skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The running is reducing your exposure time, and that reduce is enough to get you less wet.

Um, the "exposure time" variable is exactly that. The act of running causes you to increase your rain exposure, so unless I'm missing something, at some point the "exposure time" will become long enough that the act of running is rendered ineffective, and then actually becomes worse. (For example, if you ran around in a circle for a set time, instead of from point to point).

Like I said, I do get that by that point it may not functionally matter, and that if you ran from your car to the store you will not be as wet as if you walked, but it is important to understand the subtleties in order to properly understand why.
Cool! Another French word to overuse!
Apple has always tried to control all aspects of its platform, hardware, and software, so I don't think we should be surprised by its draconian rules governing the app store.

That said, I think it's pretty clear by now to most of us that iPhone/iPod Touch users and developers alike would benefit from a more transparent, less restrictive app policy. I'm just not sure that kind of policy is in Apple's DNA.
What standards does AIR stick to that Silverlight doesn't?
There is a typo. Separated is spelled wrong next to "Add Categories" button.
Despite the name, JSON is not isomorphic to the definition of JSON object literals. It is by design a subset. This provides both future-proofing against later changes in ECMAScript (adding keywords), and simplifies the grammar for conforming parsers. Simpler grammars mean less opportunity for errors and non-conformant implementations.

"A hack around would be to regexp a replace to add quotes, and then JSON.parse it,"

That is an absolutely terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Do not do that, especially if you're shipping around a "few billion JSON objects a day"! Running regexps over things that require a grammar to fully understand is asking for disaster.

"IMHO, JSON.parse should function exactly as eval does for de-serializing js objects."

The entire purpose is to get away from "eval". How do you like '{"test": window.close()}" in your JSON?

JSON is a cross-language serialization format that was inspired heavily by the fact that Perl, Python, and Javascript had very similar object literals and underlying data structures. It is not simply Javascript in a fancy spec, and you're missing the point if you think it is or treat it like it is. If you're just moving JS around, then ship whatever you like down. Back in the days before anybody had heard of JSON, I used to do that; as long as you're in control of the JS it works fine. (It's useless for communication between different entities, though.)
Why would he be bewildered? The reasons for the bombing are public. He has full access to them.
Samsung D600 Unlocked With Bluetooth Headset
Samsung D600 has got amazing features and supports, Its great resolution of camera. D600 phone has incorporated newest edition of basic functions like calculator, calendar, converter and many more. It keeps 1000 contacts with 20 dialed, received.
I agree. If you buy a fixer-upper house, you have an opportunity to get your fill of demolition work and wood chopping through sweat equity. I swear our house helps keeps me in shape.

[Edit] : From my home improvement work, I started practicing carpentry using both power and hand tools. A bench plane can be a lot of fun to use.
How hard exactly did you search for the exact sentence out of that post that, if I was solely responding to that, would invalidate my point?

You have to do your part when reading other people's arguments and at least try to find out why they might have a point, instead of searching for the exact angle that doesn't make sense. That pessimizes the information content you can get from someone; there's always an angle where it's wrong, no matter how you have to torture the English to get there, but because that's always true, that's information-free.

Incidentally, make sure you know what the term means, I had to look it up myself to make sure I wasn't misusing it: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shiftless
> As a user, I really don't care what the underlying tech is

This applies for most users. How many Twitter users who use Tweetdeck (which I argue is the most successful Adobe Air application in terms of daily use) care that it is Adobe Air?

Or how many iPhone app users care that it is written in Objective-C + Cocoa? Or how many GMail users wonder about what it is really going on in the Google cloud? I'm starting to think most users don't care much at all about the underlying technology as long as it works reliably and performs.
You are right, my definition is non-standard and has an economic implication. In societies with large and extended families in one household, the women are often responsible for feeding everyone, even if the men are tasked with the generation of income.

To use an extreme example of a patriarchal society, in the arab world, even if women are largely out of the workforce, they're still responsible for the household budget and they often generate secondary income on the side. It's very common for them to save money, shaving pennies from the grocery shopping and saving it for a rainy day. Hardly the binge-shopping desperate housewives alluded to in that article.

Also missing from the article is what women are buying. If you're left to feed a whole family, your purchasing habits are hardly the same as someone who has to worry about his cigarettes and a few other personal necessities ;-)

Read up on the work of Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank to understand this better.
The Next Best Thing to You
Looks like they started with something like http://www.swftools.org/ and developed a custom viewer for the swf files.

For doc and other formats, one can use openoffice commandline tools to convert them all to pdf.

edit: Some history - http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9874527-2.html Scribd initially used the now discontinued flash paper.
This ties into what I like to call the "other gambler's fallacy", wherein one's visceral understanding of probability tends to exaggerate high probabilities and underestimate low probabilities. That is, one sees a probability like 0.001, and ends up treating it as though it were zero.

That said, I'm not sure about the solution the guy proposes. It's basically patents for esoteric financial instruments. While I don't see anything inherently wrong with the idea, patents as they are now nominally exist to speed innovation. This idea is intended to slow the spread of innovations in one particular area.

In other words, it's possible that this system could develop all the problems that the patent system has: people would come up with slight variations on an existing financial instrument so that they could sell it without buying a license from the creator, or for marketing reasons, or whatever. This would naturally make instruments more complicated, which in turn makes them harder to reason about.
The G1 is hardly mentioned at all. If you want to compare the Pre to the iPhone then just title your post Palm Pre vs iPhone.
I was intentionally trying to avoid the "was it fair, should they have done it" argument, because it's an infinite loop debate. When I quoted Mr. Yamaguchi as saying, "How could they do that?", I was not echoing his question, but commenting on the state of mind he was in when he asked it.

I am neither smart nor wise enough to comment confidently on whether the bombs ought to have been dropped or not.
It's good to know that I'm not the only geek who occassionally dreams of being a carpenter or mechanic.
ironkeith, this most likely is a HN effect (luckily? :)
The webapp has been developed with performance in mind, however I've already noticed some glitches to fix.
Here's a good public domain implementation:
http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/tinycdb.html
I will concede that point, I misread your comment. I deleted my original to hopefully avoid that discussion.
I'd rather own Tesla.
Randomize the left and rightness of the choices, and make the "or" centered (make it a 3-column table). Otherwise you will have heavy right-hand bias in the voting.
That's a great anecdote. I did a Google search to get more info on that meeting but couldn't find anything. How did you come by it?
Evil might be a bit strong of a word for such a simple misunderstanding. The tendency to go for extremes in debate is well known, but it tends to destroy any ability to talk about the problem.
In reality, AT&T is probably calling some of the shots on Apple's censorship rules. In any-case, censorship of age-old sexual how-to books strikes me as silly, but certainly not evil.
I couldn't find any credits, but the narrator in the video at the bottom of this article sounds like Samuel L. Jackson (to my ears).

I had no idea we were building such a facility. It sounds like fertile scientific ground.
Dominos: A New Web Crawler's Design
a paper presented during web-archiving workshop by Younès Hafri and Chabane Djeraba. seems pretty neat...
Good point! Thanks for the suggestion, i will fix that.
Here's a thought. I'm not claiming it's true or correct, but it's how I understand things ...

Looking at it from the outside, as a non-participant who has studied (and practised!) game theory and strategic decision making, it seems obvious and clear as to what happened, and the reasons behind it.

When you're on the inside, maybe it's different. Maybe it's hard to divorce feelings from reason, emotion from rationality. Maybe the reasons, although logical and reasonable, don't seem to make sense.

Surely a different viewpoint changes your perception.

Looking at it from the inside, perhaps he can't see what you can see - simply and dispassionately.

Looking at it from the outside, maybe you can't understand how he feels.
paper presented by Younès Hafri and Chabane Djeraba in the web-archiving workshop. seems pretty neat...
Great video on the hiroshima bombing simulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rHrV2QhArA

I find it incredible someone could experience that twice in a week.
vim ~/ideas.txt
Except you've linked to the conference, not the paper.

Here's the paper:

http://iwaw.europarchive.org/04/Hafri.pdf
Also see http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/i-hate-oracle-resul....
I usually just use a text file (Textmate is my editor of choice) to create a spec sheet describing what my idea is and how it works. From there I share that planning doc with my partner and we start making mockups together (or more likely, she does, since my Photoshop skills suck). If I need to make a mockup for her to clarify something in the text file, I use Photoshop, or since my Photoshop skills suck, pen and paper (not that my pen and paper drawing skills are any better).

No wow factor, but it works for us.

To present ideas to people on the outside, I usually just do it verbally or via email. You should be able to explain your idea in relatively simple terms using nothing but words, imho. Again, no wow factor, but it works for us.
Lithium sulfur batteries: hope for 4x li-ion
I've been using Things to keep track of ideas as well.

Actually, I've started using things for all kinds of notes and code snippets. I love it.
Testable and reliable chunks are totally cool, but they are increasingly unrealistic and "passé". Modern systems use lots of unreliable parts which are not well defined (eg Google's server farms), and before long (especially at MIT) there will be quantum computers whose behavior will be impossible to exactly quantify or predict. Teaching students how to get real work done in these uncertain environments is definitely preparing them for real computing systems of the future.
Can someone spell this out phonetically in English? I'm just learning French. :)
Here's a somewhat more visual version of this that I whipped up quickly when this appeared on Reddit: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rDPGKugP7_BC8ksp3PFyy...
Thanks for pointing this out!
I should have checked it twice...
Is there anything new in Visual Studio 2010?
The paper mentioned may be the last (May 2009) reference recently added here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_sulfur_battery
Ask HN: Flag spammers accounts ?
Hi All,
Over the last week or so, I decided to enable [showdead].

I wanted to get a flavour of what submissions constitute signal/noise. I stumbled upon stevefranklis's profile (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stevefranklis) and have found nothing more than spam posts.

Is there anyway to flag this account? I know that spammers will change and start creating temp accounts for spam, but aggressive mods and users will help to stamp this out
I'm impressed you went through the steps of adding thousand's separators to his number!
It is very common in Italian too ("Deformazione professionale").
I've just tried creating an account and logging in to folist, but I get the "You don't have a board" page, and then nothing happens. Am I doing something wrong? There doesn't seem anyone to ask, any links to click ...

I'm confused.
I agree, the interface is not perfect now, but it will get better over time.
Interesting rule, however I disagree with the extent of the assumptions taken from the experiment in the wiki, because:

Blasting the second group with a less painful noise AFTER a more painful noise will result in a sense of relief when the less painful noise occurs. I believe this relief has a big impact on what people remember.

Also, I believe the second group would insist on increased unpleasantness if the less painful noise preceded the more painful noise.

Nonetheless, I believe there is some truth to the rule.
Hackerspaces now are what computer clubs were in the 1970's.
I'm having the same problem in both Firefox and Safari. A better waiting signal would cut down on the frustration of trying to figure out if it's working or just broken. It seems to be doing this for the english-only word searches. If you combine english with any other language, the process speeds up dramatically.
"Business constraints" are other peoples' decisions in a company that you don't control or influence over. Some of these "poor decisions" may be viewed as good decisions, from a different perspective.

"Why didn't they redesign the site 12 months ago so we could see it today? One or more poor decisions twelve months ago, that's why."

Maybe this was a good decision optimizing for something you aren't aware of.

"Other companies like ING and Apple get it."

Perhaps some would think they make poor decisions too.

Decisions optimize for things based on a perspective. If you share the perspective, it's a good decision, if you have a different one, perhaps it is a poor one.
That's a good point and is a result of how Microsoft and Apple has positioned and controlled their products. I've had a good experience developing and using Microsoft products. So have my hacker friends. My elderly dad, on the other hand, can't seem to keep his Windows machine running. Over time, it'll become this bloated, slow machine. I got him an Apple and there are fewer problems.
i guess naming it "paskell" might bring back some bad memories
I use Microsoft OneNote for jotting down my ideas. I found it pretty fuctional and free flowing for my use. I can also just output a project notebook as a PDF and send it over.

I am proud of whoever at MS made that piece of app.... for some reason it feels different than any of their other stuff.
It's really easy to say that, and yet...

Do you really think UX people at Apple or ING don't have to go through this as well? They might not have quite as many people impacting the process, but there are still hurdles they have to jump through.

Working for a large corporation is a challenge. You do the best you can to effect change, but most of the time you have to settle for small victories and pick your next battle. It sucks, but that's what you do.
I am not totally convinced that WPF & Silverlight are even in competition with one another. They are both based on the same core technology, XAML. Without knowing what Microsoft's long term plans (presuming they have them) for the two technologies, it's hard to say with any certainty whether or not they intend to converge the two eventually or phase one out in favor of the other.

I am not really sure how great of an indicators book are. All of the "usual suspect" publishers either have books on the topic or are working on them.
Although Evernote is also pretty good i heard.
Microsoft still can't figure out how to make Windows 7 make sense on netbooks
I'm very late to this party.
(not sure if this is still a hot issue)

Just thought I'd mention, that there seems to be some work in this area.

gem2deb - a gem to a *.deb (Debian/Ubuntu) package
http://github.com/thwarted/gem2deb/tree/master

(and for rpm's)
http://rubyforge.org/projects/gem2rpm/

a repo for rhel/deb/others
http://rubyworks.rubyforge.org/

I'm sure there are others,...
It makes you wonder why they don't mark applications with the explicit tag that they use for the rest of the iTunes Store. Then you could have parental controls that disallow explicit content (apps or otherwise) from being visible to certain users (your kids' iTunes accounts).
I turned showdead OFF a long time ago.

The moderation system seems to be working, as the spam posts don't last very long.

pg is a relatively bright guy, at least according to what I've read, so I imagine that if there were some benefit or requirement for flagging accounts instead of submissions it would be implemented (or in progress).

So, given that I see very little spam in the actual pages with showdead off, I think that whatever is currently in place is working.

It might be that NOT flagging these accounts helps prevent them from setting up new accounts and makes it EASIER to manage the spam problem.
A caveat to TinyCDB in Windows:

Don't forget (In Windows) to specify O_BINARY eg:

O_RDONLY |O_BINARY

Also the case in Berkeley DB 1.86.

Otherwise it opens a file in ASCII mode, when Windows writes \r\n when it reads in \n... , and dies after just a few records.
UVa First-Year Student Computer Inventory: 1997-2008 Comparison
Worthwhile part:

>Call it Madoff’s Law. Where there are consistent returns, it doesn’t mean that the risk is reduced, it means you can’t see the risk.

Worthless part:

>I would create additional forms of licenses (...) that any financial institution can apply for (...) and receive for a new financial instrument.
That's an interesting take. But it feels like an argument over semantics.

So what would you call the requirement that my product parse iCal (RFC2445) instead of ignoring it and simply using the much more rationale Google Calendar GData API?

I could ignore iCal. It'd marginalize me to less than 5% of the market. You could argue it's a decision and you'd be right. But it is a decision that constrains the success of my business. Hence "business constraint".

What am I missing?
It surprises me that they are so successful, despite their draconian rules, fanboism thrives.
In 2007, 51% of college students graduated with a job. In 2009, it's 19.7%.
Not Evil, but certainly brain-dead stupid. I just watched the Eucalyptus Video (http://th.ingsmadeoutofotherthin.gs/eucalyptus/) and -- judging from that -- Eucalyptus an absolutely stellar example of software craftsmanship.
Nope, I give up. It seems to me that what you're saying is either trivially true and therefore completely pointless, or simply wrong. I can't believe you're as clueless as my parsing/reading seems to make you, so I guess we're just talking past each other.

Maybe others will understand you and gain something from it, but I doubt there's much to be gained by you continuing to explain to me, and me trying to understand.

Thanks for trying.
But isn't that completely obvious? Surely he must mean more than that, otherwise his "contribution" is completely pointless.
Per unit time, yes. Per unit distance, no.

I'm just not getting you. I'm giving up.
Please explain why the data format needs quotes around keys.

And yes, I'm just sending data from server to client. I couldn't care less if it conforms to some spec or not. I want an efficient, useful data format.

>> The entire purpose is to get away from "eval". How do you like '{"test": window.close()}" in your JSON?

You're absolutely correct. but that is simple to protect against with a regexp, which is how the json parser at json.org works - regexp it, then eval().

My point is, that for my use case, the native JSON parser will mean an increase in bandwidth. Which is a pain - especially as there isn't a good reason for it.
My mistake, I was referring specifically to the Stern Report - there's a good discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review .

The IPCC (ipcc.ch) also plays games with discount rates.
Well, it appears that the sidebar is confusing and non user-friendly. I will work on this more.
I'm curious, is your ISP a cable company? I have DSL through Verizon, and maybe they like the idea I can watch ESPN without paying Comcast for it. I wonder if they will block it if FiOS comes to my area (but I've been told that Comcast and the city of Pittsburgh have a sweetheart deal to block it).

In any case, blocking content is exactly the kind of thing we should be mad about. If I can access the content I want free or for a reasonable price on the device of my choosing (Mac in my case), I am very happy regardless of the underlying technology. But ISPs blocking content their customers want is only a feasible business strategy with a government backed monopoly and as consumers we should be upset about it.

Lastly, I am starting to suspect that the networks who create content would be perfectly happy to see cable companies reduced to common carrier status and deliver all their shows and broadcasts through Hulu or their own branded web sites. I would love to see the networks lobbying against the cable companies in Congress.
Thing is, it doesn’t even have to be something intensely physical like chopping wood or landing crabs. I code all day, but I come home and enjoy cooking. Not only do I get healthier food out of it, but there’s the satisfaction of producing something deliberately physical that my friends and I can enjoy for what it is.
Jytes been doing this for a few years: http://jyte.com/
Currently the number of pages is virtually unlimited.
In Python, what is the value of this expression: x % 3.3 == (x+1) % 3.3
Twine Is Taking Off, Now Bigger Than FriendFeed
What I'm saying is I don't think it matters what Microsoft is going to do. With XNA being the way to write games now and Silverlight V3 looking like it can do everything WPF can (in a (theoretically) multi-platform enviornment to boot) why would anyone choose WPF?

As for books, the fact that there are already dramatically more Silverlight books out there and it came out after WPF I'd say that indicates something.
Hi, a real human interface [video, art, poetry]
Yup. Spot on with his analysis of the problem, completely off with his idea for a solution.
On the Web Every User's Opinion Counts (Even the Pirate's)
Thank you pg and rtm
That's true. When I was in college as a CS undergrad, the only hardware-themed course we were required to take was an Intro to Computer Engineering class that was mostly done on paper (think logic gate circuit diagrams and truth tables).

There was an end-of-term lab requirement where you inserted wires into a board full of tiny holes (I forget its actual name) to demonstrate certain basic circuits, but that was it. I remember that there was no professor or TA for the lab so you were completely on your own.