skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see much point of upgrading if you own 3GS. But is worthwhile consideration if you own 3G or older to take advantage of multitasking. Unless you must have 720p hd video and video chat.
Skype's network effect and lock-in is extremely small compared to something like Facebook, or even something like an IM network.

Think about it: early adopters (techies) start using a free competitor (or several free competitors). They get their less tech-savvy friends and family to switch. The rest of the world follows. It's easy to explain ("It's like Skype"), the carrot is obvious ("except it's free"), and the lock-in is minimal - download a new client, enter the contact you want to call, and you're done. There's no chat history, or complex social network, or tons of uploaded pictures, etc. etc., to keep people from switching.

I don't think the "mundanes" really use Skype, they still use regular phones. If someone's savvy enough to use Skype, they're savvy enough to switch to a free competitor if it's good enough.
To those who know the SBCL compiler better:

The paper says that to get the speed they had to turn off run time type checking, but they say "here's how to do it globally" does that mean you can turn of type checking in just one module or function?
Carried Away
I was actually considering getting an iPad + bluetooth keyboard for remote (web) coding. Ditched the idea because the available "IDEs" are not yet very matured (bought a MacBook instead). I'm sure this will change in future. An IDE for web coding could be even implemented as a browser app, as long as you do the sftp stuff in server side. Full keyboard support (shortcuts for everything) is major requirement, because you want to keep your fingers on your bluetooth keyboard. Not a problem for web app, though.

Oh, and you won't really need integrated development environment if Apple enabled multitasking for every app + makes possible to switch application on external keyboard (i.e. support for cmd+tab). Then separate apps would do fine.
I'm guessing the reasoning behind this is that phone based Skype calls actually cost Skype money because more data has to be routed via them rather than the peer-to-peer infrastructure that regular desktop Skype uses. If there's a technical reason why this is the case (i.e. you can't use peer-to-peer on phones because of bandwidth issues) then I can't see how a competitor would be able to undercut them without finding someone to subsidise it.
Skype not playing honest with their customers? Hardly news is it? I dropped them several years ago because of basic dishonesty on their part.
But in the sale of the gift cards/credits, at a 1:1 exchange rate, your assets would increase as well as your debt, surely?
Very cool. This reminds me of Kamal Meattle's talk on TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_o...

The only plant that he mentioned that is not mentioned on this list is the Money Plant (Epipremneum aureum) which he lists as the best detoxifier of his three recommendations.

It's very cool to see research that confirms Kamal's claims. Now, if only I knew good places online to buy these plants...

(You can also see Kamal's talk, along with his slide deck, here: http://greenspaces.in/blog/ted09/ )
Shorting sends information and that has serious utility.

Having faith in all people, all companies, all industries, all technologies (e.g. buggy whips, punched card ADP) is delusional. If you're basing a ban on short sales on that, you're just sweeping problems under the rug, ones which will get worse and eventually bite back.

Question: are you interested in efficient allocation of capital or something else, and if the later, why is that superior?

However, did Germany ban real short selling or naked short selling? I've read one account that it did just the latter (and I for one don't support naked short selling).
The long running mystery of ice coffee pricing
Don Stewart is now spamming Hacker News and reddit.com/r/coding, as well as /r/programming ...

Edit: modded down for what? The truth is he spams all these fora with irrelevant articles.
Background VoIP support in iPhone OS 4 suggests Apple has no intention of blocking these apps; in fact, it seems that they're encouraging them. And as I understand it, G Voice is not a VoIP solution yet. (And that's not to say I agree with it being blocked. On the contrary, their UI — the supposed rejection reason — doesn't look much different from the other dialer apps, including Skype.)

As far as "competing VoIP solutions", it's not like Apple is competing in the VoIP arena; they seem perfectly content to let other companies battle it out.
So it does! Oh well the 2nd link is clickable.
Dispora: Five part Analysis
Probably because it's a full blown OS ;p
This isn't really anything to write home about. It's just a syntax-colored text editor. Let me know when someone rolls out an expression tree editor designed for touch screens; or I'll let you know when I finally get around to it...
There's a 3rd edition now. (AI: A Modern Approach, actually.)
Supported tags are b, i, u, s, o, sub, sup, code, spoiler, quote, blockquote, and m.

Let's get some semantic tags in there; I thought we all agreed that the display elements (bold, underline, italics) are out and semantic elements (strong, emphasis) are in.
Craigslist is good for this kind of thing
Actually, I think this characterization is pretty accurate.

Most developers that like dynamic languages do so because they can write less code, which is exactly what the blog author is saying.
Notice that the Apple rep makes absolutely no mention of applications. I feel that there is a big misunderstanding going on here.
Personally have used this technique with SOLR/Lucene as well.
Interestingly, to make a decision like that for which single programming language you'd have to learn, you'd have to know enough about each language in question to make a good choice.

Here's my revised method of picking:

* make a list of 5-10 languages that seem neat
* spend a few days on each one, learning the syntax and what it's useful for and what
libraries are available
* pick the one you like the best
For one, you were bashing Don Syme (the F# guy) before you edited your comment.
The Mystery of Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam'
The article speculates about Roman or Phoenician maps that might have been lost, but makes no mention of the more probable Arab influence. This is just my naive guess, but wasn't Arab mathematics and astronomy the state-of-the-art of the time and also probably Arabs had the most detailed information about the mediteranean region at that time.
Skype-to-skype is cool but when you're tethered to a computer and internet connection it clearly has limited to value to most people.

Now that phones that run apps and have internet connections are popular the game is changed entirely. They had to give it away for free before because it wasn't as useful. When you can use this on the go it becomes much more useful and they will see many more people using it.

When things change that drastically sometimes you have to re-evaluate your business model.
when you start having to carry around the ipad and a keyboard.. whats the difference between that and a netbook now.. where you will have a much easier time running applications.. example most of us would probably like a browser and ide at the same time... on an ipad this is a major PITA.
thanks for the great link!
Skype won in part because other attempts at VoIP didn't work very well. There are lots of practical problems in just getting a p2p connection to work, there are often firewalls to route through. Trying to debug these is not helpful when you're just trying to find a way to talk with your mom.
Because he repeatedly used the words "bad writing" without providing any support for the assertion. He just provided sample texts — sample texts which read to me like translations of Old Saxon and Old Norse. This implied to me that he was saying that Anglo-Saxon texts are inherently "bad writing."
If you trade commodity futures, ask yourself: "Do I know more than the farmer? Do I know more than Nestle?" When you trade stocks, ask yourself: "Do I know more than Fidelity's advisers? Do I know more than Goldman's quantitative analysts? Do I know more than the insiders?". It's 50/50 up/down minus the spread, minus the fees.
I was looking forward to trying it, but then I had a problem installing it. (That's on Linux 32bit)

$ cabal -V
cabal-install version 0.8.2
using version 1.8.0.2 of the Cabal library
$ ghc -V
The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 6.12.1
$ cabal install berp
Resolving dependencies...
cabal: cannot configure berp-0.0.1. It requires integer -any
There is no available version of integer that satisfies -any

Does it work for anybody? Does anyone know how to solve this?
Rooms Of Japanese Teens
They love technology and a lot of manga cartoons, that’s for certain.
"Web-based tool for getting yourself or your website/network vulnerability scanned over the Internet."

For malware/website qualys does it for free: http://www.qualys.com/products/qg_suite/malware_detection/

For network in general hard to compete with QualysGuard but I guess you could use nessus/OpenVAS
Yes. The Common Lisp spec says you can put declarations a lot of places, including prog:

http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/s_declar.htm

So you can basically wrap it around any S-expression you want.

When I was at ITA we did that a lot. For example, there was a macro i+ that would expand to basically "the two arguments are fixnums, as is the result. Now, please give me the sum."

In debug builds, the type declarations would be come assertions. In release builds, they'd become assumptions, i.e. the whole thing would compile to a single x64 ADD instruction.
Modded down because it's not spam. He posts a metric fuck-tonne of Haskell links but only the ones that the community is interested in get voted up. That's how these sites work, so obviously some of us like some of the stuff he posts. If you don't like it mod it down or ignore it and move on. Go to the new posts and vote for things you are interested in.

If you must complain, you're unlikely to find much agreement here since people reading these comments are probably interested in the article.
When i started using Ubuntu a few months ago, it made me feel like i was being more productive, but i was basically wasting a lot of time installing the correct drivers (wireless problems) and fixing other small things. That's why i switched back to Windows. I installed Windows, got excellent wireless connection after one update and the only thing that i needed to do was fire up my text editor and i could start coding again. But if you don't care about ease of use as much as i do, then i don't think you'd regret using Ubuntu.
the main reason is mobile.. are you seriously telling me you are carrying that ipad with you everywhere. Shopping, going out to eat, driving in the car.. the iphone mobile web, maps, email is awesome. I won't be upgrading because I'm getting a google phone.
http://literateprograms.org
What incompatibilities is Pharo or Squeak introducing? The ANSI Smalltalk standard is pretty weak, but it does enable a workable compatibility/translation scheme. You'll have to be more specific. Explain how this is any more of a problem than base-library extension name-collision incompatibilities between Rails and other libraries.
You could also use SXML[1].

[1] http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html
I'm thinking it might be nice to make a late-binding optional-typing VM language with Go's general syntax. (For which a fully-typed code base would compile into Go.)
App Store's terms and conditions are there:
http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/appstore/us/terms.html
If you are not in US you can find yours there:
http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/ww/
I thought this too but there are some things of interest since this list isn't the same as a list of just population density (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...).

We can infer the percent of the general population of LA and Miami with a degree is slightly below average, Seattle's above average, etc. You're basically right though: this list is stupid.

> ratios of degree density over population density

A simpler way of stating it would be what percent of the population has a degree.
I logged in just to upvote this article, excellent! I don't have too much experience with several languages so I won't comment on the validity or merit of the arguments, but it is a very well-designed piece.

I agree with the point that you really do need to learn several languages to become a good programmer, though. I just don't think it's possible to be as well-rounded and knowledgeable without doing so.
Having slept on the idea and read some more news this morning, I'm much less optimistic about it :-(

I'm struck by the fact that there are other oil plumes nearby on the seabed, eg 400 feet away from the big one. If the borehole itself is damaged and oil is also leaking out through cracks in the ocean floor, then successfully capping the wellhead will just increase the outward pressure to other leaks, and we'll end up playing whack-a-mole. Depending on how porous or fractured the ground is in the area around the well, attempting to just cap it may be futile.

Indeed, it seems as if the latest strategy is the mentioned here of dropping a giant funnel on it and sucking up as much oil as possible through a pipe rather than allowing it to diffuse into the water, while we try to get an/other rig(s) in place to drill relief wells. And the estimate of having that done by August is based on the time it took to perform a similar task in much shallower water. The explosion in April took place about 3 months after drilling began, and while BP began drilling a relief well around the first week of May, there's no guarantee that any individual drill will tap into the same pocket on the first attempt, which I presume is why the government has ordered they get a second one going ASAP. The Ixtoc I oil spill in the 1970s, which was also in the gulf, took 10 months to bring under control. Although our drilling and seismic imaging technology has improved significantly since then, they're also applied to wells at much greater depths.
The best I've heard of is approaching 50% native speed on benchmarks, but losing by a factor of 4 in real-world calculation-intensive apps. Langs on a JIT VM have been matching business app (network & DB bound) performance for over a decade already.
Would you really give anything? Because it's possible. We could do it.

There just aren't enough people yet that are willing to give enough to do it.
Do I have less money in the market and am more flexible? Do my decisions don't change the market?
I have a hankering to produce a late-binding dynamic scripting language with optional typing and very similar syntax to Go. (Which would be identical when all typing is put into a program.)
There are quite clearly a large number of applications in the app store that only have a business use. Apple have happily allowed them in the app store.

I'm sure this is taken out of context.
Does it (and will it) support either of the following: frame introspection, proper tracebacks.
A short tutorial, more interesting than the link's list of dependencies: http://wiki.github.com/bjpop/berp/using-berp
You can always try odesk.com or some other sites as well or you can check out www.confiz.com (Disclosure: I run this company and we consider ourselves to be pretty good)
Wow. Gee. Let's see. /r/coding (where the maintainer asked me to submit articles!)

http://www.reddit.com/r/coding

3 articles in 3 weeks, all of which above 75% positive.
I agree with you. I said he failed but his vision isn't wrong. He is as convinced about his vision as when he saw the GUI. In fact, what he saw in 1996 remains the same - web dev is still in the everything-custom age (stone age). Every new app is a reinvention of lots of wheels already made ...

What I am curious is that why he failed. My hunch is that he just isn't a fit for this project.

It sounds like you and I and Steve Jobs agree on this fundamental thing. Care to get together offline? I live in Sunnyvale Bay Area.
I'm basing this on Europeans who've lived here for an extended time (really mostly my wife) and have come to realize how truly jarring is the discord between movie-America and the reality of how we think.
More importantly for most of the members of HN, is this worth my time at all? If markets are inherently interesting to you and you want to spend (a lot of) time studying them, then great: go for it. If you are looking to slowly invest over the long-term, then just buy sporadically and hold.

Otherwise, you are probably better off investing your time and money building something yourself, for reasons that completely ignore whether or not you are capable of doing well as a trader.
Oh, possibly. The entire conversation with Apple was based around the author of the post purchasing an application though. He repeats that point several times.

Perhaps the situation has been clarified since then.
I'd rather just hide them.
Edit the .cabal file and rename it to integer-gmp or try removing it (haven't tried it myself yet)
Ahh, ok, so blind speculation about even positive outcomes is dangerous (and I can see how this can be just as abused as shorting). So, I can see why paying attention to who is shorting and why they are shorting it is equally important.

Personally: I'm by no means a financial person — just super curious about the usury and trading world and the recent blow up that occurred.

I'm also super curious to see how economics will change from this point forward.

(That article that I posted says that germany wants to ban naked short selling.)
I can think of absolutely zero reasons, technical or otherwise, that Apple would want Skype to charge for only its iPhone software, much less a reason strong enough to "badger" them into charging. Isn't it far more likely that Skype's new buyers see that they need to begin to monetize their largest usage stream in order to survive, especially since that usage stream has started to migrate to more "usable" platforms?
Quote: I don't think the "mundanes" really use Skype

You are wrong based on my experiences. Skype is used for free international calls all over the world by "mundanes". Immigrants use it to communicate to their home countries. A local immigrant-run mom&pop store in my Helsinki neighborhood is even advertising Skype-calls in addition to normal international calls.

And I think that Skype has some brand value as it's been used for these very personal calls between family members.

However, you are right that the network effect for Skype is not that strong: As it's used for "calling home", a hypothetical better and "cheaper" Skype-competitors can spread family-by-family, as it's easy to replace only two endpoints. But it will nevertheless take several years, which gives Skype time to adjust their strategy.
An extension that allows us to hide annoying users would be great.
How many of those 30k visits signed up? How many were still using it a week later?

You might have learned that your assumptions about what people want were wrong. I would bombard every user who signed up and quit with a personal sounding, "Hey, I'd love to hear your thoughts on why this isn't the right to-do list tool for you."

But yeah, you're hitting the wall that most web app makers hit. The site doesn't market itself (most don't unless they are designed for virality or SEO). If you don't want to self educate about marketing, then I'd put a bullet in and make sure your next idea has some built-in marketing juice.
The semantic web somehow took a hit when w3c decided to work on html5 at the expense of xhtml2. By the way, the semantic web is a lie (really, I don't think there's a good way to separate content and presentation, as the presentation is somehow part of the content).

What people on a forum are trying to do, is not to make their text look "strong", whatever that means to the person who made the forum stylesheet, but to make their text bold, whatever that means to them.
That's what it does, yeah. I added "hide" to the title.
Very cool. That site has a large number of cutaways, and aviation related images:

http://www.flightglobal.com/airspace/media/21/default.aspx
Hm, I might add that too.
The map most discussed in the submitted article was about contemporaneous with Marco Polo, who was preceded as a traveler to China by John of Plano Carpini

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_da_Pian_del_Carpine

(ca. 1180 - August 1, 1252). Early Chinese cartography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Chinese_cartography

was sufficiently good to serve as models for the maps mentioned in the submitted article, although the time sequence of interchange between China and the West alone does not prove any Chinese influence on the European maps.
Could anyone point me in the direction of cases when people were hurt by their information being stored for too long?
As a general rule, how many here don't prefer Safari over web-pages-as-apps?

Don't forget that the iPad is also positioned as a "family" device. While most people here would chiefly check email/twitter/RSS/recipes/etc, their kids want to play games. The majority of kids' websites are flash-based, and so that renders the iPad Safari useless, the only option being to download apps or get the laptop out.

Some really impressive apps that I think are hard-to-impossible to emulate in a browser right now are the Formula One Timing and Positioning app (which is amazing if you follow F1 racing). Another are games like Broken Sword.

But yeah. I'd rather read Google Reader in a browser than an app. It's all about the nature of the content.
So after 8 years are you now consistently profitable?
"gearing up"? You can use GTalk since 2005. It's available to anyone with a gmail address. And you get free GTalk-to-GTalk calls.
Irony is the soul of wit.

"My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go."
This is a classic Made for AdSense spam site by the looks of it. The content was probably "written" (read: copied and modified) for $10 by someone completely unqualified.

Sending them traffic will just encourage more submissions like this.
It was a mistake not to oppose the Frenchman's arrival in our lands. After the Frenchman finishes the castle, he will start breeding orcs.
As the author points out, S-expressions using parenthesis as delimiters are probably not appropriate for text.
Looks very unpromising, there is however huge potential for a text editor on the ipad. Don't think we're quite there yet.
If that were possible, I'm sure that's exactly what we would do.
It's many times more useful to use Skype on your mobile. If you're on 3G, it means you have no access to desktop Skype. And if it's more useful to you, they can charge for it.
Not to mention all the other societies in that part of the world going back about 4000 years before that map.

It hardly seems surprising that earlier maps aren't around - by their very nature they tend to get used by people doing things, often quite risky things, so they are bound to get damaged and/or lost.