skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"They're going to continue building Motorola branded devices and it's going to be the same team doing it."

Too bad. My Droid RAZR suffers from all the crapware added by Motorola and/or Verizon. I'm sick of being asked if I would like to use VZNavigator instead of Google Maps. My personal hope for the acquisition is that someone at Google would tell them to stop making their phones suck so they could squeeze out a few additional pennies from each customer. From Google's standpoint, not shipping a product which maximizes customer happiness is penny-wise and pound foolish.
So instead of giving up on the flawed idea of data caps, they are putting the onus of caps on app makers instead of customers? I can only imagine that this new spin on an old strategy will have all the same problems.
I find it amusing that they choose global warming, the most politicized science, to argue that conservatives lack of belief in constitutes denial and ignorance. While I have no love lost for conservatives or even liberals for that matter, I think there is plenty of cause for concern in the global warming debate from both sides. Big interest on one side and Scientist with the ethical rigor of the Joker on the other. I am surprised that the majority are not skeptical of both sides. But to the point of this piece I think it has little value, it's hypocrisy at it finest and is pretty much a group think smear piece, it's propaganda and has no business on HN.
Ah, I didn't realize you were the article submitter. Looking forward to it. And god help you keeping up with Gmail's constant changing interface.
Chaotic moon's brain controlled skateboard
"I can say that no third world country makes it as hard to be self-employed as we do in the US"

I don't know what kind of self-employment you're talking about, but in some of the Third World countries it's pretty hard.

Here in Uruguay, unless you fall in the special category called "monotributo" (only for very low income), you have to jump through a lot of hoops (or pay a lot for a pre-made company), and pay lots of taxes, most of them are of the kind "pay now, we'll reimburse you later" and are reimbursed in tax credits mostly (not actual money).

Of course, you can also work illegally, and that's what most people did, that's why the "monotributo" tax was created, to make people pay at least a little tax and social security.

The same happens in Argentina, and Perú had such a huge illegal infrastructure that liberal economist Hernando de Soto made it his field of studies (at the beginning, it took 400 steps to be a legal company in Peru).

Professionals (such as engineers and programmers) fall under a different scheme, but it also entails several regulations and you usually always fail something in the eyes of the IRS equivalent (DGI) and have to pay fines.
Technically, it only works because it looks very much like an accident. China and at least one dictator have accused the US of doing this on purpose, so the US has to prosecute and act all hot and bothered about it, otherwise it starts to look like an intentional leak.

China's case is particularly interesting. It's nearly impossible to criticize them directly for anything, since they just deny it, mirror the same criticism back, and then threaten some kind of economic retaliation for it. Their playbook is clear, and effective.

But this accidental Wikileaks release allowed the US to publicly say to the world all sorts of stuff about what our government really thinks about the Chinese government, and there's nothing they can do in response. It was an accident, US is embarrassed and pissed off, but it just so happens the collateral damage to Chinese government's PR machine (and various dictators and whatnot) was worse.
I must admit, I had no idea what Travis CI was until today. I have never heard that name before. Today there have been two submissions for this Python/Perl support they're adding (the first one had 15 up-votes in 13 minutes). Now this one is here.

Is this some super-popular but yet not very well known (to me, at least) piece of software? Because it sure seems like they've got some pretty hardcore fans.
More similar to the (initially announced) Palm Pre. It was supposed to be a device which runs Web Apps natively, and you write your applications in HTML + JS, using their "Mojo". Well, developers weren't having it, so they eventually allowed C / C++ as well. I'd predict the same with this device. Since it's running Linux kernel, I can pretty much guarantee that you will be able to run C / C++ apps on the device, and developers will choose that more often than not.
This idea is the subject of Bret's essay "Up and down the ladder of abstraction" [1] which is a fantastic read.

[1] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
> Verizon was 80% of the way there and its management got cold feet.

I have a simple explanation for that: A regulatory and commercial environment that was clearly not going their way. Verizon spends something like $1,000 to install FiOS at your house, then a few hundred dollars a year in hardware, bandwidth, etc. To make that work for them economically, they need customers paying an average of $100+/month and preferably even more over time.

But how does Verizon get your $100+ when you watch all your TV on NetFlix, Hulu or iTunes? That's pretty obviously the way things are heading, though it may take another decade. Now all you want from Verizon is an IP pipe, and good luck convincing customers that "Internet only" should cost as much as "Internet + TV + Phone". And an Obama-appointed FCC is unlikely to allow Verizon to demand a cut of NetFlix or Apple's revenue for use of "full bandwidth": That's what the Net Neutrality fight was always about.

Without their own services to sell, the capital cost of laying and maintaining a "dumb pipe" didn't look so good.

I think Apple is going to have a go at solving this problem for the providers: "Let us take over the user experience (i.e., the hardware and software) and in return we'll give you a new way to package your services that guarantees a healthy revenue stream regardless of how consumers are getting their content." Just think how much more money AT&T makes from the average iPhone subscriber vs. the average dumb phone subscriber and you'll have the right idea.
> Really a PITA to use on multiple screens, way over-engineered IMO as it's the trend in both Gnome and KDE world lately.

Yes, this new generation of window managers seems to suck with my three monitors. Looks like I'll be sticking with XFCE for the time being (considered KDE, but looks like someone decided to make the whole thing really ugly since the last time I used it).
I bought pack of generic modafinil (do not remember exact brand). It was manufactured in India.

It had no effect on me. I tried up to 4 100mg pills at once (i.e. I started with half table one day and each day increasing dosage). Although, I also suspect it might be a fake, since I was buying from some online "pharmacy". Provigil both too expensive and require doctor's approval.

Just found about piracetam, thanks to this thread. just ordered :)
Mysterious electron acceleration explained
There are reasons to sell a startup aside from having built it to flip. It can even happen in a startup that the founders had every intention of building into a big sustainable business. Many times, it's because the founders and/or investors have "checked out" of the business and want a quick return on their time.
Scan Your Food For Bacteria With Your Cell Phone
My personal experiences with modafinil's effects are similar to the OP's. It increases my focus more than caffeine but not like Adderall. It completely clears away brain fog and eliminates sleepiness. I find it lasts 6-8 hours for me, depending if I'm sleep deprived or not.

I found that if it's evening, I'm tired, and I take it that it may take up to 2 hours before my alertness improves. Normally it's about 1 hour.

Other than terrible smelling urine I don't notice any side effects.

Modafinil also seems to be synergistic with caffeine. I can take half the caffeine with the same or better effects.
“Entrepreneur” is Dead.
Freescale puts entire cell phone base station on single chip
This is far from a new phenomenon: look at the early days of the automobile up to today's KIRF iPhones.
I should have been more specific. I was mostly thinking of sequence analysis like the PhD candidate in the OP wants to do. Bioinformatics in general covers a lot of ground which is directly clinical in nature, like image analysis.

Sequence analysis has had an important role to play in genome annotation and comparison, but the recent (extremely expensive) attempts to apply it to the genetics of human disease have been quite disappointing so far. The biggest technical issues are firstly that our tools for measuring genotypes are too imprecise and too expensive to support experiments which will nail down exactly which variants are contributing to a given disease and secondly that almost all related studies of human disease so far are epidemiological in nature, because you can't do experiments on actual humans (and I'm not arguing that you should be able to. :-) This means it is very difficult to establish a variant as causative, and hard to design reliably repeatable experiments.

The political issues arise out of health research funding being fundamentally motivated by hope and fear, leading to massive commitments to research strategies which are wishfully ignorant of the above technical issues. This is followed by a lot of wishful ignorance of the strategies' failures by the groups who implemented those commitments. Usually this ignorance comes from moving the goal posts post hoc. The current sunset of GWAS is a good example. (See Peter Visscher's article in the January issue of AJHG for example.)

The technical issues are being worked out. Better genotyping will be developed, and at least some disease biology can be modeled in animals or cultured tissue (cancer might be good for this.) But those issues have been ignored for too long, at tremendous cost, because the serious funding rewards such ignorance. For instance, essentially the same strategy as GWAS is now being pursued on a huge scale, just using a different genotyping technology. No one has run an initial small-scale experiment validating this new approach, it's just based on the hope that the extra information provided by the new technology will provide the ingredient that the studies to date have been missing.
"Indeed no developed nation does either"

Are you kidding?
Declaring the German labor market to be a success while counting only German unemployment is misleading, something like saying US fiscal and labor policy is a blowout success because of yet another year of record low unemployment in North Dakota.

To measure the effectiveness of the policies that lead to German job creation, we need to count every worker who is receiving a wage in the German national currency against the workers who wanted to, and legally could have received wages in that currency.

When we look at the whole picture, the situation is ugly and getting worse. Headline unemployment averaged across the European single currency area is now 10.4% and rising rapidly. [0]

Germany is a manufacturing powerhouse, and its exports are currently red hot. Any breakup of EMU would brutally reprice those goods. I would expect this to lead to significant German unemployment.

[0] "Eurozone unemployment hits new record" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16808672 - 31 January 2012
Jam Tracks and Black Keys
Quality varies significantly between Indian manufacturers. Sun Pharma Modalert is a known quality brand.
How to share pictures with Friends
Travis is an open source CI system for running open source projects on. It uses a distributed setup to run the tests of projects in a sandboxed environment. The VMs also provide multiple lang versions so you can test your library against several ruby/python/perl/node/erlang/php versions without even having to think about it.

In short, Travis makes CI testing easy and fun for OS projects.
Earth's clouds are getting lower, which could be a good thing
Yes, ok, you will use WebSockets for your API. But what will it look like to book a ticket on your API? "{'action': 'book', 'from': 'Chicago', 'to': 'Moscow'}"? It's still junk without REST style.

The point of REST is operating with resources as building bricks of your API, and using only four CRUD operations on them (or on their collection). Besides, for testing purposes it is good to still have REST API to test it with curl or some web client in your code.

So what I'd suggest is to continue building REST API, but create a smooth REST2WebSocket layer to make your REST requests through WebSockets. Like "{'method': 'PUT', 'resource': '/api/users/john', 'data': '\{\'name\': \'Paul\'...".
Well said KLS, exactly well said. I regret that I will never get back the 30 seconds I wasted reading this article.
The other problem is that it cuts academics off from the rest of the world. Because paywalls effectively prevent non-academics from seeing what academics are doing, they end up being underappreciated, and their contributions end up being underutilized. And, since we might as well bring it back to money, I suspect it ultimately has a downward influence on the amount of money legislatures earmark for universities and research.
It has certainly piqued my interest. Oh, and I just did a quick look around too and realized that yes, many people know about this software. :)
You know, I started to get suspicious around the time I read the phrase "gentleman's agreement". I can't think of any good motivation a person could have for wanting such a thing aside from the fact that the lawyers haven't drawn up a contract yet.
Cotton Sheets for the Elite
What would you consider to be the essentials of a bedroom? Would it be a big and comfortable, queen sized bed? Bright and colorful lighting that breathes life and energy into the room? Or would you say something simpler such as cotton sheets?
Great idea. Having Balsamiq integrated into ux.stackexchange.com seems to be a win-win for both companies. Stackexchange get more tools for describing Q & A, and Balsamiq gets more people aware of and using their product.
Nice!

My first words after reading, (and I'm alone in my office, so totally unsolicited) "Ohhh, how awesome is that!"

It's always nice when you can do something to make the world a better place at scale.
HTML5 Context Menus
I remember geeking out to that when it came out! Since reading that I have been playing around with d3 a good deal to try and be able to make some of the stuff he has. I've been slaving away at this for the past few days actually:
http://zacharymaril.com/analytics/

This afternoon, I will put up a better version (this one won't work for you due to some figuration stuff), but this takes in your google analytics data and maps it a bit better than the normal set up.
Those small little detailsa all added up to things people really liked when they got them.

When we say apple "innovated X" or "invented Y" - I think most of us know that Steve Jobs, or even his engineers didn't necessarly invesnt the technology - in fact they probably didn't. What they did do was put them together and package them up in a way nobody else had before, even if only visually, and make it part of a whole product lineup.

I'm sure there were tons of inventions that let these cool apple power supplies exist.... ebtter electronics. plastic with better thermal designs.... and someone came up with a good way of attaching an extention cable or plug to the thing that's mechanically stable...... all these things matter. Putting it all together into one package and shipping it then selling it is what matters.
What iOS would have looked like in 1986
Frases de Felicidade. Sorrisos através das melhores frases.
Facebook, Microsoft, Mozilla form W3C group to clean up the mobile web
I'm one of the developers working on WebBluetooth and Bluetooth on B2G. If you're interested in progress, check out our metabug on it at

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727618

This is where we're gathering the tasks for the project. It's still hardly implemented right now, and our main focus is headsets first. I'd like to get rfcomm going pretty quickly too so we can do fun hardware experiments. :)

In general, if you're interested in the progress of something on B2G currently, just plug "b2g [word of interest]" into http://bugzilla.mozilla.org. That's where we're keeping tasks/bugs related to gecko internals.
It's a ratchet effect. Population are not particularly interested either way; government tells US government they're not going to put US interests ahead of their own people's, gets overthrown and replaced with a brutal dictatorship, population gets distinctly unfriendly, democratic government replaces dictator after revolution, opposes US interests as it plays well with population.
Hey, that sounds kind of familiar... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#Pahlavi_dynasty_.281925.E2...
Exchange for tradeable small business receivables trades $1B of contracts
Dude, seriously, this isn't helping anyone unless you give some clues allowing people to figure out who The Company is.
It's not that much about Android and phone providers as it's about Symbian/S40/S60 and Nokia's feature phones. Hi-end smartphones is an away match for Nokia so they're bringing the game to their home turf. Apple is not interested in this market (at least for now, iPhone Nano rumors appear every two years) and Android is not designed for phones that cheap (I know because I got one: Galaxy Ace). The strategy seems logical: push WinPhone into cheap hardware, build an ecosystem, grow a brand awareness among the users and make some solid money in the process (thanks to a high volume).

If they'll execute this right people, while upgrading their phones in a year or so, will be more likely to choose familiar looking Windows Phone 8 smartphone over "strange" Android or iOS. The only problem is: Nokia didn't manage to do so with Symbian and can't afford another failure.

BTW, if I were Ballmer I would push for a tablet designed for this part of market as well. A Kindle Fire but without Android flaws and hiccups. Nokia could make one that'd be strongly integrated with their phones - for example: a tablet without camera but flawlessly cooperating with all the Lumias, 808 PureView and so on.
(maybe the examples I provided are not ugly enough to show difference, so I'll try to do that here)

On non-rest API you can get in trouble mixing actions and resources, so you can get things like
{'action': 'list_users'}, {'action': 'rename_user'}, {'action': 'user_ban'}, {'action': 'rename_user_and_email'}, {'action': 'list_active_users'}

While on REST API you are at least consistent that user-resource is /users/, that concrete user is /users/<user_id> and that only operations are CRUD on either all users -> /users/ or on concrete user /users/<user_id>. That gives so much more clarity (+ caching reads, + only open transactions on POST/PUT/DELETE).
While the product name is apparently intended to be humorously ammended, the observation itself does not appear to be sarcasm. The poster appears to be legitimately claiming that Windows Mobile is an efficient platform.
We had a great replacement for caffeine -- ephedrine. Mini-Thins were a staple of my college life. Then they banned it (I blame media hysteria), and now I'm stuck with the steeping ephedra plant leaves (known as "Mormon tea" in these parts) for the occasional late-night productivity boost.
Modafinil on Silk Road is about twice the price of online pharmacies and most of the people selling it appear to be international.
Dropbox does 1 thing beautifully – sharing and syncing files across different platforms. Alot of people are over looking the sharing aspect.

That’s it and that’s all it needs to be. It doesn’t try to be all flashy and start adding more features on top of a core and proven principle. No it doesn’t need to start syncing screens. It doesn’t need to sync your drive states. It doesn’t need to start syncing your calendar. Etc etc.

It's more akin to a service than a feature. And there's nothing wrong with being a service!
When their break even point is well below 2 years going into debt is hardly a bad idea. In their situation debit is simply leverage and while it increases risk you can easily maintain profitability while borrowing significant amounts of money as long as your creating capital with that debt.
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So, in other words, unless you're already rich enough to pay for your customers' data usage, your app will be at a disadvantage on AT&T's network. This is why we need source-neutrality in networks. Otherwise existing players can subsidize their services and "dump" their product in order to drive new competitors out of the market.
One thing I've learned over the years is that you can't take it as gospel when a customer says "I want X". When following a customer request to the letter, most times you'll end up regretting the decision.

For us, the better way to handle when the customer asks for X, is to sit down and create a persona and ask ourselves why they are asking for it, and who else would want it.

I find we get a much better result when building requirements based off the customer's pain rather than just giving them what they want. It helps maintain usability by avoiding confusion over additional features and functions.

Then again, in a startup environment this is a tricky balancing act. You can't forsake sales for a drawn out product management/development process, but you also can't just add every customer feature request either.
Most likely, technology is only expensive to build the first time, or, at least, the cost decreases from there.
Yeah, I agree. I didn't expect such a quick influx of new bits- definitely need a way to detect duplicates.
There are so many uninformed comments here about .NET, WPF, and C++ that I don’t know to which to respond. So let me just leave this here:

1. .NET Framework and Managed C# is the highest programming abstraction level in Windows, and is the way most Windows Apps are now written.

2. The underlining system of .NET is written in C++ and C. And hence is why Microsoft is supporting unmanaged C++. Because it's part of everything.

3. WPF/xaml hasn't died. It has replaced WinForms. And is #1 way UIs are now written.

*This will all be complemented with the new Metro interface where JS/HTML5 are now also part of the top level.
This is the equivalent of free shipping. I predicted it a while ago (patting back): http://richvsreach.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/the-long-game-on...

What it’s not is net-neutral. I’m OK with that.
A Cash Cow Business
Nothing says a "cognitive enhancer" can't be a stimulant. Nootropics can be anything.
I went through this very same left-at-the-altar scenario a decade ago with a startup. It can be very difficult to prove that the company used the NDA information they had in their possession. Clearly the tech staff in the big company saw it, since this seems to be how they made the determination that they could do it in-house for less.
However, it is not general, e.g. it does not provide a solution if you want to chain computations where returning None/Nothing is valid (e.g. a Map lookup in Haskell).

But I think that's a feature, not a bug. Conflating errors and valid values leads to ambiguity. As PEP 20 says, "Explicit it better than implicit".

If you actually want certain function return values to act as a failure, I think you should wrap it in a new function that adds those semantics.