skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(along with an app store, we hope)

Is it me, or are people beginning to forget that Chrome OS does not run apps natively, and instead that web apps are Chrome apps? I'm actually looking forward to a Chrome tablet, because of several things:

1. very elegent multi-tasking, as each task is just a tab in the browser

2. circumvents the need for an app store by using "native" web apps

3. no need to specifically target new apps at it. build once for the web, put in zero extra effort and have a chrome app.

4. simplified target for developers: web standards

5. no need to learn another framework for another device

As such, I think a Chrome OS tablet could become a very succesful, yet quiet, replacement for the iPad. As (I believe) Google said before, the internet is Chrome OS's killer app.
It makes sense to me. Happiness doesn't come from amazing "things". We can fly but we are coerced into constantly hating our bodies, poisoning ourselves, living in fear of things we don't understand, and viewing our neighbors as competitors.

Our technology is amazing, but our cultural practices have evolved to make us miserable. Almost every enduring widespread cultural practice in the U.S. evolved and thrived precisely because it fostered mass spending. The cultural practices that made us healthy and self sufficient have long since died out.

Darwin is dead, long live Darwin.
Accumulation of blog comments solves substantial mathematical problem
You change CEOs when your current one starts making boneheaded power plays that will ultimately harm the company, but nobody has the balls to stand up to him because his eyes are weird.
Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1
I actually understand the risks and importance of software freedoms. I just think this isn't marketable or practical at all. And if nobody wants to do it then you don't have a social network.
"A good parallel is the romantic realm: First a light kiss. Then harder. A hand wrapped around the low back. Upper back. In the hair. Grabbing. Tugging. Pulling. A brush against the breast. A kiss on neck. The clavicle. Sternum. Clothed breast. Bare breast. Nipple. And pretty soon you're upstairs rollicking on the kitchen table....This, my friends, is how the poor man should hire."

With this kind of enlightened dialectic, I just can't understand why more women don't go into computers.
I agree that we do live in an amazing age we live in, even though I wouldn't put too much emphasis on being able to fly (as this has been around for about 60 years now). I think technologically speaking, a major breakthrough was definitely the internet and mobile communication.

However, I would like to say something about the current generation. I believe the reason they are whiners is maybe because many youngsters in the west are facing the perspective of not being better off financially than the generation of their parents, putting lots of pressure upon them.

I think many people (at least here in Europe) are skeptical of technology because they perceive globalization, outsourcing, technological advancement and increasing competition as interlinked factors, which do not necessarily improve their quality of life, but rather present them with additional unknowns.

Again speaking for Europe, technology would be more widely accepted and hopefully appreciated, if there was a way to give the current generation more certainty that there will be enough water to flow all boats.
> A sizable chunk of society?
> I do not have exact numbers, but judging from this thread, >15%

1) 15% is a sizable chunk? Really?
2) Hacker News posters are about as unrepresentative a sample as you can get.

> And I'm fine with that, just as long as you also understand it's unhygienic and, after being brought up to your attention, selfish (I'm comfortable) and inconsiderate (live with it).

How unhygienic is it when compared with the conditions of the rest of the world around you that you interact with (voluntarily or otherwise) day by day? I don't know. I suspect you (and the blog poster) don't either. It may very well be that -- as usual -- humans are just really bad at risk analysis and stuff-from-feet just really isn't a big deal.

Regardless, it's been a week or so since this post, and I've been somewhat-consciously more aware of the situations where I put up my feet. I noticed that I never put my feet up on desks (that's kinda uncomfortable; I tried it [shoeless] out of curiosity), and never on conference tables (ditto?). My favorite kind of place to put up my feet is on one of the lower supports under a table. So it appears in general I avoid putting my feet up on the actual surface of things where people might put food, or put their hands, or rest their heads, etc.

Having said that, I put my feet on top of my coffee table in my living room all the time. But I never have my shoes on in my apartment, so at least that's something.

Still, though, I think the obsession some people have with "public hygiene" is a bit excessive. Being conscious of personal hygiene is great, but the world is a dirty, gross, germ-ridden place. Get used to it, or go around in a giant hamster ball.

On a side note, I noticed that quite a few posts here didn't present hygiene arguments. Many were from people of Indian or Middle-Eastern cultures where showing someone your feet is considered rude (a fact I was not aware of; thanks to HN for teaching me something new). Now, personally, knowing that, I would certainly avoid putting my feet up in front of people who may be culturally sensitive to that sort of thing. But, directed at people of those cultures: you're (presumably) in the US, or a place where your culture is not the dominant one. You have to understand that other cultures are different from yours, and people may not know that things they find innocuous will offend you. The onus is on you to be accommodating toward them, not the other way around. Just as when they are in your country, they should be sensitive of your culture.
Guide To Flirting [pdf]
Brian forgot to mention that we're crazy-ass profitable.

Find the filings for proof.
Also worth keeping an eye on: the TouchBook, a netbook with a detachable touchscreen display: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

I'd love to see an open-source product that rivaled the utility and UX (and fun!) of the iPad, but I'm not holding my breath. Put simply, the free software community doesn't have a great track record when it comes to interfaces and behavioral design. What makes the iPad great isn't the hardware, it's the OS and the APIs.
Their "speedtest.bin" file downloads at 175 KB/s for me on my 2 MB/s connection, so no deal. Granted I'm in Australia, but using Rapidshare or Usenet directly I can max out my connection.
Ask HN: Good Teaching Materials for Precalculus Mathematics?
I'm looking for online teaching materials for learners of secondary school mathematics, generally any subject from what is called "prealgebra" in the United States (topics such as ratios and proportions, simple use of literal variables, coordinate graphing, etc., which are often late elementary topics in other countries) to "precalculus" (trigonometry, functions, matrices, and other school mathematics that precedes calculus instruction). I'll share some examples of good exposition with thought-provoking problems in a comment to this post, and I welcome all of you to share more suggestions. I observe that many HN participants who have children are eager to make sure their children have a good mathematical education.
Go sit in everything before you make up your mind. You may have to drive to several office furniture stores to do this -- one store may not carry all the major brands.

In the end, I purchased a Steelcase Leap, and I've been very pleased with it. Unlike cheaper chairs I've used, it doesn't leave me feeling fatigued after hours of use.
Persistence Smoothie: Blending SQL and NoSQL
The Web’s the Place
Adobe's target audience is people who don't want to program in Objective C. By writing a mega .lib to allow cross-compilation, you're not reaching those customers. I really think there are not that many iPhone developers who want to port their code automatically to Flash.

Having worked with both Flash and Cocoa/Objective C, I believe this idea would be near impossible to execute - the platforms are so dissimilar. I start to get a headache just thinking how you would translate Cocoa to ActionScript 3/The Stage.
Yes on both counts. I'd say it happens all the time in startups, especially with co-founders and early hires.
The kinds of people who work in startups are probably living in cheaper neighborhoods and finding creative ways to make their dollars go further. As pg has commented, nerds tend to be rather frugal. Also, salaries are high equivalent to the higher rents, so it all evens out in the end. Calling NY expensive is misleading. It can be expensive. But it can also be inexpensive if that's your goal.
Is anyone hiring in Dallas, TX?
from their faq

Your files are your business. We do not log your location, isp or ip address.

http://help.put.io/faqs/security-privacy/is-putio-reliable-s...
Heh, one can only stuff so much in one comment.

At the limit, I still see some large stuff coming together unless you rip out the legal system well beyond what I think is optimal. My father works for Chrysler, and I have observed that even as they outsource everything they can, the remaining core is intrinsically huge, as there really has to be an entity that is finally responsible for the car. That means that entity has to have a huge testing component. That further means it needs to do its own design. It also really needs to be the one doing the manufacturing, too, even if that is only a "final assembly" step.

Structuring things so that this wouldn't be necessary anywhere in the economy is probably not currently practical. But ask me again in 20-30 years; technology is rapidly shifting from encouraging centralization to the opposite.
Gemvara is hiring (Lexington, MA)- http://www.gemvara.com/Careers/pages/v/about/careers/

- CAD Modeler

- Front-End Developer

- Senior Java Developer

- Procurement Manager - Colored Stones

- Web 2.0 E-Commerce Developer

- Personal Shopper
They have already done a bit of work in this department with the whole Alchemy project: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
1> This violates the agreement

2> The installs expire after 3 months (adhoc that is)

3> I think this model isn't going to get around apple. They're famous for defeating workarounds.
Thanks for the great feedback. I'm looking mostly to have an active community, but one that generates some small revenue on the side. I'm just looking to pay back hosting etc. costs. I agree with the idea that a project should never be finished, and that's what I used to think, but then I read a few hacker news articles about fail early etc., and I realized I was spending way too much time on little features. I went through a bunch of layout changes, and while this one is boring, I think it works.

I just added anonymous arguing, so that will help the site get some activity, I think. I don't want to do blackhat stuff/actively SEO it, but only if nothing else works.

I bought a Reddit self-serve ad, and I guess I'll see how that works, and I'll start making small comments on political forums or something.
Thinking of the entire valley as looking entirely like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_San_Jose_(crop).jpg is a bit hyperbolic. Downtown Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose are reasonably urbanized and offer at least some of the culture one would find in SF (albeit far less).

It also matters what age you are. Those with kids tend to favor the suburbs over SF. Those without may favor SF. Personally, I work in Sunnyvale and hate a long commute more than anything else -- hence I am happily living there.
You can definitely find cheaper places, but in the end you are still going to be paying almost double what a cheap place in the Valley costs.

Also if you are bootstrapping, your salary isn't really tied to cost of living.
Well, at least we know he's listening and is concerned enough to respond to the criticism. Where this leads will be interesting to see, it's only been two days after all.

Thanks for emailing him.
Steve's second response tells us that he's well aware of what they're doing. The platform is going to be heavily guarded. If you make something for the iPhone or iPad you're going to have to hire fan-boys or developers who are very, very willing to bow to the Apple.
It's funny, his main example of a "high quality cross platform app" was Mozilla Firefox. In my opinion, Mozilla Firefox is a prime example of why the intermediate layers (if Firefox uses one, I'm not sure) and the cross platform stuff is a bad idea. It uses its own weird certificate store instead of using the operating system's, its interface does not have a Cocoa feel in any sense of the term, etc.
Am I the only one that doesn't sit on a hard chair? :) I tried them out and I much prefer the "sofa chair"

http://ioj.com/v/h6qxu <- photo of my aging chair
It seems like every few months, John Gruber hits another clout milestone. Now Steve Jobs's own statements are a self-described tl;dr of Gruber's posts? Not too shabby.

Anyway, the puzzling thing here is that as Greg says, most iPhone OS apps are written in one of the whitelisted languages already. Couple that with what I think is the likely fact that Apple is being honest about its motives (namely that it doesn't want its roadmap to have to consider third-party toolkits in any way), and it's confusing. Why would they go to the trouble of pissing everyone off to bring about a result that had largely brought itself about?

Two answers. One, I think Apple feared that more third-party toolkits are on the way, and that they'll become more popular. Two (and I think this is a huge part of it), Apple seems to have simply underestimated how mad this would make developers.

I wouldn't be surprised if the company went back on 3.3.1, or at least moderated it. Apple's only willing to be a jerk when it and the public agree about the level of jerkitude at hand. If Apple gets more ire than it was expecting, there's precedent for it backing down.
Enterprise-play RhoMobile sees way out of new Apple restrictions
I would not consider Firefox to be a "top-notch" Mac app. Every time I used it it felt slow, awkward, and clunky. I'd even find myself using non-native keyboard shortcuts (despite the native ones being available; e.g. F5 vs. Cmd+R) simply because it took me out of the "Mac native" world. No matter how close its emulation came there was always something to throw me off, mostly little GUI idiosyncrasies.
Which community would that be, if you don't mind divulging? ...umm, ignoring the irony of me asking you for more information...
You know they are worried when they are using their PR backchannel. (But damn, what a great tool from a PR perspective.)

(I don’t really know whether Firefox is such a good example. It’s a great program because it first challenged IE, not because it’s anything close to a native feeling app. There must be better examples out there, right?)
Ah, you mean because the description reads like a romance novel, women would think they are being typecast? :-)
So let me get this straight, you are a fanboy per definition if you're an iPhone developer? Holy fundamentalism, Batman!
Good ideas, thanks. I haven't seen whitehouse2, which is really good, or allrise. Mine doesn't have a focus, it's basically a site where you can debate about anything, and tag it so it stays a bit organized. Or do you mean something else by focus? I'll add a quick feature matrix now.
Tell HN: Stealth startup seeks django/jquery dev
We have developed a prototype for a crm app which is basically similar to highrisehq.com in terms of functionality but not design.

My cofounder and I are looking for a seasoned django/python dev who also has some decent front-end experience using jquery/css.

Please post anything relevant like sites you've worked on, blogs, and/or your particular strengths.

We're based in Santa Monica, CA but remote work is also fine.

thanks
Ask HN:  Idea - Phone Analytics/Tracking
Hi all-

With phone service moving (slowly) to the web with services like Google Voice, Phonebooth, Line2 etc. I was thinking that it would be cool to create a dashboard that could track who/what/where you were calling/get calls from. This could be useful in the life planning sense or could be very useful for businesses that use these services as primary point of contact with customers. It's a pretty rough idea, but would love some feedback.

Thanks!
Great post. I'm reprinting this from my comment on the blog because I hope more HN peeps who are making the NYC/SV choice read this:

Having recently moved from SV to NYC, I love how much more quickly I can get to startup offices and events. Even better, when I do travel, I do it by train. This means I don't need to pay for a car or car insurance, and it means that I can read my book while on the subway. In Silicon Valley, I couldn't afford a car and had to bike everywhere or be at the mercy of the Caltrain... a _very_ bad thing at 2:30am in San Francisco, I can tell you.

Also, Manhattan rent can be expensive (although the LES is not much worse than Palo Alto btw), but living in Harlem, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, or even NJ and Connecticut is much cheaper and, as the map above shows, adds only minutes to your commute time.

Also, after working hard on a startup, sometimes it's nice to play hard too. Bars and clubs that close at 4am, and being able to get home by cab, can make that part of your lifestyle a lot easier.
No. Repeating myself now, a fanboy or just willing to work within Apple's tools and nothing else.
This is pretty awesome.

I slapped together a private solution on slicehost that pretty much does the same thing, but this is much cheaper.

It'll be good until it gets shutdown.
Browsing around the Web, I've found a number of useful materials young learners or for their teachers about the mathematics that Americans might consider "middle school" or "high school" mathematics. Here are some examples of downloadable materials:

An amazingly clear and thoughtful textbook from the state government of Kerala, India, available not only in the English version linked below, but also in Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada.

http://www.education.kerala.gov.in/englishmedium/mathseng/te...

A guide for teachers to the most critical issues in mathematics education at the early secondary school level.

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/

The Mathematics Pre-service Teachers Need to Know is a detailed discussion of how teachers of even earlier topics can get ready to lay a good foundation for learners to learn secondary school mathematics topics.

http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083

The Singapore Math series cover these topics well. The various textbook publishers have permitted some sample pages to be shown from sublinks on the North American distributor's website.

http://www.singaporemath.com/Secondary_math_s/22.htm

Some college-level teachers who teach prealgebra topics in remedial classes have put together impressive lecture notes.

http://ms.yccd.edu/~jb2/Prealgebra/fm.pdf

What other resources like this do you like?
PS. I wish it did Usenet though.
Want it? Give. (Plea to Rails Developers)
Art.sy is looking for a Lead Front-End Engineer in NYC: http://bit.ly/bHo0rW
So, I can understand why developers dislike and hackers despise the new 3.3.1 rules. What programmer, in their right mind, wants to have the language they develop in dictated to them?

But, for just a moment, I'm hoping that some of you can appreciate how miserable an experience Apple users have had with the couple decades of various levels of cross-platform development that Microsoft has done.

At times, those applications have been _so_ bad as to be an advertisement for windows. I'm an Apple fanboy, and own three generations of Apple MBPs, three iPhones, and, of course, an iPad - but to this day, at work, I still keep a 2003 class Windows XP system with Microsoft Excel on it to get work done - The painful experience that is Office 2008, (and don't get me started on "NeoOffice") single handedly make me appreciate the fact that Apple is dictating that people write dedicated, high quality applications, directly for the iPhoneOS, rather than trying to do some crufty translation to that platform.

When I read Jobs's response, I could only imagine that he was having bad flashbacks to some of the x-platform disasters of years past.

I appreciate and respect that developers don't want to be told how to develop, but if the end result is that the few development shops out there capable of putting out a AAA title like Microsoft Excel, have to pony up a few more developer resources and put out a world class app directly for the iPhone OS, rather than just creating some half-baked x-platform experience, I'm in favor of 3.3.1.
When Steve Jobs got a demo of the graphical user interface and object-oriented software at Xerox PARC, he saw a computer that could be interactively programmed. In Smalltalk.

When Steve Jobs started with NeXT in the mid 80s he got a demo of a novel program that can be used to interactively design general user interfaces - the first program of its kind.

It was written in Lisp by Jean-Marie Hullot. It was called SOS Interface, marketed also as Action! by the company Expertelligence.

Steve Jobs hired him and Jean-Marie created the Interface Builder - which became one of the most important tool on NeXT OS. Then for Mac OS X and now for iPhone OS.

This innovation is now hindered by Apple. The innovative software may not be written in Lisp anymore, but it is not necessarily Objective-C either.

With the Mac everybody got a copy of HyperCard - everybody could write and design programs in a simple way - using the built-in HyperTalk. Xerox had such a software years before - called NoteCards and written in InterLisp-D.

With the iPad, which is much more capable than the Mac where SOS Interface and HyperCard were developed, everybody is degraded to be a consumer. The goal is no longer to be a maker, a creator, a programmer. You can't even use a shell to connect to your own iPad.

There is huge domain of visual programming and end user programming to be explored on touch screen devices. Maybe Apple is working on that and hiding this (like Jobs claimed that 'nobody reads anymore' and some time later Apple now sells iBooks) - from what we see now Apple hinders innovation and innovators in these areas.

I want a 'DynaBook' and not a media player.

Steve Jobs did not really understand what he saw at Xerox PARC when he got the demos of the Smalltalk system. He got the idea of the graphical user interface. But what he overlooked was the concept of object-oriented programming. He later with NeXT understood that. But what he never really got was the importance of interactive programming, end-user programming - the role of the user being able to program his computer in a straight-forward way. The cultural importance of being able to write, understand and change software.