skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone ever used: http://www.eztexting.com/ Considering it over clickatell if I can find a good reason.

Thanks
Well i'm sorry if that wasn't clear in the first place , but i actually agree with matz. I don't intend to bash on ruby either, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077664 for a more clear (i think) expression of what i meant
Creating a Whole New Business on the Web: Untemplater
Tell HN: something I love about GitHub (realtime fixes - see timestamps)
30 Asian students injured in attacks at South Philly high school
Agreed.

Nothing in Clojure is new - its all been done before. Its the combination of features that make it interesting.

Having said that, I don't think Ruby has anything new either and I find Ruby interesting for the exact same reasons that I find Clojure interesting: its combination of features.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
While I personally liked him, I couldn't figure out their strategy, leading me to believe that they didn't really know what they were doing.

You used to be able to buy low-end SPARC systems for $995 (v100, Blade 100) now the cheapest system is much more than that - the same pricing strategy that ruined SGI: as their market share declined they retreated to higher end customers, which led to more market share declines.
"...leaving the company in the hands of new owner Oracle (ORCL) and its very profit-minded leadership"

Maybe I'm reading too much into the above statement, but the point of a company is to make profits. There are these things called "charities" for cases when you don't want to do that.

That said, Sun's approach in recent years has certainly been a mess. They have failed to really make open source work for them as a strategy in the same way companies like IBM and Apple have.
Cloudkick (W08) Rolls Out Freemium Model For Server Management System
Scotty, Macgyver, & Doctor Who are Hackers
Utopian Pessimist Calls on Radical Tech to Save Economy
There is a lot of doubt surrounding the suicide verdict.
The story of the HeLa line was something I really wanted to include in The Geek Atlas, but I couldn't come up with a convincing place to visit to go with it. Glad to see that this book is finally coming out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
Addressing the Innovation “Valley of Death:” It’s the Products, Stupid
>Clearly what Linux needs is more shiny buttons and less freedom.

Which is why Google Chrome is a potential game changer
What NYC really needs: A support group for founders
great show from infibeam...pi has all reading features and price is 50% lower than kindle after taxes so very likely pi will be super hit. amazon will have a tough time selling kindle in India.
Google Reader now lets you 'subscribe' without RSS
The next step is to generate these images as advertisements targeted at web developers.
>Will governments ban photo-sharing sites?

No, but that's a horrible way of communicating. I can't image a future where people have complex programs to decode pictures and re-encode them to post to innocent looking sites. Plus, how are average people going to get these programs in the first place without being busted?

I think a better method might be to create a big complex MMO that everyone plays that happens to have a news forum inside it somewhere. Then the data doesn't have to be encrypted per se, but it would be harder to see from outside and wouldn't be complex for users to participate in.

>Also, banning cryptography will mean that online banking, VPN access, ssh, remote desktop, etc., etc. will no longer be possible. So I doubt this will ever happen.

I wouldn't have to become impossible, it would simply have to be changed in such a way that the government can always see all communications.

As I say, I hope you're right, but as a programmer with a background in network engineering I don't see anything (outside of P2P) that couldn't easily be stopped.
I think Clojure "agents" might be new.
Ask HN: Programming on Mobile Phone.
I just bought the Samsung Corby touchscreen phone. While playing games on it, it just struck me that if we can edit texts files and view pdfs on a mobile why cant we program on it?Ok not like actual major programming work, but lite tests for the time u have a brain wave and just need to test it. I searched for it and found some non mainstream scripting languages like hecl[1], mathpro [2] and mobilebasic [3].

I was wondering if anyone knows implementation of a mainstream(er) language. I think something like lisp would be good also as jRuby can be run on JVM cant a java enabled mobile act as JVM?

[1]http://www.hecl.org/
[2]http://www.mobile-sciences.com/
[3]http://www.mobilebasic.com/
Notify.io brings notifications to the web
RedHat launches OpenSource.com
Yes, I am very excited about the new features, but they've priced themselves well outside what I'm willing to pay. If the host isn't down, I can ask nagios for free. If it is down, Pingdom (even the free version) will send me an SMS. There may be a target market for their price point, but I'm not part of it.
If your question is "How many times in January is [there going to be a code release of] jQuery" then the answer is only twice: jQuery 1.4 and 1.4.1. However we've also released the 14 Days of jQuery (jquery14.com), jQuery.org, the new jQuery Forum (forum.jquery.com), and the new jQuery API browser (api.jquery.com). Today we're releasing jQuery Meetups and tomorrow is jQuery UI 1.8. And none of that is counting the oodles of videos that we've uploaded as well.

You can see more of the details about the releases here:
http://jquery14.com/

We also have a whole bunch slated for post-January, you'll be hearing a lot more for sure.
Apple's open source strategy is well defined, but not, shall we say, integral to their company. They take what works for them, give a bit back here and there, and mostly do proprietary, closed software and "ecosystems". In some ways that's better than a mess (Nokia), but they're not really big open source boosters in the way IBM are.

Sun has given a lot to open source, but they don't seem to have gotten as much back as IBM. I think once again the issue is that there wasn't a particularly clear strategy.
Android Poised To Take Runner-Up Phone Slot by 2013
In the Flash VM's defense, the new alpha releases work pretty well on Ubuntu 9.10 x64. My laptop still can't handle two Youtube videos at once, but there's a lot less flickering and I haven't seen the 'flash crashed' gray square in a while
I wrote Hecl, and think you should give it another look:-)

The problem is that 'mainstream' languages are awfully big. The initial versions of Hecl ran on my Nokia 3100, which had a limit of 64K for applications. Also, most mainstream languages that run on top of Java run on 'regular' Java, not Java ME, which lacks things like reflection. This means that porting them to Java ME is not trivial. Android might be a better bet, but it's still tricky, and it's still an environment where you don't want to be wasteful with space.
Fun read poking at the spark of life, and how science imitates religion. What a shame.
Excellent article, very thorough.

I am always surprised when you have someone non-technical try out, what for me is a very trivial application, the results are always eye-opening and humbling. Its almost a different world.

I did something similar , ask one of my elderly relatives to use YouTube , they just couldn't.
Why not Python? Maemo, Android and Nokia's s60 (at least) support it fairly well. Also, if you have a decent idea, have a look at http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html
Why Linked Data for data.gov.uk?
The installation issue doesn't just affect novice users. The entire package management idea is utterly broken. Most of the time the packages are not created by those who create the software. They are embodyments of someone's idiosyncratic idea about what should go where.

Package maintainers keep inventing new contrived ways to distribute files all over the place. Reading the documentation of the actual software often doesn't help me find out where everything is and how it can be configured.

The default sources.list keeps falling behind the older my installation gets and there doesn't seem to be any recommended way to keep it up to date. Of course I can add package sources of more recent OS versions, but that seems like a rather more dangerous thing to do.

Package managers are supposed to help me deal with dependencies but they end up creating new dependencies of their own.
Interesting, and it looks like they got it to what they considered to be a stable state (based on the web site and the last release), but it appears to be three years dead.

It might be very interesting for someone to pick this up. It they did, I'd probably use it instead of my current plan of doing an LLVM PreScheme backend.
Linux Foundation to World: Get a Job
I surrender, Comcast
Hope to see a pattern emerge of decentralized startups that are micro businesses. Matt Mullenweg is doing a helluva job with Wordpress, so it's certainly possible.
Ask HN: Google Go
One can observe unprecedented popularity spike of Google Go language:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Go is introduced as "systems programming language", so I wonder what experiences have you had with this language, and how do you find it.
From the FACTOR's FAQ:
"Forth is untyped, not garbage collected, and close to the machine. For flow control, Forth code tends to use immediate words. Variables and arrays tend to be global, and programs aren't usually written in a functional manner. Factor is very different from this. It is dynamically typed, offering a high degree of reflection. Unreferenced objects are garbage collected with a generational garbage collector. Factor code is a little bit more distant from the machine, though the C FFI allows using words like malloc and mmap. For flow control, Factor generally uses quotations, allowing flexible higher order functions; parsing words are used mostly for definitions and data literals. Variables are dynamically or statically scoped, and arrays are just objects which don't need to be treated specially"
Encoding JSON is very easy. If that's all you are doing (e.g. only sending data to the client through say a web API), and you don't have a native library: build one.

Edit: also, I am a big fan of providing both. It can be done simply and cleanly, so why not.
That's not what he said, he said the notification was by "Instant Message", not that the notification was "instant".

Obviously it have to poll the page, but in principle that can be polite, ideally it'll have a decay feature where if it hasn't been updated in a while the checks will by steps decay to, say, once a day, then once a week, then once a month, and give up after, say, 5 years.
But it would have to be polling to get a response in a way that is quicker than you could get by visiting HN a couple of times.

So, the question then becomes how frequently does it poll?
http://www.esendex.de/ in europe
But as the article says, if you add a certain percentage of votes to one candidate, you don't actually break Benford's law.

I wonder why this law is used for detecting fraud...
That shows how bad security is on most places… The bad guys just need to find 1 mistake to get in, while we have to protect at all places.

That’s why covering all angles is important…

--dd http://sucuri.net
Volunteer Your Computer for Global Privacy
The Nokia N900 smartphone is currently the mobile programmer's paradise. Underneath its Maemo OS veneer is a fairly standard Linux. A terminal is part of the standard install, and there's no jailbreaking needed to install whatever you want.

There are packages for Python, Perl, GCC... And of course you can run pretty much anything by building it from source. The ARM A8 Cortex CPU is fast enough that it actually makes sense to do this.

If you want a more desktop-like programming environment, it's even possible to install Debian on the N900.
Usain Bolt: could do better, say scientists
Matt Mullenweg on public speaking
Horizontal transfer seems like genes as the pivotal item chosen in evolution, Selfish Gene style?
Let's flag this.
Is that because there are less of them?
Or at least if the patents weren't enforced.
I don't know if I buy the article as its written. It's too easy to make a racial issue out of normal high school group dynamics... I'm skeptical.
There are some paper notebooks which close using a magnet embedded in the cover. Not very harddisk-friendly, though.
Yep, it sucks being the company that owns Java and puts open source on a pedestal, but gets beat badly in creating the ecosystem for Java development... i.e. Eclipse. NetBeans was never even a contender.
Viigo for BlackBerry is A One Stop Shop for Data
I have to be honest here. Although I have seen Viigo in almost every single top 10 list for BlackBerrys, I never tried it till this week.
This has been present on google for months now; a quick search shows Labs announcing it May 24, 2009. That this is making HN now goes to show that most people still don't use the "Show Options" search modifications in the left sidebar, instead refining their search through additional words and search autocomplete.

I find it interesting that Google continues to hide these in a user-initiated sidebar in the interest of "sparse", while Y! and Bing now show search refinements by default.
Is Apple a counter-example to Customer Development and MVP?
phew I don't feel bad now. I wrote a HTML preprocessor in 1999 to allow PHP-like embedding of Perl in webpages. It did the equivalent of register globals. I still have it up on my website but with a big warning that says "this has known security issues, don't use it". At least someone else made the same mistake around that time :)
Similar issue in NYC five years ago. See http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-13-asian-teens-b...
Ask HN: Statistics for Programmers
I'm trying to learn elementary statistics, but I cannot find a good book (or website) to start with. I tried 'Introductory Statistics with R' but it assumes you already understand basic statistics. Everything that I lookup on Amazon is a textbook and cost an arm and a leg, and I'd rather not shell out for something that I'm not sure about. So tell me, how did you learn statistics and what would you suggest to someone whose been programming for 10+ years but doesn't know what to do with a standard deviation.
When in Rome
U.S. bans texting while driving trucks and buses
While an interesting idea I know I wouldn't use it if it was an ad. Despite the problem of my sample images trying to sell to me it would be annoying when trying to mockup a design (with images that randomly have undesired colors, patterns, etc.)
Ask YC: apps.ycombinator?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077586

vs.

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077586

since when there is this apps sub-domain?
I hadn't seen it either, although after a few minutes of playing around with it I can't help but think it'd be more useful if following a node included the context of the original search - as it is it's very hard to narrow down on anything, which is what searching is surely all about?
How to Blog Your Way to Online Business Success
My Chinese-American wife does medical interpreting in the SF Bay Area. She recently was at the mental ward of a local hospital interpreting for a Chinese man who busted his chops to get here and now works as a janitor at an Oakland hospital. He's one of only two non-black janitors at the hospital, and to hear him tell it, he is treated brutally by the other janitors. Their supervisors (also black) side with the other janitors. He's so stressed out he had to be committed.

My wife has also had to put up with anti-asian racism from blacks as well, but thankfully nothing that bad.
Normal high school dynamics don't usually end up with 30 people injured over the course of a few days.

If blacks are attacking asians for being asian, it's racism. Now, if it happens that the problem is limited to two rival/conflicting cliques or something, sure, maybe it's not a race problem.
I'd argue that WebKit is very integral to Apple strategy.
LLVM? GCD?
We currently use http://www.mobilemarketing.net/ on a couple of projects. Their site looks terrible, but they are fairly cheap and have 'sticky' sessions. Their support is also very responsive.

Textmarks http://www.textmarks.com/ is also good but they no longer support sticky sessions. They also have free messaging if you don't mind a "powered by textmarks" with a link back to their site at the bottom of your SMS.
I agree with most of what you've said, but I just wanted to offer that there is a middle ground between "making money" and "spending money."

Offtopic, Cloudkick is a very sexy offering, and it's priced for a certain set of customers, which may or may not fit you or I, but ideally, I'd like for them to find a cost structure that scales a little better, perhaps. 10% of the cost of the server might work better for users with less than 10 servers, for example.
The UK web design scene is often just self serving, indulgent bullshit
Yes, just over 1.5 years at ShareThis. ~150 nodes managed by RightScale for ~$4000/mo (Premium account plus an add-on account for developers). In this case, the "managing" includes rich metadata, server provisioning, configuration management, deployment scripts, monitoring, alerting, etc. You can basically think of it as [Chef/Puppet/CFEngine]+Nagios+Cacti+AWS console+misc other tools, all wrapped up in a pretty (and very functional) GUI.

CloudKick's pricing puts it at about half that of RightScale (at our scale - I'm not sure how RightScale is priced at the bottom end), but it looks like the features are monitoring/alerting focused - the management tools appear to be largely undeveloped.

CloudKick is certainly making good headway feature-wise, and I'm glad to see them spin up their revenue stream. I look forward to seeing what other features they add on in the future.
What's the reasoning for not just using points from a continuous spectrum? His approach tries to both make adjacent colors distinct while also making them blend well with nearby colors, which he admits are contradictory goals.
I am reminded of the tradition in Chicago that when you bribe an alderman or judge to do you a favor, you put the dirty money in an envelope and put the envelope on the table. It seems that even among public servants who are as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, there is some residual shame at taking bribes, which expresses itself as an unwillingness to touch the bribe with bare hands.

(But maybe I’m reading too much into that tradition: last year, a Boston city councillor was videotaped by the FBI stuffing cash into her bra.)
China to lead world scientific research by 2020
I don't know what it's like with Ubuntu, but certainly OpenSuse has offered one-click installs for a while, e.g.:

http://en.opensuse.org/Firefox

These aren't terribly difficult for developers to set up, certainly easier than creating an installer for Windows. I wish Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. offered this sort of download as the default, with tarballs only for users who know what they're getting themselves into.

The main pain is presumably in generating these for different distros. Novell's build service is supposed to make this easier, but I haven't tried it:

http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/supported_build_targets

One more thing that would help with this is if more browsers used the distro in the user-agent string, which would help with presenting the right installer to the user. Distro-built versions of Firefox certainly include e.g. "SUSE", but not the version. Windows and Mac browsers send the OS arch and version ("Windows NT 5.2", "Intel Mac OS X 10.5") so just sending "Linux x86_64" seems silly.
Static pages generated by drupal. Not the same thing.
Why I don't believe in software architects
From what I've learned, that is a good approach. Doesn't necessarily have to be structured as a blog with chronological entries, could look more like a traditional website.

An example: let's say you have a time tracking web app. Your content can talk about good approaches to time management, or techniques to focus, or publish research about the average lengths of different tasks from the data that you can gather from your users.

A great example is Mint.com's blog -- http://www.mint.com/blog/
10 reasons for not getting married
One obvious example was publishing the membership records of the BNP.

You and I might not share their political views, but violating the privacy/anonymity of members of any political party is not the way forward, particularly when such violation will inevitably lead to sanctions that are at best dubiously ethical themselves.
scene == London
The secret to networking - be yourself online/in person
If you're talking about this site http://www.lkozma.net/ , I think you already have a very good eye for optimization. So congratulations!

I would focus on selling yourself, not selling something. Your Pagerank should help you speak with more influence about subjects that you are an expert on, and then, use that expertise to get jobs, consulting, funding, grants or get published.
Slashdot discussion http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/01/26/0231205/China-Will-L... where at least early on many were pointing out quantity vs. quality problems, some which go very deep (e.g. plagiarism). When I checked, no one was claiming China's impact (something that has long been measured by citations) is significant.

ADDED: if you don't know what Cargo Cult Science is, check out e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science

Just because you call it science and appear to be doing things scientists do doesn't mean you're doing real science.
I think the article is correct as it is written. You take a school in an impoverished neighborhood mix in language difficulties and it becomes much easier for these things to occur. Add in the fact that chinese television doesn't display black people in a positive light. All it takes is one word to set thing off.

I know this because through the early to mid 90s there was a huge wave of haitian and cuban immigrants to my school. Because of language barriers and cultural differences there was constant fighting. Then they formed gangs and what started as 1on1 or 2on1 escalated to 30-50 people. The main difference was the school was good with enforcement so the fights always occurred offcampus.

Eventually, the haitian immigrants learned english and everything calmed down after that. But this school should definitely be doing more.
>Eclipse. NetBeans was never even a contender

The sad part is that it is far superior now. A friend of mine converted me 8 months ago and I am petrified that it will get lost in the shuffle now. The thought of going back to Eclipse is mortifying after having such a consistent experience with Netbeans.
http://www.googlewonderwheel.com/
One Architectural Step Forward (for Now) at Stonehenge
50 Three-word phrases that can make your start-up a success
I agree. The technology to facilitate distributed teams working well together is in place, and it lets you pick to work with anyone in the world, while ducking a lot of office expense, etc...

As a founder of a small decentralized tech company, one of my favorite things is finding other small focused companies to do business with. Finding a small company that loves what they do, and does it really well, and is small enough to understand your needs and really value your company as a client, makes everything about the relationship better.
Innovation: Apple patents hint at tablet's technology
It's not clear that it should be used for elections. See for example, http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/does-benfords-law-apply-to-e...
Video: Fred Wilson talks trends, advice for startups
The Healthcare System: An Apple Tablet's Biggest Opportunity
I find the Android Scripting Environment to be quite cool:
http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

And it offers quite a few languages to play with, including Python, JRuby and Javascript (via Rhino).

Now if it would only have a better development environment...
Pic of the money: http://blogs.worldbank.org/files/publicsphere/rupees_front.j...