skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When will people learn to make good backups? It seems almost every week there's another story here about how people lost data because they didn't have backups.
I am not offended, just confused by your afro-centrism ;-)

It's very typical to mystify and revere Africa (or the non-occidental Other, in general) as something noble, rich in tradition, hospitable, etc. but even these kind words alienate the people spoken of (as opposed to the people spoken to) Admiring "resourcefulness", a universal human trait, in just the Africans means one of two things to me: 1) Inability to see the same quality in non-Africans (which is afro-centrism) or 2) Patronizing Africans for their ability to, well, "use what they've got" :-P

If you want to see sheer human ingenuity and resourcefulness all you have to do is look at prison tools and weapons. Any 1st world citizen will be reduced into an "African" once thrown in jail and stripped of all property; they end up collecting small items and fashioning them to works of art. It's nothing special.

You can see traces of this "patronizing" of the other going as far back as Rouseu and his noble savage. The modern day, American, equivalent is a funny series of commercials ran by GEICO, and American insurance company. A caveman is portrayed having a very normal life; he plays tennis, has an on again off again relationship, goes out with friends, yet he is treated as different everywhere he goes. To himself, he is just "like us" :-)
Surely 100m people have not posted 2,000 "tweets" each.

Two billion tweets would be 1M people posting 2k tweets each, or 100M people posting 20 tweets each.
Are the math tests no calculator allowed?
Well, yes - but that was clearly rather different, as the 2G wasn't subsidised, and indeed didn't require a contract at purchase. This seems to be consistent with all other upgrades from subsidised phones ever, so I'd say it is historically consistent.
Wow, that's huge. Ok, now I'm not feeling quite so bad about Hecl.
I unsubscribed from Mashable a year ago for two reasons that infuriated me:

1) Posts from one author who constantly insulted readers by calling them idiots if they didn't side with him regarding his politics (in any case, the posts were usually only tangentially related to technology).

2) Posting lists like "The top 10 ways to do XXXXXX online," often forgetting the most important and useful sites for the purpose. They never go back and update their lists based on user feedback, even if hundreds of people point out obvious mistakes or omissions.

Of course they are welcome to choose whom to put on their lists, but it seems that they just pick 10 rather carelessly to get the post out as soon as possible.

TC may have an acerbic vibe, but they seem to direct it at companies and other sites, not their readers.
I think selling 1000 copies would be hard - it is a technical subject.

I don't know, maybe it is a stupid idea, but I also kind of want to trick myself into writing a book. In theory I could write it for Lulu or as an ebook, and perhaps have better margins. But knowing myself, my chances of success are much higher if I have another party being interested in the project (the publisher). There is a deadline and so on, and hopefully some experience the publisher can bring to the table.

Maybe it is silly, but I am also thinking "this could be the last opportunity to do this, before publishers and maybe even books cease to exist". Doing it the old fashioned way I mean. I can very well imagine that if it works out, I would try to publish future books via Lulu or as e-books.

PG as an example: that is exactly the point though, he made his money elsewhere. But I also think that without his essays, YCombinator would probably not be what it is.

As for fiction books, I don't know, but I don't think the sales prospects for an average book are much better. It could be a bit like an iPhone app store multiplied by a million - thousands and thousands of authors writing books, but only very few of them taking off and making money out of it.
The Infrastructure 2.0 Trifecta
Wikipedia in an encyclopedia, not a tutorial. Its articles are long and well written, but neither complete nor geared towards teaching. Myself, no matter what subject I always go first to wikipedia, but if I want to actually learn something I always google it afterwards.
A not so subtle hint from Arrington to his detractors: "I make it rain".
Well, this topic is about Africa, that is why my comments may seem afro-centric (maybe I also miss my life as a kid in Bondoukou).

The trait I admire most about humans is their ability to adapt to any situation.

And yes, I also admire the expression of that trait in Africa.

And because of this ability to adapt to any situation, the idea I wanted to share is :

Let them do and help only if they are asking for.
A man who lived extreme. I just found his blog http://ligesh.com
Afridex by appfrica, Africa's Crunchbase relaunches
I think the problem is not in twitter itself but in the services using their APIs.
To be fair, they say "For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case..." rather than accusing Twitter themselves of primary-key ineptitude.
President Obamas Credit Card Statement
Being a banker and having friends in the white house... priceless...
Well, if you put it like that it sure sounds awful. Why do you assume they will die?

I sincerely doubt they'd send anyone to their deaths nor that anyone would accept it, that would be absurd (tho accidents can happen). Consider the amount of effort, time and money such a trip would take. With the right focus, in 50 years we could have the technology to sustain life in space. However, the right focus probably means "if we have something to gain from it". I guess that's why he thinks of a "Big Brother in Space" program that would cover part of the costs. I see the idea has some logic, even if I don't agree completely with it.

On a side note, I always heard that Biodomes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_ecological_system) would be the answer to living on Mars or other planets in the initial phases. Not sure if I'd want to live in lava tubes.
No, the "shills" are the ones that don't agree with me.

(Which is the reason these topics get avoided here: like everywhere else on the internet, they turn smart people into name-callers)
Reiner's tileset: free quality game sprites for commercial use
I don't know where that article appeared in the newsprint version of NYTimes. But the url (nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html) suggests the "Fashion" section. Hence: a lightweight piece that does not go deeply into either the Business or Media aspects of blogging.

Note also, since the discussion tends to slide to blog-vs-newspaper: This reader is not pleased that following the link to the NYT article takes me through a jeweler's ad page. "All the news that's fit..." ...and a lot of UNfit attempts to sustain profitability.
hey, sorry I wasnt suggesting you plan was bad :) it sounds badass. I have considered writing briefly in the past but gave up due to lack of motivation - so your probably going the right way for attempt #1. Thinking about it now were I to go back and seriously try again I suspect I'd end up in the same place.

Well r.e. PG I just meant that it's not the same as a penniless author considering writing a book. PG can invest his time in writing those essays because it serves a purpose (i.e. establishes his credentials and respect). BUT he gets coverage on a lot of those essays by already being respected (like topping up the tank :)). And if they get ignored (unlikely) there's no financial fall out for him.

Im sure there are lots of people in the same boat with some great things to say: but many get passed over and go unnoticed.

But, meh it's hardly worth disagreeing over :D thanks for the info.
IIRC, in one of Wil Shipley's presentations, I think he mentioned that they did this at Omni, and while the constant ringing of cash-register sound effects was nice at first, it got old fast.
Why opt Tech Support Companies for Wireless Network Support?
Today the latest network technology is wireless network. Network without wire is attracting people to switch over to wireless network. But in real it's not so easy to configure a secured wireless connection for this you need special devices and at times you need to have technical support.
yes, digital calculator is allowed
Alright, I see where you're coming from.

Cheers! :-)
And yet, you understood what he meant.

As I become a little less young, I begin to realize that perfect grammar matters less than I used to believe. And if someone would judge me for beginning this sentence with "And", then I probably wouldn't want to associate myself with them anyway.
Is that story about John Dalton true? I know he is attributed with discovering color blindness as an illness and whatnot, but I can't find any other reference about Dalton, color blindness, and christmas socks: http://bit.ly/ySNwL
Ah - didn't know that, thanks. Not very discoverable though - glad they changed it.
Gender gap in perception of computer science
Reversing the arrow of time on this kind of thing has provided intellectual entertainment for ages ... Nowadays, the most frequent answer seems to be "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded" - which may be true but is obviously unsatisfactory to brains addicted to pattern-matching and causality-finding.

Flipping the arrow forwards again, there's the "immanentize the eschaton" angle.

Thanks for the link/article. Shannon is on my "people I admire" list, and I've read some of his papers and looked around in the AT&T site, but this titbit had escaped me before.

Do check the link in the article, http://www.research.att.com/~njas/doc/shannonbio.html (and there's more links in that page): "the man who invented a rocket-powered Frisbee and who juggled while riding a unicycle through the halls of Bell Labs." Ha!
Fair enough. Do we have any solid references of the actual average rate of tweets?
Apple WWDC Keynote Stream now live...
Graduate school for unemployed college students
I liked it too, and that makes it relevant enough for me.
I think that definitely counts as a "nice problem to have" :-)
The Economist: The World's Biggest Military Spenders by Population
What a strange assertion you make there. I have used both the IPhone and the G1 and in my opinion the physical keyboard is clearly superior for writing anything longer than "omg lol!".

I doubt I'm alone with this preference.
A lot of times I think it also goes like this: you blog interesting content, and eventually a publisher approaches you and asks you if you want to make a book out of it. Then the work to prepare the articles for publication in book form might be acceptable.

Wasn't trying to defend my silly idea, just trying to portray some ways of thinking that might go into writing a book. Although admittedly I also wrote it here to hear criticism, in case it actually IS stupid.
Some arbitrary "best practices" don't make up for the language's general inadequacies (nor do any existing libraries). You might be able to write slightly less bad code, but you still aren't writing expressive code.
I understood what he meant, but I now also think he's an idiot that can't write.

You are free to use whatever English you want, but others are free to make inferences about who you are from that writing. It's best to write well (and "follow the rules"), so you have the best possible chance of not being viewed negatively.
Rom Machine a Review « Rom Machine
i think i'm more annoyed that the guy's obviously lying through his teeth while trying to assess how much shit he could possibly be in for.

plus, that logo is horrid. looks like something an intern/temp would have worn on the starship enterprise.
This is what Stephen Fry calls the "Milkman's Whistle" style of journalism. Good example too, complete with slightly ironic close.
If you wake up every morning at 6, give up TV and treat this list like a job, you'll have no trouble accomplishing everything on it.

And quickly run out of money!

The reason unemployed people are not multitasking hobbies, volunteering and self-improvement programs is that it costs money to go places, do things, and meet people.
THE panic in the Manhattan real estate market of the winter of 2009 lifted in the last few weeks, brokers say ...

Color me confused - is this a hypothetical piece about the market six months from now?
Oh, I definitely agree, but after a while it might make sense to only play a sound every n sales. :)
Meh, anyone who's coding for this platform must have put those id's in a unsigned integer, wouldn't they?
As the credit at bottom of this Guest Editorial says, "Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California. He wrote this article for the Mercury News." [or at least signed it after staff wrote it].

It says what the administration envisions but an op-ed from governator is nothing like a white paper from the IT sector that is developing the plan. :/
will the tutoring company satisfy GPL requirement if it includes a dozen pages of GPL license on each of its tutoring materials (vehicles, documents, advertising, website and any other media)?

assuming such logo is GPL
How Max Clifford makes you famous
the previous episodes seem legit. this one feels fake to me.

Very lucky to be videoing in his pocket when he got fired....

And it does sound a bit staged.

But then I know managers like that so.....
you have been an accessory to commerce!
When did a 12 hour project become "an age"? Real watchmakers like John Harrison spent /years/ on a single piece.
Trademarks aren't necessarily the same issue as copyright, but in this case, it does seem like leaving them alone would be best, since they (Arch) assert that they haven't used it since 2007. What with asking the community to intervene, however, it's likely too late for that.
If you believe that author entitlement trumps the social benefit of distributing books to everybody whether or not they can afford to buy them, then why aren't you advocating closing down all the libraries?
I haven't seen one, but it's easy enough to get it. Just check the UID of the latest tweet on the public timeline, wait a week and check again.
Seth -- I know what you're getting at. Instead of hanging out watching TV, get involved deeply with things that make you a better person.

Oddly enough, those qualities are supposed to be the things that college gives to kids. Yet we have to remind them. Wonder if the public could get a partial refund on all of that money we spent?

But putting it in a quick list loses the point. Makes it look like a to-do list instead of your life's mission: learn something! Pour yourself into something bigger than yourself! Plus people can then take potshots at each item in the list, completely missing the point.
You can check the data for an arbitrary country in Wolfram Alpha:
http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=israel+military+spend...

The numbers are different because they are estimates, possibly from different years. But is there a way to get the whole table of countries, sorted? I'm interested in the rest of the countries as well.
I certainly agree, and I think this applies to more than just businesses. Blogs, for example, greatly benefit from live stats. Which is why it's so annoying that Google Analytics doesn't offer live stats.

Being able to quickly spot where the traffic to an article is coming from allows you react to it, and maybe go to that traffic source and help shape the discussion there. When submitting articles to multiple sites, it also gives you a better idea of how your article is performing. Sometimes, this has allowed me to tweak an article after posting it, to fix perceived errors that were hurting it in some way.

And of course, this applies even more when you're looking at a business.
I think you could definitely do that with Lua (I know someone has ported it to J2ME), and Javascript. Python and Ruby are harder, because they are bigger, and their Java implementations use lots of more 'advanced' stuff like reflection and bytecode generation that are not going to fly on Dalvik.
That effort has been put into sequencing and arranging, which would still give a claim to copyright.
Off-topic, but please note in title of such links when they are only audio (or video). ...or link to a transcript, if any.

Text can be scanned. Audio takes real (valuable) time.
Kite-like sail cuts ship fuel consumption up to 35%
This sort of person does exist, though it seems they would rather walk the streets jingling cylinders than seek employment.
I was born and raised Polish and lately I've been talking it way more since my Grandpa is in the country. I've definitely experienced this.

I usually find myself knowing the word in English but instead of it coming out, my brain keeps thinking and trying to spit out the Polish word. Then, a second later it clicks or someone corrects me. It's annoying, but I'd rather speak two languages than just one :)
Top Productivity applications
Definitely. It's not uncommon when singing to intentionally "mispronounce" certain words to make them more intelligible to the audience. I would think that that skill alone would help without even getting into the tonal aspects.
Songkick Launches History of Concerts Wiki
No content in this article. And even phparch voters only rate this article 2.5 out of 5 stars.

—PHP user
The best you can do is something like this:
http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=israel+military+spend...

But the data is really inconsistent.. Different years for different countries, different years for the population vs military numbers within countries, etc.
And Arabic for numbers! Wowww, crazy.
'Sharing of digital content is basically impossible to stop on an open network'

I agree on this. But the problem is again whether it's right or wrong.

A close example is "You hire a coder to code your idea. And somehow you bypass the paying step."

Yes authors don't write custom books for you. But he expect something back to support his time & effort. But you bypass the paying step by downloading it illegally or let's say 'without paying any'. This logic is applicable for any other intellectual property.

And I support software freedom. I love the freedom. When it comes free (cost wise) it's great. But there's not always free lunch. If the author expect money, we should pay. If the author doesn't expect money we should make him happy for his great work someway.
I don't agree that there is a moral dimension to this debate. As you mention, it's an economic question about optimizing the production of valuable creative works in our society through incentives to authors. This needs to be balanced with the obvious social benefit of making creative works available to the largest audience possible.

In the last 20 years, the variables in this equation have shifted radically. Computers have reduced the effort needed to write and edit a book, while distribution now has no cost at all.

Our intellectual property system very desperately needs to be reexamined in light of the way technology is changing creative production. What matters here is what benefits our entire civilization the most, not what any individual author 'deserves'.

It's clear to me that author moral rights are barely relevant here, since the decision to write a book or not is up to the author. Piracy is a fact, and so are libraries. Somebody who is thinking about writing a book needs to evaluate the effect that both piracy and libraries are going to have on their personal motivations for writing the book and reach a conclusion about whether or not it makes sense for them to put in the effort.
I agree, and this is actually the problem I have with most steampunk sculpture.
Every time some new project comes along, the "what makes this project special" inevitably appears.

In this case, shouldn't it be "What makes Android special?", since ASE is a complementary addition?
Aid to Africa is minimal. Compare the GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa. excluding South Africa to the amount of Aid received - it's minimal and insignificant.
Is it necessary to spend money for volunteering, meeting people and self-improvement programs? In any case, this list could apply to those who have the opportunity to support themselves with a part time job or something else
Summary: "The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently"

Twitter appeals to people who really, really care about news in real time. Like techies, bloggers and journalists. These people feed the hype cycle because it's what matters to them.

But like most of the "real" people I have tried to introduce to twitter, rss readers, popurls etc they just say "I don't have time for that. Does any of it really matter?".

And the answer is honestly... no. All important news eventually bubbles to the top. Knowing it first doesn't really convey an advantage in the vast majority of cases.
I see these all the time, but never a single "spenders by GDP" chart. What gives? Seems like that info's more relevant anyways - how would they spend money they don't have?
I'll do so on the day the libraries start to have same number of copies from each book equal to the number of users.
This was my initial reaction, but I think it's just bad writing. The headline should have been "MoFo offers new branded bulk-installer product" or similar.
Link Didn't work for me. This one does.

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_12536333
It's such a low barrier of entry and almost non-existant learning curve to code for Twitter, so I expect quite a lot of services to have made that mistake. Not the big ones, though.
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Yes, I was hoping for that also. I am curious as to where North Korea stands. Their nuclear weapons program must eat up a lot of their (presumably small) GDP.

Edit: I answered my own question:

http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=north+korea+military+...
The entire article appeared to be presuming that ATC was only concerned with "safe, orderly and expeditious" flow of air traffic and not with murky ownership of the aircraft. In my (non-repo man) experience, that is all that ATC cares about.

ATC won't care about #3 ever. If you're not in class B, ATC won't care about #2. Jets are allowed to fly VFR, too; they just don't very often. In class B, you can get your clearance by cell phone, and start using the radios once you get to the movement area (or at a non-primary class B airport, when taking the active).
BING: Bing Is Not Google.
Is that really important? It seems that the relevant observation here is that just like piracy, libraries reduce opportunities for authors to receive compensation for their work.
Yeah, good point. The bbc offer both an audio podcast and a transcript on the site I linked. I listened to it live this morning but didn't have the time to listen to the QA session afterward, so printed out the transcript and will go over it with a fine toothed comb sometime soon.

Know it's a bit of everyone's (valuable) time I'm asking for, but this is the type of topic I would like to see gain the big discussion threads here on HN. But time is money, so I can't expect too much! Hope some find it interesting at least.
Because AT&T have limited bandwidth (the physical constraints of the universe prevent any other option), and they offer "unlimited" service based upon the average usage pattern of phones (+ a few standard deviations) being within their networks capabilities. The usage pattern of computers is significantly different (p2p services, background downloading, etc.) so in order to be able to offer unlimited service for that usage pattern they need to increase their own limited bandwidth significantly.

If you want "true" unlimited bandwidth (using your full download speed 24/7) you would have to pay a order of magnitude more for the service.
Sigh. Elitism and witch hunts are boring, don't you think?
Somewhat related; kites as wind turbines: http://www.ted.com/talks/saul_griffith_on_kites_as_the_futur...