skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand how this would ever work... what is to stop someone from covering it in aluminum foil so it thinks they never move?

I mean I understand the idea, tax for road usage... ok but why GPS? There is a mechanism for measuring mileage built right into the vehicle, the odometer. Its already there on all vehicles and I would assume less people would try to defeat it. I don't know if Oregon has an annual inspection but it could easily be read then and reported.

It seems like the cost of outfitting all cars with GPS devices would be costly... plus it would never work anyway.
iPhone dev team's secret message: 2.2 may have been cracked
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew-warner/3154443184/sizes/...
What I don't understand is how this is in any way better from a policy perspective than a gas tax?

A gas tax is already a proxy for distance driven, and - although I disagree with it - it builds in a policy that social progressives like: rewarding folks who emit less carbon per mile travelled, and punishing folks who emit more.

What is the defect in the current system that this seeks to remedy?
The usefulness is arguable, but I wouldn't classify this as spam. Each app is slightly differentiated since its tied to a different name even though the functionality is essentially identical.
$240 plus a DMCA violation and stealing a $100 piece of software to end up with a beyond low end Mac that breaks as soon as you perform a system software upgrade (according to the article).

Just go the mall early with a brick, you know, when the walkers are getting their exercise. Throw the brick through the window of the Apple store and steal a mini. Its a better machine and Apple probably won't mind since they need to flush the inventory before next weeks announcements. Why, you are probably doing them a favor since they can write off the retail price as a loss from theft instead of flushing it at a reduced price. No one gets hurt, same as the original article.

(Ok, the mini isn't better if you want the two 3.5" SATA bays, in that case steal it the way the author documents.)

[Downvoted? At least I amused myself. Perhaps I should have added a smiley somewhere.]
Getting Real and Design
Yeah well, driver headaches if you don't pick your hardware carefully. Nobody will release OSX drivers & you don't want to depend on third party drivers. They all suck.

I actually hit this hard a few months ago while trying to turn my laptop into a hackintosh. It would only boot once every 3 tries. And ultimately there's nothing special about the OS. I missed my apt & kde4
A New Day:  Don't reread old books, play familiar games, rehearse worn thoughts...
also because it's just a preview of the list
Сказка ложь да в ней намек
Добрым молодцам урок.

Tale of sense, if not of truth!
Food for thought to honest youth.

http://journal.petajinnathandersen.com/2008/03/fairy-tale-fr...
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to appear at Macworld
Poetically See Through to Opportunity in 2009
But you bought one. Why is that? Everyone I know who knows about the RRoD issue buys one anyway. People who don't know don't seem to care about consoles. It's curious to me.

I bought one too, and I knew about the issue. PS3 was too expensive for my blood and I prefer XBox games over Wii games. I also knew that MS wasn't being an ass with returns. Mine has held up so far though, so I don't know firsthand.
Don’t Multitask
Thanks. The book you mention is the same book by the same author as mentioned in my thread-opening post. I'll have to check which version gets the most updating attention.
if it's mostly MSN, it can't possibily be a cut of 15,000 people. Or can it?
Why would Microsoft disallow criticism internally? Isn't that the one place where you want criticism?
Cost Innovation vs. Product Innovation
American startups too.
Important caveat at the end:

"Also, doing the non-program updates (system updates) seems to screw it up. I'm not sure why and I am finding a fix but for now just update iTunes and the like."
They buy them because they're really an awesome console. Microsoft has been the leader in online connectivity since the original.
Still the same. Though PR doesn't really seem to matter that much anymore. My site with PR 0 gets much more traffic from Google than my site with PR 4.
I'm from Oregon.

There's very little support for this in the state.

See http://www.blueoregon.com/2007/04/gpstracked_mile.html - a bit old, but still relevant.
It's a huge win. They could clone his app anyway. Zynga already has. My understanding of IP law as pertains to games is that unless they infringe on his trademarks (which is impossible anyway since app names are unique on Facebook) there's precious little he could have done about it.

SGN effectively got nothing beyond whatever money was in the settlement there. It's about all Maestri could possibly hope for.
Thats because in order for osx86 to work, you have to hack the kernel and several kext's. They all get reset and updated in system updates.

FWIW, not even iTunes updates can be safe. They update Quicktime a well - which Apple has used to break osx86 in the past.
Cyn.in Open source Group Collaboration Software
This is really old, but I wanted to post further on this. After continuing to use Django, I got past the admin interface and have been building some pretty great stuff with it. Even hosted a sprint in Portland, OR. There are still issues, in my opinion, around contrib.auth.User but I officially retract my 'only useful for trusted CMS' opinion.
Good question - I will need some time to think through my response. I'll be back here later.
If there weren't surging rents displacing people, why would there be rent control?

Because politicians try to appease renters, who in turn tend to wrongly assume that "rent control" is something that would benefit them. A prevalent assumption among renters seems to be that if a given thing is bad for landlords, it must automatically be good for renters. For example, when landlords back advertisements against rent control measures, that is actually given as a reason by "tenant's rights" advocates to vote the opposite way.

By the way, the rest of the "tenant's rights" -- including any kind of tenant rights -- also contribute to homelessness and high rent prices. Also contributing are building codes, construction codes, use codes, etc. Without any of those, apartments would necessarily be dirt cheap, and there would be no such thing as homelessness.
The impression I got from the article is no new money is being pledged; PE firms are just calling in previous investments.

Those investors (like homeowners and the occasional VC limited partner) could default on their pledges, but that might prove even more costly -- in reputation, in loss of their other monies already stuck at the PE firm, etc.
> It was first created by Maestri while still employed at SGN’s former iteration, FreeWebs, under the pseudonym Jason Gilbert. That alone is evidence that the game actually belonged to his employer.

No. That alone is not enough. I hate you Mike Arrington. Die in a fire. Those contract clauses are complete bullshit, as evidenced by the decision in this lawsuit. That's the only thing that is proven here. I can't believe someone would side with the bloodsuckers that come up with those ownership clauses.
This is exactly the answer. I wanted a gaming console, and the 360 is the one with all the games. I have a Wii as well, but it only gets turned on when my parents are over and want to bowl.

Xbox live is pretty nice as well; I'm not a huge fan of the "New Xbox Experience", but I can appreciate that they've put a lot of effort into it.
Is this a way for app creators to get more exposure at the store? Maybe every every app should come in 50 flavors as a way of getting user attention?
Odd that Myspace doesn't start until a few months in. What's up with that?

Also I'd love to see the U.S. (aka monetizable) chart.
How Small Can Computers Get? Computing In A Molecule
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/12/31/call-mi...
I work at a video game company with lots of video game geeks. I can say honestly that my coworkers have had more problems with Wii's failing in the last year than Xboxes.
Also, only 12mbps usb.
I have a Wii too, and I buy a few games like Mario Kart or Zelda that are exclusively for it. But any game that's on both systems, such as Rock Band, I purchase on the Xbox. The high def graphics alone are enough to ensure that.

I'm not a fan of the new experience either in one respect: if you're going to force me to choose an avatar (which is annoying) at least make a creator as good as Nintendo's. I find myself unable to make reasonable approximations of anyone I actually know. Also I don't care for where it starts you out now, on that little shopping area. Other than that I find it generally a more efficient navigation system.

Also, Worms on XBL Arcade cost $5 and is my favorite game ever.
What does this have to do with hacker news...
The problem with OpenOffice is that cloud office apps are replacing MS options. Few people are looking for new desktop office programs.

I keep trying OOO, but it lacks the features of MS or Apple's products. And it doesn't have the collaboration features of Google's offering.
Google Reader API
I don't know about what they will do in Oregon, but this can actually be a more fair tax system.

They can divide the state into tax zones. If you want to drive in a city with good public transportation, you should pay more than someone who is living outside the public transportation network.

A gas tax hits everyone. Some people depend more on their car than others. If the goal is to reduce carbon emisions, the tax burden could be put on the drivers who have better alternatives.
I wondered about this myself, but I do see potential long-term effects of a purely gas-tax based system. Even electric vehicles contribute wear and tear to the road system though they don't contribute emissions. The need for maintenance doesn't stop just because cars would be non-gasoline based. Eventually we will need to acknowledge this point from a purely pragmatic stance. Encouraging high-efficiency vehicles via a gas tax is a reasonable incentive now but it's not sustainable.

I suspect that the eventual system will bear a resemblance to the one in use for long-haul trucking, where operators keep a detailed log of how many miles they drive in each state as well as loaded weight. GPS is one way to facilitate such a system.
I feel that math will probably show it's head in studying neuronal networking; after all, we're going to want to model it someday.
Tweets are generally not that hard to understand. Checking whether there is a missing word would probably force you to get some understanding of the tweet -- how can you avoid it?

I could add some heuristics about what sorts of words to remove. But note that you could always click "Skip" if the answer is not clear. Also, I took out the "No" option since it isn't fair: a tweet may still make sense after removing a word.
It's questions like this that make me wonder whether humanity will ever learn to cease its fruitless search for illusory solutions to non-existent problems in favor of a life defined by one's personal discovery of the infinite.

SELF AWARENESS: THE ONLY FRONTIER
Because a certain contingent likes to see Microsoft mess up?
Turns out this may only be a temporary fix...
That's a fair point, though I disagree about the parallel to gas prices (housing isn't a commodity, and rent control only applies to existing tenants). I've been in the position of defending 'rent control' on this thread, but really all I'm committed to are the ideas that the op was a terrible article that proved nothing, and that not displacing people from their homes is a worthy societal goal. If there are better ways to accomplish that than rent control, I'm all for them.
The best thing about that resolution is that you have a way out. If you don't manage it, you could always just do a pressup a day to reach your goal of 100 ;-)
The Best and Worst of 2008 (Dennis Forbes)
Does anything apart from google.com have a page rank of 10?
Dude, come on. Your contribution to this conversation is really going to be latching onto my use of 'wild fluctuations' instead of 'large price increases' as somehow disingenuous?
Well, 7 million USD would be over 60,000 notes... so unless your carry-on weighs over a hundred pounds, it's probably not true.
I haaaate catchy headlines.
Steve Jobs' Health Is Everyone's Business
Forecast Survey: Java/JEE not a hot skill for ‘09
Would have liked to have seen more about the innovation vs improvement issue, since cost innovation is not really a factor for web startups, as mentioned here.
this story rocks and if you disagree you're probably a tedious person.
i wonder if the leap second could be a catalyst, especially if the zune 'year' is really just a collection of seconds sectioned into 'days' meaning december 31st is an anomaly that has been encoded with 1 extra second.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9888226...

that wouldn't explain why it's only on the 30 though.
Why would that stop it being voted up? Things don't stop being interesting just because they are illegal.

Also, he advocates stealing it or buying it.
No change for me on my sites - hopefully its a rolling change
Ten Technology Forecast for year 2009
Now you can choose which SATs you want colleges to see and which you don't
At 350 lb, it's more like a tiny aircraft carrier.
John Gruber wrote:

> Last night, between midnight and 2 am, all 30 GB Zunes in the world apparently broke.

I stared in wonder. They sold thirty Zunes!? Then I figured it out. I need more coffee.
There is a lot of value in failed results, especially in science. What doesn't work is critical, if for nothing else, than for protocol and experiment design. Freeing up negative data is a huge motivation behind Open Notebook Science(1) and a subject of much discussion on the science blogosphere(2)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_notebook_science
2. http://network.nature.com/groups/harvardpublishingforum/foru...
Books That Have Shaped How I Think
I wouldn't find it surprising if they did. Think of it from the companies stand point. If employees are bitching about salaries, working conditions, etc... All that does is serve to get the entire work force all hot and bothered about it. It's not like we're talking about debating the merits of UI design in their products.
I talked to jeff barr @amazon a while back about these kind of issues (if you have large datasets to shuffle on/off EC2, is there an efficient & cost effective way to do it?) - shoot him an email or comment on the aws blog so they know more people have this need. Amazon public datasets can help with this for some use cases, for example certain bioinformatics or other academic use cases.
Venture Capital's Coming Collapse
Ha, I'm pretty sure they sold at least 50.
How is a story of someone cheating on a test inspiring?
> You often hear the complaint that people don't understand math. In this instance, however, an equally valid way of explaining what's going on is that mathematicians don't understand people.

This is by far the most insightful thing I have ever read about this problem. Furthermore, this being a site about startups, I would say that you will be more successful if you understanding people and math than if you just understand math.
Whenever someone exhorts you to "think outside the box", they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where "outside the box" is located. Isn't it funny how nonconformists all dress the same...

- http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/outside-the-box.html
Most Awkward Consumer Trend of 2008: Feedback Bribery
ultimately there's nothing special about the OS

I would dispute that... except that I suspect that it might be much more true if you're foolish enough to go the Hackintosh route.

The whole point of the Mac OS is that everybody is using more or less the same thing: similar OS, similar software, similar hardware, similar drivers. That makes it fairly easy to adopt tips and techniques from the community, or to Google for applicable advice, and it makes the user experience smoother and simpler. Once you throw away much of the ease of installation and maintenance, the consistency, and the stability the Mac OS is not that much more than Unix with pretty windows and a stricter set of UI guidelines -- and there are plenty of ways to prettify your Linux windows!

You do get access to well-designed, closed-source, Mac-only apps. (The open source Mac apps can generally be cross-compiled for Linux, or more likely vice versa.) But if you're too cheap to buy actual Mac hardware you're less likely to care about the power to pay for nicely designed Mac apps. Especially when some of those apps might exhibit mysterious bugs on your hackintosh hardware.

Just spend those hours you'd waste trying to maintain a hackintosh learning more about Linux. It's a better use of your time. Or buy a real Mac like everybody else.
It is, but not only is that not true in practice, its irrelevant. Gold is an industrial good, just like anything else. Its price fluctuates for a variety of reasons, including simple changes in taste.
I think it's a shame that rather than just commenting about the parts of the story that interest you, you besmirch others having a debate.

The discussion on the environment may have been somewhat tangential to the article, but the comments had been thought about and the debate was not the kind of derisive bickering on Reddit. If that topic interests the readers of this site, how is it irrelevant?

I do admire Carmack's achievements, drive, versatility and most of all his drive. That doesn't mean that I'm not at liberty to disagree with part of his philosophy. At the end of the day this article was posted as a review of the Tesla by someone who we like, who has had a number of supercars. That has nothing to do with any of his achievements which makes your comment as sideways as that of the topic of the environment.
I suspect you might find the exact details in an Android forum. But yes, you'll have to pay customs, taxes and tariffs to ship the Android dev phone outside the US. Also, how well the phone will work depends largely on what carrier and data plan you're trying to use. Again, HN is probably not the place for this, but here are the specs for the phone. This is the only additional information you'd see after paying the $25 for a developer account.

==Development Platform Features==

SIM unlocked - Put any SIM in the device --
Hardware unlocked - Rebuild the Android operating system, and load it onto the device --
Test out your apps on real hardware before publishing them to the world --

==Software Features==

Real web browsing --
Customizable home screen --
One-touch Google™ Search --
Android Market --
Google Maps™ --
Gmail™ --
YouTube™ --
Google Calendar™ --
Google Talk™ --
SMS and MMS --
Music player --

==Hardware Features==

Touch screen --
Trackball --
3.2 Megapixel camera with auto focus --
Wi-Fi --
Bluetooth v2.0 --
Handsfree profile v1.5 --
Headset profile v1.0 --
3G WCDMA (1700/2100 MHz) --
Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) --
GPS-enabled --
QWERTY slider keyboard --
Includes 1GB MicroSD card (Can be replaced with up to 16GB card) --
Included in the box --
HTC Android Dev Phone 1 --
USB Cable --
AC Adapter (with US plug) --
Stereo Hands-Free Headset --
Battery --
Getting Starting Guide --
1G Micro SD Card (inserted into Device) --
Sorry I didn't see this when you posted it. The problem is not `return :foo if bar()`, it's something like `pizzles.each { |p| return :foo if p.bar() }`. In Ruby, that returns from the surrounding method, not from the block where it's defined.

You can decide for yourself if this behaviour of return more trouble than it's worth. I didn't say it was, I said that this definition is what forces a block to be something different from a proc, which makes the language more complicated.
I had a similar experience when taking functions of a complex variable, where a midterm problem asked you to show that a solution existed and several students (not me, alas) found a non-constructive proof that worked without actually finding a solution. Unlike in your case, though, the professor gave all of them full credit.

I had good math professors. Too bad I wasn't a good math student.
I agree with you, but -1 for wishing death upon someone, even if it was for dramatic effect.
Carbon Neutrality Has Limits
We didn't; I'm not sure what we would have done with it if we did.
Including me :-).

We took off about 3 months in between when we decided to close down kiko and when we moved on to Justin.tv, although that's fuzzy because kiko wound down over a month or two and Justin.tv took a few months to ramp up to full speed.
Suspecting that might be the case, I tried opening some pictures before posting, and it all worked for me.
usa.gov is the only one I know. Adobe and Apple used to have PR 10s but they are now 9
Posted on December 26, 2005
Uh, no, it's not. And neither was it people's business whom William Jefferson Clinton elected to sleep with. There is still a right to privacy in this country. And if there is not, then I recommend emigrating to Canada.
mine is working great. i've never had an issue with it. best purchase i've ever made from woot.com :D
What makes you think I'd be against externalities taxes on all of the above? I think it makes much more sense to tax those things, which we don't want more of in our society, rather than say capital gains, which we do want.
as evidenced by the decision in this lawsuit

Is anything evidenced? They reached a settlement. Who knows which way the courts would go.
Presume for a moment that you believe global warm is a real and present danger. Then a carbon tax makes perfect sense.

I agree if you think that global warming is uncertain, or that perhaps we actually want to increase CO2 in the atmosphere, a carbon tax would be a bad idea.
Are Programmers Spoiled?
Inspiring? Only meant as light humor.
Environment minister Sammy Wilson: I still think man-made climate change is a con
I think he means the trade deficit/surplus.
I had ever such a low opinion of electric cars in years gone by. At the weekend I was in a discussion about old cars - my parents had cars that couldn't do 60mph and had to stop on the way up hills to let the coolant stop boiling and the engine cool down. No big company will ever release a car that basic now or in the (non-dystopian) future - if someone designed one, it simply wouldn't be approved. Standards and expectations have gone up.

Recently I saw Top Gear review the Tesla, and I twigged what Carmack said about the drivetrain. The Tesla has one gear. No multi-gear-box, no (or less) gearbox oil, no shifter or paddle shift, no oily engine and spark plugs and cylinders and valves and fuel pumps and air intakes... it's a motor with one moving part.

Suddenly, I feel the same way about this - quieter, smoother, simpler, more maintainable - it will be the standard type of car one day.
2009 Prediction: Microsoft buys 37signals for $300 million
I had a box downtown in the loop (in the Chicago Board of Trade building) here about 4 years ago:

http://www.fdcservers.net/ContactUs

Like all colo, it's not cheap (if you buy for a year, it's $82 a month). But you get a great pipe and 24hr access (it's manned at all times) to drop DVDs in the server (you can colo towers, it's not just limited to rackable).

If you only need to do this once or twice a month, I'll bet you could email them and they'd work something out where you could pay something small to come in with a laptop or even maybe drop of a whole USB drive for them to upload (you'd be willing to entrust your S3 keys like that?).

It wouldn't really take that long with their network speeds. Let's say you could get 10MB/s to S3 from there, 30GB would take, what, like an hour?

Anyhow, they're reasonable, won't hurt to ask.
Voting up does not necessarily mean you agree with the article. It means that the subject is interesting and you would like more people to see it and share their thoughts. Apple employees read HN and now they are aware of it and can take the necessary steps if they want to stop this (maybe by hiring the guy/gal).