skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The curious case of the Microsoft Zune phone
Xross Wheeler
This blog is an attempt to summarise my day to day activites, my views and opinions, issues i care about etc.
I9 phone Quad-band with JAVA dual sim dual standby support 8GB M
Specifications:

3.2-inch pure flat screen, 260 K color, 240 x 320 dots
Phone System: GSM: 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 compatible
Support 8GB storage capacity memory Card
image, song, and game switch based on screen motion function
Keystroke input and handwriting input
Support MMS , EMS , MMS.
Recording
Karaoke / KTV functions
MP3, E-mail, GPRS class 10, wap 2.0
Support JAVA
Support Bluetooth
FM Radio
support 8GT-Flash, USB cables.
Settings of standby pictures of the screen
Calculator, game, calendar, alarm clock, and memo
Phonebook browse, quick search for contacts
Receiver volume and ringing volume settings
Profile selection
Language selection: Chinese, English and many other languages
Power-on and power-off tone settings
Timing Power-on and Power-off settings
Picture turnover function
Seems great.

Are there any similarly gentle intros to emacs?
You're right. Those 3 methods are best.

Let me ask you this though. If you knew that someone in the audience was so eager to hear you speak that she borrowed her friend's badge, would you be upset?
I've been using domainsite.com for about the same amount of time, and have nothing to complain about. They are simply an inexpensive, straightforward place to register domains. Their user interface seems fine to me too.
You ought to submit this.
Yehuda Yudkowsky, 1985-2004
Which is not to say you shouldn't click! In fact these are the most useful Java applets I've ever seen. He still should've done them with Flash, though.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377412
Whilst likening inventory to server usage is a bit questionable the point of looking at improving efficiency before expanding capacity is a good one. Whilst hyperoptimizing code can add complexity a moderate level of optimization can simplify code by stripping out anything not absolutely necessary.

Plus theres a natural limit to how far you can scale inefficient code by adding more computing power. In the same way as adding more people to a late project makes it later adding more processors to an inefficient system makes it more inefficient.
Sometimes it's not possible to front cash to support the event due to lots of factors having nothing to do with lack of money or laziness. All the people who asked me about copying my WWDC badge were people who had the money to do so (and I know at least one tried to offer even more money than they were worth to existing attendees willing to sell their tickets), but Apple was actively refusing to sell any more tickets to the event due to having reached maximum capacity. I certainly hope that's not the case next year, but who knows. Moscone West is not exactly huge.
I really liked Prosper, I thought they were doing a very good job of executing their idea. It will be very interesting to see where this goes
I am as Republican as the day is long, I invested on Prosper and made a profit, I believed then and believe now that innovation in the financial markets would lower prices and raise returns, and I default to the assumption that government meddling in the free market is almost always to the detriment of the participants.

That said? If you knew about the particulars of this situation, which I covered a wee bit about in a post above, you would say Prosper is about as close as you can get as a poster child for Why The Market Should Be Regulated without being founded by Ponzi himself.
If you are a bank or some other org that paid lobbyists to create the loopholes for you, usary laws hardly effect you anymore.

However, I think usary protections should exist and we need to repeal all these loopholes.
I use namecheap as well and have one complaint. They don't allow you to specify the order of your nameservers! Regardless of the order you input your name servers the primary, secondary, tertiary nameservers will be assigned randomly with no way to specify the order. I sent a support request to namecheap and got the following response. Grrrr

Hello,

It does not matter which order they are listed, because when the nameservers are queried, they are queried simultaneously, and the first one to answer is assigned by the Registry to that particular query as "primary" at that point in time.

What this means is that regardless of how they are listed, the order of the listing does not determine which nameserver is queried first.

The order that the nameserves appear in the Registry is not up to the Registrar, and cannot be changed by the Registrar.
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Then you're prejudiced against me.
In all situations except extreme crisis, having cousins is good

Ah, but genes are selected in times of extreme crisis! We have all sorts of genes that only make sense in times of extreme crisis, but which we nevertheless carry with us through times of prosperity when they are often a liability.

That's why instinct generally tells us to help cousins, not compete with them. So having a gay uncle is bad for you, sorry :-)

It also tells us to help nephews and nieces. So, no, having a gay uncle is actually GREAT for me. The question is whether being gay is great for the proliferation of gay genes.

I started writing a model to play with some probabilities, then realized that I'm just procrastinating and have real work to do. :) Maybe I'll come back to it some day, or maybe it'll just rot on the back burner with so many other bits of nerdery...

Anyway, even if you could show that being gay is definitely bad for any hypothetical gay-causing genes, it wouldn't rule out evolutionary causes. It could be an emergent property of a collection of individually beneficial genes. Or it could be the result of hormonal features of the mother that are otherwise beneficial.

(I mean "beneficial" here in the evolutionary sense, as in "likely to cause a certain gene to be passed on", not in any kind of normative sense.)

Of course I'd agree to allow gay marriage if we abolish taxes at the same time

Would you agree to allow gay marriage if the taxes are left as they are?

Why should a gay couple be any different, from a society's point of view, from a heterosexual couple that adopts or doesn't have children at all? Hell, many gay couples DO raise their own biological offspring (or at least, the biological offspring of one of the partners.)

Seriously, what's the justification argument against gay marriage that doesn't come down to: "Yeah, but like, who's tha wife, then? Ew." I mean, here you are arguing for analysis over ideology, and it's pretty obvious that gay coupling is ethically and legally fair, it's a natural thing primates do, and it's economically beneficial for society.

???
Those passer-bys looking for the HN connection can find the original discussion about this takedown demand here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372270

Perhaps Sam Odio took to heart the advice about contacting the EFF?
Oh, full disclosure: I am a former borrower, too. I got a loan from them to assist in paying my younger brother's tuition. I paid it back in 6 months.

From the borrower's perspective, if you can't qualify for a traditional bank loan, they were amazing. (I fit that description at the time: there was a dearth of traditional banks which were well set-up to service a young white professional whose salary was paid in yen.)

My loan was one of the success stories: I couldn't have gotten a student loan through a traditional lender ("Your brother is going to cosign this? From Japan? Via fax? Pull the other one, kid, it's got bells on"). My peers, other lenders from the official forums (which were later closed), trusted me after several months of online interaction. I asked them for $5,000, they crowdsourced it in $50 and $80 and $230 increments. They got all their money back and 13% interest besides. Prosper got $50 and 1% APR for providing the platform. My little brother got to register for classes at Notre Dame on time. Everybody won.

And for a while, I thought loans like that were going to be common enough to paper over the (numerous) faults. I was catastrophically wrong.
Wow - that's a pretty strong endorsement. Best of luck with it all !
Netflix on the Xbox 360: Not What It Could Be
I loaned $1000 to rather risky people with an average interest rate of 21.2%. I lost $200 dollars with a 39% default rate.
Yep, that's why I posted it. Although I probably should have linked to the original AskYC when I submitted it. Thanks for the help. ;)
Gvke - India v England, 5th ODI: Preview | Indian Team
"Real World Haskell", now shipping
Mobuzz.tv Shuts Down
Wow D:

As a prosper borrower, I loved the service (which helped fund my startup - http://fangamer.net ) because it was kinda like high school -- easy to excel with nothing more than a little effort. Not hard when your 'competition' is a picture of a dog and the words "gotta pay credit cards im very trustwrothy w/ $$$".

I haven't gone back to Prosper since I paid off my loan much earlier this year, though, so it's depressing to see that such a brilliant idea was handled so poorly.

Hopefully some enterprising young turks can find a way to make it work...hint
This is similar to an earlier thread about scaling with the cloud. But it's an important point, using X buzzword won't make your product better. Building it right will make it better. Cloud computing might be the right tool to do that if you know how to use it.
> My loan was one of the success stories: I couldn't have gotten a student loan through a traditional lender ("Your brother is going to cosign this? From Japan? Via fax? Pull the other one, kid, it's got bells on"). My peers, other lenders from the official forums (which were later closed), trusted me after several months of online interaction. I asked them for $5,000, they crowdsourced it in $50 and $80 and $230 increments. They got all their money back and 13% interest besides. Prosper got $50 and 1% APR for providing the platform. My little brother got to register for classes at Notre Dame on time. Everybody won.

William Gibson, eat your heart out...
Just an Ad - I've flagged it
I would think part of the spirit of HN would manifest in a music site as a focus on music that in some way feels like it brings something new to the art. Almost all the music that becomes popular today, even within specific genres, is not that inventive.

Yet there are some artists that, at specific times, try something that really feels new. In the dance music space for instance, about 2001(+- 2 years) artists discovered they could for instance loop over a segment of their song, then shorten the loop until it became a stuttered noisy instant, then continue with the rest of the song. This sounded amazing at first, then everyone copied it, now people are used to it and a song has to use it creatively to make people smile.
RISC daddy conjures Moore's Lawless parallel universe
How has techcrunch not picked up this story yet?
I wonder if there's a way around this: instead of an explicit interest or profit, make it a trade-based market:

I'll give you X dollars-today, in exchange for 1.1X dollars-N-months-from-now.

Or I'll give you X dollars-in-a-month in exchange for Y Euros-today.

Does the SEC regulate currency trading markets?

And, if not, why can't dollars-today and dollars-6-months-from-now be traded as separate currencies [taking into account expected inflation/deflation, as well as the time-value of money]?
So I started reading this article and immediately suspected something was wrong. It won Nebula and Hugo award and most scifi types at least enjoyed it. In fact I knew a few people who started reading science fiction because of Ender's Game. When I first read it (circa 1986) no one that I knew cared what his personal/political beliefs were. The book stands alone and could not have been too persuasive on its readers; I know others who read it in the same time period and their beliefs are quite diverse.

So I could understand it not being this reviewer's type of book. But to wax on like this takes a special type of person, someone who just loves to hate on (popular) things. I decided to check out a few other reviews this guy has written. This comes from the same guy who hated the lord of the ring movies...

http://plover.net/~bonds/lotrfilms.html

and the matrix...

http://plover.net/~bonds/matrix.html

So who cares what he has to say about Ender's Game. His review adds little value here where there is, presumably, a majority who enjoy scifi and fantasy. His opinion is obscure at best and predictable based on his previous reviews.

So there you go, I've reviewed him the same way he's reviewed ender's game... Minimal thought about the material mishmashed with my opinion of the author.
Thirded. They're also one of the few registrars to tell you explicitly that "you own the domain in your name."
Their free private registration offer is a nice touch, and their control panel is pretty solid and thorough.
Here the URL since your link didn't parse right (just url encode any weird characters):

http://www.netbanker.com/WindowsLiveWriter/ProsperAdvertisin...
Offtopic : I am frustrated with people ignoring no free lunch theorem and trying to use GAs everywhere.
So the logic is 'MSFT would be willing to effectively kill Windows Mobile if that's what it takes to launch their own phone, because Windows Mobile is so far behind already'

If MSFT do indeed do this then I would applaud them. Too often legacy products / business units get in the way of innovation, as that innovation has the potentially to cannibalize the legacy.

The question that remains is: has it taken MSFT so long to get to this point that they are already too far behind? I'd guess not - they're well practiced at coming from behind.
Check out:

http://www.kvrx.org/node/32430

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

Most likely encrypted spy messages, but the numbers seem random enough.

As a kid, I recall being able to pick up a few of these number station broadcasts.
Git for the Cocoa Developer: A Typical Workflow
"I'll give you X dollars-today, in exchange for 1.1X dollars-N-months-from-now."

Isn't that the very definition of interest?
Of the books I read in the past year, the bulk were strong recommendations by friends who then proceeded to say, no really, read this, and then GAVE ME the book. If the Kindle platform eventually gained the ability to "give" your copy to a single other user (who could then give it again) then I would buy. Without even that very limited re-sale right, I could care less.
Thanks. I fail at URL encoding unless my language provides it for me, so I ended up TinyURLing it instead.
Preventing innocent people from getting ripped off by scammers asking for investments is necessary for a healthy market.
Banking is a racket and they can practice usury all they want. They just hate competition, that's all. Credit cards have 21% limit in some states and no limit in others. How's that for usury?!
Just ask tptacek, I hear he likes to talk about it ;)

(Thomas Ptacek in the article == tptacek on Hacker News)
No, interest usually compounds. This is more like a one-off currency trade of now-dollars versus future-dollars.
A volitional guide to bookmarklets
Not very much different from the git workflow for all other developers out there. The only difference I can see is the inclusion of additional files in .gitignore.
Techcrunch promotes capitalism, mind you
Psoriasis Treatment
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Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft All Slowly Start Their Lifestreaming Initiatives
> again, not as bad as GoDaddy

I don't think anything is as bad as the GoDaddy UI.
math scales programming

compare j=n*(n+1)/2 to for i in range(n+1): j+=i

the former being math and the latter programming for solving summation from 0 to n
i use 1and1.com ... no idea if it's good or not

any comment?
Have you considered supporting third party "packaging" formats for Windows? Some companies, for instance, have already done the work to package up their product for U3.
Well, this kind of stuff: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377155
Because Mechanical Turk only allows U.S. residents to set tasks (although the rest of the world can work on them). Feedback Army seems to get around that inconvenience.
CorePy: Assembly Programming in Python
I installed it yesterday (on Windows) and there's a big fat "Install Glassfish v3 Prelude" checkbox on one of the first pages. Unticking this should work for you. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt 'cos perhaps the *nix installer is very different
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidu is here too, although not as active as tptacek.
A smart thief may exploit a bug (buffer overflow etc) in closed source banking software system and siphon away funds. This may continue till someone from the bank or the software company notices this bug.
I like the idea of a popup box and making the cursor ideally select all the text.
oh and could you make your bookmarklet popup in a new window? never got why people didnt do that.
nice to hear the windows folks get to opt out ;). I didn't see such a choice on the OS X installer.
> What were the odds I'd get to say that twice in one day?

Just don't say it a third time, lest you create an unkillable meme...
http://url.ie (another url shortening service -- do we need yet more???!) does exactly what you want. I believe it's just javascript but you can check the page source for yourself
Obama wants to Keep his BlackBerry. Its a security risk. Potential Solutions?
I have been following the story about how our next president wants to keep his Blackberry. He wants to remain in contact with people outside the 10-12 people surrounding him daily.

Some Issues
"A president's e-mail may be subject to public records laws and can be subpoenaed by Congress and the courts. It may also be a security risk for him to carry a traceable cell phone."

I think one of the main things is definitely security risk. Rest of the issues can be dealt by lawyers ;)

I am really interested in hearing opinions about the security implications of owning a cellphone and blackberry in specific. Most likely there would be additional effort/technology that would be needed to make his phone/PDA untraceable. This definitely makes Secret services job much much harder. His security can be compromised quite easily by skilled hackers. At the same time I think in todays age the President should be well equipped with communication devices that enable him to do his job better.
What do you think?
Integrating JVM within Intel CPUs will enhance Sun business.
> Offtopic : I am frustrated with people ignoring no free lunch theorem and trying to use GAs everywhere.

GAs don't violate No Free Lunch. After all, you're a genetic algorithm...
The NFLT mainly applies across all functions. So, I don't see a prima facie reason that there can't be a best overall algorithm for the problems we tend to encounter, since these are an infinitely small subset of all possible problems and likely share common characteristics.

In fact, to be a total contrarian, I suspect intelligent design theory can provide such a heuristic for all real world problem domains. The irony is thick indeed.
That isn't what he's saying. He thinks people should focus more on the problem domain rather than just use GAs indiscriminately.
Technical summary, please?
You might accidentally end up volunteering that way...
Cloud Options - Amazon, Google, & Microsoft : Simpable
TBray Response: Sun Should Stop Sucking
WinMo is not bad in the latest version. It's better than Palm by far. Like normal Windows, it largely depends on what the hardware manufacturer does with it.

It's not great by any means, but it does many things well.
PicClick - Visual Shopping for eBay & Amazon
You don't want to be carrying a constant-frequency radio beacon in a non-shielded environment if you're going to have sensitive information conveyed via vibrations (i.e., if you're the president and you're going to be talking to people). Think Doppler effect. The NSA will explain this to Obama; and while he might still consult his blackberry from time to time, it won't be present during sensitive meetings (and when you get right down to it, pretty much every non-public meeting at which the president is present qualifies as "sensitive").
Thank you for posting this. We do need to work faster. In the day to day actions of waking, working, and sleeping until the next day we tend to lose sight of the longterm goal. At least I do. I am somewhat reassured my younger sister will live long enough, though I am not sure about my mom. I've had to accept my grandmother won't, as my grandad died in March. This is a good reminder to all of us who think there is an answer.
these guys are on the same level as godaddy.
I thought Harmonix was responsible for Guitar Hero's creation. This article credits RedOctane.
Yeah, they were, this is a bad article. Red Octane made the guitar peripheral.
I'm looking for the ideal co-founder for my Cairo startup
Backpack: Some things you may not have known
How NERDY are You?
When hi-tech is too-much-tech
Still, you are giving some amount of today's dollars in return for a larger amount of tomorrow's dollars. That implies some effective interest rate over that time period. Also, while most financial institutions use compound interest, the concept of simple interest also exists.

Am I missing something?
Then his "offtopic" disclaimer is apt.
In case you want to find your source, I'm guessing it was economist Robin Hanson:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medi...
I guess the relevance is that they came out of TechStars, a YC clone/competitor.
High-Level Nerd, of course.
They're getting some interesting answers there. Good on them, and good to see a government entity not being afraid of a democratic system!..
Seth's Blog: Death of the personal blog?
If I heard everyone in the audience was so eager to hear me speak that no one bought an entrance ticket, and therefore I would not be able to fund my research that made my speeches so interesting, I would doubt their intentions.
Apparently I'm a supreme nerd god. Must be those graduate reading courses in mathematics.
Colors and the UI
Twitter Boasts 343% Growth
Has someone figured out a way around the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Or is it not a law anymore? I'm not a physicist, so I don't know these things.
Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job?
This is utterly unfair. There aren't any ads on that site and the author does not market himself or his site at all.
> WinMo is not bad in the latest version

I've been hearing this from a few users. But even if it is a good OS (HW config dependent) the question still remains: can MSFT make money from that business model? Will developers develop for it? If the answers are 'no', then they need a new business model, not a better OS. Maybe this new venture is it?
bodyguard PA.
M-x help-with-tutorial
it sure is...where was the SEC when every major bank in the world was doing it?
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Someone was going to make it irrelevant. And .NET doesn't run on Solaris.
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Can't you just do this ?

int rand7()
{
return (int)(7.0f * rand5() / 5.0f);
}
That's a sci fi story, not hard science.

Absolutely nothing integral to the singularitrons' vision has been demonstrated to any extent. Instead, the opposite is shown by the fact cpu speeds have leveled out.