skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Customizing isn't just about beauty. It's about getting and organizing and using your phone's features in a way that make sense to you personally.

Would you buy a computer that couldn't be customized?
exactly. I totally see this being useful in the US. I was just pointing out a counterpoint from Europes side.

And. No. The EU does not have a unified cell network. And as long as nobody does it, nobody will start with it as these excessive roaming charges (EUR 10 per MB is common) are a really nice way to make additional money - especially considering that people are moving around more and more.
"The Valley will not soon be displaced and will do just fine in spite of the larger economic problems"

Which seems more likely in twenty years:

A) The CA/US debt, education, and political problems will be fixed

B) In the near future Boris Johnson or some other politician who 'gets it' is able to convince their government to pass a series of bills that create the same economic/social conditions that created SV, and over the next twenty years this new area catches up to and surpasses SV despite SV's current massive advantage.

As for education, IIRC it was one of the top three issues for every presidential election between 1964 and 2000 and virtually nothing changed. For the past two election cycles it hasn't even been one of the top five issues, and there's no evidence that it's coming back in 2012. The fact is that the vast majority of CA/USians can't read English proficiently, that is well enough to compare and contrast the viewpoints in two different newspaper articles. This means the vast majority of our population is completely useless in the modern economy. Not only are we making zero progress toward fixing this, but there is zero will to fix it. And even in the past when there was tons of will to fix it, it still proved unfixable.

As for the CA/US debt, the vast majority of citizens STRONGLY support increasing the debt. A black-gay-atheist would have a better chance at winning the south in the 50s than a presidential candidate who supports the kind of tax increases needed to fix the debt.

As for our other political problems, our policies are completely based around made-for-TV soundbites and not academic research. That's why our infrastructure is crumbling, we support torture, we're destroying the value of the dollar, etc. And I see zero sign of this changing.

As much as I love SV-- and I still intend on moving there-- let's face the facts, the chances of someplace else catching up to SV are vastly better than the chances of fixing the problems facing the US.
I read somewhere earlier today that it downloads the entire route info at the start.
It also sucks for cell carriers who offer their own navigation services for a monthly fee. (Most of which are re-branded versions of TeleNav.)
GF and I are planning a road trip through Boston/NY using AirBnB to find our sleeping quarters. Super pumped to try it. Been pretty happy with the results we've found so far.
I remember at one of my jobs, the commute for a 9am start took ~45 minutes. The 9:30am start took 15 minutes. Instead of leaving at 8:15 and arriving home at 5:45, I left home at 9:15 and arrived home at almost 5:45, usually 5:50.
The perception, rightly or wrongly, in the rest of the world is that in the USA people go "OMG !!! IT'S SOCIALISM !!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH !!!!"

This is true, but only because most of the people decrying "socialism" don't understand that many of the things they support are also socialist. Both the right and the left are already fairly socialist in the US; Norman Thomas, who ran for US President on the Socialist Party ticket a bunch of times in the early 20th Century, was asked why he wasn't running again at one point and replied that the Republicans had embraced all his major platform points, and the Democrats were already beyond that, so he'd accomplished much of what he'd set out to do. I can't find this in a minute of googling, so maybe it's apocryphal.

In any case, socialists on the right were discredited effectively everywhere by WWII, and in the US, socialists on the left were discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1990 and/or the (perceived?) near-collapse of Britain in the 1970s.
just joking :)
Droid is CDMA-only but at some point, AT&T will have their own Android 2.0 device.
Breaking news from the office of fallacies: People are fungible!

Seriously speaking, however, money is a pretty major problem. It is hard not to feel unfairly treated when the lawyers working on translating your product into patentese make 5-6x per hour that you do. Of course, I have equity. I don't know how I'd feel were I an engineer, paid market rate, without it.

Why is the market rate for engineers so low, compared with other professionals? Do they need a union? Negotiations class? What is it?
no luck. Checked my spam too. I'll shoot you an email at info@phonehalo.com
C was my 1st and it worked out fine - curious to know which language you'd recommend.
Java directly on Xen
The downside of using internet connectivity for navigation is... that you need internet connectivity. Sucks to get part way through a trip and lose your navigation.

This could be solved by pre-fetching the whole route's data. If Google can tell where people tend to drop service, they might even decide automatically whether pre-fetching is necessary.
I kind of see the value of raw talent/intelligence as approaching a limit. Like this graph: http://www.mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/science/acon/GIFs/data_dialog3_...

The commenter's idea seems to sync with this notion, as the really talented people kind of group near the top of the curve. This would mean that they are all intelligent/talented enough to master eachother's job.

I bet there is a great deal of luck involved in the outlier cases... which you seem to be attributing to talent alone.
The Making of ReoCities, 600K accounts recovered already and counting
You don't need six lines connected to your house to deliver various services. It's a natural monopoly the same way having a single water connection is.

Because of that, the physical connection should be provided and managed by the government, or a designated government run corporation as a non-profit. The service carried on the hardware should be serviced by private companies with equal access to the hardware.
Maybe so, but the obvious solution then is to give users an option to disable the free portion of the service. Disappearing data ain't worth the $25 a month or whatever you save with the free usage.

So long as I'm paying for the service and storage, stay the hell away from my data!
It's unfortunate that it has proved impossible to get a bill through the house/senate without adding various handouts for specific industries or even companies.

That being said, creating a system that assigns a monetary value to each ton of carbon will still create the biggest economic boom in US history. What's more, like the dotcom boom it will be one that anyone can participate in, not just those who are well connected to the government or whatever.
Boston Dynamics Dynamically Balancing Biped Walker
Well it isn't a guarantee that they will delete the data, just a notice that they won't be liable legally if they do decide to do so. Probably just a legalistic CYA, but if so they should probably word it better.
I would like to add the course on Game theory from Open Yale Courses:

http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/contents/downloads

Although they are prepared for economics students,but still I believe it would interest math geeks
Why not just write a cron job to insert a row every now and then eh?
While competition is generally a Good Thing, there are times when it doesn't make sense to waste a lot of effort through duplication.

How does anyone benefit by having two or three equally-slow internet connections into their house (say over copper phone wires, coax, and BPL), rather than having one much faster connection (fiber)? All the money spent duplicating parallel infrastructure could potentially be spent making a single more robust network, one that gets upgraded more frequently.

It doesn't make much sense to force each would-be ISP to drag lines out to their potential customers' houses; once customers have a connection, a second one is just waste (unless there's some way to use both at once, but there generally isn't and most people couldn't afford to anyway due to the way they'd be priced -- each ISP has to recoup the cost of its own infrastructure).

The better way, and the way that actually fosters more competition where it counts, is to have a good, shared, high-speed infrastructure that all providers can operate on and which is made available to all on non-exclusive and non-discriminatory terms.

I think the proper vehicle for these sorts of things are public-private partnerships, similar to the way that transportation projects have been handled for years. (Ex. both the Erie Canal and the NY State Thruway were done by public/private partnerships, called "Authorities" in NY state parlance.) This provides a degree of isolation between the day-to-day management of the infrastructure and the machinations of the political process, and also discourages wasting of taxpayer funds, or raiding of infrastructure funds for other projects. The state might support a project via bond guarantees, but could reasonably expect it to stand on its own (and operate as a non-profit) from then on.

That strikes me as a compromise solution which is likely to produce the most competition where it actually benefits users.
At this point it’s obligatory to link to JWZ’s groupware essay: http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Salient point: If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy
Well, that's our problem in EU - no unified Cell Network - operators milk their intra-EU traveling customers however they want. There's some progress in EU parliament/commision, but it is so slow it will take 50 years before we get unified market. US has range of other problems with telco market though.
Perhaps, but it's pure laziness. Amazon should simply archive the data if they want to free up capacity on their SimpleDB servers. I can't imagine SimpleDB's servers are struggling under the load of their dozen-or-so users.
Fascism. At least according to Roosevelt.

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
Ok, did that.
I was going to provide a few reviews, but you haven't added my former college yet :)

also the site is a great idea
Calculus is beautiful and it is absolutely necessary for all physical sciences and has serious applications for financial sectors, computer science, and many other fields as well.

However, for the average person who is not going into any technical field, probability will have a far greater impact on their day to day lives than calculus. Probability is useful for everyone in this world.

Anecdotally, I have a bachelor's in mathematics. It occurred to me several years later when I went back to start on my master's that I had virtually never used calculus after graduating and had to review a lot of my basic calculus notes.
Thanks for this! I recall reading over your article, http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/, back in the day and being completely baffled and intrigued. These days I've been hacking with Clojure and wanting to bring some of that FP sanity back to my daily work ;)
Securilicious
Thank you! I actually applied to business schools right before I started working on Carbonmade. I pulled my apps as Carbonmade began to grow. I think people lose sight at the fact that building a product -- design and code -- is just one piece of the puzzle. It's a very important part (arguably the most important), but the things I listed make up a sizable amount of work that must be done well. Companies cannot survive, or at least cannot grow to hundred million dollar companies, without excellent CEOs, sales people, marketing people, support staff, project managers, etc.
"But they said it was up to the makers of those devices to decide whether to include the application."

err, I hope they meant "it's up to the users of those devices to decide whether to install the application."!?
I dunno... does the Google app cache the whole route and a reasonable surrounding distance and then rely on the GPS for the navigation?

Unless it does, there's still an enormous scope for the in-car navigation market as driving is one of the scenarios in which you are likely to lose your mobile signal or see it weakened enough to hurt a fully online navigation application.
This is a question about how much influence an individual has on others in terms of networking effects.

Moreover, it may be sufficient to have a positive attitude toward voting without actually ever voting.
They cache your route, so if you lose your connection you're fine. However, if you make a detour it won't be able to recalculate a new route until it gets connectivity again.
[pdf] Arnold's Message to California Legislature (look at the margin)
Haha! That's rough. I was computer science for the first two years of college back in 2002 and 2003. I had a few small projects that I worked on where I had to do both the programming and the other stuff as well. I found out early on that I was a lot better at the other tasks than I was at programming so I looked for co-founders that were talented programmers. You may want to figure out what you do best and then pair up with another person.
This may be off topic but having fun at our jobs is important
Most of the censorship/blocking/etc around the world is by governments. Even democratic ones (Australia, France, etc).

And even if things are good now, do you trust that things will stay that way in the long-run? Better to have more than on choice...
Yes- if you are selling iPod accessories. Try something a but more relevant your site (like a voucher for a free text book on amazon or something)
Also maybe you could give away Roman Noodles... when I was in college that was basically currency.
I don't think the licensing problem can be solved with money. TomTom owns the mapping data and obviously wouldn't let Google provide a navigation app since it would put them in direct competition with TomTom. That's why Google had to create their own maps for the US.

The map downloading model you're describing already exists and there are already plenty of other companies providing in-car GPS devices for that. I don't think it's appropriate to implement that sort of thing in a smartphone since the entire point is that it should always be connected.
Audiobooks.

I've listened to probably more than 20 in the last two years ranging from the Count of Monte Cristo to all of Malcom Gladwell's work to Investing for Dummies. It's a great way to make the most out of your commute because if you're like me, you probably don't have time to read all of those in your free time anyway.

You can pick up an iTrip (http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/itripauto) for about $60 at Target to use with your iPhone and audiobooks usually range from about $10 to $30.

As a start, I highly recommend Bill Byrson's unabridged A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I've listened to four times now (and counting!).
They just released their quarterly results, which say that average selling price is going way down. So it's not just the Google announcement:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=alkD...
Hands on with Droid. $199 on Nov 6th
According to CNET they do cache it:
"They cache the route selection after you input a destination, so it's stored locally and you won't lose the directions if you lose the connection. If you want to deviate from the route without a connection, you're sort of screwed, but that's not any different from other cell phone navigation apps, as opposed to portable GPS devices with more storage."

From here: http://news.cnet.com/8618-30684_3-10384544.html?communityId=...
The wording of the policy indicates that they can selectively delete just the data which has not changed.
Internet speeds and costs around the world
Anyone cares to calculate the odds of this happening by accident?
For me, the same observation holds true for bandwidth. I have had the same bandwidth for a couple of years and see just no reason to upgrade. A 100Mbit (assumed though not explicitly mentioned in the article) line seems just out of reach for now, possibly upgrades to 10Mbits but even that would surprise me very much...
The bandwidth cap sucks, but compared to DSL, that's a great deal for 10MBps. In Cambridge, MA we were paying Speakeasy more than that for 1.5MBps.

<rant topic="speakeasy">

It turned out to be terrible, but our contract locked us in for a year... and we moved to a new town in 10 months.

Free markets are great, contracts are fine, but in our situation, we simply didn't have any competitive options to choose from. Also, the assumption of "perfect knowledge of the marketplace" was violated because we didn't know how severely non-premium the service would be.

Speakeasy happens to be the worst ISP I have dealt with -- ever. Their support were competent, but customer service was terrible. They had a system-wide outage during the US Inauguration ceremony. Their prices, as I already mentioned, were very high, but we agreed to the contract under the assumption that we were paying for premium service.

In contrast, I can't say enough good about sonic.net, which is a California Bay Area ISP. I'm currently very satisfied with Teksavvy, who are an Ontario ISP.

Speakeasy, though... Avoid them. It's the free market in action. If you're in MA, and specifically in the Boston area, be aware...

</rant>
Could somebody explain how it makes sense for a few nerds to do this, but it does not for yahoo?

If geocities was eating that much of their bandwidth (which I doubt), couldn't they advertise on it?

I just don't understand how a few geeks can like this enough to buy (or scavenge from their closet) the necessary equipment to do a project like this, but a multi-billion-dollar technology powerhouse like Yahoo! cannot.
If Google can tell where people tend to drop service, they might even decide automatically whether pre-fetching is necessary.

They collect a lot of data from mobile Maps users, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'll give it back in form of all kinds of neat automations/optimizations.
Because um... I just want to play with it. I don't particularly care about the algorithms. I just like the tech.
Ask HN: Which blogs did you contact to get coverage when you launched?
Is there a list, or did you just go through technorati and emailed them all?

And which ones actually covered you?

Also, what strategy did you use to contact? Start off with the small ones and worked your way up? Or start off with the big ones and hoped for a homerun?
@jkincaid

That's cool then.

I hope they're caching enough around a route to get you to a petrol station ;) That's generally why I divert and leave the motorways.
(1/26)^7 .. without getting too fancy with any sort of linguistic probabilities...
My own guess is that they wanted to push the millions of GeoCities users to become customers for Y!s paid hosting service.

But to me that smacks of bait-and-switch, if you buy up an advertising supported hosting service you should not change the basic business model that made it a success.
The One Million Application Store
I can see three plausible options:

i) The government throws its hands in the air and gives up.
ii) The government cuts off the entire building/complex.
iii) The government cuts off people entirely at random.

Knowing the way most governments tend to work, my money is on number 3, with number 2 coming in a distant second.
And you find this surprising...why, exactly?

Being surprised when a company maximizes profits is like being surprised that water runs downhill.

If we want them to invest in infrastructure rather than pay out dividends, we should figure out a way to make the infrastructure investment be the profitable (i.e. greedy) choice. Which is sort of the point of the article; by introducing competition that threatened to take away the incumbent ISP's business, they were forced to invest in infrastructure that they otherwise wouldn't have built.

It's a waste of breath to use loaded, emotional words in reference to big companies; they are the closest thing that exists in the economy to perfectly rational actors. If we, as a society, don't like the outcomes they're producing, the solution is to modify the competitive landscape so that the desirable outcomes are produced, not rail against the companies themselves as if they ought to care about things besides profit.
I disagree, I think once people understood voting they would be much less tolerant of the government acting in anyway and would require massive majorities to get anything done.
I think a general list, would be a good idea.(posting so that I can find this in threads)

It's funny, more people downvoted this comment, than actually replied to the thread. Shows where your priorities are. Go ahead down vote, I can afford to lose the points.
...or "something that isn't an iPhone". Apparently there are GV apps for Blackberry as well.
Ask HN: Bump technologies still down from the Linode outage?
I understood that Linode was back up.. but I still can't reach this site: http://www.bumptechnologies.com
Anyone know if this is still a Linode issue or not? I'm using Linode for my project and that would be more cause for alarm.
= about 8,000,000,000 to 1

But capitalization and spacing was correct too.
The post has good questions for people to ask, but not specific advice about how to analyze results and decide when you have a conclusion. So I added a link to my tutorial in the comments section. ;-)
Thanks, jashkenas - this is fantastic.

I spend most of my day as a Ruby developer, but when I'm doing frontend work, the thing I miss most in Javascript is Ruby's incredibly simple, powerful list operations. While most of these have existed in some form for awhile now, I've never seen such a comprehensive implementation in just 5.2kb (minified) of very clean, simple, well-commented code.

This is probably going in every project I work on from here on out. Thanks for putting all of this together.
That makes a lot of sense. It would probably make a lot of sense to optimize your site for search-engines as I'd imagine that is where a majority of your users will go looking for you. Additionally, you may want to go around and post on some forums as well (such as this thread which is #8 for "geocities backup" http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&th...).

I realize I've effectively managed to not answer your original question at all - good luck though!

Edit: Also if you haven't already, post to Digg and Reddit. This thread might also be helpful - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908275
Techcrunch blogspam. Original:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/28/...

and the letter:

http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/10/27/ba-letter28_gr_...