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ummagumm-a

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cup-it-ds-classification-pairwise

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{ "score": 0, "text": "I think this is a cool idea. I'm curious how you will sort the photos in the grid once there are lots of submissions. The location of a photo will eventually be a pretty important factor in determining its life span, as it will affect the number of views and thus votes that it gets." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Shock of all shocks, the first thing I see when opening a link to an anonymous picture sharing site is two severed penises with a knife cutting through them." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Shock of all shocks, the first thing I see when opening a link to an anonymous picture sharing site is two severed penises with a knife cutting through them." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Warning: I got a very NSFW image right away." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Warning: I got a very NSFW image right away." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I'm going to enjoy it now, before 4chan gets a hold of it... :D" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I'm going to enjoy it now, before 4chan gets a hold of it... :D" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Reminds me of the old mobog.com" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I took a history of mathematics course at the University of Virginia. One of the I interesting things I learned was that people used to write out equations as sentences before symbolic notation was invented. And so you would realize that a single moderately large equation (such as the quadratic equation) might be equivalent to a full paragraph or more of text. So if you ever get discouraged at how long it takes you to read mathematics, remember that equations can be as information-dense as entire paragraphs, or even more so, and just because it is presented in a spatially compact format doesn't necessarily mean that it shouldn't take you at least as long as a text paragraph to read and comprehend." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "It can also be helpful to find others who are interested in reading the same bit of math, and talk through it with them. They don't have to be particularly better at it than you, they just have to have a similar level of interest and curiosity. In grad school we read recently published papers in a small group setting we called \"journal club\".This process helps in a number of ways. It keeps you from reading too fast or too passively because you're constantly asking and answering questions. It makes you less likely to get stuck in a dead end for very long, because others will see alternatives. It gives you an opportunity to ask about notation or background concepts you aren't familiar with. It helps you keep track of the big picture, because while some people are bogged down in a particular detail (like \"how do they get from equation A to equation B?\") others will be trying to tie it back to the big picture (\"how does equation B fit into our overall goal?\") And it allows you to see the even bigger picture as others bring in relevant knowledge or experience; it was pretty common to be working through a paper and have someone mention how it tied in to their current research project." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "It can also be helpful to find others who are interested in reading the same bit of math, and talk through it with them. They don't have to be particularly better at it than you, they just have to have a similar level of interest and curiosity. In grad school we read recently published papers in a small group setting we called \"journal club\".This process helps in a number of ways. It keeps you from reading too fast or too passively because you're constantly asking and answering questions. It makes you less likely to get stuck in a dead end for very long, because others will see alternatives. It gives you an opportunity to ask about notation or background concepts you aren't familiar with. It helps you keep track of the big picture, because while some people are bogged down in a particular detail (like \"how do they get from equation A to equation B?\") others will be trying to tie it back to the big picture (\"how does equation B fit into our overall goal?\") And it allows you to see the even bigger picture as others bring in relevant knowledge or experience; it was pretty common to be working through a paper and have someone mention how it tied in to their current research project." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "A very nice article.>A particular notorious example is the use of “It follows easily that” and equivalent constructs. It means something like this:>One can now check that the next statement is true with a certain amount of essentially mechanical, though perhaps laborious, checking. I, the author, could do it, but it would use up a large amount of space and perhaps not accomplish much, since it'd be best for you to go ahead and do the computation to clarify for yourself what's going on here. I promise that no new ideas are involved, though of course you might need to think a little in order to find just the right combination of good ideas to apply.Even knowing this ahead of time, this kind of thing can be maddening. Namely, when the meaning of the assertion is be sensitive to little sign changes, index shifts and the like these are quite likely to end up in the computation." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "A very nice article.>A particular notorious example is the use of “It follows easily that” and equivalent constructs. It means something like this:>One can now check that the next statement is true with a certain amount of essentially mechanical, though perhaps laborious, checking. I, the author, could do it, but it would use up a large amount of space and perhaps not accomplish much, since it'd be best for you to go ahead and do the computation to clarify for yourself what's going on here. I promise that no new ideas are involved, though of course you might need to think a little in order to find just the right combination of good ideas to apply.Even knowing this ahead of time, this kind of thing can be maddening. Namely, when the meaning of the assertion is be sensitive to little sign changes, index shifts and the like these are quite likely to end up in the computation." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "The article is by Shai Simonson, one of the instructors at ArsDigita University (http://aduni.org/).This was part of the reading material for ADU Course 0: \"Mathematics for Computer Science\" (http://aduni.org/courses/math/index.php?view=cw), but unfortunately the video lectures aren't available, whereas they are available for all the other courses." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "The article is by Shai Simonson, one of the instructors at ArsDigita University (http://aduni.org/).This was part of the reading material for ADU Course 0: \"Mathematics for Computer Science\" (http://aduni.org/courses/math/index.php?view=cw), but unfortunately the video lectures aren't available, whereas they are available for all the other courses." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "\"The same half hour in a math article buys you 0-10 lines depending on the article and how experienced you are at reading mathematics\"I'm still reading though the article, but this might be the most important bit of information for anyone getting started reading papers that rely on maths. I wish someone had told me this when I started in with the more complex comp-sci papers because it's hard not to feel dense when you have to go over the same 3 or 4 pages of text time and time again to get the concepts." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I hate to sound like wet blanket, but from my personal experience, browsing sessions by themselves aren't all that useful in learning about your users. Over the past few years, I've worked a lot with recording browsing sessions (I was the creator of Tapefailure, and now VisTrac.com, which is a work-in-progress).The main issue is that the sessions aren't focused (you don't know about the goal of the user) and watching tens/hundreds/thousands of recordings to get an idea of what users are or aren't doing on your website is simply impractical.What, I believe, is really important is summarized data; taking the data and boiling it down to more specific bits of information about how the users are browsing: What are they doing on the page? How long does it take them? Collectively, what is and isn't being focused on? What about how users interact with forms?These are just some very broad examples, but there are many ways in which you can distill the recorded data, and I find those to be far more insightful than the browsing sessions themselves (look at some of what ClickTale is doing).There is a lot that can be done in this field (otherwise I wouldn't be working in it myself), but I think recording user sessions is only the very least of it.Despite my reservations, I'd love to have a chance to further discuss your plans. What would be the easiest way for me to get directly in touch with you? (My email is available via the \"Questions? Comments? Contact.\" link on VisTrac.com)" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Very cool idea. I would definitely use something like this. I only noticed 1 small issue: it seems tabbing between input fields doesn't register. As soon as I entered text on the first input, I tabbed to the second textarea and entered text. The video didn't register the second textarea text until I had clicked one of the radio buttons (using Safari 3.1.2 on Leopard 10.5.5)Perhaps you could also work in goals somehow. This is one of the best things about usability tests--giving users a set of goals to complete and watching how they respond. Maybe offering certain users a chance to take place in the study with X reward?Also, CrazyEgg (another site for visualizing clicks but implemented as a heatmap) lets you run campaigns, which is extremely useful. Considering you generally want to run tests like this after you've made changes, having a set limit is a good idea (10 hours, 100 users, etc...).One small critique, I got bored with the video and went straight for the demo. I'd suggest making the video shorter or somehow showing \"the goods\" up-front.Very nice idea and good implementation." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Very cool idea. I would definitely use something like this. I only noticed 1 small issue: it seems tabbing between input fields doesn't register. As soon as I entered text on the first input, I tabbed to the second textarea and entered text. The video didn't register the second textarea text until I had clicked one of the radio buttons (using Safari 3.1.2 on Leopard 10.5.5)Perhaps you could also work in goals somehow. This is one of the best things about usability tests--giving users a set of goals to complete and watching how they respond. Maybe offering certain users a chance to take place in the study with X reward?Also, CrazyEgg (another site for visualizing clicks but implemented as a heatmap) lets you run campaigns, which is extremely useful. Considering you generally want to run tests like this after you've made changes, having a set limit is a good idea (10 hours, 100 users, etc...).One small critique, I got bored with the video and went straight for the demo. I'd suggest making the video shorter or somehow showing \"the goods\" up-front.Very nice idea and good implementation." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Did you have a cold or something? I suggest you to clear out your nasal passages before demo'ing. Unless the sniffing sound is for effect ;) Overall, very nice work. Keep it up." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Did you have a cold or something? I suggest you to clear out your nasal passages before demo'ing. Unless the sniffing sound is for effect ;) Overall, very nice work. Keep it up." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I haven't had this much fun on a demo since some random Flash app from the late 90s. Well executed cte, while some may discredit your app for providing no concrete application, I for one salute you, I would have never thought to pass a user's intuition as input. This puts the voyeurism of a Trojan virus into a web app, which is what computer illiterates love to look at. This could be a very bankable idea." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I haven't had this much fun on a demo since some random Flash app from the late 90s. Well executed cte, while some may discredit your app for providing no concrete application, I for one salute you, I would have never thought to pass a user's intuition as input. This puts the voyeurism of a Trojan virus into a web app, which is what computer illiterates love to look at. This could be a very bankable idea." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "So if one of my user logins, you get their login + password? What about CC info?This being said, it look super useful. Can we get the option to record say, a user out of 100?" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "He says "Gmail was laughable early on". I got a Gmail invitation, through an acquaintance, before it was generally available to the public. I remember how awesome it felt in comparison to Yahoo Mail: (1) file uploads were handled after hitting "Send", instead of disrupting the writing of your message like the other web interfaces did, (2) it came with huge online storage, (3) searching emails actually worked which in combination with the huge storage meant that I stopped deleting emails, (4) spam simply stopped hitting my Inbox (a real problem with my Yahoo Mail account, which made my Y! account unusable), (5) it was the only free email service I knew that provided POP3/SMTP access and then later I noticed (6) conversation threads.Ever since Gmail was invitation-only, it has been awesome on multiple levels. It has its ups and downs, but if I am to think of products that have been almost perfect ever since version 1, Gmail is right up there with iPhone 1 - i.e. missing features, but so useful and refreshing.How can you fail to mention that Internet Explorer, ever since version 6, became the main barrier for adopting web standards, as development on it simply stopped for several years, with the team being sent to work on other things, like Silverlight? How can you fail to mention Firefox for that matter? In 2006 Firefox version 2 was barely released. It then grew to over 20% of market-share, without Mozilla making aggressive deals for prebundling it. Internet Explorer isn't losing to Chrome only, it's losing to Firefox and Safari too and they ended up in this position by their own incompetence or malevolence.There was a time when Microsoft was serving their customer's needs. They stopped doing that in 2001, after Windows XP was released." }

{ "score": 1, "text": " For all Microsoft's CEO might have done wrong, he was \n right about something dismissed by many (and I among \n them): Google. \n\n Ballmer started treating the search and information \n company as a competitive threat about a decade ago. \n Google as Microsoft competitor seemed simply nuts in \n 2003. How could search threaten Windows, particularly \n when anyone could type a new web address to change \n providers? \n\n Ballmer was obsessed, chasing every Google maneuver, \n often to a fault. Execution could have been better, but \n his perception was right.\n\nTwo main points that contradict this line of thinking:1. The idea that Steve Ballmer's hostility could be recast as innovation is laughable. Microsoft was pathologically hostile to any competition, and it's obvious that this hostility was frequently tuned and recalibrated according to the success of the quarry. If anything, it only reinforces my belief, that if Ballmer were ever permitted to have is way, Ballmer's lifelong ambition is to destroy anything good, and replace it with himself.2. Very early on, Google was a better search engine than most others, and it wasn't difficult to recognize. Using it, you found what you wanted, and you noticed it when you spent less time searching, and parsing irrelevant crap. Contrast this with the MSN home page (with the earliest form of Microsoft's version of a "web search"), which (like AOL) looks and feels like a supermarket tabloid. Ballmer's recognition can be readily categorized as jealousy, not genius. My hypothesis is that he tried out Google himself, he liked it, realized it was useful, then realized it was not under his control, and set out to either control it or destroy it. It's not inspiring. It's not mere competition. It's simply another expression of greed." }

{ "score": 1, "text": " For all Microsoft's CEO might have done wrong, he was \n right about something dismissed by many (and I among \n them): Google. \n\n Ballmer started treating the search and information \n company as a competitive threat about a decade ago. \n Google as Microsoft competitor seemed simply nuts in \n 2003. How could search threaten Windows, particularly \n when anyone could type a new web address to change \n providers? \n\n Ballmer was obsessed, chasing every Google maneuver, \n often to a fault. Execution could have been better, but \n his perception was right.\n\nTwo main points that contradict this line of thinking:1. The idea that Steve Ballmer's hostility could be recast as innovation is laughable. Microsoft was pathologically hostile to any competition, and it's obvious that this hostility was frequently tuned and recalibrated according to the success of the quarry. If anything, it only reinforces my belief, that if Ballmer were ever permitted to have is way, Ballmer's lifelong ambition is to destroy anything good, and replace it with himself.2. Very early on, Google was a better search engine than most others, and it wasn't difficult to recognize. Using it, you found what you wanted, and you noticed it when you spent less time searching, and parsing irrelevant crap. Contrast this with the MSN home page (with the earliest form of Microsoft's version of a "web search"), which (like AOL) looks and feels like a supermarket tabloid. Ballmer's recognition can be readily categorized as jealousy, not genius. My hypothesis is that he tried out Google himself, he liked it, realized it was useful, then realized it was not under his control, and set out to either control it or destroy it. It's not inspiring. It's not mere competition. It's simply another expression of greed." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Looked at differently, though, the third-is-right adage is wrong. More typically version 4 crosses the good enough threshold -- Windows 95 as the fourth from 1.0 and XP as the fourth from Windows NT 3.51, for example. By that reckoning, Windows 9 promises much, as v. 4 from Vista.Windows XP is version 5.1 of Windows NT. I think it is really dumb to try to see "laws" in product versions." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Looked at differently, though, the third-is-right adage is wrong. More typically version 4 crosses the good enough threshold -- Windows 95 as the fourth from 1.0 and XP as the fourth from Windows NT 3.51, for example. By that reckoning, Windows 9 promises much, as v. 4 from Vista.Windows XP is version 5.1 of Windows NT. I think it is really dumb to try to see "laws" in product versions." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Even if Ballmer was correct in identifying google to be a competitor to Microsoft a decade ago as the article states, surely this underpins his immense failing as a CEO - given a decade and thousands of intelligent employees he still couldn't set and execute to a clear strategy and address the threat." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Even if Ballmer was correct in identifying google to be a competitor to Microsoft a decade ago as the article states, surely this underpins his immense failing as a CEO - given a decade and thousands of intelligent employees he still couldn't set and execute to a clear strategy and address the threat." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "There's one overriding factor that's preventing Microsoft from holding on to its reins. The company doesn't really understand simplicity.I remember a post here about someone who worked at MS and how everyone just sorta waft through their jobs without wondering what else is out there. No one worries about Linux or other platforms really. No one explores new ways to do things or even fixing things that aren't solving an immediate problem. The description is hard to believe and reads like a dystopian city, but it's a good indication of why MS is going the way of the dinosaur.In many ways it's the opposite problem Google has. They've gone above and beyond the simplifying and basically circled everything they offer around one account. So far, the closest thing MS has to offer is Live sign in, and even that is well after Chromebook in Windows 8.Microsoft has always been about making it easy to buy. Not necessarily to keep and maintain. With most services Google offer, I literally expend no effort with upkeep. It's simple and it just works... well the Gmail UI is arguably worse now, but that's another topic." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "(My background: I work for Google, I did a real-time web prototype using the client libraries for GChat back in 2009 when real-time search was all the rage, my Noogler mentor at Google was the frontend tech lead for the eventual real-time search product we launched, and before Google I'd worked in financial software, where real-time responsiveness really is required.)I think that the folks currently building prototypes in Meteor dramatically underestimate the difficulty of scaling up real-time software to production-grade quality.The problem is that if a single component in your stack blocks, you are no longer real-time. Any time one client writes into the database and another reads it, you have to poll, since the DB won't give you notifications. (Exception: PostGres gives you PQnotifies, Oracle gives you the User Messaging Service, MySQL it's theoretically possible with triggers and user-defined stored procedures that make a network call, and MongoDB you can break the DB abstraction and tail the oplog. Good luck plumbing any of these up through your language DB driver and ORM, though.) If you have business logic in a middle-tier server that's request-response only, then that logic becomes a synchronization bottleneck, and you have to constantly update that server and poll it with requests. If your algorithms require complete state snapshots, you're out of luck unless you build a service to manage and update that state consistently while triggering the algorithms whenever it changes. If your algorithms can't run in soft-realtime time guarantees (dozens to hundreds of milliseconds, usually), you're still out of luck. You need to figure out sharding of state and message notifications yourself. You need to figure out message recovery protocols - most real-time systems have odd consistency problems when messages get dropped due to overload, network failures, or software errors.Google's real-time search ended up polling every 15 seconds with simple AJAX calls, because when the lag for a post to go through the indexing & serving pipeline is a minute or two (itself a major accomplishment), an additional 15 seconds isn't going to be noticeable to the user.People on HN love to hate on Twitter engineering, but one thing they've done really well is scale a system that actually is soft real-time and has a lot of potential producers and consumers. This is far from the trivial exercise that someone who picked up Meteor in a weekend might think it is." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I don't see the value proposition of making (most) web apps/sites real-time. Sure, it makes sense for a chat app or a stock ticker, but blogging? A news site? E-commerce?Maybe it's important that eBay is "real time" in the last 5 minutes of an auction, but the rest of the time, the vast majority of the content is relatively static. A seller might update the description of a listing a couple times over a two week auction, for example. And while it sounds great to immediately update my search results when a new listing goes live, in reality, I already have 40 pages of results to look through, and that listing that just went live 5 seconds ago probably isn't much more relevant than any of the others I'm sifting through.I'm not opposed to client-heavy apps where it makes sense. When done well, it can create a really responsive user experience. Gmail is great at this; I have no desire for it to be "real time" -- not any more than it already is.Do we really believe that one day cnn.com will be "real-time", with article updates and errata popping up inline as we read?" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I don't see the value proposition of making (most) web apps/sites real-time. Sure, it makes sense for a chat app or a stock ticker, but blogging? A news site? E-commerce?Maybe it's important that eBay is "real time" in the last 5 minutes of an auction, but the rest of the time, the vast majority of the content is relatively static. A seller might update the description of a listing a couple times over a two week auction, for example. And while it sounds great to immediately update my search results when a new listing goes live, in reality, I already have 40 pages of results to look through, and that listing that just went live 5 seconds ago probably isn't much more relevant than any of the others I'm sifting through.I'm not opposed to client-heavy apps where it makes sense. When done well, it can create a really responsive user experience. Gmail is great at this; I have no desire for it to be "real time" -- not any more than it already is.Do we really believe that one day cnn.com will be "real-time", with article updates and errata popping up inline as we read?" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Maybe it's just me, but I find the simultaneous popularity of "only check your email 4 times a day" and "OMG ALL WEB APPZ MUST BE REALTIME" slightly peculiar." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Maybe it's just me, but I find the simultaneous popularity of "only check your email 4 times a day" and "OMG ALL WEB APPZ MUST BE REALTIME" slightly peculiar." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Python in general doesn't really have a good solution for this, so it's not something specific to Django. I run a Python web app that has certain real-time needs, and I had to forgo a popular web framework like Django so that I could use Twisted. The problem with solutions like this is that since the language doesn't have built-in support for asynchronous IO, everything has to be compatible with the library of your choice (whether that's Twisted, Gevent, or other), and at that point, you'd be better off just using a different language/runtime like Node.js or Erlang.I think the current solution is to have Django serve the main app and have a separate "API server" that runs Node or whatever, but as the article points out, you're not really even using Django at that point because all it's doing is serving up a single HTML page--the rest is handled by the browser and the API server." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Python in general doesn't really have a good solution for this, so it's not something specific to Django. I run a Python web app that has certain real-time needs, and I had to forgo a popular web framework like Django so that I could use Twisted. The problem with solutions like this is that since the language doesn't have built-in support for asynchronous IO, everything has to be compatible with the library of your choice (whether that's Twisted, Gevent, or other), and at that point, you'd be better off just using a different language/runtime like Node.js or Erlang.I think the current solution is to have Django serve the main app and have a separate "API server" that runs Node or whatever, but as the article points out, you're not really even using Django at that point because all it's doing is serving up a single HTML page--the rest is handled by the browser and the API server." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I think very few sites actually need to be SPA at all. Just because an e-commerce site has a real-time component doesn't mean it must be built in Meteor.E-commerce sites are in fact a prime example of something that I think should be built using traditional technologies. Do you want price updates? Just poll them with AJAX and let the rest of the site remain static. It's far from a multiplayer game we're talking about." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "\"hosted by\" is a bit misleading. If things are as they were, it's easy for students to request foo.mit.edu. Looking at http://web.mit.edu/maps/networks/mit/mit-topology.pdf, 18.244 is E2 (Senior House)." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Didn't even know such indispensable iconoclasm was hosted anywhere. Tart, yes. But not quite \"The Onion.\"More surprising to me are: • How slowly its tiny web pages load. • How stuck its html is in cira 1998, now-deprecated tags. • The anonymity - and the fact that the author doesn't   want credit for harpooning everyone from JC to pope to Clinton." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Didn't even know such indispensable iconoclasm was hosted anywhere. Tart, yes. But not quite \"The Onion.\"More surprising to me are: • How slowly its tiny web pages load. • How stuck its html is in cira 1998, now-deprecated tags. • The anonymity - and the fact that the author doesn't   want credit for harpooning everyone from JC to pope to Clinton." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "just fyi, the princess diana link is NSFW" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "just fyi, the princess diana link is NSFW" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "funny!" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "funny!" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "i don't like this. simply due to the Jesus thing. It's wrong and someone has to say that it is. Has the media brainwashed the people at mit?I did read it. Just clicking on the link I see making fun of GOD and I go no further. But this thread is nothing like the page. :/ thx" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "This is good stuff. I was wondering, does any one know about similar standards for system design and implementation?I would be interested in seeing MIL standards or NASA best practices related to infrastructure (telecom, data, etc) design and implementation management." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Also of interest may be some of the manuals published at NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory:Manager's Handbook for Software Development: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/dts/pm/Papers/nasa-manage.pdfRecommended Approach for Software Development: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/dts/pm/Papers/nasa-approach.pd...A lot of really important work was done at SEL and they kept meticulous records on how they did the work and what worked for them.The old-school, pre-Agile Manifesto stuff isn't a perfect match for how most teams like to work today, but it's still full of wisdom and deep knowledge. A lot of it grew out of aerospace and defence projects, which is why there is such a heavy emphasis on planning and control to cope with complexity. These days the SEI is probably the home of that strand of software engineering thought." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Also of interest may be some of the manuals published at NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory:Manager's Handbook for Software Development: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/dts/pm/Papers/nasa-manage.pdfRecommended Approach for Software Development: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/dts/pm/Papers/nasa-approach.pd...A lot of really important work was done at SEL and they kept meticulous records on how they did the work and what worked for them.The old-school, pre-Agile Manifesto stuff isn't a perfect match for how most teams like to work today, but it's still full of wisdom and deep knowledge. A lot of it grew out of aerospace and defence projects, which is why there is such a heavy emphasis on planning and control to cope with complexity. These days the SEI is probably the home of that strand of software engineering thought." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "The problem with most template sets is that they make the user still do a ton of work. Not just understanding the details of their own project, but a ton of writing work. And, to be honest, a lot of tech people don't like to write or always write well. Also, some templates just replace one big blank page with lots of smaller blanks, which can still stump you when it comes time to write.A few years ago I attempted to solve the problem by creating ReadySET Pro. It's a different kind of template set that is faster/more agile to use. People who have used it say that it is like taking a multiple-choice test instead of an essay exam, so no stumpers. That's because I spent a year writing high-quality project document text that you can reuse and tweak to fit your project. It's almost feels like cheating. You can get four free templates at readysetpro.com." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "The problem with most template sets is that they make the user still do a ton of work. Not just understanding the details of their own project, but a ton of writing work. And, to be honest, a lot of tech people don't like to write or always write well. Also, some templates just replace one big blank page with lots of smaller blanks, which can still stump you when it comes time to write.A few years ago I attempted to solve the problem by creating ReadySET Pro. It's a different kind of template set that is faster/more agile to use. People who have used it say that it is like taking a multiple-choice test instead of an essay exam, so no stumpers. That's because I spent a year writing high-quality project document text that you can reuse and tweak to fit your project. It's almost feels like cheating. You can get four free templates at readysetpro.com." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Thanks for posting this on HN, porker! :)" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Thanks for posting this on HN, porker! :)" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I converted all the html from the zip file to markdown, if anyone cares. It's on github.https://github.com/bradfa/MIL-STD-498" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Where are you hosting this? Seems you are hitting a connection limit, cant serve any more pages right now." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Rollyo is about 4-5 years old and is the best known of these,. there are probably quite a few more. Will you be doing something different at all?http://rollyo.com/" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Rollyo is about 4-5 years old and is the best known of these,. there are probably quite a few more. Will you be doing something different at all?http://rollyo.com/" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "The Idea is to empower the user with the choice of URLs to crawl, when to crawl from where to crawl (you can crawl from you car as long as you have internet access).You build your own repository around your personal web site, company intranet, your favorite sites or subject and share it with friends or colleagues.See a sample we did for YC and related sites:http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?six=SRC6187978038750" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "The Idea is to empower the user with the choice of URLs to crawl, when to crawl from where to crawl (you can crawl from you car as long as you have internet access).You build your own repository around your personal web site, company intranet, your favorite sites or subject and share it with friends or colleagues.See a sample we did for YC and related sites:http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?six=SRC6187978038750" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "\"You decide what sites to crawl indexed and search\"Should probably be:\"You decide what sites to crawl, index and search\"You might also consider avoiding technical terms altogether when you market it." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "\"You decide what sites to crawl indexed and search\"Should probably be:\"You decide what sites to crawl, index and search\"You might also consider avoiding technical terms altogether when you market it." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I like it. I wish I would have had access to this a few years ago when I had to build my own search for a company I worked for :) How do you plan on making money?" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Downvote me if you want to but I honestly can't believe that this article got 50 upvotes (at the time of this writing), while some really thought provoking articles get 2 or 3 upvotes. I know that whining about how HN content has dropped in quality is frowned upon here, but I can't just stand beside and say nothing while content like this slowly ruins HN, turning it into a caricature of it's former self.\nSo, at the risk of getting heavily downvoted I'm still going to express my opinion: This. Doesn't. Belong. Here." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This isn't a flowchart [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowchart], its a syntax (railroad) diagram [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowchart]." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This isn't a flowchart [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowchart], its a syntax (railroad) diagram [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowchart]." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I got an even better flowchart:This HN submission -> deleted" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I got an even better flowchart:This HN submission -> deleted" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "You're slipping, guys. Even the programming reddit doesn't include submissions as banal and non hacker-related as this." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "You're slipping, guys. Even the programming reddit doesn't include submissions as banal and non hacker-related as this." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Someone's already emailed her offering to pay to make t-shirts of this slide.Isn't the internet awesome!\nFrom about 200 friends on Twitter to international ironic t-shirt baroness in one move. Love it." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Did they record overt threats as opposed to stereotyped? As a little girl competing against boys in spelling bees and other academic competitions, I'm sure that there were stereotyped threats, but I was at the time too young (and too antisocial w/regard to peer group influence and too prideful) to regard them. But actual threats from the boys I competed against managed to be effective to back me down from beating them. Like boxing, there's a huge psychological component, which children may not be wholly prepared to combat." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "That women of lose more than expected when they play against men of equivalent rating is entirely consistent with regression towards the mean [1].Because elo ratings contain error and men are on average better at chess [2], the average true value that elo ratings are trying to measure will be lower for women than men at equivalent elo ratings.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean[2] About 1 SD, http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1692/2269..." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "That women of lose more than expected when they play against men of equivalent rating is entirely consistent with regression towards the mean [1].Because elo ratings contain error and men are on average better at chess [2], the average true value that elo ratings are trying to measure will be lower for women than men at equivalent elo ratings.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean[2] About 1 SD, http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1692/2269..." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I only realized recently that there are separate championships and rankings for male and female competitors in chess.Given the physical advantage argument in sports, how do they motivate the split in chess?" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I only realized recently that there are separate championships and rankings for male and female competitors in chess.Given the physical advantage argument in sports, how do they motivate the split in chess?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This is sexist. Girls and boys should perform completely equal in everything and have completely the same interests." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This is sexist. Girls and boys should perform completely equal in everything and have completely the same interests." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Full title: Girls underperform when they play chess against boys - real-life evidence of stereotype threat?" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Which is distinct from a \"totally random hash function\", which is a hash function for which the hash associated with every value is uniformly randomly selected from the key space. Totally random hash functions have very good properties, but they take a lot of space to store. (Exercise for the reader: if the hash function is {0,1}^n -> {0,1}^m (so the input is an n-bit string, and the output is an m-bit string), how much space do you need? Why isn't this compressible?)" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This is off-topic but is there an official Google API + snippet for embedding Google+ comments in a non-Google+ page like that? He seems to have some hardcoded custom JavaScript code for it, is there no easy official way to do so?" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This is off-topic but is there an official Google API + snippet for embedding Google+ comments in a non-Google+ page like that? He seems to have some hardcoded custom JavaScript code for it, is there no easy official way to do so?" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I had to AdBlock typekit.com in order to disable the custom font on this site; normally Firefox config option gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled disables custom fonts, but not here.(I think the \"idea\" presented here is silly; I think it's an April Fools. Any given NaN (IEEE NaNs have lots of different representations) should hash consistently and compare consistently with functions specific to the requirements of hash tables, i.e. one for which NaN = NaN for any given NaN. You shouldn't be able to store multiple NaNs in the hash table (unless you're specifically using distinct NaNs) no more than you can store multiple keys for '1.0', so there should be no quadratic explosion.)(Oh and furthermore: I only know rudimentary Python, but timeit taking a string parameter for the code to time rather than a lambda is revolting.)" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I had to AdBlock typekit.com in order to disable the custom font on this site; normally Firefox config option gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled disables custom fonts, but not here.(I think the \"idea\" presented here is silly; I think it's an April Fools. Any given NaN (IEEE NaNs have lots of different representations) should hash consistently and compare consistently with functions specific to the requirements of hash tables, i.e. one for which NaN = NaN for any given NaN. You shouldn't be able to store multiple NaNs in the hash table (unless you're specifically using distinct NaNs) no more than you can store multiple keys for '1.0', so there should be no quadratic explosion.)(Oh and furthermore: I only know rudimentary Python, but timeit taking a string parameter for the code to time rather than a lambda is revolting.)" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "> Since the inputs are identicalThey aren't identical because NaN != NaN. That's what \"identity\" means." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "> Since the inputs are identicalThey aren't identical because NaN != NaN. That's what \"identity\" means." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "....not sure if april fools joke or if i'm just really dumb" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Wow. I've been working on a presentation[1] for a conference in Tokyo[2] that uses this exact same image/diagram to visualize this concept. While it's fairly obvious to use a ven diagram to visualize this, it's still strange to see the exact same visualization that I used coming from someone else's brain too. It's a nice validation.Showing the open rates makes it even more effective.[1]http://prezi.com/ipuykc88vvfg/how-to-leverage-email-and-its-...[2]http://onlab.jp/blog/archives/2012/05/onlab-data-conference-..." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "http://intercom.iohttp://customer.ioGood luck." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "http://intercom.iohttp://customer.ioGood luck." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Related post on user retention/lifecycle email marketing as a service for those interested in the space: http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-lifecycle-em... (and HN commentary on that post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3378583 )Basically a call to action for more companies to tackle this .. and it looks like a bunch are. Exciting times for a big problem." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Related post on user retention/lifecycle email marketing as a service for those interested in the space: http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-lifecycle-em... (and HN commentary on that post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3378583 )Basically a call to action for more companies to tackle this .. and it looks like a bunch are. Exciting times for a big problem." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "As the comments show, there's a clear need for this that lots of great folks are going after (Vero, Intercom, etc) - but it all treads the fine line between usefulness and annoying for the end customer. If I look at some of the key examples on the Vero site, some seem to fit the obviously non-annoying bucket (email people if they haven't logged in in two weeks) while others are more dubious (send a user an email when they buy ten widgets).Two solutions to this: \n- Doing some meaningful analysis that compares successes/failures within the same cohorts to identify really important inflection points (i.e. a user needs to complete setup within 48 hours or they never will)- Talking to customers to really understand the onboarding process so that you can use these event triggers to provide even better customer service.These tools are definitely better than nothing, but I'm left thinking that we (as a community online) might be able to do better. Is the answer to better customer service on the web really more sophisticated automated emails? Or is it actual personalization + meaningful analysis?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "As the comments show, there's a clear need for this that lots of great folks are going after (Vero, Intercom, etc) - but it all treads the fine line between usefulness and annoying for the end customer. If I look at some of the key examples on the Vero site, some seem to fit the obviously non-annoying bucket (email people if they haven't logged in in two weeks) while others are more dubious (send a user an email when they buy ten widgets).Two solutions to this: \n- Doing some meaningful analysis that compares successes/failures within the same cohorts to identify really important inflection points (i.e. a user needs to complete setup within 48 hours or they never will)- Talking to customers to really understand the onboarding process so that you can use these event triggers to provide even better customer service.These tools are definitely better than nothing, but I'm left thinking that we (as a community online) might be able to do better. Is the answer to better customer service on the web really more sophisticated automated emails? Or is it actual personalization + meaningful analysis?" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "This has definitely got legs - well done to the Vero guys.If you take shopping cart abandonment emails (which I'm most familiar with), you see a set of quite tired, overpriced providers (see e.g. https://www.barilliance.com/pricing) - so there's definitely a big opportunity to shake the transactional CRM market up.Question: as a generator of customer events (I run SnowPlow, an open-source alternative to MixPanel, https://github.com/snowplow) how can I integrate SnowPlow events into Vero - do you have an API or similar?" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "It is quite interesting how much of the really foundational technology that exists was either funded by the government, by the research labs of monopolies like AT&T or NTT, or by the research labs of companies that had near-monopolies in a particular sector (Xerox, at the time, Microsoft, Google). The things that people hate: governments and monopolies.In retrospect it's obvious why: R&D takes money, and there is no money in competitive industries, since competition drives profits towards zero." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Some things are just so big that it is unlikely a company or startup can start and finish. Society really cannot function without both public and private contributions. The proportions of each determined by your flavour of politics.Cases in point are things like the British railway, roads, the NHS or NASA. In our own industry it is open source software or things like CERN and the donation of the WWW we enjoy today.You need both. They tend to flip flop too, we nationalise something because we think that would be better. Then we privatise it and maybe at some point in the future we nationalise it again. We cannot seem to escape that both are necessary for healthy society." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Some things are just so big that it is unlikely a company or startup can start and finish. Society really cannot function without both public and private contributions. The proportions of each determined by your flavour of politics.Cases in point are things like the British railway, roads, the NHS or NASA. In our own industry it is open source software or things like CERN and the donation of the WWW we enjoy today.You need both. They tend to flip flop too, we nationalise something because we think that would be better. Then we privatise it and maybe at some point in the future we nationalise it again. We cannot seem to escape that both are necessary for healthy society." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "If you want to have expensive ground breaking research done in the private sector, you basically want superprofitable corporations that have at least regional monopolies and power to guarantee their long term security via direct or indirect law-influencing/making/changing powers. If you get to this, then they'll also need corporate police, corporate armies, corporate intelligence services etc., that will also have powers over and provide protections to civilians depending on their corporate affiliation.You basically want the dissolution of traditional states and their replacement by corporation states - a form of corporate semi-anarcho capitalism....and it doesn't sound like such a bad idea actually. We just need to choose between gross incompetence (what governments worldwide have shown us they are capable of) and pure for-profit maliciousness (what corporations showed they are capable of). We just need a 3rd magic ingredient, maybe something like a "global karma system" that could help keep the "profit driven maliciousness" in check. If this magic 3rd ingredient is ever realized, and corporations agree to become more democratic, a switch to the new system becomes possible if desirable.Over all this, the basic truth is that in order to take on the risks of costly research you need to have either:1. guaranteed long term and real power (governments and monopolist corporations can have this, less for corporations since the landscape is too dynamic now to guarantee the "long term" part, nor more big Bell and AT&T :( )2. a reliable way to turn a significant percent of any kind of research "outputs" into guaranteed profit (this is actually an area I'm very interested in and I think I have some ideas, but I'm not sure if I should just"open source" them or wait until I'll be able to "sell" them...)" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "If you want to have expensive ground breaking research done in the private sector, you basically want superprofitable corporations that have at least regional monopolies and power to guarantee their long term security via direct or indirect law-influencing/making/changing powers. If you get to this, then they'll also need corporate police, corporate armies, corporate intelligence services etc., that will also have powers over and provide protections to civilians depending on their corporate affiliation.You basically want the dissolution of traditional states and their replacement by corporation states - a form of corporate semi-anarcho capitalism....and it doesn't sound like such a bad idea actually. We just need to choose between gross incompetence (what governments worldwide have shown us they are capable of) and pure for-profit maliciousness (what corporations showed they are capable of). We just need a 3rd magic ingredient, maybe something like a "global karma system" that could help keep the "profit driven maliciousness" in check. If this magic 3rd ingredient is ever realized, and corporations agree to become more democratic, a switch to the new system becomes possible if desirable.Over all this, the basic truth is that in order to take on the risks of costly research you need to have either:1. guaranteed long term and real power (governments and monopolist corporations can have this, less for corporations since the landscape is too dynamic now to guarantee the "long term" part, nor more big Bell and AT&T :( )2. a reliable way to turn a significant percent of any kind of research "outputs" into guaranteed profit (this is actually an area I'm very interested in and I think I have some ideas, but I'm not sure if I should just"open source" them or wait until I'll be able to "sell" them...)" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "It doesn't look like most of HN is in the R&D field, but from the inside it's obvious why we need government funded blue sky research. Once you get into the research and science field you realize how many old ideas you are using, ideas which were just developed because of scientists were advancing the state of the art their chosen fields.The fact is, it takes decades to realize the implications of fundamental breakthroughs in math, physics and chemistry. The long time horizon and inability to judge the worth of these endeavors at the time means a patronage model is basically the best bet. It's kind of sucks but we just have to pour money into research hoping for a better future." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "It doesn't look like most of HN is in the R&D field, but from the inside it's obvious why we need government funded blue sky research. Once you get into the research and science field you realize how many old ideas you are using, ideas which were just developed because of scientists were advancing the state of the art their chosen fields.The fact is, it takes decades to realize the implications of fundamental breakthroughs in math, physics and chemistry. The long time horizon and inability to judge the worth of these endeavors at the time means a patronage model is basically the best bet. It's kind of sucks but we just have to pour money into research hoping for a better future." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Medicine is a good example of a field that has benefited enormously from publically funded research. In countries with nationally-funded health services, it is often the doctors and healthcare professionals who treat patients who carry out clinical trials and medical research. Sometimes this research is done in partnership with private companies. But without Government support, a huge amount of valuable medical research would never be undertaken." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I especially like the explanation provided in the comments:\n \"This was done as a passive-aggressive motivation to get someone to create the linux close/min/max/restore buttons, I believe. And the message got through, and the work was done. ;)\"" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Maybe the head is there to symbolize that big brother Google is always watching you???" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Maybe the head is there to symbolize that big brother Google is always watching you???" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Definitely belongs to reddit. :)" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Definitely belongs to reddit. :)" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Drastic way to work, yeah." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Drastic way to work, yeah." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "> What is the expected result? an X button> What happens instead? Some guys headI lol'd" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Dear Libertarian Types (of which I consider myself one)Please stop arguing against the Obama strategy. There’s nothing you can do to stop it and its failure (if it does fail) will make your point better than if you wrote a billion blog posts. Beyond that if he does succeed you could write a billion blog posts saying he was wrong and they aren’t going to convince people.One way or the other it’s out of your hands.More importantly...you have a bigger problem. Right now there are a lot of people out there arguing that libertarian principles got us into this mess. That is simply not the case and arguing against that is where you should be putting your effort. Because assuming President Obama does fail you’ll want people to be open to libertarian principles in the future.Fiscal policy is like a game of chess right now and you should be looking three moves down and not at the very next encounter (which you already lost almost 3 months ago)Sincerely,Tom" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "What the GOP needs to do is punt the social conservatives out of their party and take the middle to form a coalition. Bring back truly 'conservative' values such as self reliance, personal accountability etc., but also acknowledge that society has to function smoothly to avoid market chaos. That means leavening libertarian ideals with some realpolitik. Pure ideology almost always fails, no matter which one you choose. What works is starting with some core principles, but accepting that pragmatic decisions sometimes have to stray from those ideals." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "What the GOP needs to do is punt the social conservatives out of their party and take the middle to form a coalition. Bring back truly 'conservative' values such as self reliance, personal accountability etc., but also acknowledge that society has to function smoothly to avoid market chaos. That means leavening libertarian ideals with some realpolitik. Pure ideology almost always fails, no matter which one you choose. What works is starting with some core principles, but accepting that pragmatic decisions sometimes have to stray from those ideals." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Haven't we just rediscovered that \"money management\" is basically pseudoscience? These are the kinds of people who promise to beat the market using their special models or skills. On average they fail. When they seem to be doing well for a while, it is because they are playing the Martingale.When someone says \"These people manage $2 trillion\", it seems like we should take it in the same light as \"These people are among the most successful peddlers of perpetual motion machines in the world\". Your reaction should be to trust them less, not more, about economic and financial matters." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Haven't we just rediscovered that \"money management\" is basically pseudoscience? These are the kinds of people who promise to beat the market using their special models or skills. On average they fail. When they seem to be doing well for a while, it is because they are playing the Martingale.When someone says \"These people manage $2 trillion\", it seems like we should take it in the same light as \"These people are among the most successful peddlers of perpetual motion machines in the world\". Your reaction should be to trust them less, not more, about economic and financial matters." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Wait, the people who figured out how to capture all the money out of the existing system don't want to see that system changed? I'm confused... it's almost as if they were speaking in their self-interest." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Wait, the people who figured out how to capture all the money out of the existing system don't want to see that system changed? I'm confused... it's almost as if they were speaking in their self-interest." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Comparing rudimentary 19th century financial system to present is quite absurd and misleading. Back then it was a very self contained economy fueled by production and agriculture. There were no billions of foreign bonds, volatile currency affairs or even electronic debt transfer, which can practically run the country bankrupt in a few hours if unsupervised.I don't think I've seen a more mundanely written and ill-supported essay on financial crisis at top of HN before." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I think they will call it an MBP and completely phase out built-in optical drives on Macs. After all, Apple was the first major OEM to phase out floppy drives (when floppies were still very common). Now that the Mac App Store has been launched, the timing is perfect.However, it would be really nice if the new Thunderbolt displays had built-in Blu-ray/DVD/CD-RW drives. That would make it possible to use an optical drive at home (where I, in any case, would most likely need one) without having yet another peripheral to clutter things up. Since the purpose of Thunderbolt is to create One Connector to Rule Them All, we shouldn't have to connect a separate optical drive when the new Cinema Display is essentially a docking station and monitor in one." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This is what I've been expecting. I used to think I was unique, but looking at the forums, I realize there's a whole cadre of people who buy MacBook Pros, take out the optical drive, and replace it with an SSD, so they run with both an SSD and a hard drive. The SSD runs the OS and has your code and apps on it, the hard drive has your Big Media.I hope, when Apple gives up the optical media drive, they will still continue to have a hard drive slot.I'd much rather just buy the machine configured this way from Apple than have to rework the internals of my laptop (And undo everything if I have to take the machine in for support.)" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This is what I've been expecting. I used to think I was unique, but looking at the forums, I realize there's a whole cadre of people who buy MacBook Pros, take out the optical drive, and replace it with an SSD, so they run with both an SSD and a hard drive. The SSD runs the OS and has your code and apps on it, the hard drive has your Big Media.I hope, when Apple gives up the optical media drive, they will still continue to have a hard drive slot.I'd much rather just buy the machine configured this way from Apple than have to rework the internals of my laptop (And undo everything if I have to take the machine in for support.)" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I wonder if this new crop of ultra-thin Macbooks is going to threaten iPad sales. Certainly the iPad is half the price of the low-end MBA, but the MBA isn't that much harder to lug around and it's so much more capable. Lately I find myself reaching for my 2010 MBP more than the iPad and that's a beast compared to this year's crop." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I wonder if this new crop of ultra-thin Macbooks is going to threaten iPad sales. Certainly the iPad is half the price of the low-end MBA, but the MBA isn't that much harder to lug around and it's so much more capable. Lately I find myself reaching for my 2010 MBP more than the iPad and that's a beast compared to this year's crop." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I really hope it doesn't have the wedge shape, they're so hard to get open. What I'd really like to see is for them to ditch the optical drive, make it ~40% thinner or so (but with the same thickness throughout) and to fill the rest of the space with a bigger battery." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I really hope it doesn't have the wedge shape, they're so hard to get open. What I'd really like to see is for them to ditch the optical drive, make it ~40% thinner or so (but with the same thickness throughout) and to fill the rest of the space with a bigger battery." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "And just like that my plans to by the 13 inch MBA have been thrown into dissaray" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "> Also, as suggested in the comments, I used a chi-square goodness-of-fit test to see if the deviation is statistically significant, but it was not; with a p-value of 0.2303. Meaning we would fail to reject the null hypothesis: the observed data were a good fit for a Benford process. That said, the p-value is not so large as to suggest total adherence.Welcome to stats 101. If you get p > 0.05, it means your test failed to tell you anything. Which means your test failed to tell you about the likelihood of tampering." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "this is a statistical blog post written by someone who has no idea how to do statistics. and even when told how to do it properly by a commenter, fails to accept the simple and overwhelming conclusion. why is this on the front page?" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "this is a statistical blog post written by someone who has no idea how to do statistics. and even when told how to do it properly by a commenter, fails to accept the simple and overwhelming conclusion. why is this on the front page?" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "They should expect a bias, since Wikileaks have stated that some information has been held back deliberately. From http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010\"We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.\"" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "They should expect a bias, since Wikileaks have stated that some information has been held back deliberately. From http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010\"We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.\"" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I might be missing something, but how is it that overall the number of leading 2s is greater than the number of leading 1s, but not in any of the constituent regions?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I might be missing something, but how is it that overall the number of leading 2s is greater than the number of leading 1s, but not in any of the constituent regions?" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I thought that wikileaks eliminates certain information that would cause harm to a party mentioned in the leak?" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "A very personal opinion coming up.I agree with his conclusion that there has to be a 'better way' than the smart phone, but my situation is slightly different. The author still embraces technology as the best way to handle our day-to-day problems. Mine have turned somewhat away from that.A year ago I owned an iPhone 3GS. It was more than enough. I got the iPhone 4S, however, because some apps required a faster processor, so the simplest of tasks slowed down my 3GS. It just seemed like iOS was bulkier.Fast forward to the present day, and I find myself only using my smart phone (iPhone 4S) to listen to music and use its GPS/map function. Sometimes I use it to check for venue reviews. I send a couple messages a day, be it SMS or a messasing app, and probably talk on the phone an average of a few times a week for a few minutes. I use Twitter as an RSS feed, too. For all its prowess, I don't seem to be doing much on it. I would sell it and get a cheap $10 phone, except I already bought it and as an ex-musician, I cannot stand listening to the radio, so I plug it in to my car stereo for that reason.Basically, I feel like my smart phone was an expensive, over-rated, hyped piece of technology and machinery. Either we are not using it for the right reasons or it truly is a futile piece of metal that can be replaceable.Again, this is my situation. I don't have a calendar and meetings I need to keep tabs on, so it may very well be that I am not part of smart phone makers' target audience, oddly enough.Just another overstated opinion, I guess." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "It seems that every 6 hours, some other blogger witnesses the great epiphany that when you greatly reduce your daily distractions, you are greatly less distracted.Insightful." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "It seems that every 6 hours, some other blogger witnesses the great epiphany that when you greatly reduce your daily distractions, you are greatly less distracted.Insightful." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "My smartphone is working for me, but what I realized about two years ago is that I do not need the latest and greatest one.Basically what I want from my smartphone is: phone, turn-by-turn directions, music player, emergency web browser, emergency email, wifi tether.Essentially any Android phone will fit my needs, so I moved over to using much cheaper devices on off-contract plans. My first was an LG Optimus V ($150) on Virgin Mobile ($25/month for 300 minutes and unlimited data, since I use Google Voice and Groove IP that turns into nearly infinite minutes) which I recently replaced with a HTC One V (also $150 usually, but was recently on a one-day sale for $50... $50, no contract!). Sadly moving to the One V bumped my monthly rate up to $35/mo (Virgin Mobile grandfathered in older phones into their old $25/mo rate despite the lack of contract, which was nice) but that's still super cheap compared to most people I know with $80+ plans.This route isn't for everyone, if you're one of those people that is really married to your phone and you actually use it for things like video streaming and such, use the latest and greatest, but for me it is working out great." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "My smartphone is working for me, but what I realized about two years ago is that I do not need the latest and greatest one.Basically what I want from my smartphone is: phone, turn-by-turn directions, music player, emergency web browser, emergency email, wifi tether.Essentially any Android phone will fit my needs, so I moved over to using much cheaper devices on off-contract plans. My first was an LG Optimus V ($150) on Virgin Mobile ($25/month for 300 minutes and unlimited data, since I use Google Voice and Groove IP that turns into nearly infinite minutes) which I recently replaced with a HTC One V (also $150 usually, but was recently on a one-day sale for $50... $50, no contract!). Sadly moving to the One V bumped my monthly rate up to $35/mo (Virgin Mobile grandfathered in older phones into their old $25/mo rate despite the lack of contract, which was nice) but that's still super cheap compared to most people I know with $80+ plans.This route isn't for everyone, if you're one of those people that is really married to your phone and you actually use it for things like video streaming and such, use the latest and greatest, but for me it is working out great." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "What we need is a virtual secretary: someone who will triage all our calls, and only ping us if something urgent comes through. Maybe two levels of pings, one for urgent, the other for important. Everything else just gets silently noted for later attention. Simple concept, but the implementation has a number of sticky wickets. How, for example, can software evaluate the importance of a phone call from my wife, who may be calling to tell me that our child is headed to the hospital, or that her mom called to thank us for a lovely Christmas gift?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "What we need is a virtual secretary: someone who will triage all our calls, and only ping us if something urgent comes through. Maybe two levels of pings, one for urgent, the other for important. Everything else just gets silently noted for later attention. Simple concept, but the implementation has a number of sticky wickets. How, for example, can software evaluate the importance of a phone call from my wife, who may be calling to tell me that our child is headed to the hospital, or that her mom called to thank us for a lovely Christmas gift?" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I've only had my Android phone for about a month, but I love it. I do NOT check it often during the day, but it is a great combination of phone, portable entertainment center, quick-check (and delete) of email, nano-utility-computer, good-enough camera (finally, in a phone), and hot spot.Yeah, for actual work I still use a full size computer, but the hot spot feature comes in handy when I'm out of the house or office." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Interesting move, though hardly uncommon. If anything it's good to see Microsoft uncoupling the search engine and the browser.I'm glad that it's hosted by Mozilla, at least it ought to keep up to date with regard to the latest versions. The Yahoo Firefox is less fortunate- it's still stuck on v5:http://downloads.yahoo.com/firefox/" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Visiting the page on an Ubuntu box yields a more or less blank page with the message \"Sorry, this download is not supported by your system.\"What download? I guess I'll never know." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Visiting the page on an Ubuntu box yields a more or less blank page with the message \"Sorry, this download is not supported by your system.\"What download? I guess I'll never know." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "\"Bing helps make decisions easier.\" That's true because I'm deciding to not install this." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "\"Bing helps make decisions easier.\" That's true because I'm deciding to not install this." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Hmm, I guess I never knew how much \"search engine integration\" was in Firefox. I just assumed Google was configured as the default search provider and that's it.Honest question - can someone explain to me how is this different than just changing the search provider to Bing in my current copy of Firefox? (corp PC here - can't try it out on my own now).I see other commenters saying this isn't available on Ubuntu - why not?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Hmm, I guess I never knew how much \"search engine integration\" was in Firefox. I just assumed Google was configured as the default search provider and that's it.Honest question - can someone explain to me how is this different than just changing the search provider to Bing in my current copy of Firefox? (corp PC here - can't try it out on my own now).I see other commenters saying this isn't available on Ubuntu - why not?" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Does this mean Microsoft is finally going to give up on IE?" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "One thing I don't get is how people always seem to follow the pattern \"I'm unbiased. #{strong_opinion_here}.\"Unbiased... really, hop?For the record: I think that open source + code cleanup + code review is a great idea, and not just for climate science. But it's important to keep in mind that ugly code isn't the same thing as wrong code, and that mistakes in the code aren't automatically become mistakes in the science.(For example, a poorly written data parser with lots of bugs will not affect the science one bit, if none of the data triggers those bugs.)So what's your purpose here:- To contribute to a community, finding and fixing bugs, making things more readable and robust, etc?- To do a little audit to \"prove\" what you already believe? (I suspect a hint of witch-hunt in the air...)Edit to fix formatting and add a side comment: This \"climatologists may be incentivised to spread FUD b/c it brings fame and more grant money\" bit doesn't pass the smell test for me. If this is the true motivation of climatologists, then why aren't more of them going for the fame and think-tank money available to them by expressing dissent? I can't believe that all these scientists are dishonest and greedy enough to lie about the science, but not suitably dishonest/greedy to sell out their peers." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I think you miss the fact that to figure out what scientific code does, you also have to know the science. Yeah, you can look for dumb bugs like the one they show in that clip, but you have no way of knowing whether calculations are correct without knowing what's going on.I found it disingenuous how they flashed a line of code that says \"fudge factor\" as if that makes the code incorrect. Unless you know what that fudge factor is for, you can't make that judgement." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I think you miss the fact that to figure out what scientific code does, you also have to know the science. Yeah, you can look for dumb bugs like the one they show in that clip, but you have no way of knowing whether calculations are correct without knowing what's going on.I found it disingenuous how they flashed a line of code that says \"fudge factor\" as if that makes the code incorrect. Unless you know what that fudge factor is for, you can't make that judgement." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I'd like to start a formal group to bring back the glaciers and arctic ice cap." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I'd like to start a formal group to bring back the glaciers and arctic ice cap." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "The neat thing about being a professional programmer is that you are always working in somebody else's problem domain.So I wouldn't take the naysayers too seriously. If you can't peer review climate code, you can't peer review financial code, or medical code, or astronautics code.Sure, you'll need problem domain expertise. But that's a given with any kind of programming. Climate science is no different than any other kind of work programmers do.I think it's a great idea -- if you can pull it off. But that's a really big \"if\"." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "The neat thing about being a professional programmer is that you are always working in somebody else's problem domain.So I wouldn't take the naysayers too seriously. If you can't peer review climate code, you can't peer review financial code, or medical code, or astronautics code.Sure, you'll need problem domain expertise. But that's a given with any kind of programming. Climate science is no different than any other kind of work programmers do.I think it's a great idea -- if you can pull it off. But that's a really big \"if\"." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I'm definitely interested, not sure about the time." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "More HN catching with top stories from Reddit. The proggit discussion has many insights.http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/82s16/has_joel_... The context is important. First, it is in reply to this, which quotes Spolsky as:\n \"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture\n group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around\n forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had\n lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him.\"\n Second, the post to the mailing list itself is a forward of a private e-mail\n from Greg Whitten. I can't see if he said anywhere he was okay with making\n it public.\n\nMore HN catching with proggit top stories." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I hope that John Foust had Dr. Whitten's permission to publish this apparently private mail. To the people who say that Whitten is arrogant or bitter, please read Joel's disrespectful comments first:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles\"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him.\"" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I hope that John Foust had Dr. Whitten's permission to publish this apparently private mail. To the people who say that Whitten is arrogant or bitter, please read Joel's disrespectful comments first:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles\"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him.\"" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Interesting, but it read as kind of arrogant to me. Or perhaps bitter? I can't tell. Anyone else get that vibe?" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Interesting, but it read as kind of arrogant to me. Or perhaps bitter? I can't tell. Anyone else get that vibe?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "The part about Spolsky, if true, is interesting because Joel obviously doesn't see some of the decisions he made at Microsoft as wrong since he's still doing the same thing.\"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. \"Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?I particularly like this article that says you should only write new production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of experience in and then ends with we don't though.\nhttp://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "The part about Spolsky, if true, is interesting because Joel obviously doesn't see some of the decisions he made at Microsoft as wrong since he's still doing the same thing.\"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. \"Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?I particularly like this article that says you should only write new production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of experience in and then ends with we don't though.\nhttp://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Why is everybody gossiping -- both here and on proggit -- about a discussion list thread from April 2005?(Yes, it's a rhetorical question, but if there's a reason why this has suddenly become timely I'd actually like to know.)" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "For a laugh, his facebook page - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jthompsonsHe works for Microsoft. Oh, as a beta tester, you know, the one you just sign up for and get in.Although, the thing that irks me is \"The Dreams Foundation\". It is all one big page to try to get you to \"donate\", but none of them give info about their certification. The videos are from someone not even related to the project and the MIS Orphanage fund is a GlobalGiving project, not a potofdreams or anything related to the guy that I can find. Even the Google Accredited donation uses the standard buy-it-now cart instead of the IRS Certified 501(c)3 Donate cart.The whole thing just screams \"scam\". I guess many would consider ripping people off \"entreprenurial\", but not me." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "If it is any consolation I like his font selection for the logo over yours. In all seriousness though, wait to jump to conclusion, in many markets developers form eastern Europe and India where laws on IP are a little more laxed are ripping off site designs and then selling them as templates in bulk packages. He may have thought he was buying a legitimate template from a fly by night outfit. Or he may very well known that he himself was directly ripping you off. It seems to me, a person that had the chops to rip of a site design would readily notice the Google analytics code so I would lean more towards a hatched job by a bulk template outfit.In either case he needs a cease and desist notice and the company need to be notified that they are in violation of your copyright. I am pretty sure the US, UK and AU all respect each other copyright to a certain extent at least for identity items but my word should not be a substitute for legal counsel." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "If it is any consolation I like his font selection for the logo over yours. In all seriousness though, wait to jump to conclusion, in many markets developers form eastern Europe and India where laws on IP are a little more laxed are ripping off site designs and then selling them as templates in bulk packages. He may have thought he was buying a legitimate template from a fly by night outfit. Or he may very well known that he himself was directly ripping you off. It seems to me, a person that had the chops to rip of a site design would readily notice the Google analytics code so I would lean more towards a hatched job by a bulk template outfit.In either case he needs a cease and desist notice and the company need to be notified that they are in violation of your copyright. I am pretty sure the US, UK and AU all respect each other copyright to a certain extent at least for identity items but my word should not be a substitute for legal counsel." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Nup. He has most definitely stolen our site.I can tell this by checking google analytics. Before our analytics started getting junk traffic from the knock off site. We had a quite period of about 2 weeks. We generally only get AUS traffic, but there was a spike of traffic on the 10th of July.The only NON-AUS visitors on that day were from the UK.All of them were from Stockport UK. The home town of Mr Thompson." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Nup. He has most definitely stolen our site.I can tell this by checking google analytics. Before our analytics started getting junk traffic from the knock off site. We had a quite period of about 2 weeks. We generally only get AUS traffic, but there was a spike of traffic on the 10th of July.The only NON-AUS visitors on that day were from the UK.All of them were from Stockport UK. The home town of Mr Thompson." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "About a year ago a friend of mine was creating a (very small) gaming website, and had created a fairly basic landing page until the site was finished being developed.As they were between developers, I took their PSD, sliced it and coded it into a basic HTML site, with their analytics.In the two months that followed, no less than four gaming communities out there stole it as their landing page, without removing analytics - and the best part of it is that it wasn't even a well-designed page, it was REALLY basic." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "About a year ago a friend of mine was creating a (very small) gaming website, and had created a fairly basic landing page until the site was finished being developed.As they were between developers, I took their PSD, sliced it and coded it into a basic HTML site, with their analytics.In the two months that followed, no less than four gaming communities out there stole it as their landing page, without removing analytics - and the best part of it is that it wasn't even a well-designed page, it was REALLY basic." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Looks like it's down (or it's not organic-views.com), but for future content theft (IANAL etc):\nAny domain that is either hosted OR registered in the USA can be DMCA'ed, regardless of actual location of the owner or the entity whose content was stolen." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "The symptom of empty residential developments was one of the first signs of the collapsing housing bubble in Ireland and in Spain.http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/03/michael-...http://www.nzherald.co.nz/markets/news/article.cfm?c_id=62&#...http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/...If China shows the same symptom, but on the scale of empty cities rather than just empty developments, the bursting of the bubble could be calamitous. Plenty of economically astute observers are concerned about this.http://www.economist.com/node/18836400?story_id=18836400&#38...There are already signs of new unrest in Chinahttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e0696f2c-98f9-11e0-acd2-00144feab4...http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ht3xQPsLO...in some of the most prosperous regions, and many social scientists in China are worried by the example of Yugoslavia, a country that split apart when regional economic disparities were less than they now are in China." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "In my opinion, this article is worthless. Does it mention how much cities or houses don't succeed to get sold? No. Does it mention the percentage? No. Actually, it gives no numbers.In any country of the world, you'll find cities, houses, building that are not acquired, for a reason or another. China has got more than 1 bn inhabitant, it's not unusual to find whole cities that are not alive yet. But this doesn't mean that there is a crisis or a problem; even a tiny one. A crisis when all the economy is heading toward that direction, and only numbers can prove that." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "In my opinion, this article is worthless. Does it mention how much cities or houses don't succeed to get sold? No. Does it mention the percentage? No. Actually, it gives no numbers.In any country of the world, you'll find cities, houses, building that are not acquired, for a reason or another. China has got more than 1 bn inhabitant, it's not unusual to find whole cities that are not alive yet. But this doesn't mean that there is a crisis or a problem; even a tiny one. A crisis when all the economy is heading toward that direction, and only numbers can prove that." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I've been thinking about these empty cities, and it strikes me as an indication that the planners of the Chinese economy are expecting continued increase in the value of commodities relative to other capital. If they expect to need more urban housing and infrastructure in the future and also expect the price of commodities (and also labor for construction, perhaps) to increase significantly, it makes sense to build them now. Since China already keeps a lot of capital in the form of US treasuries, it makes sense that they would want to diversify their investments by also building up a surplus of physical capital such as housing and other infrastructure." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I've been thinking about these empty cities, and it strikes me as an indication that the planners of the Chinese economy are expecting continued increase in the value of commodities relative to other capital. If they expect to need more urban housing and infrastructure in the future and also expect the price of commodities (and also labor for construction, perhaps) to increase significantly, it makes sense to build them now. Since China already keeps a lot of capital in the form of US treasuries, it makes sense that they would want to diversify their investments by also building up a surplus of physical capital such as housing and other infrastructure." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "China should open their doors to Hollywood production companies. These places look perfect for zombie apocalypse movies." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "China should open their doors to Hollywood production companies. These places look perfect for zombie apocalypse movies." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I have a distant relative who is a developer in southern china and told me that he has been so busy he has no time for himself; He bids on land sold by the government, hire people to build an apartment on the land and the apartment gets sold out before it even finishes building! So, he then has to keep moving on to building new apartments.Those ghost towns will keep springing up if there is nowhere for investors to put their money. Where else can they put it? There is basically negative interest rate with inflation being so high. If you were given a million yuan you wouldn't know what to do with it except to a. spend it or b. buy a house or stocks with it." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I don't mean to be a downer/naysayer, but how can you argue that photo printing is a growth industry?I run an ecommerce service for wedding photographers and know a lot of other people in the industry. From where we sit, the consensus is that people are ordering less prints. All the growth we're seeing is from album/book sales and digital file sales. 5-10 years ago, a portrait photographer could charge a $100 sitting fee but still make $1,000+ on print sales. That is now hard/impossible. Everyone simply asks \"Can I have the files on a disc?\".I can't see how it would be any different for the general consumer and their images. People get their utility from seeing the image on Facebook. My mom is 63 and she looks at our family pictures on FB every day.Wont the generation that is accustomed to (and prefers) tangible prints be dead in 30 years?My $0.02" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "My parents (my children's grandparents) are moving away from physical photos. The thing that pushed them over the edge was us starting to use an EyeFi card (http://www.eye.fi/).It's an SD card that can wirelessly transmit pictures and upload them automatically to designated endpoints.All of the pictures we take are automatically uploaded to my flickr account that my parents have access to. When we talk regularly on the phone, they've already been out to flickr to see the latest photos.For the few pictures that they think are good enough to have physical prints of them, they can order them from snapfish directly from flickr.Previous to owning an EyeFi, it'd be weeks or months before I got a chance to manually go through and curate the photos to find the \"best\" ones actually worth sending to a service like PicPlum and I'd always get complaints from my parents about the delay." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "My parents (my children's grandparents) are moving away from physical photos. The thing that pushed them over the edge was us starting to use an EyeFi card (http://www.eye.fi/).It's an SD card that can wirelessly transmit pictures and upload them automatically to designated endpoints.All of the pictures we take are automatically uploaded to my flickr account that my parents have access to. When we talk regularly on the phone, they've already been out to flickr to see the latest photos.For the few pictures that they think are good enough to have physical prints of them, they can order them from snapfish directly from flickr.Previous to owning an EyeFi, it'd be weeks or months before I got a chance to manually go through and curate the photos to find the \"best\" ones actually worth sending to a service like PicPlum and I'd always get complaints from my parents about the delay." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Has this sort of thing happened before? \"PicPlum acquired the assets of a previous Y-Combinator company PicWing, and took over its printer relationship and initial user base.\"" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Has this sort of thing happened before? \"PicPlum acquired the assets of a previous Y-Combinator company PicWing, and took over its printer relationship and initial user base.\"" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "The value proposition of \"take photos of baby with iPhone; grandparents get them automatically in the mail\" makes so much sense to me. Glad to see PicWing living on." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "The value proposition of \"take photos of baby with iPhone; grandparents get them automatically in the mail\" makes so much sense to me. Glad to see PicWing living on." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "So is this basically a relaunch of PicWing? It seems like pretty much the same thing, just more expensive?One other point. Isn't it a little odd to use a testimonial from the lead investor of the service in such a prominent way without designating them as an investor?" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Coincidently I'm reading Ernst Mach's \"The Science of Mechanics\" at this very moment. It includes a lot of analysis of setups like this.As for this problem: consider first the weights. Each one's downward force is 1 kg, due to gravity. There must also be exactly 1 kg's force's worth of tension in the string, because if it were less the weights would be moving down and if it were more the weights would be pulled up. Because the system (is assumed to be) not moving, we may replace the right side weight and pulley wheel with a fixed anchor for the string, in which case there would be no doubt that the spring balance displays 1 kg. Argument from symmetry says the scale would also read 1 kg if the left side were anchored and the right side free. Because the system in unmoving, it really makes no difference whether the opposite side of the scale is fixed to an anchor or balanced by a free weight: it will read 1 kg in all cases.This is very similar to a Car Talk puzzler that their physicist consultant clarified: is it worse to be in a car going 60 mph that hits an unmovable highway overpass wall, or to be in a car going 60 mph that hits an identical car perfectly head-on that is also going 60 mph? The physicist's answer was that there is no difference: in both cases you experience an identical impulse going from 60 mph to a stop in the same time.You may be inclined disbelieve this on the idea that the crumple zones in the car-to-car collision make for a \"softer\" collision, but consider this: define the point at which the bumpers of the two cars as \"the origin\". Assuming the cars and the collision are perfectly symmetrical, each car is going to crumple up on its respective side of the origin identically. Suppose the force starts small and ramps up gradually as the crumpling occurs; each car will be pushing the other away with the same force. An unmoving highway overpass barrier would resist with the same force." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "The scale really measures force, not mass. On the left the scale measures 9.81 Newtons applied by the weight, which is labeled 1kg because Earth gravity is assumed. The ceiling applies an equal but opposite force on the top of the scale through the suspending string, otherwise the scale would accelerate downward. On the right the force from the ceiling is replaced by force from another weight; this doesn't change the reading on the scale." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "The scale really measures force, not mass. On the left the scale measures 9.81 Newtons applied by the weight, which is labeled 1kg because Earth gravity is assumed. The ceiling applies an equal but opposite force on the top of the scale through the suspending string, otherwise the scale would accelerate downward. On the right the force from the ceiling is replaced by force from another weight; this doesn't change the reading on the scale." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT: I'm giving my answer below.I'm going to say the balance reads 1kg. Since the setup on the right is in stasis, you could easily remove one of the weights and anchor the string to the ground and remain in stasis. You would then be recreating the setup on the left (equipment anchored to ceiling) except the string is just being redirected by pulleys. Since each bend in the string is 90 degrees you multiply all the forces by 1, still giving you a 1kg reading on the balance.Thinking aloud about why 0kg and 2kg don't make sense.0kg: the spring in the balance is going to stretch to some extent because of gravity pulling the weights down, so 0kg doesn't make sense.2kg: I'm not sure how to disprove this one except by saying that I'm so convinced that 1kg is the right answer that 2kg doesn't make sense either.That's my reasoning, anyway." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT: I'm giving my answer below.I'm going to say the balance reads 1kg. Since the setup on the right is in stasis, you could easily remove one of the weights and anchor the string to the ground and remain in stasis. You would then be recreating the setup on the left (equipment anchored to ceiling) except the string is just being redirected by pulleys. Since each bend in the string is 90 degrees you multiply all the forces by 1, still giving you a 1kg reading on the balance.Thinking aloud about why 0kg and 2kg don't make sense.0kg: the spring in the balance is going to stretch to some extent because of gravity pulling the weights down, so 0kg doesn't make sense.2kg: I'm not sure how to disprove this one except by saying that I'm so convinced that 1kg is the right answer that 2kg doesn't make sense either.That's my reasoning, anyway." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Okay, so I thought back to my physics days some more, and the real understanding of the problem lies in understanding the definition of tension. The scale is actually measuring tension in the rope.An informal definition of tension: cut the rope at any point, and determine what force needs to be applied to the one of the cut ends to keep that part of the rope in equilibrium. That force is the tension in the rope.So in the second example, just measure the tension in the rope." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Okay, so I thought back to my physics days some more, and the real understanding of the problem lies in understanding the definition of tension. The scale is actually measuring tension in the rope.An informal definition of tension: cut the rope at any point, and determine what force needs to be applied to the one of the cut ends to keep that part of the rope in equilibrium. That force is the tension in the rope.So in the second example, just measure the tension in the rope." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "The answers people give include, but are not limited to, 0, 1 and 2. I find people's reasoning interesting, and after the discussion on the item about the weights and the pulleys (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659326) I'll be interested to see what people say about this, if anything.There is a one-off experiment hidden under this submission - email me if you want to know more, or have concerns and I'll answer them. Alternatively I'll post more in a day or so.Thanks." }