skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was a story on here (or somewhere) a while back about how 70% of iPhone apps go unused after the first month of purchasing. Couldn't agree more. AFAICT there is no killer 3rd party app for the iPhone. I'd posit that 95% of the iPhone's awesomeness is wrapped up in the following four (OEM) components: 1) Browser, 2) Maps, 3) E-mail / SMS, 4) Visual voicemail. Everything else, including games, is just fluff for most users. Relative to those four, I think the app store is a relatively small driver of adoption. I don't think a lot of people are that wedded to it, and I don't think it makes Apple a particularly large amount of money either. Which would explain why they continue to neglect it in spite of the vociferous scorn of a few programmers and pundits.
Having severe enough depression to get some sort of long-term disability from insurance isn't something that comes without a doctor's note. So a doctor diagnosed her with this severe depression, but the accountants and lawyers were the ones that diagnosed her as cured from it. Ignoring whether or not the depression was severe enough for her to be on disability, I would assume it's something for a doctor to decide... And I somehow doubt that they showed the Facebook photos to a doctor and the doctor said, "Yea she's cured!" without having a personal interview with her.
My Lawyer Gabe will endeavor to answer legal questions for your enjoyment
Drug addiction is serious. Can you get paid sick leave for drug addiction?
Spot on. User Stories (Agile) are a much better tool for managing requirements.
The Radeon HD 5970: Completing AMD's Takeover of the High End GPU Market
What people don't seem to understand about insurance is that they are entirely motivated by profit. They're not your mom and dad. They're not going to feel obligated just because you've been contributing to their plan for twenty years. If you have car accident, for example, they're ok with you being laid up for a few weeks but after a certain point you become a problem, a very serious problem and they'll do whatever it takes to get you back to work. Or off their books. Either way it doesn't matter. The longer you drain their funds, the more intensely they'll scrutinize your life, looking for some justification to ditch you. If you're on sick leave due to depression it's just dumb to post party pictures on the Internet.
Chips in brains will control computers by 2020: Intel
> Most have never seen combat.

That's anecdotal at best.
If it is serious, why aren't those benefits available in US?
My CSOTD is OS X. I'm a Windows guy, 15 years of win32 development. But at home, I use a Mac.
Cloud Computing: Where to Next?
There's no widely-accepted cure for PTSD yet. Sometimes people get better on their own, but we really don't know why.
It's crazy that reddit's interface gets criticized so much. You know what it looks like?

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=dog&sort=new

http://www.google.com/search?q=dog&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8...

...minus the incongruous map and with 1/10th the ads.
Prejudice.
You should really read up on how the various systems of government medical systems work. In the UK, the government owns the hospitals, so some things are free and somethings require payment (which you can get medical insurance for). In Germany, it's a government-owned insurance company and the hospitals are still privately or publicly owned. In Canada, the health system is not tied to the Federal government as much as each Provence has their own health plan/system. (i.e. Ontario has OHIP, the Ontario Health Insurance Plan). You can get insurance from your employer (or privately) that basically covers whatever the government plan doesn't (including some medications, etc that aren't normally covered).
Thanks joshu. I like the idea of a screencast. Will upload one to the site this weekend.
The most damaging disease you can experience? Sure, in a sense. I've never held down a job for more than six months because of it, and several times I've had to pick up the pieces of my broken life after a particularly bad episode. To be honest, though, I'd rather have this than, say, down's syndrome.
The Droid's best feature is it's ability to make and receive phone calls in San Francisco
Concur.next — Parallel I/O (clojure)
It wasn't that long ago that people with mental problems were sequestered away in asylums where the conditions were often-times worse than the prison system. And many times the workers would abuse the patients (phsyically,sexually,etc) because there was little the patients could do (i.e. if she says that I raped her, I'll just say that she's delusional).

Is it any wonder, that other mental conditions aren't really taken seriously? For most people 'depression' is some nebulous condition that no one takes seriously until the depressed person has a failed attempt at suicide then everyone says that the "didn't see it coming."
Google Chrome OS Demo
Depression is a devastating illness. It destroys people’s lives and kills them through suicide.
It is an interesting theory, but I am not sure whether it is true because I do not know much about other attorney's drafting styles. My personal philosophy is to make everything as clear and unambiguous as possible.

But I have to point out that one reason why legal language tends to be complex, is because natural language is very ambiguous. Thus, it takes a lot of careful writing to actually remove all the ambiguities from something. What often happens when one writes a contract is one writes a first draft and then starts thinking "how can this be misinterpreted or wiggled out of." And then one continues to add or change wording to prevent misinterpretations, and then finds new ambiguities with the new wording etc., etc. And in the end we usually end up with something long and rather difficult to read.

To put this in a software perspective, this is the same reason why there will never be a natural english programming language.
Today instead of a scavenger hunt we have just decided to put all the items on the table, because finding all that stuff is just too hard.

I love XKCD but when it's over my head (frequently)I go on a scavenger hunt and learn something new. Randall gave you the list now go forth and scavenge up some knowledge.
Catch Miami Dolphins vs Carolina Panthers NFL Live Watch
Sigh, this browser war will never end. Please MS, just support HTML5. Why wait?
People have faked being paralyzed too. I guess we should eliminate disability for paralysis then...
> Most AppStore apps sell for a dollar, because thats about all they're worth. (BTW: please disprove this by creating something valuable.)

This is a chicken-and-egg problem. The reason I don't write huge, complex apps is because I'm not willing to sink time into them if I don't know they'll pass review. I'm willing to waste, maybe, a week's worth of work, tops.
This is absolutely awesome. I was talking with my co-founder about the need for this yesterday. When can I buy or test one?

PS- you should have contact info on this HN post for potential investors, customers, or biz dev.
Thank you, I just got an iPhone and I have found zero apps worth downloading. Take this 35 list of great apps http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/15/the-35-best-iphone-apps... and find something useful or fun.
Not every change Twitter makes is newsworthy
I think this is the tip of a large iceberg, and we may see more of the iceberg in upcoming years. A large number of web users have discarded traditional ideas of privacy to post information about themselves.

Suppose Facebook applies some Machine Learning algorithm and can predict roughly which users will incur insurance claims. Inputs could include user-generated text, size and shape of social graph, entities recognized in user-generated photos, etc. That data would be valuable to insurers.

It seems like many of these users are mentally in a living room with their friends, while actually uploading their private info to a corporation's servers.
Feedback would be great, regardless of whether you're interested in exploring further.
As an attorney, I have to say this is very true. It is especially true and infuriating for patents.

When you write a patent you have to explain a complex system in such a way that a non-technical judge or juror will understand it while someone else is actively trying to confuse said judge or juror by intentionally misinterpreting the explanation. It is not an easy task.
Possibly. I'll assume that you're really wondering this and not just being sarcastic. If you are being sarcastic, then why don't you look up whether or not drug addiction is a disability under a Canadian insurer instead of making a comment that doesn't add too much to the discussion?
Why do human testicles hang like that?
From an interview with Steve Jobs in the NY Times 1 Nov 2007

But the App Store was announced to the public only seven months after that, in June of 2008.

If they did all that work in seven months, my resume will be on someone's desk at Apple by Monday. Seriously. I don't want to compete with any large companies that can move that fast. They win.

No, the only reasonable conclusion is that you can't take Jobs at his word when he appears to rule something out.
Asus G51J-SZ028V 3D - Laptop for gamers
along those same lines if you enjoy this kind of thing
http://xkcdexplained.com
http://xkcdexplainedexplained.tumblr.com which explains the explanations of xkcdexplained.com
The answer to that question in the US appears to be "no".

Canadian EI sickness benefits are paid, at least in some cases, to workers who are residents at inpatient clinics for addiction.

... but not, apparently, by Worker's Comp in Manitoba. Nor is mental illness in general, unless concomitant to a physical trauma.
> I am a long time Mac user, and I will tell you that nobody cares about your app, least of all Apple. I didn't buy the iPhone because of you, I bought it because of Apple.

The App Store is like C++: everybody uses a different 20%. Apart from games (which the author acknowledges as a whole separate category), users use different apps. Consider Omnifocus, Timely, LogMeIn. None of these will make anyone a millionaire, but you may pry them from my cold, dead hands. Everyone has a shortlist of apps they use on a daily basis, and they're all different. But that's in no way a sign of an unhealthy market.

If there was a "killer app" with mass-market appeal, Apple would either buy it or clone it. The App Store, by definition, is the long tail of the device. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I don't think so, at least not if your idea is better.
Extreme difficulty of reliably diagnosing and assessing the impact of the illness on ability to work.
We are keeping the early prototypes close to home (i.e in New Zealand) until Jan / Feb while we get CE and other approvals and do further testing. I'll be putting a shop-front on-line where you can buy one in the coming month.

Email me at tom at gridspy.co.nz if you have further questions / ideas / purchase requests ! :)
If you ask the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, it's psychology's eugenics campaign through the use of 'poisons' in the anti-depressant drugs that kills people with depression.
May life never throw you a deadline in Montana.
How is "the cloud" a certain place?
Ruby on Rails :) know its too programmer, but without this framework we are still using dump java/.net WebForm based approach... jQuery adds to this.

Really end user... hmm... Mac OS X? :)
Shoutcast listeners on Google Map
Litigation is very much adversarial. True your arguments are aimed at a judge, but another party is free to attack them and misinterpret them. Thus, there is still an intentional desire to misinterpret your arguments.

Court opinions are not technically adversarial, but the same issues apply. It is virtually guaranteed that other parties down the line will try to misinterpret court opinions to get a judgement they are not entitled to.

It is true that journals are probably not subject to active intentional misinterpretation, but people that write legal journals are already lawyers and thus are already trained in that particular adversarial style of writing.
Why did I read that 'in cannabis' ??
Ouch, touchy subject. In case you missed it, my site has no advertisements.
History of Micro-emacs ...
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MicroEmacs
If you restrict yourself to only funding those startups which have prototypes and real clients you would be off to a great start.
Next thing you know, university literature departments will be teaching 'xkcd studies' classes. The irony will be palpable: http://xkcd.com/451/

Seriously, if someone doesn't get the jokes (and isn't interested enough to look up the references for the sake of general knowledge, rather than just to 'get the joke') then they probably aren't the intended audience. Everyone has different areas of interest; you'll laugh more if you find a webcomic whose author's interests are similar to yours, and who makes obscure references you do get.
While that may be the case, in this instance the insurance company is probably in the wrong. The Facebook photos along should not be enough for them to say that she's cured. Maybe enough for them to feel they need to spawn an investigation, but I somehow doubt that they consulted with her doctor or had a doctor of their own choosing interview her.

An insurance claims agent looking at Facebook photos is not enough to say, "Look! There's a smile on her face! She can't be depressed! It's impossible for a depressed person to smile!" This isn't exactly the same as seeing a photo of someone that claims to be paralyzed from the waist-down running in a marathon...

How the insurance company accessed the photos in this instance is irrelevant. I'm more concerned with how they used them once they had them. I'd be concerned with how they obtained them if there was a possibility of using 'dubious means' though.
Back in the day there used to be an emacs-like editor that would fit on a floppy (1.4MB) disk. Not sure if it was microEmacs or some other name, though the name microEmacs certainly dates back at least to the early 1990s.

The idea was if you ever found yourself needing to do some work on a Windowz box that only had Notepad you could whip that out and get something done.
30 years ago we finally got rid of mainframes, the priesthood, and the control.

The cycle begins again.

When he says 'nobody questions the wisdom' though, I needa point out that Larry Ellison does.
That is a great strip :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=5f375a86
Wait, wha? Really? That bullshit?
The claim that Nevada is the world's fourth largest gold producer is accurate. It goes China, South Africa, Australia, Nevada, as states go.

It is also the world's low cost gold producer, at an average of $260 an ounce.

The part about mining being pain because of regulations is also as accurate as a subjective claim can be. My father works with Phelps Dodge, and they recently opened the first copper mine to be opened in the States in 20-odd years. I'd have to ask him for the details. Comparatively speaking, in Chile the pollution due to mining isn't awful, especially considering a lot of it occurs in places where it only rains every 400 years. It is not really corrupt, at least not much more so than the States, and there are straightforward laws that govern how you deal with the environment. If you want to dispose of mercury, for example, you have to solidify it with special salts before you bury it in a predetermined way. You don't have to destroy the environment.

Having said that, I doubt the US would be incredibly richer by exploiting these natural resources. But I believe it would be substantially richer; opening this up would increase the GDP by an extra 5% for maybe 5 years in a row. That order of magnitude.
Shut up and build something
A hunch is a gut feeling or intuition about something. Asking someone to prove a hunch seems odd to me.
Makes Office and Windows less relevant.
Scratch: Programming for all
Need 10,000 stars, please
This reminds me of how Mozilla's bugzilla used to (still does?) block links from slashdot.org, because spam like this in a development tool really gets in the way of reading and responding to the actual bugs.
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Selling with Inspiration vs Selling with Desperation
Some people were saying the same thing about computers 30 or 40 years ago. Most of the gloom & doom did not come to fruition. Google, or any other cloud service provider, has a huge financial incentive to keep your data safe and private. Ultimately it's a personal choice. Paper files didn't disappear when the computer was popularized for example. Desktop apps won't disappear either. A company that simply chooses to offer a service that some people do want is not EVIL in my opinion.
Didn't he say the same thing for Vista?
I did QA for years (8+) and would love to have developers write a test. Specifically NOT unit tests, but the harder more interesting one. I think it happened once. Or, was it twice?
I don't think we'll see a "proper" handheld developing environment until AR specs, Accelerando-style, become linked with virtual-keyboard interfaces in a big way. (I'm talking the sort of thing that detects the position of your hands and fingers at all times, so you can type on a keyboard that exists only in your glasses. Force-feedback gloves might also be important, for that clicky-keyboard feeling.)
Or she doesn't want to wax eloquent about the attractiveness of other guys to her boyfriend?
Please explain. This sounds like a kneejerk, snarky comment, but perhaps I'm wrong.
Be Strong = Adhere to Apple's prescriptions, limitations, rules, approval, and just shut up otherwise??
I love Scientific American.

> Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Dr. Bering, how do you account for the fact that testicles are rarely perfectly symmetrical in their positioning within the same scrotum?” In fact, the temperature regulating function governed by the cremasteric muscle can account even for the most lopsided, one-testicle-above-the-other, waffling asymmetries in testes positioning.
To sum it up: Air Con-ditioning. (But you knew that.)

In other news:

"With a keen enough eye, presumably one could master the art of “ reading” testicle alignment, using the scrotum as a makeshift room thermometer . But that's just me speculating."

This might be a neat party trick at a nudist camp, but I imagine it would tend to scream "fag" if you are male or "tramp" if you are female. As a WAG: Not likely to catch on.
Here is my alternate take on this particular matter:

Microsoft builds browsers for the dumb. This is a huge market for them and they continue to dominate.

Instead of saying Microsoft "still chasing", perhaps we could say people "still dumb".
With a keen enough eye, presumably one could master the art of 'reading' testicle alignment, using the scrotum as a makeshift room thermometer . But that's just me speculating.

Not the kind of skill you'd want to brag about -- assuming you are a heterosexual male, that is.
I'm no Kent Beck, I'm just an average software engineer on the east coast with a bit less then 10 years experience. Recently I turned down 100K a year + 3 weeks vacation and all kinds of other benefits, from a large well known company. The people there were super nice and every developer got their own office with great windows. The job was just simple programming.
But I had no interest in the industry and chose a different offer.

Anyway, I am not sure what Kent Beck's financial needs are or what he means when he says that The prices for programming have fallen so far.. It seems to me any decent programmer should be able to make a good living just programming.

Does anyone know what Kent Beck is talking about?
Any emacsen around that could shed some light on why you'd use this instead of a more "modern" emacs?

NIH.

It would be pretty easy to make GNU emacs behave exactly like mg or microemacs. But then you couldn't tell your friends, "I wrote my own Emacs".
I beat you to essentially the same thought by about one minute.
It's much easier to make powerful, cross-platform browser applications when IE compatibility is not an issue.

I don't think I can stress how important that "much easier" is.
ONE amino acid! I know South Park used "Praise Science!" as a joke, but damn if I don't feel like saying it earnestly.
Perhaps youtube is not counting embedded views (but that would be a serious bug their analytics team would never allow.)
I thought it was a funny coincidence. Someone want to explain why that's an offensive observation? Does it need a smiley face or something? (Serious question)
The moment Apple decides to make a model with a non-glaring screen, I'll buy one too.
Thanks for elaborating. I don't personally agree that HTML5 is a threat to Windows or Office, but I see your point.
I think this rings true, not only for women, but all software developers. I think too many people in software become too focused on arguing the best way of doing things that they never actually accomplish anything of real value.
Linus also talked about how instant commits in git are changing the behavior. I generalize this to "all things you make often must be effortless and instant", ranging from reaction time to a finger-tap in the iPhone app and to my own build process.
correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anywhere on that site that she is doing a startup. Sounds like she could use her own advice.
Like all "lost job" situations, it is a myth. If you write good Integration tests, QA's job should be to find gaps in them, test the really weird edge cases only a human can come up with and perhaps provide usability feedback.

Any decision made that promotes inefficiencies to "save jobs" puts the entire company in danger.
Yeah, but that lacks the extensibility that makes Emacs really noteworthy. I use mg for editing /etc when setting up a new OpenBSD system, or very quick edits, but it's not a replacement. It's just as "always there" as vi (on OpenBSD, at least), but with the default Emacs keyboard shortcuts.
This article never answered a very basic question: so evolution exiled man's balls from the body because sperm are temperature sensitive - but why didn't sperm just evolve to be less vulnerable to high temperatures? Anyone have a clue on this one?
If that's the point then I guess I did because I thought it was a response to PG's article.
s/spec/unit-tests/g
I'm not really certain, since I didn't vote you down, but I suspect that whoever did didn't find is offensive so much as they found it unfunny.
Google Search.
Gosh, I had no idea little quality software was on offer until now. I can only see one or two useful apps in there.
Perhaps this is it? http://bundl.it/About
We need less vapid startups thanks.