skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rather then wielding this patent b.s., the solution to hurting competitors (Andriod) would for Apple to kill it's exclusive at&t contract and then further innovate the iPhone. Andriod's uptake is attributed to the Droid being on Verizon, but if iPhone was available on Verizon, t-mobile and Sprint, Andriod's uptake would seriously slow down.

I owned a HTC hero in oct., but it was junk compared to the iphone and took it back; replaced it with an iphone. The driod feels junky to me when comparing it to the sleekness of the iphone, as well the lack of apps andriod has comparatively is another negative.
HACK your cell phone Get free internet
Well, some people just use it for payment later on if they don't want the hassle of wire transfers and such.

For RAC, they used to charge 10% of the transaction value so it could build up. My experience was that most people contacted me off site after our first project but sometimes still used RAC for payment because it was easier for them(I can't use paypal). Although they were nice enough to take on the 10% charge.
I've ended up with that style. The robot software is Python at the high level, C++ for low-level or OS-specific stuff. It runs fast and is easy to hack on
If you have a plan about where you want to take the site, but aren't sure how to do it, you may want to break up the project into smaller chunks and perhaps hire out one of those small pieces and get it done. After you see that feature up and running, you may feel more motivation to get more done. You can work on bring in some revenue and using that revenue to pay for additional work to be done.
I make like $150 / month from it even though my traffic is small, which I think is pretty cool. Essays about how to build stuff get high-CPC ads for servo motors & robot kits & stuff.
I would happily pay a locksmith to replace locks. But there's no electronic system I've seen that didn't suck.
Well said, but I don't think it's a problem per se. Lisp was way ahead of its time, but it also hung around until everyone caught up with it.

Programmers tend to think about code at the level of the most powerful language they know. Show someone partial application who has never used it and they say "that's a neat trick I guess", but take partial application away from someone that is used to it, and they suddenly feel like something vital is missing.

So at the moment, Haskell's new ideas seem at best to be "neat tricks" and at worst "confusing" to most programmers, but, as with Lisp, those ideas and features will get added to other more mainstream languages a bit at a time. Haskell's contribution probably won't happen because a bunch of people go out and learn Haskell, but because it's ideas will slowly move the cluster of mainstream languages up the curve.
I highly doubt it is.

$200 a week can definitely get you a shopping cart. But so can $10. And I am not sure how well it will work.

Usually for that kind of money you'd get someone customizing or re-branding an off-the-shelf open source one or some programmer trying his hand out at writing it from scratch. Use of open source components is fine and probably the way to go but its not ethical if you don't tell your client that you're doing so otherwise use a framework.

I'd say something like $500 should get you a shopping cart with the regular functionality. Probably $200 for customizing an existing off-the-shelf one.

Of course these are just my opinions and experience, so they might be completely off target.
Does anyone here use Google APIs? Care to comment on your experiences? My experience with them has... not wowed me as much as their customer-facing or advertising products.

In terms of great API design for startups -- meaning both "something to emulate" and "something to convince other startups to use me" I think MailChimp and Twilio are both top notch. Their documentation is excellent, they make doing easy things really easy, and you'll quickly get actual business value out of them. By comparison, many of the Google APIs I've seen have documentation which scares the Big Freaking Java Enterprise Developer in me, no useful defaults, huge commitments required for integration, and many hours of work required before I see anything useful.

See, for example, the Google chart API. You would think doing a sales barchart should be pretty easy, right? That is pretty much the Hello World I'm A Barchart, right? Even using a wrapper in my language of choice, that was nearly half a day of banging my head against the wall. I had my entire Mailchimp integration done in less time.
And yet the recommended solution for upgrading MacPorts with an OS X upgrade? Uninstall and reinstall all ports. What's the point of it creating its own universe if it needs to destroy it anyways?
I disagree...

This is quite reminiscent of the Mac/PC battle in the 80's. It's a more open platform vs. a walled-garden.

There was never a 'open' mp3 player battling the iPod. There was never really a developer eco-system of any kind. Mp3 players, the iPod included, where single purpose devices. The value proposition never rested on open development and innovation.

I think Android will win this, provided that Google gets some kind of handle on the fragementation issues. They're pursuing a model quite close to what Series 60 has done for years. The entire Android eco-system is bringing a lot of phones to market. Some are hits and some are misses, but at the end of the day all of those phones results in HUGE numbers and ultimately a higher combined market share...even if no single phone ever sales as well as an iPhone.
Hi Ignacio, I was watching a movie with my wife, but I just approved your comments. Here's what I replied to your comment over on my blog:

"I hope you guys can invest more on privacy and take the heat." Ignacio Zendejas, I think Google has invested more on privacy than most other companies. I'm not aware of any advertising company that has done as much on the Google Ad Preferences page (e.g. to the point of writing a browser extension to opt-out of ads even when people flush cookies). The Dashboard page is also pretty rare in terms of bringing information into one spot. Earlier this year we also flipped on default HTTPS for Gmail too. I'm not aware of any other major webmail provider offering HTTPS after login authentication, let alone turning HTTPS on for every Gmail user by default. It takes a major investment to offer HTTPS by default, and it only costs money -- it doesn't generate any revenue for Google.
Ask HN: How do you fight procrastination?
I often find myself with piles of work to do and many projects to complete but yet distracted by social media, investigating new technologies, and other less important tasks. I'm sure many of you are the same way so my question is how how do you buckle down and start working? And I don't mean simple technical solutions like resolving https://twitter.com to localhost but instead strengthening your mental resolve. What have you tried? What are your recommendations?
Manned space exploration also causes people... to pursue degrees in science

There's a surplus of people with advanced degrees in science. Take it from me and every other former postdoc.

Like the Moon landing itself, the shortage of trained scientists is a problem from 1958 which has long since been solved.

What there's a shortage of is research funding that would put our existing pool of trained scientists to work in science. To fix that -- if, indeed, fixing that is a high priority -- we need money for science, not nostalgia trips or cargo cults.

I went to school with astronomers. They did their work with the usual tools: Telescopes, computers, pencils, paper, and coffee. Commuter trips to low-Earth orbit, let alone the Moon, were not required. Even the planetary scientists are very successful as telecommuters: Robot probes worked pretty well in the Voyager missions of the 1970s and they work even better now.

And I'm always entertained by the claims that manned missions to the Moon or Mars are some sort of important step toward "terraforming Mars" or "mining the asteroids for their precious, precious metal" or, god help us, "the stars". If going somewhere were a meaningful step toward terraforming it, I'd buy a ticket to Antarctica and plant some pineapples. And to say that Mars (0.00024 light years away, on average) is meaningfully closer to the stars (4 light years away or more) is literally like saying that one side of my house in Massachusetts is meaningfully closer to London, England than the other.

If you want to carry out a plan to, say, terraform Mars, shouldn't you work on that? Maybe you could start with a cheap but useful theoretical model of terraforming? Then convince someone with money that the model is practical? Then build a pilot system that can, say, grow palm trees in Siberia without a greenhouse? [1] And only then bother to spend billions of dollars to actually take such a system to Mars?

In the same vein, even if human travel to the stars were possible [2], the secret to interstellar travel isn't going to be discovered in space. It's going to be discovered by someone doodling on a napkin in Pasadena or Oxford or Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then it's going to be prototyped on Earth, and then it's going to be tested with robots.

---

[1] Not that this isn't several orders of magnitude easier to do.

[2] Which it is not, for any reasonable definition of "human" and "travel": http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
True, but what you said also applies to freelancers not working through RAC or similar websites.

After a year or two of freelancing and if you're good, you'd pretty much get to choose the projects you work on. I usually go with the projects that are interesting to me(research projects from my local university) or that come from good clients or friends.
Not sure what to make of his theories, since his "real world examples" are such utter BS:

In Korea, the local script was terribly difficult and complicated; so, in North Korea, the Communists created an entirely new alphabet and a simple script in order to teach all the people how to read ... Among the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Ouighbours, the Manchus, the only texts in the new script are Mao’s works.

The only group mentioned who actually got a new alphabet were the Uyghurs (not "Ouighbours"), and since the 1980s they've switched back to Perso-Arabic. Hangul was created in the 15th century and became widespread during the Japanese colonial era. Manchu was clearly moribund by 1960, so there was no need to design any "new alphabet" for them. The PRC explicitly rejected script reform for Mongolian due to the Sino-Soviet split (which is why they still use Classical script in Inner Mongolia).
I agree Jaynes made some significant, important progress. However, the conclusion that the problem does not exist comes from Kant, its a dodge. The problem is still open because Kant's theory of knowledge is a denial of ALL knowledge.
What I don't understand, is why aren't drivers smart enough to just shift into Neutral and turn off the engine? I mean, it's not rocket science.

I've had my throttle stick on my floor mat in my 2002 Passat quite frequently and I've never freaked out about it or even had a problem regaining control.

The real thing to do here is to make sure the drivers in the U.S. know how to properly operate a motor vehicle.
My only experience has been with the java frameworks coming out of Google and those are top-notch.

In particular google-collections (http://code.google.com/p/google-collections/) and guice (http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/) are, in my qualitative estimation, fabulously designed.

Maybe the difficulty you found with their chart tools reflects some inherent complexity of the problem? Did you ever find an easier / more useful library?

In the absence of a better solution, I would wager that it's just a hard problem that they're trying to solve.
Connecting Clouds - Summary of Intracloud Network Testing
Thanks for the heads up Paul!
But, could the demonstrator have given any other lines and still caused the audience to observe them in the song? Those lines were deliberately designed from careful study of the song.
You can always try and post that on RAC and see if anyone bites, but i think you'd find more people who work on that on dedicated forums or groups.
I was not trying to say it is like the iPod, but at the same time, I think it isn't like the mac/pc either, and lets face it, the pc has never been (pc = windows pc, at least here) a truly open development platform.

Android will win this, if by win we mean more marketshare.
But we all know that is not the only measure of success.
RethinkDB is hiring C/C++ engineers with irrational desire for world domination
Any chance you could share our code? I'd like to see how you did that...
I am my own boss, so there is no-one lording over me to make sure I am finishing things on-time, nor do I have "office hours"... I just work during the day until I feel that enough stuff got done. Sometimes that means I work for 6 hours, sometimes that means I work for 12 or more.

I often fall victim to the distractions of the inernetz; email, twitter, HN, etc...

That being said, I have found that the best way to stop procrastinating is to set goals with hard and fast deadlines. Nobody is going to accomplish those goals on-time except for me. If they are missed, I only have myself to blame. For me this is a great motivator to get things done during my waking hours.

I have an extremely huge and looming deadline approaching in the next couple of weeks, and like patio11 said in a comment earlier today, I am efficient because I have to be [1].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189284

[edit] found link to patio11's comment

[edit2] I also use a "Legal Pad Computer" to manage my TODO list. Making sure the list doesn't overflow to more than one page is another good motivator. I wrote a more extensive post about the concept here: http://bootstrapd.me/?p=62
Did you ever find an easier / more useful library?

In the full knowledge that this comparison is apples versus porcupines: OpenFlashChart 2 is my favorite charting software ever. It gives you quite a bit of fine-grained control, but if your needs are I Want A Freaking Bar Chart then in ten minutes you will have A Freaking Bar Chart. There are no steps such as "OK, first things first: we're going to need you to scale your data down to fit in the range 0 to 100. Then you pass that to us with your min and maxes -- you have to specify those, we don't pick sanely -- and we'll recreate your original data for you."

I'm sure there is a good technical reason for that but, ahem, I use APIs so that I don't have to care about good technical reasons for things being hard. That is the sort of ugly implementation detail that the API is supposed to bury for me. (Google Charts is still impressive, by the way, in that it totally abstracts away server administration and scaling issues from graphical processing, which if you were to scratch build yourself would not be pleasant. Also, since you end up with standard image tags, you can use it with any browser, down to and including the ancient Japanese cellphone I often check my stats from. That said: it could be better. I see they have a Javascript version now and it looks much, much saner.)
I keep a short list of programming problems handy - small use cases that interest me. When I feel like I'm slipping away into FB or Twitter or whatever, I break out one of the problems and solve it.

The secret, though, is to solve it from scratch each time. If you're really having trouble concentrating, do it in a new language (COBOL - seriously, this will keep you up at night).

Some examples of my problem list: recursive function to show classified ads; FSM for reading old-style INI files; simplest possible chat protocol, either client or server

I'm no psychologist, but I suspect that, once you get used to doing this kind of thing, it works a bit like self-hypnosis. Just create problems that you would find interesting.
hold on to that one
The Wisdom Of AdMob’s Founder Omar Hamoui
I've used Google APIs in many projects and love them. Here's one: http://chir.ag/projects/drop-search/

I also used the search API here: http://chir.ag/wiki/bingo - Wikipedia search. I almost always end up doing site:wikipedia.org when I'm looking for articles on a topic. Now I just go to chir.ag/wiki/%s and it works great. I do not have to do anything on the server end and Google's JS search APIs handle everything. It works especially well when I don't know the correct spelling or even the most relevant keywords.

I wouldn't think of Google API as being complex enterprise-y APIs. They have really powerful JS APIs that you can use on the client side. This puts less stress on the server and you don't get rate limited. I've also used YouTube API in the past and it was pretty decent.
"(The big one that always gets pointed out? '\' and '¥’.)”

The point there though is that Japanese DON’T want \ and ¥ to map properly. They want \ and ¥ to be considered the same. So Unicode isn’t losing information, it’s forcing a distinction the Japanese don’t want to be able to make.
Apples and Oranges -- A Comparison
If you keep coming back to the project, it means that you want to do it and that's the most important thing.

Write down what's left to do as manageable tasks and try to address them when you can or ask for help on the ones you can't.(paid or free) That way, at least, you'd know you're making progress and have a clear idea where you're heading.

P.S. layout is broken on FF3.6. also, you have a few typos.
API Design Maxims by Joshua Bloch, 2008 (no flash needed)
For a website with such a heavy "enterprise" slant it sure is very slow to load.
I tried many different things, too many to remember, including GTD type of things, "don't break the chain", and many others. I think what's working best for me (and what may work for you depends on your personality type and what you do) is setting (preferably) one goal for a day in the morning, writing it down, and then working to accomplish it.
Lots of us use and love C++ and lots of new things is still being written in C++ — it is not a legacy language.

C++98 introduced us to generic programming and C++0x continues along that path.
Hmm, I should change the numbers; we've expanded to 4 days of interviews, so now we may be able to interview around 80 groups.
Very compelling use case. Got to meet the guys down here at #sxsw. Very cool p33ps.
Good find. The author has since updated the article, below. It's also a written article instead of a flash presentation.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190419
Not really an antimatter explosion, but rather that antimatter is involved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova
Have you looked at: http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/

Visualization > Bar Chart
In the past I procrastinated a lot. The problem I found was that the sheer number of tasks to be done was immense and I would often be paralysed by the thought of it.

So what I did was get a simple task management tool (I use RTM) and started off by just setting 2 tasks per day.

It's only 2 tasks, anyone can accomplish 2 tasks in a day.

Soon after I got accustomed to it, and I simply ramped it up, first 3 tasks, then 4... very easy.

After I got used to the idea of accomplishing things often, then I worried about efficiency, but the secret is to just get started.
I wouldn't want to apply there. My desires for world domination are entirely rational.
I think "in X hours" is silly too, because that just means it's gunna be easy to copy. Not a good business plan.
The arduino's got so many built in methods via Wiring that coding's really not bad. Shockingly easy at times..
I'm curious, does anyone who reads HN still read Digg as well?
Very nice, will be adding "print to pdf" support to my site post haste.
There's certainly no trolling on Somethingawful, home of the :10bux: entry fee!</sarcasm>
I thought there were 3 cofounders, now listing only 2. Is my memory serving me right?
I fail far too often, hence why I am posting here.

Seriously, when I really need to concentrate, I try to place myself in environments where the temptations are minimized. Turn off the wifi if I don't actually need it and put on headphones with mild background music and focus on the work at hand. It is no cure, but it helps me.
This is the kind of job description that I wish someone in India would advertise. The job boards hereabouts are full of the outsourced "maintain legacy enterprise systems" crap jobs.

No I am not looking for a job [1], but this ad crystallized what I miss in the Indian sw/startup ecosystem. Too many people building db backed websites - clones of successful western products. Not much hardcore tech.

Devs in the USA are lucky to a degree they aren't aware of.

(Mildly) depressed.

And as for jobs with upfront info about salaries/equity, we can only dream.

[1] I am working on a cutting edge (non startup) project that involves a lot of Machine Learning and algorithmic complexity. If I were to advertise I could mostly cut and paste this ad - replace DB internals with Machine Learning - but this is very, very rare in India and I know a lot of talented devs who would give a great deal to be able to apply for such jobs without going through visa hassles and so on.
I'm sure there are folks out there that do Digg, Reddit and HN all together. RSS feeds through something like Google Reader help a bunch. And it's good to see Digg reinventing itself - that's always a plus for any company.
You didn't take DST into account. The world is going to end =P Nice touch with the twitter hashtag - might be the longest one ever.
You should include Google along with Apple. I understand that Chrome OS won't allow any native apps whatsoever. The only native apps that will run are Google developed apps. So by your logic, Google is even more evil than Apple, right?
Wow, thats a significant increase. Happy to hear that.
http://www.thocp.net/hardware/pictures/pda/apple_newton_sml....
Leif went back to finish his degree.
But that takes the fun out of reading the books. Plus, the advice in the Carnegie book are well known. As in, they're pretty obvious. But i think the way he tells the story to emphasize his point is what makes the book such a classic.

I too resisted reading it for a long time because of the silly title and because I don't like reading "advice" books. But i broke down a few years ago and actually read it and it was a good read.
So from the open req page:

You know C/C++ like the back of your hand.

So are they looking for C OR C++ programmers, either may apply? or are they looking for strong understanding of the nuances of both C and C++?

I encounter a lot of "C/C++" on resumes and after interviewing a lot of folks, I've grown a distaste for this joined tag. The problem is that when I see "C/C++", I never know until I interview a candidate whether the intent is that "C/C++" is...

1) Shorthand for I program C and I program C++ (I know both well)

2) I program C with classes. I don't really know OOP, but I fake it with big class buckets.

3) I program in C++ and know OOP well, but I would get lost in the strict procedural world of C.

If you don't get where I'm coming from, I've programmed in both for many years, and I will simply say that "C and C++ are two paradigms separated by a common language."