skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From David Pogue ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/technology/personaltech/06... )"The Nexus can accommodate memory cards up to 32 gigabytes (a 4 gigabyte card comes with it) — and yet, inexplicably, the Nexus allots only the tiniest sliver of that (190 megabytes) for downloaded apps."

If this is a hard limit, this will be a total dealbreaker.
Without rooting the phone, how is this trivial?
Can you figure out a way to port to guitar hero and keep things enjoyable? That would be excellent.
The simple cure would be to simply ban those pages that use google adsense

This is actually an amazingly good idea!

It should be possible to build such a product on top of Google search. And you have a competitive advantage against Google: they will never ban sites that use AdSense, it would kill their $10B market. So you are safe.
This is right on.

I've worked at big and medium size companies in the past decade. I worked at a startup that was acquired by a big company. I've implemented enterprise systems from design through support for governments and dow30 companies.

Those of you that think that these systems are symptom of the corporate culture are wrong. I'm not defending the poor corporate cultures that I saw. I am defending the argument that better technologies and processes could lead to better systems.

From a process standpoint the problem is it's counter intuitive to most management that smaller, higher paid teams using obscure* technology could out produce the highly polished cogs-in-the-machine process. For example, this usually isn't true for (most) mechanical engineering projects. We all know it as fact on HN but it doesn't apply to many enterprise industries. I remember times where as a team we were denied the ability to create scripts or tools to do work for us. Or we were denied the use of open source tools. Instead we spent days doing it manually. Then, when it needed to be done for the next project, we would again do it manually. We couldn't push a small but critical change without completing a multi-day code move process. When we did write scripts, IT had to approve them which meant you were at their mercy. There were many more of these sorts of poor process decisions. And there were smart capable programmers working there, often pushing to make the right decision.

When I run into old co-workers many still believe it's impossible to implement enterprise code in something like ruby, python, lisp, haskell, etc. It's Java or C#. Common reasoning - What happens if I need a new Clojure or Lisp programmer!? Or, where will ruby be in 20 years? We know today where Microsoft support will be in the future. Look at Microsoft's support plans. Etc.

I'll add a little bit of my own opinion in here too. It is my hope that eventually there will be a few elegant generic enterprise solutions where DSLs are implemented for business analysts. It's insane how much of this work is still done by programmers. How many more times does a programmer have to code a { main-menu customer organization admin ... } window or custom approval process, etc. (Yes, I know this has been attempted often without success, it's still a good idea. And I think in the end it'll happen. It just takes time to figure out what will work)

* obscure to management.

EDIT: Grammar
An Analysis of the iKeeB (duh) iPhone Botnet
When I was in the navy (conscripted) for almost a year, we had pocket sized calendars like that (with nude women on the other side, of course). Each day I could cross the day I was there, it was a major topic for discussion/bragging and a huge motivation to go through the boring conscription.
Clojure does allow you to remove symbol mappings from a namespace. The only problem with deploying via the REPL is that there isn't a function for atomically deploying a namespace, or set of namespaces. I suspect one would have to use a global lock to pause all request-handling threads for the second or so Clojure needs to teardown and reload all its libraries.
Got to be one of the best apps I've ever used. It's how I found out about YC and HN. Great team and a great company.
Yeah, and you don't pay when someone sms you!

By the way, that's why it was easy for Twitter to provide free sms forwarding in US (first). Operators would easily agree - they'll get the money from recipient.
My reaction to this is that people who are easily offended must have some insecurity. Where this insecurity is not justified, it reduces my respect.
I submit this post in response to the article on scripting by Larry Wall (inventor of Perl) (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033677, linked article http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/997).

In his article Mr. Wall says: "So it's rather ironic that my views on Postmodernism were primarily informed by studying linguistics and translation as taught by missionaries, specifically, the Wycliffe Bible Translators. One of the things they hammered home is that there's really no such thing as a primitive human language. By which they mean essentially that all human languages are Turing complete. When you go out to so-called primitive tribes and analyze their languages, you find that structurally they're just about as complex as any other human language. Basically, you can say pretty much anything in any human language, if you work at it long enough. Human languages are Turing complete, as it were."

The former Wycliffe Bible Translator/Summer Institute of Linguistics member Dan Everett reportedly counters this in the New Yorker article. "Everett, once a devotee of Chomskyan linguistics, insists not only that Pirahã is a severe counterexample to the theory of universal grammar but also that it is not an isolated case." This article is fascinating.

My grad school experience is too far in my past to exactly distinguish the nuances between "non-Turing-complete" and "not conforming to Chomsky's universal grammar" -- so have at it discussing the differences. In any case, this article describes a language where it's impossible to describe some common human ideas -- and not through lack of vocabulary, and perhaps not even because of inadequate grammar. Rather, the language betrays a completely different mindset where such ideas may not be relevant to survival.

Dan Everett, former Wycliffe missionary, reached crisis when he found no way to describe the notion of a God or Jesus Christ and their relation to humans to this Amazonian tribe. Mr. Everett decided that if there are people to whom one cannot convey a Christian message, the message must not be universal and cannot be real.
I somehow doubt google would be pleased if you did that on Google search.

It also leaves you with the subtle problem of where you're going to find a way to monetize, adsense would be 'out'.

edit: another way google could fix this is by no longer counting visitors that they send to sites when those visitors click on adsense ads.

In other words your adsense income can not come from selling google traffic back to google.

That would likely cure 90% of the problem, since these sites have 0 autonomous traffic.
LuaJIT is really impressive, but honestly, the stock interpreter is fast enough for me in general, and I'm fine with just moving hotspots to C as needed.

I'm more impressed with how concise Lua is. I've got the Lua 5.1 Reference Manual sitting in front of me. It's 103 pages for the whole language (roughly half of which is the C API), the entire syntax fits on page 95, etc. I can keep it all in my mental L1 cache, so to speak. Yet, it's expressive enough to have displaced Python as my go-to language. It's not perfect, but I'm very happy with the trade-offs it makes.

I'll be psyched once it's ported to a couple more hardware platforms, though.
Fair enough, I am unfamiliar with the misspellings. Musli(s)m sounds perfectly normal to me as a non-native speaker of the English language, and for a bunch of other people on the internet for that matter hence the suggestions of google.
I would be reluctant to rotate the mattress so that the old feet location is the new head location.
If you want less page spam in your results write better queries into the search engine.

There are still plenty of good results and it's fairly easy to ignore these SPAM pages just like you ignore banner ads.

If the author said that Google's gotten worse then there might be reason to worry. But they're constantly improving I wouldn't worry about them getting beat at this game since they're the ones who control the rules.
Google's biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL
In this article Larry Wall (inventor of Perl) says that Wycliffe Bible Translators taught him that all human languages are Turing complete. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033741 (Pirahã: a non-Turing-complete human language) for a counterexample. Fascinating article.
Thanks! But you misunderstand me. The VM is the thing that is executing the DFA which represents the regular expression. That's what the paper I linked to explains. The DFA is represented by simple instructions like char, split, and jump (see the paper). Actually, I originally found that paper via - you guessed it - HN! It applies directly to the problem I am trying to solve.

The VM was already implemented. I had to compile a canonical regular expression into the instructions I listed.

Why? Well, let me see if my partner will let me talk about it. For now, I'll just say that we are using a completely un-string-like data structure, and we might use this engine for things which actually aren't strings. But it works on strings for now.

Our demo code will currently take a regular expression (supported operators are (), ?, *, +, and |) and a list of strings, and return the strings which match the expression. I had never written a compiler before, but the code is very clean, well-documented, and doesn't have any grammar issues. So I consider this a productive week already!

Next up: character classes, and maybe some character class shortcuts (\d, etc).
The point is that what should motivate you is your ultimate goal or dream, not a mental trick.
clint eastwood
It is now (mostly). It wasn't back then.
Rearranging the Machine (RATM get the remix treatment)
I couldn't figure out what exactly he did from the article. Set black and white photo paper on top a metal table and fire up a van de graaff?
I like Netflix as well but they are definitely a long-term risk as their current business model is going to dwindle and on-demand is going to rise. Now they are doing some good stuff in the on-demand space, but they are going to be competing against all the cable providers (some of which are going to be buying movie companies like Comcast). They could also end up competing against Apple or anyone else who decided to get into streaming, they might have first mover but will it be enough? I think Hulu is a sign of how the studios want it to work, they want to own the deliver network so when they have a choice they might start their own and block out netflix.
In programming style, as in most things, moderation
http://www.optask.com - outsourcing (research and admin assistance) at the drop of an email. We're working to open up the world of task-based work, just helped some customers with file conversion and compiling a spreadsheet of apartments on the Upper East Side. Just linked up with our first socially-responsible BPO. Really sweet that we can create fair-paying digital work for folks around the world.

Currently also interested in live video streaming (how will this space be impacted by the iSlate? Is there room to innovate beyond Justin?), mobile surveys, eBook readers (Kindle's way too expensive. I want a cheaper, more open product).

Will be @ CES, let's link up if you're around.
It looks like the publisher's site is offline too: http://www.bookfix.com
There are a lot of good musicians in the world.
Completely agree with you. That is why I didn't put Netflix on the list. I just think they cant own online streaming like they have owned "rentable" DVD subscriptions.
I'm working on a website with my Mom! - http://www.wordsonthefly.com

The aim of the site is to provide tools and tips for communication and writing. She's a veteran in marketing and publishing and I've been in the software field for a couple of years now so we decided to collaborate. The site's pretty basic at the moment, a blog and a tool for templating short pieces of writing, but I am looking forward to upgrading to a VPS and possibly producing some more interactive features.
Good point (I don't like sensational titles either) -- but shouldn't HN disallow you to edit the title and put them back in then?
For more information, this Wikipedia page is helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichtenberg_figure
Huh? Since when common sense, avoiding trouble and trying not to offend socially sensitive groups count as 'grounds for boycotting'?
That'd work, the only catch being that when you see 1 you need to know where 2 is, and it's on the other side of the mattress (I have a latex mattress, it weighs about 30kg so it's a pain to turn over, even to look. Turning it twice because you got it wrong with the first movement is a big cost.)

You don't actually need to remember which instruction to read, cos they're the same on the each side of the mattress. I could have just written "side to side" on one side and "top to bottom" on the other side, it'd just sometimes be upside down.
Sweet, thanks! I'll be sure to try them out. Np re: Resolver One. How is it working there? When are you guys gonna kill Microsoft already?? ;p
If you don't mind me asking, what do you do once you've invented new data structure? I think I have recently, too, but (besides thoroughly documenting it and posting a library based on it, soon), I'm kind of at a loss. I'm not in academia, so publishing in an academic journal isn't the clear choice. I've been trying to find prior art, but thus far haven't found anything similar.

My e-mail address is in my profile.
To be fair, religious affiliation seems unusually tightly bound to some people's sense of who they are. What's unclear to me is why certain religions have this worse than others, e.g. compare Muslim reaction to the Muhammad cartoons with Christian reaction to "Jerry Springer: The Opera".
It's not Google search that's the problem, it's Google AdSense.
Possibly the starting "Is" in Islam throws the googleboxen into a self-recursive Gödel gyroscope.

For example, if you try with related phrases such as "Muslim is" it works. So my guess would be algorithm breakdown because of "is" repeat.
It's amazing what happens when you price things according to how much people are willing to pay as opposed to how much it cost you to make.
The easy stuff usually gets sliced off and dealt with.

The folks working on these boxes are Not Dumb.

When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not.

These servers and clusters are very different than what most folks are accustomed to dealing with; vastly larger servers, application environments, communications, storage. And unfortunately for upgrades and migrations and incremental work, usually also involving (often fragile and ill-documented and poorly understood) interconnections all over the place. And critical.
Woah there tiger-- where do you get that I am suggesting using the placebo as a therapeutic invention!? (If it makes any difference, I meant to type "due to" rather than "do to"). I am suggesting that the following situation might exist:

1) Drug A is 5% effective

2) Placebo is 10% effective

3) No one ever gets the benefits of drug A, since its benefits are masked during trial.
If you want a vegetarian port, there's also 0xFA1AFE1.
Does buying the dev phone count as rooting?
How to get Apple/ATT to let our iPhone app run in the background like Loopt?
We’ve written a proximity based application that uses no infrastructure (aka doesn’t need GPS or AT&T 3G network). We’re working on the Android and Blackberry versions but would like to get the iPhone version running in the background. Any ideas where to start and who’s door to knock on to wedge this door open a bit further?
Characteristics of Intelligent Hauntings | Pentagon Directory
Product placement in iPhone apps: shrewd, inevitable, depressing?
Everyone underestimates the impact of removing the right 10 minutes from a process.
Groupie

An app that allows you to create join and manage social groups on the iPhone. Every group has a message board, live chat room, gps-enabled map and member directory.

Thus far we have over 70 groups and 300 users. Many thanks to members of HN that helped make it possible. You know who you are.

Url: www.groupie.mobi
Video: www.groupie.mobi/whatisgroupie
App Download: http://www.groupie.mobi/images/Apple_BTN.png
This is absolutely true when your users are naturally programmers: libraries and frameworks benefit more from network effects than any other not-inherently-viral software I know of. The users can, do, must contribute! Everybody gets their warm fuzzies.

The opposite is the case for end-user open-source software -- users are a fucking curse unless you can sell support and they're throwing money around. When your users contribute it's by generally by giving crap cargo-cult advice on disparate web forums, if you're lucky they'll use email lists to complain and bike-shed, if you're real lucky they'll design terrible themes for your app using copyright-infringing artwork. They'll do marketing for you, but they'll base it on the features you hate, bring in more digg/reddit/lifehacker 'power user' types, and promote pointless forks.
While in principle I think the approach is great, I have recently learned that some of your "volunteers" are in fact people infected with spyware. Can't find the corresponding article atm, though :-(
This is rather disturbing. I didn't live through a dictatorial government in my country, but 30 years or so one that was ruling for about 50 years was put down. The worst thing about a dictatorship is not the censorship itself that will cut the parts that they don't want to be read from a text or a poem, it is when the author himself limits its expressiveness and freewill to the walls built by the fear of the censorship, and will instead write the version of his feelings that he thinks it will not get cut.

Google is doing the same... actively self-censoring, the worst form of censorship.
I have long wanted an 'advanced search operator' that excludes sites running AdSense ads. Similar to the 'site:' or 'link:' operators, we could have 'ads-from:'. So when I want sites without AdSense, I could add this to my query:

-ads-from:google.com

(I'm not holding my breath, though.)
One of the most remarkable parts of the language is that is does not have recursion. Nor does it have ways of explicitly differentiating temporally distant events.

This is an old article, but there are new ones a-comin'; the implications of Dan's work are just starting to be realized.
This idea seems analogous to the fallacy of web 'hits' in the 90s.
IPhone vs Android: It is Happening Again
T-Mobile also has a policy of unlocking subsidized phones at the request of customers in good standing. 90 days? Paid your bills? Just call and ask. Done.
What is this term "hard limit" of which you speak? Is it something related to proprietary software?
Loopt doesn't run in the background on the iPhone like you would think. It actually runs on servers at ATT pulling already available GPS data on your cellphone's location from the towers.
Before and after pics would be nice. Perhaps you should make a blog of it. I love these projects. As a hacker, I have high expectations of you!
What he wants isn't a search engine that punishes ads. What he wants is really a search engine that punishes bad taste. (Specifically, too many ads greedily placed and greedily optimized text poorly written.)

I think that such a search engine has tremendous profit potential. Would it be possible to detect redundancy? Is it possible to detect poor design?
This also might reveal why Verizon's continued support of the CDMA island effectively exempts it from having to compete with carrier-unlocked phones.

It's frustrating as a consumer that Verizon is incompatible with the massive hordes of unlocked GSM phones, but it might be a business advantage in the short-term for Verizon. In the long term, people who want phones like Nexus One will just switch carriers.
Actually, I tried a few other examples using "minorities" as the start of the phrase and then using "are". They are all censored. Non-minorities aren't; e.g. "men are" works fine.

So my algorithm implosion theory is clearly wrong.
Hyperlocal sites becoming major M&A targets
2010 Will be Year of the Paywall: Newspapers try to persuade users to pay
The blogs were saying that even if you buy it with T-mobile service, you get an unlocked phone. It's only the contract that locks you in with T-mob, not the phone.
Not so...try "Isaac is "
I wondered if its because one word is the prefix of the other. My first attempt, "ishmael is " also suggested nothing!

Then I tried a few others; "isaac is " and "israel is " which did come up with suggestions.

Oh well.
I'm in too.
The Online Slang Dictionary - http://onlineslangdictionary.com
The Droid is CDMA, which is a deal-killer for anyone travelling internationally. Also it's the first time in the US that a major phone has been sold with an option to buy it without a contract. This is fantastic from a user freedom perspective as Telco contracts in the US are typically quite abusive.
That's like saying do you remember how hard it was to use a PC before Windows came around? The problems solved yesterday do not give you a pass today.
Explosives planted on man to test airport security
Absolutely unbelievable. A massive abuse of trust on the part of the police forces.
Is that uptime [Flickr's] acceptable to a bank?

I would love a Flickr-like bank. Banks are only open about 8 hours out of 24, and (at least here in NZ) even when I do an online money transfer, it only goes through in their batch that midnight. I would love a front-end to our bank system that did things right, especially instant and easy transfers.

I guess you could say PayPal tries to do this, but you have to get money in and out of PayPal, and they have high fees.
Ask HN: What was that programming language based on creating new grammar rules?
A programming language was submitted to HN a while ago. I remember that the only thing you could do was to create grammar rules.

Does anyone remember what this language was? Or, if you created it, could you speak up? :)
I'm not going to miss much about my 2003-era Nokia brick, but week-long battery life sure has been nice. =\
Aren't they simply withholding phrase suggestions which they deem wrong? I.e. you can still search for anything ranging from the angelic to the vile, and they probably don't censor (but of course, there's no way for an outsider to ever know).

What I do wonder is whether Google, for example, actually filters out from its search results websites that are blacklisted by the Australian government, when people down under google.
Probably not. "Island is" works. It's not even that you don't find offensive things in the dropdown; it's that there's suddenly no dropdown.

Weirder still is that "Muslim is $ADJECTIVE" is ungrammatical. Typing "Christian is" turns up some nonsensical results, not the same negative ones that "Muslim is" or "Christianity is" do.
Hmm, good point. I was assuming that it'd be too slow on the client, but maybe the opposite is actually true.
Related news:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357692,00.asp

"T-Mobile, AT&T Push HSPA 7.2-Mbit/s Upgrades"
T-Mobile is also significantly less evil than other carriers in that they're the only ones who are willing to unlock phones for their customers. Of course in a perfect world they wouldn't have the gall to sell you a locked phone in the first place, but if you explain that you're travelling internationally, they're usually quite obliging.