skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the data collection is not benefiting most of the people in the county, then the question quickly comes up, why is the county doing it?

That doesn't completely address the county doing collection that benefits everyone by providing information to a small group of people, but I think it supports the notion that any prices should be set to mitigate the sharing costs, not the collection costs (because the county should be organizing data collection around beneficial activities, not around creating salable data sets).
Appstore discovery optimization can help, but I guess the real boost comes from press coverage, I've been trying to gain traction with my app, a full text rss news reader (shameless plug: http://www.sparserss.com : Free sparse rss pro) and am still struggling. care to share some results from your admob campaign?
To add to your point, of the original six NHL teams, four were American. Hockey is a very American game, at least for the upper half of the country (it is a big country).
Why do you think it works quite well? It's only just happened after years of arguments and the OS itself fought against it, most independent groups fought for it to go further and we've ended up with a compromise.

If governments limit themselves to doing things that can be sold on the open market then there would be no need for a government. Instead they should be catering to the market failures like generating mapping data that can then be used by government and business alike at marginal cost i.e. free.
The article is mostly wrong as to where the white space frequencies come from. He talks about the Guard Bands put between two transmission channels to reduce interference, which is only an incredibly minor gain, if any at all.

White space actually comes from considering your frequency allocation on two geographic scales.
When the allocator gives out tv spectrum, they make sure that two adjacent tv zones aren't on the same frequency so that they interfere, as you would expect.
TV Masts cover a large area though, so if you are only transmitting a short range you can be cleverer.

Let's say you have Mast A transmitting in Zone A on frequency A, next to Zone B (etc.).
If you're in the middle of zone B, you can safely transmit on low power using frequency A, because you're too far from A to interfere.

This is what white space does - intelligently reuses unused bits of frequency at short range (shorter than a TV Mast).
This is already how frequencies for things like Radio Microphones are done - you apply for your licence, and someone in an office somewhere works out what frequencies you are allowed to use at your address without interference.
White Space intends to do the same thing automatically, probably with some form of database based solution (using a known location, possibly from GPS).
Disappointing. I thought it was going to be a text adventure game, real old school. Instead it was one of those new-fangled graphics adventures. Bah!
What's the big deal about Hadoop?
Python’s Valentines Day Gift to Clojure
Don’t walk the folder and ‘rsync’ each file you encounter

If I just tell rsync to syncronise between two directories, what does it do internally? I might have assumed that it does the more naive option, but in practice it seems to do a lot of upfront calculation that suggests it's doing something more sophisticated.
Innovator’s Dilemma at its Finest – SAP, Oracle, and the Cloud
Search Engine Optimization - The Secret Sauce of Great Websites
The Startup Store - stickers from startups
I've revised my original comment now. Thank you.
The Pry Ecosystem
If I'm paying double what I would pay for other brands, I expect to have driver issues fixed in short order. It's been 7 months now and a lot of other people have the same problem. It's an undisputed bug. What on earth does that have to do with any relativity or user satisfaction statistics?

I wasn't making any statistical claims whatsoever. I replied to someone talking about "zero driver or hardware comparability issues".
How does it make Netflix free when Netflix has to spend half a billion dollars buying the content?

Netflix's content bill is far bigger than their bandwidth bill.
This means it's perfectly legal to blindside someone as hard as you can, often helmet to helmet.

Intentional helmet to helmet hits are forbidden. Indeed, blindside hits are a pretty dangerous ground, with any hits touching the victims head or neck yielding significant penalties. Further there's the concept of a "defenseless" receiver, again bringing major penalties.

They constantly amend the rules to try to make the game safer, while still physical and exhilerating.
Absolutely it should be possible. It just sounded to me as if they don't do it. But maybe I'm wrong. I'm not a Tumblr user.
(Sorry, it's hard to judge the right amount of sarcasm on the internet.)

The author of this blog post, Lennart Poettering, apparently works for Red Hat. Even Hat Enterprise Linux is missing from the list. As is CentOS.
That seemed to be mostly a rant about what you _don't_ do with Prolog, not about what you actually can do. The example of exporting a spreadsheet to CSV doesn't sound too convincing of the language's miraculous powers.
Author complains 'lsb_release -d', the standard from ten years ago, isn't always there.

Proposes alternative to fix this, by changing to a new system , which will solve this problem, once it's always there.
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A JD is not a research degree. It is a second entry degree, meaning there is no necessary reason it could not be an ordinary bachelor's degree. A JSD is the US Law School equivalent to a real doctorate.

Obama was the first President of the HLS in yeeears not to publish. He's a very, very smart man but calling him an intellectual might be pushing it. His popular works are not brimming with ideas.
Google's acquisition of Motorola approved by EU and U.S DoJ regulators
Or you can be replaced on the field by another player while you wait for the blurry vision to go away. I have always wondered what football would be like if you changed just one thing: Limit substitutions to one per half like Soccer and thus, obviously, force all players to play offence, defence, and special team plays.
I think in this neck of the woods it's hard to offend anyone. On the other side of the river though, where the socialites put up camp, things are different. They thrive on "taking offense" & spreading vapid rumors.
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Think Different.
> And it brings up all manner of ethical grey areas: is blogging journalism?

There's nothing "grey" about it: it's a straightforward conflict of interest. Unethical practices that were mostly stamped out of more mature industries with professional codes of conduct and industry best practices are rife in the tech startup sector.

That's as true of collusive, interested tech journalists as it is of startups collecting sensitive personal information without disclosing it or providing a clear opt-out (or preferably opt-in) provision.
Flame bait? ;)
Wasn't Merkel a chemist, not a physicist? The upper levels of the CCP are full of engineers, not scientists. Don't know about the next or nextnext leadership generations/cadres.
The only way I can think of to pay for this, is for the more productive people to pay, in the form of a citizen's wage. We have the first inkling of this in Britain, in the form of the proposed universal credit.

But it should be borne in mind that stuff is getting cheaper, thanks to automation. The proportion of income spent on food has fallen from 33% to 15% in fifty years.

In any case, I think we have little option. It's possible that current employment problems are a blip, but annual hours worked per person have fallen by around 25% since 1950. And halved since the 19th century. It looks like a trend to me.
Electric piano
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Startup opportunity for accelerometers in helmets/pads/shoes and real-time data collection?

I imagine if you came up with the right visualizations, that fans would be interested, e.g., "omg, did you see how the LB lit up that receiver coming over the middle! 150 Gs of impact . . . "

And you know, since we are on HN,
"Football Physics: The Anatomy of a Hit" http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/sports/physics/4212...
Oh, you're right. Maybe there's a few songs here and there not available through no fault of Amazon's. Maybe you have to download a piece of software freely available on all major platforms to download an album. Or, you know, just click buy multiple times (it doesn't take that long honest-to-goodness). But I get that since everything isn't PERFECT, you might as well go pirate everything, cause you know, that's your right.
I'm pretty happy with blogger - has nice analytics to boot!

It really gets the job done without much of a hassle (if you know some css you can change the template as well - with a bit of hacking).

You can even use GData to pull info from your blog to your website (if you have one or planning one later on).
A big kudos to Dice.com for getting such traction out of this non-story. The actual content of their infographic - http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/dice_lf_linu... - is full of revelations that would be very interesting in 2008.
I also thought this, but it's not true!

American Football was always this violent, even before the pads. They managed to kill 19 (NINETEEN) people playing it in 1905, well before the helmets came in (1939ish, although: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_football_helmet).
Also important, and related, is my wife claims it took a year or so of fellowship training before she learned how to ask a scientific question. She's an MD who did a research fellowship at NIH; I'm a physicist.
I think it works well because the free data covers much of what the public could want to use (I have used this many times myself), whilst I can't really think up a case in my mind where non-businesses would want to use the more detailed information (aside from councils who are provided this for free).

More important to me than free OS data would be if the UK govt could create a GIS database of land ownership. This is where they lag behind the USA and Australia to my mind...
The problem is that I was confused. r/jailbait had already been banned in August[1], before the Cooper story. I had no idea it had been unbanned and then re-banned.

So yeah, following the second ban, you could see the writing on the wall.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jkmx7/dear_reddit...
> A meeting should not be a free-form discussion -- leave that for chance encounters in the office kitchen.

I saw this a lot of times and I still don't get it. I actually don't want chance encounters in the office kitchen. I don't use the office kitchen, and I don't want communication to be a matter of chance. I don't want to have to "hang around" when it comes to work.

I want to hear the "btw I'm also working on this pb for XXX in parallel" during the meeting if it should have any effect on my work. Even if it's not on the agenda. And I don't want a second meeting afterwards just to discuss this point. I don't want 10 meetings in a days with ultra tight agendas if all of it can be freely discussed in one.

I want one meeting with a clear theme (like "how's the project going"), but where you say anything you want, and we are all done with meetings for the day.
Utopia: USB power sockets on every wall
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Thanks for this note, and suggestion.

Indeed, I first checked my bank and PayPal accounts. Thankfully, there was no activity.

The only piece that was connected to me was the email address. But that wasn't what was important to the eBay representative - it was finding my information, even though I don't have an eBay account. Not once was the question asked about the user ID associated with the actual account.

Kind of makes me wonder who was the more aggressive phisher in this case.
Wonder how are they going to keep people from gaming the name reservation system?
> For me its just another sign that 'tech' is growing up.

For me it's another sign that 'tech' has some serious growing up to do.
As the OP has indicated in the title, DidThis took part in an individual (mini) Seedcamp event, but wasn't selected for investment by Seedcamp.
It's not about the adult players, it's about the parents of high-school players that might become more risk-averse or litigious, which might make the high-school recruiting dry up, which in turn lowers the quality of the college-level games and in turn the NFL. And that is a spiral of death: Lower quality -> less prestige and sponsors -> less kids going into the sport -> even lower quality.
> It's the same copout that 2/3 of the commentariat falls back on whenever the subject comes up of why Apple is so successful. Must be those fanboys, that pixie dust, that RDF...

It's the other way around: Apple isn't successful because of Gruber and Siegler, Gruber and Siegler are successful because they tied their fortunes to Apple.
Yes, but would their parents allow them?
You sir, nailed it.
Congratulations.

I'm working on something similiar (ok, the biggest similiarity is in graphics - my game will be more like 2d sf action rpg with asteroid mechanics :)), and I'm very interested, if there's market for such games.

If you could publish your experiences, I'd be grateful.

EDIT: here's alpha version of my game. Most thigs don't work, and bugs abound, so beware :)

Should work on modern browsers (capable of webgl, or at least canvas).

http://alan.umcs.lublin.pl/~ajuc/tiled_arcade_webgl/current/
Is it just me or does that map functionality throw a wobbly in Chrome on Mac?

By using a magic mouse and a single swipe backwards/forwards - which is to zoom in/out respectively (similar to a mouse wheel), causes the page to freeze and for Chrome to kill it due to it being unresponsive.

This functionality works fine on the generic MapBox demos.

It's a shame because custom maps are a good idea, especially when you have so much flexibility over the styling, I just like using gestures to make zooming that little bit easier.
Please update how many stickers you sell =)
eats 100% of CPU
Rsync will compare timestamps, to only transfer changed files.
You have my vote.

Lots of policy decisions are made based on statistics. Yet they are easy to fool someone with if he or she does not understand them properly enough.

In my experience, to a doctor, even a good one, _at first_ it's just an annoying thing they have to do to get published and they don't really understand the significance of significances.

Slightly disappointing. I'd have expected doctors to have an understanding of placebo effects, and the field of medicine is one where you regularly hear (even outside medicine) about studies being discredited afterwards for wrong/improper controls, positive results being unreproducible etc.

I don't remember the last time I heard a comp sci paper being withdrawn for bad statistics. (They tend to have none, even when they should)
Looks like it's only Swedish startups at the moment.
Why is this getting upvotes? Are some people voting before actually reading the content? The formatting of the text and the content are very poor and the points are not justified at all.

"Prolog is cool because you can write stuff is a spreadsheet, then export it to CSV and then use some regexp to convert that to actual prolog code." Seriously? Who would do that?

"Forget data structures and algorithms you don't need that." This paragraph starts with "You don't need to know recursion". Prolog. No need to know recursion. Prolog. Okay dude, sure.

Last but not least, I don't think someone saying that Prolog code is naturaly concise and elegant because it's like writing SQL queries knows what he's talking about at all.
Yes I think that is a minimum. Still the other concern is the kind of racket that is described: you pay or we won't mention you, or worse we will destroy your reputation (hitman).

"Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.” Most big companies paid up and considered it a cost of doing business."
The anti-meeting attitude has pervaded my workplace to the point that we don't have meetings for things we really should. It's a strange feeling to wish for more meetings.

For a while, we had a scrum master contracting with us that ran meetings with an iron fist. She didn't take any bullshitting or digressing from the point. It was awesome. I miss her all the time.
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I had to double check the date of this story
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I'm liking the minor revival of the 80s-style graphic adventure genre, with new twists. I also enjoyed this game-poem-like one that came in 2010 (also cross-platform): http://cardboardcomputer.com/games/a-house-in-california/
One thing I absolutely despise about the phrase "anti-intellectual" is the ambiguity about what it means. There was a great explanation of why people should be suspicious of "intellectuals" in an HN comment from a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400310. ESR also had examined the various possible meanings: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4001

In general, though, "anti-intellectual" seems to usually mean, "Why won't those damn hick Republicans just get out of the damn way!?"
Hahaha, yeah. I've had managers call meetings before at a past place I worked, with the result already decided beforehand of course, just because they couldn't take ten minutes to read a code review thread or lookup the difference between two protocols online. It wasn't enough to program it right there, you had to program it and hide anything the manager couldn't understand and would get upset about.
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Readmill founders are swedish, but they are based in Berlin.
As cool as the rsync algorithm is, i'd much rather we had the dsync utility outlined in this usenix 08 paper.
http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix08/tech/full_papers/pucha/...

An adaptive protocol that matches to the systems load dynamically whether its cpu/disk/network. Anyone know of what happened to this?
Thanks. It seemed completely unreasonable to me until I saw this explanation.
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Yeah, this is a very... strange article. I like Prolog, but not because it's "almost exactly the same as relational database sql" with better syntax.
Yes, I understand what you meant, but your example doesn't scale. OK so there is one (1) position for an economist at a game company. There were hundreds if not thousands of positions at banks before the collapse. How can this minister say that letting the banks fall over was good for employment, or at least that the people who had to go looking for other jobs could now go do more meaningful ones?
Ask HN: How do I ensure that a real iOS client is using an API
Hello HN! Hoping I can tap the colossal power of the HN hive-mind.

Working on a project where an iOS client hits an API. How do I ensure that only my 'real' client is allowed to use it?

I could bake a secret token into the app, but surely it will just be sniffed (HTTPS only, but a MITM proxy?) or the app decompiled and the token extracted (Like the Sony PS3 master key).

Is there any reliable way to ensure that a hacked, dummy version of my app can't use the real API?

Thanks HN!
Drowning in a sea of startup advice
I think what Prolog, SQL, Lisp, or even J really offer is cheap exploratory development.

I am tremendously productive sitting in front of a REPL with access to data. Even with my Ruby hacking, I tend to be playing with 1 to 4 lines of code in irb while building my scripts and tools.

I have not had the opportunity to build a big production system with any of these languages though. I wonder if some of the reason the OO enterprise languages work and hang on is that they facilitate understanding and communication between developers.

I hate the amount of boilerplate code that seems to wrap around code examples I see in Java and C# sometimes. I was looking at a tutorial just yesterday that boiled down to declare an array of values, use a matrix of these other values, and apply these functions to the matrix until convergence occurs.

The amount of jumping I was doing between different Java class files and static functions was completely an impediment to the point of the tutorial, which was to demonstrate the logic of the process. OTOH, I was able to jump around and follow the points. But I really think it could have been more aptly demonstrated in a few lines of code in another language.

Thinking of this interview with Arthur Whitney and this topic:

"BC To ask a slightly broader question, what is the con-
nection between computer language and thought? To
what degree does our choice of how we express software
change the way we think about the problem?

AW I think it does a lot. That was the point of Ken
Iverson’s Turing Award paper, “Notation as a Tool of
Thought.” I did pure mathematics in school, but later I
was a teaching assistant for a graduate course in computer
algorithms. I could see that the professor was getting
killed by the notation. He was trying to express the idea
of different kinds of matrix inner products, saying if you
have a directed graph and you’re looking at connections,
then you write this triple nested loop in Fortran or Algol.
It took him an hour to express it. What he really wanted
to show was that for a connected graph it was an or-dot-
and. If it’s a graph of pipe capacities, then maybe it’s a
plus-dot-min. If he’d had APL or K as a notation, he could
have covered that in a few seconds or maybe a minute,
but because of the notation he couldn’t do it."

http://mags.acm.org/queue/20090203?pg=12#pg16
It would be interesting to see how this affected the MLS and therefore world soccer as a whole. The best players in the world could move to the MLS rather than the european leagues, and America could start to dominate at a national level.

The world club championships would be more interesting, that's for sure.
Yes, I would mostly come down on the side of making the data open due also to the benefits of letting anyone have at it and create new and interesting things. GIS data is not some tiny niche.
I like the coffeesound, where do you get it?
ddar calculates a 32-bit Rabin fingerprint over a sliding 48-byte window (a Rabin fingerprint is a type of checksum which allows quick calculation of a "slide" with just the previous fingerprint, the new byte coming in, and the old byte going away). The fingerprint is compared against a mask which has n bits set, where 2^n is the desired target block size. If there's a match, then the location of the window is taken to be a block boundary. With random data this should lead to a binomial distribution of block sizes centred around the target block size. But minimum and maximum block sizes are also enforced for pathological cases which skews this slightly.

Blocks whose boundaries are determined by this algorithm are hashed (SHA256 currently). The hash is used to key each block in a reference-counted key/value store.

Then each archive member is just a list of block hashes.
I think it is more serious than you make it sound. This article describes a racket that resembles mafia behavior.

“Pay seven figures a year to buy a corporate subscription to my newsletter and I’ll say nice things about your company, and when the press needs a quote, I’ll be there to puff you up. Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.”
I loved this, from the FAQ:

Why didn't you call this file /etc/bikeshed instead?

Nothing like good self-referential, recursive, meta humor. :)
I can only imagine the same people who are saying meetings are terrible are also the ones saying "why doesn't anyone respond to my emails quickly???"
HN already auto-deads submissions from several domains; wonder if it'd improve quality around here if those were added to the list, adding some friction into the game they're playing.
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