skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The handset makers (mostly HTC) have taken to shipping the same kind of "value add" UI changes that they did with Windows Mobile.

What's most unfortunate is that it's not even bullshit -- they are actually adding real value! HTC's on-screen keyboard is better, and they add in some of the multitouch events that Google foolishly left out.
Sounds at least a bit familiar: http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
You could always use JEAIG: http://jeaig.org/
Unless the app uses the back button for something, right?
Woz says that because he's a sweet guy. There's no right or wrong answer here, but I can tell you I was there and no one cared what color the case was. The Apple II was a genius product for reasons that had NOTHING to do with: the case, the logo and the advertising. I'm sorry. Woz may be nice about it but historians will remember Steve Jobs as "the guy standing next to Woz in the photos."
Creating an account on the SCP wiki is like pissing glass
Comment on the page:
Most of your complaints can be summed up as, "I don't like developers having a choice," "I don't like consumers having a choice," and "I don't like not being given a choice."

Seems about right
The trouble with these and some other solutions (like use of imgs), is that they aren't an option on something like linkedin.com or a forum where users can only post text!
Particularly the bit where the song doesn't rhyme. Now can I get back to HN? I already have Reddit in the other tab.
I don't think 14 times difference make sense. Could it be a typo?
After you press the 'Back' try holding the 'Home' button down for a second. You should still see the application in the list that comes up. Further, after you receive 'onDestroy()' your activity isn't actually unloaded. It just 'could' be unloaded at some point in the future. Good developers will null all their pointers so the GC can clean up....and we're all good developers right?
How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.
Yes, items are lazily loaded too. Responses to http requests get killed after 30 sec, so if the server has to load too much stuff to satisfy a request, it will die first.

It's always been this way. After the server has been running for a bit it stops being a problem.
I'm not sure if it helps, sometimes it does for me, but if you do a google search for something and the results seem out of date, you can click on the show options link and show results sorted on the latest, past 24 hours, past week, etc.

Interestingly enough, your comment above shows up as the top result for the latest search for "ubuntu ntp":

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=ubuntu%20ntp&tbs=rltm...

Do they subscribe to the HN RSS or index the site that quickly, pretty interesting.
Efene - a programming language with C-like syntax that runs on the erlang vm
1. use a special account for special sites

2. use id+mask@gmail.com or anything that can filter

3. something like this myemail_REMOVE_UNDERSCORE_AND_CAPITALIZED_TRAILING@gmail.com
"One of the traits was that winners compete against themselves, not others."

Awesome!
Why the US and much of Europe are shivering in the cold
Post a link to your own webpage where you can obfuscate the address?
GMail's filter is actually incredibly accurate, and if you periodically scan your spam for anything that shouldn't be in there, you've really got nothing to worry about.

I've only found three or four false positives in the five and a half years I've been with GMail.
Be careful what you wish for. If you declare anything in public to be fair game, but fail to allow for the possibilities of recording, mining and sharing data created by modern technology, you may not like the result.

For example, you probably wouldn't mind if I walked past you in the street and saw you go into a shop. You might object if I followed you around from the moment you left your home, filmed every shop you went into, what you bought, what you paid with (including any visible numbers on your cards, any PINs you typed in, what your signature looked like, etc.) and then put this on the web along with your name and address.

The idea that privacy is some sort of black-and-white concept is part of the problem.
I am a pro-hobbyist photog as well. I have heard stories of people being harassed in NYC for example for taking what would generally be considered "normal" photographs of buildings/bridges/monuments from either standard street-level, or in some cases slightly more artistic (but legal in the sense of not trespassing) vantage points.

From what I have seen, there is no true legal restriction from taking these photographs, but authorities either don't know this, or try to use intimidation tactics to discourage.

The "grey" area is that I don't know first-hand how all these cases have played out, and/or if there wasn't really some odd terrorist-area unconstitutional law that was being cited.
The process of finding the most elegant answer to the question of ‘how do I?’
I'm currently looking for decent VPS hosting, and am shocked at how cheap prgmr.com are; what have your experiences been like with them?
I've seen one false positive since I started using Gmail in 2005. It was an important email, but I'm far from terrified.
This is really good information, thank you! I didn't think about getting my own merchant account, seems like getting one is indeed a good idea.

And regards to FirstData, I am not planning on using them directly, but through Spreedly (who in turn just abstract the connection with FirstData and security and give a easy API to work with, but I may be wrong, this is simply from some information I gathered in the past day). Now that you mention it, I will look more deeply in to it.
> People say "I wish I could do that" about everything. Playing a musical instrument, for instance.

Among my resolutions for 2010: learn guitar.

Step 1: signed up for weekly lessons every Thursday, as of ... 20 minutes ago.

Onward!
... and by news.yc !

;-)
When I used spam filtering I was receiving perhaps ten spams for every valid mail. This made it very difficult to scan my filtered mail. There was just so much of it.
German ‘Fleshmob’ Protests Airport Scanners
I hope they've figured out that customer support is more than a half-baked web portal.

I can already see the submissions coming in the first time someone even thinks Google has lost one of their files and ends up having to deal with the atrocious Google support machine.
Note that this article does not cite an official source.
Research into the BD+ VM isn't illegal. Publishing research isn't illegal. Releasing an easy-to-use circumvention tool is. I don't agree that this is how it should work, but still, we shouldn't tar everyone with the RIAA brush.
The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be. That means their are getting Apple like obscene margins.

The point: You missed it.

The Nexus One is officially unlocked, and usable on just about any carrier. The carriers are the problem here, and breaking the hold they have over consumers in order to allow competition on price and quality is the goal. The Nexus One isn't magic. It doesn't fix the carriers; but it is one more thing to allow consumers to escape without having to break the EULA, hack their phone, possibly bricking it, etc. Apple is the enemy of this idea, not a friend, and the iPhone is among the best servants the old guard (well, the oldest guard, AT&T, anyway) has in their fight to maintain a stranglehold over consumers communications.
You seem to be confusing the tools with the product. Nothing more boring than a brick, but you can build some pretty neat things with them.
Why is this news?!

Follow Postel's law and simply apply (ever cheaper) horsepower to filtering on the back-end + gray-listing & white-listing. This IS NOT rocket science people.

If one can write a regular expression to parse the "obfuscated" content, it's just one more rule in a markov validation chain in a data mining script.

"...Same as it ever was..."--The Talking Heads
Cutting The Cord And The Impact of a PC In Every Living Room
> It's just a really creepy thing to do and disrespectful of your fellows.

Are you trying to imply that laws like "Don't be a creep" and "You must show proper respect of your fellows" should be created? Should I be arrested or fined if I don't show proper respect? If someone thinks that I'm being creepy should I be jailed? Do I deserve to get raped in the ass in prison because you didn't like something that you did in a public space which I recorded (thereby embarrassing you)?

A personal anecdote:

A friend of mine got too drunk at a house party and started getting sad and complaining about all the things going wrong in his life. Another of my friends at the party stopped talking to him afterwards because she thought it was 'creepy.' Should he have been arrested or fined for getting drunk enough to complain about his life problems? (Note: He wasn't talking about embarrassing stuff like genital warts; He was talking about people dying in his life and frustrations with work and stuff.)

Just because something seem wrong/immoral/improper to you, does not mean that it needs to be illegal. When society starts moving in that direction, we are no different than the Catholic Church of yesteryear with The Inquisition or the Crusades or the Romans before them (executing Christians).
but it signifies that I am competent enough to not reply to spams
I don't think there's anything inherently hacky about Perl scripts (or any other kind of scripts) if they're in the service of a coherent design.
With YC moved to CA it looks like the three in Boston are Start@Spark, Summer@Highland Capital, and TechStars. Anyone familiar with them?
A geeks view on religion
Boxee opens beta to all
My excitement for the tools I use is directly proportional to the excitement I have for a product.

For example: over the past 4 years, I've all but abandoned all of my PHP projects in favor of my Rails projects. Because Rails is far more interesting to me than PHP. Just a small example, but it goes all the way down the chain.
I think your observations are correct. There are some differences between the U.S. and Europe that may explain it:

i) the U.S. is protected by two vast oceans, and Canada and Mexico were never a threat. By contrast, Europe has been under siege by Islam various times, starting with the conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the 8th century, to fighting the Otomans in the East for various centuries. Mass immigration feels more like an invasion in this case.

ii) the U.S. is much more multicultural and multi-ethnic than each specific European country. There's enormous variety as a whole in Europe, but each country tends to have its own identity. Sweden, for instance, is one of the least genetically diverse countries in the world.

iii) in Europe, Church and State tend to be more separated. Some years ago, Germany's federal government wanted to ban Christian crosses from Bavarian public schools, as it violated the law, and there was huge outcry. Now they do the same to Islamic veils, and people say it's Islamophobia. The truth is: the law applies to all, and Muslims, if they are citizens, must abide and do not deserve special treatment.

In the end, there's also the arrogance and pride. Europe did rule the world for centuries. Now the U.S. is in charge, but we still feel like we know better. We certainly are not going to adopt the cultures of Muslim immigrants who come to Europe because their countries are failed states. We know better than all, so whoever comes to Europe either plays by our rules or can go somewhere else. It's a bit strict, but it's fair. It applies to all, regardless of religion and ethnicity.
You might not believe this, goberoi, but over the holidays I started playing around/prototyping an identical service (that is, phone polling based on twillio).

Looks like you guys have a pretty good product, good luck with it.
Sometimes it also means "I wish I could magically be able to do that because I don't want to work hard at it."
A nice article which gives a high level summary of the issues involves. I like the general idea of "factoring" programs. By outlining the issues well, he also lets me question some of his claims.

In a game design where you have important information about a rule smeared all over the object hierarchy, you have very poor separation of concerns. It looks at first like there’s a clear factoring “Baltic Avenue has a method called isUpgradableToHotel,” but when you look more closely you realize that every object representing a property is burdened with knowing almost all of the rules of the game.

Hmm,

A "noun" or OO language would make each property part of the property class and that would solve the problem so-far as he's articulating it.

The thing is, how would a 'verb' oriented language deal with a very specific kind of noun, one which both reacting to general verbs differently and required it's own special verbs. It seems like this special noun would 'smeared' around the verbs to a worse extent. If Baltic Avenue has some weird behavior, it seems cleaner to have it as separate subclass than having it's behavior taken into by various conditionals.

Similarly, think about the design of a Chess game. The verbs would be 'move', 'capture'. It seems cleaner to make these verbs into 'messages' or member functions that each piece responds to according to it's class, rather than creating a single method that might call submethods.

Still, it's a nice discussion.
Apache May Stop 1.3, 2.0 Series Releases
Does it seem like there has been a huge uptick of anti-Google articles floating since Nexus One was introduced to anyone else?
Indeed: if you really got a sudden influx of free time, you'd likely invest it on something high in your priority list that doesn't need the extra time investment, but seemingly desires it (e.g. it activates your dopamine system); by the time you got to the low-priority tasks, none of the extra time would be left over. People can overcome their fears, lack of energy/focus, etc., but only when they make it a priority to.
What are ewe guys bleating about?
I'm tempted to waste an afternoon to see if I can make a smaller implementation using bogosort. Shuffle the input randomly, check if it's sorted, if not, shuffle again. Hey, if we're allowed to use selection sort...
> Then your talent is the ability to work hard.

That's not necessarily a talent. You can get it from practice.
I don't know, but I don't sweat it either. Anyone who is sending me super-important email has other ways of contacting me if they don't get a response. And in the case that they dont, a missed email still isn't the end of the world.
New "Wet Computer" To Mimic Neurons In the Brain
Totally agree. I use blogs to document stuff at work for this reason. You can't rely on people frequently going back to increasing numbers of old documents to update them, so you must leave clues for the reader as to what the context was when the article was written. Date is a really important part of that.
I enjoyed the post. But I'd challenge anyone to google for the Paris Review interview between Frost and Poirier.

Frost was interested in James' old, difficult Harvard veritas and all that -- for about five minutes. Although he had a bit of a deeper classical training than he lets on in the article. Still, Frost's idea of truth is much more temporal and ad-hoc ('performance' being his big thing -- though this is a somewhat limited reading, if you ask me -- unless you take the idea of performance very, very seriously). I think he'd have encouraged evolutions of ways of thinking as long as they were original. As long as they struck you ('performed') originally.
Firm to Release Database & Web Server 0days
Single Page: http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/01/12/melodeo-making-big...
Spreedly looks very much like vxsbill in concept, from what I get they basically handle the transaction through a common API independent of the gateway that it is sent to.

What I like about their way of doing things is that you get to host the payment page if you want, this will definitely positively affect your conversion rate.

Judging by the FAQ they are not yet PCI compliant but they hope to be certified soon.
Please review my iPhone app.
Fellow HN readers, in particular @wallflower, were kind enough to review my iPhone app last week. Based on that feedback, I have created a lite version.

Bugbox Lite is available on the App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bugbox-for-bugzilla-lite/id349892146?mt=8

I would request any Bugzilla users on HN to check it out. If you need to be in a corporate VPN to access your Bugzilla server, Bugbox works in a VPN.

Thanks!
Its the same problem with the difference between pornography and art.
We need some way of having official artist or author licenses so we know which is which.

ps. Sorry for the misunderstanding - where I live we have a state broadcasting corporation and FOX is the beacon of a free press.
Ji Lee: The transformative power of personal projects (video)
Nope, I taxied and rode the train when I was in Boston.

I had a hard time with the beltway in Virginia/D.C. (I drove it twice and went the wrong way both times) and Denver/Boulder. I might hate them equally if I had to live in those places. I lived in Houston for 7 years and Austin for 6, and Houston has the nicest roads and signage of any city I've ever visited. Austin gets a lot of complaints, but I never had much trouble there.

I'm dysgraphic, and the directional component has the most noticeable impact on my day to day. If I have the option to turn and have no signs to tell me which way is which, I will choose the wrong direction at least 50% of the time. I occasionally get lost in parking lots (seriously, the big shopping center at Showers/San Antonio in Mountain View; I've been lost in that lot several times).

So, maybe for some folks California is fine. For me it is a seriously hostile driving environment. Luckily, I don't drive much.
http://freedns.afraid.org
When using Gmail I have a bunch of filters that make it easier to read through my spam mail.

For instance:
IF X email is in the spam folder AND contains any of the words (Cialis, Viagra, Rolex, etc...) -> Move it immediately to the trash.

This cuts down the number of emails that stay in my spam folder by a huge margin, and makes it much easier to check for false positives.

That being said, I no longer even bother checking. I've been with Gmail for 5 years and I've never had a false positive.
By definition, start up ventures are understaffed. How does outsourcing work for you?
Now somebody will actually respond to support requests for the first time in years!
You may also want to check out http://PrecisionPolling.com. See our post on Twilio's blog today:
http://blog.twilio.com/2010/01/precision-polling-a-business-...
On my about page, I simply display my email address as an image instead of text. http://techiferous.com/about/

This does have significant disadvantages, the worst being that users cannot cut and paste the address.
This is one of the reasons Jeff and Joel made Stack Overflow - so that pages can improve over time by whoever has useful information, while keeping the same URL and building "Google juice"
great idea. I like that you can upload your own voice. I think a lot of people will start using this...particularly for political polling and smaller companies that don't need a heavyweight way to do this.
"It's adding structure (methods to classes) at runtime which normally would require writing source code."

-- the linked blog post doesn't do this, though it is possible.
Suddenly, communication habits of everyone changed. People started grouping their communication into topics and resurrecting old 'waves' when it was about the same topic. For example, if we were talking about bonuses, and then spoke about something else for two weeks, then came back to bonuses, we would simply resurrect the old wave.

I'm sorry but couldn't he have achieved the same with a threaded email client?

It sounds like Wave just helped him smooth over a lot of poor email practices - perhaps on the other end of the conversation as well, but still.
I haven't owned a car since moving to CA, and have rarely driven, so never bought a GPS. I drove down to Monterey this past weekend with a friend's Nexus One doing the navigating and things went without a hitch. I'm, obviously, going to order up a Nexus one soon, though I'm kinda waiting for the car dock to arrive. I just bought and RV and will be travelling a lot, so will need to have some sort of GPS in place. Standalone units have gotten cheap, but I hate to have unnecessary devices.
Existing thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047977
I'm amazed that he would continue to work with someone after this:

After two months, one of my freelancers replied my email with a screenshot. It showed his inbox, and there were about 50 unread emails from me, 10 of which where various threats about why he was not replying my emails.
http://twitter.com/benjaminwootton : He wants one
For about 1 year I checked my spam folder. After never seeing a false positive, and only 1 or 2 spam in my inbox, I stopped checking.

aside: for poor man's obfuscation (like in my HN profile) I do jhl805atgmaildotcom ... my belief is that this is hard to extract automatically.
It's easy to change your communication habits. But it's very difficult to change the communication habits of others - particularly people you only deal with for a single contract.
Every once in a long while I need to collaborate on some sort of document with my coworkers, but the vast majority of the time I just want chat.

As you point out, Wave's UI is horrible for chat. That's why we're building http://shoptalkapp.com; it's similar to Campfire. We use it every day and couldn't live without it. It's like a virtual office.
We just made the switch at the end of last month, so I can't say anything useful. I do like their blog, which gives some insight into what it's like running a service like this.
For me, HN is a time suck, but it also inspires me to do things I might not otherwise bother. Overall, I think it works out to a wash in terms of net productivity.
So would you say the primary benefit of using Wave was it's effect on the people you communicate with? It was hard for me to get out of the article if the big benefit was on how you communicate, or if it was how they communicate with you.
Google quietly changes the world again
//you have various outlets to mobilize change and if you don't act on them it's no ones fault but yours

I disagree. I should not need to mobilize change or act on it to be able to have certain things. Mobilizing change has a cost (time, effort, money etc) and I should not be forced to pay those costs for things an individual in a civilized society ought to be entitled to.
Thanks for editing the title. It previously included "RailsTips by" and I thought this was for Rails developers and didn't click on it.
Update: thanks to rbritton it seems like http://freedns.afraid.org is a good alternative.

So, if you sign up you'll probably just get a link to http://freedns.afraid.org if/when EveryDNS changes some or all of its services to paid only.
"Who will do to the 50 inch screen what the iPhone did to the 3 inch screen?"

The first service to offer a-la-cart programming over ip, in an open format. Recorded tv, on demand is nice, I am a huge fan. It is a wonderful format for things like series I know I like. But sometimes, I just want to be fed my entertainment. Sometimes I want to learn about/find new things. Some combination of these is what the TV industry is currently good at. Also for live sports. If uverse allowed me to select channels individually, or in very small groups (eg mtv package, or possible a bundle of mtv, vh1 and cmt) I would have 70% fewer channels. For everything else I would not mind paying direct for shows. If someone can successfully pull this off they will be very, very wealthy.

There are many hurdles tho, and more than one chicken/egg situation. However, if it can be done... I'm a fanboi of a non-existent company :).