skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There is currently no supersonic passenger jet in service."

The dream isn't dead yet:

http://www.aopa.org/aircraft/articles/2012/120426back-to-a-s...
Derive the quadratic formula.

It's just about as simple as FizzBuzz, and requires primarily symbolic manipulation. Anyone from any branch of mathematics (including applied math and statistics) should be able to do it in their sleep.
The person you were replying to was talking about the Galaxy tab which did infringe on Apple's design patent.
Dagdum has been harping on this concept for over a year at this point: "don't waste time talking about your tools, you can do amazing things with everything, go do them".

It's a platitude, sometimes it's even the wrong mindset to have, tools do matter. And worse still it's starting to sound hollow given that all dagdum talks about is how you should do awesome stuff instead of talking on the Internet.

How about he talks about something cool he did recently instead? I guess that doesn't get him as many page views.

At least in this case it is actually correct, unlike previous entries, C++ and Perl are filling two very specific niches perfectly and their obvious shortcomings are the flip side of their strengths.
Thanks for the info. It's sad that I out my employer will allow it.
Exactly, loved the service a lot. Used it +10 times a day. Had their blog in my RSS reader.

I got this email, and instantaneously the iphone app and web app stopped working. Rude and strange way of dealing with users... Never received an email or survey invitation whether I'd like to pay for the service or anything.

So I assume what was being commented in this thread became reality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2989256
None-outsourced government IT projects aren't any better.

We decide to install system X so we need to hire some experts in system X. But system X experts are expensive and if we hire them as staff they are paid according to fixed internal pay scales - or there is a hiring freeze - or we have to hire 'internal candidates" from other government branches first.

So we hire consultants. These are a lot more expensive. Then part way through the project there is an investigation into how much "external consultants' are costing. So there is a ban on external consultants which the government shows has saved us $$$ million.

The result of course is that we have a half-implemented system X that costs us $$$$million and doesn't work.
I truly think most of the future classes of web apps will operate with auto-generated guest accounts. It's a no brainer. If you truly have a great product, let users dive right in (I don't even believe you should have to click to get to the trial, just dump them right into it!).

It's like bait. Once they begin to use your product and put their data/actions into it, you simply remind them to save it with with their email (and password if necessary to save it). Their investment in trying it is a much stronger motivation to sign up than some features list with a promo video ever could be.

EDIT: Not to mention as we move more towards desktop style web apps, it will be the natural progression.
Design and functionality are interlinked.

And it is pretty common to trademark colours.
I don't see anything when I close my eyes
Nice work there detective. Unfortunately that Galaxy you showed is the 10.1n which is the modified version to make it deliberately look different than an iPad.

Here is the "original" Galaxy Tab.

http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/...
Firefox's bar works exactly the same as Chrome's now.

Is it exactly the same? In Firefox, AFAIK you don't get every URL you type sent off to Google for logging as part of the instant search system; that only happens with things you type in the separate search box. In Chrome, I'm not sure whether it's the default for a new installation at the moment, but that capability is definitely there for anything you type in the (only) box.
> Which could eventually lead to bankruptcy and still stick the taxpayer with the bill and poor service provision.

Precisely. Thus G4S have a clear incentive not to let their standards slip elsewhere in the business and face further damage to their finances, or for that matter their reputation.

G4S is a massive multinational with ~£7.5bn annual revenue. They're not going to spiral into bankruptcy over this Olympics debacle.
I am not sure this is true generally: the JVM has been able to use "Compressed OOPS" aka 32bit pointers to objects managed by the VM in 64 bit platforms for a few years, even without any support from the OS.
This is the healthiest view I've seen in the comments for this article - so far.

I've found out that most times when I "urgently" want to get a hold of someone - leaving a well thought out message works out just as fine.
There's some truth to what you're saying. Gnome 3, Unity and Metro are simply worse desktop environments than their previous versions. They are aiming for touch-friendliness and for some reason trying to radically change what was working fine. Both of these are massive mistakes.

BTW Chrome's UI is almost perfect (including OS and mobile browser). The people behid it must be one of the best in the industry.
Actions can be mafia even without physical violence.

As everyone can see the notice was sent by Apple itself not by an US institution like a tribunal or a governmental agency.

Even juridical acts can be a form of violence expecially if they came from a big organization against a small retailer. The fact that there is no physical violence put them in another plan but violence and intimidations are always of the same nature and qualifies this act as mafia (in my point of view).
There is ZERO evidence that Apple has used core FRAND patents (which that article refers to) against its competitors.

But Samsung, HTC, Google etc have. Hence the ITC/EU investigation of those companies.
This amazing, finely crafted software is built despite the handicap of lesser tools, not thanks to them. Which makes the feat of crafting that software even more amazing.
Besides the nice hardware on the Nexus (although not quite as powerful as the Galaxy S III), you get almost instant OS updates. Other devices have to wait a few months (if they ever get the updates) since the carriers control the updates and have custom themes on top of Android.
Actually, a huge amount of archaeological research goes into trying to determine how we can tell what people ate from their bones, teeth, etc. The amount of information that can be gathered is pretty substantial. For example:

1) Tooth decay rates are still the largest indications of eating a carb-based diet. These are often also used as markers for cereal agriculture, naturally enough.

2) Societies that consume excessive quantities of milk develop bone abnormalities associated with anemia, because cow's milk interferes with absorbtion of iron.

3) Societies that consume lots of fish have bones that show up as a few centuries older when run through carbon dates. This is true both for consumption of salt-water and fresh-water fish.

The doctor is right about some things. A calorie is a calorie when you are looking at weight loss. A calorie in or out s a calorie in or out. But a lot of things impact how much energy we burn, and when we are hungry and these range from when and how long we sleep[1] to what we eat.[2]

Overly simplistic/reductionist approaches don't work.[3] Chemistry is not applied quantum physics even though our understanding of chemistry is informed by quantum physics. If you are trying to help people diet, arguing that calories are what you directly control rather than the end-game is just a recipe for misery.

[1] http://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/502825

[2] For example, the effects of what we eat on insulin production are well understood, but also there are effects of insulin production on appetite that are getting more attention now. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16933179 for example.

[3] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393.full.pdf or if you don't want to pay, read it at http://www.meso2012.com/pdfs/AndersonScience177,393,72.pdf
What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?".

Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume must be business purposes.

This must be hyperbole. That would make sense.
>That really cool stuff nestled deep in a propiratary binary, Odds are its not really that neat or cool.

Really? By what logic exactly did you come to this conclusion?
Thank you so much for noticing this! I've just corrected the links.
The majority of government outsourcing deals are ideology or to hide the numbers.

Take PFI, if I offered to take over the rest of your mortgage on your house. But you had to pay me equivalent of the mortgage payment for 100years and you had to buy my services for any cleaning or maintenance of your house for the 100year term - then even though you were now mortgage free (ie. you had reduced your deficit) - you would be mad to take the deal.

If however your only interest was being able to claim that you had reduced your deficit going into the next election - and it wasn't your money anyway - you might look at it differently
But trademarks aren't a part of this lawsuit, are they?

The point is that if Apple was suing under trademarks they would have done things differently, but don't appear to be doing so, probably because patents have wider protections than trademarks do.

You can trademark a color in a certain context, but I doubt you can trademark the color and then enforce general ownership rights to it.

After all even in more specific contexts, I seem to remember 'Gel Cel' being impermissibly generic as a trademark.
We call this the 'dark matter' problem - when you're trying to hire great people, for every well-known rockstar, there are tens of people who are better, toiling away in obscurity.

The early JavaScript scene was like this - there were people who published amazing JS work and everyone on DHTMLCentral knew who they were, and it was easy to find them and try to hire them. Yet we felt this huge frustration because occasionally we'd interview someone who was as good or better, but we had only found them by accident.

I'm excited about sites like Dribbble and GitHub, which make it easy to showcase your work without having to go through the pantomime of a large folio piece. Though it can be a pain for introverts to do, I've never met anyone who regretted overpublishing their stuff.
the fact that it got included and remained included makes it notable according to the technical meaning of Wikipedia.

Why does that remind me exactly of this:

Listen up! The first rule of Tautology Club is... http://xkcd.com/703/
PandoDaily’s Fireside Chat with Elon Musk
Using Reddit for Blog Comments
Here's the full video:

http://new.livestream.com/pandodaily/elonmusk/videos/1908918
My guess if it looked like the iPad but provided a sub-par experience, Apple would be laughing in their Ivory Tower about how cute it is they think rounded tablet edges make all the difference.
Why is it how it should be ?

The fact that I know how to sell myself makes me better paid, better treated, and better recognized that others who have the same level of programming ability as me but are less good at shouting it to whoever wants to hear it. And yet, I don't provide anything better than them to anyone. Worse, it's overall detrimental, because I spend time making myself known instead of doing actual stuff.
Hacker News. Simply because it just gifted me this thread, full of intellectual goodness.
Cracking the on-line classifieds 'thing' has been an 'idea' since day one of the Internet, literally thousands have attempted it, getting traction seems to be the consistent issue, why do people use Craigslist, well, mainly because people are using Craigslist, certainly not because it has function X or does Y or looks hip, as a market it's worth a massive shed load of cash, one time an anecdote was that it was worth more than TV/Radio and Newspaper combined, am I showing my age...
Theoretically easy, I agree. We need to dislodge the dinosaur thugs that have made this difficult. Unfortunately it seems as though their moral compass and logic calibration is inversely proportional to their degree of desperation for profit.
On the Ugliness of Wikipedia
"Dot Matrix Printer" in Game of Life
1.3% of ~a billion strong device market can still be a lot of customers in a 13 million target device audience. Not as big as the other players by an order of magnitude, but many folks the size of app dev teams make livings off small town shops serving less than a thousand customers.
Seriously. What ARE you talking about ?

Governments don't send notices like this. Lawyers do. Which is exactly what happened in this situation.
Most of them weren't making a circuit -- just running the wire from one end of the battery to the base of the bulb. That shows a very fundamental lack of understanding of what's going on, without even getting into things like the power requirements of the bulb.
An ounce of passion is worth a pound of tools. You /can/ do amazing things with limited resources and crappy tools.

You have to be careful about this. Using this as a justification not to have good tools ("What's wrong with you? Suffering worked great last time") is bogus logic; there's no reason not to have good tools. The other side of the coin, NOT doing something because you don't have good tools yet, is equally poisonous.

- The test team that spends all its time writing test frameworks and tools, and never writing any actual tests. (How many times have I seen this?)

- The engineer who spends half his time "optimizing" (finding the perfect language, defragging his hard disks six times a day, tweaking TCP settings so repository access is as fast as possible) and not writing code.

- Going around and around on a class design until it's /perfect/.

- Not moving on something because you lack complete understanding.

It's hard to overstate the benefit of just getting in the ring and doing /something/.

After 25 years of random fiddling with one side project [not going to tell you want it is] I finally just started writing some fucking code. And you know, it feels darned good. The stuff I'd been worrying about being inefficient and so forth turned out to be only a few hours of thinking and coding. It was fun.

A poor craftsman blames his tools.
Web whiz snared with NYPD cop in drug and gun bust
I completely agree with the thesis of the article; that outsourcing leads to inflexibility is performed by a staff that is not necessarily invested in the goals of the organisation. However, how does this apply to providing security for the Olympics, a once-off event that may not return to London for another 50 years? A city can't be expected to constantly maintain a police force capable of covering an event of this size.
Potentially a smart judgment, because if Apple were to try and overturn it they'd have to argue that their competitors are as cool as they are.
> the quality of the inclusionist arguments outside of Wikipedia itself is pathetic.

I'd be interested in reading some of the "good" deletionist & inclusionist arguments inside Wikipedia that you mention. These pages [1][2][3] seem to summarize most of the well-known arguments from both sides, but each of the points listed there are too schematic for a casual reader to make sense of what's actually going on within the community. Besides, some of the arguments there actually look even more pathetic than anything I've read outside of Wikipedia. (What the hell does Roe v. Wade have to do with this?)

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Deletionism

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Association...

[3] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Association...

> people discussing Wikipedia policy are doomed to rehash arguments long made on Wikipedia meta pages... poorly.

Members of some communities seem to think that outsiders are not fully qualified to participate in debates about their beloved policies. But often a detached outsider's perspective is exactly what is needed to fix a broken status quo.

For example, both the deletionist and inclusionist "Associations" are made up of experienced editors with strong commitments pro and con. These folks might not be in the best position to talk about the many hurdles that new contributors face every day, which has more to do with maldistributed burdens of proof and the lack of clearly articulated standards.

Well-intentioned new contributors don't care whether Wikipedia should be paper or toilet paper. They care when some editor on a power trip spends 30 minutes arguing to delete a little article when he could have spent a much more productive 3 minutes looking up a couple of references that the newbie didn't know how to include.
Yes, and plenty of other people would disagree, saying that most pirates wouldn't have bought a copy anyway, so it's not denying him a sale. This thing you want everybody to just agree on is the central matter of the debate.
I like UIs that have wow effect and shallow learning curve. But this fades off quickly - after you get used to it, you don't take any pleasure from the looks of the UI. What matters in the long term is efficiency and features.
Exactly. Writing well is hard, and you have to spend a lot of time thinking, writing, editing.

'A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.' - Thomas Mann
I'm not an expert on these matters, but as I understand it, Windows is not ignorant of the fact that you have 8GB of RAM, it is simply unable to address it. So it makes logical sense that it would show you having 8GB, but only 3.8GB of usable RAM.
An awesome infographic of the solar system
It had one ref and was marked {{stub}} - for a series of public art pieces relating to two major public events in a UK city. The event only really reaches 2 or 3 major city areas for 3 months every couple of years; I don't bother looking but I guess it's not WP:NOTABLE or whatever the tag is.

I'm not bothered really; better to delete them then than when I'd actually written the article.
Patent troll script:

1) Find an excepted business process that has been used for literally centuries.
2) Create a patent but include the words, "on a computer" or "on a computer network".
3) Profit.

What a stupid system.
Apple set a trend of prioritizing learning curve and aesthetics over long term efficiency and features. I understand why some poeple don't like that.
> Conventional wisdom is that the private sector is just much more efficient than the state can ever be, but I have never been able to find evidence-based studies for or against this.

The train of logic is that if coprorations become efficient to maximize returns on investments and products sold, then since government programs have neither a need for a return on investment and exist outside of market economics because all the associated costs are a forced payment by the "customers" that they have no reason for themselves to be efficient. The government as a whole might want them to be efficient, but there is no intrinsic benefit for a government program to maximize efficiency because that has no influence on its short run continued existence.

Not saying it couldn't be as efficient, but large programs end up with too many people in positions of power which means there's probably at least one bad apple in there trying to milk the lack of demand economics or operating costs.
Tips for the Timeless Startup:

- Don't ask permission for anything. Just do it and apologize if you get caught.

- Don't hash your user passwords. Ensure that you have a "database leak" at least once once you hit over 100k users. (Make sure you drop TechCrunch a tip to make sure that you cover your security breach). Also make sure you use SHA1/MD5.

- Make sure anyone signing up for an account has to pick a password at least over 8 characters and must contain at least one symbol, one upper case letter, and a number. Additionally, no two identical characters can be next to each other (both on your keyboard on in the password string).

- Hire female models to do all of your publicity material. Ensure you film it. Don't take any BS if people criticize you for this.

- Make sure all your users have to verify their email before they can access their account. (Wait an hour before sending out any activiation emails).

- Send out newsletters and marketting material filled with BS martketing speel at least once a day.

- If you provide an "unsubcribe" on your email, make sure that it's behind a login wall, that requires users to log in before they can unsubscribe from emails.

- If your users want to cancel their account, require that they provide you with a reason. Once they have provided you with a reason, tell them you are sorry to see them go, but incase they change their mind, you will keep their account open for 14 more days. (Keep sending them emails telling them you miss them)

- Run regular "competitions" for your users, but make sure that you always pick an employee as the winner so that you don't have to give out any awards.
> Outsourcing is seen as a panacea because it is believed you can offload worrying about the details. All too often this means the outsourcing process itself is handed over to people who don't (or don't want to) know the details. Hence we get fiascos like this.

You're absolutely correct, but it does not follow from instances such as this that outsourcing is itself the root of all evil, as this author would have us believe.

Furthermore, the case in question is hardly an example of poorly managed outsourcing. G4S were, by all accounts, the most suitable firm for the Olympics security contract. That said, it is a largely unprecedented event, and not unsurprisingly they underestimated the task, and couldn't get enough staff trained in time.

Taxpayers don't stand to lose out as a result of this. G4S are to blame, and G4S will have to eat the cost of sorting the matter out; taking a loss of up to £50m on the contract, it has been reported.

> The result is we are likely to have an Olympics with an overt military presence. Still this should make a lot of overseas visitors feel at home.

13,500 military personnel were already scheduled to provide security for the Olympics, and the government has only committed an additional 3,500 in response to the G4S revelations.
I don't think it would hurt conversions. Instead I question the amount of time spent building the demo versus working on making the product itself better.

In case of LinkPeek the demo was basically just a free version of the SaaS product. It only required one webpage to be built and took on the order of about 2 hours to create.

If you are interested in seeing the demo go to linkpeek.com and click try now.
I love the design (more than OS X's), but it's simply less usable than Windows 7.
The edit to the title of the post deletes one of the main points of interest of the clip: Gordon Ramsay says this is how his restaurant tries out cooks who want a job --- in other words, it's FizzBuzz for restaurant cooks (as the original title of the post said).