skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great idea! My kids have a set of grandparents in Korea, and they can't see each other more than once a year. I'm going to forward the site to them today.
> Please explain how I mis-used the term, considering the definition is: In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.

In what way does Apple lock you in? If you manage to switch to Apple, which is the more difficult task since you clearly have to buy their hardware and can't re-use what you already have, then switching away is as simple as installing Linux or Windows on the Apple hardware.

> I didn't say this incident is the result of incompetence, I am saying their developers have illustrated a lack of competence in the past. Breaking with third party fonts installed. Breaking iPhone updates that require the use of another computer to fix a broken patch. The list goes on and on.

No, you didn't say that, you are saying that now.
> The current speed of human evolution is over 100 times what it was in prehistoric times.

Citation?
GeekDad 2009 Holiday Gift Guide #1: Books
Ugh, this nonsense again?
This site also seems to be very compelling for traveling with kids. Great for Virgin America.
Humans have the most powerful brains and hence the greatest opportunities for learning. This makes parenting different for humans.
A "dirty" environment strengthens the immune system, and if I were a toddler again, I'd much rather live in a cool abandoned house or junkyard or shack in the woods than in a sterile room with a television where I wasn't allowed to touch anything.

Douche.
I would argue that this is pretty unreadable. Why do obfuscate your code to save one LOC?
Who feels like they got the most out of their particular level of educational attainment? With years of hindsight now, I believe I could have made a lot more of my educational career — delving in to things that really interested me rather than simply completing homework assignments and beating the curve on tests. The amount of available time you have as a full-time student is massively underappreciated.
This is VERY well designed. Many congrats on that regard.

Rather than critiquing it for not being a suitable replacement for parental story time, why not someone suggest it be used in libraries? Let the librarian record the stories and give the children access to them on the library's computers. For children who can't read, they still get a fun experience and it's more intimate than some tape recording.

This also has educational implications, in teaching children to read and maybe using the interface as a 2-way communication device for some sort of tutoring service where children learn to read by practicing with a teacher listening and watching them as they try. What about allowing them to do have real-time drawing capabilities, like you see on NFL games, circling words the child makes a mistake on, or underlining a sentence the teacher wants to emphasize for whatever purpose.

These iterations of this service are what make it a beautiful thing. I don't reckon it would be too difficult to add either of them as well. Would also provide it a more viable business model.
Great job! Very clean design and excellent interface. Did you custom build the page turning animations?
> "Long Jumps" is a myth imho.

You are 100% on point.

The parent's poster's point on conformity is well taken. Still, "independent" researchers are viewed with suspicion because research is hard. As psranga points out, to make a long jump a researcher has to stay on top of the incremental steps. Unfortunately, for 99.9% of people, to do this they must be fluent with the literature and much more importantly talk with other researchers. No one works in a vacuum (and don't bother bringing up counter examples like einstein or newton).

Conformity is a big problem. It might arise when too many PhDs are hustling for a small pie. I'm not sure.
Curious responses. Most HN'ers seem to be saying "same old same old". But I thought this was a very interesting and thought-provoking article.

In any case, the question of how to provide a good (for various values of "good") social environment on the web is a difficult and important one. The more people that think about it and talk about it, the better.

(And, on a rather unrelated note, I printed the article out, so that I could read it more carefully later, thereby learning that Linux FF 3.5 -- which came with my recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 -- has that wonderful print-preview interface that Win FF has had for years. That's cool, and it removes almost [but not quite] the last reason for me to keep my Win machine around. Still, I wonder why it took them so long; after all, the Win & Linux versions of FF have been more or less identical in most other ways.)
I think this idea had been done before and didn't work. I think signing up for a website to split a dinner tab is a bit excessive, especially with the email notifications and everything.

Maybe a better focus would be on larger costs such as rent payments and room subletting that actually requires a more formal agreement between parties.
Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart
The site is absolutely beautiful. Great design.
Good stuff! Perhaps it's safe to remove the "" qualifier from my assumption.
Well, whether it's good or not is debatable, but they are backwards.
My personal trainer said that weight lifting is better than aerobics because it elevates your metabolism for 36 hours whereas running will only elevate it for 4 hours. Also after my weight training session on Thursday my heart rate monitor / calorie counter unit said I burned 800 calories in an hour so I believe the guy.
It may already be a feature in the product, but I'd want the ability to export the story either to youtube and/or be able to download it to my disk.

I can see myself using it having my kids read a story as a saved memory. I also can imagine my mother in law going nuts over this thing because she lives so far away from us.

It's really a good idea. Awesome job
I once read a tip that said:

"Read '=' as 'equals'. Read '==' as 'is equal to'"

I made this error much less after picking up that habit.
Think a little longer term. The iPod touch has a great chance to displace the Gameboy as the portable gameplayer of choice. You get way more processing power per dollar (and not much more expensive), a massive catalog of games, and services like this demonstrate other uses nicely. I would do the iPod touch version stat!
I'm not completely doubting your trainer, but I'd be curious to hear some research to back this up.
Why it wouldn't be useful?

While it might be true for some compression formats/programs, it is not the case for .tar.*, as the directory is archived to the single file first (tar), and then compressed. So if you have similarities within 2 different files, that will be exploited.

I think to make something work for "large blocks" that already does a good job for "small chunks" is just finding the right values for parameters of compression algorithm used.
> "how a candidate thinks" sounds like a very subjective criterion.

Of course it is. What part of the interview process isn't subjective?
iTeddy (Was on dragons den UK)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kwjYSn03-M

Original pitch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhMNipYqY5Y
> eat frequently

The human body is made to run off a gas tank of fat reserves, not to be tethered to an extension cord of continuous eating. Eating every couple hours is historically impossible, and just on that basis one can reason it's likely maladaptive. You eat a proper meal, insulin levels spike to put the energy in fat and glycogen, insulin levels drop, then you switch over to running on the fat and glycogen. You are not built to always stay in the "post-meal" state of elevated insulin and fat storage.

There is no basis to the idea that eating frequently boosts metabolism. I think the practice really has origins in the body building community where they want somewhat elevated insulin levels in order to pack on mass. Body builders pack on fat along with muscle and then shed the fat later for competition.

Some recent studies indicate that the same life extending benefits of calorie restriction can be had by eating only every other day. The point is to spend much time with low insulin levels.

> I've lost 25 pounds of body fat and gained 7 pounds of muscle mass in the last 14 weeks using this approach.

Notice how you never hear from people who have stayed thin for years by counting calories. The research indicates it just doesn't work. Even in the short term we only get these anecdotes of success and the data indicates it's not very effective.
I did a survey on this a few months ago. The results are posted at http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dEhmQ0J....
In addition to the things people have already mentioned, I'd suggest combining all of them, and more, into a credibility score. If your application doesn't involve a strict tallying/reporting of votes, they you can use the score to do weighting, otherwise, you'd use it to discard votes below a certain threshold.

For the JavaScript fingerprinting, I wonder if there are ways to probe for bugs that characterize different browser versions both for a richer fingerprint and to detect spoofing of the useragent.

Other things that can fit into a credibility score: B
computational JavaScript payload to impose more costs on automated abusers. Elapsed time between when the voting form was returned, and when the vote was submitted.

On the IP front, keep in mind the ability to correlate not just IP, but also netblock.
How about counting how many calories you buy? I understand people eat out a lot, but the grocery store is a place where you can make it both precise and effortless. That’s a business idea for you, or Kroger...
Don't get too hung up on bleeding edge tech, there is money in $ALREADY_EXISTING tech.

Put all your focus on marketing now.
It's not a useful measure because it's not the same thing at all. Dedup only works if the block is aligned to a ZFS block size. Compression will find blocks which have no particular alignment.
When gcc warns you, it tells you to wrap it in parens if you really mean it: "warning: suggest parentheses around assignment used as truth value". Your PHP example wouldn't raise a warning from gcc, because it already is.

I find assignment-in-conditional more useful in loops than if's, since you can't just plonk the assignment on the previous line.
It helps a lot with idiomatic C error handling. You'll often have a function that does something, returns 0 on success, and an error code on error. It's nice to be able to do the assignment in the if statement there.

There's no good reason for it in any language built with exceptions from the ground up, though.
Here's a story I was told by a dolphin researcher about 20 years ago. They had a man pretend to be drowning in the open ocean near some dolphins. A dolphin came to rescue the drowning man. They repeated the experiment. After the third or so repetition, the dolphin, instead of saving the man, smacked him around and bruised him up pretty good.
My Wii has become a dedicated emulation machine these days.
I completely agree, Four Steps seems interesting but I feel as though they gloss over how to do the parts that matter and describe in detail what you shouldn't do.
I'd really like to hear some info on the headaches from you if you have any links - it sounds like something I deal with.
The New York Times Best Seller Books - Week of November 1, 2009
I wonder how people will interpret this.

For example, if there are 3 upvotes for "Some High School", does this mean that some 33 year olds completed some high school and dropped out?

Or does it mean that there are some high schoolers who have yet to finish but aren't dropping out?
he calls himself a serial entrepreneur even though he's still on his first business and his second is going to be T-shirts (notoriously bad business sector)? I forsee bad things in the future.
What little energy is needed for pumping could also be supplied in-situ from solar power. What about solar thermal driving turbines or steam engines? This has the disadvantage of requiring high-pressure pipes. Solar Stirling?

An even better idea: if possible, use tides to fill the normal-conentration seawater tank at a higher elevation, and let water flow naturally downstream. Use the same tidal basin to generate the process electricity. This would require a lot more infrastructure investment up-front, but that would pay off in the form of much lower expenses for inputs afterwards.
> Perhaps you could ask some women.

Quite a few women I know would rather be at home with their children than work. I hear that same complaining line from a family member often. It is not torture for someone to stay at home and raise kids.

I personally would like to be a house-dad when I eventually have kids (while my wife works). I think the importance of raising children is quite underrated. And the modern trend of outsourcing the raising of your kids (to day-care centers and after school programs, etc…) is wrong.

> I'll offer just one feature: If you have a job outside the home, you are free to quit your job and take a better job when conditions change. Not so easy to "quit" the "job" of raising your kids, or of living in your home when you have no other home to live in and no work experience that you can use to find a job somewhere else.

You can’t really quit raising kids – whether you like it or not. I would also offer a flipside: In my parents’ generation it was common for women to work half-day (half-day secretarial work, etc…). Yet today it isn’t so – the majority of jobs require you to work from 8 to 17h00.
But a low IQ means you're stupid. So it's still useful information.
Better criticism (or link thereto) please.
Why? If it's not Apple hardware ('what they expect it to be') then they don't support it. So why spend the time to check if you're on non-Apple hardware, and then pop up a nice "Unsupported hardware" (or similar) error message? Unless, of course, you're trying to prevent non-Apple hardware, but that goes without saying.

If you only support one platform, you just need to make sure that it works on that platform. People that try to run it on another platform are on their own if it breaks something/corrupts their data/etc just because you didn't do some sanity check somewhere. Putting that sanity check in is work on top of supporting your target platform (because your target platform will already be 'sane' by definition).

[Note: I'm just arguing against axod's sanity checks surprise, not necessarily anything to do with the article]
Apple’s iTunes Pitch: TV for $30 a Month
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: query()
in /content/public_web_sites/www.inc.com/reflex
/lib/dbi.class.php on line 152

Ouch. Here's a printer-friendly version with the full text.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-way-i-work-jason-fr...
The only difference is it's got a smaller screen, and a touchscreen instead of keyboard.

Which are huge differences. Sure, I've had an ssh client on my phone for about six years now (Sidekick II first, and now a G1), but I can't do work on my phone, even though it has a reasonable keyboard for such a small device. But, my Mini 9 is actually a pretty reasonable device for most of the work I do, up to and including development (though its obvious sweet spot is email and forums and such, which I do a lot of since support is a huge part of my business; and using the phone would be way too slow). I wouldn't consider it a replacement for the big 15" lappy or my desktop machine for serious development or graphics work or whatever, but when I am travelling light, it's exactly the right size and form-factor.
Agreed. It's in the works. And thanks. :)
> It is difficult to switch to Apple hardware

No it isn't. It's no different than getting a new computer, and then putting Windows on it. I think you meant OSX, not 'Apple hardware.'
I'm a big fan of Steve Blank. His blog is marvelous and his ideas are more relevant and experience-based than basically anything out there. We're lucky to have him. That being said, a rant has been building up in me for a long time and I don't think I can resist it any longer. What the hell was going on with that book?

First, the title makes it sound like a treatise on Christian mysticism. If you're such a great marketer, how come you can't name your own book? Second, I've never seen such bad editing (I am not exaggerating). If I were one of the people thanked for proofreading the book I would have either (a) asked for my name to be deleted or (b) done my job. Third, the book is as stilted and processy as his blog is lively and addictive: if your idea of fun is diagrams connecting step 3a with step 4c, dig in. It reminds me of those old photographs where (presumably) warm, funny people would get dressed up in uncomfortable Sunday suits and stare stiffly at the camera because they thought they were supposed to be serious. Fourth, the book doesn't connect its ideas with other work. This diminishes its value; it would be easier to understand if it pointed to other things and explained where it differs. Particularly useful would have been how it differs from Crossing the Chasm and the product-adoption lifecycle. As best as I can figure out, the main difference is that it focuses on how to acquire (paying) early adopters so that you have a chance of later hitting the mainstream. In other words, it's about reaching the chasm in the first place. (Hey, maybe that would have been a good title.) But even with something as basic as that, I'm left wondering if I'm getting it right.

As I said, I'm a big fan. :)

Edit: I mean that. This stuff is so important that I wish Blank would write a good book, in his own wonderful voice (as evidenced on the blog), to really get it across. I volunteer to proofread.
a company at TC50 launched a similar service.
http://storysomething.com/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/14/tc50-story-something-ma...
As other articles have pointed out, this is interesting timing with Hulu's recent announcement of possibly charging for content (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=897853).
How high-traffic web sites still not obfuscate these errors, or even allow them to happen in the first place, is far beyond me.
It bears repetition: make things people want and sell them at a profit.
Twitter may not be making anything right now, but when they decide to start monetizing it, they have the potential to rake in huge profits.
For efficiency reasons, try to stop reading source code in your mind. It's best to just feel it. Reading is is akin to mouthing words in a novel; the lip movement is distracting and slows you down.

FWIW, I read = as "set" (the verb "to set") or "assign" or "let".
Interesting... Thanks for the feedback.

First up, no sign up is required to create the bill. Check out the mock-ups: http://blog.split-the-bill.com/split-the-bill-the-mock-ups

Also there are no emails notifications (yet). You are free to IM, tweet, SMS or Facebook the link to the bill.

Of course we are looking at mobile phone apps and an API for other systems to integrate with (How cool would it be for a POS to include a link at the end of your receipt ?).

Integrating a payment method would also be a possibility.

Nonetheless I do like the idea of supporting more formal agreements and larger costs... will add it to the road map :)
That was my thought too
It's a historic accident Apple currently uses NeXT's OS as the foundation of OSX. Before that, Apple failed miserably a couple times trying to make a better OS upon classic MacOS.

And mind you they once did A/UX...
In his first business he noticed a profitable demand and filled it. Now he has the advantage of capital to try other ventures, as well as real world business experience. He may do well. I love stories like this.
I have to ask whether or not you actually have kids?

There is a significant difference in the development of a child's verbal ability when they are read to by a caretaker vs. watching the exact same thing on a screen. One is an active process, one is passive, and it engages them differently.

You can even tell by listening to a child talk whether they watch a lot of TV or not. There is a specific accent that they pick up, which basically amounts to a lack of enunciation.

Now, all that being said. I think your idea would make money. I thank many parents would love it.

But I think if you are not prepared to be abhorred by child development professionals, you should think again.
I find this a bit confusing. I run a hosting company myself (unbelievably shameless plug: http://asmallorange.com ) and the overhead in maintaining smaller and underpowered servers is relatively massive. On top of the financial aspect, there's also the matter of reliability and performance. Why run your stuff on inadequate, antiquated hardware?

If you're looking at this end of the spectrum, just go with a VPS/Cloud system. You'll be paying about the same amount, maybe less. And you get drastically improved reliability if your provider is using failover and isn't using crap hardware.

Basically, would you rather take a business class seat on a jet or charter a 50 year old plane being piloted by a drunk hobo to fly somewhere?
This is very impressive. I can understand people's first-thoughts of "the lazy parent", but I would have loved to have this when I was traveling a lot when my kids were younger.
I have no idea how many hours my employees work -- I just know they get the work done.

I wish someone would just tattoo this on the forehead of every PHB (backwards, of course).
He's been successful one time in a row. I admit that that's a better success rate than I currently have to my credit, but it did make for a rather lame ending to an otherwise good story.
I learned ARM while working on iPhone reversing, and it's certainly nicer, but there are still a ton of considerations. It's much nicer to write, but when reversing it you have to handle so many edge cases it's not even funny. Writing a decompiler for it really drives that home.
Another question:

What part of your knowledge comes from formal education?

In my case its at most 20%.

Edit: typo
> I hope this criticism is helpful.

It is, thank you.

I'm still looking for the sweet spot; I hope that the link titles themselves give enough context to decide if it's interesting when the topic is one you know, and the blurb just enough to decide if it's one you don't. Next week I'm going to try inverting the link and the description and see if that's more helpful.
At least when programming is involved college was a complete (and predicted) waste of time. Only a couple of years ago, some 5 years after college, I found there are programming languages worth learning, books worth reading and paradigms worth exploring. Also made me feel like a complete waste of space, but that's a different thing (and arguably a good one).
Ethics Committee Staffer Leaks Secrets On File-Sharing Network
The money was split with the developer, so they made $15K each. I'm assuming the 2-8 hours per week was 2-8 hours each. I didn't see where he said otherwise.

To me this looks similar to what you might make from many kinds of small app projects, but the App Store process seems to introduce so much additional risk.
Interesting blog post about visiting "Argleton": http://walkinghometo50.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/destination-...
Fuck the license terms. If people pay for the copy of the OS and are willing to accept that Apple will only offer support for OS X on Apple hardware, it's not really any of Apple's business what they run it on. For end users who don't have contractual relationships wth software publishers (eg special pricing deals, technology sharing agreements or whatever), those EULAs are basically meaningless; the moral rights of the software publisher are adequately protected by existing laws on copyright and so forth.