skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Headlines like "H.P.’s TouchPad Tablet Was Bound to Be a Flop, Some Say" are a blight on journalism, and it's another dent in the reputation of NYT to feature something that reads like that.

Everyone can see that the touchpad is a major flop, so it's easy to just write some hindsight fluff piece about it. It's ridiculous to write about the inevitability of the device's failure after the fact; the only way to write in this tone is to write the article before the fact, unless you intend to revel in someone's failure.

Even so, they use weasel words like "... some say", which they no doubt will use to hide their snipe piece behind. In other words, as certain as it seems that the touchpad was a complete and utter dud, and how ever epimethean and arrogantly the piece reads in its hindsight and rationalization, they still waffle on arguing their point rigourously and confidently.

I can only hope Brian Chen himself didn't write the headline, because that would at least serve to redeem the intention of the article.
> Sure they could: just disallow any "unknown" encrypted communication.

Even then, it's impossible to prevent arbitrary communication. You can always hide your message inside of allowed messages (steganography), or an even more basic albeit inefficient technique: just use the timing between allowed messages to encode your hidden message.
Complexity of and Algorithms for Borda Manipulation [pdf]
I always liked the term "art music" to refer to the entire classical music genre. "Classical" implies a certain period to me.
Whenever I read social advice online for startup/tech people, I tend to find that the benefits of networking, etc. are really overhyped (I may be biased by my industry). You aren't going to date a supermodel just sitting outside the Playboy mansion on the street, and you aren't getting in to the Playboy mansion unless you have proved yourself worthy of being in that club. You aren't going to get funding if you have no product or talent. Obviously networking is important, and you should take high-value opportunities, but this article is exaggerating its value/frequency it is needed

In my experience, it is so much easier to find like-minded people through online means. I try to imagine how someone could try to find someone like myself in the real world inadvertently. Given my lifestyle (work in private office, don't frequently socialize with startup people), it isn't happening, outside of the occasional major conferences (PyCon) and invite-only events.
Sorry to be pedantic, but a 9th chord actually has a 9th and a _flat_ 7th. For example C9 has the notes C-E-G-Bb-D. 9th chords are part of the dominant group, not the major group.

A chord with a 9th and a 7th is a _major_ 9th. For example, the chord C-E-G-B-D is Cmaj9 (sometimes written C triangle 9).
If you're learning a web framework, you could always roll your own with Rails/Django/Sinatra/Flask. I think it's the most fun option.

Then you get to implement things like a sitemap, categories, comments/Disqus, page caching, and anything else you're so inspired to add. Makes for good blogging material.

No slower than any static content generator like Jekyll if you just cache everything to a static directory, too.
Like? If I emailed a few friends around the country and asked them to help me out like that, how would Airbnb know?

I'm not saying they haven't considered it, I'm saying they can't stop it. Making the claim that a transaction based review system is inherently trustworthy seems either naive or disingenuous.
How about applications involving NFC?

http://www.fastcompany.com/1795224/2012-the-year-nfc-goes-ma...

Not to toot my own horn here, but I've got a good record in being accurate with these predictions so far ;) --http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1448851 (and in conversations with friends I successfully predicted that SRI would be the flagship feature for the next iPhone)
Counterpoint to the original article, based on your comments: Children do exist, because civilization exists. You could also say "civilization doesn't exist, we invented it", but that falsely implies that things we invent don't exist, which regardless of what definitions you use for any of the critical words in that sentence, it's way too bizarre an idea to slip into the discussion unexamined.

I would say that as civilization has deviated farther and farther from the "default" of human civilizations, we come out of the womb increasingly less adjusted to it and therefore we have created a distinct phase of "maladjusted human" in our discourse to reflect it. And it is a real phase, which we must really be educated out of, or the result is a slide back to the default human state, which you may also know from the word "barbarism".

As I rather like "civilization", however artificial it may be, I'm OK with the "invented" child phase, and actually not terribly impressed with the original essay as it is written. Extol the virtues of having an open mind, sure, but children don't just have open minds, they are frankly stupidly open minds, and a variety of other difficulties like a near complete inability to rationally account for future consequences, even ones clearly mere seconds away (at the younger end). I don't believe the author can accurately describe his behavior as "childlike", because if he really was acting like a child, he would not be able to claim it was successful. I know 25-yo man children. Heck, I know a mid-40s man child. We're counting down the months until he gets arrested for some form of tax evasion, on the grounds of not really feeling like doing them. This is not a successful lifestyle. There's a lot more to "childlike" than having an open mind and a certain blind, stupid perseverance (that, might I add, only really works out if the adults in the life have created the proper environment).
That then points to a reasonable solution: use disposable stuff for rare events but have a good set for everyday use.
Interesting - I had an original Pre, and could go weeks without having to reboot it. Contrast with my new Nexus S, which I find I need to give a kick every few days.

I did have few apps installed on my Pre compared to my Nexus, which is likely a factor.
I bet it would be fairly easy to plug this into org-mode. It already supports exporting to web-based presentation tools (I forget exactly which ones) so it's not without precedent. The tricky bit would be encoding the positions and transitions and effects, but that shouldn't be impossible.
Or how about a kickstarter-like platform in which authors and artists agree to release their work under a CC license once $x has been raised.
They didn't discuss Go in the talk.
JWZ also complained about the calendar app taking 20 seconds to launch, and being unable to buzz people into his building due to the extremely sluggish phone app.

And of course, their dev kit was a mess, and their "App Store" a joke.

WebOS was a Hail Mary attempt by Palm to save the company after the failure of Palm OS 6, which was under development for 5 years before being canned. In a panic, they took a Linux kernel and WebKit and spat out an OS in a matter of months. It's no surprise it was a failure, but it does show how clueless HP is, and how blind the faithful can be.

Here you have the actual WebOS engineers taking about what a turkey the platform is, yet there are people who still refuse to believe it.
I would argue one of the reasons the demo is so effective is because it's expressing (in language) the same thing it's doing visually.
"I mean as an app developer what would you rather code in?"

1 & 2... :)
> webOS the platform is fantastic

It is and it isn't at the same time IMHO. It is for simple stuff and for typical applications it was great. It also has an amazing online designer. But it suffers when you had to do something more... I run into that for example when I needed to handle RSA. Have a look at how many encryption libraries are out there for ObjC and Java. Now try to find one for JS - you'll need to find 3 different parts usually - the rsa itself, key reader/writer, base64 library. Then you have to deal with their different inputs/outputs and missing features... Really not a great experience.

So yeah - the platform is great, just misses the whole ecosystem which you take for granted in Java. That said, I don't know why people complain about hardware. I'm not letting go of my Touchpad - it can do all the 3d I would expect from it and more. With preware patches it's also more smooth than other pads I've played with so far.
Even ignoring that, it still makes sense to avoid selling to Dell, HP, or similar. Those companies compete directly with IBM in other areas, so why sell a major division of the company to them and make them stronger? Plus, Dell and HP already sell desktops and laptops which makes them less likely to fully adopt the ThinkPad brand like Lenovo has.

For that matter, IBM actually derives ongoing revenue from the sale of ThinkPads, due to owning part of Lenovo; I don't know the terms of the sale, but they might also get some ongoing licensing revenue on brands and designs. (Also, they still use IBM's tech support, right down to the phone number: 1-800-IBM-SERV.) That kind of ongoing revenue would make Dell or HP even less likely to want to push ThinkPad laptops over their own systems.
What happened with Uber['s Surge Prices] on New Year's Eve?
Yes, not bad. Perhaps as opposed to "entertainment music"?
Hackers get iOS apps to run full-screen on Apple TV
PostSecret shuts down iPhone App due to abusive posts
Ms. Whitman said 600 employees were still working on WebOS

Clearly that number includes more than the engineers... but wow.
Sony slashes Tablet S price, signaling trend
You don't need special tools to create cool stuff with it; the presentation itself works as an example of how easy is to use it: https://github.com/bartaz/impress.js/blob/master/index.html
"WebOS was a Hail Mary attempt by Palm to save the company after the failure of Palm OS 6, which was under development for 5 years before being canned. In a panic, they took a Linux kernel and WebKit and spat out an OS in a matter of months."

Yeah, this is certainly true. All us Palm users got endless emails that there was a new OS coming, and then we saw Palm sell the entire OS off, and buy it back, and yeah, total trainwreck.

JWZ also was one of the first people I read talking about how WebOS was better than iOS or Android for the reason j_col spells out: a better development system since it meant writing in JS and Web like technologies.

(FWIW, in the 30 days I had one, I never found it slow, or had it crash, or even found the phone app slow. I went from there to my first Android, the Hero, which was widely acclaimed at the time and in fact so slow it could not answer the phone reliably before seeing the call roll over into missed-call-landia. I returned the Hero and went back to my Treo until Nexus One came along.)
Oh Jeez... 42, all unique. Somehow I plan to use them all at some point in time. I used to have around 60 but I got rid of some over time.

It's a bad habit we all have. We get an idea, find a domain name for it, find out it's already taken, we find the person's WHO.IS info, call them up and ask them if we can buy it from them, they say "no I have plans for it", we call em a "domain squatting asshole", then a few weeks later, we get another idea, find available domain names, register them, and sit on them for years and years (preventing others from using them), then when someone calls us asking to buy one of our domains we tell them the same thing that one "domain squatting asshole" told us. "We have plans for it."

I can't tell you how many times I've tried to contact people to buy their un-used domain only to have them tell me that they're "very close to launching". A few years later I check back and guess what, it's the same "coming soon" splash screen from last time.

Every few years I recheck domains that I wanted, just to see if the person gave up on them. Sometimes they do. That's how I grabbed up vgost.com (video game original sound tracks).

I notice more expensive TLDs like .vg .tv and other don't have this problem. So deep down inside I kind of wish the base price for .coms would increase to $50/year. A LOT of good domains would open up then. Guys like us can't afford to keep them all. Naaa, Actually I've been really good about selling my domains. Just sold one a month ago for $500 on the first call.
This is exactly what I was going to reply when I saw the GP. SICM is a brilliant book I've only started that revolves around putting concrete understanding ahead of notation. Unlike most books of that type, this one is a seriously advanced math/physics work. At world class universities, upper division undergrads in Physics can study Lagrangian Mechanics in their third year if their calculus is good enough.

One note from the excellent introduction focused how to learn math (q.v.): "In his book on mathematical pedagogy [15], Hans Freudenthal argues that the reliance on ambiguous, unstated notational conventions in such expressions as f(x) and df(x)/dx makes mathematics, and especially introductory calcu- lus, extremely confusing for beginning students; and he enjoins mathematics educators to use more formal modern notation."

Plus, Lisp!
Officially Introducing "SST" (Python Web Test Framework)
You don't want kbfiles - you want to install hg 2.0 and just use the bigfiles extension included with the download. It's based on kbfiles, the kiln folks helped upstream it.
I have a related but different complaint about them: political threads are bad because they bring out a chorus of rose-tinted nostalgia about how HN is going down the drain, is "becoming Reddit", etc., etc. I only hope that y'all copy/paste them instead of wasting effort on writing a new comment to that effect each time. ;-)
But you can do 3 on iOS, as Safari is a WebKit browser. But for when that's not enough, you can do 1.
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week - GoDaddy-edition
Content With Code: Learning to Love My Non-Perfect Code
This. A hundred times this. It is truly mind-boggling how many crimes against maintainability are committed in the name of future-proofing.
Fascinating stuff, isn't it? No wonder computer geeks and music geeks are so similar.
Or you go someplace else, where your sense of humour is appreciated. There's usually more than one place to find the connections that'll get you to the next level...
Wordpress had 6 "mandatory security update" releases in 2011 alone - http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Versions .

It doesn't seem to have had a secure design from the outset. Worse still, ordinarily one might advise "keep up to date", but wordpress had a release backdoored (http://www.cgisecurity.com/2007/03/wordpress-websi.html) once, so keeping up-to-date isn't without its risks too.

I've been giving tumblr a try, and so far - so good, but the functionality is pretty minimal.
This looks like it will be effective.

Something to think about...coding well takes a certain type of mind that most people don't have. Code is, as Fred Brooks says, "pure thought-stuff." You need to be able to build and understand multiple layers of abstract stuff all at the same time.

Coding is like having a vivid dream in that you're occupied with something entirely mental and disconnected from your physical reality. But unlike real dreams, it's coherent and rigidly structured, and fits in your conscious mind.

Some people can think this way. Most people can't, even if their mind is advanced in other ways.

I don't think most people, even the ones who are interested in Codeacademy, realize this.

(That said, I think it's useful for people to try to learn to code to understand the basics. And surely lots of people out there could code, but haven't learned yet. But most people will not be able to build complicated "apps and websites.")
This reminds me of an anecdote from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Feynman had been invited to a cross discipline conference on the ethics of equality. While there, he was given a paper to read by a sociologist. Here's Feynman's description of reading that paper (the list he refers to was a list of books they had sent around before the conference):

-----------------------------------

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read—something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damned thing and my eyes were coming out—I couldn't make head nor tail of it. I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of, "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm going to stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means."

So I stopped at random and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it and translated. You know what it means? "People read."

Then I went over the next sentence. And I realized that I could translate that one, also. Then it became a kind of empty business. "Sometimes people read. Sometimes people listen to the radio." And so on. But written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first. And when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
You know that bacteria is "life", right? Does the government need to protect them? Obviously you intend "human life", but equally obviously that doesn't just mean living human cells (scratching -- killing skin cells -- isn't murder). The valuable thing worth protecting doesn't obviously begin at conception. On the contrary, it rather obviously doesn't.
From the linked NY Times article:

"Novartis, for instance, makes both branded and generic versions of Ritalin; Shire Pharmaceuticals does the same for Adderall XR. In both cases, the companies have ensured that supplies of branded drugs are adequate while allowing generic versions to go wanting."

Note that "branded" means the more expensive, non-generic version of the medication.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/health/policy/fda-is-findi...
rsync? So if i change the name of an 800 mb image-file i have to reupload it? Really?
Automatic copyrighting is required by treaty, namely the Berne Convention. However, in the US you have to register your copyright before you can sue and damages generally only apply for infringement after the registration. Laches, implied license and fair-use likely cover the remainder your concern.
I second the recommendations for Wordpress, but only if you're committed to maintaining your own domain. If you don't mind spending a little bit of money on hosting, the platform is simple, flexible, and pretty powerful. Plus, you'll have total control.

If you want to farm out to someone else, tumblr is good because it's inherently social (people will follow you, share your posts, etc), but it's largely visual and a bit spammy at times.

Posterous is another good platform because it's simple, has some social features, and tends toward the more content driven format.

Wordpress is still my vote though, because it can grow with your blog/site and vary from the fairly simple to as advanced as you want.
And you can also create a place that fits well. That's what Rob did with Poker Nights and so on.
Lace Front Wigs Help Reduce Expenses
Very interesting. At first blush (based on the title and first bit of the article) I wanted to offer an alternative explanation, something like:

1. People make sense of things through language. (You can get this sentiment in sound-bite form from any number of linguists or language philosophers, e.g. Wittgenstein's "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.")

2. People with more linguistic resources are better able to make sense of things, and thus tend to rise to the top of the pecking order. (N.B.: Language is more than just words, so this isn't simply an issue of vocabulary.)

3. People with fewer linguistic resources are drawn to the expressions of people with more linguistic resources because those expressions give them new ways to make sense of things. They're like design patterns for thought.

4. Thus, what's being measured isn't power or influence, at least not directly.

But of course none of this is relevant to the article, which draws its conclusions from the degree of periphrasis in a discussion, rather than the substance of what is said. So, again, very interesting.
When do you ship code? When it's ready.
While technically true, it isn't going to be easy to produce a general presentation for that code. There are a number of hardcoded x/y cords and specialized css classes ("<span class="have">have</span> <span class="you">you</span> <span class="noticed">noticed</span> <span class="its">it's</span> <span class="in">in</span>")

What I'd love to see is a way for me to write relatively vanilla HTML, possibly run it through a parser (in a perfect world, I would just annotate it with css classes) and out comes a sexy presentation. Or maybe a wysiwyg UI, like how Prezi's interface works.
The language is a compiled language, with the JVM being used (originally) because I wanted a particular parser generator. Deca code can't access Java libraries because Deca code compiles to LLVM bitcode and thence to machine code. decac is a compiler, not an interpreter, so it takes the Deca code in and outputs the LLVM bitcode.

Sorry about the lack of docs. I've been slowly dumping my undergraduate thesis on this into the wiki, but the language has been evolving and I've been starting a career. Oy ;-).
Nice work so far and a the few issues are expected. Although I don't understand why he didn't went with canvas.
Doing business in CA? Prepare to disclose use of slave labor.
Rambling, possibly-helpful non-answer: whatever you can get up and running with the fastest, and can use with minimum of friction. Blogspot, wordpress.com or posterous would probable all fit the bill.

Seems like about half of the most productive people/ most interesting blog posts I read are hosted at *.wordpress.com or someplace similarly humble.

But I mostly post this because I'm just finally finishing up a migration from self-hosted wordpress (which was working fine, but I wasn't happy with for various reasons) to octopress. This has taken me several months to get around to almost finishing (during which time I've gotten out of the blogging habit), and many hours of fooling with ruby environments, converting my old posts, etc., etc.

Hopefully the payoff for me will be simplicity, a better work-flow, new blog format that fits what I'd like to do better, etc. but it might have been a lot of wasted time and energy.
I still think this is the major effect that makes it harder for adults to learn a foreign language. Brain chemistry changes a little between child and adult but your resistance to social inferiority signals changes a lot.

If you can reach a zen state of submission to the ocean of expression around you and follow the currents, you could learn like a child again. That's dang hard to do.
Ask PG: Can't flag or downvote anymore
Just realized I am unable to downvote a comment or flag a post anymore. Is there a change in threshold/policy for that?
I wouldn't trade my touchpad for an ipad. The only advantage of the ipad is that it has more apps (that you probably don't use anyway). I think the multitasking / cards approach from WebOs is awesome.
Living The Well Discovered Life