skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really understand all the comments saying "of course it's growing extremely fast, it's a new platform". The point is that a year ago it wasn't at all obvious whether Android will become one of the major mobile platforms - now it's practically certain.

Yes, there's hyperbole in the article (what do you expect from a site called "Android Phone Fans"), but I really don't understand the attitude that, since it's a new platform, its growth is somehow self-evident. Many (most?) new platforms never take off - how's Palm doing, for example?

See:

http://metrics.admob.com/2010/01/metrics-update-android/

and tell me that's not a curve most platforms can only dream of.
One of the not so obvious problems with Steam (which I love and use regularly) is that all your eggs are in one basket. If, for whatever reason, Steam decides they're going to cut you off then you'll lose access to all of your games.

A real world example of this is a friend who purchased a Steam game which did not work on his computer (unrelatedly due to overzealous DRM). Steam would not refund his purchase so he threatened to file a credit card chargeback and they replied that their policy in the event of a chargeback is to disable all of the users games immediately. Because he had >$300 tied up in Steam he wasn't about to lose it all over a $60 charge.
I bought two - a fully loaded 3g one for myself and a wifi one "for my mom," which coincidentally, will not leave my possession until the 3g one arrives.

In the meantime, I'll be working on an app for it.
Hey, I am all for GPS navigation and the like. I have a certificate in GIS. :-D

(Not that it's done my career any good...at least not yet.)
To be fair, Android also had the largest total increase in market share by increasing 4.3%, whereas the next highest total increase was 1.7%. That is pretty significant.
CDOs are a bit trickier. If the issuing company held onto the lowest tranche then they were required to hold the debt and assets on-balance sheet and it was essentially a form of financing like any other. If they sold all the tranches, then they could keep the issuing fees and push all the debt and assets off-balance sheet. There usually was no recourse to the company for off-balance sheet CDOs, but there were some complicated and obscure exceptions.
Steam has fairly easy-to-break DRM, but apparently their strategy is to offer such a good service that people don't want to bother with piracy. It's like the exact opposite of putting non-skippable FBI warnings on DVDs.
that may be the threshold now, but it almost certainly won't stay there. pg regularly increases the thresholds, to account for 'karma inflation.' so it's a good idea to quantify numbers, if you give them, so that people don't google them up in the future and come to mistaken conclusions.
Ask YC: Designers for Twitter clone
I wanted to relive the scalability issues and learn so I built a Twitter clone as a side project, but now thinking this could be more. If there's any would be designers/(css/html) out there that would want to help, get in touch @dustineichler
I think your kinda outa luck with iTunes. It seems iTunes is listed in the requirements. I wonder if iTunes works enough under WINE to use for syncing. It is stated on Apple's website that third-party ePub books could be synced to the iPad.
I know of options for that sort of thing (look for "digital signage") but the pricing is not in the same ballpark as a digital photo frame. (In Japan at least, it is sufficiently expensive that I think going the Panic way is probably cheaper if you plan on providing your own programming.)
"And without Haskell I would be trapped in Scala-land, writing syntax-sugared-Java, confused about why functional programming was so great…"
It is important to do "burn-in" testing for parents. Wouldn't want to give them a defective unit. :)
The reasons against Haskell in this article are quite shallow and he would benefit from more knowledge (Why putting functions in the IO Monad to log/write stuff ??).

Real reasons I have against Haskell are it's complexity: compare it to the average readability of Python. Often, to resolve a tough problem, you have to upgrade your "level", which can be considered good (you tend to resolve it in an intellectually satisfying way) or bad (others have to understand it...).
Canada about to cut public sector jobs to tame deficit
FDA liberalization is not exactly a fringe position among economists. The basic argument is that the FDA may kill more people than it saves and may hamper medical innovation in the long run. It's hard to measure counterfactuals, but you can measure the costs of FDA regulation which are huge, about 80% of the cost of a new drug. So the benefits of the FDA would also have to be huge to justify its existence.

The arguments are out there if you are curious. You can find people that argue the position better than I can on a Hacker News comment thread.
Can you name the 25 most popular programming languages?
I just picked out some wiki software (I use DokuWiki) and start logging everything on there.
In theory, you're absolutely right. In practice, the USPTO has shown themselves to be uniquely and spectacularly incompetent at handling software patents. It's possible to imagine a software patent system that is a net benefit to society, but what we have now is a huge negative. We should nuke it from orbit and then maybe think about trying again.
plesn,

I don't disagree that the reasons are shallow, but it turns out that solving some problems in Haskell is just plain hard. It's precisely because the issues/reasons are basic that it's hard...

Also, I'm confused by your comment about the IO monad & logging... How would you log outside of the IO monad?

Would also be cool if you'd point me to your Haskell repo. I'd be curious to see how you solve these problems.

- Alson
It is the hard part. Part of the value of the book is in providing a simple framework for people to understand something a little alien to them. This will increase your chances of understanding. This is not the same as trying put people in a box and limit them, it is more like trying to study what typifies a particular culture and being sensitive to that.
I think it really depends of the person speaking to you. If he's talking to you with a superior voice, yes I would feel manipulated. But someone saying it with a smile and genuinely would make me feel happy
Sam Adams
I did the same thing a few months ago, only my implementation uses an old PSP I had lying around.

http://hackaday.com/2009/03/30/psp-as-a-status-monitor/
I click on "Ask" all the time. I think I may have accidentally clicked on "Leaders" once or twice in the past year and a half.
Yeah, everything I've found thus far it'd make sense to just get a Fit PC and a small LCD - it'd be nice if there was a small frame like this that was hackable (a la the WRT54g) for a small status display.
Obama to 'aggressively protect' intellectual property
What sort of possibilities? I'm running some sites on Google's AppEngine, and recently found out that it is blocked due to the GFW. I don't see any signs of that changing, especially with this new policy.
Leaving aside the question of whether most patents actually document something innovative, if you really think that patents can protect innovation, see the recent post by Jonathan Schwartz: http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-artis... .

Also, I'd like to suggest one reason to distinguish software patents from others: they hurt more, and they kill certain types of development. If a mechanical engineer has to license a patent and pay a certain amount per widget, that might cut into their profit margin or raise the cost per widget, but it won't necessarily kill the product (unless the patent owner outright refuses to license). If a software engineer has to license a patent for a FOSS project, even a fraction of a cent per copy would kill the project, because it fundamentally can't work with a FOSS license.

Note that I've worked with mechanical engineers who give away their designs under similar terms, at which point they'd face exactly the same issues; however, this represents a far rarer case than in software.

That said, I do personally agree that patents in general ought to go away. However, I think that software patents do a lot more damage than some other kinds, and therefore it makes sense to focus on them first; they also represent a newer and more tenuous concept that we can more easily fight.
How would you log outside of the IO monad?

By collecting status messages in addition to computation results. The Writer monad is one (convenient) way to do this.
No. Have better uses for my money. Don't see what value it offers me.
Online Video Startup Ideas You Should Explore In 2010
I am efficient because I have to be.

And therein lies a lesson in how to make yourself productive.
It's quite different from Heroku. With Heroku you're deploying your app to a foreign hosting service. With oncloud you're running it locally while making it accessible publicly. No need to push anything anywhere and you have full access to your local filesystem.
Good point, although I think it depends on the context. I agree that people who just throw my name randomly in the middle of sentences come of as insincere and transparent. It almost feels like a teacher in the middle of a boring lecture trying to make sure I'm paying attention. But if I run into someone that I've only met once before and they remember my name, I'm instantly more interested in what that person has to say.
I've always wanted to build a site that does a tl;dr of advice books, since it always feels like a few simple things plus a boatload of stories and blah blah etc.
On-Chip Routers Could be a Choke Point for Future Chips
I ordered one. For those of you who are interested in participating in an iPad Community, I have one here:

http://www.ipadforums.net
"Goojje" Google Clone Set to Receive Venture Capital
I can't recommend homebrew enough - I've been burned by macports and fink in the past, and so I had reverted to the time tested "just compile stuff by hand". Homebrew strikes a good balance between the raw, do it yourself approach and something as big and intermingled as macports.
Should be long term capital gains since you had it for more then a year.
He was able to find it for this reason; ldd is statically-linked:

$ ldd `which ldd`
not a dynamic executable

But if you audit your /etc files or the list of files in the executable directory of your web app, you also would have noticed this. It's not really undetectable, as it doesn't hide itself or the things it needs to run at all. More people check /etc once in a while than check the md5sums of their binaries.
The Chinese Government control information flow in China. It is how the Government works. Google can do business in China in other ways they sell advertising for searches done outside of China on Google and they can create hardware devices to sell in China. But trying to distribute information in China or being a source of finding information in China is probably not as great of a business plan as say selling cars in China. Making and selling cars doesn't doesn't really bother the government too much.
"solving problems in Haskell is just plain hard"

That's what I agree with: Haskell nearly requires programmers to read papers each time they want to solve a new problem [1]...

For the logging, I mean of course you can't be ultimately outside the IO Monad, but I don't like putting many things directly into it, if so I would prefer using the writer monad, or an additional argument, or something... I'm sorry though i don't have any public repo, I'm more of a lazy tinkerer...

Edit: [1] But I would like to add that there is also cultural bias of our comp-sci education, otherwise C++ can sometimes also be quite harsh...
$95 http://www.amazon.com/Kodak-EasyShare-W820-Wireless-Digital/...

Comments suggest you can place any RSS feed into it.
USAGE NOTE Methodology can properly refer to the theoretical analysis of the methods appropriate to a field of study or to the body of methods and principles particular to a branch of knowledge. In this sense, one may speak of objections to the methodology of a geographic survey (that is, objections dealing with the appropriateness of the methods used) or of the methodology of modern cognitive psychology (that is, the principles and practices that underlie research in the field). In recent years, however, methodology has been increasingly used as a pretentious substitute for method in scientific and technical contexts, as in The oil company has not yet decided on a methodology for restoring the beaches. People may have taken to this practice by influence of the adjective methodological to mean "pertaining to methods." Methodological may have acquired this meaning because people had already been using the more ordinary adjective methodical to mean "orderly, systematic." But the misuse of methodology obscures an important conceptual distinction between the tools of scientific investigation (properly methods) and the principles that determine how such tools are deployed and interpreted.

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=methodology
Zack's been wanting one of these but with analog gauges, and I just hooked him up with an atmega128 complete dev board with LCD. I have been thinking of the design, and will probably be hitting the junkyard for some old car gauges.

But man, car gauges just don't have the same flexibility as an LCD...nice work Patrick!
Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand.
I find that there is big difference between "Jim, I need to talk to you." and "Hey, how's it going Jim?". When someone leads into a conversation with my name I typically anticipate a negative context. On the other hand, if someone (particularly acquaintances) uses my name mid greeting or conversation, I find it incredibly comforting.
I just installed homebrew a few weeks ago. Consider me a fan. It's extremely straight-forward, and has almost everything I'm looking for. It's easy to update, and easy to remove packages.

I might never boot back into Ubuntu.
I think I have said this previously but, at the risk of sounding like an idiot, will repeat my anecdote:

It took me several months to figure out where "the front page" was linked in the top bar. It just somehow wasn't intuitive for me, though it seems stupidly obvious now. There were several occasions where someone would refer to "the leader board" (meaning the front page) and I would promptly click on "leaders", then go "Doh! I've already checked that a dozen other times. I know that's not what they are talking about. Where is the blankety-blank mythical leaderboard?"

I grew up in a bilingual home. Maybe some of the foreigners can relate to my "dumb" behavior. (Yes, I am one of the 233 people who upvoted "I prefer ask in the top bar".)
Cool.

Also check out the related Hello, World! test http://www.sporcle.com/games/psychofish25/hello_world_syntax (where you really want to see if what language you type in matches the slot you think it should be in). Brought back some old memories.
I currently use MacPorts... just wondering why I should switch?
I don't use it currently, but according to AppDB it has a spotty compatibility history, so I'm not sure.

I'm hesitant to rely on the "iTunes under WINE" method for fear of future updates breaking compatibility. I could dual boot, but that pushes the hassle to reward ratio a little too far for me personally.

I guess I'll take a wait and see on the iPad. Oh, well.
This is a great idea for an app -- I've occasionally found myself in this exact situation -- and an impressive turnaround from idea to functional. Congrats!

That said, the fact that you label it a "startup" instead of an "app" is a pet peeve of mine. You created an app on the bus, not a startup business (though perhaps one will develop around the app).
Jason Calacanis does not get "massively downvoted" no matter what he says. He has a reputation of 247, 32 points coming from four submissions.
> What's your plan for fixing earthquakes?

If we had the means, this would do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(The_Culture) . Obviously, planets are not safe unless very dead, which is also inconvenient.

(Not that I think that 'fixing' mortality would necessarily be a good idea ...)
So...Homebrew is MacPorts with simplified Portfiles and a smaller dependency graph?
Have you thought about making something like this a startup? A SaaS metrics dashboard service? I deal with a lot of call centers and marketing houses that do big "competitive" dashboards to motivate/track staff and they have to roll their own systems. I'm sure a bunch of tech groups would like to have a Panic-esqe dashboard, but wouldn't want to go through the hassle of doing it themselves. Not sure if it is a huge market, but could be interesting!
What problems did you have with MacPorts?
I like this idea. Could be gamed by a group of 'bullies', but it would be very obvious and easy to pick up by an automated filter similar to those already in place.
Some might argue that the documentary above is a horror movie.
That's absolutely it: it's not the product, it's the process that makes the product. Patents are supposed to help foster innovation for the benefit of the consumer and society as a whole. The innovator gets rewarded as a matter of course, but it's not the main purpose. If you make something marketable, then decide to rest on your laurels, then you deserve to get left behind by your competitors.

I hate to beat a dead horse, but look at Microsoft. They tried to protect their advantage instead of innovating. (Or they may have tried but simply failed in their attempts to innovate and execute.) If Apple ever starts along the same path, then they'll get the same results.
Here's what you can do: draw an image using GD, I don't know if you have GD in Ruby. PHP has it, I am sure you can hack a little script for that. Feed the generated image the photo frame and Bob's your uncle.
Educating Elite Hackers and Cybersecurity Experts
I think 100 times in a period of 2 years is not so much, is it? 2 years is approx. 100 weeks of work. So 100 mistakes would merely mean about 1 overcharge per week. I'd only suspect the drivers that were overcharging more than once a day.
Regardless of where you come down on this issue, this whole incident should be a lesson for communication. Assume, especially if your work is controversial, that your private e-mails, etc aren't and make sure they are worded so that you don't look like a fraud.
Just make it anonymous or use a fake person. May be you can register everything(domain name,trademark) on your wife or you cat. Also you can join an open source project.It's your life, by the way. It cann't belong to your company
FWIW, I was an early Homebrew user and even contributed a few recipes, but I moved back to MacPorts because (and no offense to mxcl, but it's kind of unavoidable) the author seems to do things with little understanding of the underlying system or justification.

Taking ownership of /user/local is completely utterly pointless and just plain bad advice. Copy-and-pasting optimization code from the Gentoo wiki is pointless. Binaries and libs are stripped without must justification, which will (did for me anyway) cause problems when compoing against the libs (eg, easy_install-ing anything against homebrew libs caused problems for me).

There has also been a lot of FUD spread about at the expense of MacPorts which I think is just low class. The anti-Macports complaints basically amount to "I don't understand this, so I'm going to say it's bad".

That said, it's written in ruby, uses github and the homepage is well done, so it will probably be wildly popular.
My electronics priorities are:

1) new laptop

2) smartphone

3) iPad? The desire to own an iPad is a bit more of a luxury than a necessity at this moment.
Higher karma doesn't certify knowledgeable or interesting people at all. Others answered plenty of times how easy is increasing karma.
really cool idea.
we tried on the flight from Fort Lauderdale to Austin to build a simple app, but the battery of my laptop didn't make it through the all flight so we'll finish it and launch it today :)
I haven't switched to Homebrew but the advantage is that MacPorts creates its own universe of libraries, whereas Homebrew uses what Mac OS X already comes with. This makes installs a lot faster.
The title here and the quote at the bottom of the page say that it's better than MacPorts but there doesn't seem to be any comparison between them other than that. The only thing I've seen people use to say that it's better is that it's written in Ruby, but that doesn't seem like a big deal. Is there a comparison of the two somewhere? It seems like the problem people have with MacPorts is that it's been around longer so there have been more chances for things to go wrong.
Frequently, when actually needing to compile other things (outside of macports), Macports would be pulled in "magically" and cause issues (such as gettext and Python-core). Frequent issues debugging strange issues when trying to port install things, etc.

Homebrew does just enough to work, and get the job done and attempts to "fit in" with the OS I already have, versus making it's own sandbox off to the side.
Ask HN: Y Combinator-minded local meetups for socializing and networking
You applied to YC and March 13th (or any other application deadline) has come and gone and it looks like you didn't get in. But you still would like to engage YC like-minded folks. How?

I'm a bit of a newcomer to YC but I feel at home in the community. I've been working on my own idea for a business for a few months now. It seems that many here are like me, give or take the execution time.

A problem for me is that while I engage with many of you online, I know none of you in person. I'm sure many of us would be interested in an in-person meetup whether it's to discuss ideas or look for any partnerships. Or it could also be something of a weekly happy hour that serves as a support group so that entrepreneurs get out of the house and engage with society. :)

One of the first important steps of starting a company is building the right team. It seems that many could benefit from a YC meetup (that is, people who are part of the community but may not have been a part of the YC program) due to the nature of being like-minded in starting a company and certain approaches to that. Also, it would be a chance to meet people that are beyond your network.

Does something like this already exist? And if not, how many would be interested?

(I'm located in San Francisco btw.)
Why would anyone write an article like this without citing the general market penetration for iPhones among tech professionals? I have no idea whether 10% is high, low, or average, so how can I have an opinion about this?
It's a cool idea. I think pigeonholing it as a business networking tool might detract from a lot of other potential use cases. Some comments on the execution:

1) I don't understand why it uses FB Connect but still forced me to enter a name, e-mail and password.

2) I understand that this iteration is closely tied to SxSW, but it shouldn't have automatically populated the Austin and SxSW tags for me because I'm nowhere near there.

3) It would be cool to see the global public stream, or the stream for any particular tag.

Good luck!
In short: make money fast auctioning off the broadcast TV radio spectrum.

[Author is] a professor of economics and behavioral science. Dismal and abysmal, then ?
What are you using to monitor delayed job?

Edit: looked at the code. Got the answer :)
"I doubled my sales and made the cover of Time magazine"
MacPorts creates it's own universe because that's the only reliable way to do it. What will Homebrew do when Python gets updated by Apple, or when you want 2.6.10 and Apple only has 2.6.4? With Macports the situation is easily dealt with, with Homebrew it's not.
Oh. I temporally misplaced my recognition of Seneca, then. Should have looked it up, I guess.