skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I couldn't agree with you more. So many well-known sites are publishing terrible native apps for the iPhone which could have been much more effectively implemented by some CSS/js tweaks.

For instance, the PayPal app is utterly terrible, and gives only a fraction of the functionality you get from PayPal's full site. A few weeks, at most, could turn the PayPal site into an incredible custom iPhone web app.

And to add insult to injury, they don't even take advantage of the benefits that a native app gives you on the iPhone. For instance, they don't use the keychain to securely store login credentials so you don't have to re-login each time you launch the application (if the user requests it).
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/03/07/southwest.planes/index....

"Boeing Inc., the plane's manufacturer, which was contacted when the problems arose, said that at no time were the cracks unsafe, Kelly said. "Cracks do occur. That's why we do inspections.""

Also

""In this particular situation, we identified a gap in our documentation. We voluntarily reported that to the FAA. We worked out with the FAA how to fix that problem, and we fixed it," he said on CNN's "American Morning.""

But you know what? I'll concede, that was a huge blunder on Southwest's part. However, they found it in a safety audit and took all appropriate actions. Still, that should never happen.

Moving on, let's look at their safety record. From http://www.airsafe.com/events/airlines/luv.htm

"Southwest Airlines has not had any fatal events involving a passenger since it began service in 1971."

Take a look at this chart and compare the "passenger" fatalities per flights flown, to the other more expensive airlines.

http://www.airsafe.com/airline.htm

We can also look at a general crash database:

http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/airline_detail.cgi?airlin...
http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/airline_detail.cgi?airlin...
http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/airline_detail.cgi?airlin...

and Southwest

http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/airline_detail.cgi?airlin...

(southwest has operated since 1971 so you should keep limit your scope of crashes to those years for the other airlines)
There was no gene flow from the Americas to the rest of the world during that time period. So unless you're Native American, it doesn't really matter.

More importantly, 10,000 years is enough time to see some evolution, but when we are talking about the "diet we evolved for" the time-scale to look for is probably 100,000 years at least. 10,000 years is enough time to have evolved resistance, but not much more: Europeans get less obesity and diabetes on the "Western diet" than other peoples who have had agriculture for shorter periods of time. But that doesn't make the Western diet great for them. Agriculture was the biggest human health disaster ever recorded (read Jared Diamond's essay on this).

Grains were not a substantial part of the human diet until agriculture. Tubers and vegetables were to some degree. Fruits like anything you'd find in a modern supermarket were simply not available in most climates.

95% of calories from meat is too high for anybody except the Inuit. I think estimates are closer to 60% or so. But the Cambridge world history of food volume one is a good resource. Basically, it's a matter of looking at those hunter-gatherers who are left over and seeing what they eat. Of course, the hunter-gatherers who are left are naturally in the most inhospitable areas of the globe (otherwise the agriculturalists would have killed them all by now). So it's not an exact science by any means.
Umm... this study used water as the placebo? Shouldn't they at least have used oatmeal? As it is, the study compares eating vs not-eating, rather than eating high-GI vs low-GI foods.
Ask HN: Work on Palm Mojo Application Framework 
Hello HN,

I was given the access to the Palm's SDK for development for the Palm Pre. I am wondering if other people in the Bay Area with access to the SDK, would like to meet up once/twice a week at some coffee shop, library or any other place and help each other out.

It would be a good opportunity to learn, teach and network with fellow developers and maybe even create teams for future.

Cheers.
Ask HN: Rate my app: PNGSquash
Jonathan Lebed's Extracurricular Activities by Michael Lewis
Like a single cloud in the sky is context for interpreting whether you are being rained on, sure.
Very interesting. Here's the paper http://groups.csail.mit.edu/commit/papers/06/gordon-asplos06..., which is what you really want to read. From my brief perusal, it looks inventive, but maybe not practical.

By that I mean that its (as it states in the name) a stream-oriented programming language. If you're calculating FFTs (and many people are, especially in high-performance computing), then this could be very useful. Essentially, your language would fit your coding model, which is much easier than adapting say, C, to the same task.

The possible problems I see here are 1) I haven't actually seen a parallelization graph for even something simple like linear algebra vs. number of cores and 2) there are many cases in which I can see this as being just as complicated as threading/semaphores/whatever. If the application you're using does not lend itself to concise representation in the stream metaphor then this could lead to more problems than solutions.

For two other "next-gen" languages that seek to yield an implicitly parallel solution, see Manticore (http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu/ University of Chicago) and Data Parallel Haskell (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell mostly University of New South Wales but Peyton-Jones is putting in some time as well).
Don't forget the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies :)
Interview with Bill Gates (1995)
L0pht Website Relaunched
Here is an actual link to the framework if anyone is interested: http://bluetrip.org/
Collection of Free Stylish Examples of Web Forms
OK, so careful reading turns up this gem

Our compiler achieves consistent and excellent parallelization of our benchmark suite to a 16-corearchitecture, with a mean speed up of 11.2x over sequential, single-core performance.

Unfortunately, I still can't seem to find the standard Time vs. Cores graph.
Money As Debt

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544
"Yes judge, I truly did photoshop images of him getting..... by a donkey."
I think that is inaccurate, and probably based on the backend they are using:
* -DCORO_ASM
* Handcoded assembly, known to work only on a few architectures/ABI: GCC + x86/IA32 and amd64/x86_64 + GNU/Linux and a few BSDs.

The other backends use standard libc/SUSv2 calls like (get|set|swap)context, setjmp|longjmp and sigaltstack
Give people credit, even if they don't deserve it.

This, a thousand times this. I'm constantly surprised by the effect that a simple, heartfelt "good job" can have on motivation. I'm regularly surprised by the effect it has on me.

We're social animals, this kind of response is wired in deep.
APC opcode caching absolutely turbo-charges PHP. Quadruple performance.
My guess is that it's because labour is not a very large % of overall costs.

A similar example is the car industry. Car manufacturing plants are often located in high wage countries, simply because labour does not represent a large % of the overall cost of producing a car.
George Burdell, "one of the greatest alumni to graduate from [George Tech]"
Second Life, online adult games to be banned outright in Australia
I can't really google for it on my phone, but look for tales of Sylvan Tompkins (not sure on spelling). It might have been a gladwell book where I read about him.
Writing a language spec and prototype compiler for a new language, Ultilang (the name is by no means final). A few friends and myself came together and developed a list of features we would have to have for a one-size-fits-all language, and it's been designed from there.

Brace-based syntax parsed into an s-exp; real macros operating on this expression tree; multiple backends (CLR, JVM, Python at the very least); strongly typed and type inferred, with optional dynamic typing; no difference between statement and expression context (so nested structures a la Nemerle are supported); Nemerle-style pattern matching.

The goal is to build a fairly small language on top of existing frameworks, and let users fill in the gaps with strong metaprogramming. We'll see how it goes.
The two reasons why you would want to use the Objective C iPhone SDK are:

access to advanced multi-touch gestures,
the ability to store data on the iPhone.

If your app is simple, though, a web application running in Safari might be a feasible solution.
High-performance applications? 3D? Accelerometer usage? Access to data on the iPhone (contact list and such)?
Nice app. I use pngout from the command line, so this might save me some typing.

Feature suggestion: Tell me which of the 4 compressors gave the best result.

Also, since the point of testing 4 png compressors is to get the smallest size possible, why not use "smallest" as the default setting?
How Facebook Could Create a Revolution, Do Good, and Make Billions
He left out "be on a cable TV show".
They could use reCaptcha for the text. The results on http://recaptcha.net/digitizing.html look promising.
Even if all the tips were valid, the performance gain is tiny in comparison to simply installing an opcode cache (APC/Zend/etc).

And even after installing the opcode cache, performance for many web apps doesn't improve much as the bottleneck is often in the DB. Caching DB results where possible (pretty simple to implement with your own code or an external library) often results in far greater performance gain than any type of code optimization. If you can actually cache the resulting HTML (all or parts), even better.
I think the issue is what you called the legalware. And I agree with you: the legalware on the iPhone prevents it form beeing a full-fledged personal computer. OTOH the OP has a point: the legalware on the iPhone is far less restrictive than the legalware on other cell-phones (and other closed hardware like playstations). Is it enough to talk of a quantum leap? Maybe yes.
Totally, the Dresden Dolls are working from a huge fan base, but it was interesting how it almost totally took any third parties out of the equation. My main interest in tech is the customization of physical products with web based design tools and It struck me as an interesting model for distribution in the future. If you are a purveyor of some limited edition good, it would give you a direct channel, add some mystique to the process, etc.
Is this actually real? I couldn't find anything on the Focus Magazine website.
I was making a tinyurl clone in appengine that opens multiple urls. Silly really, but i hadn't seen that done before and i thought it would be useful. But i just saw this (http://fur.ly/) today :-(
First off, I have no idea what your site is all about. Why would I go to this site, why did you create it.

From a design perspective, it is simple, but very dark and hard to read. Reversed text (darker background, lighter print) can work for headlines, but for larger bodies of text it is more difficult to read.

Unfortunately, the way I see it you haven't communicated what it is and why i'd use it, and you also haven't designed it well enough from a strictly visual standpoint to make it usable.
This article is confused and misleading. Implementation minutiae such as tables with lots of columns is not the right way to think about the problem of selecting a database model or technology.
The important questions to ask are: why do we need this data, where does it come from, who or what will need to use it, what parts are most important, how long must we keep it and what can we afford.
I'm not sure that is actually such an inefficient method of cooling your place- water is after all, famous for its high heat capacity.
House passes historic energy bill, Obama happy camper
China argues to replace US dollar
I think if they took the reCaptcha approach to get the text in a usable manner then used that to catalog and cross link the information.

After cataloging the information I would put it into some kind of photo viewing software that handles large sets of pictures well. Microsoft has an interesting product with seadragon that could handle this:

http://livelabs.com/seadragon/

Though I think that the software would need to be modified to do text search and hyperlinks in order to be the most useful to the largest number of people.
As an iPhone user, I strongly prefer native applications. They can integrate with the built-in technologies (address book, location, P2P, MDNS, etc), and they don't simply stop working for 30 minutes while I ride the subway.
I know where you are secretly attending (by reading your brain)
I don't believe he launched it he appears to be just passing on the news. The L0pht was a very famous hacker think tank back in the 90s. They've presented for congress and it's members have done a lot of influential things in the security and software world. The people that will use this site and that follow them will appreciate the simple what I call developer design of the site.

For reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0pht
wasn't aware of sabermetrics before you mentioned it!
At the bottom of the page it says:

Text for this page is extracted from the RISKS archive: <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.44.html>;
This is the raw interview transcript (from which the magazine article was transcribed in German) kindly provided by the interviewer, Dr. Jürgen Scriba. The introductory text at the top is from Klaus Brunnstein, as found in <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.43.html>.
That was the most important comment I had seen. I'm kind of surprised Gwynne's did not include similar links.
Partisan Portfolios - What congressional Democrats and Republicans own
Is there any software company out there that ships products on the scale of Windows and Office and always fixes all known bugs in its code before RTM? If you know a bug will only affect 0.1% of users 0.1% of the time, it doesn't do anything showstopping even then, and fixing it will delay your release, you'd probably decide not to fix it too.

Disclaimer: I am working at MS this summer. But I would have said the same thing months ago.
Looks like people investigating this in 2006 hit a dead end too: http://msgboard.snopes.com/message/ultimatebb.php?/ubb/get_t...

No reply from either the magazine or Dr. Jürgen Scriba
Did anyone here take a crack at this? I had some ideas that I wanted to try this summer but now its too late. If anyone already has a model built and made submissions using the KNN and SVD methods perhaps we can talk. I thought of a different approach that was not discussed in any of the papers, forums or websites that I read. I know its a long shot but it could happen... yhfin at yahoo dot kom.
Likewise, here story about a coffee shop which uses Twitter place to go orders.

http://blog.mrtweet.net/twitter-to-go-how-one-local-coffee-s...
Can I continue to be a freelancer? For life?
I have to sort this out. I am a freelancer (frontend) working as an assistant to other developers/small agencies per project wise, whenever someone needs my services. Thats my full time work and pays me OK ever since i started. But friends/family think otherwise and advice me to start my own full blown 'yet another web design company'.

But neither i have that knowledge to be make/run a company, nor i am interested to loose the FREE part of freelancing (time for family, peace of mind, time to read a book or watch a movie, friends are life). I am less interested in getting uber rich, amount of money that pays me to buy a home or car is good enough for me.

So my concern is, is this a good plan to continue as a independent coder (with learning more stuff slowly of course) for life? Would like to hear other's views, and essentially from people who continue to do that successfully.
Easyjet, Ryanair, Westjet - no accidents.
Southwest had a jet overrun a landing and kill a passenger in a car outside the airport.

Compare this with KLM (worst accident ever), BA, Air France etc. And bear in mind that budget carriers operate the most 'dangerous' routes, short hop frequent take-off landing all weather - not the 'safest' transpacific long haul routes.
the company you build is only what you build it to be.

if you want to build it with your freedom in mind, there are ways.
And you get a very nice discount if you go to Boeing when the rest of the industry is in a downturn an order 500 737s.
Even better if like Ryan you do it while also talking about buying Airbuses instead.
He has a point though. I think if they said "you have to buy the next version to get the bug fixes", customers would be quite upset. Some companies do that, but really, these days I would expect to get bug fixes for free.
Single quotes aren't a constant string literal, because they have to parse \'.
Their tips on how to optimize HTML pages are similarly silly. They suggest removing all end tags, as well as start and end tags that aren't strictly necessary according to the HTML standard, such as the 'html', 'head' and 'body' tags.

Saving a byte here and there for the sake of transfer-speed, without a thought for rendering speed or maintainability, is apparently ideal.
In very high volumes, tiny performance gains change user behavior.
They're apparently launching a site called Hacker News: http://hackernews.com/
The Edge On Brain Time
from a quick usability standpoint, i'd make the entire recipe div clickable, and not just the title and image.

Also, your text goes to a light grey on hover, which conventionally is 'unavailble'. I'd go with the blue you use for the headlines on hovers.
It's actually another relaunch I think it was originally launched in the late 90s as hacker news network. Then after the @stake merger some stuff happened and it was shut down. It use to be like a slashdot specificall for computer security if I remember correctly(It's been a while).

*Add link with some history from the creator. http://www.spacerogue.net/wordpress/?p=94
That does sound counter intuitive. But even if performance differences are negligible, I still find it much more efficient, or at least ergonomically comfortable, to use single quotes with only one finger/keystroke, no need for shift. Same reason I dislike PHP's arrow -> for methods/properties, that's three keys right there, vs. just a dot in other languages.
To save you some time searching for it: y-combinator is at 77 in the list.
"TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING."

I'm guessing that's only because her advance was greater than her royalties so far, so she really did make money off of those sales. Probably much more than $19,000 too.
I sincerely hope this novel is in the works.
Hopefully while freelancing you'll meet lots of different people and leave a good impression. Then in later years you should have enough of a network to get a sufficient amount of requests for freelance work. I am not that old yet, but I've seen it work for some older friends.

I don't see why a company should be inherently more secure than working as a freelancer.
I was part of a study that looked at this issue when I was an undergraduate. I would look for replication of the new study

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

before taking this as the last word on the subject.
file this under "duh", men care about looks, women care more about status as a stand-in for fitness to provide offspring with resources.
Let's be honest, though. Most people accepting these tips without second thought probably aren't catering to high volumes of people.
DARPA: Can we have a one-cabinet petaflop supercomputer?
Heck, if and when I find bugs that affect .1% of users .1% of the time, I'd put it at a lower priority than the release, even with a tiny project. Cost to benefit.
Truly disheartening. I've also trusted Google without thinking twice...lesson learned. Myself and others I'm sure are now going to take Google's "tips" with a grain of salt.
> Great article. One of the things to remember is that most of the times 70% of the communication actually happens through body language.

Come on, that figure is obviously made up. How would you even measure that? I hear this all the time, usually when it couldn't possibly apply, and it grates on me.
My wife and I try to make as many of our purchases as possible using credit cards because we get at least 1% back in stuff. It's sad that the merchant eats at least 1.5%, but it's not my problem (although I will offer greenbacks to small business owners). We've never carried a balance, and the credit card companies haven't done much scamming for fees. I guess we're seen as more powerful than someone who needs a credit line, so they know that even a little bit of gaming will cause us to cancel the account.

Interestingly, Revolution revoked our card. I'd used it exactly once when Buy.com was offering $50 off a purchase for signing up. I guess they decided that it wasn't worth it to carry our credit line on their books (and make themselves appear to be in a more risky financial state as a result) when we weren't revenue generating.
I saw that too. But the question still stands. Is this real?
Baby Boom Generation Driving an Entrepreneurial Boom
... unfortunately, they appear to have failed.
Taxonomy of Wordplay
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. Any nontrivial product has a bug database with hundreds of known bugs per module/component. Most are not worth fixing because regression testing is so expensive. And the expectation of end users is really low, people expect software to be lousy.

People even except phones to crash nowadays. In a Palm Pre review I read the other day they praised the Pre's stability: it "only" crashed 4 times during testing, and it was because "we were running a lot of apps at the same time".

Expectations matter.
After running PNGSquash on a directory containing 10 PNGs totaling 456KB (which had already been optimized with pngcrush from the command line), it shrunk them to 432KB using the smallest squash level. The processing time was around 4m20s on a MacBook Pro with 3GB RAM.

A similar tool is ImageOptim
http://pornel.net/imageoptim/en ,
an open souce GUI for the following PNG / JPG optimizers: AdvPNG, OptiPNG, PngCrush, JpegOptim, jpegtran, and optionally PNGOUT.

Just curious about PNGOUT - did you get permission to bundle it with your app? Their license http://www.advsys.net/ken/utils.htm#pngoutkziplicense seems pretty restrictive: "Redistributing, repackaging, or reusing the PNGOUT or KZIP executable is prohibited without the express consent of Ardfry Imaging, LLC, and a formal business agreement."
The title makes it sound like it was a 'nobody' suddenly using the 'net to strike gold - Amanda Palmer has a veritable army of uncommonly loyal fans, fans who would certainly pay far more than $25 for impromptu hand-designed T-Shirts from her, whatever the medium through which they were advertised. This story is, for anyone without such a fanbase, worthless.

And 'indie musician'? The text itself (that was copied wholesale from the artist with little/no value added) references a "huge-ass ben-folds produced-major-label solo album"! Stupid stupid linkbait. That said, it is a fantastic record and it's a shame to see she's not made any money from it as yet.
You're right. Here's a sample: http://www.spacerogue.net/hnn/061600.html
via http://marklogic.blogspot.com/2009/06/entrepreneurship-not-j...
> I strongly dislike this type of music

Out of curiosity, which type of music is that?
the timeline is neat, assuming it is true.

i wish it wasn't framed by the seo part. i'd be interested in a more general and "trustworthy" (i feel weird saying that.. ?!!?) report.
You said "Do you have the audacity to call him a conspiracy theorist? He's only one of the greatest scientists of the 20th Century. What kind of track record do you have to belittle Dyson?"

That is an explicit appeal to authority.