skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Solution in search of a problem.

Steve Blank speaks about the technology lifecycle adoption curve [1], and I think this entire "health + mobile" market is (optimistically) on the far left end of the curve.

The problem isn't the problem - it's how people feel about the problem. I know I can have a completely digital banking solution, with even phone support 24/7 if I need it, but I don't want that.
Banking and my money is important to me, and when I need advice or have problems, I want to walk into a branch and speak with a real person. I'm not a dinosaur or a luddite - I'm 24, and I'm well versed in emerging technology.

I feel even more strongly about my health: I don't care that I can take a picture of my ear drum and send it to a doctor and have an antibiotic prescription that I can forward to my pharmacy and pick up in 30 minutes: there is something wrong with my body, I am concerned, this is important to me, and I want to speak to someone who is trained, credible, and can offer medical advice. The trouble with digital services that attempt to melt themselves into the physical world is that important things need to be dealt with by people. A doctor offers credibility and that is what I want. A 99c iPhone app offers no credibility, and for important things, credibility is important. If a doctor waves off my ear problem as "sleep on it for a few days, here's a note", I trust his advice and I'm more than willing to go through with it. If an iPhone app told me the same, I'd be probably reaching for the uninstall button around the time I'm dialing a doctor to make an appointment.

1. [PDF] page 23/45 http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...
I'm not sure anyone is arguing the iPhone invented all these individual technologies, and if anyone is claiming that, they shouldn't be as the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary.

I think the real meat of the argument is "iPhone synthesized all those individual pieces into something coherent and incredible.". It's kind of like how the Macintosh and Lisa took the ideas from PARC, perfected them, and turned them into a real product. I think the stink is being made that Android is copying that aspect of the iPhone, instead of just a piece or two.

Maybe that's not what's actually being argued, but that's what I think should be argued at least.
White House pushes online privacy bill of rights
And the very best just seem to be "luckier" than the rest...
MicroGems: five minute RubyGems
Ideally, this is true.

But, I've worked in places that had bad resource planning, and didn't allocate the same kinds of resources in staging. When we had performance problems, there was no place else to go.

It can be hard to convince people to take their expensive hardware and IT time to set that production system up, and now, "duplicate it so we can debug". Eventually, I think you just give up and go somewhere else.
All of the greatest under-achievers I've known were constantly told how smart they were by people with the best intentions, and they had experiences similar to yours.
The difference between getting competent with Postgresql versus MySQL was just a few hours.

Yes and no. There are a vastly more hosting options that provide MySQL vs Postgres. So it's not an issue of getting competent with the DB system, it's an issue of using an existing LAMP stack or having to roll your own.
Hedy Lamarr: Actress and inventor of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum system.
I would buy a Fire if it were a real Android device, but it's even more heavily modified than your average heavily-modified-Android device, and we all know how up-to-date those things stay. For example, why should I be satisfied with Amazon's browser when I could be using Chrome instead?

I understand why they might not want the "Google Experience" on their device, but I don't understand why they can't maintain a patchset on top of AOSP. Give me an up-to-date OS, and I'll add the software I want. I'll even promise not to ask for support!
> If possible, break up the original product into smaller modular sub-projects you can rewrite independently.

This.

Many projects can be done this way. In particular, the process of figuring out the set that can be replaced at any given time can aid in the refactoring.
Presumably the data is now publicly available? Or at least FOIA-able? What's stopping me from running my own analysis and writing my own paper? I am not part of any agreement the industry made with DEMS.
Toronto Startup Heatmap - where are the startups in Toronto?
http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html
Well I didn't say all, and I didn't say welfare programs get people back on their feet. I said it helps people get back on their feet.

Living in Michigan, almost all of my family became unemployed as a result of the factories closing down. Some took the assistance to get retraining and find another job, and some took maintaining the assistance as their new job or as a retirement package. Some just weren't able to get back into the job market no matter how they tried. I got out of my state's "No Worker Left Behind" retraining assistance just before the new governor shut down the incredibly successful program.

It's a combination of willingness to work and ability to work. Welfare programs can do no more than take basic survival off your "worries" list.
Or come up with a plan to gradually replace key areas with new system. I have a real world example of what Joel describes, came up with a plan to do what I am describing it was rejected, a total rewrite done and it was a disaster, the company has never really recovered.
New Flashback Trojan Horse Variant Hits the Mac
Who ever heard of data that was really deleted or purged? IT folks work really hard to ensure that data can't easily be deleted in such a way that it will disappear irrecoverably.

Legislation will not fix the fundamental problem that some data is actually really hard to selectively delete. Take the very common scenario of some small company that made backups of its databases to tape for years and years. If you were to exercise your right to purge your data, how can this be reasonably done? If they just delete it from their online, live database you'll have folks cry foul because they didn't really delete it. What a mess!
Check your Skype--they'll text chat before they call. Shouldn't take long.
When I saw this headline on HN I thought to myself "Wow, Apple is finally implementing ReplayGain in iTunes and on iDevices?".

Isn't that what Apple calls 'Sound Check'?
it's fairly common to ask for the year to be included in submission titles that are old. It helps clarify for the reader that we're going to see something out of computer history (or general world history) rather than something brand new.
"I'm not sure anyone is arguing the iPhone invented all these individual technologies, and if anyone is claiming that, they shouldn't be as the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary."

Isn't that what the current legal battle over slide to unlock is over? I'll be the first to agree that the iPhone put all the pieces together, but it seems like every other week there's a new lawsuit over some iPhone or Android feature that is more of a common sense thing and probably shouldn't have been granted a patent.
The government does what the voters tell it. And so long as the voters are supporting the war on drugs -- so long as they demand drug abuse problems be tackled by trying to control drug use -- the government is required to be involved.

And it simply does not matter whether the policy is enforced via a hard cap on production quantity, a hard cap on production licenses, a soft cap on prescriptions, pressure on the psychiatric industry to self-limit prescriptions, or a legal requirement that certain prescriptions need to go through a second-opinion or review board process.

The result of all of those is the same: voter opinion on drug policy has interfered with what you and your doctor feel is right for you.

Who cares whether you can't get Adderall because the manufacturing capacity isn't there, or your doctor was forced to ration his prescription allowance in case a more-severe case walks through his door, or a second-opinion review disagreed with your doctor? If the motivation is the same and the end result is the same, the method is irrelevant.

That's why I say that arguing against government control of production is beside the point.
The fundamentally silly part about all is that Tesla doesn't offer insurance for this rare thing.

Seems trivial to setup an insurance scheme for this rare, but exceedingly costly event, either internally, or via an external insurer. It may not be cheap but this PR issue can be fixed in an afternoon talking to Farmers insurance or the like.
I'm not sure that's exactly the same thing. I interpreted that quote to mean that one lab at Tufts was using Quartzy to keep an up-to-date inventory; what I'm talking about is a university mandating a particular platform which all its labs must use -- because that platform is convenient for the administration, not because it's necessarily convenient for the individual labs.
Google to name Dennis Woodside as new CEO of Motorola Mobility
Handheld Gaming's Biggest Challenge Yet: Smartphones
Other things that grew more quickly did so afterward, using the web in order to achieve that growth. Each one seems to grow more quickly than the last.
Perhaps a distinction can be drawn based on how you use the device - with exception of audio and vibration notifications, phones have to be in your hand to be used. Wearables can be used without overly impeding whatever you're doing.

Still, having an always-accessible computing platform and internet terminal, even if it has to be held, is a pretty big deal :)
T-Mobile: Our Q4 Stunk Because We Don’t Have the iPhone
While the Hummingbird icon was well balanced and indicated motion, there were a few reasons that made us change:

- We didn't feel it was Mac OS X-y enough; it didn't seem to fit in with other icons in my Dock.

- The concept itself was too abstract. Given our product name is also abstract, we wanted something a little more concrete. The new concept is an animator's lightbox, which we felt is closer to its purpose. Admittedly not a lot of people have seen this in their lives...

- We wanted some way to convey the HTML5 given its importance in our app.

- Everyone is doing birds nowadays!
Ask HN: Do startups start with a business plan?
I find the UK is big on business plans. Any business and every business is required to have one. reading the article below, do I need one? or at what stage will I need one when creating a start-up?

www.entrepreneur.com/article/38290
My boss wrote MidasWWW, a Motif/X based browser for Unix. It was out in November 1992.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidasWWW
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser

> Where does Mosaic fit in?
> A: As I understand it, Marc Andreessen at NCSA was shown ViolaWWW by a colleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA. Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out. He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser for unix from scratch. Later, several other folks at NCSA joined the team to port the idea to Mac and PC. As they did, Tom Bruce at Cornell was writing "Cello" for the PC which came out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.
This is so the future. Determinism is over rated.
IPhone app Clear sells 350k downloads in nine days on the App Store
Your link has lost it's '.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick's_law
We do have separate variants for 32x32 and 16x16 sizes, which are visible when scaling in the Finder.
The article does not really suggest that the variation must be related to climate change, and mainly simply reports an interesting result with the need for more data. I suspect (though open to be corrected) we already know about plenty of weather features that can regularly vary by 1% over ten year periods, climate change or no climate change. (The annual minimum Arctic ice area, by comparison, shrunk by something like one-third in the same time period, although it has stalled the last few years.)
Ars is getting worse.
"Unethical" HTML video copy protection proposal draws criticism from W3C reps
Performance cost of Ruby ORM model instantiation
You forgot about interacting with third party code that you have no control over. Like when you develop any mobile app.
That would be true if banks weren't reducing their ratios at the same time. Because their percentage of bad debts is going up, they have to reduce their lending to keep their bad debt to capital ratio at the same level. Even worse, their trying to improve their ratios because they now realize they had let them get out of hand during the boom.
Clarence Kontio Blog
In some branches of the civil service in the UK (I do not know exactly which ones but HMRC is one of them), we've had a system to deal with this for about 20 years now.

All accesses of personal data have some random chance (I think it's 5%) of being audited. If your request gets picked, a dialog pops up saying that your access is being audited and you must file a form immediately, explaining why you needed to access that record.

For celebrities and for anyone whose records have a history of abuse, the probability goes to 100%.

If you do not submit the form, or your explanation is not satisfactory, you get invited to a disciplinary interview.

That's cheaper than auditing all accesses, but is enough to discourage unnecessary "browsing" of data.
Or 'dub-dub-dub'
The queue is sorted by registration time, and a lot of people registered for this challenge during the entire month of February.
I love these kinds of articles, they're always reliably interesting. And always kick up decent debate as well, given that people often have different opinions about what works, and no-one has access to the actual data proving anything.

In a previous job (life?) I was put onto a project to (effectively) clone AirBnb, and spent a lot of time staring at the home page. While it's nice to see it again, boy am I glad to have moved on.

An aside: airbnb.com takes 4-5 seconds to load for me, compared to near instantaneous load on other sites. You could spend days tweaking your home page, but if people get frustrated waiting for it to load then you're handicapping yourself.
Yet another question for Moser/Dweck: does the almost-immediate negative response to making mistakes diminish if the subject is in a state of flow?
From personal experience, a state of flow while performing an intellectually engaging activity diminishes any and all negative feelings I may have. Positive and calm feelings remain, but when I encounter an obstacle or an error, I simply adapt to it like water flowing down a mountain.

I suspect that Moser/Dweck would find that programmers in a state of flow encountering a compile/runtime exception would exhibit significantly lower amplitude signal associated with immediate negative response.
Previous incarnation on HN from 2 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030161
Selecting a Seatmate to Make Skies Friendlier
I mean, do we really want to support synthesis of other people's work as something that can be protected legally?
Especially when most development nowadays is clicking cogs together anyways?

This doesn't seem like a meme we should seek to perpetuate.
According to the submitter, an editor changed the headline:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626011
I find Smalltalk's conditional mundane and relatively uninteresting. It's a straightforward use of closures to implement switching on boolean truth values; it removes one concept that's frequently fundamental in languages, at the expense of making the language harder to analyze statically. Rather than being able to infer conditional control flow syntactically, you need data flow analysis; and without static types, you don't know for sure that something is even boolean until runtime. I'm not sure the beauty outweighs the costs.

I think your reaction - seeing it as beautiful - is more likely if you're relatively new to closures and code as data. The fact that treating code as data lets you write your control flow as libraries, doesn't mean that it is good to write your control flow via libraries. The power of an abstraction is not necessarily well correlated with the desirability of its use; I rather suspect the reverse may be the case.
But you decide on your doctor, so ultimately, it's your decision.
iBooks Author widget export is huge. Well done!

I feel like this is one of the best deals in software. $50 is an absolute steal.
I'm a computational life scientist, so I'm not exactly in the target user group, but I will say that I consider LabGuru's (http://www.labguru.com/) research project tracking to be a killer feature that Quartzy lacks at this point.

Keep up the good work though, I've yet to see anything close to my dream CMS for science labs.
"Education is the wisdom wrung from failure."

I really couldn't disagree with this more. No doubt, failure is important in learning. However, to be educated or have an education, at the end of the day, you need to get something right.

Personally, I don't learn by failing fifty times and never succeeding. I don't learn how to lose weight if I try fifty diets and never lose a pound. I don't learn how to talk to a girl if I speak with a dozen of them and get shot down every time. I don't learn how to rockclimb by falling off the rock and never gaining elevation.

That is negative re-enforcement. I have learned what not to do--the opposite of what I set out to accomplish. Education is progressive. I learn by failing until I succeed, if only a little bit. Then I go back and try to succeed even more. That's the hard part, not calling it quits. Finding inspiration and success in the smallest scraps of result.

Just don't sell education or yourself short.
I like this one.

http://use-the-index-luke.com/
Steve Jobs saying he's going to spend billions and billions on frivolous lawsuits should make still independent developers wary about getting boxed into his walled "ecosystem". Perhaps it's time to revise the laws on "thought property" to declaw the patent and copyright industries. We need more competition, not more "I have a lot of money therefore I get even more money" monopolies. Geez. Patent law is just turning into a subsidy for Silicon Valley.
I wonder if we need to more broadly define Toronto, i.e., not just "the City of Toronto" when talking about startups. If you're based elsewhere, let's say, Palo Alto or Boston or NYC, do you care about the regional differences between Waterloo, Guelph, Toronto, Mississauga and Hamilton? Or because you fly into Toronto Pearson (YYZ) are these all defined as one larger geographical area.
Taking your question literally and in isolation, no.

But the manifestation more relevant to the real world is not having the experience base to realize it's biting you in the ass. Specifically, even though X is working, it could be working better, for less effort. Or another common case is X is not working and you misidentify why ("lazy developers not willing to do the work" instead of "used the wrong paradigm for the job", for instance).
> Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation.

This article is heartily missing the point.

Android is basically a stolen product. It's a direct successor and competitor to the iPhone, and the direction of Android in it's current form has been and is extremely influenced by what Apple has been doing.

Sure, the iPhone is a bunch of "stolen" technologies and ideas, but Apple brought them together to make something great in a way that had never been done before. What Apple did took vision, discipline, and execution. That is what Apple brought to the table, and that is what innovation is.

Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying.

We don't need to get all emotional about this. This doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the products, it's just the history about how this stuff came about. You are still free to like Android or WebOS or iOS or whatever you want. It's fine. Just recognize innovation for what it is.
Ha! Last night I read your comment, assumed you were right, and then came up with a solution that did not assume an executable stack. ;P (I'm actually quite glad, as messing around with the stack would have been much harder.)
Clear Has Sold 350,000 Copies Since Debut
Apple did not invent multitouch however they did invent how it was used to make a phone with a very specific interface that was then copied feature for feature by Google who had intimate knowledge of its design.
Solar system change.
she looks old.
It Shouldn't Take a Genius to Understand You
It will be even more fascinating when applications that could be used to assist in driving become commonplace, too. potential-hazard-detection, in-eye GPS, etc, could be incredibly useful. ...reading the current twitter from your friends... not so much
> "I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series." - azure!randals, June 1982

Well worth the read, thanks!
"in order for them to achieve the neuronormativity expected of them in say, an office job or 12 years of mandatory schooling."

And there are a lot of fields a person might want to enter, entirely on their own initiative (not teacher-imposed), that inherently require you to spend a lot of time doing 'boring' or repetitive things. And if you don't, you'll fail. Or give up painting/piano/whatever early out of frustration.
Not entirely unfair, actually.
But then you can also say that everything is a remix and a synthesis of prior innovation, and if that's the case then Apple's position is still indefensible.

We all stand in the shoulders of someone else.
A 1 line edit creates 130 audit events in Windows
Native Android activity written in JavaScript
Industries converge around good ideas. This isn't "stealing", its progress.
> there’s no need to outline the box and make it look misaligned with the “Search” button.

Wrong and poor advice to subvert browser functionality. Alert the user to which input they are currently working with. Eliminates [tiresome] user guesswork and is conventional. Also helps the visually challenged.

> via overlay boxes

I don't even.

> I enter my city and hit ‘Enter’. That triggers the search, without giving me a chance to enter my dates first.

It occurs to me that this is part of the design. They show you the inventory before asking you for your size, even though if you had the patience you can input your desired dates on the homepage. Also, note the date input is also available after form submission. Something tells me that they've done some research on user behavior.

> How else can Airbnb improve?

I'm going to stop now because if anything, this post is novice-level and poorly thought out if one is assuming that they can make better what they don't understand.