skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite is Tolkien. The Hobbit was published when he was 45.

To points made by others though he was a professor of English at Oxford for many years prior and wrote copiously during that time.
That is just fallacious. How many times something has been suggested wrongly by other people regarding other products in the past has no bearing at all on whether Farhad Manjo is right or wrong regarding the iPad.

If you want to make a point you will have to counter the arguments laid forth in the article, and show why it is likely the iPad will go the same way as Netscape. It will contribute to the discussion much more than just spouting dates.
This is still true. The N9 has amazing specs, but you wouldn't know it by trying to use the thing.
I've been incredibly impressed by Sam since he started as a part time partner at YC, as have all of the founders. Greendot are lucky to have him and his team.
UK photographer gets aurora and volcano in same shot
The title is link-baitey of course, but the general thesis is this:

* control over essential components.
* market leadership in applications.
* continual innovation.

The first one is the way in which Apple dominates and controls the supply chain. It's not monopolistic since they are paying real money for goods from third parties, but one has to wonder if there is restrictions on starting up new production lines. This becomes a huge barrier to entry to anyone else. I'm really curious to know where ASUS is getting their 1920x1200 glass for the new Transformer Prime. Like nuclear proliferation, there are a few key components that can prevent others effectively from building tablets. These are currently displays and radios.

The application one has been discussed a lot on HN, but basically what it boils down to is Apple's policies with regards to applications acceptable for publication creates a more homogenous user experience. There is anecdotal evidence that this translates into a user perception of 'quality' to those applications.

And finally they don't stop, like Intel's tick-tock sort of model they move incrementally forward each release. You can argue that the 'new iPad' is what the iPad 2 should have been but missed out, or you can argue its the same old same old with just a higher res screen and 4G, but the release after release means that if you're an Asus or a Samsung or a Dell, Etc and your development cycle is 2 years you have to guess where they will be in 2 years if you want to compete head to head. That is harder than you might think until you've tried it a few times. And of course the risk is that the 'new' thing might have come out of left field so its high risk.

A strategy which has more understood risk is to create your own product in the space which has your own vision of what it will be, but folks like RIM who have tried that have been challenged to think outside the space that they were successful in. Apple's advantage here was that the iPad is in many ways just a big iPod touch. And they had a lot of information about the touch which could help them vet various ideas.
"230%" electrically-ultra-efficient LED from MIT
He has no interest in continuing academia. His stated reasons for staying there rather than taking offered positions at google etc is that he can work on exactly what he wants and bill it out to the school.

I get what you are saying about VC's expecting people to act like they are intending to create businesses. I think someone smart will be able to see the difference here between something like what he wants to do and what something like facebook or kickstarter is doing. He is pushing the edge of knowledge and literally couldn't do it without the tools that he has gained in research. I honestly believe if someone talked to him they would see everything he has done for the last 10 years has been with this type of thinking in mind.

The social proof would not be a problem, top professors in compsci and mathematics know him; and he has code to back up his claims.

750k includes 70k a year for he and another engineer. I don't think he is confident he will find another engineer capable (other than the one he has in mind) that is capable of the work he is trying to do. Its too specific of a niche and literally cutting edge in the field.

The commercial value of the research would be the easiest sell of all; the first person/company to do it right will have immediate customers from everywhere.

He has interned at google (i fear if he sees this this line will be the proof of who I am and who I am talking about) and presumably has some connection there.

The main thing he needs is cash at this point; the number crunching is CPU intensive and he wants 20k/month for sending it out to amazon.
Obsessively Checking Email, Feel Free To Profit From This Idea
I consider myself pro-piracy and anti-copyright. Yet, this article still hits a nerve.

First off, and perhaps most unforgivably, the author makes no distinction between content creators and content distributors. All of their arguments seem to be based around creators charging too much--that isn't so! It's the distributors that saddle us with DRM, shitty prices, and ads.

A great example of this is the line:

"The artists who wake up and realize they can sell me
their newest physical CD for $20."

That's usually not the artist, unless you buy the album at a show or something! That's Sony! That's BMG! It's those bastards, not the artist!

This misdirected anger does not help their case.

Second, there is far too much of an entitled tone. Statements like

"You can offer me a pdf file or simply link me to a
webpage, but stop ignoring this valuable info. And make
sure you have a website that details everything you've
released and what you're working on. There's nothing more
frustrating than finding a new obscure artist you like
who only has a dormant Myspace music page.There's nothing
more frustrating than finding a new obscure artist you
like who only has a dormant Myspace music page."

and

"At the very least, I should get a discount on your older
stuff for being a current customer."

These do not read well, to put it mildly. When the Man comes around to point out those damn freeloading kids it is exactly these sorts of quotes he points to. Wah wah wah I want a pdf and a web page and a pony--yes, these are all sound business and advertising moves, but asking for it this way is unpalatable.

There is a third issue with the stance taken by the author. Observe:

"I heard from a friend that Mafia was an enjoyable game.
I downloaded it, played it and enjoyed it. Did I
immediately go rush out and buy it? No, of course not.
But when I heard Mafia II was coming out and it was made
by the same company as the first one, I pre-ordered it."

In theory, in a world where developers can make multiple titles, this is a not-entirely-invalid approach. Let the devs prove themselves, then reward them with your future patronage.

The problem--and perhaps the author isn't familiar enough with the industry enough to know this--is that publishers, who are the ones hurt by piracy, are the ones who nowadays make-or-break most studios. When you don't buy the first game, the publisher doesn't see a sale, and so is likely to shutter the studio and give the IP to somebody else.

It's not merely enough to buy the next game--you must also fund the developer so that there can be a next game!

(As an aside, it would seem that maybe this is why piracy seems not to affect indies so much...a lot of them take donations or have pay-as-dev-happens models. It's when studios are held under the power of a publisher that these alternate funding mechanisms seem to fail, and thus studios can't survive to make a reputation when their first game is pirated.)

There's some other good stuff in there, but those are three things the author really needs to get straight in their argument.
I took a look at your product, and your site, and I just thought I'd list a few negatives in case it helps you somehow:

1) No screenshots? I don't want to watch a movie. Also, if I have to watch a movie, I want to be able to scrub through it.
2) Wheres the one-liner that describes why your app is so great?
3) No sync'ing? WTF? Its the 21st century, I already have a Calendar app - and I've been using it. If I want to switch to your product, I'm going to need data in/data out.
This book is about the creation and analysis of efficient data structures
Play made it very very easy for me to target a jar from php. The php-java bridge at the time would start and stop the jvm with every request (I dont know how it stands up today). I did some research and was able to stand up a play server whose routes reflected classes/methods in the jar in about 20 mins.

Are there other play-like frameworks for java?
You're essentially saying that trying to do Loopt at all was a mistake and we just should have done something else.

Everyone seems to forget that before iPhone, and later Android, you had no choice but to partner with carriers - there was no other way to distribute your application.

Even in Europe, where the phone ecosystem is different, access to location required carrier support, and nearly no handsets had the ability to locate themselves without network assistance.

Loopt made mistakes, many of which were mine, but that wasn't one of them.
Advice from the Small Business Summit 2012 : Cloud Computing and Email Marketing
I only read the in closing, and while I probably am on his side the major point, his closing points are sophomoric. Essentially they are: media is like any other business, if it's doing so badly why are there more numbers of media in volume being released every year, and why do large media houses continue to exist? The answer to the first question is that a huge number of people have entered these markets due to falling barrier to entry so overall volume is up, and answer to the second one is that it takes a long time to kill giant companies. 10 years is not that long.
I prefer caps lock to Control. ^C does the same thing as escape in Vi[m]. While it is chording, the combo is pretty easy to hit.

This is a bit of a compromise, but all the other programs that are not vim will benefit from it.
It's not that any of those were beaten. It's that the season ended.
A beautiful race condition: unsynchronized HashMap access infinite loop
I'm kind of sick of all these discussions. Sure, everyone who pirates has some at-least-quasi-principaled (or even, actually principaled) decision or rationale for why they pirate. Everyone seems to have an opinion on content quality, the efficacy of current copyright laws, and most people come to similar conclusions about the companies that control content and the groups of lawyers they employ to 'protect' those assets.

But as I said, I'm kind of sick of these discussions avoiding one central point: Why do you pirate? Because you don't want to pay for it. It's that simple.
Ok, then what about a DVD? You could say the same thing of a car vs movie by giving them the $.1 for the DVD itself, not the content on it.

Regardless, it doesn't matter whether it's a physical good or digital. Both physical goods and digital goods require time and money to make. When you buy a Porsche, you're not just buying the materials. You're paying for the engineering of those materials. Just because the format of the final product isn't a physical good in terms of online piracy doesn't mean there was no effort put into it.
I haven't looked at it lately, but I think one reason I used to run Wine instead of a VM was that Wine gives better 3d support for games. I even ran EVE for a while, before I realized that Wine wasn't able to draw the lasers pew-pewing from my ship, which made things kind of boring.

Now to go search and see if Wine 1.4 works on FreeBSD at all.
I don't understand the comments from people on the blog wanting them to rush this feature and get it in ASAP. Like they mentioned, you still have Basecamp Classic. There's nothing forcing you to move to the new Basecamp before they take the time to get time-tracking right.
"The only box someone could find is the one in the front, that needs to be public. We have multiple of those, scattered like diarrhea around the world. They contain no storage device, no graphics card. Only a network cable, a cpu and memory."

Interesting. So if these servers are seized and turned off you don't know where they were talking to. Though if the police are careful they ought to be able to tap the outgoing connections and get the IPs for the others servers they were communicating with and go from there.
Yeah...I know. I'm just saying I found it deeply engaging and if they made a movie out of it I'd watch it.
The iPod disproves your assertion that Apple will hold their pricing high. They will rather sell high-priced devices than crap, but if they can they will compete on price. Look at the iPhones, where the iPhone 4 sells for $99 and the iPhone 3GS sells for $0. And now, they're selling the iPad 2 for $399.
In general I think that I agree with what you're saying. The only point I'd like to make is that he does repeatedly say that he does spend the money on the things that are worth it. He wrote this with the objective of telling content creators directly instead of assuming that they'll just figure it out. If the money backs what he's saying, all the better.
Looks nice. Do you have a beta code for HN we could use to try it out?
Android tablet vendors may not survive an 'iPad mini'
While I disagree, in the end, about breaking user applications, I can appreciate their situation. They have an upstream kernel from which they get bugfixes and patches, but which has no guarantees of stability. Any guarantees that the Debian team decides to make are their own responsibility, and could result in them maintaining multiple patches just to fix ever-more-diverging upstream releases.
Blogger was sold to Google for $5mm, not as buddy exit, but as a regular exit. I guess Loopt has eight times more potential.
What's the purpose of the arduino? Couldn't you setup a push button that needs to be pressed every 5 minutes or so to keep the circuit active, like a watchdog? You could also add a small piezo speaker or blinking LED to warn you to press it 30 seconds before the timeout.

Or even more advanced, connect it to a computer/tablet through USB or bluetooth, mimic a keyboard/mouse and use your real keyboard key presses/mouse movement to reset the countdown. I wouldn't use this directly though, but instead through opto-couplers to avoid electric shocks or other safety issues!

Related to watchdog, you should probably also activate the hardware watchdog of the microcontroller to make sure it doesn't crash.

27V at 100mA is 2.7Watt dissipation, quite a lot when in contact with skin!
A conclusion reached through faulty reasoning is nothing to be relied on, even if it's coincidentally correct.

It may not have been constructive, but it was deconstructive, and I think that's valuable too.

(did not downvote you, btw)
Erm, at least in cognitive science consciousness is generally ascribed to most mammals, if it's ascribed to humans at all. Self-consciousness and higher-order consciousness might be more limited terms, but the idea that a dog can really feel pain in some fashion which is meaningful for some of the ways that we can feel pain -- that is not usually disputed.
And by extension, of Ruby.
Data Journalism Developer Studio 2012LX Version 2.6.9 – SUSE Gallery
I'm curious to know what was so frustrating. I've had my tab for a few months and love it to death.
How Facebook is turning into one of the biggest content farm
I apologize for asking for specifics...
There is a prototype; its more than an idea.

I should have made this clear. The chance that this man will ever be employee #1 is zero.

The genius is clear enough. Flawless marks through the hardest programs, and working code pushing the boundary of human capability is all already existing.

I have no intention of going around asking. I more want to do something like say, "here is his github, here are his results, here is his published papers, and this is his idea on how to commercialize it"-- to someone who is investing money.
"Could Sam and his group have $43M in impact for the buyer?"

what do you mean by impact? how can this even be measured?

"If your "leadership brand" number is high enough, you just about can't lose. "

again, what does leadership brand mean? And what does it have to do with building a business that earns money/makes profit (revenue - expenses). Just because something/someone has market or exchange value, doesn't mean they have use value. If the goal is to sucker some large corporation out of a small chunk of cash (small for the large corp) be upfront about it. But saying there's some higher form of value that 'brands' bring that has nothing to do with building profitable businesses is disingenuous. Steve Jobs built companies that earned money (from business operations,
not financial market operations). HUGE difference.
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Ask HN: Cancel a Freelancing Contract Honorably?
Writing this from a throwaway account. I'm new to freelancing and have done 3 contracts so far on sites like freelancer.com. I have a college degree and a decade of programming experience but need entrepreneurial advice.

I have been working for 3 weeks on what originally started out being a straightforward 2 week, sub-$1000 contract. I bid more than the other bidders but got the contract because of my experience with the math the project uses.

It took 2 weeks just to make the mockup, because they had me endlessly doing GUI tweaks instead of core back-end work. There was a steep learning curve for iOS because Apple UI widgets sometimes work in custom ways that break expectations. I spent many more days in stack overflow than expected. I fully accept responsibility for underestimating the mockup phase of the project.

However, it's becoming clear that I may not be able to finish this project. There is a language barrier which is hindering my ability to communicate my experience, so they not interested in my design advice. I'm torn between doing what they want and doing it well, because I'm having trouble with the idea of putting my name on work I don't believe in.

There is also a financial barrier. I've already donated a week of my labor and simply can't afford to continue. So far I've received 1/4 of the total as an up-front payment. I've been unable to meet the 50% milestone because the GUI doesn't match their expectations. I probably have 2-5 days more work to finish the back-end, if/when I get to it.

So my question is, does any of this matter? Should I just finish the contract exactly how they want it? Should I ask to switch to an hourly rate? Should I cancel the contract somehow on the freelance site and risk ruining my reputation there? I'm planning to go ahead and finish, using the lost month as a lesson. But I need to know how to write my proposals going forward to protect myself.

P.S. I had an odd feeling going into this contract, but ignored the warning signs.

P.P.S. I had been tracking my hours casually in a text file for the other contracts before this, but for this one, I have no record of my hours.

Thanks
This obsession over theoretical network speeds always surprises me. It seems to me that when 3G is good, it's really good, and that improving things like signal strength/coverage and decreasing network congestion will have a much greater impact on user experience than any network technology improvement.

What consumer applications other than video streaming will see a significant boost from 4G LTE? Or is it just hype, like megapixels on cameras?
The subtitle of the article is:

> Why Apple’s tablet competitors don’t stand a chance—and maybe never will.
but this time it's different, there's more pixels!
he's selling crap worth $10 for $99 and people are willing to buy. so I guess it worked pretty good.
Nothing in Linux prevents you from doing so. Just ship your application with it and use a one line shell script to run it with the appropriate LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

It's just not commonly done (with exceptions like http://sta.li/), and as a user, I'm thankful for that.
Author makes great points; refusing to accept a (tested) minor patch to how tests are run should be a no-brainer because of the low threat to existing systems. One thing that was not clear to me (being unfamiliar with Play or Java at large) was wether the HashMap bug was intrinsic to Play or to Play's use of a Java library...
> Why do you pirate? Because you don't want to pay for it. It's that simple.

Well, no. I pirate somethings that I have paid for because circumventing copyright protections is illegal in my country (England). I think (but I could be wrong) that circumventing devices is always criminal, whereas pirating is only criminal if done as part of trade.

Format-shifting is technically illegal, but is set to become legal sometime. I'm not sure how they'll handle the device-circumvention laws.
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If anyone is apprehensive about vim's hjkl keys, and you like the arrow keys better, you can use ijkl instead and get all the benefits of the muscle memory you have built up for arrow keys, while still keeping your hands on the home row. Use this mapping:

" remap h to i and use ijkl for inverse T cursor movement
map k g<Down>
map i g<Up>
map j <Left>
noremap h i

Then the 'i' key will be replaced by 'h'. So press 'h' to insert, or for inner selections, instead of 'i'. Also note the 'g' for up/down motions, which means it won't skip the wrapped part of lines - just remove the 'g' if you don't like that.

If you're worried this breaks anything else, I've had this interfere with just one other thing: a plugin that let me select text based on indentation of the line the cursor was on, but I made a few minor changes to the vimfile for the plugin and fixed that pretty easily. The other thing is that random servers won't have these mapped, but just copy the config over if you'll be doing a lot of text editing on that server. Otherwise, you can just fall back to using hjkl awkwardly.
Ouch. This advice sounds alarming and extreme. Degrees will only carry you so far. One place they will carry you is into debt. Experience > formal education.
http://mashable.com/2012/03/05/android-robot-now-worlds-most...
Agreed, learn Colemak instead ;-)

Seriously though, I think with a tiny bit of key-swapping in the vimrc, you can use dvorak or colemak just fine.
This looks really promising from what I see in the screenshot.

Since you're in private beta, why not add a mailing list signup? That way, those that don't get an invite code will still get reminders of this tool and a notification when they can finally get in.
Bollocks. Absolute nonsense. Every movie is the next summer blockbuster. Every band is the hottest thing since X. Just look at the very selectively picked quotes they put on the adverts and the back of the DVD sleeves.

They are intentionally, and deceptively, putting a Skoda drivetrain into a Cayenne.

And then getting pissed off when you try and test-drive it.
if it was true, would you admit to it?
He's selling stuff worth $10 for $99, that other people were selling for hundreds or even > $1000. So I guess it worked pretty well for them too.
This is correct, and the reason they used those keys was that it was the 'home row' on a typewriter which was used in teletypes which meant your little finger could push 'ctrl' and your right hand could drive the cursor through forms without moving off the home row.

When I saw the title I was expecting to see a picture of the rogue screen. Rogue (and later hack, and nethack) is a text displayed dungeon exploration game and was often the first exposure folks got to the convention of h,j,k,l as left right up down.

I really miss having control over there. I xkeymap it there of course but some keyboards have a physically 'push-on/push-off' caps lock key there which is annoying.