skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While 30% seems like a pretty ridiculous number, I don't think there is enough data yet on if Facebook credits will hurt app profits or strengthen them.

One of the nice things about Apple's app store is you just click to buy, you don't have to worry about giving your payment information to individual app makers. I buy many more iphone apps than I would if I had to enter payment information for each of them. Many of the smaller app makers I'm not sure I would trust enough to give payment information to. Many also use more trusted 3rd party systems like PayPal, but they aren't one click experiences which diminishes conversion.

If Facebook credits become the norm and are widely adopted, there could be a significant uptick in consumers willing to pay for apps from the 1-3% which is widely circulated.
Cracker, not hacker, is what he means. Annoying mistake.
My Android numbers are similar, close to $1k after 2 months, now averaging around $10/day. It's been pretty constant for a while, I suspect the natural decline over time is countered by more users picking up recently released phones like the Incredible and Desire.
I believe strongly in the power of supplements to structure the rest of diet. Here is my current supplement structure:

Multivitamin + 6000 IU Vitamin D + Calcium

Omega-3

Whey protein(at approximately the bodybuilder-style "one gram per pound bodyweight" level)

For meals I mostly eat in a low-carb/paleo fashion - because I find the fatty foods easier to digest, overall. Protein, fat, fiber, are what I look for(and quality fats too, a lot of the cheap vegetable oils seem shady and give me bad reactions). Adding the whey protein really helped because it nullified a lot of the cravings that would make me break the meal plan. Discovery: if you eat like a bodybuilder, even without training you're going to start looking sort of like one.

The other supplements are general health measures to help my mood, alertness and immune system. My GF, who has not yet bought into clean eating, recently got the same bug as I did at about the same time. I barely realized it was there and was over it in three days. She was taken down for about a week with some vicious "can't-do-a-thing" days in the middle. I've only been with her a short while, so I hope I can encourage her.
Can anyone identify the drawing app he was using to demo?
Have you tried http://www.jungledisk.com/ ? It maps S3 to appear as a drive or directory on your computer, so you can use S3 from any program or tool that can read and write files.

Or is there something specific about WebDav that you needed?
Indeed. I wonder if the title is intentionally misleading, or if the writers had a different idea in mind when they wrote it?

Indeed, the strong controversy this articles headline will stir up proves Obama's (actual) point quite well.
Quit drinking soda.
Luis Villa on Diaspora (A Distributed Social Network Project)
I dunno, it seems to be "hacking" in the relevant sense of figuring out how a formal or mechanical system works and finding clever things to do based on that understanding (of which "exploiting weaknesses for profit" is one, though not necessarily the most interesting one). People here discuss "hacking fitness" or "hacking productivity" or whatever, so I don't see why "hacking the markets" is any worse of an analogy.
That's very well possible. But in my experience, running a roughly million-member website for over 12 years any change we ever made led to the exact same pattern:

- initial bitching

- gradual acceptance

- the new is much better than the old

This usually over a period of 3 months or so. And that's for improvements and mistakes alike. There seems to be an automatic component to all this that is 'conservative', as in 'opposed to any change'.

Time will tell on this one, if google reverts to the old lay-out then the conclusion is that they also thought that it was better before. But it is very well possible that this 'worse' lay-out is actually better for google, even if it is worse for the users, for instance because it increases their bottom line.

A design error is not always a business error.
We've been thinking about signing up for bit.ly pro, and I have to say this throws a wet blanket over the whole thing.

whitelabel shouldn't be nearly as bad - as long as you control the domain name you can always take your ball and go home.
Follow-ups:

http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.ht...

http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/05/08/responding-to-joindiaspora...
Hmm. Im not sure that was the point I was making.

iPod/iPad/Xbox are a concern because they are platforms of mass procrastination. But so is Steam (I'm supposed to be working this weekend but I have spent a silly amount of it playing COD:MW2). i.e. the argument works equally well for many other areas of tech :)

EDIT: the poster above (who wimped out...) was making the connection between my comment and the idea that the iPad (or Apple) was the cause of the whole problem.. hmm.
Finally some one with sensible opinion!
Thanks for your reply. I would really appreciate if you could elaborate a bit more on the REPL part. Are you talking of a command line with which to query your own app within the app, as to the state of objects. Is this within the app, or like talking to it on a port and passing commands on a shell.

I had been actually thinking on the lines of how emacs can expose its commands -- although i am not an emacs user. I'd need to study that.

I am very familiar with various command line parsing libraries, including cmdparse. I did not get your requirement in this context. Thanks for answering.
(organic) vitamin D helped me this winter because there is less sun during these months (in Canada).

I also sit a lot less in front of my computer since i've read http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_19/b41... (thanks HN for this) .
Consumption is not the problem; distraction is.
Are most programmers even capable of this sort of physical work?

Also, what happens if you get injured on the job?
For Noam Chomsky, like other radical leftists, the idea that the working class is deceived and distracted is part of an anti-cognitive-dissonance package to explain why the supposedly-oppressed masses fail to share his political opinions.

Obama isn't nearly as extreme as Chomsky politically, but come from the same sort of intellectual heritage.
It's a good theory. I don't quite understand how he managed to get Fox news in on the plot, though.
Moose vs Mouse: OOP in Perl
Here is the text of his speech: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/05/ob...

Let's read that before spending a bunch of effort debating only a single sentence of it.

(It didn't take me long to find. It is the speech he planned to give, not a transcript, so there may be some minor differences in the actual address.)
An interview with Glen Allsopp about SEO for small businesses
Can somebody explain the point of Chrome OS and why it's allegedly revolutionary? If I want to run everything in the browser, why can't I do that today?
Plenty isn't as important as high-intensity exercise. The hormones you're looking for are released in relation to intensity, not duration. You're much better off with a 20-minute workout that leaves you gasping than you are milling around the gym for an hour and a half.
I see it more as breaking the system in order to gain a financial advantage on someone elses behalf - which would be akin to cracking.

Your point is taken though.
Probably most can do something with their hands, even if it doesn't involve lots of strength. The thing about the guy who wrote the book about switching from being some kind of knowledge worker to a motorcycle repairman has circulated here a few times, which is presumably less physically taxing than lumbering.
1. I don't want to install a tool on each computer. I want to set it up once and then use it from all of my {servers, macbook, virtual machines}.

2. I want the links resulting from upload to be directly and (sometimes) publicly downloadable without going through jungledisk. E.g. I use screenshot app called Skitch which saves screenshots to WebDav among other things. I want to be able to save screenshot and share it immediately.
You can bring up Emacs' buffer list sorted with the most recently used at the top (bs-show). This is equivalent to alt-tab in the worst case. Because I can search this list (it's a standard Emacs buffer), I can get to anywhere in the end or middle far faster. You cannot see filenames in alt-tab until you select the icon.

Further, Emacs standard switch-to-buffer command selects the last visited file by default so you can flip between files with C-x b RET. Slightly longer than alt-tab, but not much once it becomes muscle memory.
Thus the corollary: when the Revolution comes, the workers will need to be lead by those who are intellectually capable of leading them, and academic Marxists will take their rightful place in the cosmos as rulers of all they surv... first among equals.

This has basically been the totalitarian promise for a couple of centuries now.
Suffering from smartphone withdrawal
The issue is that, with sports, people at least have a chance of being on the winning side.

Cheering for the sane public transportation team, in most cities, is like cheering for the Cubs. You know you're never going to win.
You can also put (server-start) in your .emacs config.
That's been my experience too. "Object model" almost always translates to "spaghetti". The promise of OO -- that objects would provide a flexible abstraction mechanism for writing software at the level of the domain while encapsulating low-level details -- has not been realized in practice.
Which is the wiser way to deal with hackers:

Is it to enact hard to enforce ambiguous anti hacking laws, while at the same time individually patching each exploit with unrelated fixes?

Or is it to step back and analyze why a system has so much hackable complexity, and seek to fix the overarching issues that create security vulnerabilities?

I would much rather see fundamental suggestions about how to optimize the market for fairness from the ground up rather than patchwork fixes like the dollar a trade tax, or the 5 year tax break.
That's my app, Brushes - iPad Edition:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id363590649?mt=8
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com%20g...

i.e. put a hidden input with a hl=all in the form.

(I make no warranties about this hack continuing to work past next week.)
I don't think it's within my power or anyone else's to turn many people into a success if they can't grok pointers, recursion and/or abstraction and one or more of those is necessary for the job (I'm assuming a small enough startup they can't be put someplace "safe").

I'm pretty sure the abstraction bit is innate (I'm assuming they've passed high school math), and very sure I can't teach it nor is it my duty to. Pointers and recursion are not so bad (but again, in these sorts of situations I'm probably not in a position to get them up to speed on something so basic and so far reaching in effects (especially unsafe pointers)).
I love js2-mode and only use espresso-mode for JSON. Do you know of any comparison of the two modes I could read to get more info on this?
It's a big step forward only in comparison to what Scribd did before. The Web has always been perfectly capable of showing indexable documents, even PDF documents.
But you might be able to find a way to make them an asset to your organization any way. There are many kinds of 'bad'.

There is 'incompetent', but that usually comes with a specific field of competence, maybe the employee has different skills and can be given a new role where they're more productive and happy.

There is 'anti-social', this is a real problem and should probably have been caught at the hiring time, a person like this is going to have a hard time being a part of any team.

Then there is 'not in this team', if you have only one team then that's easy, but if you have more of them you might try a different one.

There are the 'loners', people that can't work with others but have to do everything their way, these are usually better suited to become entrepreneurs themselves (I had one guy like that working for me and I helped set him up to start his own business and he actually succeeded in an amazing way).

And so on. So even if you can't keep a bad person on the team there are a few more steps before you bring out the shotgun.

I've literally fired exactly one person, the reason was that he was starting up a competing service and at the same time approached our customers. That was reason enough for me for an on-the-spot termination when I found out.

Other than that we never had any issue that we couldn't resolve amicably or part on good terms without having to resort to firing someone outright.
It is neither illegal nor immoral to own a gun. Strange thing to wonder about - where I hail from you might as well wonder about the availablility of toasters.
The parts that are written in C are mainly the lisp interpreter itself, and some windowing stuff. Unless you are doing something really strange you never need to dive into the C internals.
I have an alternative theory: Obama is contemptuous of video games and iPods because Obama is contemptuous of video games and iPods. The hip, with-it, I-use-Twitter Obama that so many folks fell in love with? That was the poll-tested messaged-massaged for-marketing-consumption version.
America is well known for its propensity toward low taxes and a small debt.
Answered my own question: found what I needed here to have the speedbar in the main window frame. Nice: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/SpeedBar
I agree. There's absolutely no problem with using, for example, ActiveRecord and MySQL when using Rails because it's the default option and it's not a completely horrible option as some of the NoSQL crowd says.

Due to the vast number of libraries for any language, and the vast number of helper/managers like ActiveRecord or DataMapper, I'm surprised nobody is advocating them more as they do support the "lean, fast, daily updates" while still small. When you need a higher performing system, it's available, but take advantage of all the previous library research. You're doing a disservice if you spend too much time to ship on exotic system, when you don't need it for another 1-3 years.
http://www.gunsandcrime.org/faildxprmt.pdf
Am I the only one who prefers the second design?
I have no intention of getting an iPad and generally strongly dislike Apple (frivolous legal threats will do that), but you couldn't be more off the mark if you tried. Yes, the iPad is primarily used for consumption, but 1) there's no reason you can't build content creation tools that are web-based, if you want to skip the app store, and 2) the biggest uses of computers in non-work settings are purely consumption-based; do you plan on crucifying Mozilla for building a web browser that's generally used for checking Facebook and reading the news?

Get out of your ivory tower.
The figures get counted all sorts of interesting ways though, which significantly reduces their impact on me, at least (except as a very good set of examples of how statistics can be made to say anything you like).

My personal experiences, on the other hand, suggest percentages which seem rather more realistic but still scare the shit out of me.
He's referring to the book "Shop Class as Soulcraft." The NY Times had articles about it. Here's one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html
The President knows how to use an iPod and regularly uses a Blackberry. He is certainly not a technophobe, you are misreading everything he says if you believe this.

I think he is just being innocently self-deprecating.
That works. Thank you so much! What a relief.

<form action="http://google.com/search" method=get>
<input type=text value="" name=q size=30>
<input type=submit value="Go">
<input name=hl type=hidden value="all">
</form>
This is a very good summation of where we are, why it's bad, and how we got here. It's a good video to show someone who's interested but not in the industry.
Three words: Less is more.

No bloat, so it should run on low-end hardware, and blaze on modern hardware.

How many processes do you currently have running as you browse this? And, how many of them are necessary to your being able to do so?
The birthers are only the easiest example. Look at the health care debate. I am sympathetic to a capitalist-based reform, but the fundamental problem is that even the moderately informed had difficulties following the real issues because the media failed to actually tell people what the public option was!

I've heard multiple anecdotes (I know, not a representative sample) where someone "came up with" the public option but didn't explain it with those words, and their friends thought it was a good idea, but the "public option" was "government intervention and death panels."

The problem isn't the competing ideas -- the problem is the level of the debate.
Probably flat-fee. A talented editor can make your manuscript better, but that doesn't guarantee sales.
Look into Braintree (http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/)

They are known to have the best customer service and can deal with these types of issues better than the other solutions.

However, it is slightly harder to set up an account with them as you have to meet certain requirements before starting an account (and literally talk with a representative). For example, new businesses with no credit history probably will find it very hard to get an account with them. That said, all these precautions probably lead to reduced risk and higher quality clients on average.
And you sound to me like someone who comes to this discussion with some preconceptions of his/her own.

He regularly acknowledges other viewpoints and their validity.

What he is speaking out against is obvious mistruths: birtherism, "Obama is a socialist", death panels, "Obama is a secret Muslim", health care reform gives the government the power to pull the plug on grandma, etc.
I am reminded of the idea of doing this, except subtly enough they can't actually prove anything's changed, over and over again, as a way to bend somebody's mind quite badly.

Of course said idea was presented as a Malkavian prank in a Vampire: the Masquerade sourcebook I was reading, so it's hardly a serious suggestion.

I do occasionally wonder if you could make sweeping changes in a gradual enough way for regular users to not so much not mind as largely not notice, under the frog/frying pan principle. Sadly for this wondering, Shadowcat's a consultancy so the sites I work on with enough traffic for it to be interesting all belong to other people :)
Useful, thank you.
Assuming you can run all your needs in the browser, this will provide an OS with the browser as a front-end. Think security, speed, less-expensive computers.

If you are a developers or computer user who depends on applications to do work which can't be done on a browser, ChromeOS is not for you.

I think the idea is that you are not attached to your computer, but you are attached to the information in your computer. If the information can be on the cloud, you can log in to your account in any chrome browser/OS and resume your work from there.
Awesome deal for Linux Gamers
A blackberry isn't a toy. I have at least three of the items mentioned on the list (which are toys), and I use none of them for actual productive work. Though I do have a telnet terminal app on the iPod. Still all of the devices he mentions were not designed for productive enterprises, but for diversions. And diversions have a way of being big time wasters if you're not balanced. Not today Halo 3!
perhaps http://www.flixster.com/ (and its Movies Facebook app) is the closest analogous site.
yes, it is what we would refer to as "humor"
The internet is for a lot of things. A social network is for socializing. Fan sites or pages are a form of socializing.

Certainly Facebook is within their rights to prohibit this kind of thing. You can even see why they'd want to do it: to make Facebook more friendly to the paying customers (advertisers).

But it's an interesting question, how far down this road Facebook or any other site can travel before the utility of the site is reduced to the point that there aren't enough active users to attract paying customers.
I went low-carb three weeks ago and have lost c. 6lbs (edited!) since. I gave up alcohol a week later (still have the occasional one though). Feeling much better, sleeping better, more energy, etc. I have always been skeptical of "fad" diets but this one is working fine for me. "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes was the starting point for all this.
You're human, aren't you?

We haven't sat at desks long enough to affect us as species. You've got everything you need to be a hunter-gatherer or a farmer apart from the skills.
Great question. I've made a little bit of money making Authorize.net's AIM API easier to use in .NET: http://sharpauthorize.com

Now, authorize.net could replace their aim API with an easier to use soap one, and that might put me out of business - doubt it, because there are lots of free competitors already and I still do pretty well.
On the other hand it's not like the Democrats were going out of their way to explain what was in the bill either. Instead, they spent most of their time talking about how "reform" is "necessary" (without acknowledging that many types of reform are possible) and even more time demonizing any opposition as either ignorant hicks or shills paid by the insurance industry.

You won't find any disagreement from me if you say that the level of political discourse is too low. You will find disagreement if you try to claim that Barack Obama has a genuine desire for it to be higher.
Ask HN: Tradeoffs of using a nosql database?
I've been hearing a ton of advantages over using the various nosql solutions (primarily couchdb and mongo). What are the disadvantages to these DBs? Data duplication?
Yes, definitely whitelabel was already a requirement for us.

My comment was more about the moral aspect though.
Death by stuff
Not the first guy who has had thoughts of quitting IT and getting a real job.
"Without understanding the language"

Certainly any language is unreadable without understanding it. I don't pretend to make any comments on the readability of Chinese because I don't understand it.

Most people aren't familiar with logic programming, which is a different way of thinking about programming. It's not a huge leap to make, and I've tried to ease the process with tons of examples in the introductory tutorials.

Once you understand the basic concepts, Cascalog is much more readable than any of the alternatives. Here's the query for all people that are 25 and male.

(?<- (stdout) [?p] (age ?p 25) (gender ?p "m"))

It reads as "Find all ?p where ?p's age is 25 and ?p's gender is "m". That's a lot better than specifying a query in terms of explicit joins and filters.
It would bother me too. My girlfriend is German and she's upset with the bailout. My point to her is that if the whole world were like Germans who would do the buying?
The article deliberately highlights that as an aside - and none of the transcripts have it in them (that I can find). I can't find a video that covers the portion of the speech but it could well be a joke - or a bit of irony. It reads that way.
Only in the sense of the number of characters provided to perpetrate said stupidity.

tweet.im keeps tinyurl-ing my xrl.us URLs. The result is actually longer.

I suspect the closest to a solution here is a "don't shorten this unless it'd be X% shorter as a result" type flag for shortening APIs and then beat client authors over the head until they all pass the flag.

And then beat client users over the head until they all upgrade.

And then ... er ... never mind. I think I'll go stick my head in an oven now.
Maxing out your Adwords budget
It opens up the door for a competitor with the same design as the old google.
I was definitely with you but when I just did a search with the old interface, it felt very right.
Mommy, where do ideas come from?