skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is there interest in a commercial recurrence rule server?
As a biproduct of the startup I'm working on I wrote a recurrence relation server. It takes in a JSON object representing a recurrence relation[1] and a JSON object representing an HTTP request to make. It then makes the request at each instance of the relation. Recurrence rules allow for very complicated time periods (e.g. The second last day of even months, but not any Tuesdays) and frequencies between seconds and months. It can also be used more simply just to create timed HTTP callbacks.

I'm looking into things which could provide a small revenue stream while the main product is ramping up, and I'm wondering if this is something useful enough that you would pay for it.

[1] http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/ical/rrule.html
Gotta say, that font-color is absolutely terrible. Light on light, really difficult to read.
I'd love to someday see the return of the 17" MBP, in Retina form. There would be no compromise in screen real estate in the hiDPI mode, and the full-native hack would provide mind-boggling space.

The 17" sold poorly, but was it because of the size or the weight? If it was the weight, maybe there's a chance.
I'd agree with underdesign. I've long-emphasized the point that if you're working in interaction design or web development as a designer, you need to know these mediums in-and-out in order to not only be effective, but at this point in the game, hirable. When someone says they're a web designer, but they don't write any code or understand the gamut of possibilities, their designs are going to be lackluster, the workload handed off to the devs will be greater, and the end-result will likely be discernibly less stellar than if you were doing it yourself. Not to mention it's fun and far faster to iterate on if you get your workflow right (LiveReload, CSS pre-processor, etc).

There will always be a place for static designers in print, but the resources available to developers to make their sites look "good enough" for them (see the Bootstrap Effect or all of these free asset sites) means you're going to need to get your hands dirty to stay relevant to companies and freelance devs alike if you prefer to design for digital mediums.
I can buy that voter fraud is pretty limited. But it's simply untrue that there's not a single example.

People are convicted and go to jail for it. Not many, but some. Saying they don't seriously undermines the credibility of the argument.
Slideshow: Apple iPad Mini Teardown
The concept he's talking about is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_inversion; http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Inversion.html has a bit more detail.
Don't get distracted by the politics and fighting in the mobile space. Work on what you love and enjoy.

My suggestion: start with native app development for the device that you own and use most. Run through a couple of beginner tutorials and write a few toy apps. This will give you a more solid foundation for making decisions. (I would not recommend using cross platform tool-kits until you understand the trade-offs.)

Then, I recommend that you build one of your ideas for the same device and release it. After releasing it, you can either move on to the next idea or port it for the other platform.
It may have been a narrow victory in the popular vote, but it was an absolute stomp in the electoral college. Obviously we can't go back in time and try it a different way so you're never going to have any "proof", but there was clearly a strategic advantage by the Obama camp in the battleground states.
I currently spend about 60 hours a week working with my 15" rMBP. I tried the 2880 x 1800 and 1650 x 1050 resolutions; but in the end I gave up and went for the native emulated 1440 x 900. Because what that gives you is in effect an incredibly crisp 1440 x 900 pixel display with sub-pixel anti-aliasing (as far as the GUI furniture is concerned), and large enough to work on comfortably without squinting.

Disclaimer: I have 48 year old eyeballs with dormant peripheral retinopathy in one eye, a damaged (by surgery) fovea in the other, and a (different in each) mixture of presybyopia, myopia, astigmatism, and a squint due to muscle weakness (in the left). My eyeballs need all the tender loving care I can lavish on them, hence the rMBP. Your priorities may (and probably do) differ, but if you've got eyesight issues, this screen is simply a joy to use.
Skype !
>>Retina branding [...] is not significantly about competing on productivity.

I am far from a UI/UX expert, but I (and many others I've read about [e.g. see cstross in another comment]) have the experience that "retina displays" make a very big difference for text [readability].

If you really have good references to support your claim my experience is marketing bullshit, I'm very interested.

(Personally, I think HN has degenerated to FUD wars over tablets the last week(s). At least increase quality.)
Correction: the will of those who are financially able to represent themselves in front of politicians. Presidents and leaders don't have time to understand their populace on their own accord these days.
Putting just over $2000 on Obama several days ago would've gotten you $800.
Agreed; zeteo is looking at the past thorugh some decidedly colored glasses. That's never been the way it worked. Elections have always been won via "haggling", whether that happened in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of party conventions. Remember that the expectation of a general election being "close" is a fairly recent one. From 1865-1932, for example, the president was effectively picked by the republican convention delegates.

Winning an election through careful attention to the polls simply means you're tailoring your messaging and policies to the opinions of the demographcs that matter most to victor. How is that not "democratic?".

If your complaint is that some demographics matter more than others, then address your criticism to the electoral college, not the strategy picked by the winning candidate.
If I trusted the government-approved definition of "clean" I'd be a bit more enthusiastic about those subsidies.
Overhyped title. Corporate lawyers explicitly tell developers to never ever look at patents, read about patent news etc because if there is a chance they knew about the patent and then used it it is tripple damages so of course they "pay no attention to anyone's patents", that is how you are suppose to behave given the way the system is currently setup.
> Drugs really aren't as dangerous as you've been told.

I guess no one here watches the TV show "Intervention". Pity. That TV show is a better education on the real impact of hardcore drugs than any book you might read. This Colorado vote is a relatively minor issue, really. But, it does indicate that we're heading down a slippery slope. Since those running the meth clinics say that only one person in 50 can stay clean for a year, there might come a day when half of society are hardcore drug addicts. But, we will never face that kind of zombie apocalypse because the life expectancy for a meth addict is only seven years from the moment they get hooked. Let the down-voting commence!
I am a bit confused. If the resolution is 2560x1600, why don't you run it at 2560x1600? The idea of not running a panel at its native resolution bothers me greatly. Is it the case that you're not able to run the system at its actual native resolution? That seems to be what these articles are saying, but they all seem to be dancing around it or assuming I've read something I haven't.
The article's critique found shortcomings due to the way in which Apple's decisions regarding the display negatively impacted the utility of the computer.

Different people have different needs. Some will engage in tasks which entail functional system performance; others tasks which entail gazing at their screen in admiration.

There may not be a single product which meets both their needs.
Ah, the Register... they should know that it's industry-standard practice for software engineers to explicitly not look into patents in their area since that reduces the risk that an infringement will be treated as "willful" which can lead to treble damages.
This is called 'science'. They used these techniques back in the days of JFK, too.

The difference is that now, campaigns have access to unprecedented amounts of audience data. But make no mistake, it was all dog and pony back then, too.
I get this message:

"We're sorry
Our servers are over capacity and certain pages may be temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to resolve the issue."

I got there through Google's Web Cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Silver affirms that public opinion polling is accurate - as long as you know how to read the data.

Not to diminish Silver's work - I'm just saying the data he uses needs to be accurate in order for his models to be accurate.
San Francisco Sends Problematic Gross Receipts Tax to November Ballot
If it's just a viewer, why even bother with it and not use something like Quick Office that will probably be free very soon.
The problem with the game theory's ideas on voting is that people do not always behave as game theory predicts.

Free will is great way to avoid stagnation if we were to but use it.
Electoral fraud in Illinois would swing a maximum of Illinois's 20 electoral votes, or 29 in Florida

With a popular vote, it would be popular to have millions upon millions of fraudulent votes in a single place, say, Delaware, that would allow the opposing candidate to win even if there was supposed to be a landslide victory for the other candidate.

I think "Firewall" is a good analogy of this.
I worked for a DARPA contractor for years. Nerds all wank over how awesome DARPA is, and how great they are for putting money into all these blue-sky projects that may not pan out, etc. Yet the administration puts some money into technology that doesn't have an immediate benefit in killing people, and people flip their shit.

For context: DARPA has a budget of almost $3 billion. The risk-weighted investment into Solyndra was probably on the order of the low tens of millions.
I find the "social" needs of animals very interesting. I own a rabbit and most of the time he doesn't like petting and will run if you want to catch him, but if you leave the room he will follow you and go to sleep in a hard to reach corner.
Firefox OS – video presentations and slides on the OS, WebAPIs
There's at least some evidence that, in fact, the Romney campaign fooled itself into believing the "unskewed" polling models which simply (and incorrectly) disbelieved the demographic makeup of the polls. So yeah, it's hard to believe the republican campaign could have run a heavily data-driven campaign.

And the evidence that Obama would have actually lost is obviously not going to turn up. But you can look at the relative performance in "swing" states vs. the general electorate for hints. He clearly outperformed among the demographics that ended up deciding the election, as witnessed by the very large electoral victory on the basis of a very narrow (currently <2% I believe) popular vote margin.
Interesting analysis on the collision angle.

For those interested in another look (basic) at the Birthday Paradox, check out http://alexanderle.com/blog/2011/birthday-paradox.html !
Doesn't say anything there about defending internet freedom or net neutrality.

Not that Romney would have, but it can never be pointed out enough that we're not given real choices with these elections. Given that 98.5% of the electorate voted for one of the two bozos, it's clearly not being said enough.
I really think that you might want to give it for free in a "Beta phase". Get some traction, add features and design and then charge for it.
As said before there are much more robust themes for $10 more.
Who Are The Most Influential Posters on HN?
Don't be afraid to nominate yourself.
I have no issue with the judge taking into account that they were probably genuinely nice people and I suspect that that was indeed taken into account (if you read the Guardian account, even the prosecutor mentions it).

However, while not breaking down the numbers, it doesn't sound like most of the money went on philanthropic endeavours and I suspect it was a long way short of even a majority of the money (I've read four newspaper accounts now and not one uses "most" to describe the proportion).

In reality of a three year sentence given their prior record, their age and the nature of the crime, they'll likely serve a little over one year and that'll be in a relatively low security prison. As they've likely personally profited to the tune of over £250,000 after their charitable donations that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.

Also worth noting this line form the Telegraph account:

"Mr Foster, 62, admitted regularly selling cannabis in deals of around £1,500 to a local drug dealer to whom he had been introduced through a loan shark."

The point here is that while they're nice, some of the people who they seem engaged with in the wider venture might not be. They're not in this on their own, they're also enabling others. If you deal drugs you probably have other people sell them, you probably get involved in money laundering and all that can lead to a greater criminal enterprise which will have genuine negative effects, even if what you personally do doesn't.

Now you can make a really great case that it's only the illegality that makes that so, and I'm completely on side with that and support it, but while it remains illegal it does mean that it's hard to do the sort of things they do in an entirely innocent way.
I was beginning to think that I had completely hallucinated Steve Jobs telling the world that FaceTime was going to be an open standard.
Have you made any sales yet?
Yeah, that's right kids, a tv reality show gives you a better view of what's happening than anything those stoopid scientists might have to say.

/facepalm
Robert J. Sawyer: Letter to Beginning Writers
Honest question - why would you use Tmux for local sessions?

I always thought the advantage of programs like Screen and TMux were that you could persist remote sessions over bad connections, or from different terminals (e.g., going home from the office and keeping the session alive).

For purely local sessions, I don't see an advantage over iterm + vim. That also seems to be the conclusion on StackOverflow [0]:

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10015575/tmux-vs-iterm2-split-panes

[edit] - thanks for the feedback guys, I'll give it a try
It's all in apple's implementation of retina in OS X. The display is running at its native 1600p but runs applications at a "logical" 800p resolution. It's just as if points and pixels suddenly had different meanings.
Have you tried Zoho? http://www.zoho.com/mail/
Is there a 'jump off the cliff' app for all of the Apple lemmings?
While your project got the right result, I don't think it's mathematically justifiable to take an arithmetic mean of the published survey means without accounting for the standard deviation of each sample distribution.

Doing that would make your model more mathematically complicated, but it's no doubt one of the things that Nate Silver is doing.

But besides that, Silver isn't just trying to call the election the Monday before the election, he's trying to build a model that predicts the outcome as early as possible.

A lot of the stuff he's been throwing into it, like the 'economic factors' or 'convention bounce' adjustments are about keeping the model from going off into the weeds due to predictable fluctuations in public sentiment caused by ephemeral events.

If you compare the history on the right column of the site to the "now cast" tab, which excludes those adjustments, you'll notice that the former contains fewer and more modest fluctuations than the "now cast".
Didn't think I'd ever see a .gov page officially referencing: a) a ballot initiative, b) marijuana and c) Cheetos & Goldfish, but here you go: http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagenam...
I still have no idea why SF went with a gross receipts tax vs. an income tax. I don't like paying taxes, but an SF-specific income tax (business and personal, including people who commute in) does seem a lot more fair than either payroll or gross receipts.

The argument against income tax is that it's hard to administer, but in SF, they can just piggyback off the free tax returns from US IRS and CA FTB. To make the correct income, it could probably be something like 0.1% or less.

This is surprising because the proponents of this tax (SF.Citi, Ron Conway et al) are really smart.

(One of the only bad things about Washington State is the B&O tax, which I also think should be replaced with another form of tax making at least the same revenue, although at the state level, there's an argument about collection and administration cost. Still, they can just piggyback on the federal returns, or even better, just raise sales and property tax, or other inexpensive to collect taxes.)
Right; it's not that knowing about the patent makes the infringement willful. It's that (as I understand it) a good defense against willful infringement is being able to say "I have never seen that patent".
A collection of useless websites
Windows 8 overtakes Android web presence in less than 10 days
http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
> Too bad "Concepts" did not make it into the standard. Would help avoid the tons of unintelligible error messages one gets when using template functions incorrectly.

As far as I understood it, this was merely due to discussions what types of Concepts would be supported. There was one group of people that wanted very granular Concepts, and another group of people that wanted just very broadly defined Concepts. They never reached an agreement on this.
Can One Good Link Make The Difference?
Higher quality text display is absolutely a functional design issue.
It's basically about whether applications are DPI-aware or not.

Applications that are get the full 2560x1600 resolution. Applications that don't, don't; instead, they get 1280x800 by default, for an 1:2 upscaling. If you want, you can change that number, of course at a performance cost.

People are complaining because even most of the apps that are DPI-aware (Chrome, etc.) don't offer a way to change the physical size of their chrome, but that isn't really Apple's fault.
Strategic conduct on the part of businesses isn't the same thing as smart (or ethical, or legal) conduct when it's done by governments. Everything has a context.
Investors in startups are looking for a potential 10x-30x return on their investment. We aren't talking about razor thin margins in this equation. While it is of course true that they will have to make more pre-tax to come out with the same amount post-tax, I don't think it drastically changes investors motivation to invest. Also, where else will they invest their money. The capital gains tax applies to lots of types of investments, so the risk/reward balance versus other types of investments is still the same.
On the other hand, you don't get to count coup for postdocs.
Review: Android 4.2 is a sweeter-tasting Jelly Bean
Hmmm... I guess I am worried about the opposite. The fact that lots of people might be working on it and I might be wasting my time.

Perhaps allow partial answers?

I have seen this happen often with StackOverflow. Were a person gives a one line answer to start things off, and then within 30 minutes elaborates the answer to a very detailed one.
It was mostly a marketing ploy
Hydrogen vehicle: Vehicle that uses hydrogen as its onboard fuel
Are you confused because you believe that libertarians are on the right, maybe? If you examine libertarian positions, you might be surprised to find many of them "left" of Obama.
From an outside (undergrad) perspective, I always thought that the focus of any faculty or PhD was toward attracting government grants or alumni donations.
Not gimmicky, it's empathizing with the end user.
So Influence goes in order of posters with most Karma to least?
I should think it was the price first, then the size and the weight. That was an extremely expensive laptop.

If they brought it back, I'd be afraid to ask what kind of GPU it takes to drive a 17" Retina screen on a laptop.
Imagine, too, a scenario where the results deviated significantly from his predictions. In the past, the public, guided by the media, might have been satisfied shrugging it off as "god's will" or "people are just unpredictable" or even "pshaw, more conspiracy theories!" Now I like to believe there will be more pressure to investigate and rationally explain the source of that deviation. Are dead people really voting in Chicago? Were voting machines hacked in Cuyahoga County? I feel like Silver's counter-narrative -- and more critically, his methods -- have been an important contribution to a fair and open democratic process.
How An Upstart Company In Detroit Is Building An American Heritage Brand
The comparable Dell panel was the same price last time I checked (which didn't have all the extra ports/webcam/speakers)
Depends on what you call 'intelligence': making a home for living is more intelligent than just picking a stone for playing, is it not?

Building for the future (you know, you do not build a nest with a couple of straws) means projecting oneself in the future: that is intelligence for me.

'I know you're wrong' is quite strong.
Sorry, but this is how I was taught and how I've seen a lot of VC's do it. They take their assumptions which include revenue projections, required rate of return, risk premium, future dilution, and of course the tax rate. They then plug those into a model to tell them what percentage / valuation they need. Of course this doesn't work well for seed stage since there's not enough information.
Ding! next
Tell me, how else could it be done?
Camera and Video Control with HTML5
The fact that it is 'hardcoded' does not diminish its value as 'intelligence'.
First of all, it should noted that institutional racism and oppression exists and is executed today against people of color, esp. black folks, in the US. Therefore, any examination of policies that seek to address race imbalances need to be considered in this context.

Second, crime and race are related in a major way, esp. in regards to institutional systems that keep black folks economically depressed and include them as prison population component of the industrial-prison-complex the US currently runs.

I can appreciate you want to abstract these thoughts out, but that is a very difficult exercise. Instead, it is much easier to talk about the actual reality minorities in the US face in regards to political and social systems and how those systems affect their existence. Such systems and policies that continue to keep economic opportunity and education out of the hands of people of color need to be addressed, and a race related policy like affirmative action is just one such tool to address those problems.

> I doubt you believe that all 2^(6 billion) subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration, however. So how do you determine which subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration?

All members of the human race deserve moral and ethical treatment and consideration. However, many different groups of people in the US are not treated in such a way, both on personal levels and systemically. As a society, different approaches and tools must be employed to correct that mistreatment, and yes that means the most disadvantaged and screwed over people will need tools that empower them and help them to no longer be considered a second- or third-class status in society.
Hi,

Claudio (one of the developers) here.

The motivation is that you can interact with the content of the panes both with shortcuts and programmatically, as an example I can link you this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J...

The other advantage is that if for any reason iTerm crashes or is closed by mistake, you can resume your session.
President Obama’s Election Night Speech
I am a "pro". I care far more about the quality of the display than the putative resolution.