skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As seen here: http://www.gibsonandlily.com/blogs/72

I have heard countless rumors like this one; about apple developing a tablet.

The question becomes "why?".

I think that very few people would try to make the argument that the iPhone has NOT been a phenomenal success. Lets look at why...

The iPhone is a computer. A pretty one, that can run lots of shiny, pretty apps covered in gradients. When people see it, they are immediately aware of how hip the person wielding it is. Apple took everything great about their desktop computers (pretty, fashionable, stable, simple) and condensed them all into a small, even more fashionable, even more convenient, simple package called an iBook. Coffee shop dwellers wielding an iBook could let their fellow caffeine-solution enjoyers just how hip they were, just how PRODUCTIVE they were with their wonderful macbooks.

Then came the iPhone. Apple took all the wonderful things about their desktops (stability, simplicity, etc.) plus all the wonderful things about their notebooks (simple, fashionable) and combined them into a wonderful even MORE portable packaged called an iPhone. This iPhone could be carried in its owner's pocket. The look-at-me oppurtunities were endless. People could admire the superior technical prowess (complete with white apple logo displayed in stark contrast the black case on the back of the thing) of iPhone users on the train, or on the bus, or on the sidewalk, or in a coffee shop, or the office, or in the kitchen, at a restaurant...ANYWHERE!

A tablet, however...what does this supposedly offer that the iPhone doesn't? It isn't as mobile, meaning less oppurtunites for look-at-me, it would likely run Mac OSX or some derivative of it.. meaning a hefty tax to the apple gods...it would undoubtedly be covered in ultra-high-gloss plastic, meaning that any hopes of replacing something like a panasonic toughbook would be seriously mis-guided.

The only market that apple has not yet tried to dominate, and that it is in any sort of position to even enter, is netbooks.

They had a sort-of false-start called the MacBook Air, something that I think everybody would agree is an example of just how much of a failure apple can produce.

The next itteration of the iPhone is, most certainly, a netbook. The question is whether or not apple is willing to forfeit its position as a luxury item in exchange for increased penetration. A sub-300-dollar netbook is something that is likely NOT in apple's future.

Apple has got something really great going for them right now. People WANT an apple. Macs are seen as something that is, in some way, better than their windows-based counterparts. Even Microsoft seems to be willing to admit this in their latest ads.

In conclusion, apple will NOT be creating a tablet; it simply does not follow with the current trend of their products. If anything, they will produce a $500 netbook that is still seen as "better" than its competitors. If this happens, I predict low market penetration and ultimate failure.
Bastardizing Helvetica for the ImJustCreative Logo Design
Q looks too much like 0. otherwise cool.
Harsh...

Account activation Sorry, your account could not be activated. I don't care why this happened.
I ran my own mini-advertising agency during college. They don't take much to start and ended up with a very, very nice salary (middle $100's). I even lived for free for two years exchanging services with collegiate complexes in the area. Here's what I concluded:

1. Top-notch creative counts for big accounts, but not necessarily local (local small businesses micro-manage)

2. Great Account Service (people want honesty and good work ethic, bullshit excuses are transparent — you'd be surprised how many designers/freelancers don't get this)

3. Automate Remedial Tasks (don't waste hours on proposals, revision orders, etc. most of them are the same anyway). The ad agency I left to start my own spent ~$100K+ a year on employees to do this crap. Waste.

I was learning PHP/SQL at the time so I built my own extranet for the business. Wrote a script to generate 6+ page proposals in a matter of minutes. And had a backend system built so I could simply upload images to the FTP and it would categorized and auto-thumbnail for the clients to preview, etc.

Due to the demands of college, I usually contracted initial concepts to freelance designers and then handled most of the revisions, etc. This kept me mentally sane as the initial conceptual process is usually the most draining. When I closed it all down after ~3 years to chase a dream in a video game startup, I had utilized about 20 contractors from all over the world during that period.
The old Hacker News Network will be back online 01/11/10
People generally are treated worse than property....that's still true today.
That was the entire premise of my YC app back in 2007, actually. Here's a mockup, in case anyone's interested in working on it ;D

http://reidesign.us/misc/veracifyWebsite3-5.png

Promises are used like credit, but the tab often goes unpaid because people forget. Politicians, blogs (especially Apple blogs), and talking heads have made an art of exploiting this 'loophole', so it would be nice to have a website where you could track their past performance re: promises and predictions.
Doctor hiding diagnosis from patient to "protect" her -- ethical?
Stephen Hawking: "Will Extraterrestrial Life Be Carbon Based?"
I agree with his comments.
I just wish Apple let developers respond to user review-comments in the app store comments section
Well it worked for me. So all I can think to say is thanks.
What you're saying may be/probably is true. But I don't think it does much to detract from my point.

Facebook probably wishes they could target ads given all their demographic information. They probably want to be able to help users make decisions by leveraging their social graph, but I think in the here-and-now, and probably for the immediate future, that will not be the case.

I think it is silly to constantly worry about what everyone else is doing when it is substantially more fruitful to understand what you yourself should be doing.
I have to wonder how much of this is a chicken and the egg thing. Ever since the beginning of this crisis the media has been hammering the same meme: "This is as bad as the great depression"

So now we're almost a year later and everyone stands around shocked at the fact that jobs are being lost even faster than in a normal recession. But job loss, at it's heart, is mostly just companies gauging how many employees they'll need for the future and making adjustments. So if every news agency is telling these companies we're at the start of a great depression what else would you expect them to do but to cut jobs at an even higher rate?

How many tech companies have we seen in the last year who cut jobs before they even noticed a revenue drop? Jason Calacanis says he had enough money to keep Mahalo running without revenue through 2011 yet he cut jobs and moved his operations overseas. How is that not panic?
It's not exactly what you're looking for, but a friend of mine made http://www.hacker.org/ which is a bunch of games that are related to hacking plus some games where you have to write programs to play them.

(The "challenges" game is pretty close to actually having to hack, with various difficulties.)
Except that the default presumption is, by law in every state, joint custody, and every state has court rulings to back that up.

The proponent of exclusive custodial control must prove the other parent's unfitness for custody. This is easy, if say, the other parent is a convict or a drug dealer. It's not so easy for suburbanites or rich folk. While the bar is lower than criminal guilt, it's not much lower -- proof must be by "clear and convincing evidence", which is significantly higher than the usual civil burden of "more likely than not".

Indeed, in over 90% of the cases I worked on, the exclusive custody proponent lost. The myth about mothers always getting the children isn't just a myth, it's blatantly untrue. Where exclusive custody is awarded, the father is just as likely to get custody of the children (usually b/c the mother does not have a job and is unable or unwilling to find one).

Kid, I worked in Cleveland. If there's any city where mothers should be "stealing" the kids from their fathers, its going to be a city where more than a 1/3rd of the male population doesn't have a job.
This is impedence mismatch between you and the community.

Your readings and experiences have caused you to form some opinions about how the world works (i.e., connections are very important), but most people here think that connections don't matter as much as you think.

I'm not that surprised that people here think that way since most of us here hope to make something brilliant and rock the world (and thereby make tons of money).

My two cents: In mature industries (e.g., telecom, entertainment, construction, banking, automobiles, healthcare, pharma) connections are almost the only thing that matters (both in China and in the US), but in dynamic sectors such as computers connections are much less important.
Maybe not, if they offered a more descriptive dataset next time. I think the only data offered was (customer_rating, movie_id, rating_value, date). If they included things like the customer's age, how long they've used Netflix, and other such data that's on file, I'm guess that the RMSE could be improved by a fairly good amount (at least 5%, if not 10%).
Top Russian ICBM designer resigns after launch failures
It seems that "connecting the dots" failed in this article on so many levels...

1. No, I don't consider .99 fart apps as revolutionary improvement of my living room

2. Netbooks and Amazon kindles/other ebook readers comprise one of the most rapidly growing markets, "fad"? Whatever.

3. Skype is already here. And, "free" and "Apple" don't go next to each other in a sentence. Steve will find a way to monetize on your free skype chats.

4. Take any other non-apple phone - see, no carrier exclusivity.. right now, without needing to go to the future and buy new apple gadget.

No really, I think it might live in some homes but revolution? Now come on, there's not a single hint. I think it will be EOLed by 2011.
Can you teach yourself to control your dreams?
Thanks for the elaboration, and agreeing with ThomPete, this article isn't going after academic skills but how the brain learns in general.
Apparently AT&T has started blocking 4chan
I wonder how long it will take before the US will learn that every dollar they have ever spent 'aiding' the 'good guys' behind the scenes has in the long term boomeranged back tenfold or more in damage done to the US or its allies.

- korea

- vietnam

- afghanistan

- iraq

Besides giving the Iranian hardliners another reason to claim rightfully that the US incites trouble within its borders I find it hard to see how money will empower the populace. What will change the tide in Iran is another revolution, and it should be manufactured by the Iranians to avoid a repeat of history.

Iran could only become the state it is today because of the foreign support for the Shah.
Cool idea! I guess iQ would not be available in US?
Should've been named TLC - Too-Late-Compilation.
Look, he wrote his rant in response to voices suggesting that Microsoft would not contribute to Linux unless there was some compelling, unadvertised, hidden motive for that. Turned out they were right in the end (license violation), but already got under the swing of Linus. Declaring them fanatics, implying that he shy to associate with FS due to them (which means they're not a fringe in Free Software movement one can shrug off, but more like a norm, right?).

Just ask yourself, would've he likely put it as harsh now, with the hindsight? I still maintain that it's best if he takes effort to postpone insults a few days or so, just in case he is not right. This is not a technical debate, and as a geek celeb whose opinion has extra weight he should be careful before throwing accusations.

All of that has nothing to do with Linux (which I use daily since 1999 and wrote a few device drivers for), or Microsoft (which I'm mostly indifferent to). Just about some basic caution in making wide ranging statements on political subjects or personal traits.
10 Tips for iPhone Users at DEFCON 17
In the DC metro area? Hacker News Meetup 7pm tonight (Sunday)
please add mattgillooly
See also: Speak You're Branes [ http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com ], a blog dedicated to the foam-mouthed ranting found on just one of the BBC's viewer forums.
Retweet.com Looks To Be A TweetMeme Competitor With A Killer Domain Name
Here's more info on the author

http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=6066

Apparently he worked on the V2 rocket. But there are lots of scientists that can write technical books targeted to experts. This book is worth it because this guy is devoted a lot of his teaching career to explaining difficult topics to non-experts. I think he did a marvelous job, of mixing technical material and history. I think this book was part of a course he taught at yale univ.

It is an expensive book, but I'll go in and say it's worth it. Check your univ library.
figured I'd jump in on HN since I've been lurking for a while (and loving this site), and mention that I wrote the software for this, which is tracking the four colors on the car.

It's using openframeworks (openframeworks.cc) an open source, cross platform c++ toolkit (which I am helping develop). the source code for the car tracking software is here:

http://www.openframeworks.cc/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=...

and you can check out openframeworks at

http://openframeworks.cc

http://openframeworks.cc/download

It was quite fun to work on this -- the driver and type designers blew me away with how good they were.
Shared nothing: is it the best architecture for a database?
I would far rather use this than code. I've mentioned http://synthmaker.co.uk/ (which includes code modules) before. For many applications the procedural emphasis of code may not be the best approach. I like Yahoo's Pipes tool for the same reason. DSP and (to some extent) circuit board designers use these kind of schematic, flow based applications a lot - it's basically the same idea as analog computing.

Remember flowcharts? If you're trying to do something complicated, a good way to approach it is sketch it visually and then refer back to your information or decision flow chart while punching in the code. When I first learned programming I thought how nice it would be to just draw the flowcharts in and build the program that way, but that would have been far too computationally intense. This is no longer the case.

Frankly, I'd rather let the computer do the work. I also grew up with log tables and slide rules (as well as walking up hill to and from school), and a prime joy of having a computer was to be able to automate much tedious pencil-and-paper calculation. To me, writing code is the tedious crap one has to do to implement ideas that are often most easily represented in schematic form. Ugly and flawed though these tools may seem at present, they seem vastly preferable to typing everything.

These questions remind me a bit of discussions about Emacs/Vi vs (your favorite modern IDE). Of course you can do truly amazing things in editors like Emacs. Just as people who knew Wordtsar* and WordPerfect could churn out documents at high speed with their advanced knowledge of key combinations. Just like with TeX or CSound you can produce amazingly specific renderings of typography or music, and where experts with these tools can wipe the floor with those namby-pamby WYSIWYG tools...and yet the vast majority of people are happy with the WYSIWYG tools and get more stuff done, because most people are not sufficiently masochistic as to want everything as abstracted as possible.

* accidental misspelling that was too good to correct :)

Of course, doing it the easy way means one will never be as hard core as someone who has mastered the techniques of working with high degrees of abstraction. On the other hand few programmers seem consumed by a burning urge to throw away their high level languages and libraries and hand-code everything in assembler, or hardware designers casting aside spice and breadboards in favor of writing out bessel equations for everything.

Tools like this can seem clumsy and restrictive at first, but all that's happening is that you're learning to deal with a visual grammar rather than one based on keywords and syntax. The underlying concepts of programming are just as portable and useful, and if you stick with it you might be surprised at how much a tool like this can do for your productivity. You will certainly find it a hell of a lot easier to see what is going than reading page of code for all but the simplest tasks.

tl;dr don't mistake your personal investment of time and effort for the best way of doing things.
add mgrouchy pls
Any guesses as to what is the reason ?

If linking to copyrighted or objectionable content is in there somewhere I'd suggest that AT&T block google, that way we'll get some solid case law about this.

Possibly the FCC will step in. Also, after this how will AT&T claim common carrier status ?
Totally agree with you.

When me and my buddies are working on new (hobby) projects, we usually do our quick prototyping using something like CodeIgniter. It's fast and lets us have something out within hours vs. days.

A lot of these frameworks have super simple tie-ins to other APIs, so we can easily include the Google Maps API, Twitter, etc within a few seconds. Now the app isn't going to be very efficient or scalable but it's something that we can play with and then build the final product off of.
Please, agree by up modding his comment. Your single word agreement adds nothing of value to this conversation.
please add dougp
That is a really sweet idea. I envision a sort of LOGO style language with the output being visual. There's a Javascript based LOGO interpreter at http://www.calormen.com/Logo/ which could come handy. It would be quite amusing to see people tweeting LOGO sentences.
Agreed on the first point. It's true that minimising the amount of random input will help your security. That will always be true. It was only their fault that they don't limit the access.

OTOH, they have to run public services in an accessible way. Someone could just as well find a bug in their webserver, or mail server. It's bad for PR of course, if their webserver is hacked. But not all servers are equal. (here starts the IMHO part) If you want to spend your time on making everything perfectly secure, you're a full time sysadmin, not a security researcher ;) I think that there are a lot of test, web, mail, etc. servers that people just don't treat as very valuable. Every webserver could be virtualised and the whole system could be checked in a loop by a securely signed checksum verifier which sends (every cycle) results using PKI to a vpn'ed server which sends you an sms if your index.php checksum doesn't match (and snapshot + suspend the machine along with memory, then bring a failover up via a non-lan channel). Is it worth their time though?

People can think that makes the company look bad, I don't...
Young genius
Perhaps you are writing different kinds of code in each.

For example, when I'm writing C, I'm usually just using the standard library and maybe a couple of OS routines. It's especially the case because I'm usually writing C in the context of a compiler, which is as close to a pure function of input to output as most programming gets.

On the other hand, when I'm writing in a higher level language, I'm tackling bigger problems and using far, far more third-party code. That's where the occasional documentation lookups and odd errors come in.
I can remember this game, with this nice Soundtrack :) It was one of my favourites free-games.
I suspect problems with understanding regular expressions are really just psychological.
AT&T has a history of doing stuff like this, apparently. See links below. But you're right, I don't know how they could possibly remain a common carrier.

What I do know is that sometime next week I was thinking about going and switching from Verizon and getting an iPhone. Now, I'm not so sure.

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/08/pearl-jam-censore...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9759184-7.html
Snowflake: a server modified to being unique, fragile, and unrepeatable
Yes, you'll probably need to hack out some code to get things done. But it's not inevitable.

This http://kineme.net/files/Nord-Modular-30-large.jpg is the first-generation programming environment for the Nord Modular a (since discontinued) DSP-based representation f a modular analog synthesizer. No coding at all here - you have a bunch of modules, some of which are bitwise or digital, some of which are not. The configurations are referred to as patch files (after patch cables) - not to be confused with a code patch.

I don't want to go reinstalling the software, finding the file, and making screen captures (and I've since sold that keyboard), but I had a patch file that would let you play Asteroids when you plugged the audio output into an oscilloscope (or ran a softscope on on a computer). I would play by twisting two knobs (for heading and thrust) and hitting a piano key to fire, pew pew.

I think we could all agree that Asteroids, even a primitive implementation, involves logic. And although this might seem like a very perverse way to implement, there are many tasks oriented around signal or data flow for which the procedural approach to programming is equally perverse.

Look into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer for more.
Hanlon's razor:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Perhaps ATT just corrupted their DNS servers or something.
Related: next ludum dare contest takes place end of August (48h game programming competition).

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/07/23/ludum-dare-15-augu...
First, they came for 4chan. But I didn't go to 4chan.
We didn't panic as much as we realized the revenue and fund raising opportunity had changed radically. Given that we cut our spending by 25-35% by moving from inhouse editors to community-based editing with a virtual currency. The truth is we were on our way to this model already as it is the most efficient in term of cost and motivation. In other words, the folks in the virtual economy get more done for less and they are enjoying themselves.

This user is on track to make $3,000 "Mahalo Dollars" over the next year (which translates to 75% that amount in USD).

http://bit.ly/kXQTp

We'll break even in the next year I think, and by making the cuts/getting more efficient we extended our runway by a year.

If the market wasn't so fracked up I would have spent more and raised more money.... however, I felt there was a significant chance that raising money would be very difficult for a year or three. It turns out I'm probably wrong and we'll be able to raise more money if we want/need to (we've started getting a lot of calls recently in fact... I guess VCs are looking to place bets again, which is a good thing).

all the best,

Jason
According to the thread on reddit, AT&T had been contacted and said that the site was in fact blocked:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/94pf2/att_is_now...

They of course don't say who called AT&T, so who knows.
Isn't the whole thing:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity...but don't rule out malice"
I Love my iPhone, I Hate my iPhone
I've heard that apps are more popular in America, and webapps are more popular in Europe.
What I've never understood is how this is any different from IRC with a bunch of handy bots (esp. a logging one) sitting in on the channel.
Why IT Happened in Southern India, an Unorthodox Explanation
Actually the whole av8n.com site is a great resource for anyone interested in learning more about physics. One of the reasons why I linked it ;).
You are absolutely right, when I'm writing in C I write dataprocessing code, usually elaborate filters and pipelines of filters.

The java stuff is web applications.
easyfrag