skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in China as an expat (from the US). It's not really clear to me what the political/social motivations are for blocking Dropbox. Maybe Dropbox is going to merge with Facetwit; that's blocked here too but dropping Dropbox is something new.
He's right, I'm a Motorola droid owner; it's a fantastic phone first and a so-so "device" second. The Android market has lots...and lots of crap. The game selection is simply dreadful compared to the app store.

The signal to noise (decent apps to cookie-cutter garbage) in the Market is minimal at best.

The phone is absolutely reliable, the gps is fantastic. The app selection, unless you're some crazy who needs 12 apps to tell you about "stuff around you" or you want a puzzle of every pixar/disney movie ever made, is in need of some serious house cleaning.
This means they aren't taking enough risks.

Seriously - the stock market is risk based. If you aren't taking risks then you're not going to be in those areas that make the most money. Sure, you want to make more than you lose, but if you never lose any money then you aren't taking enough risks to really strike it big by finding something nobody else thought would produce good returns.
True, but right now search fails miserably for images. It might not, if people tagged their images better (facebook does a good job of getting people to do this), but most people don't.
Tony Hsieh discusses Zappos culture & Delivering Happiness
http://www.sparkfun.com/ - Best place on the web IMO. Great resources and support. They are incredible. The founder started the company right out of college (CU Boulder). He gave a talk in a kick-ass embedded design course I was taking in CU. I think they've been around for 6-8 years and had been growing at 100% every 6 months for a while. Don't know how it they are doing right now (pretty well I'm sure). The web site is always chock full of nicely organized articles and videos.
Python and vim: Two great tastes that go great together
They said it was mostly used to impress clients who came into their office and wanted a visual experience of seeing users rushing in and buying stuff.
The lag your experience with the camera is mostly likely do to the autofocus/exposure whatever stuff. When I first got my N1, I would "click" the onscreen shutter "button" quickly like it was a hyperlink or something. Instead, you need to hold the onscreen shutter "button" down until you hear a tone and get a yellowish outline around the picture preview area. Then let go of the "button" and the picture will take instantly.

Of course, your mileage may vary. :-)
> More practically for the instant case, I use a provider who has a turnkey backup option, rather than one which would force me to spend expensive engineer time rolling my own

EBS lets you create backup snapshots in S3 with one single command. The problem the (I think the epithet is warranted here) idiot who posted the original article had is that he didn't use it.
You're getting downvoted (not by me), probably because your post was a bit over the top, but in reality you're right. Whatever the merits of this idea, it certainly isn't new, and Apple wasn't the first to try it. But as always, when Apple implements an idea from somewhere else, they get all the credit. But like you said, it goes far beyond Apple. No doubt people discussed this very issue years and years ago, and had solid reasons for choosing a file-system. Things may have changed, so it's fine to reconsider the decision, but rather than everyone pulling an opinion out of nowhere, perhaps we should review the past rationale first, and once again weigh the pros and cons.
Full Exchange support is available in several third party apps (IMHO, that's where it belongs. I despise Exchange).
Google Docs: use of an URL parameter is a violation of intergalactic law
At a guess; dropbox lets you share public files; both privately syncing them with others or presenting them publicly.

All of which is non-indexed and not easily tracked.

Im guessing it's become a distribution method for information they are not keen on (or they feel it will be).

In a sense it was only a matter of time :(
"There's not a single good reason in this post why Dropbox shouldn't sell to anyone interested in paying, nor are there any reasons stated why Dropbox should open source."

Sure there is. "I hope they don't" and "I hope they do" respectively, for correct values of "I".

Well, I suppose you could argue about whether that's a "good" reason, but people are still allowed to hope people do things without rigorous analysis of whether or not it is in those people's best interests to do so with cited references to economic theories and the disputes swirling around said theories, yes?

It's a blog post. It's not a bad one, though I'm not sure why it's the #1 link on HN right now since it is literally just one person's "hopes".
I'll second the recommendation of SparkFun as heir apparent, and add Make magazine.
Ha! Don Knuth came to CMU last week, and his talk was entirely about BDDs and ZDDs. He said he wouldn't tell us where the ZDD name came from, because many people are already forgetting, and it would just be staving off the inevitable.
Are you happy with the service/bang for your buck that comes with that bill? I'm curious as I've just started using Heroku and I'm a little nervous about the costs associated with scaling...
plants mostly.
First sensible comment about Facebook. All the outcry now is somewhat mystifying because who didn't expect Facebook to start monetizing the private information? How did we all expect them to make billions of dollars otherwise?

The right way to treat Facebook is strictly as a public billboard. If you woulnd't tack it to the board in a public square, don't put it on Facebook.

It would have been better had they been completely public from the very first day.
No one believed me and people actually thinks I am being snide towards Apple/Adobe when I told them during winter, when my heater was not working so good for one week I would play a flash video on my macbook and put my palm under the laptop to keep myself warm. Yes, it does indeed gets that warm and I am not joking.
The "dipshit" in question won't be naming it dropbox, releasing the code doesn't mean they would be forfeiting the trademark. But yes, Winer really didn't provide a good reason for dropbox not to sell to anyone willing to buy.
Rogers under fire for iPad plans
I like sshfs as well, but it seems to perform even slower than scp for me, and way slower than ssh.
Yes, it is. Any kind of non-hardware-accelerated video playback will be CPU-intensive. The MAIN point is that Flash is MORE CPU-intensive for a given frame-rate, color depth, and resolution than comparable codecs.

Comparing open, fresh-off-the-vine, HTML5 animations to a decade-old proprietary implementation like Flash is also a non-starter.

On the plus side, Flash videos currently make great, handy fan-speed servo tests for any Mac laptop.
Thanks. Interestingly, I cannot upmod you because I did not read it.
Yup. You sure can. I'm not sure why you'd want to, IMHO the Gmail app is nicer.
Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Training Kits Released
I believe they deliberately removed vim from the default install since they felt that it wasn't suitable for a desktop-oriented operating system. It can be installed using via optional packages ('installoptionalpackage' in console).
Having followed news.ycomb since launch I wanted to share this little nugget, even though I suspect I might catch some flak for this not being the most topical piece, hopefully some of you will be entertained ;)

We launched November 07, 100% bootstrapped by myself and two co-founders. Finally getting the resources in place to be able to do fun things like this. Not sure if it was worthwhile monetarily yet but we had a lot of fun in the office making it!
To me, his analysis is less important then the explanation, details, circumstances, etc. of Steve Job's rejection of their proposal.
Agreed. Their CEO Nathan Seidle gave a talk in one of my classes at CU and seems like a great guy. We also took a tour of Sparkfun and their facility is really amazing. They have a great selection of parts/gadgets available for "hardware hackers".
So, let's try to make your post into something more informative.

> he's sounding like a smug dynamic language weenie

I'll give you that. I have a strong opinion on the overall usability of statically-typed languages. I have been writing Java code for the past month and I really feel less productive than the month before, despite the very smart tools that take away most of the drudgery. I am also not anti-static-typing: I like C a lot. I don't like C++ that much because of Smalltalk-induced bias.

> It pulls the "mandated by management" straw man

I am yet to witness a C# project that's not born out of a corporate IT department. I have never seen someone move from dynamic languages to static ones for other reason than execution speed, and, even then, only after careful profiling.

> This looks like an exhibition of the classic blub fallacy.

Name 5 reasons to consider C# as your development language and I'll concede you another point. While you are at it, name 1 area where C# is considered the best language.
Yeah this is the reality of police work after Guliani. Guliani discovered that the best thing for a politician to do is to reduce crime so he tells his cops "reduce crime or else" and the easiest way to do it is to cook the numbers.

The funny thing is that sometimes cooking the numbers works. That is if you create a perception of lower crime you get gentrification and a lot of middle class people move in and crime may actually go down. But nobody should confuse the talk of politicians with actual reality, new york is much more crooked and crime ridden than any of those "tough on crime" politicians would admit. Some times that crookedness bubbles up to the surface, for example couple of summers ago when cranes started falling from the sky and killing people and destroying entire buildings.

I have to say that I feel bad for these cops. I was hoping that being a beat cop was one of those rare fields of endeavour where one could do their job well as driven by their own conscience and their own initiative and sense of self worth and not have to go by some ridiculous metric, but alas even the police departments have been invaded by modern MBA thinking. So apparently even in the police force it is all about performance metrics and making your numbers -- writing a sufficient number of tickets and stopping and frisking a sufficient number of random people, while making sure not to notice too many crimes.

Maybe in the end of the year the mayor looks at the numbers and sees -- wow, we frisked 10 million people and brought in 5 billion dollars in fines, we must truly have a fine police force.
Ask HN: Know of a program to increase delivery rate of confirmation emails?
Hey everyone, our startup, Addoway (www.addoway.com), is having some issues delivering emails to some users after they register on our site to confirm their email address. The problem is happening to a few percent of registrants on the site and there does not seem to be a common email provider among those who do not receive the email.<p>Does anyone know of a web service we can utilize to fix this or improve the delivery rate? Thanks for your help.
I don't think they really understand the N1 angle, it's the phone Google demos their apps and products on, it's the phone featured in their YouTube videos, it's not meant to cannibalize the sales of the other android phones.
And for reduced typing, you can even alias it in your .gitconfig:

[alias]
cam = commit -a -m

Then you can just type 'git cam "look what I changed!"'
awesome :) in case you couldn't find it (you have to click the butterfly/logo thing then scan the right column to even see the link): i have some random stuff i threw up on github too (http://github.com/lzimm), its all super old though, as the README's disclaim, so probably not a great example
It sounds like you simply tap anywhere but the dialog and it's "canceled"?

Yes. When a modal dialog is active, Maemo also blurs and darkens the background so it's obvious that it's inactive.
Their forums seem to be down, with some kind of Wordpress (hosted, even) error message.

Strange.
Happens on monthly magazines too, they are dated the following month. I guess its a way to extend the sell-by date. Readers only want the latest issue. This is a way to give the appearance of.
I was just thinking that maybe it's a Harrier since you can easily tilt the thrust the wrong way and end up screwed. But you can always get back to where you were, so perhaps it's a Harrier with a time machine.
Tracking works on any browser since it serves up a single pixel for each page view. Only the front-end monitor for the graphs use WebSocket.
I can feel your pain. I've recently begun doing projects with wordpress which require several custom queries and own code. I'm pretty sure there's a better platform for those "advanced cms needs", but, hell, wordpress is still just so convenient.

Also, the "future incompatibility" is not that bad with wordpress, just look out for "deprecated" in the source.
You are right indeed. Thanks for pointing this out.
That's the source:
http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/ResearchAndPolicy/TheS...
The carrier subsidy model provides an incentive to throw away your phone every 2 years, anyway.
GIVINGETTING
Tips for Finding a Good Patent Attorney or Agent
It's almost a rite of passage for a successful startup now.
Real men/women run a C program doing floating-point divisions (to peg CPU) while writing random bytes to memory (to heat up caches) to keep warm. :)
Both a Blackberry and the command line can be used to read your email. Some people may prefer the command line for a variety of valid reasons, but that doesn't make it a BB killer.
When I read the comment about how "it was an honor" to be banned by the GFWoC, this poem cam to mind.
"When the regime ordered
Books with dangerous knowledge
To be burned in public and everywhere
Oxen were forced to pull, carts with books
to the bonfires, one of the persecuted poets
discovered one of the best
studying the list of the burned
disconcerted, that his books were forgotten.
He rushed to his desk, flying on wings of rage
and wrote a letter to the the authorities.
Burn me! he wrote with a quick stroke
Burn me! don't do this to me! Do not spare me!
Have I not always reported the truth in my books?
Yet now you treat me as were I a liar!
I command you: Burn me! "

OTOH, this means that Dropbox has obviously gotten big enough to be a threat to the authorities.
This is what credit card statements are for. (And ChartBeat is pretty darn cheap.)
I saw this demo'd at MongoDB conference by Gilt Groupe. Hummingbird display only supports webkit. My friend made the same thing later that night (took him maybe 1 hour total) using tracking pixel + Tornado + javascript graphing software (not canvas). The admin panel worked in IE/Firefox too b/c he used long-polling (not websockets). You can definitely roll your own to offer multi-browser support.
“You walk into a regular RadioShack and it’s become like a neurosis,” Cohen says. “‘Sir, can I sell you a cell phone today? How old is your cell phone? What about your family, do they have cell phones?’”

Depressingly true. Of course they have to worry about the bottom line, but I really doubt the long-term future viability of becoming a mini Best Buy - if all they sell is mid-priced consumer goods, I have no incentive to buy there rather than on eBay for.

Where they are really useful to me are for speedy supply of things like batteries, media, and accessories (eg specialist cables) which I might need at short notice and in unusual quantities or configurations (compared to consumers). I have a feeling that that won't last, though.
What's more relevant is that the odds of either drive failing are identical. The likelihood that the first drive will fail doesn't change because the second one failed -- which is the classic statistical blunder. ("I got 42 heads in a row, the next one's BOUND to be tails!")

Every single drive in the datacenter typically has the same likelihood of failure (since they're usually the same make and model, and similar production runs), so the odds that a drive somewhere in a large data center is failing RIGHT NOW are in reality rather high.

The Big Mac ended up being a good example of this. The likelihood of having a memory error on a normal PC is low, because the likelihood of a single DIMM having a memory error is low.

Punch that up to the 22,000 or thereabouts DIMMs that populated the Big Mac cluster, and now you're looking at a very HIGH likelihood that a large-scale computation using the cluster will experience memory errors, and therefore produce invalid results -- which is why UVa ended up replacing the entire cluster with ECC-equipped machines in short order. Until they did that, researchers had to run simulations multiple times and compare results to make sure that their simulations weren't contaminated by memory errors.
I know lzimm in real life. Such an awesome guy.
I wonder whether anyone will ever read the paragraphs between 'The are no X on this project' and the button to add them. Reminds me of landing pages, perhaps bullet points as to why you should use them would work.

I always thought the videos were a good idea, then again I've never actually used the concept, I guess they looked at the actual view rates and saw no-one was using them?

edit - just noticed the comments say the videos were useful and JF's replied that the videos are out of date.
I have, generally speaking, three services up:

- GTalk

- Android Keyboard .

- BatteryLife

With these services up, my Droid loses maybe 40% of its battery life in a day (with minimal usage.)

While I sleep, it rarely consumes more than 10%. The counterexamples have been when I've left the Pandora Service running, as well as the Email Sync service.

So, I test it by enabling the service, changing nothing else about my usage, and watching my battery life take a nosedive.

And on the subject of what exactly it's doing, that's roughly the explanation I got from my friends on the Windows side. We have Exchange disabled outside the firewall, so my phone has to hit up OWA to get the data. Is Exchange Web Services an API available from OWA, but separate from the HTML? It's my understanding that my phone is in fact scraping the HTML.
Think before you code (2007)
PhoneGap is explicitly OK according to the requirements, Titanium isn't.

There's no wait and see, it's "build and pray".
Yes, but specifically talking about Heroku, what do you suppose the plan is? If it were Engine Yard (at least the pre-EC2 version) I would know--they need to buy a lot of servers. But I figured Heroku would be able to stay a lean mean profit machine without taking big funding. Is their model out of whack? Too many free apps (aka marketing expense) to be subsidized by the paid ones?
It's hard to blame the cops for not interacting with the community, though. I lived in a similar neighborhood in Oakland, and saw 75 year old grandomthers calling the cops "pigs" to their face.

Some of the hostility toward the police is justified, much of it isn't. But whether it is or isn't justified, it exists, and it's hard to blame cops for not going out of their way to be sociable with people who, more likely than not, hate them because they are police.
You can control Firefox from emacs using MozRepl. This extension allows you execute code on the browser. For example, you can tell emacs to refresh a specific tab when an html file is saved. MozRepl is not the only extension doing that. There are 4 or 5 similar projects.

More info http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MozRepl
Implementing the viewport meta tag in Mozilla Fennec
fyi, title is cut off on first slide, if you're the original author. (ff 3.6 os x 1920x1200)
Bob, you just solved one of my problems with the N1. That technique works perfectly for me. Thanks!
Hand Made Hobbit Hole – Bag End from Lord of the Rings
I'm a "biz guy" and you caught my curiosity and I would like some more info...

What are the coming reporting changes that the industries are required to adapt to? (Links are fine) Also when is soon for the required reporting?

Have you been developing this with input from potential user/customers, aka Customer Development? How do you know many of them have no way of doing this now?

You can respond here or via email if you want. Mine is in my profile. Lots of other questions...
A library of stuff: Reinventing circulation in the digital age
Nope. I didn't make this and I didn't know the person who did. Nor did I submit it.
Ask HN: Decent Inventory Tracking Software?
So I'm helping someone start a business and have been able to point them to all sorts of great web apps that will help them manage their business, including freshbooks and basecamp. But they also need something that can manage their inventory. They'll have a lot of inventory, they help companies manage physical item promotions.

Do you have any recommendations? Just about everything I can find on google is an old really expensive piece of junk.

Thanks!
Sexy Pitch [MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition]
It's not that writing "accept [username]" is a bug — the bug is that you can use it to accept people who haven't asked to follow you. Similarly, OK buttons in dialogs are not a bug, but it would be a bug if they all had the same effect as the OK button in the dialog "Are you sure you want to erase your boot drive?"
I recently tried out a demo of a "high-speed" side-scrolling game library for flash. It ran OK, but not terribly impressive considering how little was going on. But it seemed really familiar somehow... Eventually I realized that it was nearly identical in both content and performance to a Univesa (like DirectDraw for MS DOS) demo that I ran on my Pentium1 60Mhz back in 1996.
headache phase

I heard the same thing from several other people about the N1. I ended up buying it anyway - I really needed a smartphone, and I'd never been quite willing to go for the iPhone, mainly because of what my friends told me about their monthly bills (I like to prepay on a fixed-rate plan and not have to think about it).

So I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy everything was, apparently because it was all new for me. battery life was the only thing that upset me at first, but after juggling setting a bit I'm happy with that. Haven't had a problem with the other things, other than the flaky touch sensing - I'm pretty sure this is a software problem, because when I run into it (once ever 2-3 days) I've gotten into the habit of sleeping and waking the phone with the top button, which seems to fix it.

The poster above is right about it being a little 'scruffy' in terms of not having a completely smooth user experience...but like him, I'm OK with that because I like having a pocket computer rather than an appliance. It reminds me of the home computer v. game console debate in the 80s, actually, with Android as in the role of MSX.
http://docs.python.org/reference/expressions.html#calls

Line 9: A formal parameter using the syntax * identifier receives a tuple containing any excess positional arguments.

Line 11: When the syntax * expression appears in the function call, expression evaluates to a sequence, the elements of which are treated as if they were the positional arguments.
Mike's an adobe employee. Obviously. Here's the problem for Adobe -- it's not just apple / apple employees / apple devs that despise flash. The performance sucks ass, no matter what deluded blog posts they publish. I know this because flash runs on my computer, and I'm gonna believe my lying eyes over their nonsense.

Instead of having employees run all over the web lying about flash performance when people see the truth right in front of them all day long while using the internet, perhaps he and adobe should try fixing things? Just a thought.