skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry your Android experience wasn't the same as mine. If you're talking about vendor specific 3rd party software, then yes I agree there was/is some terrible UI skins out their. But that is what happens when you create software that is free and open source, companies )and in many cases carriers) can do whatever they want with it. I think Google realized the impact this was having on their UI and is now taking steps to fix it. If you have used an ICS or JB device the experience really is much better and much much more unified.

I'm not saying Android is perfect they have certainly made mistakes, but I think that now they have worked a lot of the kinks and are shipping a much better product. This is something that often happens in the software industry, how many people used Mac OS before OS X? How terrible was the Palm UI before WebOS? How bad was Windows Vista?

Software companies make mistakes, but the good ones learn from them and create better products in the future, that's what innovation is all about.

If you haven't yet I encourage you to try an Android ICS or JB device and see if your experience differs.
The problem is that usually the people doing all the work get very little whilst the people who're just being rich get made richer. Yes within the current system a small return on investment should be expected but a commensurably larger wage should be paid before a large return is given to investors.

It's by no means a universal truth that an investor deserves profit.
It could be a bit cheaper, but I'd hope SSL certificate vendors would be putting some work into identity verification. You know, making sure the person with an @gmail.com e-mail is the right person to send the gmail.com SSL certificate to. That could mean manually checking scanned copies of legal documents, making some phone calls, maybe even faxing or sending some things by post. Look at all these requirements Mozilla have to include your CA certificate! http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/certs/policy/Inclus...

$60 sounds a little high to me, but if you think you could do it for substantially less, why not set yourself up in competition with them?
Is Outsourcing Actually a Bad Thing?
Apple investigating iOS in-app purchase hack
"... actually trying to dominate in the marketplace rather than in the courtroom."

They're doing both, and it's a very slippery slope if they send the message that they are not willing to protect their patents.

I do agree, though, that it is a shame all of this effort is put into legal battles for what is usually minimal benefit. And that goes for the legal system in general.
Looks like they were trying to protect their trademark and logo (the rest of section 5a) and they went a little over the top. Probably somebody with an impoverished imagination. ("If anyone creates an image link to our site, the image will probably be our logo. We must stop that! What? Exceptions? But why would anyone create an image link to london2012.com without putting our logo in the image?")

The real question is: Does a ToS like this actually have any legal force, either in the UK or anywhere else in the world?
Awesome! Now I don't have to switch accounts! Sparrow for Google Docs. Now make an app for iphone! It's annoying to open webpage to access google docs on iphone :/
Oh and Thank You!
Implicitly in contrast is a loud minority of newbs, with their resume-building blogs that have an about-me page, a picture of themselves, and reposting/paraphrases of old Joel on Software posts.
Is there a BSD/LGPL licensed c/c++/ implementation? I'd love to try it out in some public domain satellite imagery to see the results
I may be old-fashioned, but the idea of any of these "extreme" diets scares me. I have always found that an approach with regular ( 2-3 times a week ) exercise and an conservative approach to eating is better.

My usual diet plans for eating is breakfast (some cereal), a big lunch at about 1 o clock (this is my dinner effectively), and perhaps something light, like pasta, rice when I get home, followed by a bowl of cereal for bedtime.

This with some running or other exercise leaves me at a desirable place without causing me too much pain.
Lets not get into a conversation about the state of software patents in this country, or the quality and breadth of Apple's patents.

But I think it seems a bit unreasonable to ban the sale of an entire device which is based on hundreds if not thousands of patents just because it MIGHT (keep in mind this case was not won but Apple, this was a preliminary injunction) infringe on one or two software patents.
Patent troll wins lawsuit against RIM
He isn't saying that losing water is a bad thing, he says that how you lose it could explain the measured increased levels of calories burned from this new study, even if his own evidence says that you don't lose more weight from a hig fat diet.

"There is not an advantage from the calorie balancing point": what he says is that there are no advantages from a weight loss point, as the calories balance IS what creates long-term weight loss (according to him).
I'm not sure but suspect not. The Olympic Committee are very, very hot on usage of the olympic logo and the word "Olympics"
It may just be my perverse nature, or some variant of Streisand Effect... but this just makes me want to buy one.

[disclosure: I'm long AAPL]
Nvidia and Intel join AMD to help the Department of Energy's computing project
force consumers to pay a fee just for owning non-Apple products.

People already pay a fee for owning non-Apple products. All the crashes, malware, borked phones, wireless never working quite right, external monitors never working quite right, and various circles of driver hell aren't free.
Very true.

While bringing lots of money home, I would add.
I was being imprecise. Sorry about that. I don't think that we will see totally autonomous cars _in_our_lifetime. "Never" is not a useful timescale.

You have to have a truly limited imagination to think we
will never get there.

40 years ago people did the same sorts of extrapolations on air-travel and figured that 15-20 years later all commercial air travel would be supersonic. And why wouldn't they? Orville Wright was still alive when the first supersonic flight took place. We went from not being able to fly heavier-than-air machines to breaking the sound barrier in 43 years. But of course, that didn't happen.

And in just the past few years we've gone backwards. There is currently no supersonic passenger jet in service.

A lot of domains appear to exhibit the same asymptotic behavior. Space travel, medicine, AI etc. Domains where initial speed causes undue optimism and where we later suffer regressions. (No regressions in medicine you say? Well, how about the crazy anti-vaccination people and the re-emergence of diseases that were practically eradicated?)

I build stuff, I program stuff, I occasionally build and race cars. I don't think my skepticism stems from _lack_ of imagination -- I think it has more to do with an abundance of imagination.

The argument about airplane maintenance also doesn't hold water. Result of a
malfunctioning plane: plunge 30,000ft and hundreds dead. Result of a
malfunctioning car: coast to a gentle stop. See any difference?

I'm sorry, but that is pure nonsense and many, many, many people pay the ultimate price to prove you wrong every day.
I didn't say that an investor deserves (which is a moral judgement) a profit, I said that she rightfully expects to make one - otherwise she simply wouldn't invest.
You get paid by the fruits of progress and enlightenment, for which to nurture your soul. Or alternatively in dollars, if that doesn't cut it. To be honest, it sounds like what a lot of people seem to eat anyway, I know loads of people who appear to exist solely on vitamin milkshakes.
* If market forces had been adequate, we would not have such laws today.*

The problem here is what you mean by "market forces".

For a market to be truly open, free and efficient, buyers and sellers must be able to enter into transactions without hindrance. There must not be an overhead associated with transactions, and buyers need relevant information. People rail on "free markets" when really they miss the point. Unless the market is also open and efficient, being free doesn't amount to much.

In the past, you'd call a telephone number in New York and reserve a hotel. You had no relevant information about your purchase -- yes, you probably assumed a lot, such as "hotels in New York are nice" but you really didn't know. The market was open -- anybody could play.

So you ended up in a flea trap in a high-crime neighborhood and the manager took all of your money. You complained, and New York took action (Note that I'm making a generous case for regulation here. You could make a case that most regulations were the result of trumped up charges by monopoly players) People had no idea of what they were getting into. There was a lot of money and perhaps lives wasted due to people making deals in which they were unaware of the consequences. The market was not efficient.

What New York was doing, in a way, was creating a brand as a way to increase efficiency at the expense of market freedom. So when people came to New York they would know generally how hotels would treat them. This increased the amount of knowledge the buyers had, so it made the market more open. (But less free)

But that is _somewhat_ an outdated model. Note in my story I specifically said I was able to compare or contact previous tennants, look at the property on a satellite map, check references, and so on. The internet has made the market vastly more efficient. I no longer make a blind phone call and then show up and see what I get. There's still risk, of course, but the risk is distributed throughout the system. One bad actor steals 2 or 3 people's payment, then that property is effectively blacklisted. In a way, the penalties on the sellers is much more harsh than it used to be under the old system.

So this isn't an argument about free markets or some kind of laissez-faire capitalism. What we're talking about is simply what's necessary for people to trade efficiently. For many things (but not all) we simply don't need the same kind of government guarantee that we used to.

The problem was never in "market forces". It was in creating efficient markets. We've made some progress on that problem since those rules were enacted. We don't have to tear down all the rules, but we should at least acknowledge changing conditions. I'd argue in this case existing rules exist much more to protect vested interests than anything else, but that's just me.
It's not a "truism" at all. For a start, companies are going bust taking these contracts[1] -- going bust generally being a good sign that they aren't making a profit. More importantly, the alternative is a state-owned security service (police, army, etc) who are likely to be inefficient, highly unionized with tons of overhanging pension payments. Is that cheaper? I don't know which is why I was saying in my original comment that these things can be studied.

[1] http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2012/july/special-adminis...
Yes! I have to have a client. Web interface is too much trouble when you have multiple accounts to monitor. I would pay a lot for a decent email client, where I could customize things to my liking. (IE: remove everything I don't need like; calendar, tasks, unnecessary screen real-estate)

Previously I have used Windows Live Mail (Yeah, I know..) because it's one of the most lightweight and minimalistic out there (that I have found). Thunderbird, Outlook and Postbox all have too much 'stuff'. (Postbox seems to look alright on OSX, but I have only tried it on Windows)

The ultimate email client in my view is a super-simple application like Metrotwit, just for email. ( www.metrotwit.com ) And Metro look doesn't hurt.

My 2 cents
This will no longer be a problem if all cars are self-driving. Then, they can just up the limit incrementally. Possibly even to something much faster than a human could do manually.
http://boingboing.net/2012/07/13/london-olympic-committee-sa...
Has anyone researched this and documented a correlation? I'm doubtful of your claims, and given your opening line, it's ironic that you go on to compare observations from your hobby against statements made by a doctor with 60 years of research behind him. His criticism is not unproven, there's no substantiation for that claim at all.

But you also make an interesting observation, if it has a basis in fact. It would seem to contradict the research of the Okinawan diet, which is almost exclusively plant-based, and 85% of calories are carb-derived.
Surely on that argument, the body of almost any animal that is bigger than us is actually a more complex piece of machinery. Blue whales are massive, for instance and are made of far more cells than we are.
His latest blog post (http://www.in-appstore.com/2012/07/please-read-personal-appe...) ends with:

"PS: Dear hackers, SourceCode will be available in couple of weeks."

Something to look forward to! :)
Supervising Women Workers
I should have been broader: I'm saying a simple narrative can't possibly tell the whole story of such complex chemical processes, whether it fits that particular snoclone or not, which includes "a calorie is a calorie". It's a leaky abstraction.
Which would have been a gender-neutral barrier had women contributed a similar share of work and dedication in the early days and thus achieved similar influence.
Also, writing requires a tremendous amount of effort. Effort I'd personally rather spend on creating my next project. When I get to a point that I feel writing would scratch an itch, I find that simply getting the thoughts out of my head and onto paper or into the computer is enough therapy for me to move on. Organizing that into coherent written English takes lots of effort I'd rather spend elsewhere; sharing it on the 'tubes then necessitates dealing with the things you mention.

In short, being technical (and pretty decent at it at least), public writing just Isn't My Thing.

That said, I find that spending a few moments organizing my thoughts into coherent English for commenting on HN encourages me in the direction of writing and could indeed possibly lead to be blogging. Eventually.
This is really easy to do and a fun experiment to learn MITM attacks. My boss was gloating he was the best at jetpack joyride and the whole office had a good laugh knowing that I could always beat his best score by a small amount the day after het set it. Apparently that put a downer on his christmas because he spent so much time trying to beat me.

It did cross my mind whilst watching the traffic if you could spoof in app purchases but never took it any further.
If you read the article you'll discover that developers are interested but few are actually writing apps or activley planning to write apps for it.

I think that is a fair summary.
Sylvester's Son Sage Stallone Dead - Post-Mortem Result Confirms Reason 
Today’s bad news is Sage Moonblood Stallone is no more. Hollywood’s action movie star Sylvester Stallone’s son (Actor and filmmaker Sage Stallone) was found dead on Friday afternoon by a housekeeper at his home on Mullholland Drive in the Studio City area of LA.
1. It's a finance app, not the internet. 2. I go to church on a regular basis, does that mean I can't visit the internet as well? 3. You seem very insensitive to people who are different from you. 4. I don't generally go around the internet whining about every little thing. But amishforkfight specifically asked who would be offended, and I said, me.
Ad-Supported Road Projects
Why aren’t city and state governments selling ad space along streets and highways to pay for road construction instead of using tax dollars? Why can’t we pay for some infrastructure with our attention rather than our money?

Maybe a better question is, are there any ad-supported road projects going on right now that save tax-payer dollars?
"Meritocracy" doesn't exist as long as human judgement is involved, and organizations that claim to be such actually encourage biased-based behavior: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/65884

The problem is not contribution, it is deletion and some of the strange "we don't care if it's actually right if more sources think it" policies. They make it frustrating for anyone who doesn't think like existing editors to contribute, as your hard work gets erased and ignored. Because these people believe they are operating in a meritocracy, the editors feel no pressure to acknowledge that other people may be interested in things they themselves are not.
Smart people keep having the same tired arguments for the nth time for the past 2500 years. That's just the result the result of those question being fundamental and difficult to answer objectively.

The piracy thing seems like a silly semantic issue on the face of it but the semantics strike at the heart of the issue.
> They risk losing on average a bit over half of the patents at issue

And the other half get significantly strengthened.
Which myth exactly?

Also, swapping memory in and out of the address space is a rather costly operation. And it becomes infeasible if the process's working set grows larger than the available address space [thrashing].
And you get a lot of attention for bashing something, which aggravates the problem.
Yes. There's a gender imbalance in tech but it's not as bad as 97%/3%. I thought it was a pretty unfair stereotype, if only because people reading the article will continue to think that Linux is very exclusionary toward women.
SpaceX are well-known for not using subcontractors to make their parts etc. They do almost everything in-house.

Does spaceX even outsource their security guards?
This article misses the most import reason (outside of Express/Outlook, which really is a reason): lack of checklist compliance.

Most corporate "infosec" policies require all kinds of oddities like difficult password format, running an anti-virus, software pushes, micro-managing browser proxy, encrypted disks, "personal firewall", on and on and on. Corporate infosec standards are written to compensate for Windows weaknesses, and so require a large number of tweaks to a base linux configuration.

While each of these things individually is possible, all of them together is difficult, and non-standard and causes problems by interacting poorly. Windows at least nominally has all the features demanded by corporate infosec policies. Some infosec policy drone can check off a checklist of features, and give the green light to Windows far easier than he/she/it/them can do the same for a Linux desktop.
I doubt we'd see a 100% reduction of accident injuries and fatalities with automated control of cars - diminishing returns due to other uncontrolled factors like pedestrians, dropped loads, pathological algorithm responses in unusual situations etc. Of course, spending 6x as much on road-safety campaigns as in the referenced studies won't deliver anything like a 6x improvement either.
Did everyone forget about bank switching and address extension tricks like PAE?
They were far from all contrived: many were taken from bottlenecks in real Python applications. Off-hand, at least the django, genshi, and html5lib benchmarks are very much real code, and none of the three benchmarks are optimized for PyPy in any way.
if only I'd read this article two - maybe five years ago ...
Spool in deadpool
"Dear Spooler,

We’re writing to inform you that Spool has shut down. Your bookmarks are attached to this email. If you’d like to import these bookmarks into your browser or another service, please visit http://blog.getspool.com/instructions/ .

Thank you for using Spool and providing feedback during our beta period. It’s been a pleasure to build Spool for you and we’ve been flattered with the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve received. However, after careful consideration, we’ve decided to pursue our vision in a new way. You’ll soon be able to read details on our blog at http://blog.getspool.com

Thank you again for your support,
The Spool Team"
I would attribute the mafia-style handling even more to Microsoft who basically formed a protection racket demanding fees from all Android manufacturers who want to build devices using a free and open source OS.
Facebook Fan Page & QR code
>The success of outreach programs prove your “Women just weren't interested enough to put CS in their application forms for college.” wrong.

Actually it reinforces my point.

If it took "outreach programs" to make them take interest doesn't it mean that they _weren't_ interested enough in CS in the first place?
There's also the problem that if your phone uses the hotspots internet connection, anything it connects to gets the ip address of the hotspot - and Google (and probably Apple, and quite likely several law enforcement agencies) can look up the geographic location of that ip address. I haven't looked to see how chatty my iPhone is when it gets a wifi internet connection, but I strongly suspect iMessage pings Apple with some unique identifier for my phone whenever it can. I'd be surprised if there wasn't some similar "phone home" process for an Android phone with an associated Google account as well. Google and Apple _probably_ won't roll over to a request from some curious local small-town cop, but I'd guess most three-letter-agencies can get pretty quick access to data about my phone if they ask the right way…
Why are any articles deleted, unless they are factually wrong? Censorship.
Who is to say what will be important in the future? Censorship.
Who is to say that people will want to read? Censorship.

There should not be any notion of importance. All knowledge is important. What I find important is as valid as what any one else values as important.

Frankly, and to my shame this is the first time I have given any thought to it, I am disgusted that something which, IMHO, is supposed to be an unbiased information repository actually deletes knowledge. To me, this is the most disturbing case of censorship I have ever thought about. Government censorship is expected, bad news, sure but expected. But this is supposed to be above that. How can they bleat on about SOPA etc, then allow a small number of geeks to tell me I can't see an article about some princesses dress? Wikipedia is NOT Geekpedia. And it should not be censoring knowledge.

Quite sad actually. My Wikipedia love bubble just burst. :(
Should have been called "How to loose customers and annoy employees". I swear I've worked at places where this was the standard operating procedure!
The DLR is slow, very slow, and services are fairly spaced out. I want automation for safety, speed and much higher capacity used on the infrastructure.

At least one Paris metro line (ligne 1?) has been automated, and it's faster and more frequent than most of the other lines there - at least that's my anecdotal experience from two weeks ago.
I remember, but sadly haven't bookmarked, a blog post by a guy who made a fair share of money building a decent music player for BlackBerry when all cool kids were building iPhone apps. Actual needs that will get people to pay money can be quite unhip.
RIM hit with $147.2 million verdict in wireless patent lawsuit
I suspect that taste has a lot to do with weight gain.

See for instance the Shangri La Diet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet