were thinking about a freemium/subscription model and open the market to businesses that don't necessarily want to spend $5K on one report; statistics like "29% of college students in the U.S. own smartphones".

Wolfram Alpha is more of a computational search engine than a stat search engine, so IMO the overlap is minimal.

Good idea to talk to B-School students; that's definitely a segment of the market that might be interested in something like this.
Here's where the python one above (as well as a different haskell version) lives now: https://github.com/ahupp/bktree
"The rest 199 do not understand why a bitcount of 1's complement of bitwise XOR of two variables would give you the number of similar bits in corresponding positions in both variables"

That seems like a pretty skewed test of what makes someone a "real engineer".
I'm not sure how you can "safely say ... [he] knows precisely what he's talking about" while admitting "not knowing the meaning." I think perceiving it as "breeding confidence" is precisely the reason why many business situations where experts' actions must be managed/approved by non-experts result in a flood of impressive-sounding jargon.

The deluge of specificity creates a posture of expertise; however,without knowing what the specifics mean you can't possibly evaluate it for truth. There are many equally impressively structured but semantically ridiculous statements, such as "We host our servers on NLTK, serving up EC2 to a browser frontend running varnish and memcached."
Intelligence And Productivity Are Correlated?
Just a reminder that emails are public, everyone you dont want reading them will see it. Unless you are the government with the torture emails which were accidentally deleted.
To offload the SSL processing.
I agree, I was sort of mocking the term 'web scale' as a joke. At this point we wouldn't be able to scale automatically but with some reasonable metrics we could plan capacity accordingly.
Making 2012 plans: mozilla + web makers
When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners?
One of the things that I've done for iOS developers is provide something called "WebCycript": a reasonably seamless way for you to just <script language="text/cycript"> in an HTML document being rendered (in this case, on the lock screen, to allow for easy-to-make lock screen widgets), and then have access to Objective-C APIs (even using Objective-C syntax; cycript.org for some example code; and I now wish I had finished putting up the new fancier website I was working on a few weeks ago ;P). If I supported something like this on desktop systems (along with the other arguably-simpler things, such as the embeddable browser), would that be valuable help for this problem space?
Can anyone explain exactly why this is sinister? If the label is aware of the price they're selling the license at and buying the data, where is the unfair deception?
Ruby is actually incredibly beautiful. I used to think Python was beautifully concise and minimalist till I started playing with Ruby.

I don't use Rails, though. But I do write and use Ruby for hundreds of everyday data and text manipulation tasks. Its also great fun for sucking data from a database and slicing and dicing it into a dozen different formats really quickly.

I love its natural language constructs. They're incredibly productive.

Python is like that, too but I find myself drawn to Ruby. It is fun in itself and it does make drudge-programming fun again.
> If we were talking about music, would you let me get away with saying "The average student doesn't like music, in any form whatsoever"?

This is kind of a ridiculous comparison. As you said, "Music is something human beings just like. We're wired to like it." On the other hand, we are not wired to like math. We don't go to math concerts. We don't listen to math when we drive. We don't typically do math in the shower.

And sure, some people feel that math "can resonate in the soul", but most do not. We certainly don't teach people to feel that way about music. On what basis do you claim we can teach them to feel that way about math?
I would argue "be careful whom you send emails to" as well. While drivingmenuts' comment about behaving ethically might apply in this case, sometimes you might think you're behaving ethically and it's only later than you realize that, while operating in good faith, you inadvertently broke some law (patents and copyrights are a minefield).

I prefer not to correspond with the type of person who would take advantage of this by releasing or publishing my emails. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but less often than you might think.
Las mejores resetas para dietas que puedes encontrar
Automatic, self updating, embedable solution.
RIM drops executives who were drunk on Air Canada flight
IOS grippers
Off topic, but why does the text on this website look so awful in Chrome 15 in Win7 64? There are actually gaps in the letters. It looks awful in a different way in Firefox 8 - clumpy letters with awkwardly variable line width.

Update to clarify that it's the text that looks weird
Personally, I use Keepass over Dropbox. I have my latest passwords available on any device I use. So if my phone and my computer burns up in a fire, I can still access my passwords from anywhere I can securely log in to Dropbox and my safe. If anyone hacks Dropbox, they will still need my safe key. If I lose Internet access, I can still access all but the most recent password changes.
The second paragraph, if I'm reading it correctly, details how they don't report streaming data to the labels until they have enough data to guarantee that they can charge labels more than the cost of streaming the songs. I imagine the labels don't particularly care for this behavior, and history (specifically Grooveshark's history) seems to have borne this out.
Ask HN: Is there a better mindset in the US?
I'm from Europe and I come to the conclusion that Europeans are really negative contributors on forums, and I wondered what other peoples experiences are.

I have no evidence for this but just a gut feeling. Europeans appear to be happy to downvote than give positive feedback. I've noticed this on a number of forums such as this and stackoverflow for example.

My impression is that if you post a question in Europe daytime, you run the risk of criticism and downvoting, but post it during US time and a bad comment will generate comment, and general positive advice, rather than outright criticism.

Of course I prefer this approach, and find it almost a hidden "code of conduct" when US timeframe replies come in.

Is this just an illusion or are people generally more keen to avoid downvoting wherever possible in the US?
Nassim Taleb talks about anti-fragility at UPenn
Adding onto this thought, even if life can arise under extreme conditions, the probability of necessary events could still be far lower than the probability of necessary events for life to arise under earth-like conditions.

Thus, the habitable zone criteria is simply narrowing the search space to planets with a high(er) probability of developing and supporting life--while discarding planets with a low(er) probability (though some discarded may indeed have life). It seems reasonable to me in this light, as well.
The adverse selection can be solved a different way: legislate that health plans have to be open to all comers and regulate price differentiation to a few key cost drivers that are politically viable (eg smoking).
I understand all of that and yet I understand none of it. The article is talking about explaining things to people in an understandable manner, and that's a bad example.

I don't care that you did your data analysis with $technology unless I happen to be the maintenance programmer that's having to take over that project.

Why did you do the data analysis, how did you do it, and what were your findings, and what does any of that entail would be what most people are interested in.

Even if I'm interested in the technology you've told me nothing. What are the main bottlenecks in your stack, how does it scale, does it even need to scale at all etc?

It's not only important that your audience understands what you're saying, but that you pick the right and pertinent items to discuss with them.
There's a huge number of people who didn't know MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets existed before the day Apple showcased them.

No there's not.
I could see this sold as a gag gift. Like in spencers (not sure if this is still around, but they used to have these kinds of products).

Because of the nature of your game (IE: bad language), it will never be that popular.

It's kind of like the band "Analc*nt" expecting mainstream radio play and then complaining when it's not happening.
I didn't misread that. I was confused as to the response to

Mr. T shows that you can be cool and have morals

with

Mr. T cut down a bunch of trees and pissed off some
prissy rich people back in 1987
C is much more than a portable assembly language
NASA confirms discovery of first alien planet in ‘habitable zone’
Naah, wasn't that big of a deal. If anything, it was a security lesson for all of us, albeit a very vivid one.
Comments by one of our distribution specialists
People who do this are very annoying(aka CHEAP!). Mainly because most VoIP calls have low quality and have static issues. When you call me and I can't see the number of the person who's calling, that's annoying. It's also annoying if you break up or I can hear a time delayed echo of everything I just said and then have to wait for you to hear it. When this happens I don't want to talk to you as it's a painful experience. If you can't afford $20/month for a voice plan then perhaps you should just have a tablet and stick to e-mail?
Hi Chris,
Not sure if you had the opportunity to see the cards...Just wanted to clarify. this is just a drinking card game with a lot of F
I guess I don't see how that's any different than performing any other blocking operation off the main/UI thread, either on a hand-rolled secondary thread or using a util class like AsyncTask which handles that for you.

It seems to me race conditions are no more or less of a concern for rendering animations than updating data -- and probably less, actually, since there's probably not much contention for animation resources, and if there is contention, synchronization of access to drawables should be straightforward.
PayPal to Zivity: You're Too Naughty Zivity's cofounder was on PayPal's board