skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was going to include Israel (I hear really awesome things about it). I hope to visit sometime soon. But I don't know anyone who could do the guest essay for Israel. I am hoping to do a follow up post sometime with guest essays including Israel, Brazil, China, Russia and others.
Site loads fine on my Verizon Wireless Droid.
to be honest i 'am capable of solving the above problem without any dificulty as they are pretty straight forward.to answer your question
i don't have the time to go to a university nor a local library as i need to work to feed my family.but i can buy sufficient time to study on my own .anyways thanks a lot for your advice ,if you have further recomendations i'll be really glad to hear from you
> Those users won't complain to you, they'll just switch.

In my particular case, I only make things that don't exist already i.e. I'm not making yet another twitter-posting app or social bookmarking app. So I highly doubt my target users will switch simply because my app doesn't work nicely on a browser I don't even know about.

Also the solution to this would be to show a small notification if my app is being run in an untested environment and let the user complain with a 1-click form if they wish. I think most people who have a bad experience will let me know that is the case.
All stats I see (and I looked at quite a bit of them) have iPhone traffic at 50% or more of mobile trafic. See e.g. Morgan Stanly: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/how-the-iphone-is-blowing-e...
While I agree you shouldn't _exclude_ the smaller browsers, it's not strange to optimize for your largest market share.
PPK is right Nokia sells a lot of phones. However, people who buy nokia's aren't _using_ them to browse the web: They use them for phonecalls. Iphone users do.
How to a Geeky Girl’s Heart
The tech / startup world is filled with lots of people who are interested "building something people want" but with no clue about monetization. (Twitter, or just about any company with no revenue/profit model...) Articles like this provide contrast -- people who've figured out how to monetize the web (but aren't necessarily adding a ton of value). Affiliate marketers have at least figured out that "unique visitors" or "active users" doesn't pay the bills like it did in the late '90s. It does seem shady / etc, but I think there's lessons to be learned.

I think many in this community are hoping that there's a middle ground, with both value creation ("building something people want") and extracting that value via monetization.
Have some of you on the moral high ground ever considered the ethics of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of investor money, promising a huge payout, and then squandering it? No? That's what hundreds of angel-backed startups do every year.

Affiliates create value and jobs for their customers and contribute in a positive way to the economy.

How much value has your zero-revenue startup created for anyone?
This title no verb.
What's Programming?
I had a Nokia phone for years and then a Motorala phone and then a couple of windows mobile phones from HTC and others. But, in none of them I have ever downloaded an app, leave alone having the interest to code up an app. With my iPod touch however (don't want to deal with ATT) I have downloaded dozens of apps and feel good to code on it (though I had to buy my first Mac for this and had a hard time with Objective C's syntax).

I used to work in the windows mobile development team at Microsoft and at that time used to have a dismissive tone about iPhone and said it was just an expensive version of HTC Touch. But, once I started using it and downloading apps, I found the real difference. It is in a whole different league and engineers in other phone companies know that. (I can speak for atleast one of them)
the only thing it's really ideal for is software engineers writing their own HTML. in professional team environments in my experience designers always like to be able to at least dip in to HTML, and as "illogical" as this might seem to a programmer, they are never going to learn something like HAML - it's just too complex and programmery.
excellent philosphical thoughts.really makes a lot of sense.
Social Music Player TuneWiki Raises Funding From Motorola Ventures, Others
Facebook profiles + augmented reality, in Python
In four years of reading Cassini updates, they have never once mentioned worrying about software errors due to cosmic rays. And this is without any atmospheric protection at all; we have 100 miles of atmosphere.

They have mentioned that their solid state relays trip 2 or 3 times a year due to cosmic rays. I'm not sure how comparable those are to DIMMs, but it does suggest that the author's claim of one error per day is a bit off...
> And most people's domains hadn't reached the point where just using initials was unworkable.

Seems like my first email address (especially university VAX accounts) back then were even more cryptic and included some bizarre Godzilla reference like djd984kd@mothra.someschool.edu.
Evaluate the New KATO Demo
Yeah, I guess it's a bad time to switch careers.
That apps that power Mingus 0.9
...and you would have ended up at community college. HS guidance counselors and college admission officers get this type of smartass thinking all the time and the answer never changes. Anyone can take the GED, it proves you aren't a complete waste of space. Anyone with half a brain can also graduate. What separates you from all the other mouth breathers is what you did with those 4 years. I, technically, finished highschool in 2 years. I spent the following 2 taking college prep and AP courses.

And that is how you go to college.
FTA:

Inline your HTML: That’s right. Just put some HTML into your Haml document. Don’t be afraid, it’ll be just fine.
Yeah the "faster than they should" was kinda weird... I'd rather define it as an increase in the money supply.
I don't think this is significant. Try asking a 12-year old about mechanical engineering or accounting or just about any other job that doesn't have a strong public face and I imagine you'll get the same response.
Any recommendations to use with a GWT application?
KATO is a software agent platform surfaced as your online personal assistant. Save time online by delegating your routine and mundane tasks to KATO. We are rewriting KATO as a GWT app. The link takes you to a blog post about a recent upgrade to the prototype. Please evaluate the prototype and provide feedback here. Thanks!
And that's a red herring, because unless you keep a designer on staff, in real systems designer markup never hits the wires. Even pure HTML still gets broken up into templates and partials.

Software developers may not have to design their own HTML, but they sure as hell have to write it.
looks like a well done site. i've bookmarked it!
clang and llvm-gcc are two front-ends which translate C code into LLVM intermediate representation. LLVM itself optimizes that IR and emits (statically or at runtime) object code, C code, etc. An example of using LLVM to JIT C code can be found in this presentation by Nate Begeman: http://llvm.org/devmtg/2008-08/Begeman_EfficientJIT.pdf at the 2008 LLVM dev meeting. There is video linked off of this page as well: http://llvm.org/devmtg/2008-08/

There is less incentive to JIT languages like C because so much can be determined statically, unlike more dynamic languages. It can still buy you something if you use runtime specialization to e.g. make different, optimized versions of functions based on the values of the arguments.
Spear Fishing for iPhone Brings Awesome 3D Graphics
There are many possible reasons an iPhone app would be a hit. There are apps that receive a lot of hype from the blogesphere mainly because of their developer, there are apps that provide a truly new functionality to your iPhone, such as VOIP calls for example. There are games that are just so fun, you can’t put them down, and then there are apps like Spear Fishing that give you a close to real life experience of what it would be like to explore the deep parts of the ocean and actually go spear fishing.
We are much more shielded on Earth.
Haha! Oh Lou.

Nostalgia makes for great motivation. I still remember staying up late critiquing some of these.

The important part, though, is that we are now far beyond the point where mobile devices need pseudo 3d for games. And even Lou moved on to OpenGL eventually.

I wonder what he's up to.
It Is Now Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off The U.S. National Debt
I'm half programmer, half Web developer. I'm great at both (I don't mind saying). Being from both worlds, I don't get the need for HAML. HTML is so easy as it is. From my point of view, any programmer who can't write HTML with proficiency is deficient somehow.
Heh, I'm so old I remember being on the first mailing list on the Internet back in 1972-73, which was (suitably meta) a mailing list about mail programs & related issues.

(It was based out of BBN, whence came the first email.)

The first mail servers were rather primitive: they were just (pre-TCP/IP) FTP-like servers that would open your local mailbox (on TOPS-10 in our case, at HARV-10) and append to it. Lots of interesting locking issues...
Getting It: What Makes a Great Software Engineer
These specifically? Hmm. I think I don't have the source to Ventura Heat anymore. I probably should ask him and write one. :P
I haven't seen this link on this thread yet so here we go:

http://people.redhat.com/drepper/sha-crypt.html
Ulrich Drepper's implementation of a work factor in SHA password hashing. He addresses a popular article on bcrypt() and how using SHA allows one to follow NIST guidelines and still have the advantage of a time-consuming algorithm.

me@myhost ~/ :) time perl -le'print crypt("some-password","\$6\$rounds=900000\$myrandomsalt")'
$6$rounds=900000$myrandomsalt$O4u/Z5FRNBi3fw6YhAM1V1hC1LAawq9Ri65Kx77GchzOWieXeRs6w83bYqotyqBcz.WE29NygNli93dBDAbpt/

real 0m3.996s
user 0m3.990s
sys 0m0.005s

If someone could comment on this in comparison to bcrypt I would appreciate it. Why should we use bcrypt if this exists in modern crypt() implementations?
"Customer metrics are not the same as customer interaction."

This is a good insight. Sometimes startups assume customer development means gathering a lot of metrics. There is something about a face-to-face interaction which trumps metrics.
@jamesbritt I understand your point, but 37 Signal's was an already establish business bringing in some type of revenue from their products. Once you have a successful product that is selling people are going to copy your idea and revenue model no matter what. It's simply the sad truth. Your job as an entrepreneur is to create a barrier to entry, the harder the entry point the least you have to worry about it.
Or, just have a half-decent password management tool which keeps an encrypted file of your passwords on your phone, and remember just one password.

Schneier may say it's ok, but to me it seems stupidly insecure, especially when you consider that we're talking about a student's university network password, and that there'll be identification in that student's wallet that allows the thief to make use of the password immediately.
Well, you could do something like this in Ruby:

def my_if_else( cond, a, b )
if cond
a.call
else
b.call
end
end
x = 2
my_if_else x < 0, proc { "#{x} is lower than zero" },
proc { "#{x} is greater or equal zero" }

My point is that you can't do without 'proc' (or 'sub' in your case).
<html><is><redundant></redundant></is></html>

Whereas
HAML
is
not
I think it is significant for the exact same reason. Part of the article was about how computing courses focus on software use.

Ask a 12yo about what is math? The answer will focus around doing problems, not creating solutions that are logically sound, nor mention of solving proofs. Ask that 12yo about about science and it is about science and it is about boring fact memorization, not a process for discovering how the world works.

There is something wrong somewhere, but I honestly am not sure what.
It really needs to add things like:

How a kid/student made $20 million (mixergy interview)

or

How AMAZING BUSINESS was made with only $3.50.
Dunno what the defaults are, but I'm fairly sure I've compiled C applications with JIT enabled.
Detailed Review of Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python 3
Wow. You definitely are half a programmer! Burned!

HTML is a huge pain in the ass to write:

* It requires balancing tags

* It's verbose

* It is crudded up with syntax (</-="") and keywords

* It consistently runs right off the 80 column right margin

* It's an enormous pain to extend

* It's slow to read; for instance, try picking the plural version of a constantly-used class name out of tag soup

Haml isn't a shortcut to writing HTML. On the contrary, to use it well, you have to know HTML well. What Haml does is to solve the problems that make HTML a pain to use to express user interface in.
Yes, a function should be short and sweet. This applies very well to functions in Haskell or Scheme (or words in Forth). Those languages (Scheme slightly less so) also have low syntactic overhead for defining a function/word.

It's OK for functions to grow more abstract. Just provide the simple things, too.

E.g. you start out with `map' and `filter', but then realize that `foldr' can express both of them and much more. One viable path is to rewrite the definitions of `map' and `filter' in terms of `foldr'. One should not use `foldr' everytime in the code where a `map' or `filter' suffice.

One can layer abstractions and then use the most specific tool possible that still has all the flexibility you need at each point.
Q&A with someone successfully employing the 400 $1-a-day projects approach
Facebook took it's core function and made it better; added threaded comments. Thus to the many who never used Twitter now they don't see why they would. Everyone they know is on Facebook and it's a more private network. My mom, her friends and others in that demographic were not on MySpace but they have been one of the fastest growing demos on Facebook (growth) if im not mistaken. This same demo as a whole want and are used to privacy. Doubtful, they'll flock to use Twitter ever.

Though Zuckerberg is pushing to be more like Twitter and he may have achieved such by fooling millions. Yes it was all over the news, but millions still don't understand nor cared to. Twitter on the other hand when understood is that you are saying random things openly to whoever and anyone can read it. That's not how people comprehend Facebook.

Zuckerberg's comments that people don't care about privacy was a bit surprising. His demographic might feel this way - but doubtful!
The startup culture is surely catching up in rest of the world. We are just a couple of ex-Microsofties who moved to Chennai, India from Seattle a couple of months ago as we found the former to be more suitable even for product based startups in some factors.

There is an enormous amount of interest here in entrepreneurship these days. For ex. every month we have an informal entrepreneur gathering at a cafe shop and there are hundreds of tech entrepreneurs directly and indirectly become part of these gatherings; otoh even in tech centers like Seattle it would be hard to see more than a dozen guys turning up for these events.

There are plenty of expats returning back to India after their studies and few years of work experience in the US and that is significantly changing the startup culture and attitudes here and resulting in a lot of cross pollination - where ideas of West meets with efficiency of the east.
Interesting as this guy seems to follow a similar approach to that suggested in the recent popular post, "How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter" [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1107828]
Top Worst Company Name Changes
Hmmm... seems to me that his blog posts are more a response to the realization that many people won't/can't read his book.

But as it is, this blog post would of been very very helpful to me a few years ago. Now it's a pleasant reminder of how far I've come.
Ask HN: VPS - Where should I go?
I am looking for a good VPS (Virtual Private Server). I just tried 1and1.com's 3 month money back VPS II - and found it to be slow, unresponsive (SSH / WWW connections literally took seconds).

Can someone recommend a good place for a VPS that would give me a quick and responsive server? Something I can run ubuntu on, manage security and updates.
I can't wait for "Hacker News Headline Generator in 3 lines of Erlang"
Scientist make a leap in quantum computing
The real irony is that diamonds are all but worthless on the secondary market. You'd probably get more for the gold it's set into.
Quantum photosynthesis
Interview : Travel Agency
The original article's point was about progressive enhancement. If you're starting a project that requires, say canvas, it is your loss. If you start with tables and images, the site will work on a lot of browsers.
> I don't think the little > is cutting it anymore.

Edit: Read the article before you respond.
Sales figures are not relevant. What matter are:

- proportion of devices currently subscribed to a data plan;

- time spent online / number of pageviews per device;

- for businesses who don't plan to be profitable in the next couple of months, what OSes will be actually used for mobile web surfing in the future;

- which users have been trained by an AppStore-like system to easily spend money online.

Nobody in his right mind tries to surf with Windows Mobile if they can avoid it; the vast majority of Nokia or Sony-Ericcson phones, those which constitute the bulk of their sales, are barely usable surfing platforms, and are generally not sold with unlimited data plan; Spending money on Palm support supposes that you bet on their middle-term survival, a bet not everyone is willing to make; RIM is totally specialized into the corporate market, and is relevant if and only if you target this audience.
It has always seemed to me that Twitter had been extremely hyped up, but only by the very people Twitter is optimal for (e.g., journalists, bloggers, and anyone else who would benefit from spreading information in a 'one-to-many' way). Other (average and non-tech) people, whose 'followers' are limited to Facebook friends, generally don't understand Twitter, and are often actually quite annoyed that they have to keep hearing about it.

I think, therefore, it could be true that all these readers/commenters who seem to be 'rooting' for Twitter's downfall, may more accurately be rooting for it to stop being so overhyped, or for it to at least be presented as a product they can understand.
I love this kind of meaty thinkpiece from someone who clearly knows what he's talking about. So rare.

I wonder if LLVM isn't getting mature enough. Yes, the Unladen Swallow folks are having trouble with it, but it sounds like the most important troubles are related to dealing with Python runtime realities, so those wouldn't necessarily apply to another runtime system.
An Amazon clone in 9 lines of Megan-Fox-picture
When did "start a business" become "build something that you can't monetize"?

The goal of business is to make money. The people you should be most concerned about building value for are your shareholders.
How horribly wrong can it go? Do you mean spend a lot of time for barely any return, or actually losing a lot of money?

If the latter, how so?
A Twitter clone in 13 lines of CSS
The iPhone is the new IE 6, says mobile developer
Timeline 0.9.0 su Debian e Ubuntu
Ask HN: Dynamic Illustration Tools or Code Libraries
I am interested in programming an educational tool that can change the dimensions of 2D illustrated items. Any suggestions from the HN crowd?
Getting the Size of the Early Stage Note Round Right
There's a great 1982 essay from The Atlantic Monthly called "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" that talks about the same issues.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond
Actually, you can change your user agent with Opera Mobile if I'm not mistaken.
A widely available option is to dual-enroll in high school and college courses to take classes at a nearby University when you've exhausted the high school curriculum.
I guess I set myself up? You make some good points about why HTML is a pain in the ass. I'm just desensitized to it to the point that it doesn't bother me anymore. In fact, I didn't even think of the issues you brought up.
The problem is with your argument is that that sort of observation is purely subjective. It's based on your experience. It's almost a trope for a discussion about lisps to have someone make the claim 'All those parenthesis are ugly!' and have some lispers chime in with 'Really, its not that bad! I hardly see them at all!'

I've learnt that hard way that writing off a language because you hate the syntax from your initial impressions to be a _huge_ mistake. I used to detest Haskell's syntax for so many reasons after suffering through courses about it at university. Now that I actually know haskell a little, and understand the why behind all those syntax choices, it makes a lot of sense and is a really smart syntax choice.
I was at the same talk, but I got the impression that because his perspective comes from trying to do static analysis and optimization, he doesn't fully appreciate some of the capabilities of dynamic languages. The overall effect was a static typer missing the point.

But as he says in this post, PHP code doesn't necessarily take advantage of these capabilities in practice.
Many (most?) community colleges have affiliations with proper universities such that if you're not a complete dud for the two years you spend there (place in the top 40% or somesuch) you can transfer your credits and do the last two years at a proper university. I've known several people who have done this successfully.
I appreciate that it's meant in fun, but it does beg the uncomfortable question: Have we become so predictable?
Is Notion Ink in Bangalore or Hyderabad?
Yeah, not sure what happened, I was referring to the "Bussard Nuclear Reactor" posting.
Talking about DeBeers and truth in advertizing: "Diamonds - that'll shut her up... for a minute!" --Ron White

The issue, really, is status. Our society places pressure on women to show their status via clothing and jewelry. I'm glad to see substitutes like synthetic diamonds and moissanite making it to the market, because of the ethical concerns of supporting systems that promote such destruction. It is important to note, however, that it is not the mere materialism of a woman here that causes the drive for diamonds -- status is important, and let's not fool ourselves if we think it isn't important to us. We have karma systems on HN, we hold successful entrepreneurs to the limelight, and we reach for it ourselves.
The title is in the reddit linkbait genre that is becoming increasingly common on HN.
"You're making yourself look like a total Luddite by discounting Web-2.0-oriented content-management-valued models techniques. It's true."

or something.
But every happy marriage is founded on that each finds the other beautiful.

Really? That doesn't accord with my experience, or any actual research that I've read. The conclusion of the research that I've read is that appearance generally matters more to men, and less to women. And anecdotal experience suggests that the initial infatuation fades in perhaps 7 years or so, and after that looks don't help that much.

Not that you're likely to believe me. After all I've only been married 20 years, so what could I know?
I was once like you.

What it took for me was writing a UI in Haml with very minimal, semantic markup and all the controls keyed in jQ off classes and IDs.

When you structure your HTML, CSS, and Javascript correctly, Haml is absolutely gorgeous. You're no longer writing in HTML: you're writing in a DSL designed to express user interface. For instance, a "save" button encoded in a DIV in Haml:

.button#save

That's it.
Here we go again.

If you have lots of spare CPU on machines in a web server farm, you have too many machines. Even though I/O is the bottleneck for any single request's response time, CPU is generally the bottleneck on total load.