skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Google Need to Buy Every Cool Thing?
While this is similar to Aptana's Jaxer project, Jaxer does server-side DOM stuff just as easily as client-side DOM stuff. I'm having a hard time imagining this framework does that. The only DOM stuff in the example is marked as clientside. With Jaxer, they actually have JQuery running serverside. I'm not sure how pyxer could even make use of JQuery clientside (or other frameworks).
Smart eating while working
Odd Techie Stuff: Netron Doodle
There was a good segment on earmarks recently on Bill Moyers Journal. I found it online here:

EXPOSÉ on the JOURNAL: Mr. Heath Goes to Washington
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02222008/watch.html

"The broadcast profiles SEATTLE TIMES reporters on the trail of how members of Congress have awarded federal dollars for questionable purposes to companies in local Congressional districts—often to companies whose executives, employees or PACs have made campaign contributions to their legislators."

The show describes the amount of work the reporters had to do just to decode the various earmarks in the DoD appropriations bill. For example, $4m was earmarked for "NG4BW," and the paper had to locate additional documentation--and it's not conveniently attached to the bill--just to determine what this actually represented.
"Mainly because we get a desktop application for free, and partially because we can deliver a next-generation experience compared to existing browser apps."

So...you're using Java?
How Green Is Your Web page?
I wonder what effect the product recommendation system is going to have on pricing and availability. The wine industry is very susceptible to information cascades, which is why you have people paying twenty-five bucks for a bottle of Cloudy Bay.
I knew it - Digg is up for sale
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the kind of people who used to go into physics now hack. After all, I have a phd in physics, and I find hacking to be really fun...
Not sure if this will do, but you if you're on OS X you can use TextMate's 'Edit In TextMate' to edit code in any text field in any web browser.
What 2.484564472E24 means for internet security
doesnt work...hwork
Tech leaders scramble for IT talent
If you're a Firefox user, check out the "It's All Text!" extension.
It lets you edit any text area in the external editor of your choice.
For instance, I'm composing this comment in vim.

The download page at mozilla.com claims that it's hard to get working
on Mac OS X, but that's actually not true. Skim through the comments...
someone explains how do to it.
Akihabara (Tokyo) Online Map in English
Why Startup? 50% believe their idea can change the world
TSA looks for laptop case that can clear security
iPhone SDK And Restrictions: Some Of The Details Aren’t Great.
Sure, it's probably possible, as certain types of cellular automata are turing complete. However, I've not seen anything more complex than a logic gate--no one thinks it's practical.
I think someone must be 26 days early with an April Fool's joke. Really, how can an "IT consultant specializing in Unix and related technologies" be so clueless about cryptography?

He has "long thought that [symmetric ciphers] can be bypassed using the same approach [as was used 2000 years ago]"? RSA is "self limiting" because of errors in messages? This is the sort of gibberish for which the phrase "not even wrong" was invented.
What I learned in jail last night
i always thought america stood for the worst and the best, with new york beeing some of the best.
what's happening?
Back in the day, when I was working on handhelds, icons were always defined in some nasty bit-fiddly binary format. Masking was similar hard.

I ended up building (?) an Excel spreadsheet to do it for me. In some ways, it was almost the inverse of the technique in the link:

- one set of cells was used to "draw" the icon by filling them with "X"s

- another set of cells would glue together the values specified by each X into appropriate 32-bit integer values

- a final set (the coup de grace!) would grab those ints and bit twiddle them directly into a short line of legitimate c code, ready to be copied into a header file
The real question is will it be able to use its firepower to open any doors for the wine industry. Alcoholic beverage shipping and sales laws in America are still stuck in the dark ages.
Pico-projectors - Looking at the bigger picture
The battle for Wikipedia's soul
You're right in a way, at least regarding education.

If you're very poor, but smart, america probably offers more opportunities than most euro places. Elite Unis heavily subsidize in this case.

The more common case though, is somewhat poor (single mom, 3 siblings, $40,000 a year), and somewhat smart but not national merit level. Many people in this situation seem to wind up getting aid packages with low interest, but huge principal, managing to get their degree but graduating with a lot of debt. This may be changing with even the shift to free tuition by some elite unis, but haven't seen really big changes yet.

In your last sentence, you seem to make the same point, only for med care rather than education.

So perhaps we agree that the american system is harshest on people who are poor but not "poverty level."

That is a bad way to be though. Because what happens when you are poverety level, and work your ass off to get up to the "just poor" level? You lose all that subsidy! And back to poverty level, for many.
Google mappers banned from U.S. bases
This reminds me a lot of the coverage of the Wii before its release. Some people don't seem to grasp the huge difference between what Apple (and Nintendo with the Wii) have done compared to previous mobile platforms. We are looking at a first of its kind device that has the potential to wildly grow the smart phone market to be the mainstream of phone users, plus a big chunk of gamers, plus... the appeal is just so huge.
It's very well executed, no doubt about that. But is the technology a great leap forward? I'm inclined to think not really. Just good execution and good design - nothing to scoff at, but not a revolution, either.
MS updated their ie testing images on Thursday. ie8 + XP happens to be one of them. So I'd assume it'll work under Parallels. You'll have to run them thru Transporter first.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21E...
It's hard to make definitive statements about field as huge as "software" or "engineering". Yes, there are areas of software with high requirements for safety (avionics), performance (air traffic control), etc, just like there are areas of engineering that don't have them (improving the manufacturing process to make toothbrushes cheaper). I'm using it in the statistical general sense, sort of like "Men are taller than women." More software gets written for business apps than anything else, and the strict safety requirements aren't there.
but seriously $99 for deploying to all iPhones? I think that is a bargain. Even if your "just" a single developer. If you make something usefull, you should easily get that investment back on sales, mindshare, userbase or sheer cool factor.
On my project I put a lot of effort into scalability: the typical use case involves no running code on the server, only static content. With just tens of users so far, in retrospect I should have given more work to my PR skills.
What I want changed in Java is removal of (non-final) static variables.
Learn Python By Watching Video Lectures
This is pretty weak for the economist. I've been reading the same article, written in different words, for at least five years now.
I went from a Razr to the iPhone, and I am a huge fan. I finally can use my phone for my calendar, contacts, check things like weather/stocks, full video ipod capabilities, and so on.
This comment is very, very interesting... I keep reading about physics people who now are running 2.0 companies and that kind of stuff. But my question for you is: don't you miss science when working on a 2.0 environment? Or how do you correlate one subject with the other?
Google, Microsoft bidding $200 million or more for Digg?
Spokeo spam
A few close friends and family have an iPhone. But to be honest Nokia's e90 Communicator looks better to me. It kicks the crap out of the iPphone's features. I would rather have 3G, GPS, 3 megapixel camera, and a keyboard with tactile feedback. To each their own...
Perú
MegaPhone developer on iPhone SDK: "It exceeded all of my expectations"
not sure its possible to learn anything that way...
True enough, but I'm sure we'll still see interesting applications that don't need to break these restrictions.
I'm sorry if I don't trust these "innovative" ISPs to not take advantage of any control they have over the data that passes through their lines.

Take bandwidth limits for example. With Netflix and XBox Live, on-demand movie viewing is becoming more popular. With Hi-Def content that is a massive amount of data being passed through the network (and entirely legal, I'd like to mention). Now, at first glance it might not be unreasonable to think that, for instance, Time Warner would impose a download limit for subscribers to prevent issues with certain users stressing the lines.

However, what happens when Time Warner that introduces their own video-on-demand service that, surprise, isn't effected by these download limits? Suddenly

I just think that the downsides with Net-Neutrality come down to annoyances, while the downsides to allowing ISPs control over the data to be much worse.
ATL-YC: Visiting next weekend
Atlanta-YC,

I'm going to be working on a datacenter move next weekend and from what my co-workers tell me there are a lot of young guys with half racks working on their systems in the new facility. We're moving some of our equipment to qts in suwannee... are any yc hackers hosted there?

Just want to say hello to some startups while i'm there... keep pounding keys :thumb up:
Wow. Where is my 500 dollars going, exactly?

As a developer, for me this is a Dead End. Being able to work on something, go work on something else, and come back to the first task, was a key revolution in computing -- compare DOS to Windows.

What use is instant messaging if you have to sign off to use the browser?

What if I'm reading a document and then have to take a phone call? I'll have to re-open the document and find where I was!

I have a Sidekick 3, and one of its biggest benefits is that, not only can I do IMs while I browse and take notes, I can take a phone call, and my IM session is kept alive on a server, and I can still send and receive messages, and the state is all coalesced once I hang up the phone. This is mobile computing.

I agree with jgrahamc: I'm sure we'll see interesting new applications that adapt to this environment.. I'm just not currently going to be one of them.
Ubuntu: next release will be the critical one
Venture Capital Investment Tool Kit
Unfortunately, the example still contains duplicated information (and effort). I would do:

words = ["zero", "one", "two", "three", "four",
"five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine"]

numbers = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

number_to_word = dict(zip(numbers, words))
word_to_number = dict(zip(words, numbers))

The rest, of course, can remain the same. I think adding this would also help to show how Python idioms like zip can help simplify code.

That said, I still voted the submission up. I've seen several articles like this which point out how people use new languages in the same braindead way they used their old languages, yet I feel this one featured a very simple example with a paradigm that maps well to Python.

EDIT: Whoops, I got distracted and didn't realize that I didn't finish reading the article. It turns out that the approach is modified later on to do something even better, but I'll leave you to check out the article for that.
Apple iPhone targets RIM with corporate e-mail
Ask YC: What was the hardest thing to learn in HTML and CSS?
I'm trying to put together a HTML & CSS tutorial, I'll use this information to put more emphasis in the most difficult parts.
Note: learning how to position elements sing tables does not count ;)

Thanks.
Howdy migpwr,

We're hosting at Quickpacket down at 56 Marietta, but I hear good things about the Suwannee center and companies there.
The built in applications also terminate you leave them, but no one notices (except for some browser apps where you can tell). The key is just restoring the user to the same place they were when they left. Word processors have been doing this for years. It isn't much code when you are in an MVC model already.

The part about not being able to run anything when you aren't the active program is more limiting. Clearly it is possible, mail gets received even when mail isn't the program, but that is Apple. I can see their point in restricting it, a single lazy coder can degrade the entire user experience and run down the batteries, but there is a class of programs that can't be built in this model.

If I want to write a system monitoring application to keep track of my important machines, that is easy and I can be very slick. But what if I want to be notified when there is an anomalous condition back at the server farm? If my app is running I can hold a connection and monitor it for incoming alerts, but if I'm not the running application I'm completely out of luck. I suppose the server side code could send me an email telling me to run the client, but that is a sad sad way of living.

I expect they will address this in the future. I can think of a couple ways...

1) Add a program to the sandbox that runs at startup but with brutal resource limits. Implement just the bare necessities of listening as efficiently as possible.

2) Make a remote notification manager of some sort. The server can make a remote call, the app runs a call handler briefly and then exits.

3) Do a cron-like operation where it looks at a crontab-like structure in the app's directory. Again, enforce brutal resource limits to keep lazy programmers from ruining the user experience.

All of these also have the problem of how to speak to the user during another program's session. A pop-up box is probably doable, you see those for carrier issues when away from AT&T and they work ok. The ability to play an audio message would be nice, especially if it ducked any existing audio.
Yes. Also, number_to_word dictionary is not needed as words[0] is already "zero"
BBC iPlayer comes to the iPhone
While I agree with you that the lack of multitasking for third-party apps is a serious limitation, one of the scenarios you present is easily solved. A program for reading a document can easily keep track of where you leave off. As long as there is persistent storage it is pretty trivial to load back up in the same place.

PalmOS devices had many of the same restrictions on multitasking. It was definitely a detraction but many applications coped well with the limitations.
Is this specific to math, or is all standardized (bastardized?) education this way?

I can't remember doing any creative writing in elementary school, but I do remember diagramming sentences, much like the musician's nightmare in the article.
I agree. I am using Nokia e50 which is great too. I am waiting for Nokia to upgrade n95 with iPhone competitive features.
Optimizations worth doing right away
This submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130567

ended up hitting on a couple of things that ARE worth doing right away; things which are worth at least considering, and perhaps implementing, early.

I'd appreciate insights from the community about those "early" optimization which seem worthwhile.
It seems like there needs to be a list of these.

In another thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131216
Article should make it clear you point your iPhone to http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer.

More details here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/03/bbc_iplayer_o...
Avoid obvious n^2 or n*m loops
BBQ-smoker-turned-'Robocop' chases off bums
If you're intending to partition database tables across servers (aka "shard") by users:

1. Make sure every table has a user_id field

2. Make sure every record gets that field populated

3. Don't forget to index it

Watch out for queries that don't use the field as part of their 'where' clause.
We were hosted at QTS for a little over three years. They are excellent - they were extremely helpful and knowledgeable, problems were very rare and were resolved quickly when they did occur. Much better than the hosting company we were at before them. Only reason we moved out is that we were bought and parent company owns two data centers with spare capacity.

Good luck with the move.
Reduce linear lookups to hashed ones if they happen regularly.
There is a Turkish proverb, "if one could learn by watching, the cats would all be butchers" :-)
You Think You Have It Tough?
Or Apple could have simply implemented something similar to the Service process used in Android. A service is scheduled and will run as long as resources (memory, battery, etc) are sufficient to keep the high priority processes (the UI currently visible, etc) running. If resources become low, Android can kill off Services as needed. And there you go, no degradation of user experience.

I am curious as to the real reason why Apple neglected to implement a Service capability. The iPhone is effectively not multi-task capable and that is a monumental shortfall. I can only guess that they had too much to implement and didnt want to take the time (at least yet) to implement the service scheduling properly. Or I give equally likely probability that they simply dont want 3rd created applications to rival what Apple can make. They seem pretty anal about maintaining tight control over their walled garden.
Since Presidents have Congress on such a tight leash and all...
I believe it's good and bad. It's dumb to outright ban pretty much everything, but I believe Apple should control everything that's put on their phones.

Phones can be forced to make calls through open bluetooth links, I believe it would be even worse for a contract iPhone to get a virus that forces you to call a premium rate number and netting someone thousands of dollars. At least with bluetooth you have to be in range, but with a trojan it could end up running 24/7. For example, whenever the phone goes into stand-by mode it starts the call and would likely go unnoticed for a good while, I've left my phone in stand-by for days, and have it disconnect whenever the phone 'wakes up'.

There needs to be serious control when a virus can make someone a profit. If it ever got to that, you can be sure the virus count would be up into the thousands as every hacker in an eastern-european country starts making iPhone viruses to net them a small fortune.

So yes it's dumb, there are better ways to protect the phones; for example a verification program built into the firmware and any time the verification gets hacked (if it does) they simply update the firmware and licensed software and any trojan would be incapable of running. This way anyone who wants to hack their phone can, and if they call up complaining they broke it Apple can simply give them a simple 'STFU moron, ToS violation'.
Speeding up GROUP BY if you want aproximate results
"What static type systems force you to do is talk about the data flow of your code. This isn’t so that humans can understand it (though with some discipline it’s possible to create readable code this way), but so that the compiler and runtime don’t have to figure out what the data flow will be when your code is executed. It’s really a form of optimization."

I've been thinking along similar lines recently, and I was pleased to see this put so succinctly. If static typing is merely optimization, it follows from Knuth's Law that the first draft of your program shouldn't be statically typed. The ideal high-performance language, then, is one in which it is easy to write dynamically typed code, but also one that lets you selectively type your program where necessary, without a lot of changes. I haven't seen too many languages that do this, though; I believe Lisp allows it, as do VB, Boo, and Actionscript 3.0.
Google Redesigns the Advanced Search Page
Tool to convert image into 3D
I think this is a brilliant business move. It keeps the overall experience of all that you would call 'iPhone' contained exclusively by Apple; this dramatically dampens the chaos that could be potentially introduced by having too open of a system. This exclusivity factor has served it well with the overall experience called 'Mac OSX' (I excluded 'Macintosh' on purpose because everything prior to OSX was a waste of time - ESPECIALLY my own!). The iPhone platform is powerful, and letting loose that power in the wild could cause serious issues for the overall 'iPhone' experience (think of unwanted software rendering your iPhone experience worthless).

Apple is paving a new path with iPhone and the whole experience of iPhone. The last thing they want is for that experience to degrade because of too much chaos. This goes against the grain of geek culture where diversity is king (and I have ALWAYS subscribed to this rule). But in the long run it will server Apple and iPhone users very well.

As another example, the 2008 Subaru STI is an overall dream machine that allows you to mod the hell out of it so that you can beat a Ferrari in a quarter mile competition, but which one will get you laid more often? Which one of these cars will cost more in maintenance fees? The Ferrari is far less practical, but it has its utility as a unique experience factory. The iPhone is not a superior product but it is a superior experience in this same way.

The second you see an iPhone whipped out in public (forgive the poor imagery), you see a symbol of experience and quality, not a smart phone ('smart phone' is what I think when I see a Blackberry). I REALLY hate to admit it, but there is a certain status associated with being an owner of an iPhone in that the whole experience it represents is vastly superior to any other experience for any other phone (disclaimer: I do NOT own an iPhone, I own a Blackberry because I need to get things done).

Apple is trying to sell MUCH more than a product: it is trying to sell culture and in order to guide this culture properly it needs to exercise crazy control.
numbers = range(10) is mucho easier than typing the numbers :)

words = ["zero", "one", "two", "three", "four",
"five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine"]
number_to_word = dict(zip(range(10), words))
word_to_number = dict(zip(words, range(10)))

The last approach with lots of testing is good.
> the 2008 Subaru STI is an overall dream machine that allows you to mod the hell out of it so that you can beat a Ferrari in a quarter mile competition, but which one will get you laid more often?

It's not the Ferrari that gets the owner laid -- it's the money required to buy one...

Good analogy, though. If your app is otherwise overpriced and impractical, putting it in the iPhone (Ferrari) may be the way to go. If your customer base would rather just get things done... well, I'll bet a lot more STIs get sold than Ferraris on any given day of the week, that's all.
Google Pulls Map Images At Pentagon's Request
I think the points were taken away, anyway.
I wonder what the reason is. Is Apple being extremely careful, as they're new to the phone market? Are they trying to avoid mistakes they made with the Newton (this is a wild guess because I'm not very familiar with the Newton)?

It may just be system resources -- either they're too limited, or Apple wants to make sure that the currently-running application (especially if the front application is playing a video) runs smoothly

Another reason may be battery life: Maybe if there's more than one app running - especially if one of them is playing music or video, and one is using the internet - the battery drains very quickly.

I can say that on my Sidekick 3, your application can do whatever you want: constantly read off of sockets, use a bunch of CPU -- but before your application can be downloaded by users, it has to be approved by Danger (and probably T-Mobile).
US Economy Lost 63,000 Jobs in February