skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing to know about Amazon is that they use PR to leak things.

I think there's an ethical problem in reporters not revealing that a "leak" is coming from a PR agency. "people familiar with the situation said" conveys a very different impression than "according to amazon PR off the record."

When I worked there, they released dozens of products a year. They would have teams work for 6 months to create a product for a press release and then the team would dissipate over the next 6 months, the "product" would simply get stale and eventually be cut.

Amazon movie times, local menus, catalog ordering, etc. Amazon is a hype machine, driven to keep their PE in the stratosphere. I understood this in the 1990s, I have not understood it since, but that's how they operate. They do have a solid business in Amazon.com (but notice how the international expansion stopped dead. Easy to do a big PR campaign about going worldwide, but then you don't have to follow thru).

All those kindle fire rumors before it was announced? They came from Amazon PR. This is how MG got his hands on one early... it wasn't some amazon employee that snuck it out of the building, it was an amazon PR Flack that handed it to him.

This is how they also say things like "The kindle fire is selling like crazy" to create that perception, without actually releasing any numbers. If they released numbers it would allow direct comparisons and be embarrassing. If they released fraudulent numbers it would be actionable in a shareholder lawsuit. But they can release whatever "Whispers" they want and create the perception that the kindle fire is selling like crazy... because Amazon PR said so.

I can't say it doesn't work though. These rumors come out, the stock price is goosed. They eventually release a phone, the stock price is goosed. By the time they give up on the phone, people will have generally forgotten about it anyway. Or it might be one of those few products that does make some money. (or that they figure is a sufficient PR generator to keep pouring money into-- if legions of people will call every leaked upcoming kindle fire an "iPad killer" then maybe the PR value is sufficient.)

Frankly, I think it is a form of fraud. They have way mislead people about amazon fire sales. Some people even think they sell as many fires as Apple sells iPads. But that's the kind of company they are.
My immediate response was "surely this is less than the cost of the electricity to run the CPUs" but it turns out it's equal to the marginal cost of heating a room with CPUs relative to conventional heating (natural gas or electricity) -- which is pretty genius.

In the long run you would expect this would drive up the bidding for idle CPU time, meaning that having a couple of idle computers in your house would generate you a small amount of positive revenue, in much the same way that contributing electricity back to the grid using solar cells could. Of course, most people have no use for solar cells (which are expensive), whereas a lot of us have use for local CPU.
If this were a replacement to the current backscatter scanners, this would be more interesting. Since it doesn't seem like this would catch knives or other non-chemical weapons, this seems like yet another step at the airport that won't provide very much additional security and could provide a lot of false positives, as already mentioned.
Are major version iOS updates done Over The Air, or do they require connecting to iTunes? Does AT&T give the bandwidth for free?

I suspect the real reason is that it is harder to reflash an OS from inside, and a higher risk of getting stuck in some bad state. Not impossible of course, just not as simple as reflashing from outside.
Submitters do occasionally badly editorialize titles so there is some need for editors to fix them, but of late there really has been an extremely overzealous HN editor or two at work.

Actually, at this point I'd agree - I'd rather have immutable submitter-editorialized titles than editors butchering half the submissions.
Early 2008 MBP is ok for ML. I guess I was a bit lucky there since I got 64-bit EFI in it.
I would bet coffee and doughnuts that it's less that Universal's lawyers believe that than that Universal's executives have ordered the legal team to use anything they can find, no matter how flimsy, to attempt to kneecap Grooveshark and other things that inconvenience the old-media cartel.
>Believing the outbreak affected only their underclass, the health officials made a conscious decision not to not tell the public

I love the part where homeless people aren't considered part of "the public".
Welcome to every Mac OS upgrade I've ever encountered.

Although, I can't place the blame entirely on Apple. I find that for any consolidated release OS, a reformat is ALWAYS the way to go (after waiting a good long time for all the bugs to be ironed out). Hopefully one day Apple will drive the cost of their software down so much that they'll just go to rolling release.
> ... or do you want to see a preview of Domains for Friends before logging in?

Remove that.. All it does is require you to login anyway. Redundant. Other than that, I can't really test it much as Facebook is blocked at my work, but I do like the idea behind it.
I don't see anything on this page that explains why you'd use this instead of say, IKVM.

Also, they claim their technology makes your app platform independent... How exactly? C# and Java are both compilable for basically every platform out there, so I don't see how a language translation would help. Do they map WinForms/WPF API calls to SWING or something?

What do they do about structs and pointers and generics?
Unnecessarily rude. I suggest you think twice before posting again, Daniel.
Ignoring the news for a second - am I the only one who thinks this dark grey on slightly lighter grey makes for a terrible color scheme for reading?
As of iOS5, updates are OTA, and I believe only a diff is downloaded.
Both you and the blog author are misunderstanding what targetting an API means. You can target 4.1 and still have your app run on 2.2 or lower. As others said, many of the new APIs have been backported to earlier versions. And targeting newer APIs have many additional benefits. As an Android Developer, you should always use the newest SDK and target the newest API. But still try to design for older versions.

Read:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/uses-sdk-...
The LIBOR Scandal Explained
> Wars focus only on how to make destruction

There are lots of side benefits to the things that aren't directly weapons (e.g. RADAR). I'm definitely not encouraging war, but I think it's a fallacy to imply that the only thing that come out of 'war research' is weapons. There are plenty of ways to make "destruction faster and more effective" without developing an actual weapon (e.g. making the supply chain more efficient, finding better fuels to power vehicles, etc).
Veracity 2.0 and onVeracity.com (beta)
Original title: "A Drupal Developer is Dying and Needs Your Help."

The new title reduces the information and context about the article by several orders of magnitude, which is a tragedy given the gravity of the situation.

To all who read this comment, please upvote the OP so that it stays on the front page longer and signals "must read" with its large number of upvotes.

This heavy-handed re-titling of HN posts has got to stop. If any incident can clearly demonstrate why, this is it.
Hackers may be interested in the story of Jaimie Heywood, who when his brother was diagnosed with ALS started his own garage-biotech company to try to find a cure. Sadly the brother died but the effort lives on and Jaimie went on to start PatientsLikeMe.com.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heywood_(chief_executive)
http://westcityfilms.com/smsf.html
Thanks for the feedback, the "preview" in this case is the Youtube video in the resulting popup. Which may be blocked at your work as well :(

I'll work on the language of that link a little to be clearer.
Note that the 28 days of 'time off' includes employee vacation and whichever public holidays the employer chooses to include. There are 8 public holidays in England and Wales, so the number of 'true' vacation days is usually closer to 20. In addition, the law says that the employer can decide when you take that time-off. For many blue- and white-collar jobs, that often includes about a week over Christmas and New Year where factories and offices literally shutdown, which may or may not gel with some people's personal choices.
Submitters do occasionally badly editorialize titles so there is some need for editors to fix them, but of late there really has been an extremely overzealous HN editor or two at work.

Yep, exactly. I don't have a problem with editors fixing titles that are full of gratuitous spin or editorializing. But lately it seems that they're all but enforcing a policy of "every link must have the original page title and nothing else" and that's just silly.
Yes, concept is good, but, with respect to the author, the themes are not appealing at all.
I would be really interested in what you think Lithuania's politicians did right and Greece's did wrong?

It would be very useful to see the diff
We need to do this differently: we need a very visible way to show the user of a particular phone how many unpatched security holes there are.

This should (hopefully) lead to demand for newer versions of Android to be released everywhere (or at least backported patches).
Google’s $22.5 million FTC penalty is not enough - Here's why
Of course they are. Homeless people were not informed either.
Yes, the fundamental problem is a weak state.

However, deregulating the industry made the problem far worse than it could have been. Our law enforcement is not entirely ineffectual, and a permit system would have provided more control than a free-for-all, by moderating supply. Buses remained more tighly controlled and I don't see bus warfare (there is an upward trend in accidents involving buses though I think that has more to do with poorly skilled drivers than profit-seeking).
This article is probably appropriate:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

And a quote from the same article:

>>Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET - All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That's probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it's just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can't, because this is how the game is played, Bubby.<<

Except that in this case the wounds are self inflicted.
60% Of Major Mobile Patent Suits Have Apple At The Core
I couldn't find this in the article: which court is the decision from? The bio of the judge[1] suggests that it's a superior-court-level decision. This is an annoying omission to me because with decisions like this, it's important to know what the appeals prospects are. The odds of a decision being overturned on appeal are relevant.

[1]: http://www.nycourts.gov/courts/comdiv/newyork_bio_Kapnick.sh...
What about Exec?
This looks like the same scenario as the car engines - mechanics adapted - those who didn't - perished. Same will happen here, if this works, rest of the industry will follow and everyone who tweaks has to adapt(invent new tools to fix) or perish. The industry would like it to perish so more $ in their pocket.
Because Wi-Fi kinda sucks at roaming?

It's fine if you need a network connection at arbitrary end-points. But IME it's not so fine when you need a sustained connection while moving. (excluding on-train/on-plane wifi and the like , natch)
This is exactly what my point was about. Perhaps I didn't express myself properly.
Reading for entertainment is great! But if you're working in the startup world and your fun reading is all about startups, you should probably broaden your horizons a bit, if only to avoid becoming a bottomlessly tedious person. Go read some fiction, or some non-fiction in a field that has nothing to do with your work.
I think it's your browser trying to resize elements of the page to fit on the screen. Firefox for mobile and IE on my Windows phone are both pretty inconsistent about sizes of text on HN pages.
Site is slow ? Remove loops !
Verge Favorites: Joshua Topolsky
I've heard of several cases of programmers getting ALS. This seemed statistically unlikely, since the ALS site stated that only 5 in 100,000 acquired the disease.

Then, I googled "programmers ALS" and found this study:
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/162/12/1146.abstract

It suggests that programmers do have higher risks. (Still, keep in mind that the study is small, and even if there are increased risks, the odds are still low.)
Macros for HTML---good or bad?
I've been looking at both less.js and more.js with the idea of adding constants/definitions to my CSS code. While doing so it occured to me that, that wasn't what I actually needed. What I need is to be able to give arbitrary Unicode meaningful names no matter where I use them. As a for instance, &#9812; is the hex version of 'Black Chess King'. Clearly the official 'name' isn't particularly easy to use, but it is quite descriptive. What I'd prefer, is something more along the lines of &mdash;, say &bking; but at a guess the W3C folk play bridge (hence &club;, &spade; etc.) and not chess. This suggests to me that a macro processor would be a solution. Having said that, I'm also aware of how such things are abused (see: 'C' and 'C++') and wonder what those who actually code in HTML or adjunct material would feel about such a thing?
I don't understand how Grooveshark can be compliant and/or considered "acceptable" when companies like Youtube actively work to prevent restricted music from being uploaded and yet anyone can upload Rihanna's latest album to Grooveshark and they do nothing about it. How can that be considered reasonable?

They're not even reasonable about uploading; I login to Grooveshark and go to "My Music" and click "Upload" and it asks me to upload my library, nowhere does it mention "oh btw if you don't own the rights don't do it", that's hidden on the terms of service page. The language used on the upload page is I'm sure well crafted so that they don't fall foul of the law but don't dissuade users from uploading: "...and only upload content that does not infringe upon the rights of others.". Why isn't that "Do not upload content that you are not licensed to distribute"?

I must be missing something.

Edit: to clarify for anyone that doesn't understand how Grooveshark works. They encourage users to upload their own music collection and do not at any point explain to the user that the music they're uploading is available to everyone or that what they're doing is illegal. Yes they're DMCA compliant but only at the very minimum required; if they wanted to be respectful towards labels/artists they could quite easily prevent people from uploading unlicensed material.
Us centric nonsense.

Sent via mobile internet on a bus.
Have you taken a look at the code? It's disgusting, seriously.
This guy needs our charity, not our political opinions.
Yeah I remember hanging out on my Xoom with an iPhone wielding friend to watch football together last year while we were in different states. Didn't realize the functionality had been dropped - good reason to not update if that was the case, Hangouts are Google+'s most compelling feature IMO.
Ah, I see, yeah Youtube is blocked also so all I seen was the "sign into facebook to get started"

Hopefully when I get home after work I can better test it.
The US healthcare system is broken but that doesn't mean that other countries' systems can be transplanted here.
A bonus tip: do not merge arrays if you're not absolutely positively sure they are truly associative. Consider:

array_merge(array(CONST_1 => 'val1'), array(CONST_2 => 'val2'));

You'd expect the result to be

array(CONST_1 => 'val1', CONST_2 => 'val2')

And you'd be wrong most of the time. If we have something like this:

define('CONST_1', '1024');
define('CONST_2', '65536');

The result of the above array_merge is:

array(0 => 'val1', 1 => 'val2');

And that's because PHP doesn't care about the keys if they are numerical (note that I didn't say numbers; these were strings.)

Coming from PHP background first I didn't understand why I would need separate types for lists and dicts in Python. Now I think they are a godsend.

If I had the time I'd write 999 Things You Should Check in Your PHP Right Now. If this is the only language in your belt, please for your software's sake learn something else, widen your perspective.
I agree with Mindstab.
"Amateur" or "Semi-pro" or whatever console gaming breaking-ground kickstarter campaign ( 3M$ after 2 days ) with some great game designers ( Brian Fargo being one of the most eminent ) appearing to follow a "post-iphone" gaming trend sounds very very not cheerleading to me.
Lots of great game-development teams ( most of which being indie ) have joined iOS game development trend because it's a great platform but also because it seems to be a huge and very potential trend/market. I think that the WHOLE scene is looking forward to see the success of this platform. It could mean a huge game trending for Android. And it could also just mean that "amateur"-hour is powerful.
I just hope they'll deliver. ( They say that their proto is "up-and-running", which is a very good sign ). But with 28 more days to go, and already 3M$ of cash, I think that they can easily ramp up to 5-10M$, which is "not too much" to create a game industry, but it's a lot to start. ( + I believe that kickstarter brings a LOT of marketing value to the project, meaning that they'll need less cash on Marketing to promote the gaming console, it's already famous, and the viral effect will surely make it boom even bigger )
Seconded and thirded. The linked article makes a few mistakes that would be avoided if the author paid some attention to the Android guide. Which is extremely common for third party tutorials. The Android guide is great and is often updated. There's ton great resources like videos and tutorials. It's by a huge margin the best place to learn android.

I would advise anyone beginning Android development to avoid third party tutorials as much as you can. Only use those if you cannot find a specific topic you need in the Android guide.
As a controls and human-factors engineer, I think the subject is highly relevant and very interesting.

There is a large and distinct difference in the flight control mechanism of these two airplanes. It's been discussed over and over, and the transcript of the voice recorder and control logs show there there was a distinct discrepancy happening in the cockpit while the plane was going down:

"As the plane approaches 10,000 feet, Robert tries to take back the controls, and pushes forward on the stick, but the plane is in "dual input" mode, and so the system averages his inputs with those of Bonin, who continues to pull back. The nose remains high." [1]

So, being in aerospace, is this subject annoying or something that is normally not discussed?

[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...
Dark grey on slighty lighter grey? Try light grey on slightly lighter grey.

The Readability (http://www.readability.com) bookmarklet comes in handy.
My favorite trick in this ever is step 2 of Seomoz's cancellation flow.

Step 1 (after clicking Cancel My Account): "We often find that people cancel for one of the following three reasons. Here's our most persuasive microcopy possible on why that wouldn't be a good idea, two sentences each, with links to longer explanations. [Wow, That's Awesome] [No Thanks, Cancel My Account]

Step 2 (the genius bit): "OK, your account is canceled. Your service will remain active until $DATE. We will happily extend this to $DATE + 7 days and then cancel your account with absolutely no funny business if you take this brief exit survey."
Show HN: MercuryPuzzle - Explore your skills
That webpage is part-information, part-marketing. It conveys the message that the company wants to tell. EPEAT's criteria come from published IEEE standards, last updated in 2009.

Other vendors with similar form-factors seem to be able to meet the EPEAT criteria. The new "Ultrabooks", which are similar form-factor wise to Apple products, seem to be capable of meeting EPEAT Silver criteria.

What is Apple's commitment? Right now they may meet EPEAT Gold standards. Will they next month?

I suppose that I could hire people to figure this out, but why should I? There are plenty of competitors with quality products.

Why couldn't Apple have proposed updates to EPEAT, if it's so hopelessly out of date? A: They hold the institutional/corporate customer in contempt.
More info on ALS:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001708/

If I ever get something like this, or anything that eventually "locks-me-in", or something that destroys my mental faculties, I'm going to kill myself before the worst of it happens, around the time when I'm still able to do so. It's the only decent thing to do for yourself and the others around you.

Your opinion might be different.
Australian Thought Police Target Free Speech
You're just describing successful PR, and also describing company performance that you're not happy about. The relation between those two things is not always strong. But as long as it's not actual fraud, figuring out how to get people with an audience to write about your product/company is just what PR is about.
In another balance, I take guard when people say "I'm doing Node, and machine learning, and this, and that."

The reason is there seems to be a large number of programmers who "want to be good programmers" that do this. All that it really results in is a shallow understanding in many things with an accompanying attitude that they're smart, well cultured, or have seen a lot of things.

Dabbling in many different things is killing your learning curve because of all the context switching and you don't ever get awesome at any one thing. Putting those technologies or frameworks on your resume and blog like Foursquare badges doesn't mean anything. What have you done? Then and only then do I care about what you know.
Last paragraph... hammer, meet nail.
The conclusion seems like a bit of a leap, considering how many people were willing to upgrade using iTunes for previous iOS releases. People can handle downloading software to get an OS upgrade. Also, once you get the update process started, it's not like the random screens you've never seen before are going to deter you.

My main issue is I have yet to get the OSX version of Kies to work on my MBP running Snow Leopard (not sure the OS matters, but maybe it does). When I open Kies, it tells me there's an update to the software (and I agree with the article here - wtf Samsung? Put the new version on the site). Now this update will download, then ask me for my password, but after that it just hangs. It takes up 100% of the CPU and does nothing. Canceling causes Kies to restart, but no indication that the update actually took place. Then plugging my phone in it says my phone cannot be upgraded. Now I'm stuck waiting until I have access to a Windows machine to try my luck there.

If AT&T doesn't want to give mobile bandwidth away for OS updates, they should have Samsung change AT&T branded devices to only allow OTA on WiFi.
I'd love to see some statistics from Apple regarding Wi-Fi only iPad sales versus 3G/4G iPad sales.