skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are lots of casual games for the Xbox 360, and they are making a clear push against Nintendo Wii with Project Natal.

Also, Microsoft envisions Xbox as an entertainment center where families not only play games together, but watch TV and movies as well.

Nintendo and Xbox have claimed different market segments but that's not because they weren't competing.
Google are smart enough to let the new-and-chancy cannibalize the old-and-profitable, rather than vice versa.
Interview with Tim LeTourneau on 10 years of making The Sims
Live Mesh (access my files anywhere), Exchange Online (affordable hosted exchange, my personal email, calendar, and contacts actually in sync, everywhere), Windows Home Server (my music and movies, available on any device in my house, trivial backup, etc).

That's just what I've started using in the past year.

These may not be as awesome individually as an Xbox or an iPhone (which I adore), but they've changed my day to day life.
I was literally afraid of reading pdf files before I came across Foxit pdf reader ! I haven't used acrobat reader ever since !
Murdoch's Daughter Recognizes That 'Piracy' Can Be Good
On equal terms there is also the issue of Apple's control over the software that iPhone OS devices run. Adobe's Flash includes an interpreter, that will be used to deliver applications to devices circumventing the AppStore.

While Apple officially supports scripting WebKit and extends it ever deeper into iPhone OS APIs, I don't think they'll be willing to take on a similar venture with Adobe's Action Script.
We Convert PSD to CSS 
We Convert PSD to HTML/XHTML/CSS in fast time, with cross browser compatibility at very reasonable prices. Our job include slicing to handcoded css/xhtml... layout.As soon as you submit your requirement, we will contact you via email with project details. We will clarify any doubts if any! And request for upfront payment via paypal. When we receive your payment (50% advance), we start to code your design. After the agreed term you will get a link, where you can download your files or we send files at your specified email.
Better to React Than to Act
Considering FF with Flash on Youtube can bring my well-powered linux desktop to it's knees, I'd be floored if any mobile device could handle it in an even remotely reasonable way.
I know that a lot of people would think that, but I can tell you from personal experience that that is likely not the case. One offs, impressive or not, rarely, if ever, factor into an administrators budgetary decisions. Killing the goose that laid the golden egg is a quite common occurrence.
Illuminated manuscripts are orchestral music. Printed books are rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll wins:

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/01/cory-doctorow-c...
…but my web browser doesn't run python.
Hacker Tees | Hacker News
How Motion Detection Cameras Work
As much as I like Lisp and even pure functional languages (such as my own Fexl), I still like that old-school loopy, branchy, bracey, break-ish, drop-down to the iron, procedural feel of straight-up C and even Perl.

You won't get a language war from me, but there's a huge difference in "feel" between those two major language classes, and strangely, I kinda like both of them. Sure I can do some impressive reasoning in the functional realm, but even in the procedural realm I can do iron-clad reasoning and correctness-preserving transforms that (I hope) would make Dijkstra proud.
You might be right. But in any case , with his name in such a great story in the news , he greatly improved his resume.
Seems like a strange project to me. With just a little effort, you can really make equations that almost perfectly model any curve you find in a photograph.

What's so notable about this? I guess the pictures are pretty.
I'm pretty sure it's just Symbian, not S60, the UI platform. So you can not build E71 firmware with what they open sourced.
Damn, I didn't try that because I thought Readability had failed on InfoQ before. Thanks!
Chris Dixon on VCs backing out of a term sheet
These kind of collective challenges seem to me the best way to learn programming. If I had the time/money, I'd love to find a way to monetize a website dedicated to competitive challenges like this. I'm surprised TopCoder doesn't sponsor them.

About the problem itself, it seems solvable in a way that a good algorithm will never lose. Or am I off in my intuition?
This made me smile all the way through.

My first computer was a VIC-20. I wanted a Commodore 64, but now I know I was better off because I had friends who had '64s who spent more time playing games than programming (the games for the 64 were so very, very much better).

As it turns out it mattered more that I had a computer of my own than the "quality" of the computer. I had access to better machines, but I had unlimited access to my VIC-20, and being able to sit up all night with it, to start coding minutes after waking from dreaming in BASIC, resulted in getting so much more done than if I had access to a CRAY-II but I had to go to the library to use it.
An Intel Core2 Duo Mac Mini, with no graphics card to speak of (so this couldn't skew the results even theoretically) plays 720p H.264 YouTube-encoded videos with ~9% CPU usage, and no hiccups, the frame-rate is evenly distributed, every frame lasts for whatever time it should. Compare and contrast with the Flash decoder, that ceilings at about 70%, and plays un-evenly, even on a frame-by-frame level -- there is no way of telling how much time a given frame is showing on the screen.

That's why many will use Rentzsch' Click-to-Flash WebKit plug-in, to block all Flash permanently and play H.264 movies natively.
github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash

Here's another one, this time from Firefox for Maemo RC3:

> We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release. The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.
Full disclosure: this recently happened to me. So it's apparently not that rare.

Founders beware, a signed term sheet is not a done deal.
You're absolutely right, I've even heard of people receiving negative performance reviews because they spent a little unauthorized time at work creating something that improved the productivity of the entire staff by a measurable dollar amount. There will always be companies that shoot themselves in the foot.
I can eat up 100% of your CPU with JavaScript.
Update on My Startup's Progress
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=graph+1%2F10%28ln%28x%2...
And Apple allowed a new iPod nano to supersede the very successful iPod mini while the mini was the top of the game.

To have sustained competitive advantage, you need to be able to say goodbye to the current stars.
Smathersandbranson:How Gifts from their girlfriends started their business
He probably doesn't know much about the gaming industry. The 360 is already an unqualified success. It's unquestionably reached status as an iconic platform in the history of console gaming, right up there with the NES and the PS1/2. To outsiders it may seem as though Nintendo is leading this field but that's somewhat misleading. Nintendo opened up a new market and has been able to sell console gaming systems to a whole new group of people who wouldn't have bought them before. This is fabulous for Nintendo, but in a very real sense it means it's no longer operating in the same market as Microsoft and Sony (though there is some overlap).

The 360 is the go-to console for any major game developer. Partly because 360 owners buy about 50% more games than either Wii or PS3 owners. Given that games are responsible for the bulk of the profits related to console gaming that's an enormously significant figure. The 360 console is raking in cash for Microsoft and continuing to grow in popularity. It's one of Microsoft's most successful ventures of all time.
We got a request to give a "where are we now" post for DoLeaf, so here it is!

For the curious, DoLeaf (http://doleaf.com) is a marketplace to find and buy plants from specialty nurseries and garden centers. We're a small startup just trying to stumble our way through.
Ok, the post is up: http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/04/update-on-doleaf-progres...

I also posted an item here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100662 Upvotes would be appreciated
Cool. Is there software that can create a Fourier series that matches the contour exactly, e.g. the contour of the mountain tops in the third pic?
It sounds like Microsoft's internal competition is exactly the same kind of dysfunctional as its external competition.
I agree, I really like the idea but the 2D ones seem a bit forced to me - not that aesthetic. The 3D ones on the other hand are beautiful and have a much more natural feel.
"Let’s just say they didn’t know what a IF/NOT loop was."

Me neither.
As an amateur photographer, I have often noticed how the best nature images are often of curves, or other geometrical shapes with some amount of symmetry. Lines that converge to the corners or lead the eye towards the intended focal point are another good example. Seeing function curves overimposed on natural curves tells the observer explicitly of the underlying harmony in nature and in math, which we all perceive, consciously or not.
Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet?

And yet shareholders are not, in fact, rewarding Microsoft for its consistent profitability:
http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=126531720000... msft&ntsp=0
s/mountain tops/piles of snow in a parking lot/

Yer not from around these parts, are ya? ;)
Try using a disposable email next time. I never give out my real email address anymore. (of course i am the developer of a disposable email app, so i'm a little biased...WhySpam.Me)
Just curious: Wouldn't these types of details be subject to an NDA or whatever agreement he signed when he left the company?
Wikileaks: Supporting freedom of information
down (v): to drink rapidly; to quaff
Maybe it was just me, but back in the day when I was paid to write Lisp I was pretty fond of the Common Lisp loop macro. So my Lisp code was pretty loopy...
It's no coincidence they feel different. The Lisp family of languages was based on theoretical mathematical considerations (Lambda calculus), with implementation as an afterthought.

The Fortran family of languages was based on the hardware's capabilities, with theoretical considerations like expressiveness as an afterthought.

We are fortunate to have reached an age where we have CPU cycles and RAM to spare so that languages that were not designed with performance-related restrictions in mind are becoming practical for a wide variety of applications.
:) oops.
Preparing for the Big Pitch
Does this matter?

Any book will serve as published prior art against a patent on page numbering. It does not have to be the main subject.
How Wi-Fi attackers are poisoning Web browsers
I've noticed that these days, Google's answers to search questions are generally "why don't you try Wikipedia?"

These days, the Web is somewhere between three and five titans plus a complex of secondary sites (specialist wikis, newspaper sites, news aggregators, major blogs), with a background noise that chiefly consists of spammers mirroring 90% of Wikipedia to improve their search-engine rankings.

So, in a way, this search engine is inevitable -- but I wouldn't have imagined it as early as thirty minutes ago, so it's probably not inevitable, just an idea so good that you forget that it ever didn't exist.

"Duck It!" seems to work _really_ well, too; I'm switching. My only concern is that "Duck It!" doesn't include a way of telling you whether a given paragraph is true or false...
I don't see how you can say with a straight face that's Windows has "nearly not changed" since 1995 while saying that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001.
Oh, I did not want to create a `versus' argument. Please pardon me, if I did.
Same thing in Scotland, with the Edinburgh Parliament building. Started out as costing £40m, ended up costing more than £400m.

In this case, the architect died before it was finished. Noone to sue.
Facebook Requires New Terms for 3rd-Party Advertising and Offer Providers
Google only has one channel that produces money right now ... AdSense. All their released products are complementary to it ... in fact, I don't know of a single product that isn't.

So you can draw an analogy here ... Microsoft held to its cash-cows (Windows, Office) for too long, although they are showing incremental success in other areas ... like the XBox. Google may get to that point where AdSense will start making them irrelevant, and then they'll be in the same situation.

All big companies face this. Even Apple ... if you'll look closer, they are far too focused on their iTunes Store. And when a cash-cow starts to become irrelevant, although it's still profitable, it's a tough decision to let go.
In 16th century England, after a book had been printed, someone would go in and draw pencil drafting lines marking the text area and the text baseline as was done before hand-writing a manuscript.
Like a duplicated gene, the two seem to have evolved in different directions over time.

I've read that Torah scrolls have the same kind of transcription errors "inherited" from one copy to the next so the origin of a scroll can be traced back.
Facebook Releases HipHop JIT
Climategate hack and data leak lessons learned
Sun Microsystems was spending more than 10% of its revenues on R&D... that's not a recipe for sure success, I would say, if you're not able to produce something sellable from time to time. Ah, SUNW used also to have a "CTOs council"...
Seconded.

Also see http://pauldowman.com/2008/02/17/smtp-mail-from-ec2-web-serv...
Adobe Defends Flash, Again
...says the lad merrily prancing about on Hacker News.
Unfortunately, it's less likely than you think.
No, the Symbian open source release includes S60 as well. (Although S60 is not long for this world; it's going to be replaced by a new Qt-based layer in Symbian^4 next year.)

That said, porting Symbian^(x) to the E71 would be a major effort. The S60 5th Edition UI layer seems to assume a screen resolution of at least 640*360. Even if that were resolved, I'm not sure how one would get the software on the E71.

Apparently some Samsung users have created customized Symbian firmware upgrades, so maybe it's a more realistic prospect for S60 5th Edition devices.
Today's read: The A to Z of Programmer Predilections
Really? Time Capsule backups for Ubuntu? I think not...
Two channels, AdSense and AdWords. Wait, three channels: don't forget DoubleClick.
There are lots of ways to deploy your talents and other resources, and those of your employer. Some of those ways are subject to your choice, and some are subject to constraints. Maybe he didn't have $1500. He accomplished something for his employer. His employer was happy that it was done cheaply/quickly/at all.

The way budgets and head count works, it may have been easier/possible for his boss to say "use your labor/time to work on this" than to justify a specific purchase of the off the shelf product. They're rockin', right now, rather than still waiting for a budget approval that might not come through.

He works for a library, which is a front line service to the community. I imagine he gets a different personal spiritual/civic ROI doing this for the library than if he worked for Office Depot and did something similar (not that there's anything wrong with that). Direct service to the community just seems more ... service like.

No, I'm not joking.
I concur. Fexl can whip combinators around so fast it makes my head spin. But I still like writing C, even if it's only to write a Fexl interpreter.

Consequently the whole purpose of Fexl is to be a thin functional "layer" on top of C. That way as a C programmer I can escape to functions to avoid all the gnarly horrors of memory management and such, and as a Fexl programmer I can escape to C to embrace the hard-edged bits and bytes. That way if you asked me whether I was writing the thing in C or in Fexl, I couldn't really give you a straight answer. ;)
You know the Bible has two creation stories as well: http://www.skepticfiles.org/atheist/bible3do.htm / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_according_to_Genesis
Wow. I didn't know copy protection was that old. Map makers do the same thing, by introducing intentional errors.
Sorry, but many companies are using the Exchange/Office combination simply because there isn't anything better.

Also, while many developers are preferring Unix-like OSes, customers actually want Windows. It's what they know and it works well for them.

Another example would be their developer tools ... which are quite well integrated with each other. I have seen many (good) devs that wouldn't dream working without Visual Studio, and if you get a MSDN subscription, the resources offered are top-notch. Myself I wouldn't touch any of that, since I can't stand working with Windows servers, but if they made their tools multi-platform, I would switch without blinking.

> they're not really thinking about what people need

And since when do people really need iPods / iPads or whatever else comes out of Apple?

Actually I think Microsoft does a pretty good job about what people need ... but they aren't particularly good at anticipating what people want.
The logos - should be links to the sites as well as the small links above them.
My wager is that he just isn't in it for the money. I doubt librarians are. I think he would be much more satisfied by helping libraries stay operable.

All things being equal, when given the choice between a 25k system and a 20k system that a business needs - they choose 20k, no matter how much of a markup it is. Value to the customer is still value even at 500% markup.
It's not a failure, but it's not an unqualified success. They've got very big revenues but have only turned a profit a couple of quarters total.
JGnash 2.3.3 su LinuX
Ask HN: I really need some help with my iphone app
Apple messed up and launced this app on page 18 of app store :(

I have made three good updates and they still buried the app on page 18.

I need some thoughts on what might be a good hook to make this app stand out.

Any ideas?

I am NOT trying to sell anything today. I just want some help please.

I am sorry for the self serving post but I have no idea what to do now to get people to use the app.

I can't even give it away :)

This is a free liscense(s) with no limitations (sorry only for U.S. store)

[1] 3HJWHYJMLAH6
[2] 6LEXKNKRF4J4
[3] 7LRHLXLXKLWR
[4] F93RM9YF4JW9
[5] 3F3H3JFFH6MH
[6] HYW63TKKXH4E
[7] XJLXJNERPM46
[8] X7YM9F9AT7X4
[9] ME3YH4KJTNTW
[10] PEWFKANHEME7
[11] J7TYLP3T3EYX
[12] 669ARHF7T3LJ
[13] RW7NYX434JF4
[14] NMPE9MNRM79N
[15] PW99L96AEWLR

joubee.com
Seattle Needs an “Incubator” Culture
It seems like a business plan competition, except with a very ambiguous payoff and you're pitching to a bunch of random guys. I'm not saying it isn't legit, but I'd think twice before applying to this.
The second lives of vacant auto dealerships.
The info box is cool but the layout of it is really annoying. Since it's a div, I can't resize it and scrolling to the bottom scrolls the page down as well when I hit the bottom so the whole thing is very jarring.

It would be a lot better if the text were simply in a textarea instead of a div so that I could resize the box (in Chrome at least, IE is screwed either way) when I want to read it.
Ask HN: Please review our redesigned Web App, GradeMate
Facebook Becomes World's Biggest News Reader
People who like this may also like this Nov 2009 edge.org article:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter09/gelernter09_inde...
"However, CCD produces higher quality images. Thus, security cameras generally use CCD technology."

Assuming this statement is true, then why is it often difficult to make out suspects in security camera footage shown on TV news reports? The classic example is a case involving a theft or other crime at a mall -- facial features are never clear. Banks, however, seem to always have good images available when robberies take place. Is it an issue of placement, older technologies, or something else?
You would need to do segmentation to extract the contour. Not sure if good segmentation software exists.

Once you have the contour, just use FFTW (fftw.org).
LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood
Hate Apple's App Store? Developing for Kindle won't be any freer
What is the first thing to look in a project?
I understand this line of thinking, but I think it oversimplifies the issue. Some companies have a market cap larger than a small country. Some companies sell weapons to foreign militaries. Tools of different power need different laws governing them. I think the fact we restrict the political speech of federal employees (example: public school teachers) reflects this idea. Are you suggesting the same laws that apply to a pen that Larry Page owns should apply to the Google home page?
Google's Android code deleted from Linux kernel
Tom has a new crush. It's called the WattVision Energy Monitor.
I really dig duck duck go, its possibly the greatest google competitor on the net (in my opinion) I love the ajax populated results when you scroll, and the results are usually pretty relevant. If I have any complaints, its that some of the graphics seem less than professional. Anyways, while I've been watching it for a while this feature encouraged me to make it my default search engine in chrome.
Living in A Lognormal World: Optimizing Sales vs. Optimizing Customers
It depends how you understand the innovation.

I don't say that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001. Please read carefully. I mean Apple as a whole. They do a lot of innovation. iPhone literally revolutionized the way we interact with mobile phones, and iPad is going to do the same with the standard computing model.

For me, innovation is all about the regular people. I don't care about the buzzwords, and the top notch innovation, which is used by 0,0069% of the population. Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used.

The same goes with iPhone/iPad pair. I know that spec-wide, there's nothing new about these tools. We, hackers, are so used to some concepts, we forget about our dads, girlfriends and co-workers from different departments, which are still in 1995.

By the way, I think OS X changed a lot. Not significantly, but a lot. This is not a completely different paradigm but things like MobileMe (iCal, AddressBook in the cloud), Spotlight, iTunes are big steps.
What happens to the Kindle Reader App now?
What's more likely is that one psalm was copied from the other during the Torah's authorship. Just looking at the translation you can see the use of YHWH (translated as the LORD) in one psalm, and the lack of use of YHWH in the other. This is probably because one psalm was written by J, and the other was copied by E.

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

Also, I'm not quite sure what kind of transcription errors are permitted in Torah scrolls. They do throw out the entire scroll if there's a significant error. I can't imagine someone duplicating an entire psalm. At most, a letter might be missing from the text.