skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comes up all the time. Here's a quick way to put that argument to rest, an interactive feature by the New York Times showing the patents Steve Jobs is personally listed on: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/ste...
I understand what you're saying; but the problem here is that 1 state raised the minimum wage. Naturally, jobs will flow to the neighboring states. But what if the Federal minimum wage was raised?

You do understand the point I'm trying to make: that there should be _some_ _significant_ economic incentive for people to get off welfare and on to work! Right now the incentive is minimal at best.

So how do you create the gradient that moves people off of welfare and on to jobs? You can either take away welfare benefits; or you can give much more rewards for working.
JQuery templates and ASP.NET User Controls
Converting a portion of your everyday purchase into a charitable donation
If local businesses can get access to a mobile platform in which a portion of a consumer's purchase at their store becomes a charitable donation and the consumer shares that experience on their social media (kind of like a Foursquare check-in) would you use it?<p>How would you envision the way this social venture work?<p>I was thinking of some sort of QR payment app where the consumer can go to a store hosting a donation campaign to make a purchase and also at the same time donate to a cause of their choice. This would basically be a social media marketing tool for local businesses and a fundraising tool for charities.<p>What do you guys think?
My kids don't go to school, but we use the Saxon books for math here at home. They are so well put together. Incremental development. Enough consistent repetition of core concepts. All lessons back reference the fundamentals/foundations with a simple indexing system.
I don't understand. Either PATCH (and PUT and DELETE) work on (say) K-12 networks, or they don't. If PATCH doesn't work on K-12 networks, you have to tunnel; Rails does that with "_method", and every competent Rails programmer knows about "_method". If PATCH does work on K-12 networks, well, Rails supports it, and would in fact prefer you use it.

What's the complaint here? Rails can't do anything about shitty proxy software. It's there, and Rails works around it.
Well, it's hard to say that other companies didn't rip off the "idea" of the iPhone. After all, all the hardware had been available for a number of years, including displays, CPUs, GPUs, capacitive touchscreens, batteries etc. Someone else could easily have come along with a multitouch phone two years earlier, but nobody did. Of course, the "idea" of the iPhone wasn't new either, but Apple was the first to make the idea into a working, usable product.
Not "unwilling to discuss it here," just trying not to post everything twice. Now as regard to that objection- I have also read that the empirical studies of defect rate seem to show that defect rate does not correlate with anything once you control for size (leading to the argument that you should decrease size at any cost). I haven't examined the studies or the nature of the code in them. My personal observation is that not all code bases are the same (even those with the same number of defects). Some code bases seem to have a brittle behavior where there is an unlimited reserved of subtle bugs that depend on particular circumstances to happen (so likely undercounted, so called mysterious crashes) and other code bases do not (they are rock solid). I don't think this is captured by just counting tracked defects (as a "mysterious crash" can one bug or many interacting). But, yes current industrial consensus is size is most important.
So basically, we need new textbooks because the law demands change for it's own sake. Good to know what the real problem is.

But why is the author of the submission complaining about textbook publishers rather than state legislatures and school administrators?
How does HN keep the signal:noise ratio high?
I'm a journalist and contributing editor at Tech Review. I've been lucky to have some of my work featured on HN, and I find it a consistently excellent source of thought-provoking ideas. I'm wondering how 1) HN keeps the signal:noise ratio high, and 2) whether this might be generalizable to other communities on the web. I hope to include any responses to this question in a write-up on Tech Review. Thanks.
I buy crates of bottled water, and keep them in the back of my car so I always have some handy. For this I pay $5. I am not paying $5 for water, I am paying for convenience, the disposable bottles, somebody else to fill them and make it easy for me to purchase the bottles and transport them to my car. Sometimes, I pay an extra $1 a crate for bottle caps that don't need to be unscrewed to drink. Those paying for San Pellegrino are probably paying more money for status than for water. In a convenience store, buying a single bottle, I am primarily paying for cold and ready to go. I'd say overall, I feel that I am paying less than $0.05 for the actual water, if I broke it down. I am paying for it because it is cheaper, easier, and more convenient than doing it myself. There are many things like this.
I never understood why people exaggerate so much Android's fragmentation problem, when the world's most fragmented platform, the Windows PC, has demonstrated it was not an obstacle to market domination...
> However, typically book work is intended to be rote practice of an algorithm.

I see your point, I see the article's point and you're both right -- a maths textbook probably shouldn't look like that. It's a mistake, an oversight, a bug, and, as someone noted in the comments, it would be great if books were being improved instead of written anew every few years. It's why I can run the most current Linux kernel and actually have a better experience than with a stable one -- it was improved, not rewritten.

What I didn't like was this idea that a parent could be scared because of some imperfection in the way a homework problem is framed, pandering to this light version of maths anxiety many people seem to have that actually prevents them from learning maths. If the problem is poorly stated, reframe it, point out the problem, guess or find the missing information, assume whatever needs to be assumed to get some sort of workable solution (which you can then improve upon :) There is no reason to panic, be afraid, or even really bothered by that.

Again, I know, it was just a hook but it bothered me enough to post these two comments.
The critical difference is once a new version of iOS is released Apple stop distributing the old one (with a slight exception when the iPad first came out, and was on 3.2).

Only today Samsung have announced some new handsets at MWC that still run Gingerbread...
Haskell is often put forward as a learning language. I have myself worked through "how to program" books for people with no prior programming experience that used haskell, in the same way that lisp (scheme) is used in sicp.
A lot of good points there, but the part about detecting mobile devices is a bit short sighted.

Varying your content based on mobile User-Agent (or any User-Agent actually) renders public caches almost impossible to get right.
I'm surprised that there isn't better translation to "minority" languages.
"CLAIM The ornamental design for packaging, as shown and described."

really?
No, that just concatenates a file reading bytes from the end, backwards.

The real opposite of cat would be a putative 'trunc'. So if you typed

$ cat somefile

It would print the file to your terminal. And then if you said

$ trunc somefile

The printed lines would be removed from your terminal. :)
Discovery of free apps can be accomplished by downloading all of them and finding out which ones (if any) suit you.

This method sucks, but it sucks much less than paying $2 for each of them and finding out which ones (if any) suit you. That's why they don't seem like orthogonal problems to me.
It's silly to have churn in the publishing market with ever new approaches, all of which are known to be less effective than proven methods of learning math that have been known for hundreds of years.

Just use the Singapore Math series for K-6 and be done with it. Sound pedagogy, known to work, has been debugged, no frivolous cutting edge theories from M.Eds who have never taught math successfully.
It's a fundamentally different paradigm. A lot of people who have been in the mobile business a while remember the 'bad old days' of J2ME and horrific compatibility problems.

Don't forget, a new version of Windows comes around every 3, 4, even 5 years. But on mobile, we have new OS versions dropping every year, at least. And these new versions bring substantial new APIs. So it's a very different environment to a traditional desktop OS.
Please, Someone, Disrupt Education
The final else block is a good point. In R this would cause an error during the attempt to return a non-existent variable (so at least R doesn't form a new variable on reference, just on assignment). This better is you now can see the error if it occurs. But it isn't everything as you may see this first in production (if you have insufficient testing). I still like the bug to not be at all possible. For example in Java we could declare the variable final at the top of the block and then the compiler would only accept code where the variable is assigned exactly once on all code paths (no matter how unlikely the path). This would catch a bunch of other popular errors (like forgetting to type "else" before one of the chained "if"s (as "else if" is unfortunately just a convention).
That's significantly less than the average high school student probably hears in a day.
Storage Systems Overview
Huawei Reveals MediaPad 10FHD – 8.8mm, 8MP Tablet With HD 1080p Output
seriously. who uses that crap? i'm supposed to spam all my facebook contacts with 20 second reads i went through? and even if i did want to share it, i could figure it out w/out having a a big expanded dialog. this is useful probably to 1% of readers and annoys the other 99%.
It's not as simple as that. It's not one poor guy looking a video feed or judging ads. It would be sophisticated system that pools together many workers in ways to get quality.

So, for example, if the factory robot knocks something over, and there are 10 different people watching a few frames of video, it's pretty likely they'd spot the mistake.

Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people.
Yes, I would be interested.
...75 device combinations with identical aspect ratios, and very similar hardware. Think about the difference between a Sony X10 Mini (320x240 display) and a Galaxy Nexus (1280x720 display): that sort of drastic hardware/software differentiation isn't there on iOS. Writing an app that works well on both is no easy challenge.
As I recall, part of the rules of the Death Note was that the user has to picture the face of the victim as they write the name, so they have to have a name and a face to kill. I assume a printer doesn't manage to do that, although I do suspect at times that some printers are fairly malevolent.
The empirical evidence is as you say. It just hasn't been my experience that code bases with the same number of tracked defects are all the same. Some are brittle and littered with rare lurking bugs (rare in the test environment, but guaranteed to be hit by many in production) and other code bases are much more stable. I think this depends on the style, the rigor of design and the discipline seen throughout development. So even if my experience with static typed code bases has been more pleasant, dome of that could be due to the type of developer that uses them.
The associates degree might be an issue in the long run towards advancing your career unless you do something phenomenal that makes up for it. As others have said, get the BS at least. However, get the degree on a part-time basis slowly while on the job. Definitely check around to see what decent college would give you the most credits for the classes already taken. Make sure to look at the curriculum that you would take at those schools.

One famous person who did the part-time degree approach was U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner.
The same threshold applies whether at the federal or state level in terms of the consequences. Push it too far at the federal level and you'll wipe out a row of cheap labor jobs, that will either be automated or off-shored; and those that can't be either will result in consumer price increases (which just burdens primarily the poor and middle class).

If you want to incentivize with $20 / hour minimum wage, you'd have to mandate hiring, or change the laws governing firing employees. Businesses would rebel against it immediately otherwise.

Bill Clinton & the Republicans worked together in the mid 1990s to successfully overhaul the existing welfare system by altering the terms of how you could get welfare and for how long and so on. Prior to that, the system was largely resulting in a stagnant perpetual welfare cycle, where people went in and never came out. It seemed to work great right up until the big economic implosion of the last few years.
Get an Email an Sms when the Raspberry Pi is available
> "Most of them are "simple" engineers well versed in current "technologies" but are uninterested or unable to break new frontiers".

I'm glad you said this because I feel as if it needs to be reiterated much more often. I'm a CS student right now, and a lot of times I look around and see my university's CS program as a factory designed to turn out by-the-book software engineers fit for corporate consumption.

I really enjoy CS, but here's my anecdote: the other day I got a chance to tour a microfabrication lab, with tons of expensive equipment and a lot of knowledgeable people milling about (who I'm sure were nervous with us being there). That really instilled an appreciation of the complexities involved with real, true innovation. I love writing software, but I won't do it forever, because the vast majority of true innovation really does require a deep understanding of scientific foundations.

Also: the guy who showed us around worked for Bell Labs for awhile before coming to the university where I'm studying. His one pre-condition for accepting the university job: the $2 million, room-size, laser-equipped system that he built for detecting flaws in silicon wafers had to come with him.
The mind boggles -- does this man not value his free time at all? He continued searching for software to avoid paying the $50.

I understand your reasoning, to a point. But remember that he was previously paying $0 for an open source app that provided mostly the same functionality, and it's a big jump going from nothing to $50. In that situation, I'd probably spend quite a bit of time researching my alternatives so that 1) I didn't have to pay $50 more than I'm used to paying, 2) I don't have to pony up an extra $25 if I add another computer to the mix, 3) I can tell my friends and coworkers about the free alternative so it gains momentum and supplants the pricy version.

The "price/utility" equation is very much at play here. A $50 replacement for a free app better provide an enormous utility to make it worthwhile. There's a certain cross-platform text editor that gets mentioned lots here on HN that I bought because it was very useful to me. "Small" apps like a mouse sharing widget just aren't useful enough to me that I'd be willing to support that price point.
How does this put the argument to rest?
You could not use Octopress...

Octopress is just a theme and some nice tools for Jekyll, but you can recreate those tools yourself.

It also doesn't look horrible in IE7/8, just not fantastic either.

Personally, I would (and previously have) just use Jekyll itself and not worry about Octopress. I tried using Octopress, but just got annoyed with it, which caused me to switch away from Jekyll completely, and move to mynt, a simpler blog-aware static-site generator written in python.
It's more accurate to say that theobromine is poisonous to dogs: 100mg to 1kg of body weight.

Which is why my shepherd can filch the occasional candy bar and not die. One candy bar - annoying (to me) but not fatal. A pound of bakers chocolate and she'd be in doggy heaven.
New Uncertainty About the Uncertainty Principle
Indexing The World Wide Web: The Journey So Far
It's not a matter of the base material changing, it's a matter of how that material is presented and taught. When I keep hearing everyone claim that the way that math is taught is terrible, I'm willing to believe that someone can write a better textbook.

Granted this isn't actually being accomplished. The reason why new textbooks are needed is independent of why new textbooks are being bought. However, I feel that your argument "Subject X hasn't changed, so we shouldn't textbooks on X" is off target. Why are there new web frameworks keep coming out? Because this time, we're going to do it right.
I've been playing a bit with OpenSCAD, but this takes the idea to a completely new level. Very impressive.
> a large successful enterprise system built on Smalltalk... To my knowledge no such system exists

"a fully-integrated, model-driven, automated silicon wafer fabrication facility (fab) ... ControlWorks managed fab saved TI the equivalent of 1.2 fab lines last year. What does a fab cost? roughly $1B!"

http://www.google.com/search?q=ControlWorks+smalltalk

Kapital, 70 developers in 4 locations in 2005

http://www.google.com/search?q=kapital+smalltalk

http://www.google.com/search?q=oocl+smalltalk
Tangential: when I saw the iPhone power supply, I was blown away. Here was this little white box, about 1-inch cube, able to convert 120V AC into low-voltage DC. No tranformer; no big capacitors; nothing. Just some solid-state electronics, and bam! Out comes some sweet DC juice.

I wish all DC equipment came with such power supplies. Heck, while I'm at it: here's a great idea. Establish 2-way communication with the solid-state power supply, so that the equipment can tell the power supply what it wants, and the solid-state supply can then give it out. Then you won't need a separate power supply for every piece of equipment!
> Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people.

But you're still asking the "wrong" people. And you're asking, instead of observing the actual behaviour.
I agree with your general point, but please could we lay off the "does not $X make" snowclone? I think it annoys me more than any other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone
I agree, and I find it kind of funny that this movie is having troubles where it is: Weinstein's productions--including most (all?) of Kevin Smith's movies, for example--are often running up against the R/NC-17 divide (largely because of language!) instead of the PG-13/R divide.
Jony Ive mentioned this in the biography, and said it was especially annoying to him since he always remembered who came up with an idea.

It's the same "phenomenon" described by Hertzfeld here: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Fi...

That said, this story is about an invention that Steve Jobs _doesn't_ take credit for. It's another example of how Isaacsons biography gets simple facts wrong by simply quoting people without doing research (just like the NeXT quote by Bill Gates discussed earlier).

Also, I think Steve Jobs comes off as belittling the accomplishments of Woz here, by saying that the power supply was just as revolutionary as the logic board, which apparently is clearly false.
If you don't like the conditions then you can decline and not have access to the creation.
It's called a design patent. It explicitly covers only the ornamental, non-functional design of the object, and is subject to somewhat different terms than a utility patent.

In terms of IP law, it's actually quite reasonable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
At that point just hire someone skilled to write around it. The unskilled labour isn't competitive at 7.25/hr. I'd rather send it to a semi-skilled in Bangalore at 5-6/hr.
Apple should offer the opportunity to merge two iPads (with mockups)
Quick question - how do you work with the asset pipeline in development mode. Did you not find it much, much slower than pre-asset Rails ?
This resonates a lot with Henry Ford's innovations of conveyor belt assembly lines. Ford found out how to humans into an early form of robot, and once technology caught up these jobs inevitably were replaced with actual robots. Even if this Turk Station idea works, how long will it be until AI replaces any need for Mechanical Turk? About 10 years I'm guessing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Compan...
They've just announced the Tab 2 (10.1), which is actually thicker than the original Tab, and has very similar specs.

It seems quite likely that Samsung is going to use "Tab" for it's low end tablets and "Note" for its high end tablets.

As for Beam, it's a niche product, and has a place. A very few people will buy it and be happy that it exists, and the rest of us can safely ignore it. Large companies can successfully address both volume and niche markets simultaneously without shortchanging the niche or diluting the volume markets, although this is a very difficult task and most companies who try, fail.
I like the point. And not being able to use if(0) (as in C) has caught tons of bugs (like writing "if(x=0)" instead of "if(x==0)"). There are ton of things that sounded convenient in the early history of programming languages that are really anti-patterns.

For example:

Confusing ints with booleans.
Confusing ints with pointers (no longer done, thank goodness).
allowing assignments to have a non-void type ("x=1.0" should be of type void, not type double).
Poor choice of assignment and test equals (would be nice not to use "=" but to force ":=" and "==").
Pverly aggressive type coercion and autoboxing.
Integer division using the same symbol as floating point (many end-users want 5/2 to be 2.5 as the answer, mostly you want it to be 3 if you are doing loop-foo).
Making "else if" and if-braces mere convention.
Allowing null way too many places.
Automatic variable decleration.
I had pain in my right hand, that I fixed with trigger point therapy.

Using a mouse, typing, or using an iPad all made the top of my right hand hurt and feel very tired.

The trigger point therapist pushed on a few points in my forearm. When pressed, I could feel tension in the usual spots on my right hand.

Having found the right spots, the therapist simply pushed on them really, really hard, and maintained the pressure. It hurt, but immediately afterwards my hand was useable for everything except the iPad.

I went in for another session a few months later, he found another small spot that again referred pain to my hand, and after that session I could use my iPad normally.

It's a year later, and I'm totally pain free. If you have an insurance plan that covers trigger point therapy (most likely under "massage"), you should definitely try it.

Note: It can be hard to find a good practitioner. I'm not talking about deep tissue massage. Trigger point therapy is sustained applied pressure more than massage. The technique should hurt if it's being done properly, but the results are worth it.