skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah great, something else to read on my new Kindle DX!
I agree. I laughed out loud when I got to "could avoid losing 108GB of data from lost or stolen laptops". If you're losing 108GB per year from lost or stolen laptops you need to strongly review your corporate policies.
Why would you want to do that for? You would still have the annoying ads (or whatever) plus the overhead of a chrome extension to convert them when the page loads!
PyPy has no such limitation. PyPy has perfect sandboxing.
Ask HN: Review my app's screencast demo
Amen to that. Good luck.
You're right, if someone had seen the Chrome speed tests video then they would likely see the direct reference.

However, anecdotally, I did see the Chrome video and I didn't see the direct parody until I read the comments here on Hacker News.
Wikileaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor
You're assuming that these houses will be left vacant.

Many will be left vacant for some time. Foreclosure is a slow process, even when the mortgage holders are not fighting you every step of the way.

In almost every case (outside Detroit) there are plenty of people who would be willing to pay for those houses at the right price. Why shouldn't we let them do so?

According to the statistics compiled by CalculatedRisk, that seems unlikely [1]. Many housing markets (not just Detroit) are still very sluggish. There may be tons of buyers for properties in hip urban areas where most HNers live/work, but most foreclosures have been happening in suburban/exurban areas whose real estate markets are still in the toilet. The national housing market has a very large stock of uncleared inventory, so vacancy should be the default assumption until that inventory returns to normal.

This article [2] suggests that you're wrong regarding homes in Ohio. If there were really "plenty of people who would be willing to pay for those houses at the right price", then I don't we'd be seeing banks walk away from foreclosed properties and abandon them.

[1] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/05/existing-home-sale...

[2] http://www.cleveland.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/bank_walkawa...
Lala submitted an iPhone app for approval just before they were bought.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/its-almost-here-exclusive-v...
You might wait till next week (June 7--11) to see if Apple announces a new 27" LCD to match their larger iMac.

If they do, it'll have the same resolution as the great-sounding Dell mentioned by the OP, but it'll also probably actually look good. ;-)
I would really like to see a support table for smokescreen like Gordon has here: http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/swf-tag-support-ta...
Website of the newly founded company:
http://www.roundrockresearch.com/index.html

Very little content, but interesting to look at the design of the top graphic. According to article, logo was designed by his 14-year old daughter.
Clearly somebody who really likes flash ads, but for some reason doesn't like adobe?
wget http://72.18.130.89/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf '--header=HOST: hackermonthly.com'
I think this guy winds up sounding like a self-centred jerk: in that earlier post he mentions he basically says "all that stuff other developers have complained can't be that bad becase it hasn't happened to me", like he doesn't believe them, and now it happens to him and suddenly he agrees with everyone else's complaints... Sheesh.
FYI, Kara Swisher has said the interview will not be streamed live:

http://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/15205166069
I launched Preceden, my timeline app, on HackerNews back in February. I've been working daily since then and have always wanted to make a screencast demo for it, but always put it off in favor of working on the product. I had some free time this weekend and finally decided to go for it. This three minute video is the end result.

After I get your feedback, I'm going to make a revised video which I'll post on YouTube and on Preceden's homepage.

This is my first screencast and I'll probably make many more now that I've got the hang of it. There's definitely an art to this which I haven't gotten anywhere close to mastering, so any feedback is very much appreciated. Thanks --Matt
BREAKING NEWS - Google reconfigures 0,5 percent of computers
I was very surprised at how boring this video turned out to be. Draw Luck and Iterate?

Here are the actual keys to Twitter's success:

1. Simplicity - get updates from your people you are interested, and maybe let everyone else know what you are doing too. Lots of successful companies start with simple descriptions like this. Google was just about SEARCH, Facebook was just a digital contact book, etc. Twitter is surprising in that they have kept it so simple for so long and still seen growth.

2. Asymmetric Relationships - you can follow me, but I don't have to follow you. Made the service great for celebrities, which in turn brought more people onto the service. This is a big difference between it and Facebook, who had to invent "pages" and "fans" to be able to support the same thing.

3. The API - twitter.com is all fine and good, but the open API meant anyone can make great 3rd party apps. That twitter was so open with their data was rather novel. Hopefully twitter wont mess that up, but the purchase of tweetie makes me skeptical.
TMTC 22 - Agile Roots Conference & Andrew Shafer Interview
Since this would involve getting a signed letter from the company stating that the company does not own work you do for your side project while you're at work, it seems unlikely that this is an option.
If HN was invite only, I doubt anyone would have ever invited me. Even if someone was willing to do so, I wouldn't have had enough interest to try to find someone to do so.

For me that's enough that I wouldn't want it made invite only.
It looks like it was designed by a 14 year old. I think it's hilariously appropriate for this venture–literally adding no value to the world whatsoever, not even aesthetically.
Apple iPhone Web marketshare outgrows Google Android in May
Has anyone with a Mac been able to install pygame to run this? From what I'm reading, it seems like a complicated process. Could someone throw together a small guide?
There is so much here that is just sad:

1. One of the nation's top patent lawyers (a "top earner" at Kirkland & Ellis - one of the nation's most prestigious firms - who served for the past 6 years on its management committee) walks away from his position in order to capitalize on buying a patent portfolio from Micron, setting up a holding company for those patents, and positioning himself in his own boutique firm to use that portfolio (we assume) either to file a multitude of infringement actions or to exact royalties on threat of legal action - vividly underscoring what is wrong with a patent system that hugely rewards "non-practicing entities" that specialize in litigation far more than in any form of true inventing.

2. A patent system that so skews money incentives that the best and the brightest (and, yes, by all accounts, Mr. Desmarais is a highly likable and much admired and talented fellow) would be drawn to the seamy side of this business in this way.

3. What this illustrates about how a patent nightmare scenario can so easily arise from the fall or decline of a traditional tech company. Here, it was Micron. What happens, then, when Novell auctions its IP assets to private equity firms who in turn parcel them out to firms such as this? Developments such as this can raise significant threats for Linux and the open source community, among others (see the write-up here on this issue: http://url4.eu/3p37m - "Novell auction could be patent troll bonanza").

4. How easy it would be for Congress to make simple modifications to the patent laws so as to preclude this type of trolling, as for example by imposing a simple test that an invention be truly "useful" (and not merely theoretically so) before qualifying for patentability (see a recent proposal to this effect here: http://ip.jotwell.com/patent-utility-reduxit/).

5. How patent drafting in large corporations can become as much a function of the legal department as of legitimate engineers who are actually inventing things.

6. How this sort of activity does not promote inventions or the useful arts in the slightest and yet characterizes so much of the day-to-day activity in the patent world.

Patents generally have had a useful role in our society, whatever their limitations, but this side of the business basically makes one want to scream.
Concerning bank abandonments, that's interesting. Obviously if the bank abandons the home, the homeowner can legitimately live there.

As for fixing the roof simply because it makes the home uninhabitable, I don't buy it. Unless the fix were cheap, I suspect most people would probably just leave. Why spend $5,000 fixing a home you will be kicked out of, rather than just move out? Or instead of moving out, you could just put a bucket under the leak and move your bed, on the theory that you'll probably be kicked out before the leak gets that much worse.

Regarding mark to market accounting, my understanding is that a mortgage is treated as a "held to maturity" asset, while a defaulted home is treated as an "available for sale" asset and must be marked to the market. Thus, the bank must mark the loss only when the home is foreclosed on (not sure when in the process this rule kicks in).

And yes, it benefits banks at the expense of investors. Personally, I see value in preventing this.
It is not that simple. Obviously to get this on Android is going to be a lot of work, especially for someone not familiar with the environment. Now, they have to decide whether to work on other apps, that will most likely not be pulled from the app store, or branch into android.

As bad as the iPhone appstore is, it is still a proven method to generate money, whereas android isn't. While android is growing, this does not translate into money for app developers.
You sound like a corporate astro-turfer: you don't appear to have understood anything I have said, and counter with non-arguments such as "is really immature" and "everyone knows it is wrong. It is wrong".

Neither what I have said, nor the rather odd and hardly even oblique caricature you offer of me, are irrational.

I suggest you actually learn something about copyright.
In his AMA thread here recently I asked him what he does at google and he was aggravatingly vague, replying: Press buttons, mostly.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357182
BP's Photo Blockade of the Gulf Oil Spill
IMO being a part of a community for less than a year isn't a long enough snapshot to accurately judge trends in that community. The site guidelines recognizes this too: "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion."

In regards to your suggestion, invite only wouldn't work. All the accounts that submitted and up-voted the iPad articles are registered already, so how would switching over to invite only change anything in your scenario?
This is hardly a problem that's unique to Android. Like I mentioned before, the i* platform already has 2 resolutions to support and almost certainly will have a 3rd shortly. If the i* platform is offering a better long term solution than what the Android API's currently offer, I'd love to see a link to more information about it.

The whole "fragmentation" thing, at least in terms of API's and developer issues, is more of a talking point than a reality.
iPhone devices will see fragmentation soon too. iPad has a different resolution, the next iPhone will too. The problems you see with Android today are just problems that Apple is holding on but that will have to be faced in the future - it won't be the same 320x480 device anymore.

The solution - proper placement, scaling, different layout flow methods - have been around for ages, and it's up to developers to employ them.

And because Android devs had to deal with them already, I can't wait to see the barrage of shit that will happen when devs unprepared for it have to deal with the new iPhone resolutions.
Excited to see the session with PG and others that was completely full.
And don't forget to update your HN profile. ;)
I don't think he was happy at google, just like I don't think he was happy at yahoo.

I think he should write a book now. It's the natural progression for people who make a single hit startup - they sell it, join some big company, decide that it does not make them happy, give a lot of talks, then fall into some type of mentoring role, then write a book.
>It would be cool if you could drop pheremone trails too. I'm thinking like a programmable Sim Ant

That's what ICFP 2004 was. Here's the specification, if you want ideas:

http://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-bin/contest/ants....

http://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-bin/contest/index...
For all you know, the whole app is a "widget." The term "widget" is semantically empty without a relevant context from which to derive a definition. It really just means "thing." The closest thing to a relevant definition on the iPhone is "user interface element," but clearly those are not banned from the platform.
I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member

:)

What would probably happen is that unless a strong initial group existed, seeding the website with good content, the site would die.

I get it you are not satisfied with HN sometimes, I know, me too. And it's happening more frequently. But the solution is not to open a club where only the cool guys will hang out. Because the cool guys are so demanded that they will choose where they will go. You have to offer more than a maybe it will, maybe it will not happen good experiences for the cool guys.

Now, if you had an stablished place, inviting good people to go would be easier. And you avoid the chicken and egg problem by working your ass off to provide the community with the seeds of how you want the interaction to happen. The page layout, the design, if threads or replies or initial up/downvotes, all of this will shape the initial user behaviour and might dictate what happens next (might... sometimes you don't have control).

Anyway. Invitations == bad, unless the person wants to be invited. Which is something hard to achieve :)
Highly styled apps have taken a while to arrive on Android, but they definitely are arriving. The new Twitter app for Android, for example, is might nice looking. (here's an article about it: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/twitter-for-android-robots-l... , and another here: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/05/twitter-for-a.... One thing not readily apparent from the screenshots is the way the whole app is animated. The little bird and cloud backgrounds are animated and move on almost every screen.
35mm Motion Picture Prints on Photo Paper
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
Wow I really like this game! My company occasionally does engineering challenges for fun and I'm going to recommend this for our next one. The last one we did was competing Robocode (http://robocode.sourceforge.net/) bots. They're written in Java and the game has been around for a while. I'm thinking that this will be more fun as it is newer and so there's really room to get creative and have fun.
How does the world tolerate these kind of people? This kind of stuff makes me boil over in anger.
Review my startup (a student collaboration platform)
This seems like a positive move. I imagine he learned the hard way that Google may be better than Yahoo, but it's still a Big Dumb Company.
You're big on jumping to conclusions on pretty limited data, aren't you?
A way I thought might be feasible is having the actual games run on servers and then dump the game logs in a simple format, so they can be played back with either the original game or any kind of player people come up with, eg browser-based.

Concerning the integer vs bit, that was what I meant, was still thinking in terms of C ints. An even more extreme version would be to force the agents to store their state in a similar manner, but I think that would be taking it too far.
The Euro Zone Has Failed
One suggestion: It would be great if cells could pass energy to an adjacent cell. This would make it possible to form energy pipeling / distribution systems within your team, and for teams to cooperate meaningfully instead of simply "fight / ignore". I think this would substantially enrich the game.
Google is a great place. I am glad I worked there. I probably should have stayed longer than I did. I just had that itch to do something different.
I posted this last week in the middle of the night but have put the screencast on our home page. Hoping some of you are actually awake to provide some feedback :) -- Thanks.
Not this again... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357708
Unfortunately, Google does not allow Australian developers to sell apps in the appstore. It has always been like this, and we have not heard anything on this issue from google.

That is why it is immature. If I can't sell apps, then what good is it to someone trying to run a business? Some people aren't willing to stoop to selling ads, and ruining the experience.
I'm on their advisory board, and I'd consider it-- I actually am considering it. The fact is government spends more money than a gaggle of googles. Building a start-up around providing services to government could be an awesome way to both change government and make money. Meaningful work that makes you rich sounds great. But there's only one thing? How do you learn how government spends money? And how do you figure out who is in charge of making those purchasing decisions? After two years at the Sunlight foundation, I'm still not clear on it-- and it's because we're not interacting directly with them.

Coming out of Code for America as a hacker'll teach one more about how Government works, how it buys things, and what it needs than just asking customers does. I think for some smart people who can keep their eye on the ball, this could be an amazing opportunity to learn about a market, and then become a player in it in a short few years.
Hyperlinks in physical (printed) books
The article seems to argue that Microsoft did well for a company in the PC industry, which totally ignores the fact that Microsoft spent the past decade desperately trying to diversity its way out of the PC industry the same way Apple has.

You have to judge Ballmer based upon the expectations and goals he set out for himself. If he was content to manage a PC software company in a period of maturity, he wouldn't have wasted resources on trying to dominate every market from web applications to internet search to gaming consoles to mobile phones to digital music players to god knows what else. He would have focused on a smaller number of extensions with more strategic value rather than chasing trends.

Instead, Ballmer set out consciously to expand Microsoft into new markets, with limited success and multiple costly failures. Their biggest success was Xbox, and I don't know if that's even broke even yet (considering the loss they took on consoles for so long).
Ask HN: I need a videographer for a 1-hr tech event, suggestions?
I'm putting on an event next Tuesday night and decided that it would be really great to tape the discussions. Can anyone recommend an individual that freelances for this type of work in the BayArea?

(Event is in Palo Alto and will need someone from 7-8pm).
I was surprised to find that OS X doesn't come with wget, but it does include curl:

curl http://72.18.130.89/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf --header 'HOST: hackermonthly.com' > hackermonthly-issue1.pdf
Given that budget, if I were you I'd surf to store.apple.com, find the "Refurbished" section, buy the cheapest Macbook you can find and add the Applecare warranty. Now you have a machine, good as new, which Apple promises to fix for you for the next three years, and you're probably even within your budget.

I love Macs, and my white Macbook is still chugging along after five years (though I have passed it on to someone else), but I did have to replace a hard drive and a battery and get the backlight looked at. Applecare paid for it all.

I'd rather spend the whole $1k and get a machine with a warranty than spend half that on a used machine that's going to have, say, the backlight crap out halfway through my degree program. Laptops are not built to last, even Macs. The market has spoken. It wants cheap, not reliable.

The other hint to remember, as always, is that RAM is cheaper from someone else than it is from Apple. Lots cheaper.
If you had a heart attack, came to in a hospital bed, would you rip out the IV, get dressed and go to work???

Didn't think so. So you CAN SWITCH, it's just that you've become attached to your present circumstances and are not prepared to break free. So stop killing yourself, quit and do whatever it is that you can contribute greatest value by.
Except once you've sent that data to someone else (whether a photo, message or status update) you know longer control that data.
I love guessing at stuff, because problems are much more fun when you are only given little bits to work with.
Why? Performance is worse and you're not "stickin" it to Adobe at all since you're still watching Flash content (SWF rendered in HTML5).
Don't worry, I'm about to go to sleep so I won't go on.
Supporting multiple devices may be less convenient for developers (although I'd argue that the slow expansion of the number and diversity of hardware device in the i* platform will slowly bring the same problems to that ecosystem), but regardless, it's certainly not a new problem, it's something that Mac, PC, Web, etc. developers have had to deal with for ages. Mobile app developers will adjust, because they'll want to follow the users. And short of a MAJOR change in the mobile market, the bulk of the users will be on Android: http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2010/05/27/deciphe...
I was having %90 of my requests time out.

Very little of the software I'm using handled the exceptions raised while this was happening. I checked the status page first thing, but it didn't get set to yellow for another 5 minutes after I started having problems.
Talk about a conflict of interest. May I be the first to suggest that this falls into the bombshell category?
Here's the evidence:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8q2pz/ask_reddi...

In my case, Appengine does not support recursive SQL queries, so another method had to be used.
A Description of Engineering
I would just prefer that wait till I'm dead till you write my epitaph.
I’m annoyed by Flash beachballing or crashing, not the use of resources.
because their SWF format has been open for years and someone wrote another HTML 5 renderer that works with a subset of Flash content and performs terrible?
Welcome to my club. Like others are saying, use the time to develop.

After a lengthy period of me asking about what my duties were and if anything was written down and what various policies were, a senior coworker simply said "Read. Buy some books and read." I spend about one hour of the day on getting real work done, another hour or two on moving things through the idiocracy, and the rest of the day is spent on Pylons documentation. :D
Well, if some of the carriers / manufactures don't start regularly upgrading the OS in the phone, developers are going to have to make some tough choices.

On the same note, it will interesting to see what iPhone developers do about OS 4 not running on 1st gen devices (ignore or stay compatible).
Scale it up a bit, and it's the same reason a lot of enterprises buy Oracle (or other big expensive proprietary software) when OSS alternatives would be suitable.... they want someone to call (or worst case, blame) when problems arise.
How do you collaborate on group documents?
maxklein may regularly be a speculative asshat that writes questions as statements, but a broken clock is still right twice a day.
Yes, but this site would be incredibly dull if people didn't. It would just be employees making factual statements about their own companies.