skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mobile Multitasking on IPhone 4 and Android
Q1'10 spam & virus trends from Postini
Why? A browser is nowadays one of the most important tools. If I would be able to use only one single application on my system, it would be a browser.

And the same is true for almost everyone.
I think most folks who have serious iPhone development businesses ordered in the US and forwarded by FedEx overnight.
That about sums it up for me too. Well maybe not the prisoner part, my situation is purely of free choice.
I tried it and the one really annoying thing about it is that because it serves up images of pre-rendered pages when you flip your phone to landscape the page image is the wrong dimension. It would be better if it sent you one image for your current orientation and then fetched in another in the back ground or something smarter like that. Maybe there are bandwidth concerns but it makes the user experience sub-par.
Interesting theory, though I disagree that WSJ will be able to increase revenue with a premium CPM as they'll have less eyeballs, so it probably all events out in the end.

I suspect the author is correct that WSJ figured, they may as well see what happens with a high price point, as it is easier to lower your price later than it is to raise it, and they likely benefit strongly by having a large amount of the user base NOT subscribe via the Apple environment, but rather use Apple as a sales channel at a premium while providing a web subscription server the broader market.
I'll get rid of that asap. I hate that too -- I think its default in rails acts_as_authenticated plugin and I missed it.
I hope he gets better. I still use his P4 COM plugin for LispWorks.
What PDF, PS, EPS et. al. are and their diff's
I'm also impressed by the quality. I hope live streaming like this becomes the standard for tech events/conferences.
How are they making money from this?
They need to run fast servers that cater to each and every phone that has their app installed anywhere in the world.. won't that be pretty expensive?
What sucks is that when human workers are interchangeably minimally skilled commodities, management has no incentive to create a more humanized work environment: it causes no variation in output.
I recall reading one Brit's assessment of a Nike "sweatshop" in Vietnam. One of the main concerns of the employees was that overtime opportunities be provided.

I'm now considering an out-of-town consulting engagement, and I'd much prefer to work 10+ hours four days a week and have a long weekend with my family. Perhaps these workers are taking this to the extreme -- six months on and six months off?
Getting an Incubator on Governor's Island, NYC
I dunno. I'm very happy for Opera - but their branding is not really strong at all outside of tech circles. A lot of "normal" people know about Firefox, but I've yet to meet someone who uses Opera, or even knows of it, who isn't significantly connected to our industry.
Nice comment.

I also started reading this, expecting something Upton Sinclairesque, until I read

While working, the young people cannot talk, use their cell phones or listen to music.

Duh. I know quite a few places here in the U.S. that would double their output with a rule like that.
Graphical interface: BART train schedule redesign
Very good comment. They are better off with these jobs than without them. Still, they should have some basic working conditions. Such as max 45hrs a week. 2 week vacation a year, etc.
I agree. I took it off the logo. I was simply thinking of an easy way to restrict the site to quality coders, but this just sounds tacky.
Looks like I missed it as well. Anything noteworthy so far? Something that even non-devs would get excited about?
We can all agree that current programming languages have a lot of warts, but then he gets to his list of BARE MINIMUM features a language must have and the rant takes a hard left into Crazytown. Social networks and to-do lists as first-class, language-level features — not even a social network standard library, but a whole subset of the language dedicated to social networks and to-do lists.

It sounds like what he wants is a DSL, because the language he describes would be useless to most people who aren't in his exact position.
Braintree is our payment gateway for Kongregate, too. We're very happy with them.
This is BS.

Over the past three years, unprecedented photographs of
exhausted teenaged workers, toiling and slumping asleep
on their assembly line during break time, have been
smuggled out of the KYE factory.

That's what they do there. Even the office workers do this. They turn off the lights, and for 20 minutes, they all put their heads down on their desk and try to nap. You may be put off that such behavior is "mandated". What if you don't feel like napping? But it's not "exhausted workers" passing out from lack of sleep. What crap this is.

"photographs ... smuggled out"? Really? I've taken these photos myself, with factory management standing next to me. To western eyes, seeing a room full of workers sitting in silence with their heads down, in the middle of a work day, is interesting, and I wanted to show my wife. No "smuggling" was necessary.
Yeah, every revision is standalone, which is why it compresses so well (obviously there are a lot of edits that make relatively small changes). One reason is to make it easier for researchers to grab specific revisions, e.g. run the dump through a filter returning only revisions as of June 1, 2006--- without having to apply a ton of diffs to reconstruct those revisions.

The dump schema is something like:

<mediawiki blah blah ...>
<siteinfo>
some metadata
</siteinfo>
<page>
<title>Article Title</title>
<id>15580374</id>
<revision>
<id>139992</id>
<timestamp>2002-01-26T15:28:12Z</timestamp>
<contributor>
<username>_delirium</username>
<id>82</id>
</contributor>
<comment>vandalized this page</comment>
<text xml:space="preserve">Complete text of this revision of the article goes here.
</text>
</revision>
<revision>
...next revision of this page...
</revision>
</page>
<page>
...revisions of the next page...
</page>
</mediawiki>
Land of Lisp is looming, don't worry!

(I'm editing the book, by the way.)
The Library of Congress Acquires Entire Twitter Archive
One Song Sang By 2,088 Voices – Mechanical Turk Rendition
The strong focus on Microsoft made this article sound suspicious to me from the start, but it got worse as I read.
Big Picture: Journeys to the International Space Station [photos]
Well if you have your own employees apart from the regular salaries you have to pay for health insurance/401k/Social security/Gym membership etc. which can add up to a lot. Infy can do it cheaper coz not only they are paying in Indian Rupees and not in USD they don't have these much costs (All these extras are much cheaper in India) .

Also, most Microsoft internal users are pretty tech-savvy so they are more ready to work with a customer service to resolve a technical issue than regular users
Am I the only one who see's the numbers as a bit odd?

So the first day (april 3rd) they sold 300,000 units. Four days later (april 8th) they were talking about having sold 450,000 units (~37.5k per day) now 6 days after that, they announce 500,000 units (~8.3k per day).

How exactly is this "a runaway success"?
Rupert Murdoch is modren day bully and i have no regards for his publications.
Agreed. And Opera usage certainly doesn't seem to be growing. I really wish it was more standards compliant :/
Ok, I fixed the minimum login length to 2 chars. Good catch. Also, I removed the $100/hr sub title :)
These workers are taking it to the extreme: 12 months on, their kids have a shot at going to college rather than working in a factory.
Be careful. There is a very fine line past which repetition of my name feels condescending to me. Customer support representatives, particularly those that are clearly outside of the US, go way past this line every time.
Am I the only one who can't get Hacker News to show on it?
The Chinese government has three (approximately) week long holiday periods around the lunar new year, labor day, and national day. For factories like the one described in the article, they can expect up to about 30% of their workers to leave on vacation and not come back.
And the browser almost everyone will use is the one that came with the device, not one that almost nobody outside our nerdy circle has ever heard of, and absolutely nobody outside our nerdy circle would have known was released yesterday unless they read sites like the ones we frequent.
Factory workers here would revolt if you limited them to 45 hours. Many regularly work 60.
Back when I was a cat, we chased bugs for fun! Now these young kitties just want to play their vidja-games all day and night.
Library of Congress Acquires Entire Twitter Archive
Disagree. We humans are emphatically not optimized for the world we live in today. We're adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessma...
Value of a 'Fan' on Social Media: $3.60
Choice of Entity for Entrepreneurs
LZMA is well-known for its decompression speed. This is one of the reasons it's a popular choice for filesystem compression. It's quite easy for LZMA to keep a pretty fair pace with a disk, so you get a pretty noticeable performance boost by adding LZMA at the filesystem layer, especially for read-heavy workloads.

Gzip usually gets a slightly better compression ratio, but at the expense of decompression speed, particularly on less compressible data (LZMA somehow seems to know better when to give up trying to compress). Bzip2 has the best compression ratio of the three, but is far too slow to compress and decompress, so you end up losing more time decompressing than you gained by doing less actual I/O.

EDIT: source, for those curious folk out there: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1534536 (caveat: the experiments were run by taking a large file on disk and compressing it to another large file on disk, so seek thrashing may have been an issue and I'm not quick to take the numbers for all they should be worth)
I'm not too impressed with the app, myself. The interface and interaction are buggy and non-native.

I agree with John Gruber:

"I can’t see recommending this app to anyone other than those who use the EDGE network frequently.

But: it’s free."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262790
Why charge once for the service when you can charge twice?
They don't have to block access to Google. They just have to make Google a tenth of a second slower. The user won't notice that much, but Google knows how many millions of dollars it loses when its pages load slower.
How much traction do I need?
Yes. The article was full of this.

> All workers must trim their fingernails so as not to impede production.

> Workers are strictly prohibited from entering any work area other than their own.

> Workers describe factory food as awful.

Teenagers complaining about cafeteria food? Really? I'm sure conditions are bad, but the article is trying too hard.

As bad as things are, the boy interviewed comes back each night for four hours of voluntary overtime.
Yes, let's slam systems-level programming language Go for not catering to application developers...because what people writing operating system components and utilities really want is an e-mail address as a first-class language feature.
Application-level software written in C mismanages memory allocation? I can't believe it!
The vast majority of 1.5 based phones in the US will be getting upgrades to 2.1 in the next couple months.

Only phones not getting updated to 2.1 will have paths to 1.6.

Google has declared its own apps will target 1.6 and 2.1 and vendors (at least in the US) have been working on getting their phones upgraded these past few months.

1.5 is a dead platform and I suspect at least from the US that graph will look very different by winter.
Library of Congress announced that they're archiving every tweet since Twitters inception. Not sure if they said anything at Chirp about it yet.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/the-library-of-congress/how-tw...
Sorry about that, it was default in a plugin I'm using but I've removed it from future emails that are sent.
The behavior of installing other browsers or god forbid multiple browsers, isn't a mainstream one though.
Chobi Mini Digital Camera (4.4 x 2.9 x 1.2) cm
I said it earlier and my ideas are:

1) brand awareness (people will actually start to know Opera web browsing solutions/Opera Software, which is a small brand/browser compared to Firefox or Chrome, don't even mention IE)

2) they make money driving traffic to the default websites on Opera Mini's speed dial homepage
"Privileged white collars shocked and dismayed that blue collar work can really, really suck. News at 11."

Your comment made me think: Privileged white collar shows complete disregard for those that have it worse. News at 11.
They're forwarding people over to their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/notes/the-library-of-congress/how-tw...
how effective do you think such an organization could be?

For example, the first job I worked at the age of 14-15 was below 'minimum wage' in my area and thus could be called an 'illegal sweatshop' but realistically, considering my background and options (I had no immediate financial need to work; this was my 'foot in the door') it was just some kid getting some experience.

The thing is, I didn't go to school. (I mean, I went to highschool, but that's little more than babysitting. I didn't go to college) If you want to get a job that requires a degree without having that degree, you need to do that job for a smaller company that is paying you way below market rates before you can do that job at market rates. It's the way it works, and it worked out fine for me. I ended up making more than anyone I grew up with.

I'm not saying that my situation compares with that of the Chineese teens; I'm just saying, you need to be careful to define sweatshop in a way that would protect those who need protecting, without getting in the way of those who don't. My stepmother made me quit my first job after she found out that not only were they paying me under the table, they didn't have workman's comp. I was being "exploited." I mean, I was being exploited. But it was a hugely positive experience with me. The shady computer repair place sold me discounted used computer parts for years to come, and I was able to get a (legal, minimum wage, with school credit) job at one of the local county offices that was a customer of the shady computer repair place the next summer, so it all worked out okay in the end, but without getting that foot in the door, who knows how long it would have taken my career to take off?

I'm not saying yours isn't a worthy goal, just... you need to be careful with it.
5 hardest google job interview questions answered
Oh cool, I haven't read that book, will look it up. The UseR series books are very good too, although a bit expensive. If you have access to a good University library, I recommend looking them up.
So they overcharge the users and that's not enough, so now they want a piece of Google?
Right...
>> "Although the Opera browser will be a free app for download, the company’s revenue will increase thanks to advertising and search engines built into the web browser."

from http://www.techjackal.net/internet/2010/04/14/opera-browser-...
Hirota v. MacArthur and War on Terror detainees
Braintree is what we are test driving right now. My question was did you build your system for the customer sign-up /management/recurring payments to interact with Braintree API or did you use any existing software/frameworks. I am looking for any suggestions/solutions on this. Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions.
I would not call Notepad a texteditor. It's nothing else than a textbox.
Yes, I'm working on that now
But they all buy the ADSL access from BT and are basically just billing operations - if BT chooses to implement a pay per content they will have to pass that on.

If you have a cable connection then it's probably owned by Sky (murdoch) already.
In Defense Of Venture Capitalists
One more government database...
Tun/Tap interface tutorial
I have to say that is a nice looking drop down menu.
MySQL 5.5.4 is Very Exicting
>RT is a bit suspect when it comes to Russian govt. issues however

Ha, that's certainly understating the issue. I followed their reporting of the war with Chechnya and it was often war-goading propaganda. They're good if Russia has no national stake in a news item, but Orwellian otherwise.
"Pair programming" is probably the only agile practice of which I am not convinced. I'm open to do it, but I don't really know how much productive you become. Also a lot of people seem to think agile is equivalent to "pair programming" and reject the rest of the practices.
14 and 15 year olds should not be working in sweatshops. what the hell is wrong with the people defending this? this isn't the pampered western worker vs the average 3rd world worker, this is kids being forced to go without sleep and effectively without a life for pennies. fuck that. i know most people will argue something like "they are probably lucky to get it." it's still bad for them, and trying to justify the bad conditions with arguments like 'its expected of them' really exposes a true lack of empathy for one's fellow man and some pretty selfish reasoning.
Did you even read his entire comment?
I haven't tried Incanter yet, but from what I've read about it, it sounds very interesting. Perhaps that is a good way to get started learning Clojure (like I'm learning Python via Matplotlib). Since Incanter is still in early stages of development, I think I'd still prefer R to do any serious work, because it's probably a lot more solid and has a lot more packages.
An actual inability to formulate prejudice, as opposed to an ability to suppress it, would be a dangerous trait to have. Prejudice, whether it manifests itself in the form of latent tribal/racial preference or in sex/gender assumptions, is simply an indicator that the template-matching engine in the nearly autonomous, more primitive and survival-oriented areas of our brains are working properly. It takes training to associate "girl jobs" with girls and "boy jobs" with boys, or to associate skin tone with stereotype (and may we find a way to stop passing on our own training), but the recognition of "other" is probably vital to the survival of the individual. It's how we "smell danger" in details of our surroundings we may not have time to become consciously aware of. It's how we protect children and their nurturers, sometimes at our own expense, without thought of reward.

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding? Nothing -- unless you think of it as a problem of genetics.
I'm not the author, but it appears that the green tag is your current time zone, at the time you want to convert from. Initially, this starts as the current time, but it can be adjusted. When you move the green tag, a purple tag is placed to represent the current time instead.
I don't see why this particularly matters. You could likely store the entire twitter archive on a couple of memory sticks, so it doesn't seem to warrant some big library to "house" it.
"I really wish it was more standards compliant :/"

uh What? It is and always has been one of the most compliant...
Good catch with the lowercasing names. I'll fix that. Yes, I need a better implementation of searching by tag, or at least do some serious data cleanup.
There are also options like Erlang and Node.js where hot code-swapping is possible. Although having a second database is useful as a slave, of course, I don't think it is necessary to run two copies of the database just to redeploy.

Github just redeploys by killing and restarting Unicorn workers gradually. It's graceful, because any worker that is handling a connection won't be killed, so you won't get any dropped connections. http://github.com/blog/517-unicorn
One click install Oracle in Debian based OS
Friend of mine need to install Oracle the easy way, so tried to make a script for it.
Therrien Secure Solutions
Therrien Secure Solutions is a New Hampshire security systems installation company, protecting its customers for over 15 years. We are a local company, with the strength of a national central station monitoring center behind us providing 24 hour, year round monitoring.
Ask HN: Apps Using Sproutcore?
Hey guys, trying to find a list of apps using Sproutcore. I put together a list using Cappuccino here: http://www.cloudomatic.com/tag/cappuccino/ , saw that someone then search for sproutcore afterwards, which made me think of tagging apps with Sproutcore would be useful.

ps- Looking for real web apps that people can sign up for/use, not strictly tech demos.
Library Management Gets an Update in Rails 3
I think the conditions in this factory are actually quite above what you can normally expect to find, and for that kudos to Microsoft.

My mom used to work for a guy that imports ceramic tiles from China- now those workers had conditions that were just plain awful.

While I definitely don't condone these actions, I think the author perhaps should have aimed his venom at a more deserving target.
GCC 4.5.0 is out
Status report form From: Richard Guenther
Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting
>I wish people would stop talking about Williams syndrome as if it were, on the whole, desirable.

I have a relative with WS. She's got a great personality, but has health issues that no one would want. Her intelligence is also well below average and she can't live on her own.
I read jalopnik from time to time, and I can't say I've noticed that the comment quality has been anything special.

The best comment model I've seen is the NYTimes, which combines moderation and featured comments (the user recommended comments are too heavily biased towards what was posted first to be useful).
A mixture of LSD, psilocybin and early exposure to PBS has been proposed to also approximate this effect.
I feel that some of the pictures are taken out of context and portray an inaccurate image. In Asia, it's common for schools and workplaces to allow students and workers to put their heads down for naps in the middle of the day. The article uses an image of workers seemingly "collapsed" on the work bench as the first picture to depict harsh working conditions, which is misleading.
these too,

http://mazenharake.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/let-it-crash-the...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software
Despite what you might think, I'm no Ayn Rand-quoting objectivist ;)

What I do think is that this article makes much ado about nothing - sweatshop labor permitted my parents' generation to pull themselves out of poverty, get educated, and get white collar jobs - in fact my mother and all of her siblings eventually all got white collar, comfortable desk jobs.

What we're looking at is a country in a natural evolutionary state towards wealth - much like the US's tendency to impose democracy on nations with no foundation necessary for its success, it would IMHO be disastrous to attempt to enforce Western standards of work (or hell, enforcing white collar definitions of what is reasonable and fair).

Taiwan has evolved from a cheap-labor, sweatshop labor model to an educated, R&D-centric model. The island has gone from an agrarian backwater to one of the urban jewels of the Pacific. I am glad that this has happened - and yet I'm not convinced it would have gone down that well if well-meaning Western labor activists had their way.

I do think that fundamental worker safety must be ensured - companies certainly have proven that they can't be trusted to do that on their own, but enforcing someone's "right" to use a cell phone while working? Really?