skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Just for the people..."

I have an idea for a fun business model: raise a ton of cash, hire all the most talented engineers, hide them in a remote cave for 8 months while your company is in "stealth mode", and then ransom yourself off to Google for a tidy profit.
What about diamonds made in a laboratory? They're still more or less the same thing as a natural diamond, but they're still called artificial.

Though it is a bit overblown, but you know, science journalism.
So some background on this space.

This is hardly the first entrant and pretty much every tv and blu-ray you buy moving forward will have similar capabilities to what Google has announced. Though perhaps with a different provider.

Yahoo actually has the most TV's out right now with similar interactivity using their widget platform. They're on Sony, Samsung, Vizio and LG tvs
http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/

Samsung has their own platform running on their TVs and blu-ray players. Its an HTML engine and also supports a "Flash Lite" or Stagecraft. (and their tvs still run yahoo widgets as well)
http://www.samsung.com/us/internetTV/

Vudu (recently bought by Wal-Mart) has an app platform being supported by many manufacturers as well its Lua based and on Toshiba, LG and Sanyo products. (this is outside of their on-demand video service)

Panasonic has "Viera Cast" which is actually a cloud based service I haven't really figured out yet

So besides these there's quite a few "Over The Top" boxes that provide similar functions such as

Roku

Popcorn Hour (about to launch their new Popbox in a bit)

Apple TV

Boxee

Anyway its fun to see Google hopping into the space we'll see how well they do.
Ten Evil Uses for URL Shortening Services
Ignoring that this apparently came after the VC's investment, I too would prefer that a VC tell me "the deal" that he has neither respect nor appreciation of me and the others who brought the company to the point where he can help.

It's not about money per se, it's about the signal this sends. Like the previously discussed archetypal new CFO who shows who's who and what's what by terminating free soda.
Who cares about websites made in flash? People want flash for games and video. With that in mind, I think that engadget tested the context that most of us care about.
no, mainly write requirements directly into wave (do some embedding of graphics and files though).
The one feature that would make gomockingbird way more useful to me is sharing editable versions of documents.
From that FAQ: "If someone asks you to sign an NDA for receiving GPL-covered software copyrighted by the FSF, please inform us immediately by writing to license-violation@fsf.org."
It is inevitable that we will code a biological species that could not have arisen from gradual iteration.

However, there are some wheel-like things in biology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_s...
Using "mplayer -vo caca MovieName.avi" to play a video file in a Linux terminal is awesome - even if maybe it doesn't quite belong in an article about Windows tricks.
What, like HTC or Microsoft?
I'm of the understanding that they've recently been ramping up the Apple TV team.
Ok, I think I missed the genesis of whole rainbows and ponies meme. Someone mind clueing me in?

I seem to recall first hearing it connected with Django somehow, but I figured it was a reference to something I didn't get...
It doesn't only bother me practically. Yes I did consider the fact that they'd have to compete, though I didn't consider the fact that they evolve all the time anyway, that's a good point. BUT, especially if they're talking about something as drastic as eating up a significant amount of carbon in the air, it will change the ecosystem. It'll pose the same danger as moving animals across continents.

But really it bothers me in a different way. I'll say morally, for a severe lack of better term. Maybe existentially. It doesn't sit right with me that we'll be living amongst creatures created in a lab, and that there's no way to differentiate them. I don't believe in God, but I like that we exist within a certain biological framework, it just feels like part of our identity. That the players are allowed to change the rules bothers me.
all of my public services (web/email/dns/database hosting, my SaSS - http://corduroysite.com/) are hosted on openbsd servers, as well as my office firewall and workstations running openbsd. i'm also an openbsd developer (jcs@)
Google's sneak peak at Android 'Gingerbread' features
Wasn't it not too long ago Steve Jobs did the same thing on a stage for Snow Leopard (or just Leopard, can't remember), comparing it to Vista? This was months before it shipped.
I don't understand why applications should specify where they get installed. Shouldn't that be something handled by the system, possibly with guidance from the user?

Does your post imply that this feature will help some of the 1.5/1.6 devices be upgradeable to 2.x or is that unrelated?
"Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources.

But it’s not a flawless experience either. Flash content — especially video — can take up to a minute to load, which is more frustrating on a phone than it is on a desktop. And it sucks bandwidth."

How am I suppose to merge those two statements?
Announcement here http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replica... with the press release, a FAQ and some fact sheets (and the video is promised to be available soon)
this is obvious for all ruby users, why post it as a news?
OH: Why would thet need all these people on stage? One Jobs does a better job.
The fatwah against Salman Rushdie, the reaction to the Danish cartoons made it feel to people in western countries that muslims were trying to impose their values here, by extreme means if necessary. Not for the first time has an attempt to make people behave in a certain manner had unintended consequences
This doesn't seem to offer much more than TiVo. Based on Google's 2 minute pitch, much of what they promised is already available on the Gen 3 TiVo: record programs, Netflix, YouTube, video on demand, photos. The only things I saw that were new were a "global" search capability and bookmarks. Is that enough of a difference maker? Probably not. Maybe if there was some other benefit thrown in (aka no recurring service fees).
Spiderman, just because a thing takes effort and is well done, does not mean it is insincere.
It's based on the work discussed in http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/hstore-cc.pdf
It's also interesting how I can "git clone git://android.git.kernel.org/whatever", edit the code, and install it on my phone. Without any permission from anyone.
Soon you won't be able to watch Hulu through Chrome, but nevertheless this some exciting and potentially big stuff here. I wonder how the cable and media companies feel about this?
I give Google some slack for trying to be different than Apple in this respect but man, you're so right. Maybe it's the democratic way of Google having each manager demo the feature they're responsible for.

But it felt like at one point the techno music wouldn't stop as people shuffled in and out of the stage. Did we really need the music bringing all the CEOs out? It just got silly at that point.

And was it me or did Vic come off like a douchebag during this second keynote?
That's what Apple tends to do, though.. They wait and wait until a market already exists, and then they redefine it. Maybe they're bidding their time for cloud services?
"We always grandfather our customers anytime we change our prices; however, in our ToS we do reserve the right to change our prices for existing customers as long as we notify them first."

What? You grandfather your customers, but reserve the right to increase your prices for them as long as you let them know? That doesn't make sense.
Well for one thing pissing off your customers is not "letting them down."

It's pissing them off. Side stepping the fact in the "apology" is like a little kid apologizing for something because he knows it is a required action. Not because he's sorry.

This company is sorry that the customers got angry and forced the pricing change. They are not sorry for "letting them down"
And now TVs! ;]
This is a nice step for technology and a really huge deal for human culture and religion.

A certain Someone said once "Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth."

That certain Someone later said: "Behold, man has become like one of us..."
Good luck making a case with no evidence and no witnesses.

Also, how is listening to a Wifi radio any different than listening to your police scanner or AM/FM radio? I'm not convinced that passive packet capture is a criminal activity.
We've had this in Canada for a couple of years now.
Perhaps Apple TV debuted at the wrong timing. Google simply waited.
> Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds.

There's no comparison.

I'm sitting here looking out the window at my car, and there are caterpillars out there that are moving faster than it. Not only that, but that caterpillar can refuel itself. And it'll turn itself into new ones next year. In the meantime, my car will sit and rust.

Really, it's the height of hubris to think that we can engineer something that works as well as what untold generations has evolved.

(And I'll apologize for the tangent, but this is also the fatal conceit of those who believe that any central authority can manage our economy any better than the market can on its own.)
From what i have read this will be a corporation between Sony, Intel and.. taadaaaa... Logitech.. guess what, they build kickass remotes :p

So, a really nice Sony HDTV + Logitech Harmony + Internet... yeah, i'd love that!
Yeah, that's really bad, any Microsoft watcher worth his salt should know that the "too big a task" they tried was a Windows rewrite on top of .NET.

Perhaps a good idea in principle but .NET was too young at the time; in general their inital goals were was too much as well as too soon. That cost them a couple or so years and then put them under immense time pressure.
I still don't get it, dude. What could they have written in that blog post which would have rang true to you?
It's a beta presentation, relax. You can find on youtube many failures that happened on Steve Jobs presentations too. I'm sure the final version will work just fine, just like any google product.
Jupiter Loses a Stripe
13 Of The World’s Most Bizarre Plants And Fungi
Plants and fungi have a vital role in the natural world. Let's see some of them.
Your best bets are electronic trading at a bank or hedge fund or realtime market data work at a place like FactSet or Bloomberg. I don't know of anything non-finance related though. All the startup people I've talked to around here are Ruby or PHP enthusiasts.
The keynote was a mix of real stuff that's just being released and forthcoming stuff, just like every Apple keynote. Not sure what you're talking about.
They both still have to wait for the content providers to play ball.
Just my opinion. It's okay to disagree, you know?
You're using base 2 (0 and 1), they are using base 4 (A, G, C and T)... Not that different, really.
You could have rewritten this article without the word wireless. It's only relevant because he didn't have to deal with a switched network.

No wireless packet analysis at all? Weak.
Correct on both.
In that case there will need to be some kind of locking, which is probably the reason the whitepaper recommends avoiding transactions that span multiple servers: "For multi-partition transactions, one engine distributes and coordinates work plans for the other engines. VoltDB assumes that an application designer can construct a partitioning/cloning scheme and a transaction design that makes a large majority of the transactions local to a single virtual node. "
Pretty perfect.
Yes, this is hard, due to the black-box nature of the App Store. Can't really measure conversions through it. Android is better for this - I've seen some developers release for Android, optimize and test there, and then take their learnings to produce an optimized application for iPhone.

In addition to Google Analytics for Mobile, there's a bunch of companies that have free products that allow measurement within iPhone applications and therefore optimization - Flurry, Motally, Mobclix, Medialets, Localytics, etc. I own a chunk of Flurry and think it's the best, but don't take my obviously biased word for it. None of them, including Google Analytics, measure mobile web to mobile app conversions. All of them are potentially affected by Apple's recent terms of service changes for iPhone 4.0. No one knows just how affected.

When it comes to promotions, the only area where you can reliably measure is app-to-app advertisements. (And again, who knows if this will be supported in iPhone 4.0.) Right now I know AdMob and Burstly offer conversion tracking if you're advertising through them. Flurry offers a cost-per-acquisition product called AppCircle which I think works quite well, but again, I'm biased.

Flurry also has some cross-application tracking (we'll show you how many users on your application A also use application B) but it doesn't quite meet your use case, because it won't show you users who were on application A and touched the ad for application B and then used application B. I don't think any of the other companies mentioned above offer anything better than what Flurry's got - but I'm not certain.
I think he means they have reserved the right to change prices for existing customers, but choose not to do so as a general rule. If they ever are in a situation where they need to change pricing for existing customers, the TOS would allow them to do so.
“We discovered something really cool, it’s called the Internet.”

Ouch. Also, bad form for injecting "READ MORE! http://techcrunch.com? into my copy paste, techcrunch.
But the original idea for Facebook wasn't 10% as big as Facebook. 'Execution' includes turning your good idea into a great one.
Also from that FAQ: "If the violation involves GPL-covered code that has some other copyright holder, please inform that copyright holder, just as you would for any other kind of violation of the GPL."

FYI: VoltDB owns the copyright to the code.
That's probably the main reason why people keep rephrasing this same advice all the time. Even though many others have said the same thing before the author X got to it, he or she has seen all that stuff misinterpreted and used as an excuse for shoddy work. So naturally the author X decides to tell it again, but this time in an even clearer way. Redundancy out of optimism ;)
Webscraping with Python and BeautifulSoup
Am I being stupid, or does the SDK not contain the hardware update? I've spent an hour digging around in the apparently false hope that I would be able to update my N1 today :-)
Ask HN: Best saas sales/landing page
I'm going to be taking my new saas product out of closed beta shortly, and am just getting into designing the homepage.

What are the saas sites that you've seen with GREAT homepages which really get across what the company does, and why you should sign-on?

The ones I've looked at are

http://basecamphq.com

http://google.com/apps

http://zoho.com

http://www.olark.com/portal/

http://posterous.com/

http://www.weebly.com/

https://www.wepay.com/

https://www.cloudkick.com/
If I were evil, I'd point out that the East Coast attitude towards failure is much less forgiving and therefore a NYC VC needs to put lots of focus into alleviating it.

Although ... are unnecessary stealth startups based on fear of potential competition more common on the East Coast? I'm all too familiar with that concept, I just don't know if there's less of it in SV.
Linux is a kernel. It has over 400 syscalls.

The userland, with which you are probably familiar, is the GNU part of GNU/Linux.

So if you want to blame somebody, blame Stinky Stallman, the baby hater.

http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms
If you're using HTTPS, the Referer is blocked by your browser.
A good point and a valid concern. I didnt read this as a return to barter nor tribalism but instead a comment of the reduced subject.

Late Modernist and Postmodernist debates on subjectivity tend to see the Enlightenment idea of a coherent subject as being completely fragmented to the point of collapse.

It is a double-edged issue. The 'death' of the subject means on the one hand we are free to imagine and invent new relationships. But on the other hand because our notions of freedom derive from notions of subjectivity there is danger of losing freedom.

Consumerist culture exploits this exact split - as consumers, we are told how free and unique we are as an advertising ploy and then end up all wearing the same thing... We are also easily manipulated by mass media distracted by nonissues while serious threats to freedom remain relatively ignored.

If we 'buy' too much into this identity, what is left are relationships in which subjectivity is inverted. Subjectivity in this case lies more in the corporation than in the human subject. (As reflected in that bizarre Supreme Court decision of the last year.)

We do need to fight this. And it is not a right nor a left issue. Both sides decry the erosion of freedom but see different causes.

What is generally lacking in us today is what Kant referred to as 'Speculative Reason' or more colloquially the ability to think - creatively, imaginatively,actively and constructively.

Consumers dont do that - nor do constituents nor employees, etc.

"Hackers and Painters" do. Makers do.

That is a key - we (as consumers) forget that we can make, create. And if we as humans have any purpose, that is it. In fact we are only knowable in what we create (Vico "verum factum")

I had a long rambling talk in the dogrun last night with an intelligent and non-technical lawyer who reads Popular Mechanics for fun.

So I babbled on for awhile about makezine, OReilly press, Linux, Arduino stuff he did not know about. And it made me think of how exciting this field can be at times - not because of the technical advance but of the remarkable creativity.

So I dont think the point is for 'tiedyes' and subsistence farming but to become very conscious of the breakdown of subjectivity and the potential danger in the greatly reduces roles that are left in its fragmentation.
Are there full-time professional jobs out there which only require 25 hours of work per week? Why not?

Because by definition, 25 hours/week is part time.

Incidentally, if you wish to work little, you can do so. 80% of the poor don't work at all, and nevertheless live a lifestyle which a few decades ago would have been called "middle class". I don't see much reason you can't do the same, unless of course you actually want some of the stuff that extra 15 hours/week can buy.

If you do skilled labor, you can almost certainly consult less than 40 hours/week (on average, over a year).
I flagged it. It can barely be described as a paradox, and the question itself didn't contain any useful analysis. It's a shame if insightful comments there didn't get the attention they deserved, but they weren't there at the time I flagged it.
Flash Player 10.1 released for Android (requires Android 2.2/Froyo)
It's not the "what", but the "how". It doesn't matter anyhow- obviously the apology worked. All the pitchforks have been traded in for hugs and kisses already.
"This kind of algorithm is normally expected to be written, tested, debugged and presented in one hour in programming competitions with fifteen year-old contestants."

Would you deploy this code in a production application?

"Programming competitions work with a text input file to get rid of this complexity. I speak as one who has competed in and won such competitions."

So are you then saying that these kinds of problems take about an hour to solve, assuming you are someone who competes in and wins timed programming competitions? Also, what will be the maintenance costs of changing requirements going forward, as compared to adding Prolog clauses?
I can't even see the original multiple choice question. What was it?
Google analytics hacks: A real-time stats bookmarklet and full referring URLs
At times it seems like an undeniable conclusion. Notsure exactly why but your pithy post reminded me of the Ginsberg poem "America"
The Android browser (WebKit) has always been written in C++.
George Gilder wrote some weird stuff later, but his "Wealth and Poverty" presented some really good ideas. One of the best was his distinction between "wealth" and "riches". "Riches" are resources used for pleasure and consumption; "wealth" is anything used to increase or improve future production. As he pointed out many things can be either depending on how it is used, but the distinction is very useful when thinking about the future and how to use your current resources.
Did google just kill the boxee box? What about boxee in general?

@boxee says:
watched the Google TV demo. more complementary than competitive. we should start working on Boxee Android App for TV... :)
Which is interesting (much less understandable) for about 0.0001% of the people that have a phone. But yes, you have point. That is nice.
That link injection is Tynt's product. Can't stand it myself, although the company's growing like a weed.

Opt-out link for Tynt's link injection is here: http://www.tynt.com/support/opt-inout/

Nice of them to offer an opt-out, I suppose, although they don't exactly highlight that it exists.
I feel like we should give the moderators benefit of the doubt on this one. HN has been gradually shifting away from quality content, so any effort to correct that is kindly appreciated. Like any process, mistakes are occasionally made.
Oh please. Well enough to work != perfect. You don't need to spend 10 hours trying to figure out every possible edge case to sending an email with a link in it. If it works 99.9% of the time, you can manually handle the few cases where it doesn't.
If you choose an answer at random, what is the probability of being right: A:25%, B:50%, C:0%, D:25%.
You're saying that Flash "clearly doesn't kill battery life" but then go on to say it's no worse than 3G... well, yeah, but lots of people have complained about 3G's effect on battery life, and much of the time both features will be used at the same time so the effect on battery life is "stacked".

And keep in mind how much Flash you'll be running "unintentionally" doing just normal browsing (on 3G or not) in the form of ads and the like. Flash doesn't only come into play when you're playing Farmville. So this is something that affects a lot of browsing.

On that note: how does backgrounding work in Flash Player 10.1? Can I play Flash-streamed audio in the background while I browse other pages (via "tabs") or use other apps? If not, that's one more plus for native apps over in-browser Flash. But if so, what happens if I have 5 different pages open, each with a couple of Flash ads -- do they keep executing in the background?
Wow, this was pretty heavy handed.

I wasn't aware that users could kill posts like this. How many users does it get to do this? On Stack Overflow, it takes 5 users to vote to close a question, and even than the question is still visible.
they've got root
In-memory DBs can take a lot of excellent shortcuts but I have to wonder if their usability is limited. After all, I'd think most interesting data sets end up quickly eclipsing the available RAM in most off the shelf/affordable servers.
Can't all users see deaded threads if they just turn on [showdead] in their user profiles?
The things you own, end up owning you (Tyler Durden)