skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting bit of information, but wouldn't that strategy cause people to become thieves instead of starving themselves?
Video games are also affecting real life sports. Modern football players who have been weened on NFL Madden appear to be better at tactics and reading play formations.

Also, there was an instance where a NFL player executed a move from the video game.

But increasingly, according to Chris Suellentrop in this month’s Wired Magazine, the trend has reversed. A generation of actual NFL players, raised on games like Madden NFL, are bringing the influence of video games into their real play.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/02/05/04
"This part is a real designer's wet dream, we need to lose it."
Apple shouldn't open the gates to the App Store, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't open the gates to the iPhone.

If you want to be listed in the App Store and have Apple handle your payment processing and even a bit of marketing for you, you're going to have to go through their approval process. Every single store in the world decides which products it will and won't sell. The App Store isn't, and shouldn't be, any different.

However, on the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site or put it on a CD in a box and sell it at Best Buy or any other store. You can't do that on the iPhone.

I guess opening up the iPhone platform wouldn't really help DHH, since I'm sure he wants his app listed and sold in the App Store, but I can see why developers expect more parity between the two platforms (Mac and iPhone).

However, I can also see how it's easier for Apple to provide a better (and more consistent) customer experience when the App Store is the only way to buy and install apps. And since Apple cares more about customers, and customers don't really care about the openness of their phone's OS... that's probably not going to change any time soon.
No link was found between juices and pancreatic cancer risk.

Why the link with sugary sodas? Mueller says they are not certain. "What we believe is the sugar in the soft drinks is increasing the insulin level in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth. That increase in insulin is what may be leading to the development of the cancer."

This doesn't make sense to me. If sugar in soda leads to cancer, then why doesn't sugar in juice?
I like the new version better. When I entered my ASK, I was not met with a response from Kato. And I would like for a response from my personal assistant. Kato needs to be inquisitive and willing to answer to me. So I suggest a cartoon and a balloon for creativity and interactivity.
Sorry, you're the one who's confused -- the article is quite explicit that the marketshare numbers given are for smartphones, not the entire phone market.
Thanks for writing that.

> Your pitch -- and the center of your development thought process -- needs to be "use this and you will live longer and have less stress in your life, for X, Y and Z reasons". Don't write another line of code until you have that, is my advice.

We built this application in 3 days. It went from a friend saying I've been trying to use this tools but they are hard to use and cost too much money. So we build a tool equal in functionality to those on the market but with a better UI, web based and free.

We didn't go through an extensive product planning process where we could get to the root of our customers problems and needs.

Instead the plan was to launch a dead simple, minimum viable product. Part of this process is being able to get access to a community of diabetics and finding out exactly what diabetics want in a tracking tool. This is much much easier now that we've launched and put ourselves out there.

> You have nothing for exercise! That's huge!

Yes, this is on the todo list. We decided to focus on the other four as they seemed to be in the most demand.
I don't know if that's the right approach. If his target audience are people who don't know the difference between Web 2.0 and 1.0 (say, accountants in the accounting department of a big corporation), they would probably feel more at home with the desktop metaphors.

Case in point, Google wants people to use Google Docs like their Office suite, except it's 100% web based. But to ease the transition they have this notion of "folders" in G Docs even know it could very well just be a bunch of tags like in Gmail. When non Web savvy people see "folders" they go "ah, I get it."

imho.
The nature of reality is the cause of the legal professions complexity. Legalese is simply a tool used in order to make the communication more precise and uniform (you could say the same thing about programming). Without legalese, you would undoubtedly see a dramatic rise in court filings (like in programming, you would see more bugs).

It's similar to programming in that you are attempting to draw up rules/parameters for a game, but more challenging because the system it operates in is usually less constrained.

Take this for what it's worth; I would call myself neither an expert in law or programming.
You're not separating it due to work load.

You're isolating yourself from a bad egg. The point is to insure yourself against utter crooks/total screwups.
I do not believe they should just blindly get rid of the review process of app updates, but I do think that there should be some priority given to them. I believe that a developer should be able to push updates out to their apps with relative quickness compared to getting a new app approved. This would even benefit Apple for the applications that are teetering on making a decent amount of sales but are lagging in the sales due to some kind of problem/stability issue.
I hope people note this: Literally perfect diamonds can be produced for impressively small amounts of money, and the cartel barely bats an eyelid, happily swinging into their next marketing campaign to secure their position. We should all learn from these masters of marketing.
User-generated Content Vector for Malware, Spam
May I recommend that Apple copy Microsoft for once?

The fine folks on my partner team, XNA Creators Club Online, have developed a clever solution to the app review problem. The whole process is transparent, community-driven/crowd-sourced, insulates Microsoft from legal liability, and has been running effectively for over a year, albeit not at App Store scale.

Read about it here: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/quickstart_main

The same technology backend has been white-labeled for other communities: http://creators.rockband.com/
Diamonds are very usefull as abrasives and for cutting tools, 80% of mined diamonds are destined for industrial use.
And that's why I still play HOMM3 and Disciples 2... or any turn-based RPG for that matter (mainly japanese ones).
wsj.com version of topic is already in discussion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110703
If that's what the market wants, that's what the market wants.

Are you saying that these apps will suddenly (by virtue of being approved) be listed on the top apps lists, and become popular? If so, what's wrong with that, let the people decide what the people want, no?

There's spammers and scammers on the web, and people fall for them all the time, is that a good argument to police the web, then?
"Do you think the App Store clerks are combing through source code to look for security issues? Ha!"

Apple sometimes rejects applications for using private APIs they must be checking at some level. I'm not sure how much damage you could do using public APIs. We haven't seen any iPhone App Store malware so whatever they're doing must be working. It's hard to believe no one has tried to slip something in over the last 2 years. In my personal experience with the iPhone I cannot recall a third party App Store application locking up my phone, crashing the OS, or otherwise preventing me from taking an incoming phone call. Either iPhone developers are being incredibly careful, Apple's App Store policies are working, or I'm very lucky.
(SF) Giants expand dynamic pricing to all seats
In the larger sense beautiful code may not be a very useful concept, but when it comes to a tangible piece of code, the actual lines in front of you on the monitor, there is definitely a difference between ugly and beautiful code. No question about it. And over 80% of the time the prettier code is the better one.
Gruber just linked to this: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/sketchpad
If important updates are lost in the noise, perhaps Facebook is not the place to announce them.
I have no hard-earned experience with this myself. I've just been thinking about it myself a lot because I have a potentially write-intensive application in the works, and I'm anticipating aperformance issues with writes (but I should probably find out if it actually is an issue). My goal is to squeezing as much performance as I can from as few machines - I'm poor.

To explain my use case.. I'm basically storing a graph in MongoDB, which is a document/object based database. Reads would consist of enumerating a node's edges. Writes would be adding nodes/edges and updating edge weights. It would perform best on reads if I just had one contiguous object for each node, holding information about all nodes connected to it, as well as edge weights. But since some nodes may have too many connected nodes, they are divided in the database by the page they would show up on in the application, as ranked by edge weight. So an object with id 'node1page1' holds information about the top 10 ranked connecting nodes.

Now, if that made any sense, the problem: Edge weights change according to votes from users. So when a weight changes, ranks change, and I've structured things in such a way that the computation of ranks is basically pushed to the write rather than the read. So when someone checks 'node1page2' and votes a node on page 2 up, the corresponding edge weight changes and may require that node's information to be shifted to 'node1page1', while the lowest edge on 'node1page1' is to be shifted to 'node1page2'.

So what's happened here is that while I've made reads fast by requiring just a lookup, writes become complicated. And here's where the buffering of writes comes in. Perhaps I'm overthinking all this, but like I said, I'm poor.

Replication in-memory would definitely be useful, especially for a larger cluster with some spare capacity. You'd probably have good power redundancy when running a large cluster, so single machine failures would be much more common than a total cluster failure I'd think (no hard data here, but seems reasonable enough). So I don't think it's all that naive to believe that generally more than one host would not go down within 30s.

Even if the whole cluster does go down, you should only be doing this with low-value data. In my application's case, losing 30 seconds of votes is no big deal at all, I'd be much more concerned with getting the machine(s) back up.
And poorly done humor is just uncomfortable. If first impressions are of any value, you better be sure your material is top notch.
Except that we're talking about smartphones capable of delivering a web experience that is competent enough to be concerned about experience.

There are smartphones and then there are post-2006-smartphones, which actually do real web browsing. I strongly suspect that Nokias numbers here include many phones less capable than the one that was raised in objection previously. Is there independent evidence to the contrary?
"This doesn't make sense to me. If sugar in soda leads to cancer, then why doesn't sugar in juice?"

Maybe because there are various types of sugars (e.g., glucose and fructose), and these are metabolized differently? That could explain it. Just speculating...
Open Virtual Founders Interview with David Weekly
I've been dabbling with the idea of bringing operations research to small business, but I haven't figured out a delivery mechanism. However, integration with WebPOS might be a feasible way to do this.

I'm just curious, do you plan to build an API or app store at some point?

Feel free to contact me to discuss it further, email is in my profile.
It's way too cluttered with bold colors and bold fonts. I'm always so overwhelmed and confused when I land on a site like that. All the information is in your face.
It doesn't say that sugar in juice doesn't cause cancer, it says they didn't find a link. The article says

"He points out that of the 140 cases, 110 of those people did not drink sodas, while 12 had less than two servings a week, and 18 had two or more servings a week."

So there were only 18/140 people who had 2 or more servings of soda/week. You have to have a good and strong link to find a significant association with those numbers. I would assume the number of juice drinkers would be smaller than the number of soda drinkers, so you would need an even stronger link, so it's very possible that a link of the same strength would not show up as significant.

You'd have to look at the actual study to see if this is plausible (I haven't).

Other possibilities are that juice has some protective properties that nullify sugar's cancer risk, or that something other than sugar causes the problem in sodas, but I would judge those as less likely.
Perhaps the "sugar" in the soda is actually the much-dreaded high fructose corn syrup? I'd suspect as much, since this study was done recently, and most sodas don't use "sugar", per se, any more.
Visualizing CSS - Semantic markup you can see
Aren't those applications the perfect use for artificial diamonds ?
Even as an older teenager the 11 year olds were just so fucking annoying. I really wish Microsoft would allow for some sort of age, or at least maturity, certification thing where I could say, "No, I do not want to play with 11-13 year old racists who think that Nigger is the best and funniest word in the entire world."
This is not HN material. Direct this question to http://serverfault.com/

Other than that, here's a list that should do you good: http://djangofriendly.com/hosts/
I'm hoping this is a joke that I overlooked, because I think it's rather unlikely that you're going to get an interview with Neil Gaiman jumping up and down on a trampoline and incidentally says 'I love her sister' to one of this twin daughters. Also, I'd hope Cory Doctorow doesn't wear that cape in every interview.
Confession of a programmer living with Aspergers syndrome
It's not what the market wants. It's what the suppliers want. Let me give an analogy:

There is a country with no pineapples. Someone grows a pineapple farm, and sells pineapples. There are no other pineapples, so he charges a lot for them. He becomes rich. Other farmers hear of this and start growing pineapples - they become rich at the start, but as pineapples become more available, soon the price of pineapples is the same as everywhere else. But people have a lot of invested resources in pineapples, so they start selling at discounts. There are more pineapples than consumers, so people start getting aggressive with their sales. The guys who made the money leave the unprofitable market to go sell maize, but the late entries who have just invested in pineapples, and the people who were dirt poor, are still battling on, trying to sell their pineapples. They start harvesting unripe pineapples and heating them to make them seem ripe quicker.

People get disillusioned with all the shit pineapples they are getting and decide to rather buy some other fruit without all the competition. When they do buy pineapples, they stick to very old and trusted names - new pineapple sellers are automatically assumed to be doing something corny.

--
What I'm saying is - the suppliers will destroy the market.
IL perversions: throwing and catching strings
I hadn't realized until reading the article that Google Maps on the Droid has multitouch now. I just tried it and it works great.
Manymoon is hiring full-time engineers (http://bit.ly/9sdEmA) and an intern (http://bit.ly/b8yE8N).

We're a small, funded startup in San Francisco that's already generating revenue. Manymoon is also a top-rated application for Google Apps.

Please contact jobs@manymoon.com
That's easy to prove, HFCS is far less prevalent in Canadian sodas and I barely even heard of it in soda when I was living in the UK and Europe.

You simply need to correlate the results to other figures to see if HFCS is the major variable sticking out.
"The gate is not to QC an app, it's to prevent the app store from being a crapware and spammers paradise."

Is this what your reviewer friend told you? Because part of the problem is that Apple hasn't said much if anything about just what the review process is for, so everyone is left to speculate while having to decipher arbitrary and vague rejection reasons.
Reminds me a bit of a less weighty story: back in the late '70s and early '80s there was a company that made really attractive blue bypass capacitors (if you've seen a CADR Lisp Machine memory board you know what I'm talking about).

There wasn't anything particularly special about them other than their nice look, and at some point I read about a production stoppage that caused by them (I guess a lot of designs used them). At some point the procurement people asked the EEs "why these?" and the problem was quickly solved.
You are highlighting how my example is different from the others :-)
That's because you pay $100 to get in and if you do this once, you will get kicked off immediately. There is no profit in malware. It's tough to get the app in, and should you succeed, the profit will likely be less than the $100 you spent getting in.
Agreed. "svn up" and your site is updated - no FTP details need to be given away.

And you can this to automatically install via SVN
http://birdhouse.org/software/2008/04/wp-create/
(and there's a similar script for updating all the sites at once)
Another example would be Wolfram|Alpha. The site is free, but the iPhone app, and API access are quite expensive.
That's useful feedback, thanks
That's a much more generic description of the model. I'm talking about a specific type of "main app" and a specific type of "downstream service"
ALOT Home
On the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site

Yes. And you can also develop malware and give it away on your own website. And then, when customers complain to Apple, they can do... what, exactly?

In other words, DHH is wrong when he suggests that the App Store isn't about security. Sure, the App Store is not about prescreening for security holes -- obviously they can't find every hole or every trojan in their pitiful half-hour code review. But if every app goes through the store, and every store app can be revoked, and every store app comes attached to a known submitter with a valid identity and credit card...

You can get a trojan through the system. But you very likely can't do it more than once, it won't survive long in the wild after it's detected, and the FBI has a paper trail to your house.
That example is definitely not similar to the StatSheet model. I'm talking about selling pieces of a free web site. You can't use the razor without buying the blades.
It is my understanding that referees are sometimes paid, but editors rarely work for free. (Using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review version of editors.) It's a lot of work to find out who is best to referee a given work and to track down conflicts of interest etc.
When talking to my girlfriend, she mentions she is not interested in diamonds. This seems to be the next candidate: http://www.moissaniteco.com/moissanite-wedding-sets-c-106.ht...
The iPod, iPhone, and soon the iPad are from what I can tell the first time DRM has been successfully deployed in a non annoying way. I remember when 3DStudios used to require a hardware dongle(A device you had to have plugged in for the software to run.) The iPhone and co. are like dongles that you actually want to buy. We are paying for the store and then only buying from it as well as being held hostage by the fact that we don't actually own what we purchased as it requires the devices controlled by apple to use our purchases. It's the ultimate lock-in.

Note: Protecting content can not occur without tight control by apple, otherwise apps for accessing pirated content would proliferate. I'm starting to actually think that Apple has found the perfect racket and there is no way open systems can compete until someone comes along with Apple's design and manufacturing skills. There platform is just bigger and more consistent than any other competitor's with better tools and less variation in hardware designs.

ps. If you think the App approval process is annoying try being a game developer, it takes months to get your game through the processes required by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Games love it, it's the rest of you that aren't used to it, for us it's a welcome improvement plus it's a platform that extends beyond games into lifestyle applications and communication.
How to recover Windows’ forgotten password?
VC Investment (inc. angels/other) filed with the SEC in Jan '10 ranked by state
I wish they'd add spelling correction to their search.
It seems a pretty rational argument to me.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted.
Yeah, I touched on RDF in my post. I have some experience with it, but it is pretty complex for just data. I think it is powerful, but the thing that makes the web work is simplicity.
Plus, as I pointed out elsewhere in the thread: Apple can remotely disable your malware app after it's identified, they can publicly shame you, and they may even be able to sic the cops on you via the paper trail that you used to register as a developer.
Swapping out my "small business perspective" hat for my "engineer with VC sensitivities" hat: the centralization of data and services proposed by cashier live are just nuts. It creates a massive and precarious single point of failure in direct proportion to the number of customers it acquires and the number of transactions it processes. Asked to comment on the technology I would be conscious bound to speak out against it. Asked to invest, I would have to decline.

This is an odd criticism. Why is this any different from letting Google store my spreadsheets or Mint.com store all my banking/cc or 37Signals store all my business contacts. Is it because it's a startup? So much for cloud computing...

I think cashier live would have a chance if it polished up its code, released it under GPL, partnered with accounting firms instead of directly CC processing firms, and went into the premium fee support / consulting business while learning to franchise sales to put qualified reps on the floor of customer's shops to hook things up.

This will turn them into every other POS vendor. I don't see what GPL'ing the code will do (that's not a feature to most people). Same with accounting firms... I'm going to ask my accounting firm for advice on a POS system??? For most small businesses, your accountant is guy that works out his house and can barely use e-mail.
Shrinking a partition by using the GUI
Well, the problem of filtering private API usage would be easy to fix. They're already using an automated tool to detect it, so why not just scan the app right when the user uploads it? That would actually be better than the current system. Right now, if you upload an app that uses private APIs, you have to wait for however long it takes to actually get to a human reviewer (2-14 days) and then they run the tool, wasting a lot of time.
I think in this case some might find your humor offensive "commie b*stard", or an overweight man in a ill fitting costume. The list jolie provides is correct. To me it looks like you searched reddit, more than doing a proper analysis of your startup. Also as others have pointed out you have no insight to even what your product is or how it works. Talk is cheap.
The Official Petition to Establish "Hella-" as the SI Prefix for 10^27