skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have a Droid, and I'd suggest that the difference between the keys is subtle, but not non-existent. Best idea is to get your hands on one and try it. I love it and have had almost no problems typing on it, but it seems to be a love it/hate it sort of thing. That being said, I hated software keyboards... until the Droid. I actually find myself using the software keyboards (one for each orientation of the phone) more often than the hardware keyboard.
A while ago I wrote an artificial life ant simulation in Second Life. I still think SL has a lot of potential as an educational / collaborative programming environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehEzRUu4_RM
I have a T-Mobile plan right now - went to check on upgrade pricing through google's site but apparently their servers have crashed. I'm thinking I may wait for Verizon to get the phone...
But it should work with Wind Mobile (http://www.wind.ca).
How different to the days of working at Symbian (many years ago).

There:

Engineers: "We should do X, Y and Z!"

Technology Managers: "Our owners/partners don't want us to do any of that. We have a five year lead on the competition, we don't need to do this stuff."

Google Nexus One announcement:

"Together with those partners, we have increased the rate of innovation. The volume [and] variety of Android phones... have exceeded our expectations. But we want to do more and one of the questions we asked ourselves a long time ago was, 'What if we worked even more closely with our partners to bring devices to the market that are going to help showcase very quickly the technology we're working at on Google."

My prediction for the mobile industry: further disruption.
Crockford on JavaScript: A Public Lecture Series at Yahoo
fwiw, t-mobile is going that route with all of their phones and plans (called "even more plus"). if you sign up with them and have your own phone (or want to pay for the phone upfront), your monthly plan is less money and you have no contract. you can of course still buy subsidized phones through them for the normal monthly rate and a 2-year contract.
Too bad there are no plans on offering this as a development phone along with the G1 and G3
No it was definitely Reti. Its been mentioned in quite a few chess books so I see if I can dig it out.

Funny enough another famous quote from Reti was about Capablanca:

"Chess was Capablanca's mother tongue."

BTW, Capablanca was my first chess hero... partly because my grandfather actually met him!
and an unsubsidized, factory unlocked iphone 3gs costs $750-$1000.
Very cool - I've used Tripadvisor for international restaurant recommendations plenty of times.
So it works like this?:

1) Crapware makers pay PC makers to pre-load their crapware<br/>
2) PC makers use (some of) the money to reduce their selling price<br/>
3) Best Buy removes (some of) the crapware and increases the price again

Why not just sell a computer with a clean OS? Why on earth should a brand new machine need work?

I'm not knocking your services, thaumaturgy, just saying it shouldn't be necessary to optimize a new machine.
i would hardly call t-mobile crappy when compared to at&t.
I was hoping that as an existing T-Mobile customer, I'd be able to use one of those "upgrade discounts" for the Nexus One. The good news is that I can, the bad news is that as an existing customer I get the unsubsidized price:

Congratulations! You qualify for an upgrade.
There may be changes to your service plan and your contract will be renewed for 2 years from the activation of your upgraded phone.

Phone	$529.00

Service Plan Discount	- $150.00

Total: $379.00 (excluding tax and shipping)
and drinking coffee and tea decrease the risk of diabetes, possibly?
http://www.wiredprnews.com/2009/12/16/coffee-may-decrease-di...
A quick toy: http://projectsuggestions.com/
He won the 2005 World Championship in rather convincing fashion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_World_Chess_Championship_2...

If you're a purist, you probably believe that one can only become world champion by defeating the title holder in a head-to-head match consisting of of many (12-24 or more) games. That's how it was done from 1886-1993, and I think most chess players (myself included) prefer that format. But Topalov is technically recognized by FIDE as a World Champion.

More here if anybody cares:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship
a novel poker-related web app. i say "novel" because i don't know if it will end up being popular, awesome and profitable, or crash and burn, but i think its neat.
I just want it to use with wifi, like an iPod Touch
Flee the Bubble
Remindum (iPhone App, http://7mills.net/rem) -- lets you to create reminders in your Google Calendar fast and easy.
For extra money some PC makers will sell you a clean PC. Of course, Best Buy probably doesn't carry those models since the money doesn't go to them.
Same answer with the old thread. I'm working on a Python IDE for Windows. Recently released an alpha indeed. http://pfaide.com
Which kinda makes T-Mobile the only real option if you have an unlocked phone. Why spend all that money on the phone if you're still going to be paying to subsidize something you didn't buy? As long as you're happy with the service, of course.
Computing Community Consortium: IT-related job growth projected high
I don't want to write my own binary dataformats, and I don't want to deal with FORTRAN.
Multiple Cisco WebEx WRF Player Vulnerabilities
And this is why I prefer to work for small companies/startups vs. large companies.
This could easily be self-selection bias; many women may very well shy away from sending their pictures away anonymously for cultural reasons.
Where/when/how will you announce? I'm not in the art world, so I wouldn't naturally see the announcement, but I would like to visit.
I'm working on 0xCOFFEE, a compiler for a toy language implemented using Ruby, TreeTop and LLVM.

http://github.com/meqif/0xCOFFEE

It's quite fun, but I had to fork llvmruby (the ruby bindings for LLVM), since it lacked some things, like allowing access to part of the LLVM API and raising RuntimeErrors instead of segfaulting (especially because of some code mutations that heckle[1] generates).

Currently, this is just a little project to keep me busy during the past holidays and the current university exam month, but I hope to create a nice language.

[1] http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2006/12/19/tormenting-your-test...
I think the point is that it works kind of like Jail, but with the ease of use of sudo. Sometimes you might have to grant access to additional resources, but under many circumstances you can execute untrusted executables or work with untrusted data _without_ setting up a jail for each instance.

If you want to have a process that runs constantly in its own environment without even knowing that it is being crippled, jail may be the better choice. But for spontaneous spawning of suspicious scripts, this seems like a great tool.
Yes we tried XMPP at first but was way to complex for our needs.

We use Orbited for comet. The backend chat server is custom and based on RabbitMQ. See our protocol on https://talker.tenderapp.com/faqs/api/talker-protocol
I've been putting together a web site, http://www.learngrowdo.com . It's somewhat personal and came out of my struggles taking care of a loved one with a chronic illness. On the site I also plan to sell related software as I develop it.

I'm selling my iphone app on it, which was just approved yesterday. "Control Time": itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/control-time/id348796242?mt=8
What about the Droid's software keyboards are different that makes them more usable?

I'm always trying to force myself to use the G1's software keyboard, but I can only seem to use it in one of two ways: wantonly mash and hope the predictive/spelling correction code figures out that I typed "devtsvuldt" but meant "spectacular" (thus pausing periodically to carefully click the correct suggestion), and occasionally being forced to abandon a word and backspace it out because it is so mangled that even Google's rocket scientists couldn't write a spelling corrector that can figure it out; or meticulously pecking words out letter-by-letter, trying to enter that zen-like state of mind where my fear of misspelling has been released, and my fat white thumb is free to alight on the correct section of touchscreen as if guided by the nameless Tao itself.

Both are excruciating compared to finding the two little nubbins on "F" and "J" and going from there.
Packing Light for a Seven-day Cruise
Developing a generic price arbitrage engine making it easier for sellers to track price movements of their products vis-a-vis their competitors. The first release will target sellers selling on Amazon.

I should have a private beta by the end of the month.
Reception is, though. At my office T-mobile phones just go dead as soon as you walk in, even next to a window. AT&T phones keep working at full bars.

This is in Seattle btw, I was on T-mo for 4 months, and coverage will drop to zero in the most inexplicable urban spaces.
Latest Chrome on Windows, too.
User Experience Videos
Tim O'Reilly's thoughts on the Nexus One
Check out chess boxing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing
Reasons to Use Google Collections
I'm doing website user-session/click flow analysis, developing a graph/network visualization library in processing suitable for these purposes. Crunch data in Hadoop, output to interactive graph visualization web app. One step, 'just works.'

Hoping to open source this work later this year.
The screen is a 3.7 inch AMOLED 480x800@250 DPI!! Awesome!! This is better than laser printing resolution!
I've been with T-Mobile on my G1 for 6 months. I get great 3G service in the Cleveland and New York areas... even customer service is fast and helpful. Just FYI. I'm a T-Mobile fan.
I assume you have seen http://offbeatguides.com. If not, might want to check it out.
I bet Nexus One has a problem on battery usage, and this is one of the most critical things on smartphones, and RIM's guys know this very well.

You cannot get an out of battery in a middle of the day.
If you work outside as many of you, this is an essential feature.

This happens often on many new smarphones, specially with processors so fast, they run out of battery.

I can use my BlackBerry Bold all day without a charge (using 3g), I doubt can do the same thing with this.

Also the price is prohibitive outside USA.
More Food Myths
That's pretty sweet. If it's unsubsidized it's unlocked right?
Yeah, that comment made me gasp. Best Buy should fire someone who says you can't install your own software.
Here's my reference: http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanica...
One true semantic context is of course a pipe dream, theres 2 reasons I would like to be able to define whatever tag I want.

1. My markup is cleaner, <contextmenu> vs <div id="contextmenu">, this has implications on my javascript and css (both in terms of speed and cleanliness)

2. API and "microformats" are trivialised, this is of course also dependant on producing parseable (x)html (another decision I really dont understand)

but why on earth is

http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.people.ge...

different from

http://www.flickr.com/photos/daleharvey

they really dont need to be
This is awesome, there went my workday.
You're correct. The branching factor in a typical chess middlegame is 35-36, but top players usually only consider 1-3 moves per position. This is why the best humans were able to beat computers at chess for such a long time. (In the last 5-10 years the computers have pulled ahead, for good.)
in uk this is the norm for all phones : )
The bottle imp paradox
Doesn't look like it's available in the UK yet either.
Though this has nothing to do with GIL or Python, the presentation reminds me of threadscope:

http://raintown.org/?page_id=132

Take a look at it in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZXq8fxebKU
so the whole company is crappy because of one dead zone in your office? i'm sure you can find dead zones on any network.

when you compare things like customer service, rate plans, at&t's refusal to support tethering (which t-mobile allows), and phone availability (how many android phones does at&t have?), t-mobile doesn't look that bad.
Working on an general game playing artificial intelligence. Nothing grand, I just have a few ideas I'd like to test in real life. It can theoretically play any game, but it's interesting to see if it's actually feasible, since it's turning out to be quite a resource hog.
For values of 'better' meaning '30% lower', sure.
Working on my startup SocialBlaze - it helps companies do social media marketing / brand monitoring, http://www.socialblazeapp.com

In private beta now; looking to launch a public beta in the next few weeks. Some good feedback from beta testers so I'm excited :)
Really disappointed there isn't Verizon support yet :(
I'm working on a graphical model MCMC sampler for doing Bayesian statistics in Haskell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_model

http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/
Have you tried calibrating the soft keyboard? I found it frustrating until I did so on my Hero.
I'm working on Flixa.tv, a digital distribution platform for independent filmmakers as well as other indie video content.

There's a bit more information and a long interrogation of the idea here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028673

Still looking for a co-founder, so contact me at chris.chen@flixa.tv if you're interested!
UI suggestion: for REPLs, make it clearer where the user is supposed to type. I spent some time trying to enter code after the prompts in the Erlang and Ruby REPLs before I figured out that the lower box was the input box. The upper box allows text input, but doesn't submit anything on hitting enter. Maybe make it a non-editable div rather than a textarea?

Otherwise, very cool.
I've been doing lots of BlackBerry hacking lately (working on the Hecl port), and compared to Android, those guys just don't "get it". Everything is a pain in the neck, very fiddly, Windows only, and often quirky. They're nice devices, but RIM just doesn't strike me as being able to turn around and produce a development experience that's pleasant.

In terms of that price, it's 368 euros at current rates, which is certainly high, but about what you'd see for other high end phones, and a lot lower than you'd pay for an iPhone.
In Italy most phones are sold unsubsidized. It's the exception rather than the rule to see subsidized prices. In Austria, I would say it was about 50/50.
Shrink my pics.sh
You need some sort of related technology called 0xDEADBEEF.
He's saying he gets the unsubsidized price with the subsidized restrictions (meaning it's locked).

I also am a T-Mo customer (whose contract has expired) and wondered if I would get a good deal by signing up for another 2 years. It turns out it's actually MORE for me to sign up as an existing customer:
Phone $529.00
Service Plan Discount - $250.00
Total: $279.00
(excluding tax and shipping)

This is really stupid and is just insulting. I mean if I just cancel my current plan and get a new one I can get it for $179 but as a current customer who has been with them for years (out of contract!) I have to pay $100 more.
Google's Biggest Phone Move: Disrupting Carriers By Selling Direct To You
What differentiates Powershell from general scripting languages is that it is intended as a shell and hence works somewhat close to the OS, the filesystem, or whatever you are doing just now.

I can't speak for the author of Pash, but for me (and I like bash) is that unlike in the typical Unix shells, you don't pipe and work with text, you do it with fully fledged objects.

So needless to say (if you can get over the somewhat icky syntax) you can do some very neat and powerful stuff with a minimum of effort.

Want to kill all processes starting with z? Easy.

Get-Process | where {$_.Name -like "x*" } | kill

Want to kill the biggest memory offender on the system? Also easy.

Get-Process | Sort-Object workingset -descending | Select-Object -First 1 | kill

Want to list all running services? Also easy, just filter:

Get-Service | where {$_.Status -eq "Running" }

Want it exported to for instance csv? Sure.

Get-Service | where {$_.Status -eq "Running" } | Export-Csv services.csv

Like I said. The syntax leaves something to be desired, but the concept of piping objects is pretty powerful in a shell, and I like how you can add providers, so you can use this with the filesystem, registry, database-servers, whatever and just navigate it naturally and use the same syntax and commands for most processing.

It may not be for everyone, but it certainly has its place.
I found that in Firefox with any screen width less than the text + the two sidebars, the sidebars overlap the text content. I tried it in IE6 actually, and the sidebars don't show at all! Pretty lousy layout.
This article makes one great point that could have taken a single paragraph, but the hyperbole and forced metaphors are thick. Ugh.
Can you tell me any more about this?
I agree with you 100%.

If the computer industry really put its customers needs first, I wouldn't have this job.

And that would be OK by me.
jacquesm,

I considered that so I have restrictions for now (e.g. no hourly jobs, limit of up to 30 occurences for daily jobs, etc.).

I'll figure out a way to verify that you own the domain of the Url you're trying to access. The simple way is by email address from the same domain.
Seriously? Parts can't be more than $200 for this. I mean, they sell the iPod Touch for $200 which costs $155 to make ( http://iphonetouch.blorge.com/2007/12/19/ipod-touch-bests-ip... ). Is a GSM radio IC expensive? Hell no. They're in bed with the carriers, and they're even worse than Apple because they're trying to say that they aren't.
Completely agree. I'd like to know how much they really need to actually sell these things for. iPod Touches go for, what, $500 less than an unlocked phone? This sucks. I'd love to have a 3G Android phone on ATT as well as my iPhone, just to develop on an try out, but the market makes this impossible.
We can try a shared Ruby session: http://transmuscle.runroot.com/?384e8aabedad3890

Edit: a new one http://transmuscle.runroot.com/?123d0b7cf0728555
No. 300 DPI printing is not the same as 300 DPI on screen, because one dot on screen can be multiple colors (depending on the color depth, typically 16,777,216 can be expected), while one dot on paper is, well, either black or white. So for the same DPI, screen outperforms paper. 250 DPI on screen will definitely beat 300 DPI on paper.
Unfortunately, I don't think the G1's soft keyboard can be calibrated.
Are you planning on making this open-source or writing about this anywhere? Would especially love to follow your progress if you have a blog.
I'm in the same boat as you - I'm out of contract.

Also it's especially confusing since the pricing page doesn't say that the $179 is only for new T-mobile customers.
Studying the Structure of Underground Economy Markets
"... you're not really sure of who is seeing the scan."

Sure you are. Everyone.

This is data, like any other, and when you give your data to anyone, you can assume it's going to be seen by someone who shouldn't see it.

Actually, I predict a new genre of porn to emerge from this.
ANSI SQL and configuration changes everywhere you need them to be flexible.
Skiff E-Reader
So what's a good carrier?
T-Mobile - Nexus One
Verizon - Droid
Sprint - Hero

Are you holding out for a Cricket Android phone?
Skiff E-Reader partners with Sprint
I heard that T-Mo just got their 3G up and running in HNL. Great device to test it out on!
FYI, for AT&T customers considering making the plunge:

The currently available Nexus One device is unlocked and will recognize SIM cards from any mobile service provider using the GSM standard, but is incompatible with the frequency band used by the AT&T and Rogers networks for 3G data (see below).
( http://www.google.com/support/android/bin/answer.py?answer=1... )

No 3G data on AT&T! Shucks.
Ha, that reminded me of one of my heros: Michio Kaku.
He built a particle accelerator in his basement when he was a teenager and wiped out every transformer in his neighbourhood!
Another amazingly reckless Japanese guy who inspires from the danger of the edge (he now builds infinite improbability drives for the galactic elite).
Indeed, NS and SL look like similar offers (maybe not apples to oranges, but perhaps tangerines to oranges).

Here's a SL offer similar to the NS Medium offer:

SL Bare Metal:

8 x 2.0 GHz Core Bare Metal Instance
8 GB RAM
1000 Mbps Public & Private Networks uplink
2000 GB Bandwidth (outbound; inbound is unmetered)
250GB SATA II
$319/mo.

NS Medium:

2 x Xeon 3.2Ghz
2GB RAM
(not sure of uplink; I don't need more than 10Mbps)
2 x 73GB SCSI Raid 1
$0.17/hr or $122.40/mo
+ $28.80/mo. for 8GB RAM
$151.20/mo.

NS is much cheaper.

NS has less HDD space than SL (73GB vs 250GB).

NS has fewer cores than SL (2 vs 8).

NS has a free shared HLB when you get >= 2 servers (not sure about SL).

The SL offer is more quickly deployed; since NS' offer requires an add-on, it would take more time to deploy.

---

Perhaps comparing the above SL offer to a NS Jumbo (below) makes more sense.

NS Jumbo

2 x E5405 Quad Core 2Ghz
8GB RAM
(not sure of uplink; I don't need more than 10Mbps)
2 x 500GB SATA RAID 1
$0.38/hr or $273.60/mo

This supposedly can be deployed without a day or more delay.

---

What are your thoughts on SL in general? They are certainly more well known. I'm not sure how much that should factor into one's decision.

---

I wonder if anyone cares to comment on the "Bare Metal Cloud" vs the "Public Cloud" offers by SL.

The chief difference seems to be storage options. The "Public Cloud" uses SAN while the "Bare Metal Cloud" has its own local HDD. I'm no expert on SAN vs HDD. Has anyone found any benchmarks (IOPS, latency) for these two SL offer types?

Heh, I guess the point of these instant provisioning things is to you know, get one of each for an hour and try it myself! Newman!
Gmail plugin to manage contacts & attachments
Working on a simple, private, short-term mobile group communication tool called Fast Society.

It automatically connects friends who are going to a concert, on vacation, or just out for a night of drinking over SMS and has a ton of cool functions to communicate during and share content after the event.

Launching soon at http://www.fastsociety.com/ (still waiting on carrier approval)
T-Mobile has constantly been coming out on top as of late, (in regards to customer relations/treatment) but they still don't quite have the network though, do they?

(Currently stuck on AT&T.)
I was thinking this exactly. It reminds me of when Google bought YouTube in a business deal that was ludicrous on its face (and some contend it still was) but the bigger picture was they put enough muscle behind YouTube to keep them from getting sued into oblivion before they had a chance to change the online landscape into one where you could find videos of literally everything online.

This is a disruption that will pay few dividends for Google at first, but if it succeeds it will permanently change a massive part of the US economy and in doing so make it less painful for people to gain an ability to get online anytime from anywhere.
˙˙˙sʎɐʍ ƃuıʇsǝɹǝʇuı ǝɹoɯ ɥɔnɯ os uı pǝsnqɐ ǝq uɐɔ ǝpoɔıun ˙ǝןɔıʇɹɐ ƃuıɹoq
What's the monthly price of the plan with tmobile? For unlimited voice/data or whatever their closest option is?
I am working on HockeyBias

http://hockeybias.com

It is a site that covers hockey news using a simple layout a la the drudgereport and protoblogger. It is a startup I unveiled in late November and it is attracting more visitors almost every day!
If you're eligible to upgrade, are you eligible to cancel your service? (Followed by becoming a "new customer" 5 minutes later)
yeah, but unlike paper you can't see anything on it in bright sunlight