skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is another viewpoint of how applications run and (don't) exit: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-...

"Once Android determines that it needs to remove a process, it does this brutally, simply force-killing it. The kernel can then immediately reclaim all resources needed by the process, without relying on that application being well written and responsive to a polite request to exit. Allowing the kernel to immediately reclaim application resources makes it a lot easier to avoid serious out of memory situations.

"If a user later returns to an application that's been killed, Android needs a way to re-launch it in the same state as it was last seen, to preserve the "all applications are running all of the time" experience. This is done by keeping track of the parts of the application the user is aware of (the Activities), and re-starting them with information about the last state they were seen in. This last state is generated each time the user leaves that part of the application, not when it is killed, so that the kernel can later freely kill it without depending on the application to respond correctly at that point."

It sounds like Android has addressed the locked resource issue. I'm not familiar with WinMo, but I suspect it tries to be cooperative and uncooperative (ornery or crashed) processes will cause the reclamation to fail.
this already exists: USAA Banking and Investing
As user "maw" pointed out, your mileage may vary.

Random observations and anecdotes:

Unlike many people these days, I learned to type on - gasp - typewriters. Classes were on electrics although I often used a manual, too. I learned fairly early on that for long typing jobs, you have to learn good hand position and use the least force that will do the job.

The model M caused me problems but not wrist problems. It caused me problems in my fingers. After a few hours, that kick-back from each "click" adds up.

For some good pictures of good typing, look at old movies that feature professional secretarial pools. Keep an eye on the ladies' posture, hand position, and light touch.

These days I also type with a light touch partly to extend the life of a somewhat expensive keyboard - one that let's me type without rotating my wrists (e.g., the typing position is similar to shaking hands rather than to picking up a pencil).
Open standard OStatus lets people on different social networks follow each other
This is not a problem on Android.

In Android, application is not equal to process. Application may start in one process, the process may get killed when the application is backgrounded, and later the application continues in another process, where it is restored.

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html#...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTzRAtDujU

They did a demo in the video I posted above (forward to the last 20 minutes). Unfortunately, it did not work.
This article has been on Hacker News in the past (to be fair, I think this post might be about a new venue for it).

The problem with the article is that it's superficial. At its core, it's premised on the idea that threads are inherently easier than events, because they produce straight-line code and automatically handle tracking the state needed across a transaction. If that's true, then the article says threads are just as good as events once we solve all the problems that make threads dangerous or slow.

But it's not a given that threads are easy. In particular, as anyone who has spent time doing high-performance threaded code will tell you, there's the effort you have to put in to make sure your threaded code is correct, and then the 2x more time you have to put in to make sure that it's efficient; in particular, you have to do synchronization without effectively serializing all your threads. Which is a huge pain.

I think this is gradually becoming a moot point, as modern languages --- all of which have some kind of anonymous function and some approximation of closures --- allow us to write evented code that looks and feels like straight-line code. jQ callbacks in Javascript are the most vivid illustration of this idea (I suppose the node.js people are carrying that even further; I haven't played with it).
The article seems to be arguing that applications shouldn't keep resources or keep running when not visible without making it clear to the user and providing a convenient way to make the app release its resources and completely stop running.

The author is saying that most apps don't really need to keep doing things and using resources when not actively in use and visible(with GPS navigation and music players as two examples of apps that do); if an app doesn't need to keep using resources while not visible, it shouldn't need an explicit exit button because it should be releasing all of its resources when you leave the application with the back button.
The Google Job Experiment: How to get hired using $6 of Google Ads.
Yay! No more {% ifnotequal %}{% endifnotequal %}
Good luck with that.

There is no such think as a bank that doesn't suck. If there are, they are called credit unions. For profit banks have customers. Non-profit credit unions have members.
This may be the way it's supposed to work, but at least on my Devour, it doesn't "feel" that way. The only way to make the device responsive - and to stop apps from hanging - is to use ATK on a regular basis, multiple times a day. I don't mind it - but it's just what I have to do.
This is at least the second long time Twitterer to found a new business related to finance or payments (the other was Jack Dorsey's Square). I guess they're in a position to perceive a high level need in that area? Pushing money around gives you a lot more chance for revenue than dealing with mere tweets, I suppose.
USAA Banking and Investing isn't accessible to most of the public, and is locked down as to be almost indistinguishable from other credit-unions for their non-veteran, non-military customers.
This list is a clear illustration of why it's better to read Infinite Jest on the iPad book reader, where dictionary definitions are a tap away, than in dead-tree format. Because I'm only 2/3 through and I can't guarantee that he hasn't found a way to use the word "exergue" in a non-coin-related sentence. Probably in a footnote. Which, by the way, is hyperlinked in the iBooks version.
I've spent more time with Cestos than any game on my pc in the last few months.
So the browser is not really the culprit--it's flash.
Very much enjoyed this. Perhaps this adds even more weight to Dale Carnegie's advice about listening to people. I have some friends who barely know anything about me but are fond of me just because I let them speak as much as they like.
I got an email from my (senior citizen) dad today asking about Diaspora.
I Feel like the periodic table in the background is great, not being produced on a mass scale doesn't reduce its value.
Yes, I represented everything as patches. The native file format was going to just be a series of patches, so that in the single-user case I could implement the "never have to hit save" functionality just by appending to the patch stream. (An active save might have reset the patch stream to just be a straight dump of the current document.)

In my more evil moments I considered specifying the save file as an XML document that deliberately left off the final close tag. Mu-hu-ha-ha-ha!

Pretty much the same as that doc, yes, though I never saw it. (I did see and was inspired by the Darcs patch theory doc I linked.) My plan was for people to "share" documents, so a server that had a full copy of the document was not a problem, it did by definition. For that matter, in the Google Wave model, I'd rather run my own Wave server so having a full copy of the document there isn't a problem either. I, personally, actively don't want my cloud to have the canonical version of the document.

"You can't constantly be diffing and sending patches using the synch-diff approach - rather you have synchronization cycles that happen every few seconds."

Why not? Assuming just a handful of users (not hundreds), and given that patches have a certain flexibility about when they get applied, why not just send things as they occur? (Within the topologies shown, that is, not just everyone sending to anybody as they feel like it. You could probably get by with full P2P without too much work, but having the central server simplifies things a lot and I don't think you lose much. I was never planning on 100 people "in" the same document.) Clients should probably chunk things up a bit during periods of rapid typing. (I was planning on going to raw sockets if I needed to; most higher level protocols would have indeed choked this from what I saw.)

Anyway, it's pretty theoretical now. Wave is probably good enough and this wasn't even the focus of my project, just an incidental sideline to what I really wanted.
yes, that is pretty much all of the content. Probably easiest to copy it into a variable called "htmlContentInGerman" or something, and then translate it. I'll figure out how to switch languages later on. Thanks for helping!
You could expand the forward sensor to multiples, for doorways or people, say; have a few, say, 5, or 3 at different horizontal forward angles, with corresponding vibrators or a sequence of audible beeps (low, non-annoying when nothing is present). The user would learn to map these vibrations / beeps to the real world, as shown by that guy with the belt of cellphone buzzers a couple of years ago.
Ask HN: Designing an SDK
First time asking HN anything. I've been tasked with designing an SDK for an App Store, the problem is I have never designed an SDK. Can anyone point me to any resources that can guide me or best practices anyone in HN can recommend?

Technology unknown, just need an idea of best practices and possible resources I can look to.

Thx HN
Link to previous discussion?

I'd be curious if incorporating outside the U.S. is the best option for them here to avoid the regulation. Or going on a SeaStead :) They'd still need relationships with Visa and Mastercard though.
He has come to apologize.
I think that this sort of material would be best kept on reddit.
> the puritan parent is as likely to go after the store as they are to deal with their child.

And that is one of the dangerous slopes we can see. It's not the store owner's responsibility to educate the kid - that's what parents are for. And the puritan parent has no right to prevent my kids from getting what I allow them to get.

And it's not only about porn. Apple must clearly draw the line it will not cross. Today it's porn, emulators and anything that's cross-compiled. A cartoonist was blocked already (and unblocked after that). Would a network anonymizer be allowed? For how long?
Exactly. I am truly dreading hurricane season. Cleanup after a major storm is bad enough without having to deal with sticky, toxic oil.
I am guessing that the fingerprinting problem extends far beyond the browser. What about connection based fingerprinting? (TCP/IP stack, etc.) What about order of fetching images from a website? What about timing attacks that measure the time taken to load a page (browser caches, cache sizes, eviction policies, upstream squid caches, etc.)? The whole system is way too complicated.

And I feel that having additional extensions/plugins to combat this, unless deployed universally, is still going to contribute to the entropy and help increase the chances of you getting fingerprinted.

Edit: the pdf on the website talks about it. https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf

"The Curse of Dimensionality."
YouTube and the new creative class
I believe they're using Cassandra a sophisticated caching layer. It's not the "canonical" data store, but replaces Memcachedb.
Anyone else having "elevated" 503s? 100% of my requests have been are returning 503s for the past 30 minutes :(
The Small Print: Writing UI Instructions
But it also speaks to the access to education those in the West Bank have compared to ALL their neighbours.
Maybe it's worth _more_ pre-IPO!
Because they haven't wanted to build one....
Yet the domain is somehow relevant!
Does anyone know how it compares to The Joy of Clojure (I realize it's not done yet)?
What's up with the .net for their domain?
Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study In Corporate Welfare
> polluting my views with statements that do nothing but populate context variables.

That's pretty much all I like to put in views. The rest goes in models/managers, or forms, or elsewhere.
Well, it can be easy if you use the right tools and frameworks right from the beginning. When you are only using Microsoft specific tools, of course it will take a lot of work.

Using Visual Source Safe?
Using .Net? Using .Net forms?
Using MSVC? (And even now when developing for MacOSX??)
From their about faq page:
How do I deposit checks?
Take a photo of the check with your smart phone and send it to us with our app. Pretty simple, right?

Is this really secure? I know there are some people doing cardreaders as an attachment to the phone, but pictures of checks?
Unit Test Your Database
git branch -[dD] does not delete reflog entries for commits made to the branch.

A branch may have its own, separate reflog which would be deleted, but that is only a convenience feature as the man page you linked to documents WRT the -l option; the primary reflog still records all operations made on the branch.

You might find it useful to actually test stuff before posting links to man pages that you don't fully understand. I know I do. :P
I suspect placebo effect.
Sounds like a real bank:
http://banksimple.net/faq/
Maybe the diaspora guys can tackle this in the fall after they've knocked out their distributed fb
From my perspective, I like having an exit button, particular for services that do some sort of push notifications (e.g. if I'm using Google Talk or Skype, I want to ensure I don't continue to receive messages on my phone after I exit). Pandora is also another example of an app that needs to have an exit button (or 'quit' in their case).

Back and Exit are completely different in my mind. If I hit Back and the app is still running or I continue to get notifications, then that's potentially expected behavior from the app. If I "Exit" out of an app, then I know that if I continue to get notifications, that's on the developer.
I don't believe in writing business plans either - but the business plan competitions I've been to had nothing to do with the old 20 page paper document with lots of excel graphs that we normally think of.

They were just presentations pitching to potential investors. So in that sense the words mean totally separate things.
I can see it going either way.

If they hate it, I'm sure they'll try to block the script somehow. Either by changing stuff on the page or by threatening legal action.

If they love it (they might see it as a way to re-gain the trust of their user...), they might integrate it into their page.

Either way, as I said previously, I'm glad it's out in the open, that will prevent them from disappearing the project.
Of the value props he describes, the only one that remotely resonates with me is: "A bank that puts your money to work automatically."

He writes that nobody LOVES their bank. But does anybody really HATE their bank? Maybe some vocal folks, but a bank to me is a utility-- a hole in the wall where I stick my money. I've never felt gouged by fees (when I was young and stupid, I've been annoyed by overdraft fees, but they seem justified). I've never been overwhelmingly frustrated by the design decisions of my bank. They decidedly don't treat me like crap. Every time I've needed to interact with my bank(s) it's been a pleasant experience.

Given the switching cost/inconvenience, I think this is going to be a hard sell for most people.
I imagine it's as secure as the USAA method of doing it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/technology/10check.html
USAA's iPhone app has been doing this for a while: https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_utils/McStaticPages?key=deposi...
USAA lets you deposit scanned check images. The only requirement is that you have to have a credit card setup as overdraft protection. Decent photos seem like they'd work ok.
Linuxcare returns with focus in the cloud
As a Java developer it saddens me that Java-the-language has become so "unevolvable".
Far to simplistic.

There is a reason Django is introducing range checking and simple logic into their template statements. How often do you specify something like:

"If the amount owed is more than $100, make it red in the table"

That's not a question of separation of view/logic in my mind. It's a question of formatting. Forcing the view to resolve it down to a simple boolean statement results in a lot of cruft in the view layer that really doesn't belong there. It is just as evil to move presentation logic into a view as it is the other way around.
If you're already familiar with clojure, you can skip the first 18 minutes or so.
There's no reason it can't be if the app is well-implemented (though this is a big if). I suppose it opens up a concern about phone malware, but with checks that's pretty much the least of your problems. It's not like they're terribly secure to begin with.
Reshaping airframes & expectations
Venture Pimp: Crowd Reel is freaking awesome
Yeah, I too thought the logic of that statement was completely back asswords.
Its like Check 21 I guess .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_21_Act
original website: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure

excerpt:
http://media.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/concurrency.pdf
http://media.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/flow.pdf

source code:
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/source_code
Also, I'd be interested in a bank which didn't use the fractional reserve system, and did something more like the process described at the end of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy#p/p/CECDA315A8848B99...

It may then be tough to compete with existing banks whose insurance is subsidized by the gov though.
A Primer on Information Theory and Privacy
So do you think we'll move away from paper checks completely and just move around echecks from phone to phone? I've never really understood how checks are secure. They just have a routing number, an account number, and your signature right?
The funny thing is, some of the same things that the author points out, he doesn't do on his own site. I couldn't figure out where to start when I hit the homepage. Is it a news site? Is it a blog site? I finally hit 'critiques' from his blog post and was taken to a page that has a one liner including a link to "read up on this" to get started. They've already lost me :x
'Someday an entrepreneur will make a fortune by figuring out how to monetize personal attention in the most efficient way.'

pimps
How bout adding composite primary key support....ARRRGHHH!!!
Absolutely. This is something we didn't realize from the get-go. A Mac version wasn't in the initial plan until we realized (aka, I came onboard) that we needed one.
Great work guys. I do love django and everything it's doing. We can't let these ruby guys nab all the credit
Although interesting, it's hardly a good tracking method if it can be foiled by simply installing a new font.
All of these bad gateways I'm getting from nginx don't give me a whole lot of confidence in this banking website =P I know it's early, but perceptions like that matter.
My reading of the law.com items and reading/skimming of the judgment suggests that Silvaco Data needs to get better lawyers and probably needs to listen better in general.
The cellphone was very much a utility for a large portion of the mobile market before the iPhone came along.
I think that the vast majority of applications can be designed without exit buttons.

Safari on the iPhone is a great example (I'm using iPhone applications because I'm more familiar with their behavior). Safari always keeps track of its state on disk. When it's closed, if pages are open it pauses some tasks (e.g. JavaScript timers) but keeps running unless it gets a low memory warning. If no pages are open, it exits completely. The user doesn't think about closing Safari, he thinks about closing web pages.

Mail on the iPhone stays running if the user has set it to check mail in the background.

The same principles can be applied to applications on any mobile OS. Pandora should stay open if music is playing. A Twitter client should stay open if the user has set it to check for Tweets in the background. An IRC client should stay open if there are active connections.
Ideas are dangerous.
I'm sorry, but I want my bankers to be grave old men in suits. I also want my bank to have offices all over the world and I want to know that they are handling money many hundreds of times larger than whatever I have.

I don't want a bank started by a guy called al3x, and who just left twitter. It sounds innovative, but it doesn't sound...dependable.

And if there is one feature I want my bank to have, it's dependable.
Can we eat to starve cancer?
Really weird why a nation wide TV show about startups gets so little coverage on a startup news site.
They aim to fill two entirely different purposes.

JoC is for deeper understanding, Programming Clojure is for breadth and basic understanding to get you going in the first place. They, or maybe (depending on how it turns out) Clojure in Action are companion pieces to each other. On it's own JoC would be a decent book, but it really feels like one to take you the next steps AFTER you already have a foundation in the language from which to build.
This was also a major learning experience for me. I've mainly worked in Web 2.0-only companies that wouldn't dream of writing a desktop application. Everything is incredibly different from my PoV and many staples of modern web writing (functional tests, agile methodology, etc) can't be assumed in a desktop environment.

I also had to get used to having less data about how our consumers use our product. I'm used to being able to ninja through apache logs and Google Analytics to figure stuff out, but our data is much more limited from our analytics package.

Finally, finding killer developers to do desktop stuff is much harder than finding a Ruby or Python programmer. You're looking for people with specific expertise with somewhat strange problems that your average web programmer just isn't suited to handle such as memory leaks (I say this as someone who can hack in Ruby but I fail miserably at any desktop programming).
well every time I scrolled, the footer went down so until I got it all loaded I could see like signup/login for a few seconds, then the autoscroll pushes it down... so once all the posts were loaded, I could click your blog links etc
No placebo effect; on my N1, in sometimes gets to the point where opening application, scrolling, and so on, lag significantly. Even apps that are part of the OS slow down. After a task kill everything comes back to life and stays that way for quite a while. The before and after speed difference is very noticeable.
"If the amount owed is more than $100, make it red in the table"

Well, my usual advice on this goes back to the first time I encountered someone pushing a similar situation. In that case he was showing government safety ratings for cars, and if the rating was above a certain level wanted to show a special graphic because that got it some special certification.

Rather than try to force that logic into a template, I suggested giving the relevant model a "meets_certification_standard()" method, since that's the sort of thing you'd probably want to reuse for more than just presentation. And in your case I'd bet a similar approach would be the best solution.