skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For many a sensible person, lawyers seem to be more a liability than an asset. Rightly so. Indeed they are more often than not rent-seekers, and the rent is sky high. That is, until you are faced with a serious problem.

Imagine you are falsely accused and facing charges that could land you in some maximum security prison, sitting on death row. Or, even worse, imagine you get caught downloading too many JSTOR articles in a university library. Then, lawyers don't seem like rent seekers. They are an asset, not a liability. And you need one. Or two. Or a whole team of them. You can't have too many. The more the merrier.

As with anything else in life, context is relevant.
Thanks. I've played with Flask a bit but haven't really gotten into anything too intense. That is a good idea to see if Flask can take care of me for an initial prototype/alpha level release. I guess I jumped straight to Django thinking I had a complex problem and needed a full-featured solution. I'll give Flask a second look.
> what I liked the most about the iphone, and the ipad, and the macbook, was how innovative it was. Everything was new. New concepts, new icon, new look and feel.. a whole refreshing new feeling.

I can't help but feel that you're misrepresenting the past. The iPhone has had the same look and feel, icons, and basic design since the very first version released 5 years ago. The iPad UI is very much a scaled up version of that very same look and feel. It seems odd to stop and complain now that the phone is an incremental upgrade.

The iPhone is always going to be a simple hardware upgrade; its entire design is based around making the software front and center.
Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia
Read their FAQ. They are also willing to sell patents, under a deal that indemnifies all current (but not future) members.

They already use this threat as a reason to sign up now instead of later.

The path from their current position to monetizing themselves off of patent trolls is very short. They have an incentive not to walk this path too obviously - right now they are acquiring patents at fire sale prices - but the temptation is always there.

Disclaimer I had a previous employer take out 3 patents in my name. Those patents have wound up in RPX's portfolio. I am not happy about this fact.
From the linked article: There’s a reason why, just as with all five of its predecessors, it just says “iPhone” on the back.

An awfully awkward sentence in a muddled closing, but in context he's not saying it's worth buying just because it says "iPhone". He's saying that they all have just said "iPhone" rather than additionally having the model number.
+1 to the person who publicly violates Apple's copyright to give us information.

-1 to the person who complains about it.
I would say SSD replacing disk drives has been the most jarring performance improvement. It's really a night-and-day, sudden difference. But yes, that's not a new feature, per se.
I hate how it shows all freaking forks. Say I wanted to look for a theme for a particular piece of software. I'd have to wade trough the countless forks of the software in question, occasionally actually seeing a theme listed. It's terribru.
The app is currently at #12 in the top travel apps in Canada, and has held near that spot for the last few weeks. It's interesting to see how few sales it takes to jump up that chart -- I imagine it takes a lot more in the U.S. store.
I'm looking forward to the slightly taller screen. It's always kind of bugged me how you couldnt see full album art + controls, and always felt a bit squished with the keyboard on-screen.

Not sure how it will feel in regards to the back buttons though that are used pretty extensively with something like the facebook app, that i use quite a lot.
[Critique wanted on Resume/CV] I want to apply for any programming-job.
.. But I have mostly games in my showcase.

I have never written a resume or CV before (I have never had to search for a job before) so I am not sure if what I've done is okay.

I started with a template but I think it looks alright.

I have the resume and CV (is that a CV?) together, the resume is on page one and by itself it looks like this: http://imgur.com/70LHo [1]

The rest of the pages is more details of the work, some pictures and info. There are also extra projects that are not on the resume.

The PDF can be seen here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6084360/%3Ar%3Aesume/Resume-CV-JonathanWingerLang%20copy.pdf[2]

Or a picture of every page can be seen here (uglier): http://i.imgur.com/rgXlh.jpg [3]

Now I will be looking for any kind of programming-work, but my PDF has got mostly games in it. Is that okay? What would a "normal" software company think if I hand in my CV and there is mostly games shown? Shall I remove the (or some) games when applying to such companies?

Shall I send the first page (the resume) by itself or is it okay to send the whole package, or both as different files.

Anything (or everything gulp) that I shall change in the document?
That said, I think I'm going to re-think the first sentence. Any tips? I appreciate the feedback.
With more or less 40% of congress consisting of lawyers* , they might be the cause as well as the symptom.

* http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/first-thing-we-...
Anecdotal evidence seems to suggests that most people don't click that "more..." button. Not much you can do about it, but with an app like yours he's probably right you could include what the app actually _does_ right at the top.
Flow is not the same as supply

Its like a synthetic variation, not a logically novel form of argument. The flow is cutoff when the supply is witheld. The supply is withheld when the flow is cutoff. Etc.
It's an interesting article, though the conclusion is somewhat underwhelming: according to the study, there are 40% more lawyers than the optimal number.

The article also points out some legitimate sources of imprecision in the data. GDP is a poor measure of the economy as a whole. Consider the classical example of the broken window fallacy. GDP goes up when people go around breaking windows! In a more real world context, consider the two huge coal plants that were recently shut down here (thanks to litigation) in Chicago. They were responsible for about $100m/year in health damage to the community, and each created only about 50-70 jobs. Shutting down the plants is clearly a net benefit for the economy, but GDP mis-measures this situation. GDP will go down after the shut-down, not only because of the lost jobs, but perversely because fewer people will seek medical treatment for respiratory illnesses!

There is a narrative about their being too much litigation in the economy, but I'm inclined to believe there is too little. I'm doing pro bono work for a village in Illinois that was heavily polluted by a subsidiary of a major oil company. Like, children playing and going to school in heavy-metal contaminated soil level of polluted. The village didn't sue until it was past the statute of limitations because it thought the government would take care of them. This story is replicated all over the US. It's great for GDP when a company pollutes and hurts peoples' health, because that damage to human and environmental capital is "off the books" for the purposes of the GDP calculation.
Gumroad's Sahil Lavingia: 'Be contagious and optimize for happiness'
There are lots of third-party transit routing possibilities (although many are not so great). Nonetheless, many people will use the defaults, and having to switch apps to do something which didn't use to require it is, of course, annoying. Basically, the phone sucking by default is not a particularly good business strategy.

My suspicion is that the Japanese resellers (au, SoftBank) will preinstall something better than Apple's map (maybe Google's rumored new mapping app). I've no idea how much freedom they have to do this under their contracts with Apple, though, or whether they could integrate such an app more deeply (e.g. cause it to be used as the system default mapping app).
This is really an issue for entrepreneurs. I see it happen a lot with female entrepreneurs too.
In response to feedback here, I've changed the first sentence to "The latest wait times at almost every U.S.-Canadian border crossing. Quick. Easy. Check it out for yourself."

I think it will do better with those who miss the "More..." button. Thoughts?
Very nice. I've been using Redmine, and it's working but I can't really recommend it. Would love to see this. Kicked in some dough.
Can we stop pretending that Bruner has anything interesting to say about Apple products? You know what he's going to say before you click the link. It's just self-congratulation for apple fans.

Now, I don't hate Apple, behaviour aside. They make great products. But Gruber has nothing new or interesting to say about them. It's just the same old, and is uninteresting. Anyone who feels the need to read what he thinks about Apple can just go to daringfireball; nobody's discovering any great insights here.
I'm tired of this. Can't people realize that they'll change, and what they love doing now might not be what they will love doing in the future? For example, when you're old, your hormone dies out, I guess you would wish you had spent less time chasing girls in order to start business sooner, learn to play guitar or something like that.

As I change, I will want different things than what I want now. So I don't care less what that old man in the future, with different priority, viewpoint, and most of all, the privilege of hindsight, thinks his younger self should have done. Just try my best and enjoy life as I feel it. Old man takes care of himself. I'll try not leave him bad health or broke, but I'm sure he'll have something to regret. So be it.
"More often than not?" The article says that there are 40% more lawyers than the optimal number. Thus taking the article at face value, at most 30% of lawyers are more of a liability than an asset. Under the model of the article, decreases the number of lawyers beyond that level would decrease GDP.
Perhaps this is where I get nervous, I put quite a bit in my hosts file for local development.

I'm a shortcut junkie though so I completely love the idea of a personalised DNS server that learns what I commonly resolve and allows me to make shortcuts.

Have you ran into any issues with it hosing your /etc/hosts file at all?
It's most likely for the consistency within apps that can rotate to landscape and still have a keyboard displayed.

Would you expect the app to then slide to the middle? Or stay aligned-left and make it harder for the right hand?
What Amazon's Decision Means for Digital Media
Have you had experience with his book? I'm looking to see if I should consider picking that up or The Lean Startup.
Divvy automatically splits up your check.
Companies that I have worked for have developed models (approximate) to remove accidental clicks to prevent charging the advertiser. Usually, these clicks are "absorbed" into a CPM though, and detecting accidental clicks is very difficult and requires many assumptions about user behavior.
> Actually Google's transit directions are horrible in Japan

This is absolutely not true.

Or rather, it wasn't true until about a week or two ago, when something suddenly seemed to go dreadfully wrong. My presumption is that this was a bug in a new release; we'll see.
People that work in "ad operations" usually do that work by performing A/B tests etc. To me, it is a very unglamorous step child to a data scientist.
That's an easy one to answer, especially around these parts. Come up with a business idea and take a shot at a startup company. Best case, you'll hit the jackpot. Worst case, it'll be a hell of a ride and you'll come out with a better idea of what you're doing.
Huh! I would pay $15 to get rid of ads in a hot second. I wish HuluPlus came with this option
Valve's first hardware beta starting by next year
Thirded. And I think is the year smartphones finally reached something like feature and quality parity with each other. Sensor sets are mostly universal, few cameras embarrass themselves anymore, battery life is all in the same ballpark, etc...

The market is in no way stalling out, but really, the next "obvious" hardware feature isn't so obvious anymore. Putting these in the hands of five billion people is what's next.
Carter, you are a bad ass for putting your code up on Hacker News.
Bring on the lawyers child.
CTF style test bed that highlights common flaws in cryptographic implementations
Warp drive may actually be possible, NASA scientist says
Lawyers are really bad at gaming the system in their own favor. Whereas the AMA tightly controls the number of accredited medical schools to keep supply low and salaries high, the legal profession sued itself (law schools sued the ABA) to remove accreditation restrictions that would limit the supply of lawyers.

I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but law is one of the few remaining ethical professions. If lawyers acted more like the rest of the business world (e.g. the financial sector, small businesses), in pursuing their own self-interest, lawyers would be a lot better-off.
The Startup Owner's manual is a very thorough book. It's meant to be used. Much more practical than Lean Startup in my opinion, though a tougher read.

The Lean Startup is a good high level overview of the underlying concept. I found it a bit overly focussed on launching "lean startups" within big companies. This may have been to boost consulting. Whatever the reason, it made the book less relevant to my experience.

But the Lean Startup is a quick, easy read, and you will get some actionable knowledge out of it if you're not already familiar with the ideas.

If you already know the concept, but want to put it into practice, go with Steve Blank's book.
Are you in the St. Johns Innovation Centre?
WiMax was 4G and HSPA is faster than WiMax, so it had to be marketed as 4G. Whether network load can cancel out a G is an interesting issue.
Same here in China. iPhone's are so commodity now, even migrant workers have them.
I think the biggest problem is that it's the pentagon's flagship program, and it suffers from bureaucratic bloat, military-industrial complex crony-ism, and typical pentagon big-project feature creep.

Should have been a skunk-works project kept under wraps until as late as possible, a la the F-16...and even that project didn't survive without a little bloat.

Like some others have said, drones are probably the equivalent rebel project that the F-16 was back in its day...
Nodejs docs in CLI
The Eye of the Needle
> I am not upset they're not keeping support for a phone from 2007.

Except that sales of the iPhone 3G seized... on June 4th, 2010. Of the iPod Touch 2G, with the same CPU, on September 1st, 2010.

This isn't about not keeping support, this is a bit more fundamental. This is about no longer being able to get things onto devices that were sold barely two years ago any longer. And possibly not even being able to compile things for those devices.

Two years. That's the lifespan Apple gives your devices. Two years and a few weeks and it's obsolete.

The iPad 1 was introduced on April 3rd, 2010. And that was the Wi-Fi version, in the US only. The last update for the OS it'll ever get was released on May 7th, 2012.

Two years, plus a few weeks, and it's obsolete.

Two years is how long Apple plans for your device to last before they want you to buy a new one.

----

In fact, if you bought a brand new iPod touch 2G from Apple, on September 1st, 2010, you got your last OS update on November 22nd 2010. That's less than three months. And people say that Android doesn't support its devices with updates...
Also skips 5 & 6. In a closing paragraph the author mentions the discussed levels were "some of my favourite levels".
Just a tip, if you are jailbroken you can install "Swipe selection". It allows you to swipe left and right on the keyboard to move the text-edit-bracket (?), much much much better.
Patent troll's about page -> http://www.personalweb.com/About.html
Wow you are a brilliant hacker. How did you get so goods?
This is not really a review - reads more like a lover on his last moments of love, desperately rationalizing things. Personally I think smartphones have almost commoditized. Apple has added ZERO product innovation this time in software or hardware. No - making a thinner, taller phone is not innovation.

To summarize the 'review'

0. Glass was the best material for the phone till last week. Now it's aluminium. Plastic sucks because it scuffs instead of breaking but feels cheap so I hate it. Why doesn't everyone else use an inferior material that Apple just stopped using?

1. The bigger screen sucks. But after using it for a week, the old screen is too small. 3.5" was perfect till now. 4" is perfect hereon. Anything bigger is only for stupid people who have and use two hands. And if they have two sizes, stupid people will always choose the bigger one - it's better that apple decides the right size for me.

2. The display is brighter and more saturated than the 4S. But not AS bright or saturated as the S3. It's just perfect, because its from Apple. Oh wait - the display is from LG. It's got a lower resolution than the S3? Crispness is what matters.

3. The Camera is good.

4. AT&T sucks. Verizon rocks. Oh you can't do data+voice simultaneously on Verizon. But who needs that?

5. Battery life is same as on 4S. Who needs more than that?

6. The benchmark score of the processor is the highest Apple has so far. The S3 beats the pants off the iPhone 5? That's not a phone is it?

7. iOS6? There's nothing to talk about. I mean they screwed up the Maps. They copied notifications last time so there's nothing left to copy.
Using that same argument, maybe Apple will create some sort of Bluetooth-based payment system.
The phrase "luxury status symbol" caught my attention. More often than people realize, the utility of luxury is independent of signaling status.

There are many well designed and built items which people would own and use even if no one sees them using or knows they own it. For me, Apple products fit into this category.
Wondering whether this is better or to go whole hog on 30x500. 30x500 seems to be much more likely to result in something - even though it costs 2500$.
If you're saying that it doesn't matter if you know whether you're calling a virtual function or whether a parameter is passed by value or by reference then we cannot agree on that. If you have reason to use C++ at all, these are not things you can simply ignore because they can affect performance rather dramatically.

What we can agree on is that knowing these things is just a small part of what affects performance and that performance can be rather unintuitive.
Some ideas that I shared on my blog post (http://blog.anujkumar.com/post/27913522655/please-steal-my-s...) :

1. Emosic : A music discovery service that lets you discover music/music videos according to emotion tags, artists, band, album, genre etc. It should let users organize music they like in easy to use playlists and share playlists/music with friends on facebook or other social networks.

2. Hangout : A web/mobile app to let users discover interesting places to visit, events to attend and fun activities to do together in their city with their friends, family and may be a prospective date. It should let users create hangout plans/wishes that their friends can discover and join. After all, real life happens offline and not on facebook.

3. TalentHunt : An online competition where upcoming artists can participate by submitting their music/videos on website. Audience votes on their videos for a specific period. Top N number of artists are invited for face-to-face audition/competition where judges decide the winner. This can be broadcasted live online or on any T.V. channel. Winner gets some cash prize or an opportunity to get his first album recorded.

4. CyberModels : An online service to connect small business/startups (that needs fresh faces for pics/videos on their site) with people who are interested in modeling for a small fees. It can be an alternative to stock photos.

5. Udacity for music : A site similar to udacity that offers quality courses on music like - Music Theory, Learn Piano, Learn Guitar, Vocals, etc. You can charge for the courses.

6. Music Marketplace : A one-stop music marketplace where anyone (artist or record labels) can legally sell music/video online. Also, it should have a good referral program and REST API.

and the one I need (not sure if it can be a startup but it can be a useful service) :

7. HN Knowledge Explorer : It should let me find best articles/posts/comments posted on HN for a particular topic and sort it by points, number of comments, date etc. For example topics like "Python", "Machine Learning", "SEO" etc. I don’t know if it is possible but it would be nice if it can also provide a way to sort these on basis of their google rank for given search term. Once it is done try adding more sources like Reddit, Google+ etc.
I'd bet lots of people won't realise that and won't make an attempt to learn that way of doing it. For them the problem will just just be a temporary, minor -- but frequently repeated -- inconvenience that they won't ever really pay much attention to.

I think it'd be far better to completely remove the opportunity for doing it wrong in the first place.

If you'll permit me to rant a bit here, why is it that IT people seem to so frequently respond to some non-optimum feature of software or hardware with a response that comes down to "but it's possible to work around it" as if that was the only legitimate option? Does this also happen in other fields?
In theory you're supposed to develop for the hypothetical iPad mini exactly as if it was an iPad 2.
I can't stand reading this guy's article. I've been an Android user for 3+ years. The functionality of the back button just comes natural to me at this point.

The back button has always moved from an inner screen of an app back to the main app screen. It's ALWAYS done that. If they were to "fix" it for people who can't figure that out, they'd piss of every day android users.

Scenario: Text message received, using a web browser currently. Bob says: "Hey did you remember to ask Joe about that thing?". What is your next move? You respond to Bob, and you hit _BACK_, scroll to Joe's thread, and ask Joe about that thing.

This is intended functionality. Translating that into a manual friendly context is not really that easy. The majority of people these days don't even read manuals. If you can't figure it out, then get an iOS device. I feel like the back button is pretty straight forward (irony).
I have bought the book and am reading along. I haven't really read enough to form an opinion.

One minor irritant so far - there are readings from two other books, which I'll probably buy, but not expect we're needed. The Lean Startup is one of them.
I've not. It seems to "just work". This with the caveat that I have about 10 things that I actually want to use it for (so far), so I'm not doing a tons of writes. My current mappings are:

m -> mail.google.com
m1,m2 -> mail.google.com/mail/1,2/ (1 or 2, not both)
cr -> github.com/sprintly/sprint.ly/pulls (cr = code review)
docs -> docs.google.com
c -> google.com/calendar

We had this system when I worked at Google (it was probably DNS as my hosts file wasn't altered) so I got really used to going to c/ when I wanted calendars. :)
Except for NYT Digital. They want us to pay with our money & eye balls.
I agreed with graeme that Steve Blank's book is a reference book that requires getting out of the building to validate ideas. I'm taking the lectures right now.
Do you use CBP.gov data?