skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of mp3 players sync with iTunes. There are a lot of exciting things about the Pre, this isn't one.
Try using Safari. It plays Flash much, much better than Firefox.
The brand is the only thing that matters. Everyone here saw the post last week, consumers gave Live Search the highest marks when it was dressed up with a Google logo and stylesheet.

The brand is it. And branding doesn't sink or swim based on name alone, but it isn't a trivial factor.
"I quite like..."

But that's just a taste preference (though I agree with the sentiment; I personally don't like white backgrounds in general). Plus, all indications are that the images are just a haphazard marketing decision. Good design controls and deliberately influences user behavior patterns. This just tries to look pretty and not be google, disregarding any impact that might have on usability or functionality.
Oh, I'm sure these products, just like laundry soap , in the superlative war of marketing (see link below), will come up with something to one-up "the ultimate" inbox experience.

Why stop at the inbox? The inbox is so... limiting. Who wants to be stuck in a box?. Maybe something like that.

Article: Detergent can be so much more (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982087.... ).
StarBucks, and I assume other retailers, have figured this out and offer refillable cards.

The idea is that you put say $25 on the card and that is a one time VISA charge. Then each time you use the card there is no additional merchant charge to them.

At the price of say $3 drink this can save them 7 of the 8 flat fee credit card processing charges, the variable charges for using the credit card are of course still there.
It is a disaster for a cartoon WOMAN to deliver pickup line that could only come form a sleazy man. It just doesn't make any sense. It is confusing.

You need to have a second cartoon character who represents the attractive male counterpart to your sexy woman.

Any interesting variation would be to vary the attractiveness of the male or female delivering the pickup line and measure how much it affects whether the line is acceptable. The more attractive the person speaking is, the less it matters what their opening line is.
From the article:

"the odds were changed to - Roman gets White every game, the computer offers up a different pawn each game."

So the computer gave Dzindzi an enormous handicap.
Yeah, it looks a lot like XMPP to me, too:

"The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open extension to XMPP core [RFC3920] protocol..."

(From the first paragraph of the draft spec.)

Whatever your feelings about XMPP, I challenge you to point to a standardized, interoperable protocol that you think would be a better fit. It may not be ideal, but it's extensible, already supported by a large number of clients and servers, and doesn't require starting from scratch when building interoperable software.
Well, T has been the true value in Common Lisp, at least, and I don't remember it ever causing me a problem. Of course, in CL, you can shadow it in your own namespace, and that hasn't been possible in Arc without writing a namespace library first. :)
Google getting behind HTML 5 is probably going to force Microsoft's hands quite a bit. I can't imagine Google rolling out a bunch of new RIA features and having them break in IE, it would look terrible for Microsoft.
Introducing Three Python Web Frameworks: Django vs. Pylons vs. TurboGears
That's like Contenture, except Contenture is easier because you don't have to vote.
Congratulations for what? Law is not working due to weak government. I am afraid that if somebody will try to enforce DRM software to comply with law, law will be changed quickly.

I live in Ukraine (Eastern Europe).
"Python vs. Ruby (Perl’s Ugly Sister)...This makes the Ruby syntax look like someone emptied all the symbols from the keyboard into a shotgun and shot them into your face."

It's amazing watching the python web development community develop, nurture and encourage so much mindless trolling. It has turned reddit completely septic and now this garbage is on the front page here? Sigh.
Voila! I give you XMPP + threading:

http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0201.html (last updated Feb. of last year)

Wave is XMPP, with additional Google extensions for a variety of collaboration features. That is possible because the first letter in XMPP doesn't stand for "XML", it's the (annoying but common) "eXtensible", suggesting that domain-specific additions are not only accepted, they are encouraged.
I think we are reading too much from cryptic political messages.

Unless HTML5 and canvas gain a lot of momentum, and Google is doing a lot in this direction, Microsoft will come up with a broken half-compatible and quirky implementation geared to badmouth the whole HTML5 thing as they did with the ODF "support" in Office.
The Open Source Myth
Label Printing Captivates Your Imagination
That is the type of stuff nightmares are made of.
It's difficult because Google needs to compromise themselves enough to work for the IE majority. If they break too much then people won't get Chrome. They'll stop using Google.
It sounded like they all used to work for Apple. I'm honestly surprised Apple hasn't acquired them yet (possible they turned them down I guess), seems like such a perfect acquisition to me.
Sparkfun has a number of relatively inexpensive FPGA boards to use. I might get one if I finish some of my other things this summer.
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/advanced_search_result.php?...
I don't see how this get around the fact that merchant fees will be 10, 20, or 30% of the amount sent to the website/corp/user that ultimately receives the payment. If you pay the "wrapper" site (what I'm calling the site you propose) $30 and it has to be divvied up x times, the wrapper site pays $1-$2 in processing fees to receive the money. They then take a cut and divvy the remaining money. Let's make it $25. If there are 25 sites to pay $1 each, what payment method does the wrapper site employ so that the merchant payment fees don't make it unprofitable? This is a lot like that piratebay "donations" scheme earlier this month.
Fuck monkeys, make me a glowing cat! I'd buy that.
Those text replacement techniques (sIFR/cufon) have downsides though. You can't manipulate the replaced text as you would normally, you lose some functionality because you've replaced text with flash/canvas/image etc., and you won't see anyone replace entire body text using those techniques.

Using the standard @font-face css technique instead of a text replacement hack allows your custom fonts to have all the same benefits of standard browser text.
I don't think you can do that just via the history. A lot of pages are just sitting there in my tabs because I am not paying attention to them, not because I am engrossed in them. You need to be able to see what the user is really doing.

I remember a while back in the UK there was a study to actually measure real attentiveness while the TV was on. Cameras were installed inside people's TVs to record the viewers so their focus could be noted. This was all very clearly explained to them, but as time went by, and people being people, they eventually started to forget the camera was there; so in some cases the poor researchers got a bigger share of, err, domestic activities than they bargained for.
Danny Sullivan: Meet Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine
all-in-one does solve the problem of moving a conversation between all the different and incompatible existing systems. seamless integration is a huge win.
Wake me when it's all over. It's just too much.
Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?
Honestly, man, most people don't care enough about their OS to despise it. My parents or wife or non-techie friends have ever said anything bad (or good) about Vista. It's just there.

I firmly believe it's a case of tech echo chamber at work.

I will add that when I gave instructions on disabling UAC it did result in "oh, that's good" type of comments. But I did that proactively. Never had them come to me seeking relief from it. Kinda like when a loud furnace shuts off in the winter and it's so much more pleasantly quiet, but you didn't even notice it when it was on.
Time Warner Confirms Plan For AOL Spinoff
STRIP is dead Long live Strip
I think wave is an indicator of something profound about what our computing and networking infrastructure is good for. It's good for us to collaborate on digital content. It's not so good for us to cooperate without that 3rd digital object -- directly with each other. For that to happen, we need to revamp the entire interface, so it's not a total perception and attention sink. We need to be able to interact with the world and other people in the world, and have computing as only a side channel or an augmentation.
I know all about cron, I was looking to see if people choose to just queue up all their jobs in a scheduler, if they fire up stand alone scripts, daemons, etc.
You need aggregation! Here, let me help:

Use iGoogle. RSS+email. If that's too cluttered for your tastes, use Google Reader separately. In my system, RSS is for bulk while email is for specifics.

Twitter: RSS the feeds you care about, have personal tweets go to your cell. No more checking twitter.

Facebook: Use the mobile feature for things you really care about, and email for the less important things. They don't allow RSS for their news feed, so if you care about that... you're mostly out of luck :(

Bug tracker: Email + RSS. Works very well.

Hacker news: RSS.

Also, bonus tip for email: Your cell has it's own email address. Use filters to forward important email to your cell. The message will get chopped, and you will only receive who it's from, the subject, and a couple of words from the body. This reduces the amount of checking you'll have to do, since all the important stuff is taken care of.
The Guardian is one of the UK's biggest newspapers, and is generally known for being tech savvy. This is a decent "elevator pitch" summing up of the story for the Guardian's typical audience.
Hmm... Why not put an armed guard directly in front of the vault? In my experience, most geeks don't mind fooling sensors, but blanche at the thought of physically hurting someone.
I'm a web developer by trade, and even my startups generally at least begin with a wordpress install. I don't agree with their reasoning, but I find it lets me concentrate on other aspects of the startup rather than getting hung up on the design.
"It's amazing watching the python web development community develop, nurture and encourage so much mindless trolling."

Where are you seeing this? There are a fair number of Django and Python posts on HN and this is the first I've read that I can remember any such trolling.
I like it, but my biggest recommendation would be to have columns (rows, boxes, whichever) dedicated to specific categories of apps on the front page. Right now it's a random assortment of apps and it's impossible to tell what they do just by glancing at them--you're forced to do some hard parsing as the app logo/name alone typically doesn't tell you anything. If you represent categories by column, users instantly know that a whole set of apps share something in common, and will have an easier time comparing. First-time visitors will also get a more concrete sense of what's available on your site.

Consider Google News' front page: they divide stories into sections (World, Business, Health, etc.) which gives users a high level overview of the content at a glance, a domain context for headlines in a given section, and allows them to easily ignore whole sets of stories they might not be interested in. The iTunes App Store is the same way.

I'm also not sure how useful the Recently Added section is going to be in the long run. The date at which an app was added to the database is less important for users than the date at which an app launched, went out of private beta, etc.
The article was meant to address transition points from django to rails not start a flamewar. I was never encouraged by anyone to "troll", this is from my personal experiences. There's no conspiracy theory here.
> Getting your Windows refund may take several hours of work, after which you'll get a small amount of money.

I'd rather spend the time working and get a larger amount of money.
Actually I think the master plan is to switch GMail to use Google Wave (note that the demo looks almost exactly like GMail- except better). Suddenly you have a bazillion Wave users. Developers would love to target all these users. Developers start generating lots of different kinds of waves. Email is no longer lame- you can create a custom wave robot to augment your email client however you please. An Mp3 wave, a document sharing wave, a Go game wave, a Hacker News wave, a realtime peer coding wave... Hopefully this will inspire the open source community to set up non Google hosted wave servers and services.

Google Wave also seems like it might be a solid scalable technology on which to build P2P streams.

I work on an open source meta-web project called ShiftSpace. The Google Wave server looks like the perfect backend for what we're working on.
They are opening the protocol.
http://www.waveprotocol.org/
Great post. I won't hold my breath to see it linked on techcrunch
Oh sure. I submitted this story for two reasons - (1) the interesting technicalities regarding language-to-language (or even dialect to dialect) variations in sorting rules and (2) the awesome thoroughness of the reply to a seemingly minor question. tchrist can be quite scary, but this was beyond the call of duty.
I think you're wrong, just because it'd be easy for Wave provider's to legacy-support email/SMTP: just dump incoming emails into your Wave Inbox, flag it, so if you answer it, it is sent back over SMTP. Or let Wave users append to it like a regular wave message, but the user has the option to send it back to the originator as a HTML email. Sounds doable.

More interestingly, given the fact that developers can write apps against the API, this may have a non-trivial intersection with social networking, meaning this could be a competitor to sites like Facebook, Myspace, etc.
What does this article say that hasn't been said before? This stuff just isn't interesting anymore.
The middleman aggregates payments across customers and time, so it sends a few large payments to each site.
Since we're on the subject of the Singularity, are there any Singulatarians here?

If so, do you believe the following logical consequence?

The key logical consequence is the idea that it is possible that your own life is simply an experiment being run on a computer at some point in the future, as an attempt to understand the past or even to test some hardware or software.

If you believe that it will be possible for a human to exist in silico, then there will inevitably be millions of experiments in which entire lives (or even civilizations, etc.) are carried out for no purpose other than the whims of the experimentor.

The scale of the inevitable (to the singulatarian) experimentation is so mind boggling that it's hard to even consider what it means, much less its impact on the probability that your own life -- your very existence -- is taking place inside such a simulation.

Consider, for example, that upon reaching the singularity it wil be possible to simulate the entire history of humanity on earth (and every moment of consciousness of every conscious being). Now suppose it's possible to do this once per year or once per second. This means that the probability that your own conscious state is actually taking place in one of those simulations (rather than in reality) approaches 1.
The First Leftist
I'm very glad they're moving beyond Gmail and doing some real innovation, but honestly I think one of the best features about email is that it isn't just like IM.

That's why we use IM for some things, and email for others... not just because people aren't on IM when we want to write them.

The smart embedding is interesting though.
I wonder how he accounted for the cost of the gold coins? Did he attempt to write it off as a business expense?
Bing:  Behind the scenes
Interesting note, it does NOT require an Intel processor. The site went live with that in the requirements copy, but in truth it's just a suggested minimum in terms of processing power.

I and @hulusupport hashed this out via twitter today and the copy should be changed to reflect this soon.
Yes, there have been a couple of papers, I think, that have said the same thing -- we're more likely to be in a simulation than not.

More strange is the idea that the universe itself -- the real universe, could be a computable machine. This means that it could run plethora of simulations simultaneously. Reality might just be a simulation -- even reality without the idea of a singularity.

If physics and computation turn out to be so delicately linked, it could be turtles all the way down. And that really messes with your mind.

You are correct in that the infinities run away quite easily. To state your comment a different way, the chance that we're not in a simulation already is a limit approaching zero.

I'm just looking for the cheat codes.
Multiplayer Doom should be a lot of fun!

Yes, it... was.
The fundamental problem is one of marketing and convenience.

A tip jar at the counter of Starbucks is unobtrusive, entirely voluntary, and convenient. You see, decide, pay, done. The idea of a tip jar is widely accepted.

To reach the same level of acceptance, micropayments need to come with the browser. They should also be voluntary.
Yes. And no need to arm the guard.
Well maybe I am willing to be excited about the general direction. We have a distributed development environment and the levels of quoting in email do get horrendously out of control. Some of the features described in terms of managing conversation threading and "playback" have potential to address this kind of problem.
Great post? He basically said, "He said, she said, he said again, she said again and we don't don't know what happened." Which is what everyone already knew.
I was never a big user of IM or any real time communications (not even phone) so I don't think I would use it much for that.

But I do like that they experiment with new forms of collaborative document editing. This has always been a big pain. I have thought about it quite a lot myself.

The really difficult thing about collaborative document editing is versioning. The more I think about it the more open questions accumulate.

I have my doubts that a tool that wants to be so many things at the same time can be a good enough collaborative document editing tool. For instance, how do I separate the content that is edited from the communcation _about_ that content? Maybe that becomes obvious when we can actually try it.
I'm happy to see id software benefiting so directly from the GPL release of their source for their old games.

The community got some neat code to play with. And now id has updated OpenGL ready codebases to work with for relatively easy iPhone ports.

No one saw anything like this coming when they first started open sourcing their games.
The Best Kept Secret in the JDK: VisualVM
Ask HN: Signing an NDA online?
I've been emailed a few NDAs to digitally 'sign' by typing my name and then email back. Does anybody know if this is a legal method?
That's nice. Now let's see an official client for set-top boxes, and maybe phones.

It's very buggy, by the way. Crashes within 30 seconds every time I use it.
I've always wondered about this...I live in SF, where a huge number of the little coffee shops are cash only or have a $10 minimum or whatever. As a result, I don't go there, I go to Starbucks instead. I get that the transaction costs of $.25 + 3% is brutal on a $1.50 cup of coffee, but wouldn't it be better to just raise the price of the cheaper items in the store by $.25, or even just $.15? The COG on a cup of coffee is what, like ten cents? So your gross profits are good, you just need more volume. Are consumers really so price sensitive that they'd go elsewhere over a fifteen cent increase? I wouldn't...I value convenience and a good cup of coffee over fifteen cents.
CVS is Jeremy Irons and darcs is Michael Caine.

I can do this crap all day.
This probably has nothing to do with Microsoft's brand equity and everything to do with the fact that people's first association to Google is (and always will be) search, and their first association with Microsoft will never be search.

You could make the same observation about the fact that people use Kleenex and not Kimberly-Clark Wipes.
One hopes for the advent of quantitative social sciences. Hey, even the biologists are starting to employ math. (They call it systems biology.)

See for example "Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?" (http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v69/pdf/bcm_14...)
I agree. I think that's a good idea.
Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? Or, What I Learned while Studying Apoptosis
Their site appears dead.
What's so great about God?  Christopher Hitchens debates Dinesh D'Souza
Definitely shouldn't be easy. Whichever company goes big time with micropayments in the next decade is sure to become a multi-billion dollar company (I'm positive Paypal is worth that much).
It probably varies state by state, but various forms of digital signing are legal. If you are the signer, why do you care if they are enforceable? The weaker the legality, the better off you are. OTOH dont sign anything online that you wouldn't on paper.
Wolfram Co-Founder On Why Wolfram Alpha Doesn't Need to Kill Google
I really don't think the buying credits would work better. It would work, but not better. The whole point of micropayments is spending a tiny bit of money. How is buying $10+ in credits beforehand a micropayment? Defeats the purpose.
I go to Starbucks regularly and rarely see anyone using the Starbucks card. Though I see it being advertised near the cash register everywhere.
This is most definitely real, as indicated by trials and served time of the individuals responsible.
Exactly. Words like "liberal" and "conservative" have become incredibly loaded terms, and the notion that they describe everyone is absurd oversimplification.

At a very basic level, the combination of social and economic issues is silly. The politicalcompass.org site/method is not without bias, but at least they break it into a two dimensional problem.

I've found that a great number of hackers/engineers skew towards more libertarian beliefs, where they may be "liberal" on one issue and then "conservative" on the next, but overall maintain a perfectly rational & consistent basis for their beliefs. These types of people don't fit well on a simplified 1-dimensional line between left & right.
Fox Business: Firefox compared to Apple and Microsoft
You could do the same things with a breadboard, without the tedious wrapping.

At UIUC, one of the assignments for a required course in the Computer Engineering department is to build a (simple) 4-bit processor. We only got a week to do it, so you can be damn sure we used a breadboard and had a system in place to debug the thousands of wires.
Xmonad [1] makes for an interesting example. Through refactoring, writing tests with QuickCheck and sharp thinking the authors found ways to make the paths to simpler design and correctnes lead in the same direction. They used data structures that embodied more domain knowledge. Thus they eliminated the need for many runtime error checks.

[1] See http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2007/05/01