skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think foldability is just a medieval thing.

I guess some people downvoted me because they took "Medieval" to be pejorative. I was being entirely literal. Linen-based paper was widespread in medieval Europe after the plagues. (Much of it was made of the linen clothing of people who no longer needed it, on account of their being suddenly dead.) Such paper is much more amenable to folding in the manner of a map than earlier technologies. (Though most everything seems to roll up into scrolls well enough.)

Scrolling and zooming are not appropriate substitutes for folding in electronic displays.

That's entirely contextual, as you also point out. You won't know how well things can take folding and how well the form factor performs in real life until you have such materials. Until then, we know zooming works. If I had something as light as and the same size as a clipboard that was daylight readable and yet as dynamic as an iPad, this would enable a whole other world of mobile applications that aren't quite there yet. I'm hard pressed to imagine an application I'd need that could fold out, which couldn't also be met by presentation/projection systems, or perhaps an interactive worktable form factor.
There's a whole paragraph that starts with "Support Windows ASAP".
My point is that focusing on "maximizing shareholder value" instead of innovation and customer experience is what got RIM in trouble in the first place. It seems no lessons have been learned.
That sounds like a nightmarish tax policy.

Moreover one of the best things for consumers was when the stock market changed quotes from fractions to cents.
The party that implemented this is the Conservative party, the right-most mainstream party. The two parties generally don't see eye to eye, to put it lightly.
I think in this case they are using "best" to mean "effective" as in "will work as advertised". Rather than the more subjective "best" overall.
Well in this case, the conflation of race and culture is virtually a requirement. As far as we know, you can't do much really to bias an aptitude test in terms of biology because there is little correlation between race and biology¹. On the other hand, culture and race are relatively tightly correlated, so if you want to bias an aptitude test with respect to race, the surest way to do it is to bias it with respect to culture.

A great example is Jim Crow era voting rules. Black people obviously are not biologically disinclined to be able to read, but in 1900, it was a simple fact of southern American culture that a white person of voting age was less likely to be able to read than a black person of voting age. A black southerner of voting age was usually either a former slave, or the child of a former slave, and slaves did not have access to basic education. So a literacy test was, at that time, a racially biased test.

---

¹ This is unsurprising when you realize, for example, that the combined population we put in the single box of "black" is more genetically diverse than the combined population of all the races we put outside of that box. Even though populations of different specific geographical origins do often have characteristic biological traits, the social concept of "race" is not strongly correlated with geographical origin.
The N64 is actually the only console I've ever played... I had a Commodore 64 and then Amiga all they way through the "early console years", and only played some N64 stuff because a house mate bought one.

Then I sort of fell out of gaming apart from a bit of simulation and strategy games... Getting tempted again these days when I see how far they've gotten. With a young son taking up my time I suspect it'll be him that'll be the excuse...
Move to the Netherlands. The one-euro-cent and two-euro-cent bits don't exist here unless you're doing a bank transaction; cash transactions get rounded to the nearest 5 cents.
I am not saying that there should be hard rules. Just that there is a stigma there, and that it is there for a reason. Would you invest in a company with technical founders who got high every day?
instapaper read now work well on this and other sites.

readability is good too but they changed to a pay model but I think you can still use the bookmarklette for free.
Show HN: The Incident gTar, a new kind of guitar
Do you have any contact info I could reach you at? I am working on a startup in the review space and would love to chat with you. My info is in my profile.
Sure but it's a distant pivot. It's almost starting over except they have a company with revenue. Adobe also has that and each new product attempt fails or wins independent of Photoshop's success. And Adobe and MS products are more related to each other than file backup and editing.

Dropbox the product is a good revenue stream and could spark another Microsoft/Adobe style multiproduct software company.

Is that Paul Graham meant by start to chip at the big vision with a beachhead though? Because then any product idea has that potential, as long as it starts the first company. Seemed like he was advocating for a more direct path, hacker search to more general search, basecamp to email, etc. Starting companies is hard anyway, start with a clear path to something big.
Is there a good place to match non-technical and technical founders?
Just had the same problem. .mov wouldn't work but .avi did the trick.
Thanks for the hint Tzunamitom
A flag link becomes available while you are writing a reply post.
After my experience with the Nexus S, any benefits regarding the "pure Google experience" and "first-in-line updates" will be taken with more than a few grains of salt.

It's hard to describe the frustration of putting my trust in them and then watching so many other devices coming out with and being upgraded to Android 4.0 all around me, while I'm left in the dark.

Google, phone manufacturers, and carriers all seem to have a distinct "fire and forget" mindset regarding phones. As soon as it's on the market they move on to the next one, and those of us locked into a 1 or 2 year contract are left in the dust.
I'd argue their hardware is still better designed than that of most Android vendors, especially for text input speed and accuracy. Where RIM went wrong was underestimating the importance of software and the surrounding ecosystem. Their App store was dreadful.

Incidentally, this is perhaps where Nokia did the smart thing by recognising similar weaknesses in their software strategy, and teamed up with Microsoft.

Imagine a world where RIM had licensed Android 2 years ago as their primary OS for all current BlackBerries. They would probably be the world's number one phone vendor right now.

Reminds me of a line from one of my favourite authors:

"Maturity...is knowing what your limitations are".
read the amendment.

"1 SEC. 5. PROTECTING THE PASSWORDS OF ONLINE USERS.
2 Nothing in this Act or any amendment made by this
3 Act shall be construed to limit or restrict the ability of
4 the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a rule
5 or to amend an existing rule to protect online privacy, in-
6 cluding requirements in such rule that prohibit licensees
7 or regulated entities from mandating that job applicants
8 or employees disclose confidential passwords to social net-
9 working web sites."
True that we don't have a full sequence, but that's not the best example. The telomeres (ends) consist of the same set of bases repeated thousands of times. Recent research suggests that the length is probably super important. We're good at approximating length, but not detecting exactly.

There are a bunch of regions of 'N' in the reference sequence, most are just repeats.

The genome is incredibly complex, and yes, much we still can't represent accurately. As one example, some genes are given a location in the reference genome, while every person actually has multiple copies that are scattered across the genome.
"They cost more to produce than they are worth, nobody likes them, they have no commercial value."

My very first (very primitive) public facing webpage was dedicated to abolishing the Canadian penny. Good riddance!
Yeah, why not have two contraceptive methods in play - like a "Plan A" and a "Plan B"? I think you're on the right track here. Many men, including myself, feel pretty equal with their spouse in terms of family planning, but having a Plan B would definitely give me more peace of mind "just in case" haha.
This isn't the Canadian Budget; it's the budget proposed by the ruling Conservatives. This item will likely generate the most buzz and goodwill for the budget, and it was proposed by the current Opposition NDP, who are socialists.

So, the greatest PR windfall for the Conservatives will have come from their biggest ideological and political opponents. It's mildly entertaining.

That said, as the Conservatives have a majority (>50% of seats in the House of Commons), there's no chance that the budget would fail, triggering a vote of non-confidence and a general election. So it wasn't a vote that had any real importance politically, but it will serve to generate public goodwill, which they could use. The Conservatives currently only have a majority because of the ineptitude of the Liberals and Quebecers' fatigue with the Bloc Quebecois. Most Canadians are to the left of the Conservatives, have only warily entrusted them with power, and only then because the center-left liberals couldn't get their shit together at election time.
You are so right - I like to think of it as accepting responsibility for your life. Several hundred years ago "starting your own company" could be equated to "going west and creating a new life" - it takes a lot of guts and determination to strike out on your own, and most people would never dream of it.
You and I know it's an extreme example but there are lots of people that honestly believe the mortgage crisis was caused by poor people getting mortgages. Then they reference some civil rights era act that they believe forces the banks to lower their lending standards. In fact the law says you can't deny loans based on where the applicant lives (aka, redlining).
I completely disagree, but not for the reasons you might expect. Most people attribute Apple's decision to stubbornness, laziness, arrogance, vanity, or "just being different." It's not any of those, but Apple is so tight-lipped about their decision making that no one articulates why they make the choices they do. Their "one button" strategy is brilliant, and here's why:

As I said, the real reason Apple needs one button is to prevent interface designers from getting lazy. Apple (and their third-party developers) know that most people never change the defaults.

However, they don't really want to ship single-button hardware. Here's what most people don't realize: Apple knows it's a less expressive device. Back when they shipped real one button mice, their advanced users were forced to BYOHID. The hardware that Apple shipped was wasted. That sucks.

To resolve this dilemma Apple devised the Mighty Mouse (later the Magic Mouse). Since the "right-click" was in software they could keep the one-button default but have the hardware magically transform into a multi-button mouse for advanced users. Surely many will BYOHID anyway (this happens with PCs too), but two buttons satisfy many more users.

It's a neat solution to a technical and social problem.
Yes, in a way. Anything that diverges from the average should depend on the search terms I enter and on nothing else. No more second rate content from a local university. No pizza restaurant suggestions just because I happened to like one particular pizza restaurant for reasons unknown to Google.

Here's a query I might enter and I challenge Google to give me useful results: "restaurants with large tables in Paris, no Chinese food, not too expensive"

I want to be treated like the average consumer entering this search term. When I say "no Chinese food" I mean it. It might be that I'm with someone who doesn't like Chinese food even though I do. When I say "in Paris", I don't want Google to guess that it might be Paris, Texas just because I'm Dallas, Texas.
Totally agree, I'd love to read a reciprocal piece. I think programmers (myself included) often feel that a non-technical person can't write a single line of code* whereas a technical person can figure out enough of the business and product side of things and make up the rest as he goes along. A lot of times this works out, but I'm sure there have been many cases where a failed startup might have succeeded if they'd had a good non-tech cofounder and made better strategy decisions.

* unless he/she decides to learn to code well enough to hack together an MVP, but that's not what the article is talking about
Um, "best" neccesarily implies a "one or the other" proposition.
That's code for "we're talking to other companies about what we have that we can sell them."
Scala or Java? Exploring myths and facts
> They should solve this problem by using the federal sales tax to round up/down. $1.25 + 5% = 5¢ of tax instead of 6.25¢.

Wouldn't work except in Alberta, NWT, the Yukon, and Nunavut. Anywhere else, the provincial sales tax would knock it back off a multiple of 5.
Being simultaneously unable to walk away from a six-figure salaried income and unable to bootstrap a company probably doesn't correlate well with "likely success as company founder".

You'd make a more compelling point if it was "I think the small amount of funding is going to prevent YC from generating ambitious companies because it was easier for me to start $COMPANY_I_CURRENTLY_RUN without YC". But anecdotally, it's the opposite: people fully capable of funding their companies are going to YC for the network and for the automatic increase in valuation.

You can compare other startup creation vectors that you have knowledge of to YC, but it's awfully hard to make a valid comparison between YC and a salaried job. If you're going to stay in a salaried job in our current white-hot market, you probably weren't going to start a company no matter what.

(There's nothing wrong with not starting a company. Even if YC starts 10 hugely ambitious, Airbnb-scale successes this cycle, it will still wash out a huge number of other companies. Careers made in salaried jobs have a lot to recommend them, and financial outcome is definitely one of them.)

An earlier version of me used to make the same point. "$20k for 6 points! That's a CEO's equity grant and one consulting project's revenue!" I feel dumb about that critique now that YC companies all seem to be getting uncapped convertible notes with minimal drama, and now that the YC network includes so many successful companies. Obviously, the YC money isn't the big draw anymore.
How does this change anything for the female? If she doesn't trust the partner, but still wants to have sex with him, she can be on the pill, use a condom or use something else.

This simply gives men additional choices and allows couples where the female isn't able to use birth control to have sex without producing a baby.

The only 'choice' this takes away is the females choice (properly rare, but still feared) to claim she is on the pill and really that has never been reliable.
Video Interview: Why Are Kids Allergic To So Many Things These Days?
You'd want a truck rather than a bag to carry all that! For a serious discussion of wilderness travel, read Ray Jardine's Trail Life.

http://www.rayjardine.com/ray-way/Trail-Life/index.htm
The crazy thing is, this is good news for RIM. If Heins really cleaned house with the execs and he replaces them with people that can see reality, that's probably the only chance for RIM to stay an independent company.

It's not clear that is what will happen. But at least now there's a chance.
This is me : http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9gkag/iama_6th_grade_d...
I thought they don't include tax so they don't have to change it every time the tax rate change.
They have $4.2 billion in revenue per quarter, that's huge, and they still have a lot of users. They could easily scale back their ambitions and become very profitable, abandon the playbook, reduce their workforce, move focus to East Asia, and keep milking every cent out of the old-fashioned phones they kept pumping out long after Apple ate their lunch.
Say that it's a "smoke screen" is needlessly partisan. It is, indeed, a line item. It deals with something that has come up for consideration since the 80s. If it gets attention, it gets attention.

But do you think no one notices the other changes because they're ditching the penny? That is preposterous.
Because men clearly are not as invested in the possible rearing of a child.

Clearly.

(seriously: making a kid should be && not || )
Yeah, it almost sounds like a fire sale.
How is being the "milo for X" a bad thing? ebay bought them for $75 million.

If going broke and closing doors is your view of success then yes milo is a bad thing...
I see tons of BlackBerries in Mexico, when three years ago there were none. They have become an affordable phone here that works just fine for Facebook, email and chatting.

In a certain sense they are the old reliable Nokias of yesteryear.

I don't pretend to play analyst, but I think there's a huge market in producing affordable and sturdy smartphones for third world countries. To many it's their only way to get online.
Founder Dating claims to do that to an extent, but you have to apply and be accepted to one of their events.

As a non-tech looking for a technical co-founder, I got fed up with this search and decided I'd be better off just learning to build and code my idea(s) myself. It was actually the questions on the Y combinator app that made me realize that once you push out past the second or third degree of separation in your social network ("oh yeah the friend of my friend of a guy I used to work with can code") you're too far removed from this person, and a co-founder you don't know or can't trust seems like far greater a risk than investing the time to learn to do it yourself. Plus once you build your first project, I suspect it gets exponentially easier to make the next and the next thereafter!
The best deal is to sell the enterprise integration bits to Microoft, or the whole company to anyone who wants it, if there is anyone.
It's a round, not a ceiling function. If you were going to pay .98, .99, .00, .01, or .02 you will now pay .00; whereas if you were going to pay .03, .04, .05, .06, or .07 you will now pay .05 . In other words, after the very first interval of 5 cents (about $0 even) each numeral gets 5 incoming numbers associated with it.

The only people who could really try to steal pennies from everyone would be supermarkets, and they would face the problem that it's too broadly peaked -- people going to the supermarket will buy between two and twenty things, and modulo 5 that sum is not easy to predict or steer.
I don't see how this title trivializes birth control. Good birth control comes from controlling birth. I don't believe any other method can claim 10+ years of effectiveness, with practically no side effects and high reversibility.
THQ lays off 118 people and downsizes ambitions for Warhammer 40K game
I think part of the problem has always been calling them IQ tests. If they predict X (say, success in some given profession), perhaps it can't be argued with. It just doesn't follow that it predicts "intelligence".
I guess if they claim to test intelligence, they try to limit people to some inherent trait. Like they could never become good at profession X, because their intelligence simply isn't sufficient. In reality there might be lots of other reasons why some people tend to do worse in profession X than others. They can still be predicted, but a prediction is not necessarily a final verdict.
Oooo interesting. Now if they can slap an anti-virus on it, I'll be sold.
They don't have pennies in Australia and they just round up or down to the nearest 5c interval. I assume they will do the same in Canada.
Very insightful. Originally I was thinking along those lines and trying to find someone to simply construct what I'd dreamed up. Once I formed a team and we became equally invested in our work together, things really started to move.
There are always cost considerations! We are on the brink of bringing on a very large UK retailer though, they receive around a million visits a day in sale time so we are prepared to put some good money into our setup but I am always making sure we are running a tight ship.

Uptime is the most important part of this consideration
Heck as far as I can see I can't see the value of the business person at all, except for whatever connections he has.

Now I am biased, but why would one go into a partnership with a business person in the first place.
Ask HN: Going to a Startup Weekend ( Paris ) this weekend. Any tips?
Hello!

This weekend I'm going to a Startup Weekend in Paris and I'm going to pitch an idea. Does anyone who has attended one have tips or recommendation?

I'm especially scared about teaming up with the "wrong" people and getting suck with them after the SW IF the idea is proven to be successful :/

Cheers!
Just as a point of interest, Australia removed the 1 and 2 cent coins from circulation back in 1992. Prices have been rounded to the nearest 5 cent value when paying with cash ever since. A comment on this thread said that it's madness, but it's all someone my age has grown up with.
I don't know what was happening, it seems to be ok now, perhaps just a little busy. I only have a cheap VPS.
Most of that stuff is in storage in another state. I'm not sure how silverpoint would scan. It would probably just look like a pen or pencil drawing.

Basically it is drawing with a piece of silver wire. The mark is very faint, especially on paper. To get enough silver to deposit, you often use paper covered with a ground of some kind, like gesso or very find sand or grit in a sizing of some kind.

Over time the silver tarnishes and darkens, but it has a luster about it that would be very difficult to photograph or scan. If you don't want the silver to tarnish, you can coat the work with a modern sealer, but no one really knows how that will age over the years.

One of the ways of drawing with silver point is to "glaze" over the work by tracing and retracing over the forms, to build up a fusion of the marking material. This can result in a very cloudy, diffuse rendering that still has a definite graphic look to it.

Very time consuming and it's hard to judge when to stop since the image is so faint.

One artist I knew used to spray the silver with chemicals to "develop" the image to a certain point, and then neutralize it when it had reached the darkness level he wanted, and then he sealed it.

You can also draw with gold wire, the markings are a faint yellow brownish color, but they have a definite luster to them. The gold doesn't tarnish like the silver, so you don't have the change over time. Depends on the effect you want I guess.

There was an artist in recent years who did these very large semi-photo real silver and gold point drawings. Several feet across. A reproduction simply cannot do them justice. They are very faint, and the light changes as you walk around them.

I've actually thought about doing a digital installation piece using Processing that has drawings and photos that exhibit apparent change according to the light and the viewer's orientation to the work. And of course with digital, you could have the actual image itself change, and not just the viewing apparition.
Helios: A Report to the Community
I'm really looking forward to FOLEDs and other similar technologies, but then again I think the main problem is that nobody (as far as I know) has solved the normal wear problem.

Sure there are demos where they hit on of these film/screens with a shoe and nothing happens, but when I saw Samsung's flexible tablet video you could clearly see how the section that folded was already damaged, like an old book cover that's about to crack.

Whoever solves this is golden, high-scale manufacturing AFAIK has already been solved by HPLabs.