skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Granted. Yet not once has the concept of "neighborhood vehicles" succeeded. This has been tried before.

Working against them is the perception that a car is supposed to be driven on roads, any roads. Now they are trying to sell you a car that can only be driven on some roads. Part of the appeal of high economy vehicles, even those that one would traditionally consider "local" vehicles, is that they could be used for longer distance travel when necessary. Example: The Vespa-style scooters. Take away even the possibility of using this vehicle to travel, say, to the town down the road, or even the other side of the metro area, and it becomes much less appealing. It's a lot of money to spend on a vehicle that is hard-limited (legally speaking) to local travel.

I could see in certain densely populated areas, this could become more useful. My judgment may be totally flawed. Yet if I had to put money on it, I'd say this thing is going to flop.
But that was only because you had physical access to the original SIM, no? You couldn't mount this attack "over the air" against a stranger.
Eric myer on CSS
Agreed.

By the way, why does this concept pop up so often currently in our culture? (even an amateur can be successful)

ie, American Idol, World Series of Poker, Millionaire gameshows...etc
Seems like hacking the phone is the trivial part compared to the SIM authentication scheme. What am I missing?
I don't think Matt is suggesting that anyone can become successful with the tools available today.

People like John Gruber, Jason Kottke etc are the kind of people who will succeed regardless of how things are. It's just that it's a lot easier for them to do it today than it would have been years ago. Of course the barriers for entry are the same for everyone, but it's still up to the smart, dedicated person to utilise them. So I'm not so sure Matt is calling for everyone to start something. Just those who think they can make it in any environment.

Regardless of the advents in technology, the core for success doesn't change - the individual himself.
Hi Icey,
i am part of the team
(so to nitpick, iSuppli rightly DID include them? -- in the cost of the chip)
They think sleep is garbage collection: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=547598

Regardless of the question of sleep, the lack of a human known answer does not mean something else must exist that knows the answer. Perhaps the answer is unknown in the universe.

If you believe otherwise, where did the intelligent being who knows this information come from?
The supposed weakness of Scala as being "too complicated" or "too rich" can be countered by developing coding standards, creating more robust editors and tools, and by better educating polyglots on how best to use Scala.

This will never work. It never worked with C++. You need sharp C++ programmers to produce C++ code; you can't use mediocre programmers using a subset of the language. Even if you enforce simplicity internally, debugging and external library dependencies force all C++ programmers to cope with the full complexity of the language.

Java is an excellent language for exploiting the abilities of average programmers. Average programmers can be self-sufficient in Java. Outstanding programmers, exploiting the full power of Java, produce code and APIs that average programmers can understand and use. Scala cannot fill that role.
Dunno. It just had regular seatbelts, though.
Contributing specific information for a different domain easily makes this the best comment in the thread. It should go to the top.

http://google.com/search?q=elliot+rossio+wordplayer

http://google.com/search?q=stross+martin+the+art+of+being+la...
Well, I'd say killer apps on the internet only drive bandwidth and latency metrics.

Video for bandwidth & games for latency.
Security hole in OAuth behind Twitter pulling OAuth support
Your point makes sense, but but I suspect that if they were doing it for that reason the number of allowed processes would depend on the machine and configuration.
My bad. I think I confused the work being done on Prism* with the "Future of Firefox", which of course is a separate product (though it could get integrated).

*https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Prism
Twitter Blog: What's The Deal with OAuth?
Mapping a Human Genome, via an eBay Auction
Unix To PowerShell - Tail
WSoP is in a different class than your other examples. Otherwise, I think that the trend to devalue classical training in professions is detrimental to maintaining high quality standards. In some things, sufficient is satisfactory. Yet, in the systems and products that we create to run our businesses and lives on, we should strive for excellence. I contend that one of the advantages that being "schooled" gives you is the ability to discern the mediocre from the great, whereas to the lay person, both seem "good." I do not think that formalized study in existing institutions is a requirement, but I do think the level of intense study that they demand is.
I think they were originally created for environments like Windows where the basic development tools weren't part of a normal operating system install.
Welcome to the internet, I suppose.
Scala isn't really a port; it's practically a Java native. Its primary creator had a lot to do with the development of Java, and despite being originally targeted toward both the JVM and the CLR, the Scala project has focused primarily on the JVM. As mentioned in the article, Scala can be used as a "better Java" and is much easier on the fingers (notably because it has type inference, but also because it supports functional programming better than Java.)
CSS Mastery for me is THE book on CSS. Although its old because at the time the book was written, IE7 was not officially in the market yet. It contains a lot of step-by-step solutions for common real-world css problems, along with browser gotchas and hacks when necessary. Particularly useful if you plan to support IE6 for pixel-perfect layouts.
Those horrible days when musicians could actually make a living selling their work. Let's not go back there !
I noticed I can now down mod comments. When I see posts like this I'd love to delete them. I find them off topic as well as disgusting.

I'm happy I don't own an iPhone
Windows 7 Starter is Designed So That You Won’t Want It
At 100 karma you can downvote comments, for a period, and I believe you can flag posts and submissions.

I think if enough people flag the same article, it is automatically pulled.

edit: I agree, there isn't anything interesting that can be said about this.
Lynda.com has a set of great screencasts that go over basic and advanced CSS with Andy Clarke. I would recommend those.
The capacity for a specific purpose is not demonstrative of an aptitude for that purpose.
It turns out that the vast majority of all IE sessions contain three or fewer tabs.

That's only because tab management sucks when you put the tabs along the top of the screen, and the lack of organization means people feel obligated to close things out or re-use them rather than popping new tabs.

Since I started using Tree Style Tabs in FF, I'm averaging somewhere around 50 tabs up at a time (of course, I don't even notice this until FF tells me the number as I close out, since they're all collapsed and well organized).
It's part of the american folk mythology (for a real obvious-in-hindsight example, consider Star Wars (original trilogy): Luke goes from farm hand to ace fighter pilot with no training, and becomes a passable jedi with a few months of training...).

It probably originates 50% from the urban/rural divide and 50% from the underlying outlook of protestantism. In brief:

- much of american history consists of pioneers going and settling the land, then -- decades later -- the 'experts' show up (these could be anything from farm scientists to law enforcement to general government busybodies). So there's this weird split between respect for learning and accomplishment (no, really!) but on the other hand the belief that you can really boostrap yourself / figure things out by yourself just fine. Anything that plays into the belief you could perform at an 'expert' level with only a very minimal amount of training is therefore good entertainment.

- the basic protestant outlook is that your (personal) salvation is predetermined (though perhaps you can mess it up), and that consequently nothing you do can earn salvation if you weren't already gifted it; however, there's a parallel belief that God will show favor upon the saved, eg by granting them success in their worldly endeavors...and so, loosely speaking, a protestant-minded person would interpret someone attaining expert-level performance in a very short period of time as a sign that that person had been gifted with salvation.

At this point in time I'd say neither of those reasons is self-consciously driving the meme's dominance, but those are some of the deep roots of that particular outlook, most likely.
Apple Posts Its Best Second Quarter Earnings Ever
Way to miss the point of the article.
I agree that the app is disgusting however I disagree that the post is off-topic.

The article questions the iTunes App Store approval process and brings to attention this particularly striking example. It raises questions about censorship, taste and free speech. All things I believe HN readers find interesting.

The disappointing thing for me is that I had considered working with a child-abuse prevention agency to develop an application which simulates the effect of shaken baby syndrome (similar to physical dolls which do the same) as a tool for educators, physicians, law enforcement officers, etc.

Now the chances of such an app being approved are most likely zero.
My phrasing was because of the markup discussion above. I'd assumed people were talking about the high (?) markup because it'd factor into their buying decision, which seems pointless.

I see nothing wrong with wanting to know for curiosity's sake.
The Elite Eight Development Principles
BBC B, I learn't BASIC on it + "Rocket Raid" was brilliant
AMD puts pressure on Intel with new generation of server chips | The Industry Standard
Capo is selling to a market that includes folks who (and I'm included) would easily throw an extra $100 into a guitar because it has a nice rosewood back & sides versus mahogany.

Yes...but the guitar will be seen/heard on stage. People will generally spend a lot more on their t-shirt than on their underpants or socks. Nobody with an interest in musical performance wants to advertise the tedium or difficulties of musical practice, so because that part isn't glamorous. So don't base your price point on appealing to the musician's ego about investing in themselves.
I have no idea of why they were created, Windows certainly was the front-runner for GUI stuff. I worked at my first job doing java dev with emacs and I've been fully working on linux for the last several years and I still find eclipse to be superior. Maybe it is because the learning curve is lower and my emacs environment was never setup properly, but I think the OSGi framework (dependency management standard in eclipse) is genuinely useful and I love having everything I need in one program. I still find myself writing sed/awk/bash scripts occasionally, but my workflow in my IDE with mylyn integrated to bugzilla and SVN is just so much faster...
what a lame article
The definitive book is Designing with Web Standards. Not all CSS per se, but it is requisite reading if you're just getting into the whole CSS-based design thing.

That book goes hand in hand with Eric Meyer on CSS.
The Database Rant
They can do variable configuration for a wide range of machines, or they can create a static configuration for a narrow range of machines. They've done the latter.
> In the end, if they limit the number of open programs to three, it's very possible that users will look more favorably upon the performance/stability of Windows 7.

Why not just limit it to zero? If you don't run anything, it doesn't crash. But all it takes is one buggy piece of software to bring the whole thing down. I don't think reducing the load would help anything. IE7 with a bunch of tabs open can sometimes consume almost 1.5GB of memory...
PHP Named Parameters
IPhone Sales Push Up Apple’s Profits
TI-85 pocket calculator; 6Mhz of Z-80 goodness with 28k of ram, hacked with an assembly language "repl" :-)

zshell, how I love thee!
You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?

The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime, in the same way that a group of toddlers would never 100% figure out the full technology and complete mechanical blueprints if they were handed a Ferrari.

I don't think that's clear at all. I might agree with your first point, that we don't understand the internal mechanisms very well, but in some cases it's a lot easier to model a system than to understand how it functions. This is particularly true of emergent behavior, which pretty much anyone in the field acknowledges the brain is largely driven by.

Even in fields as concrete as physics, there are plenty of emergent results which can be verified to arise from the small-scale behaviors that we can observe, whereas a full "understanding" of how that emergence happens is beyond our grasp.
A friend of mine was trying to get me to make that app. Hmm ...
Interesting idea, attempting to crunch all of the requests for a page snippet into a single request. Why do it in Javascript, though?

It seems like you'd be better off with a pre-processor server-side to inline include CSS, Javascript and images, then send the resulting page back for rendering. Javascript isn't nearly as fast as my C++-based templating engine...

edit to add: Also, don't discount the big savings you can get from "302 Not Modified" return statuses, especially on big chunks of content like images. The DUI.Stream image demo they had would get smoked by the 'dumb' version if they allowed the browser to cache the digg dude.
Would an electrical engineer please explain why the number of cores is prime?
I don't think this is disgusting, maybe misguided.

Maybe they were trying to highlight how much work babies are, and how much they cry. Perhaps they were considering it to be an app for people thinking of being parents, to see how long they can stand crying for. Or, maybe they have warped senses of humor.

I don't think the X's over eyes are particularly disgusting, could just mean the baby is asleep. Or the game has 'ended'.

Surprised on the one hand it was approved, but also surprising it was then pulled.

It'd be better to have specific rules and stick to them, rather than react to media hysteria.
The oldest committer is removed from m2eclipse project / Eclipse
lack of a human known answer does not mean something else must exist that knows the answer

However, in your same vein of logic, the incapability to prove the existence of a designer does not invalidate the existence of a designer in the equation.

This same flimsy logic is applied within scientific naturalism, where we assume that because the existence of a designer is not capable of being proven, that the only way we can conclude something "coming about" is by inferring from only what is empirically given.

Surely you would not try to argue with me that because a child is not present (and thus logically unprovable to exist) that the existence of a sand castle on the beach could only be explained by the waves and functions of the ocean.

Obviously in that example we have external information to invalidate our faulty logic (i.e. seeing prior children build sand-castles), but it serves to highlight the absurdity that comes about when trying to infer from what is only empirically given. Now take that simple sand castle example and apply it to the insane complexity of trying to explain the creation of the universe. Not to mention remove the external information that enables us to validate/invalidate our claims.

I hope you can see why I choose to merge my intuition for recognizing intelligent design with empirical science.
Motorola used to do devkits for their 56k series that featured USB or RS232 connections to a box containing the DSP and a pair of audio i/o jacks with average DACs.

This plus a front-end DSP environment like http://synthmaker.co.uk/ would sell like hot cakes. Update to this now please: http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/vcl/asap/asap_demo_boards.html
Blueprint grid overlay - a jQuery plugin
yes, when artists got loans to make their records, earned under $1 for a CD that sold for more than $20, and were still expected to repay the loans?

oh wait, thats still how it goes, except the artist cut is lower because CDs sell for less.
Pixelpipe Brings Drag-and-Drop Files Uploading Firefox Extensions
VC Rightsizing
"I don't necessarily see 'undersea welder' as a future proof job. Our whole prediction of the future, currently, is the end of oil, which means the end of offshore oil platforms, which probably means 90% of these jobs will be gone. This doesn't really make it future proof."

Ah, but you forget about the growth in demand due to seasteads.
I can't tell if this is flamebait but I'll bite. Limiting to a small number has the effect of minimizing the probability of performance problems from running out of memory and thereby improving user experience. Limiting to zero obviously makes it unusable.

I see power users being a lot more upset about this limitation than, for example, my mother who uses her PC for email, internet, and word docs. I also think Microsoft has done a poor job in explaining themselves on this change but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Agreed, a lot depends on the price. However, you can't take a 50cc scooter on the freeway. If the price/TCO is right, I could see these selling as fleet vehicles for, say, mail delivery. Those little 'smart cars' from Mercedes and others seem to be doing OK.

I don't own a car, so to me a car fit for a road trip and a little runaround-town vehicle are two completely different products. I'd rather own the latter and rent the former once or twice a year.

edit: the proposed $20k isn't a winner, though. I think this kind of vehicle needs to be shooting for $5-7,500.
Majority of IE users are 'normal people', they just don't need 50 tabs for their tasks, they don't live in the internets
I think what Allocator2008 is getting at is that creating artificial life would show that there is nothing mystical or non-physical about consciousness. This would partly poke a hole in the argument for existence of God that the creation of life and/or consciousness has never been witnessed.

Fear not. Even if the thing achieves consciousness, writes poetry, falls in love, critiques literature, etc., people will still claim that it's just faking it. "Neat trick, but it still doesn't have a soul, so it can't be conscious!"

If I had to guess, I'd say that it would take a fresh generation, growing up with this sort of thing all around it, to accept (en masse) that the computers had whatever that special "something" is that we have.

Personally, the chaos I'm really looking forward to is the legal mess that would arise - what happens when a computer, aided and guided by nobody in particular, does something illegal? Creates a piece of art and wants copyright protection? Who do you sue when a computer sets up its own Pirate Bay? Do you let it get its own bank account? What about when it figures out how to beat the stock market by hacking e-mail accounts of executives and returning trades based on insider information to clueless traders that just follow its black-box suggestions - is that insider trading if the system wasn't explicitly told to do that and no human ever sees the information? And so on...our legal system is neither equipped for this stuff, nor agile enough to adapt to it in a timely fashion, and these issues will remain unresolved far past the point of no return.
This is great news for me as my current project is a gross iPhone game, and it's turning out to be a lot better than this!

EDIT: Wait, no... it's bad news... Apple already pulled it!
New Engine Design Sparks Interest
If it did cope with SF hills it could be a great fleet car for a neighborhood rental service like Zipcar or City Car Share.
First off, the "block-level" sync is exactly what rsync is for. You'll probably have better results using that. (http://www.samba.org/rsync/) You could track a list of local file paths in git, but sync the binaries themselves with rysnc. (They complement each other well.)

Tracking changes in binary files (which cannot be merged in any reasonably generic fashion) is a fundamentally different issue than tracking changes in text, particularly source code. Git is designed to do the latter. While you can use it to track changes in binaries, merging doesn't make sense anymore, and hashing / scanning big binary files for changes is significantly slower. (A bunch of images generally won't matter, but I wouldn't use it to track, say, video, or large database dumps.)
Twitter OAuth Outage Was A Vulnerability In OAuth Itself
This is a reaction to Linux. This will be sold for basically nothing, and given the choice between Windows 7 Starter and Linux on the same netbook at the same price, most people will choose Windows 7 because they're more familiar with it. This is how they're trying to take on Linux without cannibalising the sales of the full version.
Simple Google App Engine Java app to display Flickr’s geotagged photos in Google Earth
The Zen of CSS Design for me.

It takes submissions to the CSS Zen garden and uses them as examples of what techniques you can use for layout, typography, images, etc

It suits my learning style of visual diagrams and reverse-engineering things to see how they work.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0321303474?ie=UTF8&ta...
I suspect there's not much to gain by caching images in the browser: If you're looking at a page full of comments with hundreds of avatars, chances are the next page is going to make you load hundreds more that you haven't seen already: There is a very large number of commenters, and you probably won't see the same people on every page.

The demo is right: they ask for 300 different images (as in, different URLs), and their packager makes it faster.

Also, how would you inline include images? Using base 64 in the image tag?
Hmm, this goes some way to making up for the diggbar.
Yeah, but: 1) the logic must work; 2) the text must scan.

Exercise: rewrite a law in iambic pentameter, add tests.
Why am I not surprised? All my favorites in there thought a good mathematical background was helpful, if not essential.

Linus, Norvig and Gosling are hackers. GvR and Stroustrup are professionals. Dunno about Bray and Thomas. Yegge and Hansson can has cheezburger.
Shouldn't there have been a control group of English speakers or some other gender neutral language as well? Interesting findings though. I've always wondered what the "logic" was behind gender assignments in languages.
Thanks, those are good suggestions.

I don't really care about 'unclogging twitter' - that's for someone else to deal with, I just wanted to provide a nice group of cycling feeds, grouped together.

Voting for interesting messages is a good idea, as is adding some information in order to give some information about riders who are not Lance Armstrong and thus relatively obscure.
Did you figure out how they're transforming the serialized image data into real images? I remember there was something like a data-attribute in the img-tag back in the days, but i thought it was deprecated years ago...?

Any hints?
Why AT&T Wants to Keep the iPhone Away From Verizon
Well, you're talking about a slightly different issue than what I'm talking about.

You're talking about making OS's more integrated with the Web. I'm talking about changing the Web to take full advantage of existing operating systems.
I can see what you mean; people need passion.

But Newton got repeatable, predictable, reliable results pretty early on and convinced a sizable number of people.

I want cold fusion to be real, to work. I really do...
The lifestyle business bullshit