skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's $100 plus the cost of a mac to write iPhone apps.
I don't know what you're smoking aaron. I just did a site:mahalo.com and came across http://www.mahalo.com/dumptruckhitsbridge . What you haven't done with your post is provide an alternative avenue for me to pursue when investigating dump trucks hitting bridges. for shame.
Hate ChatRoulette? Then You Hate The Internet
ChatRoulette is everything we love and hate about the Internet, all rolled into one
The slides aren't that great, to be honest. You don't really miss much.
Just to state the obvious but all fizzbuzz really tests for is whether someone is familiar with the modulo operator or not. Arguably any good programmer should know about it, but I think it's not a very comprehensive check on the knowledge of any one particular individual. Suppose for instance, that the only bit of code someone has ever written was something which required them to get very familiar with the modulo operator, but virtually nothing else. They could pass fizzbuzz, but not much else.

Note: The author of the 'non-programming programmer post' saw took my comment down when I had posted it there (which is why I posted it here). Guess there's no knocking of the fizzbuzz test allowed... :p
Two interesting notes:

Looks like it was IE6 exploits : "the code [...] exploited a security loophole in IE6".

And title is very misleading. A hacker was found who wrote some code used by the Hackers "He didn't launch the attacks himself, and the U.S. cybersecurity team that tracked him down said that he didn't want his work to be used for attacks of this nature and magnitude."
This gets an upvote simply for using the word "beaut" in type.
Information is Beautiful: When Sea Levels Attack
While it's always a bit annoying to see a meme take up article slots on Hacker News regularly, I don't mind this one. I see sites like Mahalo as doing massive disservice to huge numbers of people --

* thousands of AdWords advertisers that have paid for their ads to be matched with content sites, not scraper pages with a huge ad to text ratio

* thousands of publishers whose work is being scraped, aggregated and outranked without as much as a backlink

* millions of web searchers that are hitting these pages instead of the real sources of the content they were searching for

And calling out companies that harm the fabric of the web for everyone else is worth doing.
Things I Hate About Agile Development
I wish someone would summarize this fight for those of us who haven't been following it blow-by-blow.
Nice reality check. One quibble I would have is that I think the pleaserobme phenomenon is less "culture of fear" and more just part of the age-old Internet game of gotcha. There's a constant undercurrent online of trying to find a nit to pick with any successful venture to bring it down, sort of a weird competitive thing.
The Spy at Harriton High
Ahh...now i remember where i parked my car...
Fancy seeing another person from Bloomington, IN here!

I applaud Wal-mart for making local food more accessible. There are plenty of places that could use more cheap produce in their towns.

It's understandable that Bloomingfoods (the local organic grocery store) is so expensive since they are paying for the prime retail location space in town compared to Wal-Mart which is out in the county. You are paying for the luxury of walking or biking to their stores - Wal-mart is only accessible by Car or Bus. Trading convenience for price.

For a slightly different trade-off, there are about 40 or 50 people who just started buying in a food buying club once a month directly from the distributor that Bloomingfoods buys from (UNFI). They don't have much in the way of local fresh produce (we get that from the farmer's markets and CSAs), but the canned goods, bulk items and hosehold items are typically between 30-50% cheaper than Bloomingfoods and the pickup is right in town. If you are interested, let me know and I can get you the info.
I don't know about wifi tethering, but USB and Bluetooth tethering are both supported by PDANet (http://www.junefabrics.com/android/index.php). The iPhone version of PdaNet requires a jailbroken iPhone. The Android version is in the Android Market and works directly on any stock, unmodified Android phone.

BTW.. Another difference between the iPhone and Android platforms. If an app is not in the iPhone apps store, there is literally no way for a user to install it on a non-jailbroken iPhone. With Android, it only requires checking one checkbox in the Android settings to allow you to install non-market apps on an Android phone. No rooting, jail-breaking, etc. required.
New credit card laws 2010: What you need to know about credit card reform
Little mention of gaming; how's the Android app market on that front? The iPhone is getting popular DS ports. And they're even significantly cheaper than the originals. I'm not the type that cares to bother with more than one portable device, so the iPhone being a gaming device that is popular with big developers is quite the plus.
Here's one thing to consider : Google's algorithms for detecting the actual value of clicks for advertisers has improved greatly over the past few years.

If Mahalo’s traffic was utter crap, it would be dropped.
I thought Demand Media was all about original content?
Undertaker Burned In Pyro Accident Video
care to share the link to it ?
If Schmidt Thinks Privacy Doesn't Matter-He Should Post His Own Browsing History
Here's Who's Paying For All Your Free Content Online
How can Google NOT look at that sample page Aaron has displayed? That is truly terrible :( Also, Matt Cutts is generally very honest and public, but in this case, uncharacteristically quiet.
Why isn't there more iPhone/Android applications that use speech recognition? 
I was going through iPhone App Store and wondering why isn't there more apps that use speech recognition? Are there any good libraries (free or commercial) for speech recognition?
This post title says everything that's in the article – save yourself the read.

Also – who’s George Schmidt (from article) – does author mean Eric Schmidt?
The authors arguments simply don't hold water IMO. He notes how incorporating became expensive due to an unexpected need to offer a stock purchase plan. Is he saying that incorporating forced him to offer an options plan? Its my understanding that such programs are entirely optional.

His point about finding an expensive lawyer to "build a relationship" for making introductions is equally puzzling. He might have found that such lawyer wasn't worth the investment, but that's not a reason for a startup to not incorporate.

For me, liability protection is extremely valuable. If you have no assets, perhaps the liability protection isn't worth it.
Is it really an insignificant event, though? A foreign government staging cyber attacks on human rights activists and corporations?

I've done a lot of reporting on China over the past year, and yes, and lot of it's been negative coverage having to do with censorship and this Google debacle. When China gives me something awesome to write about, I'll cover that fairly, as well.

For example, Richard MacManus is going to be having a conversation with Ai Weiwei (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei) in a couple weeks, and I know there will be some positive news from that.
Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day and GROWING.
Python is one of the languages supported by the Android Scripting Environment: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

I believe ASE is using CPython running as native code, with some kind of bridge into the Dalvik VM.

I'm not sure what the status if JPython on Android is, but my understanding is that for many JVM languages it's non-trivial to port to Android, since many of them are expecting to be able to JIT to JVM bytecodes. This is problematic since Android doesn't use JVM bytecodes, it uses Dalvik bytecodes.
A Peace Corps for Programmers
> i'm having a hard time getting through this guy's review since there is so much bias and incorrect information.

Sir, stop it. You're accusing someone of bias and then demanding they share your preferences. Nothing you've claimed here is actually strictly incorrect or "biased" towards iphone anymore than the man's opinion.

Examples for your consideration:

1. He said, "I prefer one button." You said, "but i need four for frequent use in apps!" Incorrect: No. Explicit iPhone bias? No (his explanation is reasoned and applicable to other phones).

2. He said, "On phones, I don't want multitasking due to performance and power considerations." You said, "macs multitask what now?" This is a non-sequitur. The behavior of a desktop OS has little bearing on the behavior of mobile OSs.

3. He said, "I've come to agree with Apple about multi-tasking." You said, "okay but still put it in." Not really an argument either way. What's more, you are strictly incorrect; Apple has implemented multi-tasking in the phone.

You are lowering the quality of discourse on hackernews with these histrionics. It's clear you can make a neutral and consistent argument (i.e., requests for Pandora to run in-background).

It is just a phone. Can we please be civil?
50,000,000 is a lot.

But

2,500,000,000 text messages are sent each day in the USA through wireless networks when measured in early 2009.

Source:

http://www.textmessageblog.mobi/2009/02/19/text-message-stat...

http://www.freetext.com/blogs/ringtones/over-one-trillion-te...
They are about "original content" in the Google sense. It's not quality content, just well-SEO'd stuff that is 1) good enough for Google to think it's grammatically-correct English, but 2) bad enough that contextual ads on the article will still get clicks.
Of course. But my point is that cleaning fuel is an energy intensive task. Moreover, in the past it has resulted in additional CO2 being output.
Programming language power versus genome: can they be compared?
The article provided an interesting history of the Japanese auto industry, went into a fair level of detail on statistical control, then completely choked with a couple of lines of opinion on "software," as though it's an abstract substance that we can blame all our problems on (like witches, republicans, or Al Gore). It's like the author hit his or her word limit with all the history and didn't have time or space to coherently tie things together.

The author should have done some research into software quality control techniques to complement the SQC/6sigma background, such as MISRA-C (the safer subset of C used in automotive systems) and unit testing. Another page of text and a bit less whining about the good old days of the metal bashers and this could be a decent article.

P.S. Thank-you pg for creating HN. The comments on here are, without fail, better than anything on the sites referenced. The overall tone and intelligence of comments on a site are a reflection on a publication's average reader, and from the looks of this article, The Economist has nothing on Hacker News.
Remember Magnesium If You Want to Remember
Conversely, this is also why many people are poor in the first place: not Wal-Mart by itself, but the entire credo of producing cheap crap cheaply for better margins.

This locust-like scheme is also, obviously, unsustainable even in the ideal case. While there are definite benefits to the people in the process of exploiting regions with lower standards of living and moving on to the next region when the old one is bled dry - i.e. when their standard has moved up beyond the narrow margin - sooner or later the world will run out of dirt-poor people, replaced by just regular-poor people which means increased production costs. There is a potential, then, to make up the margins from volume (i.e. decreasing per-item profit), but this is certainly not something most locusts take into account in their current business practices. It is a bit too far into the future.

The second concern is more structural: will the labour colonies be able to utilise the infrastructure left behind by the locusts (assuming the locals still actually have control of their own resources, factories and so on) to become "first world" or forever be left subordinate to others? It seems quite possible that having these industries implanted in societies - rather than having evolved locally - may not allow them to become fully independent, equal players.

Summa summarum: while some if not much of the critique of Wal-Mart is a bit silly or short-sighted (granting the premise that the world is capitalist for the time being), it is not all borne out of a sense of superiority of the latte-drinking elites or whatever the counter"argument" often is.
I absolutely love Walmart.

I live in China. Walmart is by far the most hygienic grocery store here. Everybody attacks Walmart for its size and for running small players out of business. But you know what that economy of scale allows it to do? Have a completely cold chain for its meat supply. No other grocery chain (both indigenous ones and other international chains like Carrefour) in China can do that because the costs for them would be too expensive and they would lose money.

So Walmart significantly raises the bar for meat safety in a country of 1.3 billion.
Hacking secrets
The 'Do.convert' trick is much better than previous monkey-patching approaches I've seen. Really clever - I wonder if you could feasibly do this in Python or Ruby as well? I'm pretty sure it would work in Python.

The general approach here seems quite solid, though I personally still prefer promises - it sounds like they're a non-option because of some particular dependency that comes with them, which is important to address if you want Node to be lightweight. It's good to see them offer a relatively complete set of primitives instead of just callback sugar - Having access to things like Do.parallel means it's much easier to exploit multicore without having to think about it.
I really don't think it is necessary to bring in deliberate obfuscation as an explanation. The fact is that writing clearly is hard. It takes work. And tenure/promotion/etc. decisions are often made on output, not on clarity.

So, say I'm a researcher. I've written a paper. It's a mess. I can put some more time into it, rewriting it to be more understandable, or I can use that time to do research & writing for another paper. In the former case, I get one clear paper; in the latter, I get two unclear ones. The people on my tenure committee are going to read my publications list, but not the papers themselves. Which scenario makes me look better to them?
Right—it hasn't even been proved that the decimal expansion of pi doesn't eventually revert to a digit sequence containing only 1s and 0s. (Or any other two digits.)
>Is it really an insignificant event, though? A foreign government staging cyber attacks on human rights activists and corporations?

You do realize that this has been going on for many year by many countries?
Not only are they NOT noindexing them (which they said they would do a couple years ago and a couple weeks ago), but they are still submitting them to Google via an XML sitemap

Likeso http://tinyurl.com/ydyo3ud
An interesting article. Unfortunately the results are biased unless they are double blind tests.
Applying Persuasion to Email Creative: Great Conversion Tip
I wonder how many of those text messages were tweets.
Today's news read by a BBC Micro.
Bitspace Launches HTML5-Based Streaming Music Player and Backup Service
Sadly, basic history is not taught with much subtlety. Your children's children may one day be taught this as truth.
i've heard from people who've been to walmarts in china and america that walmarts in china are nicer than the ones in america and are marketed as relatively higher-scale than how they're marketed in america.

i'd take that with a grain of salt, though.
This is essentially a solid-state microturbine.

You can order a 65-kW microturbine from Capstone Turbine Corp for about $40,000 USD.

Natgas-powered microturbines have commonly been used for distributed power generation in industrial settings (hotels, hospitals, etc...)

See Ingersoll Rand: http://www.ingersollrandproducts.com/IS/Category.aspx-am_en-...

See Captsone Turbine Corp: http://www.microturbine.com/prodsol/solutions/chp.asp

Try Googling for "microturbine".

[edit] Also, "Microturbines: Applications for Distributed Energy Systems" is a good book on the subject. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Microturbines-Applications-Distributed...
Sprint developed a web application for law enforcement to track people, and they don't require a warrent just a claim that it's an emergency, an 'emergency' constituting things such as labor union protests.

God this is horrible for so many reasons.
IMHO, his main point was incorporate after you are dealing with someone else's money. I would wait till the moment I have someone willing to pay me for my product/service. Until that point, it just gets in the way.
Its really a shame how low Google's standards are for AdSense. I've tried advertising in the content network several times, but each time I end up wasting so much time blocking MFA sites that I give up.
The Randomly-generated Conference
The about page is great:

http://www.bbcmicronews.co.uk/main/about

They use a messaging system with a "cluster" of Micros to generate the spoken news articles. They even convert tweets too:

http://www.bbcmicronews.co.uk/twitter
It depends what you mean by "pattern", but it hasn't been shown that pi is a normal number. (I.e., that every sequence of digits is equally likely to occur.)
Jakob Nielsen: Progress in Usability: Fast or Slow?
The rub is, if Google were to block all of Mahalo, a lawsuit would surely be filed.
No, their quality of service is about the same (although, like McDonald's and Pizza Hut, they are upscale here, simply because of the different average economic level of a consumer). But the cold chain thing is real - my business partner was a consultant for a major retail chain and got access to all the interesting info about the market.
There is a large incentive for google to send traffic to Maholo. The low quality of the pages causes the user to want to exit the page. What do they click on when leaving? the adsense ads! I'm not saying Google are going out of their way to support this but it is easy to see why they may be hesitant to penalize Maholo.
I agree with this. I incorporated a business that I really didn't need to and it just ended up costing me a ton of cash I could have used, and added on countless little complications to my life which I'm still trying to untie from after having dissolved it.

If you're not dealing with other people's money (investors), and you aren't running a business that is raking in solid revenue yet or not in a really vulnerable position legally, its just not worth it...
Its not fair to lump Demand in with Mahalo. Demand's business model is filling in holes with their own original content, not scraping (or "aggregating") other people's content.

AFAIK, Google views their relationship as symbiotic, not parasitic.
"If Mahalo’s traffic was utter crap, it would be dropped."

That's not even close to true. If it were, there would be no AdSense for parked pages program. Their eye is still very much on their own bottom line, not the advertisers.
Act like a fun, friendly consumer service provider if you're in enterprise IT
My conversion rates from the content network have never been as high as search. I try new campaigns targeting both networks every once in a while but always end up either opting out or setting a much lower bid on the content side.
Anyway, we're deleting any short pages right now and noindexing any short pages.

this will all be done in the next 72 hours and then there will be nothing to complain or write about after that Aaron!

Thanks for making us better.
"tape made by a privacy activist who sneaked into the event."
Anyone else find this statement ironic?
Download Free TYPO3 Templates by Andreas Viklund
Download free TYPO3 Templates with t3d files.
Very cool, detailed slides.

I think his notes demonstrate how wildly the 'optimal' settings for a scripting runtime can vary based on use case - 500K slots in a slab makes perfect sense for rails, but 10K also makes pretty good sense for running ruby from the command line to execute a tiny script.

One thing that caught my eye - I think according to slide 52, at startup a rails app is using over 3625840 bytes of heap just to represent newline nodes generated from source code? Am I interpreting the data right, or is he just counting the actual nodes and not the RVALUEs attached to them? Kind of funny to think about optimizing memory usage in a rails app by stripping out superfluous newlines.
I do not think anyone is asking for all of Mahalo to be blocked. The major issue is the insane amount of auto-generated pages that are not given a noindex call and are also added to the site map xml file.

These actions appear to be conscious choices to make sure that google will index these pages, which according to several sources, have nothing but "scraped" content and are therefore spam.
The question is: why doesn't google do anything about this? There are countless such pages. Why not just blacklist domains? Or artificially give them lower pagerank?

Or is it okay as long as they get ad-sense money?
Therac-25: When software reliability really does matter
By contrast, Google was averaging 400 million search queries per day in 2009.
I find it shocking that so many people rely on a single (centralized) source for their communication. The internet was built to be de-centralized (see how DNS, email, tcp/ip works), but now we are moving to a centralized, unreliable means of communication..
Seems more like you hit one extreme of shelling out too much money up front and now are advocating the other extreme.

My philosophy: hold off till you get your first customer contract OR take on some genuine liability(ie. DMCA).

How I'm handling it...
1. I incorporated my startup after getting the contract. It cost me $180 bucks.
2. I told my good lawyer friend who was after me to go through him that it would make more sense to consider him after we raked in more contract over the next few months.
3. I have not gotten a bank account yet. I'll do so soon as I get the first check(off the contract).
4. I do have a potential cofounder I'm thinking of bringing on board. I am unsure how to go about his paperwork. In initial stages, we'll probably just make a simple specific written agreement along with a set milestone by when we'll officially redo the paperwork.

In general, I like to let revenue/liability/funding dictate any lawyer work.
Same here in South Carolina.
And Mahalo would lose. Google penalizes SEO spammers hundreds of times every day. It's very easy to see that Mahalo does not follow the rules.
While I see your point, if your business gets sued, you personally could be far worse off than the cost of incorporating.
Another contributing factor is that most papers target an expert in the field, so a lot of information is missing that is critical for people outside the field. When you try to read a paper outside your field, the missing bits of context and information make it really difficult to understand.
I don't know what the situation is in the US, but here in the UK incorporation is so utterly trivial to do and offers such benefit that it is something of a no-brainer for any venture which has even the smallest risk of unexpected liabilities. Although you can spend hundreds of pounds on incorporation, you can just as easily do it for 25 quid.

The side benefits of incorporation can be significant. Many component manufacturers provide more resources to registered companies. Access to distributors and lines of credit is far better. Many potential customers won't even talk to you if you're not a registered company.

Maybe the OP needs a better lawyer, maybe the US needs better law, I don't know.
Encouraging open source could land you in trouble
Voice recognition is more or less included in Android. With the new updates, any text box can be filled with voice text. According to http://www.4feets.com/2009/04/speech-recognition-in-android-... (first hit on Google) it looks like there's a class that you can use as well.