skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Mobile browser detection is really hard. None of the reports I've read so far show how they detect browsers."

From my experience it's pretty easy, here's one way to do it:
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”mobile.css” media=”only screen and (max-device width:480px)” />

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/
There's actually a lot of discussion at the moment on the security of RackSpace Cloud Sites product. A lot of the exploits we've seen have focused around WordPress because it's probably the most common use of an RS Cloud Sites account rather than anything specifically vulnerable in WP.

http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/01/wordpress-to-be-currentl... and also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077311
Upgrade to a Platinum account for 2875910101401600 dedicated processor cycles per month!
I've used YUI Grids to build both Drupal and WordPress sites. It's pretty straight forward and definitely easier than trying to customize an existing CMS template/theme.
I suspect they have a lower level c++ framework for speed purposes and they're transition more of the php over. Just a wild guess though.
FWIW, close to 10% of Mibbit are already on WebSocket. It's supported in the non-dev latest Chrome, which the majority of Chrome users are using, since the browser has a proper update facility.

Ignore things at your peril, although you're probably right. People playing FarmVille are unlikely to be early adopters.
Ok, I'll bite... How?

A state flat tax will tax this new raise at the same flat rate as all the existing pay.

The marginal federal tax will tax the new raise, in your scenario, at the new, higher tax bracket.

But your scenario would have the gov't taxing this new cash into the red, reducing her take home pay. That's not gonna happen. Period.
Oh for the pricing. I'd make the free kinda sucky, and have the current basic plan be $5 or $10 per month.

My reasoning is that the current free version would meet our needs, but I'm not comfortable putting a free web service into our sales process. When you pay for something you feel like it's going to be around for a while.
21 Great Resources for Asp.Net Developers
I was a little bit disapointed. I thought your friend had a revolutionary take at online dating :)
"I can only speculate as to why so many layers of job interviews seem to be required here in California — possibly because this is an “at will” state. That means you can quit a job without notice, and also get fired without notice. Given the cost of hiring and training a new employee to fill a vacancy, it’s understandable that potential candidates are given a gauntlet of interviews. I’ve heard of colleagues going through as many as eleven sets of interviews with some of the older web-based giants — especially for manager roles — and even waiting as long 8-12 months for an offer. I’m just not used to that."

That's the opposite of what you'd expect, actually. Countries where it's very hard or very socially taboo to fire people without very good reason (Europe, Japan) you would expect to have very difficult hiring procedures, but in at-will countries and states, you can afford more risk taking and hiring shouldn't be quite as arduous.
At the beginning it's still downloading the other sections, after they're downloaded you can click around :)
Optimized pow() approximation for Java, C / C++, and C#
Cool, I didn't know about the NASA open source project.

You are right that knowledge production isn't the purpose of those other entities, of course. However, in my mind the purpose is less important than the outcome -- why is it more harmful to society if scientists produce a flawed scientific result than if the military kills innocents or the financial sector brings on a market crash because of flawed models? They all hurt society and could all benefit from more scrutiny. I admit the military case is a stretch, but certainly the financial sector seems like a relevant example.
linode, slicehost, rackspace cloud
Looks like this particular error has since been corrected.
Closed academic publishing is intellectually bankrupt, and is probably one of the greatest problems effecting research today. People don't share code, and put a paywall between themselves and the public. There are open journals, but they are rarely as prestigious, and so are not as valuable to those seeking tenure. These academics put tenure before fruitful scientific discussion.
BTW, I've done a lot of QuickBooks API programming. Drop me an email if you need any help with that.
It looks nice :) But seriously - we're going to be doing some a/b testing and that's one of the things we'll be looking at. At this point the main benefit is that they're slightly animated to catch attention
You guys should look into restaurant POS. The existing systems are horrible and usually require a team to come in and set them up and cost a fortune.

Oh and just a quick comment.. I would spell out Point of Sale and not use the acronym. It has a different meaning to most people.
In this case I think having a built-in "and it worked" story helped a lot too. HPHP was released after already having a deployment that actually worked in the real world and saved resources/money, so it didn't have to go through the usual, "why should anyone care about a PHP compiler?" skepticism.
No tedtalk gave me such cool positive feeling as this animation & music :)

And of course, XKCD rox.
I don't have a clue about HR at Facebook, but this sounds like someone who was never seriously considered, and only kept "in the running" because he was submitted by an internal candidate. Especially if he was explicitly told that they were doing due diligence on OTHER candidates. To me, that is very clearly a message of, "You are good enough to hire, but only if our first 10 choices decline the job."

But there is a lesson to be learned here -- don't start scaling back your personal work/projects just because a potential job would be a conflict of interest.
Electric cars - A Netscape moment?
this is what i see when going to your website:

http://i.imgur.com/qKNAJ.png

ditch the flash or at least put some alternative image/text there.
I realize TFA is a troll, but the problem wasn't just that it was one platform. As I understand it, IE6 was at one time better than other browsers. The problem was it was a de-facto standard, MS stopped innovating, & it became increasingly outdated. Webkit follows standards & is open source.
Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap
It's originally a camping song called "I love the mountains"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ExQGwF0Z3g

*edit: fixed link
++1 for restaurant POS. A MICROS system can cost $40K for a single unit!
In your suggestion, are fragments of the memory compressed separately, then decompressed on the fly for use?

I thought large scale distributed servers were more bandwidth limited based on this paper (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/talks/dean-keyn...)
That's interesting that it's hard to connect QuickBooks POS to QuickBooks, you'd think they would have figured that one out :) They acquired QB POS so that might be why it's not seamless.

On another e-commerce project we set up an integration with QuickBooks so we're looking to port that over here.

I have a feeling that Intuit wouldn't take to kindly to their merchants using us, but that's an interesting idea. We're currently working with a variety of processors so it's a possibility.
During that period, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to create my own outside Facebook applications. However, my would-be-colleague didn’t know the answer and the HR person didn’t answer. So I suspended working on my in-progress apps and doing any writing about Facebook for my clients for most of the latter half of 2009, losing out on earnings I badly needed.

For what it's worth, when I interviewed with Facebook in 2008 I was told that it wouldn't be a problem to keep maintaining and working on my Facebook apps outside of work. I guess writing about Facebook might be a bit more difficult.

Also, I got an answer only a day or two after the on-site interviews. I wouldn't say the whole process moved quickly, but definitely not unreasonably slow.
If you find this interesting, check out the full page by the author as he continues to think about the issues and goes back and forth on them: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
we used them for publictivity. though they say they could scale, they couldn't handle what we had for our duplicate contacts processing algorithm. Everytime it would run, we started to get: no suitable nodes to serve your request. I took this as: "we can't scale to meet your demand".
I'm not sure what he's talking about. I don't mean for that to sound snarky. I just feel like I'm being yelled at when I honestly don't know what I did wrong. When I start building a web app I start with standards, assuming that my early adopters will likely be using Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Mobile Safari usually Just Works(tm). Is he talking about custom iPhone stylesheets or what?
Agree. I think you're charging too little. Remember that you're worth _more_ to a business owner than a traditional POS because you make all sorts of problem go away which currently require $150/hour (or whatever) on-site visits.
Thanks Stephen, great info and highly relevant the scale issues.
Thanks for the feedback - that's definitely a concern we've thought about. The key point is that the free version requires you to use one of our processing partners. They subsidize the cost so while it's free to you, they pay us every month depending on your transaction total.
It's not "typical", but 1+ month isn't uncommon, especially at large companies that require the group actually hiring you to first make up their own mind, then clear it through (possibly several) higher levels of management. Intel seems to not infrequently take 2 months or so, from anecdotal evidence, even for successful applicants (not just forgetting to reject unsuccessful ones).

(It'd be interesting if anyone could compile some data.)
Using Concentrate for the Pomodoro Technique on OS X
But the comment on a status sticks to the status, not as a random flat message somewhere in a twitter-stream.

So as opposed to on twitter you do get some context and you know what they replied to. I say that is "threaded" enough to make it useful.
Remind HN: Paul Graham will be live on Mixergy tmrw(2/9) @11:00AM PST
http://mixergy.com/live/
I agree with the idea. If you don't mind my asking, how did it compare, cost-wise? I've seen comparisons of "one third less", but I've never actually shopped the market.

(And no, I'm not a cheap b######. My support is based on the lack of exploitation. But I wonder how pricing in the market for "natural" stones affects pricing in the synthetic market, if at all.)
Yikes thanks for sending that over. That doesn't look too good . I'll get started on having an alternative in there for people without flash.
The google style long-term interrogation is a major turn off. I wouldn't even consider working somewhere that interviews in that style. One six hour white board grilling is bad enough. Two is the limit. More than that... seriously, piss off. Why do people go through all that - days and days of evaluation?
Do customers want a "web-based" system or simply one that they need not upgrade manually and which stores their data in the cloud? I ask simply because it might be feasible to deploy some client-side software to solve this problem. It's going to be run on dedicated hardware, right?
Just because they're officially supported, doesn't mean they aren't there to work around the syntax's obvious limitations. I've been tracking Haml's development for a very long time I the history of many of these features is a result of users' frustration with the syntax.
A respected journal needs to be able to pay for someone to review a paper before publication. I suspect that setting up a foundation to do this for free would be a great charity, but without some sort of backing you can't create high quality.
Well, I seem to always have formatting issues with haml, though probably because I haven't worked enough with haml yet to internalize the whitespace rules. No such issues with html of course. Not a huge advantage, but can make it annoying when you're first starting with haml.
Displaying a non-mobile site on a screen that small is...of less than perfect utility.
Ask HN: Is using humor in your pitch deck a good idea?
This would be great. I love my Droid, but multi-touch zooming is the one iPhone feature that I still envy.
World's Tallest Fail The Burj Khalifa Is Temporarily Closed
There's a spectrum. Lots of companies have that policy - response within 24-48 hours after an on-site interview. Its sensible.
what a joke! Everything is like 3-4 years old, how convenient for the administration to be able to slowly leak out data reports on a cherry picking basis until mandatory publication. I hope people don't trust this junk.
I think grellas can answer this better than I can. I imagine it's something like what happens with stocks: a broker can say "I like IBM. I think it's going up from here," but has to footnote it with "This is not advice, and is no substitute for your own research. Ask a financial advisor before etc."
As far as I know they... don't. MySQL is used more as a persistent store for bits, not as a relational database.
I don't believe iPhone or Android devices have a user-facing toggle... there might be some way to hack it out, but I'm not sure.

I don't think it's ever been used on either device, so it hasn't exactly been a burning issue yet; the stated purpose is only in the event of a highly malicious application.
Loopt's Location-based Ads Hit the iPhone, 'Minority Report' Here We Come
Quality, a user problem
They use cache components to scale their writes, since they have so many writes. I assume this means that instead of hitting disk for every write, data in the cache is updated instead, and asynchronously saved to disk. Really, this pattern should be generalized, in some sort of memcached extension/fork or something.
I prefer to use the free pomodoro app together with Steve Lambert's SelfControl

http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com/ & http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/
So it is probably inevitable that the price of diamonds will plunge, but there are still amazing possibilities with synthetic gems. It should be possible to create synthetics with careful control of impurities so that they have designer optical properties.

It reminds me of failed business venture by Kary Mullis the guy who got the nobel prize for PCR. He was going to create a business that would embed the cloned DNA of a celebrity or deceased ancestor into a piece of jewelry for a fee. While this business was unsuccessful I think that if people keep experimenting with this kind of thing someone will win big.
I'm not sure what that would even mean. JIT is an optimization for virtual machines. It compiles VM code (such as Java bytecode) or interpreted code to machine code at runtime. C already compiles to machine code.

In order to do anything resembling JIT, you would have to insert a runtime where one does not already exist.
Why is recruiting so broken??!!
One touch email handling
Restaurant is definitely something we've thought about, but there's a lot of trick things a restaurant can need. Retail has easier requirements so that's where we started.

And I am totally aware of the POS vs. Point of Sale debate, I laugh about it too. Unfortunately it doesn't always fit, like on the home page. Everywhere else we refer to competitors as "POS" and us as "Point of Sale" :)
Everyone and their mom and pop in India, those who have nicer phones, have a Nokia. But, yes, you're right, here in US I don't see them very often. I'm only taking about the smartphones.

The cheaper phone market in India is pretty fragmented.
Given that he wouldn't be a "software engineer" (TN-visa compatible) and a contract employee, I don't see how the USCIS would have let him work in California (unless he's an american citizen or something - the article implies he's Canadian). Perhaps it took facebook a while to actually figure that out.
I have AdBlock+ enabled and I didn't see that flash header either. There was no giant blank space for me though.
I'm inspired to try. I'll go over the wordpress template later and see how lean I can make it.
A lot of people are saying "the difference with IE6 is that the iPhone is standards-based and open," but I don't think that's right. The problem that PPK is pointing out is that developing for a single browser is bad, full stop. It doesn't matter if the browser is the holy incarnation of HTML5 itself, if you're not testing a wide variety of browsers - or worse, relying on proprietary extensions that you know not to be compatible - you're making the same mistake that was made with IE6.
I'm not that old but I do remember the day when my college BITNET email address could finally gateway to the Internet. Seeing dots in the domain part of the address was weird.
Nitpick, but the USPS does NOT, and has not directly taken US taxpayer dollars since the 1980s. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service )
Google Office in Pictures
While I was in undergrad for my CS degree at NC State University, I took an "Innovating in Technology" course. We were split into groups and tasked with coming up with a startup idea/concept, and then spent the remainder of the course working on it. Throughout the semester, our professor provided thought experiments, examples, and principles we should keep in mind.

In the middle and near the end of the semester, an angel investor came in to hear our ideas, and provided helpful feedback for our ideas and presentations.

While this course wasn't as extensive as the programs the article discusses, I think it was a great intro to entrepreneurship, and I found it to be the most helpful and influential course I took in undergrad. Personally, I would like to see the CS degree at NCSU have some more classes on the subject.
If you're willing to allow FTP connections and create an account for WordPress to fix itself sure. But I'm not willing to support FTP and also not trusting that WP can't be hacked in a manner that will either then cough up my FTP details or download a hacker's copy of WP.
The Biggest Successes Are Often Bred From Failures
Jason Fried interview at Big Think
Yes, there are many sites that are designed for mobile devices that target the iPhone specifically instead of all mobile devices.
iPhone users spend money like drunken sailors when it comes to apps. Websites want in on that gravy train too.
21st-Century Shooters Are No Country for Old Men
You seem to have to give them an FTP login to your site to do this. Or am I missing something?
The pain you feel selling diamonds is much more due to the huge markup charged by retail jewelers than anything De Beers has done.

It might be true that they're doomed as long term investments, but if you buy a diamond for a fair price (e.g. at Blue Nile), I'd expect you to be able to turn around and sell it for >75% of what you paid.
Except that ActiveX and Silverlight are arguably products that require adoption. -webkit extensions are not of this nature.
Microsoft still beats Apple in cash and investments, for now
A well written article that does a good job of examining all sides. Although, understandably, it's not clearly explained that Flash is a proprietary format that has different levels of performance based on the OS running it.

Flash is the best solution for web video at the moment but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be working toward something better. Hopefully if Google opens up the O2 video license we can get some consensus for HTML5 video and really move forward on replacing Flash as the de-facto video standard.
Is that even their core competency? j/k
RedNotebook 0.9.2 su Ubuntu
Did you catch the superbowl commercials last night?

Done well, humor can be a key component of a marketing strategy.
If the phone is worth targetting, then target it. I'm just saying that arguing Nokia's total phone market share seems like a sort of sketchy way to extrapolate priorities for smartphone-enabled websites.

Does the Nokia S60v3 have large market share worth targeting? The reason Android and iPhone markets have such gravity is that they're large and relatively homogenous consumers of rich web content from the mobile space; maximum bang for minimum buck.

I really think that this article is just wrong, and its willingness to confuse rich-web-enabled smartphones with phones that can barely display unstyled webpages is what drives me to that conclusion.
Google Runs Parisian Love Ad On Super Bowl
MySQL has this in the form of the startup option innodb_txn_commit. It performs all writes to memory and flushes them to disk in 1-second batches. It's a good way to scale up to 000's of writes per second per machine.
It seems to me that using Gears (or similar technologies) is definately a must-have.
Google to Add Social Feature to Gmail
Humor helps if you're already doing well, and hurts otherwise.
I agree in general, but wanted to add one small caveat that I think is interesting: PLoS Biology is (a) open access, with a Creative Commons license; and (b) has rapidly established a reputation as one of the top journals in biology.
I'd not seen this - thanks for the pointer.
Keep in mind that this article was apparently written in 1982 so it's nearly 30 years old. Not that this invalidates it, but you should take into account that times change (although, with diamonds, they are largely the same).

Personally, my wife and I decided to buy a synthetic diamond for her engagement ring. She didn't want me to spend alot of money on it (knowing that whatever I spend is really "our" money once we are married anyways and thought it silly to tie up so much money in something you'd never actually sell). She didn't even want a diamond since they were so expensive in general. In the end we found a company that made synthetics that we liked and were able to get a nice sized stone for very little money. It gets the requisite social oohs and aahs and we don't have to explain why we think spending money on a diamond ring is silly.
Luckily for you, Sass 3 will have a new CSS-like syntax. You can even use it right now if you want: http://github.com/nex3/haml/commits/scss. I believe it works great with the Compass 0.10 prerelease.
Yay! ReadWriteWeb (aka, me) just posted on this too: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_creating_twitter...

The best part is, they've invited me/us to the Googleplex tomorrow for an event explaining "some innovations in two of our most popular products."

I'm so excited! It'll be my first time at the Mountain View campus. =)
What's astonishing is that, in the 28 years since this article was published, De Beers and the retail diamond market have failed to collapse.

I'll readily admit to not knowing one bit of information about the wholesale or investment diamond markets, but given the picture painted, De Beers must have something really special going on.
Introducing TypeFront: a distribution platform for fonts on the web
Design your blog like you'd design a product
Is it possible to sign up without Flash being enabled? Admittedly I'm currently on a Flash-hate marathon at the moment, and most people have it installed and enabled, but surely it's best to go with HTML for something so important?
Maybe developers aren't just obsessed with the iPhone: maybe they just don't want to develop for something that makes thier work look like shit.

Oh you mean how people decided to develop for MSIE6 only because Netscape was kinda weak in comparison?

I think you missed the central point of this guy's rant.
Are you a designer?
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?