skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you know the number of searches that went through Scroogle was so low it wasn't a factor? It may well have been a factor. Or it might not have been. We simply don't know.
Maybe try to build for both platforms? There are a lot of interesting options in that way. Titanium Mobile from Appcelerator (http://www.appcelerator.com/) lets you compile one application to Android and iPhone os. Also, MonoTouch is a software to make iPhone apps using C# (if you're used to C# it might be faster than learning objective-c) and the Novell team are currently working on MonoDroid for Android phones. (http://monotouch.net/)
Can this be used with other languages or only Java?
I have a motorized sit/stand desk, as is the norm here in Denmark (and Scandinavia in general probably). I have used these for five-six years.

I tend to stand around half the time at work, which comes to something like three-four hours on the average day. If I have just done a long run or bike ride I might sit for the entire day as my legs and back will already be fatigued.

The thing that makes me sit is aching feet. I suppose standing for a long time makes bodily fluids assemble in the lower legs, so after a while the feet start to feel a bit swollen and the heels get sore from having all the weight on them. This is alleviated by switching around from one leg to the other, but after a couple of hours I need to sit for a while (this is the reason a desk must be stand OR sit and not fixed to standing-only - you need the ability to adjust according to the situation.)
Square mobile payment system goes live on iPhone, iPad, and Android this week
I never meant to imply that Perl is suitable for newbs, but rather most scripting languages are. I would much rather newbs learn another language, in fact. I changed my wording in my original post to reflect that.

Also, for my background, I learned Perl as my first scripting language and after writing a ~1k line code project in it, decided that for anything over 200 lines I would rather use Java. Later when I learned Python I was vindicated in that almost everything I instinctively disliked about Perl was absent in Python. Since then I have learned many other languages as well, and I also know Perl the language better than most of my co-workers
Why not just use Prism (http://prism.mozillalabs.com/)?
Thank you for this, this was apparently fixed in .NET 4.0 which I was unaware of.

I think there is still some validity in my post in confusing whether you are using native accessing or routing through an additional tool/library, but the fix definitely elimates the performance hit I was discussing, so much of my post was in error.

edit: Also 3.5 it seems, I need to be more up-to-date with my concerns.
The problem here is it is absolutely not "more user friendly" to just automatically make things more WYSIWYG. When it is important to preserve content and structure rather than just presentation---as is nice in HTML generally but crucial on Wikipedia---you need to provide a tool that helps you do that, not just make it pretty.

I have a student who has just completed an honors project that demonstrated that if you give web novices a simple markup language and a non-WYSIWYG editor (but do give them a preview button) they confirm presentation but focus on content, which ultimately makes websites more usable and often prettier too. It won the ugrad research competition at SIGCHI this year, so I don't think she was out in left field on this.

So, short version: Wikipedia's making a big mistake here.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1337039
How to save the news, by Google
You could buy your child a netbook -- or a shelf of real books -- for the average yearly lottery expenditure in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Or you could save the money and use it as a cushion against cash shocks, preventing you from having to go to payday lenders, which are another unsavory business which exists to keep people poor and stupid.

See: http://www.chicagoreporter.com/index.php/c/Cover_Stories/d/I...
Another HN discussion about the Scroogle outage here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1337099
A DSL to access the Google App Engine datastore from Clojure
These kind of CSS extensions and hacks really begin to feel like Interweb has gotten a new shiny hammer, and is trying to do everything with it. IMHO a cleaner solution would be to have all interactivity/animation done in JS and CSS for styling only.
We have designed it in mind to easily add other languages. Currently their is a prototype for C++ built, but we want to do a really good job for one group of people (Java currently).

What language(s) would you like support for?
Soon to be the best use of your US dollars--origami
Yeah, the article fails to recognize that the lottery's returns are so poor because the government has a monopoly on them. At least private sector lotteries would have to compete on payout levels.
AppendChild vs insertBefore
Perhaps I was a bit harsh, didn't really mean it as negatively as it sounded. It's just that the entire post gave me the impression that he is more after making money than creating something valuable.

But my comment was that if he really is after making something valuable, he can choose either platform to make it for first and then make it for the other. It really won't make any difference since he will most likely not just be able to make it for one platform then wait for the money to roll in.

Or in other words, making it for one doesn't have to exclude the other; and after having created it for one, he will be able to get a better feel for the market and work on the other while working on the marketing.

I don't see how choosing just one of the platforms will make you the most money unless you're counting on a lucky break and get the lottery sales figures. Hence my judgment that he's really asking what platform he's most likely to get lucky in.

Of course everything I say has limitations in what you want to produce. And sort of contradictory to my point if the project is very big.
I remember when California first instituted its lottery and, upon hearing that 1/3 of the proceeds would go toward financing education (the political justification for the system), 1/3 would go toward administrative expenses, and 1/3 would go toward paying off winners, I immediately envisioned a poker game with six guys being told that a stranger would be taking away two-thirds of every pot for each hand they played and thought, "what a sucker game that is."

In his autobiography, Malcolm X spoke of the numbers-game racket that so decimated Harlem in his day. They used to call this exploitation. Now they call its modern counterpart enlightened public policy. Pretty sad.
Think of this as you would of NTSC television signals -- people with old black-and-white televisions can still watch the shows, but they wouldn't see all the pretty colours, and probably wouldn't have access to SAP or closed captioning. Progressive enhancement means that people using IE6 (or Lynx, for that matter) can still use the site, but they might not see the latest features.

Using JS to do the dirty work for something that is really no more than pleasant eye candy is somewhat reminiscent of some of the schemes I remember for embedding screen-edge encoding to control mechanical colour wheels to enable colour viewing on B&W tvs -- now, that's pointless.
One interesting quote from the article (the only interesting part for me):

It’s like the iPad was a device we never knew that we needed. Until Apple gave it to us.

That is the job of effective advertising, to make us need products that we didn't need before. Apple is good at this. I know I don't really need an iPad, and am determined to wait until the second generation comes out, yet I can't help but marvel at the effectiveness of Apple advertising and media coverage which makes it seem like the iPad is something everyone "needs".
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
- Michael Pollan

http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/15942...
I worked at a grocery store through high school, and there were people who would spend $25-50 on scratch-off lottery tickets almost every week, immediately re-spending the occasional $5 winner on...more tickets. I'm sure the details vary from state to state (this was in Michigan), but the scratch-off tickets probably get most of the money from poorer gambling addicts.
Trends are funny, and don't only go in one direction. According to the admittedly flawed TIOBE index (see http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... for verification), in the last year PHP, Python, and Ruby have all fallen, while Perl has increased.

Yeah, not what I would expect either. But Perl isn't as dead as people claim.
Ask HN: Anyone else getting followed by weird companies on twitter
Recently I have been followed by weird websites/companies like voteforpoem and spare247. In addition to this I am getting followed other spammy accounts (but that's a regular).I don't remember any connection with any of these.

Anyone else experiencing anything like this?
On Facebook Privacy Risks
When you're modifying stuff in the video, a dialog with a progress bar pops up for a split-second, but since the task finishes very quickly is disappears so quickly I feel it's unnecessary. Maybe move the progess bar to the status bar to avoid this annoyance.
don't compliment me, the title is a general purpose headline element. You can make many catchy headlines like

For the Win, FTW.

Online Black Markets, FTW

or a plain old Cory Doctorow FTW.
At some point in time I've owned Sticky Fingers in LP, 8-track, cassette, and compact disc. At least once in each format. They've all been lost or FUBAR through the years, and even if I still had them I couldn't play them.

Sticky Fingers in my iTunes library gets backed up with rsync every night, and I can't accidentally leave my iTunes library on the dashboard of a 1964 Mustang parked in the sun.
Or just forget about credit cards and use FaceCash!

http://www.facecash.com

(My startup.)

Seriously, the industry has no incentive to change. They make a killing. Merchant contracts are strict and likely forbid alternative standards such as the one being proposed here.
The used game market is money left on the table from the perspective of EA. A company should not leave money on the table if it makes fiscal sense to grab it.

EA was probably 'comfortable' with the used game market as long as they were rolling in cash because new game sales were profitable enough to compensate for the used game market and piracy.

However, as budgets increase and margins tighten, EA can no longer just look the other way. EA is hurting and many times X works out to be less than Y.

You suggest they change their business model. That's exactly what they have done. Reward gamers for purchasing the game new while not increasing the price of the game at retail while punishing the used game market which does not fiscally support EA.
This is cute. Not even Chargify or Recurly support[1] the "standard" (as far as I know), and they have vaults! Show me a list of other gateways that support the standard, and then maybe you can get the big boys on board.

I used to work in politics. This is the sort of poke-the-giant thing that longshot candidates do, and it actually ends up reflecting more negatively on Braintree than anyone else. It's a tone-deaf PR move from a great company.

EDIT: Looks like Chargify sends the CC details to the gateway and they don't have their own vault: http://chargify.com/features/pci-compliant-security/
that's the same as

var foo= new List<int> {1, 2, 3};

var bar = foo.Select(x => x*2);
We’re Asking President Barack Obama to Create a National Entrepreneurs’ Day
It has been that way for quite a while. Lucky for me I didn't enter the correct date when I signed up, and I keep it hidden so my friends don't start wishing me HB on the wrong day.
Zemlin: Fragmentation is Good and Bad for Linux
The Economist: A special report on television
I don't know Clojure. "(= (:" is equally line noise.
Good idea! I just tried to sign up and got the Oops page :(
Maybe computerized trading isn't the problem, but the solution?
Anyone has any reviews about Titanium Mobile?

Any hooks? They seem to ask for a signup to create an app.
How would you like an already painfully slow service to be even slower? The rumor that this is based on has no credibility.

And even if it were free, I'd still avoid it like the plague, because there are better offering's out there, most of which aren't mostly tied down to an OS.

This is unlikely to happen, unless Apple becomes a mobile service provider which is likely a bigger possibility.
It would be nice if the "best phone in the world" reliably made phone calls.
The Indian Govt. first needs to provide electricity to run electronic devices. Once they have figured that, and a million other basic necessities, maybe they can go ahead and waste some scientists on stuff like this.
It appears you can still edit it using the mobile interface: http://m.facebook.com/editprofile.php?edit=birthday&type...

(I don't want to test if the change actually goes through, sorry.)
You missed the point -- a power supply spike isn't a hard drive failure, even if it kills a couple of drives, it's a power supply failure.

I was explaining a common misconception about statistics, and using hard drives and DIMMs as examples.
I, for one, find that kind of function chaining somewhat unintuitive even while I understand the logic behind it. I except methods of an object to modify that object, not to return a modified version of the object.
> You could buy your child a netbook

so they can play MafiaWars or FarmVille...
Yup, that's what I did. I had to double check all my clients that would log into it to make sure they didn't accidentally reactivate me. My wife checked my account was gone by trying to search for me.
as an entrepreneur, i support this petition and would like to know where i can get my entrepreneur bailout forms.
Indeed, or simply go get a couple of personal finance books at the library and turn your life around. Too bad that few people actually do simple things that could improve their situation... If the money wasn't spent on lottery tickets, I'm not sure it would be spent on much better things.
That's why I consider the lottery not a "math tax" but an "economics tax". Your reasoning seems reasonable to someone that doesn't think about it too hard. But if a $1 lottery ticket gives you, say, a 1/10,000,000 chance to win $2.5 million... well, you need having $2.5 million to be ten million times better than having one dollar to make it a good bet.

I have no idea why anyone would consider this a rational decision, but gamblers do not typically gamble because they are rational.

There's also the effects of decreasing marginal utility, and the problems that someone poor with personal finance will have when faced with a lottery jackpot. I don't need to get into those to support my argument, but those effects are pretty big.
This is not the same mentality as the pirate discussion. A pirate gets a $60 game for $0. That's a huge price discrepancy.

At used game stores like Gamespot, the difference between new and used is often $5 or less. It also doesn't matter what the retail price point is set at. The used game price point will always be lower. Since new games are currently identical to used game, why not pick up the game for $5 less? This helps Gamespot and hurts EA.

Now, more a burden will placed onto Gamestop. They will have to lower prices on used games to compensate for the new 'taxes'. If anything, this is a win for used game buyers at the expense of Gamestop (an undesirable company from the perspective of EA).
As the rabbit said in "Street Fight"

It's our money. Let's keep it!
I read, not sure where now, that the author of this book goes back to Slough a few years later to see if it has had a lasting impact:

http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Bliss-Grumps-Search-Happiest...
and so you don't care about sound quality?
Increase conversion rate by making your site ugly
I prefer "dream license". As long as the buyer understands that all they are really purchasing is a one- or two-dollar piece of paper that allows them to dream the impossible for a few days, then there's no harm done. That the dream comes true for a very few folk is almost incidental. In fact, it's probably healthier than resigning oneself to life in the depths (sorry -- just watched Metropolis again). It's when people begin to believe that they've actually purchased eleventy-seven million dollars for the price of a cup of coffee, when they sacrifice now for a tomorrow that probability dictates will almost certainly never come, that the idea breaks down.
Good thing poor people are protected from investing in private securities offerings, via regulation and 'accredited investor' limits, so that they can spend more on government-issued lottery tickets.
This is an absurd discussion. If you don't know C#, "x =>" is line noise. (More fairly, since (= (x y) z) is trivial to understand if you've ever seen any kind of Lisp, I should say instead -- if you don't know any C-like languages, "List<int> { 1, 2, 3 }; is line noise.)

I suggest you learn the language you program in; problem solved.
Is Flash’s future its past?
Anand retains world chess championship title
Anand beats Topalov in the 12th game with black pieces
It pays to be educated?
It's up on the App Store for iPhone/iPad already. Found something interesting: you have to pass a credit check to get a card reader dongle.
A related data point is the Humble Indie Bundle, which is a pay-anything (including $.01) software bundle that is experiencing fairly heavy levels of piracy.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/05/humble-bundle-giv...
Hey Maro,

Good point! We have been debating this. As the resource was small in the shown case the dialog just popped up for a split second. The reason why we have it is because nothing else can be done when processing is happening and if the resource is large it takes a little longer to process, so it makes sense to have a dialog there for that period. Any suggestions about how it can be made better are welcome.
This can occur when somebody tries to invite their friend but they type the address wrong. I get lots of emails that were intended for somebody else and 100% of the time it is because they left a character out of the email address. I've received 2 facebook invites in the last 2 months from people who thought I was this other person.
Nope, if anything that's worse. But thanks, interesting to see another example.
Yep. Octazen make a great scraper at a good price. However, unlike Rapleaf's product (which goes through their servers and they admit they keep a copy of everything), you at least get standalone code that keeps the data on your servers. So I'm not sure they actually gained any new data from Octazen, just a smart team well-versed in scraping.
United States Patent number 1
I don't see this as effective advertising (though that is what gets you to buy it) as much as effective UX design. I never thought I needed a phone with anything but the ability to call, but now I can't imagine not having an phone with internet, GPS, email, etc. That change wasn't advertising, but the best design and form factor made at the time of its release.

Advertising gets you into the store, but an innovative product creates the "need we never knew we had."
The point is that "easier to understand" is, in these cases, subjective enough, and entirely dependant on prior experience enough, to be absolutely meaningless.
Yeah, I got that feeling too, when time measurements are in the microsecond range. I wonder how CPU cache and memory access patterns affect the results.
I wonder if there are places that will drop ship these for you.
I'm a recent convert to Git. Yes, it's confusing to newcomers. So is Subversion and all the rest. I just don't think there is any version control tool where the commands are totally intuitive, and there probably never will be.

The good news is that as more people flock to Git, they'll create better tools. Look at some of the wonderful things people have created for Subversion; for instance, the beautiful Mac client Versions, which is aimed at web designers rather than programmers. There's no reason something similar can't be built for Git. The average user shouldn't have to use the command line. Once those tools are in place, it won't matter how unintuitive Git's terminology is.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/google.com+scroogle.com/
Former Mint.com Marketing Chief Joins Startup Mindflash As CEO
I'm looking forward to reading this, but I had a similar experience reading Makers. The second and third acts felt too contrived, and I really struggled to finish it. The said, the first third is wonderful, and the short story Print Crime is worth looking for.
As a Mac user I don't believe Apple users are susceptible to buying junk. Apple users are more spendy, on average, than a typical Windows users but there is a wide chasm between well designed, simple software and junk.

The typical Windows user won't use more than what came with their PC on the day they bought it. Ever wonder why Dells, HPs, and Gateways come loaded with a lot of crap software? It's because ISVs know that your typical user won't spend more than he has to. If it comes with the PC and it's good enough than they'll use that. But that user will rarely head back to the store to search for an alternative.

When software is well written it's perfectly fine to show the developers some respect by paying for it. That's why the Mac shareware community is in much better shape than the PC side.
Lotteries: A Waste of Hope
Objective-C Tuesdays: atomic and nonatomic properties
HTML5 can't access the webcam.
Negative. I'm running it on linux.
I made a website with my wife.  It has turned out pretty well.
My wife and I used to play this game with each other once we started dating and decided to turn it into a website. The end result is Faveone (faveone.com).

It has taken about a year for it to get to where it is at, as I was new to Codeigniter and it was mostly just a small side project.

I wanted to see what the HN community thinks about it and get some feedback.

Link: http://faveone.com
What an incredibly sad story to see children fight over the estate of their parents.

I know it is quite common but I never understood it.
Write a little script that runs a search on google every few seconds and let me know how long it runs before you're blocked. Google definitely cares.

These guys weren't using an API, they were breaking the rules and scraping an obscure search results pages that Google apparently neglected to secure.
The Wrong Reasons To Pursue Venture Capital: Personal Credibility
Yeah, scratch-off tickets resemble casinos a lot more than tickets where you have to wait for numbers to be drawn. There's an immediate pay-off/loss, so you can get that adrenaline rush.
Because I want email addresses so I can tell people when the product has upgrades (assuming, of course, that there is interest)

Nothing nefarious.

There's an interesting trust/marketing issue here. People seem to not want to download free software. I can understand that. I wonder if it's particular to this market niche (tech people and people interested in stopping annoying social site behavior) or if it's more of a general problem with all downloaded software. Needs more research.

I could have went the download link. Think that would have been significantly better?
New HTML5 parser in Firefox 4 – SVG in HTML, faster parsing, and more
Ideally, the 1/3 that goes towards education would be spent on training the people who buy lottery tickets to understand statistics.
It's hard to belive that Topalov played 31... exf5 and 31...fxe4 it seemed extremely dangerous to free the powerful bishop in a8.
Does Scroogle really generate enough traffic for Google to even notice, or bother taking any action? Does anyone use it on a regular basis?