skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe a little crazy.

1. By locking in with a&tt they got concessions that Verizon was not willing to grant, which must have had some effect on the phone's popularity. (Visual voice mail, no carrier mark on the phone, a very good subsidy (though, initially, no subsidy)...)

2. By only targeting GSM, they drastically simplified the engineering required for the device. The recent comments from an anonymous engineer on the Pink project made it clear that targeting both GSM and CDMA was a huge mistake for them. My understanding is that the two radios are not simply interchangeable. Building an iPhone for both would have required coming up with two radically different internal designs. This would have required engineering hours which would likely have delayed the phone. (or the 3g, or the 3gs) And that delay would naturally have cost market share.

So, it is pretty hard to say what would be different if Apple had a phone that ran on other carriers. And, it is a two way street, it sure doesn't look like Verizon plans on having the iPhone any time soon.
I'm still waiting for my flying car....
That's wild. Drop me a line sometime, email's in my profile.
It is unfair that your country of birth is arbitrary. Surely the appropriate policy to ameliorate that is to relax immigration barriers? That seems more relevant to the problem than estate taxes.
I'm not sure the quote really means what they're interpreting it to mean. Emulating the Mac "in terms of graphics" could simply refer to Microsoft trying to create a more powerful graphics subsystem, akin to Apple's Quartz (which is strongly based on PDF). In other words, to let Windows programs more easily produce interesting graphical effects that don't tax the CPU needlessly.
a lot of problems can't really be fixed with software...

- corporate meetings that accomplish nothing

- nagging girlfriend

- traffic congestion (well maybe some software here might help)

- stupid shitty and cold weather

- an IT department that's incompetent

- annoying neighbors

- etc...

If only software solved everything.
I got bored a few lines into the generated article - it reminded me somewhat of a book report a kid might write. There was no drawn-out arc to the story; each sentence or two was correct and complete, but didn't flow that well into the following or previous ones. It was as if there were a bunch of bullet points that were joined together into a "story", which is, I suspect, similar to how it was created.

When I read sports, I want to read passion. If I just want the bare facts about what happened, I'll read the boxscore - which tells me what the details are. For an actual article, I want emotion, I want character, and I want some feel about the game itself.

If you ask me what the largest threat to professional sports journalism is, it's semi-pro local sports blogs. Guys (and it's mostly guys) who write passionately about their local team, and have a depth of knowledge about it that surpasses most general sportswriters. It's similar to comparing writings about small web businesses between SitePoint and 37Signals - in both cases you've got one author that investigated it (but also writes on other things), and one that lives and breathes it. The latter, almost always, will provide a more compelling story.
Your making the argument that corporate taxes reduce his personal income, and therefore should count as his taxes. Ok. But if corporations did not have to pay taxes, they would pay their employees more, including secretaries. It's impossible to say for sure that a 35% corporate tax rate reduces secretary salaries by 35%, but it is something highly significant.

And if he paid less in taxes, he'd buy more goods and services, too. In fact, he probably spends money more intelligently than your average bureaucrat -- certainly, he's able to balance the budget, and that's without even owning a monopoly on first-class mail delivery and taxation of income!
Ask HN: Great intro books for web design/graphic design?
Hi all,

I suck at design, i can't for the life of me figure out which 4 colors work well together, and how to put them together. Is there any definitive design books to read to figure out these questions? Such as SICP in Computer Science.

Thanks a lot!

Jason
Yahoo sets eyes on India's UID project
http://www.docmatcher.com/
People here don't know who you are, Mongoose. Why don't you put a link to "Rules for my unborn son" in your profile? Amazing site.

http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/
For branding 3COM would be better suited for the consumer market.
Buffett didn't get any benefit from knowing Rothbard. But yes, his family's influence probably helped him out, as he has repeatedly acknowledged.
I've been there many times and the ideas just aren't good. Seriously, a "jump to conclusions mat?" It was funny the first time i heard it, but to be the number one item on the site this long makes it look like a farce.
Angie's list includes doctor opinions. I have never used it for that personally so I cannot exactly recommend it but I find them useful for other service providers.
Articulate your opinion in prose or upvote; single phrase, "tl;dr" type responses are frowned upon in HN, rooshdi.
Quarantined Conferences: Claustrophobic Technophiles or Attentive Audiences?
MLS and the Competition Bureau - Did Selling Your House Just Get Cheap and Easy
People are asking me about the suggestions made by the Competition Bureau of Canada following their investigation of the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). The Competition Bureau has indicated that some of CREA’s policies that govern the operations of MLS® systems restrict consumer choice and limit the scope of alternative business models, which might be viable and beneficial to consumers if the policies didn’t exist.
Sorry poor Tortoise, you're putting words into Achilles mouth.

Fortunately, Python gives you:

* A helmet. It won't parse unblocked code like any other language.

I'm not sure why you think blocking a second time with brackets would improve things or avoid this risk. But hey, if you want to wear a second helmet, that's cool. May you encounter others like you. :^)

* A mirror where things are as large as they appear (the blocking looks like it executes), unlike other languages where these can get out of sync and cause problems. If you enjoy this risk, that's awesome. High five.

* A handy warning light should you accidentally stray too far to the wall (Python will telling you that your readability is broken at the same time it tells you your blocking is - and you only need one fix). If you'd prefer not to be told about this, two places to fix things, and enjoy receiving badly written code, that's your prerogative and who am I to say anything other than that it's not mine.

Achilles: Nice bike and helmet.

Tortoise: No!

Achilles: Er, ok. Could you explain?

Tortoise: I need to get a helmet!

Achilles: You're already wearing one.

Tortoise: But what if I fall?

Achilles: You're wearing a helmet, which will protect you.

Tortoise: But I need to get a helmet.

Achilles: No you don't, you're wearing one. Oh and by the way, you need to be visible at night. The helmet's reflective, so you probably don't want to cover it with another ...

Tortoise: You're not listening to me!

Achilles: I am listening, but I'm also disagreeing. Are you listening to my disagreement?
1. Start with a database of popular names, like might be found in a baby name book.

2. Ask the user to input the name to be guessed.

3. Lookup the name in the database. If the name supplied by the user is not in the database, add the name to the database.

4. After the name lookup or insertion in the database perform a guess as to the sex of the name based on the data from the baby name book and weighted by previous user corrections for that name.

5. Print the guess to the screen (male or female) for the user to verify.

6. Ask the user to input if the guess is correct or incorrect.

7. Store the users input regarding if the guess is correct or not linked to that particular name to improve the future accuracy of the guess on that particular name.
First web browser was on a NeXT computer
I don't know what you're talking about...I made software to fix the "nagging girlfriend" problem.
Jump to Conclusions Mat is a reference to the movie Office Space. It's a great movie you should check out some time.
"How in Cthulhu's name does this not mention that Warren Buffett's father was a Congressman, Howard Buffett of Nebraska"

Because he's trying to make a general statement about estate tax in the United States, so talks about the general condition of being born in the US. If he talked about his specific childhood, it wouldn't have the same generality. I doubt it has to do with modesty.
Internet Archive Taking Lead on 301 Works (Short URL Permanence)
Pro-tip for those still in university for a technical field:

Instead of going to lectures, completing assignments, and doing tutorials you would be better off learning engineering the way I learned. My way only works in those cases where your prof will actually assign a relevant book.

Step 1: Start at the very beginning of the book with some blank printer paper. Start reading, but be sure to use the paper to block off information further down the page. I actually used 2 sheets of paper, one for the opposite page and one for the section below what I was reading.

Step 2: When you encounter an example problem try to solve it. Make a good, honest, serious 10 minute try at figuring out what the formulas should be. This is especially important if you haven't even been given the formulas first. I "invented" the equations for electromechanical forces by thinking about what they were asking, visualizing it, and then applying basic calculus to the problem set. I also invented fluid flow through pipe networks, structural deflection, life time value assessments, and many other things. All of these concepts are stuck like granite in my mind for life.

Step 3: At exam time take all those assignments you haven't done and do them all at once in the 48 hours before the exam. If you were smart you would have asked your prof if he was ok with you handing in the completed assignments on your own schedule. The reason you leave these off to just before the exam is two fold. Firstly, you actually do the assignments without leaning on your friends to help you with the devilish details. Secondly, your mind doesn't go into auto-recall mode and remember THAT EXACT problem. It is actually trying to solve them for the first time.

That's all it takes. My university experience was a walk in the park once I figured this out, I actually held a full time job as a construction coordinator while fully enrolled at Waterloo.

On exams I could always get the bonus questions because I didn't just understand the formulas - I "invented" half of them. It's a much deeper understanding that started in first year and carried me through until the end of my fourth year. There are going to be exceptions (for me it was applied partial differential equations (except Laplace, that I understood fairly well)) but in general it is far easier to read through a 250 to 400 page book and cram for 48 hours than it is to trudge along going to class and getting stuck on stupid details in assignments.
I don't think it was a good idea to write this article. Some of these messages could reasonably be improved, and some couldn't, but regardless of the merit of each individual complaint when I read someone listing out the result of a half dozen common typos along with a description of how bad these extremely common error messages are, I can't help but immediately judge the author to be one of those NNPP's who spends days tripping over ridiculously simple issues because they never really grokked how to debug in the general sense. I'm not claiming the author is an NNPP, I'm just saying when you get hung up on the basics like this that's the impression that is conveyed.
dup (he apparently made a new URL): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934375
I disagree with the premise of this post. A lot of people making stupid comments do care and just don't understand the nature of this site.

The comments can still be killed, but it's a mistake to not give people a chance to change their behavior.
NASA - 2012: Beginning of the End or Why the World Won't End?
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Ugh. I know. But it's a joke and the fact that everyone there takes it seriously means they aren't serious. It's a waste of time. If the site is trying to be a funny place to go talk about stupid ideas, then it succeeds, but if it's trying to be a serious place to talk about real ideas, then it fails.

That's all I'm saying.
Oprah has an anal parasite, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Owww, your penis just bumped into my anal parasite!
but it doesn't do a good job of explaining what to do when your database isn't up to date. Geo django also gives horrible error statements (none at all when the libraries aren't installed right).
You are missing the point. A company has money after expenses (I'll abbreviate it MAE) which must be distributed. (Or in the case of GM, they have negative money after expenses.) You are discussing the behavior of companies in response to changes in MAE.

I'm discussing how a fixed amount of MAE is distributed in response to changes in incentives. Each dollar of MAE can be given either to shareholders, to employees, or can be invested. If you raise the cost of distributing money to shareholders (this is what the corporate tax does), companies will divert money to employees and investments. I.e., no one will pay dividends if there is a 100% dividend tax.
are these sort (flame-inducing) of articles really worth having on the HN front page? I flagged it.
Wow. I mean, who is this guy? This is just breathtaking.
If education and mind expansion were the point of distributed key/value stores, then this would be a valid argument. For some people, I suppose it is. But, for most folks they are a means to an end...and the end is not making people more clever. The end is building scalable applications for most folks, and an SQL query layer doesn't impede that.
Google Closure: How not to write Javascript
Thanks, you just answered my question posted above. Work at this level rarely comes out of nowhere.
they're getting closer but they're not there yet. they have an API method in beta that allows you to pull the last 50 posts of a user's mini-feed, and then you can grab comments for each post in the mini feed, but that's not going to get you all user contributions.
Too bad Apple geniuses don't all look like this
> I said, "I like to add sugar to my rice crispies" and she said, "You couldn't add enough sugar to your rice crispies to equal the amount in the frosted kind."

Ah, I love a good challenge!
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Brackets of the World [pdf]
http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comics/103.png
No worries guys. It's like the problem with the LHC: our stream of consciousness will simply flow unhindered into the reality in which we all don't get killed by a rogue planet.
I have the opposite problem. I am happy and optimistic. I think long and hard about problems to solve - with a notepad in hand - and can't think of (m)any. So, it will help if you share the problems you have thought of.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
I recommend checking out 'universal principles of design' and o'reillys 'designing web navigation'. These two will give you a good overview of different aspects of design while helping you understand how design works on the web. I think that in starting to learn about all of this, it would be advantageous to approach things from an 'information' angle. That is, web design is information first and aesthetics second.

Beyond that 'A Designer's Research Manual' is well worth reading.

And for colors check out http://www.colourlovers.com
> - corporate meetings that accomplish nothing

Workflow, BPM, and Project Management software can go a long way to help avoid most meetings altogether. Then the meetings that do take place can be more productive.
That's exactly how i've got it now...it looks like it might be the best solution...Thanks Scott :)
You might be interested in knowing the McDonalds has experimented with telepresense. They thought about making booths with something equivalent to skype with a big TV, so people at two McDonalds locations (presumably family) could have a meal together.
It is the most popular free iphone app. That wouldn't be the case if it weren't well made.

What don't you like?
Simple Is As Simple Does: The Risk Of Retweet
This is a good tip. I do the same thing when reading math books. Trying to pick up advanced math on your own can be really challenging because there are almost no worked examples of, well, anything past the undergraduate level. The author supplies a series of exercises at the end of each chapter, no solutions, and you're expected to provide the rest. Fortunately every theorem that is actually presented can be viewed as an exercise that was too challenging to state without proof. Now every time I hit a theorem, lemma, etc. I do exactly what you describe. (The paper is really necessary, I'm incapable of not reading ahead and peeking at the solution, at which point the "problem" is ruined.) Often my solution is way off the book's, but this is the best/only way to "learn by doing" when it comes to higher math.
Friend, what you need is a compiled imperative language with verbose type declarations. Java comes to mind.

Rails works by following conventions that feed metaprogramming and method_missing magic, and the kind of safety net which the author seems to imply is missing will just never be available in that sort of system.

I find little errors like these totally worth it because of the time I save by using rails, and after the first couple of weeks (as many have already posted) most of these are non-issues.
Almost everything in facebook is openly accessible via API if you've granted permissions to an applications to do so. We've seen services like Tweetdeck and Seesmic and Brizzly act like portals to the data.

Things get complicated with friends' data of course. Facebook has a collection of your friends phone numbers, and data access permissions and storage rights get complicated.
Hehe, nah... just good old-fashioned craigslist.

That's how nerds meet in the Bay :)
From what I had read (a New Scientist synopsis of a Univ of Wisconsin study, so my facts may be muddled) it was exposure to the 1918 pandemic that provided H1N1 antibody response. Since that flu variant lasted until 1920 we are talking about people who are at a minimum 89 years old. This is not a large enough cohort to appreciably tilt the mortality profile on its own, there is something else at work here as well.
Disqus has the same problem with 100 comments. This just happens to be a very popular post.

Tumblr theme designers can remove the picture from the list. Sadly, not many do so.
I challenge you to find a popular dicionary that isn't carefully curated. You can't just call up Webster and get a word added to the dictionary, there's a vetting process it has to go through.
It's so much easier for Cisco to compete with HP than it is for HP to compete with Cisco. HP is competitive in access-layer switching and that's about it. No presence in big iron carrier class core gear, wireless, VOIP, security/IDS, CPE devices such as cable modems & IP set top boxes, infrastructure, SOHO consumer gear, etc. Meanwhile Cisco just has to slap together an X86 server, write some management software, and they've at least got a complete product line to compete with HP. I imagine HP is grabbing 3COM to make a push towards SOHO/consumer markets because 3COM isn't relevant in any of those above listed markets either for the most part. Cisco is more worried about Juniper, Brocade, Arris, etc. They are aggressively competing with Cisco in a lot of important markets. Cisco can offer a 40-50% discount and still be unable to compete with some of these companies on pricing. Unless you really need some screwball exotic feature set that Cisco offers you can find feature/performance parity easily. Interoperability between vendors is much better these days so there's less vendor lock-in and more acceptable of mixed networks. You might use Cisco in the core but go elsewhere for almost everything else.
I wonder who's profiting more from this deal, Wolfram Alpha or Bing?
crybaby
Bad idea: tossing your cousin Penny into a fountain to make a wish. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PhzrmBgMI
It's not really surprising in either case I feel. For Facebook, their social network is their greatest value. For Apple, it's their experience.

It takes more courage than I can imagine to put your golden egg on a pedestal for anyone to touch, study, steal.

Sucks for developers, sure, but at some point devs start to sound kind of greedy. In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market. At the very least, you should respect the risk these companies take.
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This is beautifully written, and I'd add that tax is almost always imposed on earnings where you deserve the money - so saying that inheritance isn't earned and therefore must be taxed doesn't really fit with the rest of the tax system.
Ask HN: Where did HN's sense of humor go?
Why are some individuals so stubborn on here?
Maybe he just burnt-out and wants to move on to something else?
Companies like Coke and Apple purchase TV ads to do branding too. That's something text search ads just can't do that well. It's great for suggesting someone something at the right time though.
The argument that gold is equivalent to currency is false. It's almost impossible to buy food from the grocery store with the gold watch you got last Christmas. For all practical purposes, gold is a second-hand good like anything else, and selling it to a dealer ensures you get nowhere near the appropriate value for it, just like selling any other second hand good.
Microsoft Patents The Sudo Command
Pretty good critique. Hopefully Google gets these (mostly minor issues) cleaned up in the next release.
Link to the actual full story
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091111094923390
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The section "The Slow Loop" posits that many for-loops in the library are much slower than they could be because they "[look] up the .length property of the array ... each time through the loop".

I wonder what the performance difference is in terms of referencing a local var vs. referencing an object property? Surely it's negligible?
Traffic lights are totally fixable, there's just a huge amount of legacy hard and software systems. Ten years, better tracking systems, and some fuzzy logic. Problem solved.
If this practice becomes mainstream, we are-- all of us-- fucked.
Don't forget the political/social implications of convincing the world's population that these need to be changed.
Well, I learned something new from most of the points mentioned.

Only thing I would take exception to is:

>Those 1.0s are telling. Languages like Java represent integers (1) differently from floating point numbers (1.0). In JavaScript, however, numbers are numbers. (1 - factor) would have worked just as well.

It works just as well but the code seems to be clearer (without any loss of functionality or performance) for explicitly making it a '1.0'