skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our legal system has no room for ethics. If the rules of the game make it profitable to be evil, companies will probably be evil. They might not be, but it'll be an uphill battle. If we redesign the rules so that being evil is not profitable, that will make it a whole lot easier on everyone.

Of course, actually doing so won't be easy, because the status quo benefits most influential players...
In my crusade of boycotting apple production I switched from OS X to ubuntu. And you know what, despite high disregard from HN auditory, I've found Unity to be surprisingly good. For example, unity dock still worse than os x dock, but it's good enough. Single menu for all apps is familiar from os x, although I hit it when attempting to move windows more often than I want to. Application switcher can be navigated with arrows by default, which is good, although I would also like it to be navigatable via mouse too. 'Spotlight-like' menu named Dash Home takes way too much screen estate, but again, it's at least usable. Hotkeys are terrible, though, and first thing I did was disable alt and super keys calling dock/dash-home.

Overall, I like Unity way more than current Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE. Your mileage may vary.

I think, the real linux desktop problems are when something goes wrong. Sometimes updates are unsafe. Sometimes you find a bug in a software. I had 10 or 20 crashes and error report windows in my first day. Commercial software is terrible too. Skype is buggy, crashes often and is just bad. Nvidia binary drivers suck and nouveau crashes on my card (560ti). Twinview can only VSync one screen. Your other screen is doomed to lag on renders. Xinerama has a bug with cursor randomly jumping over to another screen. Whenever something bad happens you resort to google and waste 10 minutes+ for fixing it.

I also think that applications not being made for linux is not a very big deal. 80% use case includes browser, music player and office package. All of which are included by default in most distributions.
"Slide to unlock" has been thrown out in the UK

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/05/slide-to-unlo...

"Data detectors" looks completely ridiculous to everyone who has programmed for more than a year. I would be shocked if this stands, although I have heard that HTC modified their skin because of it.

"Unified search" is the classic "X + on a phone" patent, where X is something that has been done for decades. I hope this is challenged and closely examined. I would not be surprised if there is prior art even for phones.

"Word completion" is very obvious too, they have included details of their implementation in the claims so it will be easy to workaround.

But why would Apple sue over these patents? The best they can get are slight modifications to the software, which will not alter the experience or the look and feel much. Meanwhile they are losing goodwill and making people aware that there are better alternatives out there. All this because the former CEO felt slighted? As a stockholder I would be a little mad.
Because your password database is a liability.

Arguably it's a greater liability for a business to be dependent on a third party for a connection with their users. It means they lose important user data like email (they have to ask for it usually), they're tied to that provider, and their website breaks for those users if that third party service goes down or is unreliable.

If you store your passwords securely you can't leak them, only a hash, but I agree it's a pain for users to manage multiple passwords/identities and can lead to too much password sharing.

Persona looks far more interesting than social login as it addresses the issue with who owns controls user data/logins and does not have a single point of failure, plus it provides the email.
Agreed. I think the answer is simple and everyone knows it -- NO SOFTWARE PATENTS -- but getting everyone to agree to it will be tough.
I think their patent wars are currently about phones, not tablets.
I've used 4S and S2 in parallel for 8 months now.

Though I personally prefer Android OS, I must admit that build quality is now strongly coming as a win for Apple.

S2 is now a little flimsy, 4S is as new.
In particular the note is pretty innovative (in the apple sense) in it's own right.
Mobile Coupons
How do people (who basically agree with this article) evaluate the rationality movement?

My limited experiences reading mostly lesswrong.com lead me to think they avoid many of these problems. I have no idea whether they actively try to counter institutional sexism, Islamophobia, neoliberalism, etc; but at least I've seen little-to-nothing so far which actively reinforces these problems either. (But I'm not deeply acquainted with them.) Strikes me as a very healthy alternative to these skepticists in the article. Focusses a lot on introspection and effective action, rather than attacking others.
Quotes from Steve Ballmer
Christianity has a long and strong track record of intolerance, but I don't think it can be disputed that Islam does much more damage today. One out of three (!) British Muslims aged 16 to 24 believe that Muslim apostates should be executed [1]. In many Islamic countries, "crimes" like apostasy, adultery, or homosexuality are punishable by stoning or death, and such punishment is state sanctioned. This level of intolerance was commonplace in Christianity in the past, but it is virtually unheard of in predominantly Christian countries today.

[1] http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Islam_and_Apostasy#Helpful_Hints_f...
This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic

Without more information, I don't think this is true. It is true if the transition function between states depends on a finite number of previous ones (WLOG if s_n is a function of only s_{n-1}), but I think that it isn't if the transition depends on an infinite number.

(Though, in this case, clearly there is no history, so what you say is true.)
>> Would you believe that he's a well-known programmer

I don't believe I see intelligent people, like you, use someone's programming credentials as support for an ideologically motivated axe job in a non-programming subject. :-(

There is an old Swedish saw, badly translated as "where liquor go in, sense go out". Just do s/liquor/ideology/
Burying the lede is applicable to journalism, this is an essay. It is not a news report about some singular pertinent factoid that can somehow be buried. And if you want to count yourself as a reader whose time has been wasted, then spend time reading the thing, so that your complaint can then make some kind of sense.
The 4S does feel a little more solid than the S3 too, but I'm happy not to have the extra weight in my pocket.

I've also seen a lot of iPhones with big cracks in the glass in the back and I'm happy I can just swap out the plastic back of the S3 with a cheap replacement if necessary.
Why on earth am I seeing this nonsense on Hacker News? Is there a shortage of new languages or something. ;-)
On intelligence being a shorthand, I would add that some people define it as having an extremely good memory.

There are many people with an extreme capacity for memorizing facts and images. It is said that one of our national poets, Eminescu, wasn't able to forget anything.

By this classification, many people are and were smarter than Einstein, who apparently couldn't remember his son's or wife's birthday, or know how many feet are in a mile (although this may be just folklore). Einstein also started to speak a lot later than normal kids, at 3 years old by his own testimony and performed badly in his first years of elementary school, with his parents being warned that he had a mental disability.

And yet he was able to come up with the relativity theory, which goes to show that intelligence is indeed relative.
I am not especially enamored of variable interpolation, but for those that are, Perl 6 does a much cleaner job than Perl 5 imo.
What do you mean by "indie"? Creative Commons and other free music? Did you include the big free sites' catalogs?

It would be great if it work without Flash but I understand that this would be a major change.
I agree with everything except for the past tense "failed". I would use the (pause while I look this up) present perfect. Linux has failed on the desktop so far, but with influence from Android platforms and the availability of cross-platform dev tools like Java, Qt, Tk, and crap-in-browsers, it may yet succeed. I work on a desktop application for Windows and OSX and at least 80% of my development I can do on my Linux machine.

EDIT: meant to stick this in - really to capture the desktop market, Linux only needs to emulate or simulate WinXP functionality. For most users, Win7 only adds gimcrackery.
"Feminists have remained virtually silent on this matter for the past decade or two."

No they didn't. It's a common subject in blogs, forums and such less-visible mediums. But if you think it's easy to get into the media with that, you're wrong -- you will be called out on racism, possibly with good reasons -- even I, if faced with a mainstream article that focuses on FGM, would grow suspicious, since when the media cares about women this much?
It's hard to imagine Samsung winning a jury trial in California against Apple. Trying patents before a local jury should be against WTO rules. It's a form of protectionism in my view.
I don't usually think of it as "Fuck this guy", but rather, "I can help this company." There's a lot implicit in that statement - that I want to help this company, that this company can be helped, etc. But fundamentally, it's that I am offering more to my employer than they are offering to me. If they choose not to take me, that is their loss.

Actually, that seems to be a good mentality to build confidence in general. I've heard (I haven't managed it yet) that the secret to getting girls is to think of offering them the chance to be with you - you aren't trying to "get" the girl, but rather offering your companionship and emotional investment to a suitable girl who's willing to take it. The secret to networking is to offer favors to people in need of them. The secret to negotiation is to offer something of value to the other side and ask for something that they value less in return.
Yes, and include screenshots & explanation of the practice engine.

Also, the practice engine is cool but feels incomplete. There are random lines between body parts - I'm sure they are there for a reason, but I don't know what that reason is.
Fair enough. I was just pointing out your use of the word ["sciences"] to describe the same thing as the author's "non-scientific knowledge". Whatever form this knowledge is supposed to take, "science" as a term for it is explicitly rejected.

On a more substantive point:
You acknowledge the difficulties faced by "soft sciences". Does that mean you accept that there are whole categories of real-world phenomena of which it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to systematise whatever "knowledge" we do have? I don't think that position is incompatible with respect for science.
The important point is that Apple should be able to patent slide to unlock - it's preposterous. In fact, noone should be able to paint such trivialities.
No, you're the one that's wrong. Einstein did poorly in elementary school, being classified as mentally retarded. He indeed fast-tracked to gymnasium and university after one of his teachers observed his talent at math.

This doesn't mean he was stupid. Go and read "The Einstein Syndrome" [1], it's a fascinating read.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Einstein-Syndrome-Bright-Children/...
Thankyou! This is about the consumers - we mustn't lose sight of that.
It may not be broad but it's trivial and obvious. It's like dismissing a dialog box by pressing the enter key.
It's surprising that apparently almost no laptop thief takes the time to wipe the laptops.

That's the first thing I would do if I were in a business like that.
If your startup can't handle the outgoing traffic from your testimonials, it reflects a tremendous degree of insecurity.

What's more troubling is that you assert that startups - in general - can't handle that outgoing traffic.
If their lawyers learned their lesson and in future will screen the jury for those with an agenda and don't give a damn about prior art, I believe they'll do better.
If that were the case then they SHOULDN'T be doing this... they're just inciting further reaction. Mutally Assured Destruction (MAD) is quite literal, in this case.
As excited as I am about this finally happening, I was so pissed about having to deal with this issue over and over (e.g. JS files describing WebGL models), that I was on the verge of starting a service to provide the layer of redirection with CORS support, ala what Heroku does for EC2. I was actually getting a bit psyched for it, because I was convinced Amazon didn't care about ever implementing this.

At least now I won't launch something only to have Amazon eat my lunch when they finally came around to providing this much-needed feature.
This must have been difficult to work out. My thanks (or condolences?) to Amazon for this. It will make my life a bit easier!
Looks like a lot like this - http://www.google.com/patents?id=6BsWAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...
Let me gladly say "thank goodness for Apple - they force everyone to lift their game". Look at Apple's warranty - it's very good (eg. a "new for old" device swap for AU $180 when the device is out of warranty - even if you destroyed it yourself).

Do not heap too much praise on Samsung - they have a very chequered history.

Do not let Apple's reprehensible behaviour in this instance undermine the value that Apple has added in other ways. I would still consider buying an iPhone - and I recognise Apple for their unique talent in high polish of a product.

I just want fair competition - I'd love Apple to think and act the same way.
> What you are referring to, is closer to the "Potential for Potential" - I don't know if there is any way, or anyone who measures something like that.

Your parent poster is definitely referring to this concept. (S)he is referring to that concept explicitly because it is so ill-definable and unmeasurable.
The problem is that people who are uncritically accepting stuff they have no actual proof for, yet who see themselves as skeptics, are able to convince themselves that they are merely engaged in rational thought when they are not.

As an example I offer http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine/... by Sam Harris. Absolutely none of his moral claims make any sense without first accepting parts of his moral view that he fails to even question. In fact he uses an unquantified quantity called "well being" as justification for his theory. Yet the only scientifically supported definition for well being for living things is "evolutionarily successful". And by that measure, being religious and scientifically ignorant is very good for you!

Yet his reasoning is utterly compelling to himself, Richard Dawkins, and many other "skeptics".
Japan generates nearly 3x the revenue per download of the US
How much slower is an encrypted partition? (SSD) - Anyone have benchmarks?
Not finishing what you're served in Japan is, approximately, the same comment as a $0 tip is in America, except about food quality rather than service. Culturally, the act of not eating something prepared for you reads like "Your food is inedible and unfit for human consumption" rather than "I wasn't that hungry" or "This particular dish, well, I wasn't quite feeling it." This will generally not endear you to fancy chefs, although you might get a bit of leeway if you look obviously foreign.

(Japanese people get in trouble on the tip thing all the time in the US, so much so that my travel agent helpfully tried to instruct me on "peculiar customs of Americans" when selling me a ticket to my hometown.)
Well, there are a few different ways this can go for you. (Quick background: my first tech job was in the I.T. department for my school district, before I was 18. So, I've been in your position.)

You're essentially going to be entering into a negotiation with them. They are clearly interested in your talents, but might try to convince you that you're too young, so you have to do your best to improve your position. One of the first things you have to do is be straightforward about your age: "I'm 17 and still in high school, but..." You want to come across as mature as possible.

Even better is to reverse that a little bit. Companies love enthusiastic people. (Well, smart companies do, anyway.) They love to have people that want to be there. Those people can bring a lot of new life into a business. And, best of all (for the company), they tend to be cheap. So, how about: "I'm familiar with your company, it would be my dream job to work there, but I'm 17 and still in high school."

Describe your previous work even if you can't provide references. Try really really hard to come up with some kind of references, though. There's nothing wrong with very briefly telling a bit about yourself; at what age did you start doing this kind of work, how much time do you spend on it?

At this point it'll proceed from one of two scenarios: they'll say yes (but maybe with some restrictions, like, "contact us after you graduate"), or they'll say no. If they say no, what you have to do next is immediately offer a counter-proposal: ask about an internship, offer to contact them again as soon as you've graduated, offer to discuss it on the phone. The goal of your counter-proposal should be to leave an opening for them that they will like.

If all else fails with the recruiter, send a brief email back to the engineer. Thank him for contacting the recruiter on your behalf, and tell him that you'd love to work there one day but you're 17 and still in high school. (Don't ask for his help; you're sending him a thank you note. You're just also letting him know how it went with the recruiter, but only in one sentence.)

That engineer might see an opportunity within the company for you that the recruiter doesn't.

Even after all this, it still might not work out for you. The usual adage is that if the company doesn't see how valuable you are, or doesn't want to try to make something work with you, then it's probably not the right place for you anyway. From the sounds of things, you've got lots of talent and you'll have no trouble working at some great places later on, so don't let it get you down.
I logged in to write essentially the same thing. Google+ has a lot of features to solve multi-class problems.
An interesting thing would be web-based tools that Google could develop and release for different circles such that people could administer and run those circles on different parameters. I guess, the Google+ platform could enable apps that would do this. For e.g., creating a Lore-like app, that would allow you to create a blackboard for your circle, and a family-center app for your family, and such.
Sounds interesting. Very clever thinking.

Just hope it doesn't get turned on its head for some yet-another layer of DRM that stops us from accessing our own content.

I guess (or hope) that seeding the key into the CPU in the first place is what's going to make it hard for content owners to use for DRM?
How do you screen a Californian jury for people who may have a bias in favor of a Californian company?
If the back plastic is anything like the S2 back you'll never need to swap it at all. That thing is surprisingly strong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etsxu0OMqUQ
> On intelligence being a shorthand, I would add that some people define it as having an extremely good memory.

That's the old popular definition of intelligence, the "walking encyclopedia" model. But books, and more recently computers, have greatly reduced the value of that kind of intelligence, by being better at it than any person.

Now that we have more facts at our fingertips than we can possibly absorb, a different kind of intelligence is (a) more valuable, and (b) more likely to arise from the interaction between a human and an inexhaustible source of facts (like a computer) -- the ability to synthesize new ideas out of old ones.

In olden times, simply being able to recite facts was prized, but books and computers can now do that more efficiently -- consider that a computer recently prevailed in "Jeopardy" against a selection of very good human contestants.

The new indicator of intelligence is the ability to come to an original conclusion based on a mass of accumulated facts. Because fact collecting is more easily done by a computer, and because of the value of the ability to create new ideas out of old ones, this new meaning for intelligence may well become dominant by way of natural selection.

Here's an example I heard recently while reading about planetary science:

1. Jupiter's moon Io has volcanoes, but it's too small for those volcanoes to have the same cause as those here (Io has long since lost the heat arising from its original formation). This means that many people were able to describe Io's volcanoes, but no one could explain them.

2. Io also has an elliptical orbit around Jupiter -- which means it moves closer to, then farther from, Jupiter, during each orbit.

Someone put facts (1) and (2) together and realized that it was Io's elliptical orbit, and the consequent huge flexure of tidal force within Io's solid mass, that's heating the moon and providing the energy source for the volcanoes.

It is this kind of intelligence that is recognized -- prized -- in the present and future: the ability to synthesize.
Well, keep in mind that the people you already shared the post with can always save it locally.
Maybe it wasn't so "trivial" when they patented it.
I've used the Oxford comma since high school when my favorite English teacher introduced me to them. At the time I didn't know they had a name. I found out they were called Oxford commas about five days ago when watching an episode of Boss on Starz. Since looking it up then I suddenly come across the term a lot now which is weird because I had never heard that term before.
HypeM.com actually has a fixed set of blogs that it gets music from. I mean, I guess you could say it crawls those posts on those blogs, but it just doesnt crawl 'the web' per say. From my knowledge, HypeM has a relationship with the blogs it takes music from, in order to keep it's quality up.
SQL Antipatterns strike back
Alright, I'm confused. I visited the arcade site on my Android device and it said Adobe Flash was required. Am I to understand their platform takes JS and compiles it into a Flash package?
I've seen 3GS practically shatter from a drop of 3ft. I've seen S2 flying all across the room on the concrete floor and not a scratch.

I'm not trying to draw statistics here, it's just my experience that iPhones are more resistant to wear and tear, and Samsungs more resistant to somewhat more extreme shocks.
im going to catch shit for choosing www over no-www, but if you want to make it so everybody is funneled to ONE domain (ie. www.mixest.com) put this in your htaccess and your problem will be solved.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mixest.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mixest.com/$1 [R=301,L]

... just without the double spacing. HN was turning it into one line if I didn't double space.
We already have plenty of photos of houses from above. Surveilance is still hard because these things are noisy and don't have a long linger time. The tacocopter is a real use case; I'd pay for it, particularly if it can deliver to my second-floor balcony rather than having to go down to the door.