skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>At launch, Win 8 tablets will cost at least between $550 and $800, which is a scary price point to start at when the iPad 2 retails for $400 and the new iPad starts at $500.

This part is worse to me. The way I see it, the only advantage in the PC vs Mac debate is that PCs can compete on price.

What chance do Windows 8 tablets have when they are more expensive than the best (to many) tablet on the market?
I was referring to the default maps app in iOS. Not Android. Thanks for clarifying.
Without completely eliminating all parameters to Cocoa and CoreFoundation drawing functions that take measurements in pixels and instead using pixel-less measures (sort of like how we specify font size in pts), this is always going to be a "hack".

Maybe one day...?
Types of gambling are legal all over the U.S.: betting on horse races, for historical reasons, and state/regional lotteries (which includes "scratchers").

Keno and other forms of gambling are legal only in Atlantic City and Nevada, for historical reasons. Gambling is not illegal in reservations but "indian" casinos are generally subject to approval by the federal government.

Congress has known for decades how to tax gambling revenues. They have simply chosen not to do so. Generally, the justification for not legalizing gambling nationwide is that the tax revenues raised from gambling activities is far outweighed by the increase in crime and decrease in properties values.

Congress chose to outlaw online gambling in 2006 as a result of many, many individuals developing chronic gambling addictions that destroyed their own lives and the lives of their families. The alternative was heavy regulation, but the casino industries (Vegas, Atlantic City, and various tribes) fought against it.
Where's Jobs when you need him?
Why business needs people with Asperger’s, ADD and dyslexia
> It may be a fad, but it works if you're strict.

You can eat nothing but twinkies and lose weight if you're strict about calories.
Google’s Chrome Web Store Adds Section For ... In-Depth Stats For Developers
Snapquest live streams Instagram photos by location, adds sharing tools
Then why does it correlate so high with income, even after being adjusted by the economic background of the measured person's parents?
Excuses... I don't even live in NYC and yet it took me 1 minute to find a better option: take the ferry (bikes are allowed). http://goo.gl/maps/ssB0.

I bet on a good day you can cycle this route under 30 minutes including the ferry ride.
What do you do when it breaks?

Modern computer equipment is not designed to last forever. Computer equipment that is heavily used by a 4 year old is even less likely to survive. (I just was trying to talk in my pool/sandbox/mud/...!)
>>(A software person might also think of it as: "If it takes 5 cores to compress 5 GB in 5 minutes, how long would it take 100 cores to compress 100 GB?")

I don't think that most compression algorithms are Embarrassingly Parallel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law), so it's not clear to me the software scenario is equivalent, or are you saying that the jobs come in 5 gigabyte chunks?
The problem is that putting patents and similar legal steps exclusive ownership of ideas in place doesn't guarantee that they'll be used in the best ways.

Personally I think that patents and similar should be treated as property, and licensing should be required. The patent owner sets the price and it's taxed yearly based upon that price, whether products are made or not. This is similar to how real estate taxes are done in many places.

Also, at some large multiple of the price, it's possible to buy out the patent, putting it in the public domain. This way truly useful things deliver a windfall to their creators, or are licensed (possibly for much longer than patent protection allows today) creating recurring revenue.
Thank you, editing in to back up.
I see that the bubble bubble of 2012 continues unabated.
rant/

Nothing instills rage in me more than companies, knowing how essential what they sell is, slagging each other for petty, pointless money.

I hate to be dramatic, but these are disabled adults and children for christ's sake, people who need things like SfY. I just do not understand how someone at the litigating company thought "hey, let's go sue a company over some very complex and possibly unfounded patent allegations! Screw the people that rely on the products we're suing about, they won't mind". How dare they take away a person's ability to communicate? Tell me, is there any reasonable situation where it's acceptable to deny a child's ability to speak?

The humanity of it all :/

/rant
If You Kill Someone, Don’t Google it First
Nah, where's Stallman when you need him.
Possibly they're more worried about potential bad press if they fail to meet whatever tentative deadlines they announce?
very beneficial; the amount of developer and support from the community if phenominal.
Actually, most aggregators that I've used (hotwire, priceline, etc) all include taxes and fees so I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

I think the purpose of Hipmunk (and what makes it different) is that it takes more things into account than price, right? You prioritize flights that have the most optimal times with the best price, am I correct? I found they were most similar when you selected price as your priority when looking flights.

If anything, a feature I think I'd enjoy would be a fare predictor because most aggregators to have this feature and it's nice to know when you should buy.
The convex is doubly true. I used to use a quite popular simple note-taking app for iOS, and just wanted to change the font to something monospaced.. The developer's reply was "no".

Just as bad is an insencere canned "Thanks! We'll consider it for a future version!" reply..
For varying hardnesses of vacuum, you can find a partial vaccum of 4 psi at 30,000 feet.

Which is enough to drop drag a lot, and still maintain lift in, say, commercially viable air transportation vehicles.

Lowest costs I've seen to LEO are about $1,000/lb. Suborbital flight isn't much lower than that, and we're still looking at something on the order of $10k - $1m per passenger at rates like that. Affordable to some, but (considering you've likely got a baggage, life support, and related allowance) pretty pricey all the same.

$10k is comparable to Concorde, as I recall. I consider that a very optimistic estimate.
Sorry, just updated the site.. Its suppose to deliver comment summaries from Techcrunch for now twice a day to your inbox. Just a 24hr fun hack
clicking glyphs on a screen and having a device speak the words the glyphs represent is patent worthy? It's a perfect parallel to ASL. And there's enough social utility that we should help companies gouge parents $8k a pop [1] instead of $400 ipad + $unknown for software?

[1] http://store.prentrom.com/
While it's true that they're bundled, it would also appear that Windows RT is only being delivered in bundled form(Unless I'm reading this blog post incorrectly).

So if we accept that Windows RT itself is a bundle, the headline isn't particularly misleading.
Perhaps my google-fu was weak back then; searching now I see posts about it on several sites. Ha, there's even a Facebook group called "Stop using the I V vi IV chord progression" (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stop-using-the-I-V-vi-IV-chord...).
A little less than Android-based ones. They effectively compete in price with iPads, have software available and some of them can be rooted.
One of several previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068652

Hint: submitting an article from The Economist with a source string besides the canonical URL seems to mess up HN's duplicate submission detection software.
The Surrounding Game: A Kickstarter documentary about the game of Go
Twitter, Facebook, and Airtime Are Waging War Against The Internet’s Stupidity
Vulns in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers Could Allow Elevation of Privilege
>The way I see it, the only advantage in the PC vs Mac debate is that PCs can compete on price.

Enterprise users.

Of course, Microsoft is dropping the ball there with WinRT, too, but that's beside the point.
Thanks! I've fixed up the motherboard price for Amazon, though the price I list is when fulfilled from Amazon.com directly and not from their marketplace merchants.
Definitely. No ETA yet, but that is on the roadmap.
What the heck does Jobs have to do with this? The man was a capitalist and hardly a philanthropist.
I have never heard any hate directed towards OKC not including whatever drama is haunting them from their Seattle exodus.

They are probably the universally admired team in the nba.
What does "monopoly" mean, in this case? Where's the line between "I can punch your nose" and "I can shoot you dead" and "This is a military"? I assume joining an underground resistance is unpalatable?
Holy smokes, thank you, thank you, and thank you so much for posting this! I had no idea that this had a name called "Dyscalculia". I wonder if there is a way to medically verify if I actually have this condition. To this day, I cannot read an analog watch. I cannot do math in my hand, although I do perfectly fine on paper. For even simple calculations, like 23 + 45, I simply cannot keep both numbers in my head. It is truly a curse. I actually physically get dizzy when I'm asked to perform computations. When I was in high school, I still played games like "Number Munchers", asking myself.. "What is wrong with me?", despite the fact that I had successfully made it to calculus and maintained a very high GPA.

It is amazing then, that I somehow have managed to complete both an undergraduate and Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I compensated for my lack of numerical ability by heavily relating on calculators throughout my college education. In fact, one of the reasons I pursued computers in the first place is because I recognized that I could survive, and hence, fake it, by offloading such "trivial" computations to a machine.

Many standardized tests, such as the GRE, don't allow calculators unfortunately.
I'm curious.

>9. Latest research proves that Flame is indeed linked to Stuxnet....

Whats the chance that this "Resource 207" is some 3rd party module that more than 1 developer had access to?
I concede that placing the same resource in the same resource location in 2 different unrelated applications is a bit of a long shot, but I dont see it as a smoking gun either.
Which City Is Most Stressed Out?
Thanks, Alex. I've really appreciated the feedback and encouragement you've given me.
Ping is one of the few Steve Jobs-approved product failures. Even MobileMe eventually morphed into iCloud. Ping was DOA.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" - US Constitution Section 8

At the time of the writing of the Constitution something was needed to help spur innovation. It was written in the time of inventions like the cotton gin (easily copied 100x over by anyone who bought 1). But make no mistake, patents and copyrights have been implemented solely to help improve society as a whole since day 1. Enriching inventors is a by product of the desire to push science and art forward, not the raison d'être.

Now it seems that patents, taken as a whole, inhibit innovation. Most entrepreneurs view patents as an obstacle to be overcome, not a reward for their efforts.

I think it's time we either abolish them or vastly raise the bar on what it requires to get a patent. We have several orders of magnitude too many patents on the books today.
Very much seconded. Companies like Zynga contribute nothing to the gaming community, poach IP like crazy, and are, to borrow a highly technical term from Yahtzee, a bunch of hooting d*ckholes.
Ways to Kick Your Facebook Addiction
Which iOS 6 features can my device run? (fragmentation?)
iPhone 4 won't get turn by turn? Siri was the first example, but at least then there was an arguable hardware rationale.
So you think it's good practice for Apple to pull apps based simply on an accusation of patent infringement by a competitor?

Yes, it's Apple's playground. But that doesn't mean they won't receive bad PR, lost sales, and a public backlash based on a boneheaded policy.
Software Patents Are Human Evil At Its Best.
I'm no mathematician, but I fail to see how +$85 gets you up to "$800 or $900" or how they're figuring that. For the 64gb models perhaps.

I'd gladly pay +$85 for a tablet where I have file system access so I don't have to use another computer to get a file on the darned thing.
Indeed. And I also see the bubble around writing about bubbles will continue to bubble.
10-Year-Long Game of ‘Civilization’ Predicts Grim Future for Humanity
No, they didn't do it because Apple was already paying them to use their maps.

If they came out with their own Google Maps application that had feature parity with the Android app, I would imagine that most iOS users would switch immediately to that app instead of Apple's built-in one.

That could have potentially cost Google a lot of money, assuming that Apple was paying on a per-use basis.
Once I did it, hoping that the company hiring me thought I was nuts. Against all odds, they say yes. Just 3 hours of work, but they paid me 900 bucks. The advice here is: Be as good as you can in what you do. Work will come along. And charge'em what you please.
To be more of a pedant, the Bdim should be a Bm7b5, not a B7b5. Also, The Temptations, not Otis Redding, sang My Girl.
I'm pretty sure the punk movement inspired the more simple song structures of the 80's more than anything else did; New Wave was a direct offshoot of punk.
Show HN: Kandan - open source chat app
Hey guys I got this, I speak cloudonaut. Here I'll translate it to sysadmin:

An admin was doing a rolling restart that triggered a bug in the loadbalancer software. The auto restart script turned out to just make things worse by restarting it over and over (they always do), so we thought we'd just quick throw spare capacity at it, but turns out that never works in a panicked rush either. Also, our system designed to handle outage notifications wasn't capacity planned, like, at all.
Microsoft is afraid to cross the chasm. It must become a hardware manufacturer to compete with iPad.

The iPad has disrupted the steady decades-long growth of PC sales. Microsoft has the choice of competing with Android on the tablet low end, or of competing with Apple on the tablet high end.

But because Microsoft is a software manufacturer, competing with Android on the low end means competing with something that is free - aside from existing mobile patent royalties.

And competing with Apple is difficult because Apple keeps all the device sales profits, whereas Microsoft must split profits with tablet hardware manufacturers - who have the choice of using Android or some other Linux-based tablet OS.

By the summer of 2013, we will begin to see how this is sorting out. Nokia, who has bet their company on Microsoft, may be then only a year away from bankruptcy. Enterprises may be reluctant to upgrade desktops to the Metro UI in Windows 8.

What will be Microsoft's tablet market share a year from now? More than 10%?
Temporary solution would be to ask developers to port it to android or jail-break app and release from the country that does not honor these patents.

Since the app is a basic necessity for its user, customers wont mind going extra mile and root their device and use the app.
"clicking glyphs on a screen and having a device speak the words the glyphs represent is patent worthy?"

I wouldn't think so, this patent is #5,920,303 which relates to a way of making is easy and efficient to access a large vocabulary from a screen with limited space. Reading through the patent just now I wouldn't say it is particularly obvious that this would be the best way to go about things. Its got about 5 years left in its lifetime.

Is it possible the folks at SfY saw one of PRC's devices and say "Hey would could code that up in an App!" and didn't check to see if it was patented? I don't know, just reading and wondering.
Nike Zoom KD IV Year Of The Dragon Mens Basketball Shoes for Cheap Sale
Where do you call the feedback socket after sending a notification in the code? Is this something you do on your application's end? Sorry, last question I promise. Pull requests coming soon!
They are fooling themselves if they think the Office bundle justifies the price. The rationale for the Office bundle should be to give an initial boost to an unproven platform and overcome the scarcity of Windows RT apps.
Actually, the current Maps app uses Apple's location database as far as I know. In fact, when Apple announced the switch I noticed a significant decrease in the usefulness of searching inside the maps app.
Nothing a directed tachyon beam can't fix.
There are other alternatives.

Have you ever wondered why bands are allowed to "cover" other bands music without any kind of prior permission? It is because the US Congress wrote something called a compulsory license into the copyright law. Music was thought too important to our culture to allow one person to have control over a new song.

I say it is time we brought the idea of a compulsory license to patents.
Interesting. Most of the open-source projects I follow do a per-system salt. Isn't this how Wordpress does it?

http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Security_Ke...
Well thanks as well, I think I am over any annoyance here.

You are a gentleman. I think can only aspire to a similar level of politeness.
2% of customers paying is pretty average for a free-to-play model. If Zynga has 60 million daily active users, thats 1.2M payers per day, more than enough to be profitable you'd think.

The real question is the value of their users, and whether Zynga can increase that value. Zynga's largest expense is probably marketing and CPI costs have more than likely doubled (I don't know the exact numbers) on Facebook over the past couple years. If Zynga hasn't increased the value of their users, that means they can acquire less, thus the drop in DAU.

The key equation for a free-to-play business is LTV > Acquisition. Unfortunately, CPI for FB probably somewhere around $1 and on iOS it can be $1-$5 depending on who's buying the traffic that day. This is why the social game market is difficult to survive in, because most small companies don't have the marketing spend to acquire customers at that cost. For Zynga, these costs are starting to show in reduced DAU, due to a combination of natural declining retention and an increase in acquisition costs.
What are your thoughts on generating CSS animations using Ruby?
So I'm a programmer who has mostly worked with the C family of languages throughout his career, but recently I've started to appreciate HTML5 and CSS3 as they provide much more power and control. One of my particular areas of interest has been CSS3's animation capabilities. Frankly, I think it's super sweet.

Unfortunately, I also think actually writing animations kind of sucks. For simple things, it works, sure. But for more complex animations, it doesn't seem intuitive to me. I feel like it wants to be programming, but it isn't.

All right, so I've been working on a project to fix that for me. The project is called RCSS, meaning Ruby + CSS. As this isn't exactly my region of expertise, I'd love to hear some thoughts about the direction to take this.

The idea is that we can use a real programming language (I chose Ruby) to generate CSS animations for us. The syntax is sort of neat; I was heavily inspired by the animation functions provided by UIView in UIKit. The project is at an early stage (I've been thinking about it for months, but executed in the last two weeks), so it is easy to move it in different directions, depending on what would be most useful. Though as I view this as an experiment, so maybe it's not useful at all, I'd love to know what you think!

You can see an example of the kind of code you write using RCSS here: https://gist.github.com/2914616

The project is hosted here: https://github.com/jparishy/rcss if you'd like to follow along.

Thoughts and comments are appreciated/encouraged!

Thanks for reading.
Thanks for this. I kept feeling like the article was just completely lacking in depth. Now I know the research isn't. ;-)
> It's also heartbreaking to see intelligent people getting so excited about ideas like cryonics and personality uploading. I mean, they're interesting things to talk about, but a lot of people on LW seem to actually think they might get to live forever.

I wouldn't totally dismiss sci-fi concepts like brain uploading. But then I'm not totally sold on their viability either.

One of the things I always thought was interesting about cryonics was data integrity. It could be a while before you hit the singularity. (Or whatever it is you think will wake you up.) Even with liquid nitrogen I doubt your brain can be 100% preserved. So let's say hypothetically you get yourself some proper Ray Kurzweil recursively improving A.I. And as a common courtesy decide to revive the Alcor people. If you have 99% of someones brain image and use statistical algorithms like Bayes theorem to fill in the rest is it still the same person when you wake them up? How about 99.99% their brain? 99.999999? (Which brings us back to the semantics of labels and reductionism vs. wholism.)

People who think they'll live forever have huge logic fails on their hands. Ignoring the heat death of the universe as an obvious one. [0] In fact every time I think of the whole business Issac Asimov's The Last Question comes to mind. [1]

[0]: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe)

[1]: (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)
Or, if you use Urban Airship; it's literally like five lines of code with HTTParty to send a push notification.

Of course, your needs may vary, but UA scales well and is essentially free to start with.
ITT: can the Need for Cognition Scale be used to weed through candidates for programming positions?

Can it help identify candidates who have little experience but will make good programmers once they're taught how to code?
Oh sorry. Yeah we do this in our app (not automatically in the gem).
I'm not sure that the argument is the important part of this article; a lot of it was about lamentation. The author admits to having little knowledge of patent laws, and is offering their story for perspective.

As far as I can tell there were two points being made:

1. Apple might have been premature in pulling the app from the App Store. Not being under any immediate legal obligation to block the app, nor a ruling on whether there was infringement.

2. It might be unethical to go as far as having the app removed from the store this early on in their litigation. That move might take speech away from people who depend on Speak for Yourself.

I'm not saying those are good arguments, but they are what they are.

Also worth noting is the cost of SfY vs PRC products:

- The Speak for Yourself app cost $190, on top of the price of an iPad. The least expensive PRC product is $2,595. It seems geared towards the very young, or otherwise those with a fairly limited speech/thought faculties, hence they call it "SpringBoard Lite". The rest of PRC's products range from $7500 - $15,000.

I mention the prices because I wondered why the author couldn't just go buy one of PRC's products. They may be prohibitively expensive.
I think I'm in the minority but I can't stand Hipmunk's UI. With Kayak I just put in when I'm going, time of day I want to leave and hit the nonstop button. Then I get a nice ordered list by price boom done.

Maybe I'm spoiled I live near two major airports (Oakland and SFO) and tend to travel to large cities. But I've not found hipmunk's UI innovation to be anything but excess nonsense I don't need.