skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the original design for the macintosh was utter trash and it wouldn't have even made the history books. The idea behind it was supposed to be a "toaster with an friendly interface". It would be like doing a $300 netbook, but with 1980s technology. It was going to compete with the Atari, not IBM.

Cut and Paste made the Macintosh. Double-clicking made the Macintosh. Beautiful (for the time) typography defined the Macintosh. The "Start-up" chime. The Fast boot sequence. The abandoning of legacy 5.25" floppies. All of these design decisions were Steve's. And love it or leave it, he made something remarkable and lasting. Something that inspires people to sign on for the "cult of mac".
"Lot's" is not the plural of "lot". The apostrophe indicates possession. The plural of "lot" would be "lots". I'm not trying to be a dick, but this is a particularly obvious mistake and one that I see here and elsewhere many times every day. I'm sure I'll get modded down because no one likes a grammar nazi and this is completely off-topic, but I'm going to justify my complaint by pointing out that elementary grammar mistakes do not look good online, in professional correspondence or in VC applications.
There is nothing new about this. All post paid monthly plans in US requires SSN, (Palm/Nokia/Motorola or whatever), (Sprint/Verizon/ATT whatever).
I'm surprised (and confused) -- can you really include a great number of large, verbatim or nearly verbatim blocks of text from Wikipedia, cite them, and not be called out for plagiarism?

What's to stop any author from saving themselves hours/weeks/years of effort by simply by copying text and sticking a citation at the end of the paragraph, as it appears was done in this case?
Can you please provide an argument for why choice ought to be the principal factor for some attribute to be taxable? The justification is in no way clear to me.
In the spirit of the article I will state as a highly organized type that I stopped reading at this point since the rules of Monopoly clearly state that cash is not placed at Free Parking and it is simple a resting place. http://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/monins.pdf

/liked getting money at that spot anyway
Ask HN:  Games where the more random you are the higher you score?
Do you know any games where the whole point is to test your randomness and this is made obvious to the player?

It should be fun, so just asking the player to type in a sequence of random numbers would not do.

It's hard for humans to be random, so there's a challenge here. There are statistical tests that you can use to see how random something is.
Having owned a summer 2006 Intel Core MacBook (in the shop 1 for heat, and 2 times for bad 3rd party RAM I got from RAMjet.com that Apple's Hardware Diagnostics gave a thumbs up on) and a Unibody MacBook Pro 17" inch, I can tell you the build quality of the unibody is amazing compared to the first intel MBPs. I rest my hand on the Core MBP and I compress a fan. My DVD drive is loud as all hell. The unibody is silent and solid.
Web 2.0/Social Media: Really guys, it's pretty simple
I think the problem there is Apple - they don't want Flash support on the iPhone. They haven't explicitly stated so, but I think they don't want it because it would give people the ability to develop full iPhone applications that don't go through their store and approval process.
If he's never had OS X crash, then he's never put it to sleep and woke it up enough. Mine machine will hang on shut downs if I don't reboot it once a week.
Can anyone find the original paper? The nrc doesn't seem to be hosting it any more.
Is this not standard fare in the American cellphone industry? A phone is a line of credit. You can even buy 3rd party stuff with it. I could swear I've had to do this with Verizon too.
now you'll just need to find a provider who will actually allow you to use VoiP over 3G.
I believe the free WHOISguard is only for the first year of the transfer/registration. Still nice though.
I think it's time to rethink "lots". If lots of people are using "lot's" as a plural of "lot", then why shouldn't that be valid? Language, after all, is not static and if enough people use a new word or a new construction, the language changes.
Do you know any games where the whole point is to test your randomness and this is made obvious to the player?

I believe this is called "parenting," with the understanding here that "randomness" is usually designated as "unpredictability" or "flexibility."
The Sidekick data plan included unlimited SMS, but the AIM client still did not use SMS. (I had a Sidekick for 5 years)
anecdotes like these are always kinda painful to read... even a lot of comments it seems on here tend towards them however.

"I hate microsoft. The other day I tried windows 7, it
sucked and I know a lot of people who had problems too."

these irrational fanboys (of all types) need to die in a fire. (bye karma points, it was worth it)
No, no. It's just incredibly accurate fractional time-zone support! GPS-based for your exact longitude.
How does funneling pilots through the screening line do anything to prevent non-pilots from dressing as pilots? Real pilots ride as passengers, in full uniform, all the time.

I expect the reason is even simpler than you suggest; a total lack of exceptions to the screeing rules makes for simpler screening, simpler training, fewer chances to make mistakes, etc. And it's easy.
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips
http://scipy.org/PerformancePython
Very well timed! I've been working on getting into some machine vision stuff, so far I've got motion tracking and blob detection working fairly well. The list of things I want to do includes digital image stabilization and face detection.

Looks like I might be porting parts of this code into processing!
i think it might be at least an interesting "game" if you had an app that was just a single character display in which you type in a number, and then a display of your score which is based on the randomness.

just a simple display that immediately lets you know if the number you just typed in raised or lowered your score. and then maybe compared it to other players. and then a button to click to end it to see stats on what you entered in.

wouldn't exactly be super fun for the passes, but i'd be entertained by it for a while.
It's not because we're a business that we don't broadcast the talks, but because the speakers wouldn't say the same things. These talks couldn't exist broadcast.

But we're happy to share everything we can. Pretty much all the general stuff I tell startups I publish as essays, and Jessica has interviewed many of the speakers (and plans to interview more) about as much as they are willing to say publicly.
Ask HN: Tool development as a job applicant filter?
This topic came up yesterday in #startups. While not a silver bullet, might a history of tool development make one applicant more attractive than another? Is the question "What tools have you developed to help you with your job as a software developer?" a useful filter?

A secondary portion of the discussion focused on what is to be considered a tool and what tools each of us had developed.
The Life And Awesomeness Of Steve Jobs
Not at all, I'm just pointing it out. It's amusing to me how the PR departments can spin self-interest into purely mutual-interest. I.e. it would be like Mother Teresa helping people because each time she does God cuts her a $10,000 check, and then prattling on about how she's just looking out for you.
this is among the funniest things i've read on HN! but it sounds amazing. well done.
i think a "what tools do you use? what tools do you use that you developed yourself?" would be a good question combo to help filter.
Wouldn't the shortest possible Email address be 3 characters long, as in "a@b", where b is a TLD with a MX record, or did I failed to understand something critical?
Don't be a pain in the ass... Move on. Its not very difficult to reach a VC, anyways...
Nickel and diming
You shouldn't be able to pay the government to cut to the front of the line.

Agreed, but did the government actually see any of the money collected by Clear?
'cause HTML was designed primarily as a markup language, not a layout language.
Very rarely do I think something would make a good "filter" - I really think such filters can cause you to miss somebody who does, in actual fact, have an amazing amount of talent and experience. However, the fact that someone has produced "tools" shows that they are able to put together a complete solution fairly quickly, that they're versatile, and that they go the extra mile. So I think having developed tools is a big plus for an applicant, but not necessarily a filter.

As for what a tool is, I think it's mainly a program designed to automate a task that would normally have been done by the tool's creator anyway. I've created several such tools that do menial repetitive tasks for me, like collecting statistics about my project.
Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs
How Kiva Robots Help Zappos and Walgreens
I would like to see statistics first only because I would start to use it.

Will your project include samples and practice problems to make sure readers understand concepts?
Maybe making Mob games makes you think you're in the mob.
The British network "3" (that's their name!) actively encourage it, selling dedicated Skype phones and running a fairly heavy ad campaign promoting "free calls forever": http://www.three.co.uk/Company/3G_Network/Skype

Calls made via Skype don't eat up your data plan and aren't charged by the minute - they're actually free. I have one and it works surprisingly well, even in patchy coverage where voice calls break up. Whether it really will be forever, I don't know...
Quite. It's like saying the Honda Civic is no good because the Terex Titan (world's largest truck) is so much more powerful. Mind you, I have heard exactly that argument from protectionist zealots.
APL (and its derivatives) are an obvious use of that.

Note also C-style array access: a[i];

It's not new, just new in a lisp (and a good idea if you ask me).
Since the people at the store probably don't have direct SQL access to the database, they have to use the front end to create your account. And the people who wrote the front end were probably just following the spec. And the person who wrote the spec probably wasn't paid to consider every possible scenario with which to bloat the spec and push the project over time and over budget.
Torrent at

http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Road-to-Reality-A-Complete-Guide...
What I really would like to see is an independent third-party which cares nothing about data mining (maybe the w3c) host commonly used scripts (e.g. jquery) on Akamai and minified/compressed; all the parameters to their optimum instead of the myriad of options people use. They'd be so many browser cache hits.
We're veering off topic here, but it seems like a legitimate debate. I do believe language should not remain static, but I don't believe that rules should be changed just because enough people are breaking them through ignorance. Also, in this case doing so would introduce an inconsistency that would lead to even more confusion. True, we have many of them already in the English language, but the behavior of the apostrophe is mostly consistent. It indicates possession except when it conflicts with a contraction of the same form, in which case the possessive drops the apostrophe, i.e. "it's" and "its".

You could say that the current rule is already inconsistent and confusing, but imagine for a moment that an apostrophe could be used to construct an acceptable plural form and think about this example: "The lot's dimensions are..." Now, "lot's" is both plural and possessive. Is that one lot or multiple lots with the same dimensions? The current rule may not be perfect, but it is clearly less ambiguous than the alternative.
Reuse can never be 'plagiarism' if you cite your source and present it as a quote. Plagiarism is only presenting someone else's work as if it were your own.

Now, if the book is 99% other people's work, but all copying is cited, you might still run afoul of copyright laws for copying without permission. But it won't be plagiarism. Whether 'fair use' applies depends on a test where many factors are weighed. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Very roughly, the idea is: does your use add value for society without damaging the value of the original work? Using less is better than using more. Using for educational/nonprofit uses is better than trying to make a quick buck. Trying to make a buck in a new transformative way is better than trying to make a buck at the expense of (by replacing) the original work in the marketplace. Using just enough to have a conversation about the work, adding your commentary, is better than just reusing the juicy parts to save yourself effort. Etc.
As an Indian studying in Australia, I'm actually ashamed that my country's media keeps on coming up with completely baseless juicy articles like these to attract more readers/viewers. It's complete lies.
Isn't @a.gg (nothing before @) valid as an email address according to the RFC? That was my conclusion last time I parsed it..
That's why we have a democracy, where these "arbitrary" lines are ultimately drawn by votes, not central planning committees. Nobody is arguing for Soviet style totalitarianism.
I used a lot of trig in my physics classes - yes, including identities. You may be falling into the trap that because it wasn't useful to you, then it's useful to no one.
If you are curious about the enzymes/genes that are involved in the aging process here is an interesting link:
http://crea.berkeley.edu/wong-interview.shtml

If there are biologists/geneticist who can explain some of the stuff discussed in the above link - that would be great also.
Marketing lessons from the local panhandler
It depends on how you want to work, user based or just in general.

You can get all tweets from a specific person (this would be handy for a website where you sign up for) with a certain keyword, or just get them all and scan server side.

On the other hand, you can for example scan for popular developers hashtags (like #ruby, #php, #linux, etc) or just request recent tweets and scan for what you need. These 2 solutions would be perfect for a general scan.

I'm currently working with the twitter api for a small personal project and it's pretty flexible, you have quite a lot of possibilities...
Would you agree that taxes should be just? If so, would you agree that it is unjust to tax someone for something he has no choice in?
[edit: Looks like my view is just plain wrong. Skip this and directly read the replies]

IMHO email address fields need not be 254 characters in length. Something like 64 is perfectly defendable I think.

Why would a person sign-up with an email address of 200+ characters if he is not looking for a buffer overflow? Why would a sane person even bother to have such a long email address? How much time would he take to type that?

He would have tried the email id on many other websites and some of them should have rejected it. So the person obviously does have a shorter version of his email address for those sites.

How would a person fill in the emial address in a paper form where there is something like 30 fields for the email address?

I'd say 64 is enough. Anything above is just weird. I can do away with those two users who have such long ids.
I don't remember where I read this, but in respect to the topic raised in this article I remember someone criticized lots of the big players (IBM) for focusing too much on server technology and things which would make Linux scale rather than things which would be useful for desktop users.

As for the article being junk, I see lots of other posters have addressed that already.
I would expect something a lot more from google. All these ideas are way too elementary and some are just misguided.
Advice like "crop your image"...come on.
The misguided ones are things like "use single quotes instead of double quotes when printing in php since one does not look for variables in the string text". The is just misguided and is probably the last thing your should worry about. This is orders of magnitude from any useful optimization that is actually impacting your site performance.
Hitler's Stealth Fighter - Horten Ho 229
Ok, this Mashable article throws around some crazy stuff, mostly propagated by bad information in the CNN Money article. Let's straighten things out:

- Jason Bailey is the CEO of Super Rewards (http://www.srpoints.com/). They do payment processing and CPA offers for social apps.

- lolplaying (http://lolplaying.com/) made the game 140 Mafia. 140 Mafia implements Super Rewards for virtual goods.

- Jason Bailey made the comment "I don't know who puts hippies in charge of these companies" in reference to Twitter not doing a centralized virtual currency.

- The "CEO" of Mob Wars is Dave Maestri. He didn't say anything about Twitter, from what I can tell. Mob Wars is made by Psycho Monkey LLC

- The "CEO" of Mafia Wars is Mark Pincus. Mafia Wars isn't a "sequel" of Mob Wars, it's a clone. Just like 140 Mafia is a clone of both. Mafia Wars is made by Zynga.

EDIT: Thanks to joshuaxls for corrections.
/me waits for PB to tell us how it really happened.
How cloud vendors can be evil?
It will also be on a wiki-like system so you can contribute later if you want, although not at first while I get it running.

Don't.

There is already Wikipedia and Wolfram Mathworld. I have no interest in another system where math geeks compete to put the biggest knowledge dumps and most obscure references into a great big technopeacock tail.

You know all that stuff about usability and simplification that Apple/Microsoft get and Linux/OSS don't? You want to help a lot of people? Be more like betterexplained.com and less like a math entry on wikipedia.

(You're pretty much helping people who know and like maths and can make sense of mathworld, or people who haven't done anything mathematical for years or decades).

(Also, including a mental pronunciation guide would be interesting. How do you pronounce equations in your head?)
They actually found a way to draw the Google checkout cart using HTML
- how would they do that?
Which US carrier will this be available for? Any guesses? It's T-mobile in the UK.
I don't believe Google would have been out a billion dollars if the ads had been on the left instead of the right.
If you're an IEEE member, you can get it here:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1423...

It's interesting, though, that the author makes it seem like this paper is the only research on the efficacy of TDD. Even a cursory search of Google Scholar turns up a number of papers:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22tes...

Including a 354-page doctoral dissertation that studied both students and professionals over a 5-year period [PDF]:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94....

I haven't read the dissertation, but the abstract seems to contradict the OP:
"This research demonstrates that software developers applying a test-first (TDD) approach are likely to improve some software quality aspects at minimal cost over a comparable test-last approach. In particular this research has shown statistically significant differences in the areas of code complexity, size, and testing. These internal
quality differences can substantially improve external software quality (defects), software maintainability, software understandability, and software reusability. Further this research has shown that mature programmers who have used both the test-first and test-last development approaches prefer the test-first approach."
I agree, however the existing sites do not necessarily cater to the Nigerian market or have local content. Cragslist is not in Nigeria; Nairalist stepped in to fill that gap.

I'm sure you saw the piece in NYT about how web companies are shifting focus to the profitable “Western” markets. http://tinyurl.com/cv8eoz The gaps that open up will be filled by local start-ups. Interesting times ahead!
It just makes me laugh when I read posts by big publishers like Business Week write articles like these without adding or crediting any costs that were put into research/design/development/marketing/distribution etc., etc. And then average Joe swearing that these big companies are looting people by asking for so much money which costs so less to produce. Idiots!!!
Mankiw's a smart guy, but he's also very much a Republican:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Gregory_Mankiw

He served under Bush, and as an advisor to Romney. I'm not saying there's something wrong with Republicans, just that at times he tends to be a bit of a "party man".

Lately, his writing has taken a turn that's more along the lines of "sniping at Obama and company", rather than writing anything particularly interesting... sort of like Krugman with Bush.

Anyway, all very much off topic...
Glad I'm not the only one.

Radio Shack was my nemesis, as I purchased stuff there often, when prototyping and not willing to wait for next day delivery. I used to get myself worked up before I even got to the store. Over the years, I've optimized it to just a friendly "Nope!" when they ask for a phone number.

Doctors offices and dentists offices are another one. Their little 'new patient' form demands much more information than they need. I leave it blank or draw a line through it.

When I'm getting my hair cut, since it's a more intimate relationship, I'm reluctant to be quite as rude, so I just tell them that I don't have a phone.
They are drawing the image in CSS as a background image to a span tag.

The tag: <span class="cps ss"></span>

The CSS:
.ss
{
background-color: transparent;
background-image: url(/images/nav_logo4.png);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-attachment: scroll;
background-position: 0pt 0pt;
height: 26px;
display: block;
}
Probably 1px row/columns/divs.

Does anyone know where to find an example? (of the Google Checkout logo)
My favourite subject in school is history. I love it in (almost) all its facets, the military, the diplomacy, the politics, the study of what people did. You can say that my interest began at a young age, reading lots of children's books on castles or the Romans, but what really got me into the subject was a game: Age of Empires II.

I was nine, and a friend had given me a pirated copy of the game. I was instantly fascinated by the campaigns and the background to the actual gameplay (at which I was pretty bad). I learned a lot about history in general, I loved playing around with castlebuilding or crushing an enemy with a huge army. I loved the evolving and changing missions, reflecting a real battle, more a long, progressing struggle with sudden interruptions and changes than a simple fight. I spent ages creating my own scenarios. I loved playing the game, and it shaped me.

Fast foward to the present day. I'm 17, and going to choose the specialist subjects for my final exams in 2 years. History is definitely going to be one of them.
How do you defend deliberately making something fail, when there's no benefit whatsoever?

A uuid is 32 characters all by itself, and you can't get much shorter without having to start managing the way they're allocated. Not all addresses represent people.
Tell that to any AdSense publisher who has increased revenue 20-30% by moving ads a few pixels left or right, or by swapping the link color from one shade of blue to another. There are plenty. And Google is the ultimate AdSense publisher :)
That fact in itself confers no legitimacy. In fact, given what I've read about the textbook industry, it does not even imply that his work has been improved by any authorities worthy of respect.
You're screwed, Bill.

Linux is following Windows like Frankenstein's monster - slow but inexorable.

Eventually a version of Linux (probably an Ubuntu version) will surpass Windows in every way and the tipping point will have been reached.

MS is not longer a buy.
What would you gain from limiting it to 64 characters, versus complying with the RFC?