skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, if you download Apple's iPhone development environment, which is free, you can also "demo iPhone apps with no iPhone." It comes with a pretty decent iPhone simulator.
Research Paper Ideas
Great Research Paper Ideas and hints on writing term papers online!
Scientific literacy is no shield against anti-evolutionists or global warming deniers, for example, who are often scientists themselves, who couch their arguments in sophisticated scientific language, and who regularly cite articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Having the knowledge equivalent of a PhD is more along the lines of what’s necessary to refute them, and even then, the task requires considerable research and intellectual labor, far more than most people have the time for.

As a "global warming denier", now I'm being lumped into the anti-evolutionist camp. What's next? Sticking us in with the flat-earthers and the folks who believe men didn't walk on the moon? Perhaps we can be included with the holocaust deniers. That's a fun group.

Science is about adbuction (inferring patterns from data), deduction (inferring rules from patterns), and induction (inferring new data from rules). You hypothesize and test to validate, and it's always provisional.

That means that science doesn't play the role of the oracle of ultimate truth. As the article points out, for scientists to take on this role is counter-productive.

Taking a cheap shot at the critics of current global warming theory is just so much political genuflecting. The article could have done without it.
Google Wave is packed with interesting ideas but it is so much more complex than SMTP, FTP, HTTP or other universal communication protocols. Maybe it is time for such complex protocols - maybe we have now better libraries and faster computers - but it will be hard.
And what happens when you give it a full-featured version of Safari? Does everyone still use closed App Store apps when you've got Safari on a 10.1" screen?

I know a lot of developers would prefer to create web apps tailored to an iTouch via Cappuccino or whatever, rather than battle the App Store for inclusion. Even Apple started off telling app developers to use Mobile Safari along with standard HTML and Javascript.

This guy's suit-logic is a waste of time.
yea but this is for windows also. Its the only way I know that you can develop iPhone apps on windows. (Right?)
I think AdWords has been disruptive in advertising. The concept of extremely targeted ads being unobtrusively shown to you only while you're seeking information is huge. Compare that with offline CPM ads that are shown to tons of uninterested people within some demographic.

With AdSense, anyone can make money online if they have good content. Online advertising was around before AdSense, but it was more about distracting visitors with flashing animated ads than contextual text ads.
My Live GPS Bus App, just click a route
I second this. I bill at $40/hr and I'm the cheapest iPhone developer I know.

Any developer who's remotely competent it working on his own apps, where he takes 100% of the risk and 70% of the profit. Unlike desktop/web programming, where you can sort of snatch the students before they get real jobs, every iPhone developer has a "real" job working for Apple. The only reason at all to work on contract apps is to reduce your risk because somebody is paying you up front.

If you want somebody decent who writes clean code, budget at least 5-10k and start interviewing developers. If they've got an app on the app store that you like, they pass the competence test. It also doesn't hurt to simply cold-call developers who've written something similar (but be aware anyone with a really successful app store app is going to focus on that, not contracting for random cold-callers. I get 15-20 coldcalls a week, and I only even call back 1-2% of those).
Another perspective how wings are vacuum lifted: vacuum air flow has a low mass, but very high velocity. I work with vacuum packaging equipment and we often see a few 90 turns in the hoses hits the flow like a brick wall at each turn. The speed of the vacuum near 1 torr carries tremendous energy and is enough to rip silicone caulking from inside the joints. Air at double the atmospheric pressure won't see the high velocities to do any damage. I can imagine the high speed downward air flow giving tremendous push.
Pretty sure that what science is is taught pretty early in school.

"Scientists must make it clear that while they don’t have all the answers, science is about searching for the truth, an imperfect process of doing the best one can with the information available"

Really? I'm pretty sure I knew this when I was given an overview of scientific process in grade school.
This is just a demo right now, they also have Google Transit data that I have to mix in, and of course the interface will probably be completely different then, with ways to input and browse the schedule, but this showcases their GPS data now with True Type fonts courtesy of Processing.js.
Good points. I didn't mean Americans are more discriminatory, just that they are more obsessed. It's always about a person's race.
Perhaps we are simply a link in evolution between biological life and cybernetic life. Who knows?

I still think however that the Super AI singularity is a phantasm. Intelligence is not the key to everything. As fast as ideas can go, putting them into action is the tricky part.
Racism certainly isn't, but I think the making a big point about race is. In Australia and the U.K. for instance, I don't think you would (at least in the media) focus on the different marriage rates between races.
Actually, that's not really much of a comment. Based on your pitch I was expecting a nice little tear-down, instead it's just drive-by on a book they wrote.
> should an app like this be fairly simple to develop for a moderately experienced iPhone developer?

Yes. The only thing really difficult that you want to do is syncing, which can be done by a competent developer.

Don't forget, though, that there needs to be some time spent designing a winning interface. You don't want users to have to type in markup with the keyboard; you need an intuitive way to do that on a mobile device. Little touches like that are the difference between something people use and something they don't use, and going through that process takes some time.
The "nice little tear-down" is in the book review mentioned, but not linked, by the parent (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/unscientific_amer...). Apparently these guys aren't very fond of PZ, and he isn't very fond of them either.
Appstores are also a solution to all the speculations about how to monetize content.

Yes, but the open internet contains many solutions to distribution, and many solutions to monetization. App stores permit only one method of distribution, to climb up the opaque "top apps list".
House HN: Northeastern University/Fenway area
I've found this absolutely fantastic apartment on Westland ave in Boston (near whole foods if you knew the Northeastern area), but I need one more roommate to make it economically feasible.

The apartment is a 2-bedroom split (three bedrooms, one of them can be used as a common area) and is being redone now (new appliances, new hardwood... new everything).

The only problem is that I've only got one friend who is looking for an apartment. He (a fellow computer science student at Northeastern) and I are on the search for an inexpensive apartment in the Northeastern area. This apartment gets us really really close to our goals, but we still need one person (or better yet, a couple) to fill the room.

Anybody want in on an inexpensive apartment in Boston area or know anybody looking?
I was deeply disappointed by this program. The title and the content clearly imply that thinking about infinity drives people insane. It's more accurate to say that the people who went insane were pretty clearly unbalanced to start with, and when they were ostracised and ridiculed for their work (which turned out to be correct!) they went off the deep end.

It's not the thinking about infinity that did it. It's getting it right, and then being rejected and bullied by your peers that's likely to have an extremely adverse effect.

The program, however, does everything it can to imply that infinity shouldn't be considered lest it drive you over the edge.

Tabloid journalism from the BBC - most disappointing.

(edited for typos)
The number of people who come out of the woodwork to say that they invented delicious before delicious is ridiculous.

He says "essentially the same" and then indicates it was actually a great deal more complicated.

The hard part is not deciding what to do. It's deciding what NOT to do.

I can't seem to find any image or screenshots of the actual site (it appears to have been prodata.de) so I can decide if "no product clue" should be added to the list.
That bothers me too. I would not call myself AGW denier, more like agnostic with some inclination to believe, but this attitude that if you don't believe in god that makes you believe that the Earth is flat is just stupid.
The whole GW issue to me looks most alike to faith from them all.
It's not suit-logic: I'm genuinely interested. Gruber had a blog post about how PowerBook specs from 2002 are equivalent to iPhone specs, and the Air's got gesture support. And Apple hasn't pre-announced anything, obviously, so everything that everyone's saying is pure speculation.
There's also NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com), which allows you to create sophisticated web sites and web applications easily and intuitively in a single development language.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH.
The link is blocked by GFW, I think, I can not open it here in China.
I wish I hadn't upvoted that. He's usually pretty good, but on this score I wish he would engage, engage, and engage some more rather than get defensive and dismissive. Their solutions need criticism, but I agree that scientists have generally been part of the problem. I interpret the anti-science I see in society as a backlash against the lack of humility, and outright arrogance, many scientists use to push their favored field.

The bottom line is we're dependent on public dollars. It's our duty to explain what we do as public servants not as private dictators. We may not be comfortable talking about questions of faith, but that's what the public demands because it's closest to what they believe on a daily basis. I much prefer the Sagan model over the Dawkins version. From a distance it seems Sagan managed to advance science, while Dawkins seems to undermine it. It's all in how you treat people who disagree with you.
Should've linked that one first!
Watching it right now. Completely agree. I hate seeing BBC do these documentaries. Sensationalist.
"As a "global warming denier", now I'm being lumped into the anti-evolutionist camp. What's next? Sticking us in with the flat-earthers and the folks who believe men didn't walk on the moon....Taking a cheap shot at the critics of current global warming theory is just so much political genuflecting."

Misuse of the word "theory" to imply debate where none exists puts you squarely in the same rhetorical camp as anti-evolutionists. It's not a cheap shot to group pseudo-scientific criticisms based on the common logical fallacies used to advance their respective agendas.
How People Share Content On The Web
That's because the comment really should have linked to the actual review, which I bothered to dig through the backlog for:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/unscientific_amer...

and the followup:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/unscientific_amer...
I think it's hard to make the claim that apps are more popular than websites on the iPhone. Unfortunately, it's hard to find data on overall mobile web traffic (or total web traffic in general), but over 60% of all web traffic from a mobile device comes from the iPhone. My guess, though, is that the number of websites visited since the iPhone's release hugely eclipses the number of apps downloaded.

And I'm not sure you can call the app store a monetization solution either, considering that >90% of all downloads are free apps.
Sure, just like any website that starts by asking you to invite your friends.

All of these devices are just ways to try and get people to spam for you. Ooops spam is so 1.0. I mean "go viral".
I wish he would engage, engage, and engage some more...

Well, isn't that as much a problem with blogs as a problem with PZ? As I found by digging through his archives, he'd already engaged, at some length.

The problem is that it's a hassle for either him or us to dig through his backlog and provide links to the meat of his arguments.

Blogs are great, but there's certainly room for improvement in the way they organize knowledge.
Posted 2 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721189

Much discussion already there.
You all need to read the actual page. This just creates iPhone WEB APPS not native apps. In the tutorial they skirt around that but you can clearly see in the instructions (http://www.tersus.com/#Id=1336) where it says...

If you don't have an iPhone, you can see a preview of how the application will look on iPhone. Simply add "/iphone.html" at the end of the application's URL in your browser (e.g. go to http://localhost:8080/ShoppingList/iphone.html instead of http://localhost:8080/ShoppingList):

So it's creating a web app not a native one. Something you can create with any Windows HTML editor (and you can demo it simply by using Safari for Windows and resizing it)
Hypothesize and validate. It's as simple as that.

If that puts me in some rhetorical camp of yours (or anybody else's) then I'm happy to be there.
All of blogspot is blocked by the firewall, and has been for some time.
Maybe it's just me, but I've never actually believed that Microsoft bundling a browser (that they made, of course) is monopolistic.

You are right. Bundling the browser did not make Microsoft monopolistic. What the court did find was that Microsoft had a monopoly on the OS market and then used that monopoly to restrain competition in other areas, such as web browsers. That is where MS got in trouble.
Show me the part of your comment where you advance and validate a hypothesis.
The link doesn't work because HN excludes the trailing period, which, as it happens, is actually part of the link.

Try this instead ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr%2E
Blogs are great, but there's certainly room for improvement in the way they organize knowledge.

Hear. Hear.

I appreciate the comments here on HN above suggesting that I should have linked to PZ's review of the two authors' book rather than to his post today about the Boston Globe piece. I chose specificity of response to what was submitted here (yes, and personal convenience in slogging through PZ's blog to find the links) over lengthiness of post and point-by-pointness of reply.
I forgot to wave my "I'm Joking!" flag. Sorry about that.
"A recent 90 nanometer TSMC test chip, called Infinity, demonstrated switch fabric performance at about 4 GHz. A new test chip, called Marina, has just gone out for fabrication. Marina will test the programmable interface, and if successful, will give us confidence to build a complete Fleet. We seek participation from sponsors, programmers, and designers of basic computation elements."

It sounds like it's far too early to know how 4-GHz "switch fabric performance" will translate into MIPS or FLOPS, much less application-level performance.
Out of curiosity, why aren't you raising your rates?
This is getting ridiculous. Is it that hard to download a different browser if you want another? My parents are happy with IE and Microsoft products, why should they be forced to make a browser decision if there's a default one ready? Furthermore, who is to blame when Firefox/Opera/whatever crashes? Microsoft?
This article starts by complaining about lack of basic knowledge "what is a stem cell", and then ends with complaints about the unwashed masses not toeing the line on global warming.

Science used to be only about testable things. Not anymore, now if you think about it really hard, and everyone else does too, and no one can find a flaw, it's science.

Global warming, evolution, and most of cosmology are not testable. Are they true? Maybe. But they are not at the same level as the rest of science. Will they be testable? I hope so.

So I'm not surprised that many people don't believe in those things, and scientists too. It's for a good reason. And complaining when scientists dispute global warming, when they have every right to is part of the problem! This article does EXACTLY what it itself is complaining about.
This article could omit the words "PHP" and "web" until it starts listing the specific frameworks and still be valid.

I'm inclined to agree with the posts opposing the use of a generic framework for a very scalable or complex application; they're usually not for that. What frameworks ARE for is small to medium applications with low budgets.

I do some contract work on projects with budgets in the $500-2000 range. For projects like that, frameworks like Rails or Django save a lot of time over writing it in scratch (even in Lisp, which I've done a couple times).
The author seems to think that real science is a subcategory of political science.
I much prefer the Sagan model over the Dawkins version.

I think most members of the general public (in the United States) would consider both Dawkins and the late Sagan as rather hard-line critics of religious commitment, which may be part of what is at issue here. I'm still looking for the scientifically trained person with a "friendly atheist" manner who can talk about secular rationality as a view of the world without being dismissive of trust in traditional worldviews.
It is likely to be much closer to a regular iPhone (not jailbroken) than a regular Mac in terms of openness.
Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance in Crackdown
Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in "Hacking Games"?
It seems to me that most 'true' hackers are generally interested in what the rest of the world considers hacking (i.e. - breaking into computer systems) but think it is lame to do so maliciously. I couldn't agree more - and I had an idea. Maybe this is completely unoriginal, and maybe this is actually highly illegal or widely frowned upon - but that's why I'm throwing it out there for comment. I think it would be fun to set up a monthly competition where a server is set up, and contestants attempt to be the first to hack the box (and achieving a specific goal like replacing the home page, or something like that). I'd be willing to run the contests and provide all the hardware, etc... I was thinking a series of games could focus on various Linux distros, or various versions of Windows, etc...

So I'm posting this to see if there's much interest in running such a contest (say, once a month or so), and if there's comments as to the other implications of such a game. Obviously, DoS attacks would be strictly against the rules, so as not to cause any problems for my ISP. Any thoughts?
Kites Surfing
Known as kite boarding in the United States, kitesurfing is one of the most vivacious sports in today’s worlds as it incorporates a variety of other sports such as wakeboarding
This really needs a set of users to help test this. My username on that is zitterbewegung . I have a wave called hacker news.
His "actions"? Boy did you pick the wrong crowd to come out with that self-righteous bromide.

never heard him referred to as 'rtm'

A tip: it's in that capacity that he administers the server you're posting to.
You didn't understand him.

Just "having no debate" is NOT a good way or determining "this is science". Until a hypothesis has been tested, it's not science.

Global warming has not been tested. It's not even a theory, it's a conjecture, or a hypothesis.

Science is not done by majority vote, I don't care that more scientists that not believe in it. By that criterion phlogiston and luminiferous aether were both science. Until you test it, it's just an idea.
I agree to a large extent. That's a big part of the app we're working on.

But in these posts, he comes across as angry and bitter. That's no way to engage the general public (even as it might be a great way to engage his audience).
Sagan never came across that way to me and he described himself as agnostic.
The reason I always dread these "will [x product] succeed inside the enterprise?" posts is because most bloggers simply don’t understand enterprise computing. In an enterprise, features don’t necessarily win the day (which is the argument this author makes). A good enterprise has a few primary concerns...

1. The availability of good support
2. An obvious return on investment
3. Ease of deployment
4. Integration into existing systems
5. Products that require testable skill sets from employees

Microsoft wins in the Enterprise generally because its support is so good. If you have $245 and a phone you can solve any problem with a Microsoft product even if you’re a low level tech support person. They will sit with you for however much time it takes to fix the problem (even overnight if necessary). On the other issues Microsoft publishes tons of Return on Investment studies, half of Sharepoint is already built in to Windows server, Microsoft has gone to all kinds of trouble to make Windows developers able to manipulate Sharepoint and they offer certifications to test possible employee knowledge.

Google on the other hand offers no support for its services, Google Wave is way too different from anything that exists to demonstrate return on investment, deployment is easy but worrisome from an IT perspective because you have no control over the server, and there’s no skill set to test for just yet. The only thing it has going for it is its ease of integration.

The concepts of Google Wave may very well make their way into the Enterprise but we’re years if not decades away from that actually happening. When it does I suspect Microsoft and every other enterprise application vendor will have competing products making the discussion no more than academic now.
Another good discussion about this is in the online pilot textbook "See How It Flies" at http://www.av8n.com/how/ (section 3). That author also disagrees with the Coanda effect conclusion.

The discussion in there is the best I've seen, it centers on the concept or circulation, the vorticity of the flow field around the wing. One example that's used is the fact that if you just take a wing by itself (try it with a long, flat piece of cardboard) it will "fly" while rotating in the air. It doesn't fly very well, admittedly, but it certainly exhibits a glide ratio a lot better than something with the same cross-sectional area that's not a wing. In that case, there's no top or bottom of the wing at all.
In a gold rush, you're better off selling shovels than digging for gold.
CreateDebate is an interesting site.

It's great to seem people working on ways to do online communication and debate better. And visual communication is definitely one tool that can help reduce misunderstandings that can make disagreements turn ugly. I was really taken with the idea of building an online community to support more thoughtful and structured debate.

In this, the results are less than one might hope:

http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/The_Great_Debate
> Breast cancer survival rates in the US are 90.1%, versus 79.0% in Europe. The prostate cancer survival rate in the US is 99.3%, as compared to 77.5% in Europe. We get better health care in the US.

You conclusion doesn't follow from the data. The only conclusion you could make from that data is that the US has better care for prostate and breast cancer than Europe.

Most people don't die of these diseases. Indeed, most people don't die of cancer. So we should be looking at survival rates for all conditions, i.e. life expectancy.

As it happens, most (all?) western European countries have longer life expectancies than the USA, and all spend less on healthcare. If you wish to conclude that the US system is the best one, your conclusion isn't supported by the facts.