skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Conceptualizations of what constitutes core functionality in products and software have become increasingly shallow and less feature focused. I don't know if this is because of a somewhat less "business" driven mindset, or because Apple is absolutely brimming with UI freaks, but the mentality seems to at present be that the imitation of a dialer in software rather than the actual ability to make calls is what is most important to "protect".

I appreciate Apple's attempts maintain integrity in the UI interface but their hysterics over something like this make me wary.
Is it possible to tell if he held onto it until their IPO? Is that kind of thing declared in their filing?
> Maybe at the time this was a fairly unique idea, but now it's common place for many many websites.

It would not be if Eolas could help it!
To note:
"While it's not clear what Bezos did with his piece of Google, Swisher notes that his stock would be worth $1.6 billion today.
Just curious, how much maintenance or code reuse do game developers have?
Yes, definitely. The failure rate of Skype text chats, especially group chats with many participants, is astonishing.

International SMS is quite reliable, depending on destination country and routing.
The best thing about posting bills online for six months is that it doesn't matter that legislators don't read them. Instead you'd have an army of partisan bloggers etc trying to point out the flaws, ensuring that all the bill's flaws would get brought to the surface eventually, and at least some of those should get amended away.
Meebo’s Reach Spikes To Over 90 Million Users With Community IM Growth
My plate is so full these days that I won't use a new site / service unless I can consume via RSS. Didn't seem to find a feed on the page, which makes it effectively inaccessible for me.
That makes sense.

Elaboration? Proof?
CouchDB emerging as a top choice for offline Web apps
Stargate Universe and the myth of the lone genius
To me, this says more about the importance of rigorous test writing methodology than the silliness of IQ tests. You're trying to get a particular signal, the fact that noise exists does not eliminate the need to read that signal. However, IQ tests were first developed to determine how far behind normal certain types of children were, rather than as a measure of excellence.
You're probably taking it too seriously then.

Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity, it's just that there's a certain part of my brain which takes delight in pointing out all the potential flaws in everything I read. It's much harder to concentrate on the test when half my brain is busy visualizing what four hundred Captain Picards would look like marching down my street.
This all seems to devolve to libertarianism --- "the bills are complicated because regulation is complicated", "no, regulation is only complicated because we over-regulate", and on and on until we hit the point where we say the free market will take care of PCBs in the watershed.

I'm fine with the fact that Dick Durbin isn't doing line-by-line review of the health care reform bill, and with the idea that one party is lining up behind one set of experts and interests, and the other is lining up behind another one. Dick Durbin would do a crappy job of making good judgements about health care. Replace him with someone who's awesome at health care, and now you have someone who does a crappy job with defense contracts.
The design is confusing. Not because there's too much information (there's not) but because there's no hierarchy. You haven't told me where to look. There's not an element on the page that has any more visual importance than any other. Comparing the site to HN makes me think these are going to be ranked/ordered, but we haven't ranked anything.

Below, jlees suggested splitting out the design and the news sections. I think that'd help. The grid layout you currently have for the whole site would work fine for the design section, and then I'd do news the same way HN does (why re-invent the wheel?). If you look at the HN homepage, it doesn't take more than 1/2 the width of the browser (or in the cases it does, links could be truncated/wrapped). You could have the news/design sections side by side on the homepage. The split alone would help me decide where I should spend my time.
It's not clear whether he's saying that threads are bad in Ruby, which is true because of the GIL, or that threads are bad in general, which is just unfounded bashing.
I like what Michael Mandel had to say on this subject back in 2006:

"Suppose that a pharmaceutical company was selling a pill that would improve your memory by 30% or your IQ by 30%, with the same sort of side effects as steroids. Would you be willing to take them for 3 or 5 critical years in your career? What if you knew that everyone else was taking them? What if you knew that the Chinese or the French were taking them? And would you be willing to give your kids these pills in, say, the junior year of high school, to increase the odds of getting a good score on the SAT?"

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/arch...
Yep, was on the 'add if anyone cares' list, will be working once I get home.
One benefit is I no longer have to use my minutes to call 1800 #s. like cust service etc
And that's exactly browsers are turning into.

Browser: Canvas/WebGL + fast JS = new generation of NeWS.
I'm planning on it.
X is fine in my opinion. It's flexible and a known commodity with pretty good hardware support. The cost (in man hours) of replacing X and modifying all the associated bits that rely on it far out weighs NVIDIA or ATI getting someone to spend a few hours developing a utility to setup multiple monitors. A lot of the things people blame on X really have very little or nothing to do with it.
The Thrush combinator in C#
I hope you are not serious. People are not only in touch with each other through the internet. There are lots of different ways for people to hear about a game (friends, school, work, etc.)
Funny because of what I remember Java applets were running inside the browser in 1995.
I don't know much about Ruby or 'threads vs processes', but his blog sure is refreshing and simple!
If you need your search to be specific you could use the (+) operator in front of the keyword (with no space).
I wonder why the "abolishment of patent" meme has not spread yet.

Could it simply be that people have not heard of this book: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

I have seen the anti-patent sentinment spread very widely in libertarians circle enough so that major libertarian think-tanks like the Ludwig von Mises insitute publishes quite a few anti-patent and anti-copyright articles.
The git checkout [filename] behaviour always confused me..

Yes, it's documented, but git seems to really try and make it difficult to lose any work.. but has a command that makes it simple to irreversibly lose your upstaged changes, without so much as a warning?

At least "git revert" sounds like it might undo changes.. In what way does "checkout" imply both "checking out" branches, and reseting a file to it's previously commited state?
At least last time I checked, he was running a custom written blog engine that several of us in #sinatra made a bit more generic. It's probably been heavily modified or even replaced since then. Link: http://github.com/rtomayko/wink
Seconded, sort of. For bigger installations, I stay away from trixbox and just use asterisk and sometimes freepbx on top. To get up and running fast, trixbox is certainly one way to do it. Also look at PBX In a Flash as a potentially better alternative.

Our company is similar to yours in size - 15 people. Call volume is a little higher - 162 calls today according to the logs, and we have very few problems. We've had boxes die in the past so backups are key, but don't cheap out on the hardware even though you can. We use both TDM cards and SIP providers and both work well.

I should say this is only viable if someone is going to take the time to learn the basics of the system, install it, and support it. But you do not need a huge amount of experience to get a full featured system up and running.

We have all the features we need or want, plus many options on physical phones. Mostly we use Aastra but have used and tested Polycom, Grandstream, Cisco, and a few others.

The best part is the freedom - add as many extensions, mailboxes, etc. to the system as you need. Have it email your messages, page you, forward to a custom application. And we are opening a branch office so we will be trunking between them to reduce costs on long distance, all basically out of the box.
If you are on a secure page most browsers will either have a pop-up or a warning about unsecure content on the page.
If you're using Firefox, set security.OCSP.require to true. There is also UI for it under Preferences -> Advanced -> Encryption -> Validation -> When an OCSP connection fails, treat the certificate as invalid.

I don't know whether it protects against all OCSP attacks but it's obviously better than the default option.
Obligatory xkcd
http://www.xkcd.com/435/
Is there a non-bigoted interpretation of this slur-laced question?
I don't like biometric ID because once someone steals it, you can't be issued a new one!
I speculated years ago that Microsoft's long-term vision was to eliminate the browser. I think they wanted a world where people ran fat .NET clients delivered via one-click deployment.

Interesting to see now that the browser continues to be the application "container" and javascript the implementation language for applications. And the alternatives and challenges to IE have continued to grow.

Wonder if Microsoft regrets not maintaining IE for the Mac, and their even older *nix port.
Ask HN: Selling Business Idea/Source Code
I have an idea for what I think could be a profitable business and I have the required skills to code it. The only problem I have is I am a student and would not have to time to run this business as it would involve selling advertising and managing a staff of contract workers. Is it possible to do some sort of deal where I would sell the source code/"business" in return for some equity in the result corporation? Should I just move on?
Twitter don't hide their use and nobody's said anything.
So you make sucky games and have a poor advertising stragety? Big deal!

That is like saying you won't succeed because 99% who went into martial arts never made it to black blet because they never took martial art seriously.
I've worked for a major DRAM company and it's a wonder that the parts are reliable at all. The storage cells are being pushed to their limit as they are often the bottleneck in scaling the overall size of the bit structure. Not to mention the engineers are pressed to the max to get them out the door, often before they are fully qualified. Throw in the millions of process steps that are required to make the part, and the fact that your computer boots at all is remarkable.

Then throw in a high speed bus, processor and disk array....
I have a ruler with 1/16ths of an Inch marked on it. I don't have one with every 0.3175cm marked off on it.
There's a 3mm mark though and I'm fairly certain that that trailing 0.175mm is well within your normal margin of error if you are using a ruler to begin with.

I really don't see what the difference between not having a mark for 1/10th of an inch and not having 1/16th of a cm either, so that issue goes both ways and I'm sure you don't suffer particularly whenever you need to calculate some awkward unit that's doesn't have a mark on an imperial ruler.

I agree fractions are more useful in many cases, which is why if I could relate to your previous mention of splitting a cm into eight, I would've calculated with 1/8cm fractions until I was forced to use decimals.

I have a ruler with 1/16th of an inch on it as well. Many rulers come with both but I've never had to use an inch for anything in my life and I'm going to try to remember asking some engineering friends if they've ever if I can remember. (http://cdn-write.demandstudios.com/upload//5000/300/40/8/353...)

I agree. But the average person doesn't need to. We're not all traveling the world buying things in different measures or collaborating on space shuttles. Most of us are popping down the shop to buy a pint of milk.

I'm sure they don't, I hardly think all that many peoples around the world were happy to move to the metric system from whatever they were on before when that was introduced including my own countrymen but you have to realize that it's an issue that everyone has dealt with and after a few years it should stop being an issue entirely. The average person buys a pint of milk but somewhere someone is calculating pints from liters because the UK is nowhere near self-sufficient in food and I'm sure that includes milk, so it's not unreasonable to think that the cost of conversion does affect the average person in some small unnoticeable way.

And lastly, these are the things that make countries unique! Different! Interesting! Culture! Anything to keep those differences is good.

Sure but you could qualify anything with that. I like culture as much as the next guy and I would enjoy ordering a pint ( and then hand it of to whoever is closest and actually drink beer ) but keeping a unit system that's different from everyone else is like showing up to a party and telling people they need to say the words backwards and not use any vowels, it's doable but frustrating. Then again it's in my culture to be conformist, maybe others think culture is enough of a reason to never change.
Communigate
Math is a language, not a science.

If you dig into that statement, it turns out to be a very nihilistic view. We should be careful not to fall into the trap of demoting math to a mere notation. It isn't. It's the truth.

Green's Theorem, for instance, is no more just part of a mere language for describing electromagnetic theory than the law of gravity is just part of a mere language for describing, say, spacecraft propulsion.

In other words, if math is just a language for physics, physics is just a language for engineering, and we don't have any "sciences" at all ... just languages for higher level disciplines.
You could go to a post office and buy, in a transaction which is linked to you, a uniquely identifiable card with a predetermined value?
It's not just the GIL. Check out Joe Damato and Aman Gupta's awesome presentation from this year's Hoedown for more info on concurrency in Ruby:

http://timetobleed.com/ruby-hoedown-slides/
Intelligence has a lot of dimensions. It's not unreasonable to say focus is one of them.
I'm also about 90% sure that I'll be there!
You have to realize who Gladwell's audience is. I think you're severely underestimating the number of people who have done any research into IQ studies. Now, you could argue that he is not rigorous enough in his arguments, and while this is true, he's still exposing many people to new ideas that can help to reduce widespread misconceptions that the general public holds.
My first impression was that it is very difficult to quickly scan which articles I want to look at, but as I look at it, it seems that it's more usable because I can see what's behind the link. Maybe a combination of the two strategies might help?
It would be easy enough to identify regular customers when they in their home town. These days it isn't all that difficult to pair someone's spending habits with their location an do a bit of online research to find out who they are.

If one was careful about it they could probably stay relatively anonymous though.
Man banished from PayPal for showing how to hack PayPal
Oops, I didn’t even notice that! I’m not a subscriber myself, was linked to this page from Tim Bray’s twitter feed (http://twitter.com/timbray). Regardless, it seems to be sanctioned by the site themselves, if their big advert at the top of the page is any indication.
I wrote a response to this http://www.turnleafdesign.com/?p=172
It's possible that education is increasingly providing the kind of skills necessary to do well on IQ tests.
The link could also give you the ability to bring your userbase back to your site.

Clearly on the mobile or something, not as important. But bringing them back via the web page. Allows you more options in terms of what to display.

I know you haven't mentioned nor asked. But a potential tier pricing scheme.

1) How many reminders per week / month

2) Maybe allow non paying users the ability to pick 15min blocks, yet allow paying users the freedom to create any.
Thread programming is hard. A lot of people point out different ways of doing it and say "if you're not a terrible programmer, threads work fine", which is all well and good, but they are still much more error prone than async and process models. This is one of the reasons Apple wrote GCD, which is a very interesting approach to threading that makes the messy parts of dealing with threads easier.

I would agree with the author. Unless you have a compelling reason to use threads, processes and async tend to make for more correct programs. However, they're often more difficult to get started with. Trade-offs, it's what we do :).
Could you drop you a line off HN? Have a question for you about these lists. Color me impressed on a few fronts. My info's on my HN profile page.
You must have some numbers to back up such a bold statement. Otherwise that's a ridiculous assumption.
Just curious : For the monday event - how many are taking time off from work ?
I can't "prove" my code, but I can prove that my test executes every function, every line and takes every branch and every return. I run my test using valgrind (callgrind with a few options), then I wrote a valgrind parser and combined that with a c++ parser and output the results. Some fun tidbits:

Every time I discovered that a bit of code can never be executed.

The amount of functions that I never even call, even when I am using my test generator (built on top of the same c++ parser)

I enjoy coding. If I spent 1 hour coding a test that finds nearly all of the bugs in a class that means later I wont spent a week deciphering reports and fixing bugs that are annoying users. I get to hack more and my users get more stable code.

If you want to try out my code, http://arora-browser.org/

The c++ parser I used
http://github.com/icefox/rpp/tree

My evil little test generator
http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2007/11/auto-test-stub-ge...

My valgrind tools
http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2007/12/valgrind-callgrin...
Of course that wouldn't work for a rich or famous person...

True enough for O.J. Simpson. But Michael Milken could give you a different take on that issue. Prosecutors often want to make a name for themselves, and prosecuting John Q. Public doesn't further that goal as well as nailing Daddy Warbucks.
Simulate some nanotech
On T-Mobile, you have to buy 400 minutes a month before you are even allowed to pay for data. I use about 1% of my minutes...
I don't care for most of their editorials, and generally don't read the fiction either, but the expository writing in The New Yorker is often superb and quite intellectually stimulating. This peek into the behind-the-scenes processes there goes a long way towards explaining why.
I don't understand what colabopad does (besides something education-related)
Poll: Why do you use your particular OS?
Just wondering what operating systems you use on a daily basis, and why.
I primarily use Microsoft Windows because I want to.
I primarily use Microsoft Windows because I have to.
I primarily use a Linux distribution because I want to.
I primarily use a Linux distribution because I have to.
I primarily use Mac OS X because I want to.
I primarily use Mac OS X because I have to.
I primarily use something else because I want to.
I primarily use something else because I have to.
FWIW, Skype over AT&T 3G has worked for many years on Windows Mobile. Or... it did 2 years ago when I last used it.
I think there are two aspects to this that you might not have considered.

1) If your contact with maths is simply reading a formula out of a book and implementing it then long variable names might be fine. If you are actually trying to do a calculation then long variable names are terrible on two fronts: firstly because they take so much longer to write out, secondly because the additional characters obscure the 'moving parts' of an equation. I'd much prefer looking at "a(b+c) = ab + ac" vs "first_variable * (second_variable + third_variable) = first_variable * second_variable + first_variable * third_variable"

2) I don't really understand what you mean by meaningful variable names. Perhaps if you are using mathematics to model a specific thing then they make sense: eg number_of_people = number_of_males + number_of_females. However, mathematics as a discipline isn't about modeling specific situations, there is no "mathematics for groups of people" for instance. Instead mathematics deals with manipulating abstract ideas - do abstract ideas really have meaningful names?

If you do have some idea then perhaps you could explain how you would define a derivative with meaningful names? The best I can come up with is:

derivative(some_function(variable)) = limit small_change approaches 0 (some_function(variable + small_change) - some_function(variable)) / small_change

Does that really assist cognition more than the standard:

f'(t) = lim h->0 (f(t+h)-f(t))/h ?

btw, can you see from this example what I mean about the extra wordiness hiding the parts? (Maybe I've just used the standard notation for so long the words mess up my pattern matching.)
I'm flying in from LA on Saturday, missing work on Monday. Seemed like a great excuse to get out of town for the weekend!
Holy crap! That is extortion!
no i didn't. whatever i said is based on the style of your expression, which I thought was unlike usual comments.

my explanation was related to "walking vegetables". I already mentioned I don't want to get into meat/anti-meat.
That's not true.

AT&T has always limited iPhone VoIP applications to WiFi to cripple their usefulness. They just announced today that they were extending VoIP apps to 3G, most likely due to pressure from the FCC.

Also, you can't replace the native dialer or any core functions on the iPhone. Google Voice implemented its own dialing interface and was rejected for duplicating the built-in dialing and voicemail functions.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ATT-Extends-VoIP-to-3G-bw-7675...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_voice#Rejection_from_iPh...
Yeah, and in many ways, they don't make perfect targets. In the case of Martha Stewart, it seems she only got taken down because there were vested interests more powerful than her interested in that goal.

I agree that rich/famous people certainly can make a good target, but whether a particular rich/famous person will make a good target depends on the power to which that individual has access to, obviously. Money talks, regardless of how many people hate you for having it. I would suggest that the amount of wealth an individual has access to would be a far more accurate predictor of whether that individual will be taken down in court as opposed to celebrity. It just so happens that many famous people are also wealthy.

Sure there's always going to be exceptions, but you can't seriously be suggesting that rich/famous people in general make perfect targets in court? I'm thinking a famous, yet poor person might be the best kind of target.
Helping robots get smarter with Mechanical Turk
FCC would have ruled AT&T to do this anyway.
'Whitopia'. My question: What is the startup scene like in these parts?