skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly I've seen lots of re-invention of the wheel because battle-tested, proven, reliable component X that was available for FREE on-line weren't licensed under terms that were acceptable to a particular organisation. I think the benefits of a permissive open-source policy aren't just in the sense of satisfaction it can bring to the developers, but in real measurable dollar terms to the cost of projects.
Short Version: There's blood in the water. People are realizing Windows could fail and that in itself is leading Windows down the road to failure because other companies are now starting to vie for Microsoft's core business where as they wouldn't have dared before(Example: HP buying WebOS)
Then send them yams and pomegranates. ;)

(For those unaware, they both contain progesterone; wild yams were the first plant to be used in synthesis of birth control pills.)
Yup, it will take under a minute. Should do an end-to-end screencast.
This guy should know better being an iPhone developer.

> but it also has the property that method calls in Objective-C are very slow and the more code that you write in Objective-C instead of in C/C++ the slower your codebase becomes.

Obj-C is not "very slow". While it's very dynamic most code is fairly static. You setup classes with methods, instantiate objects of those classes, and send them messages. Methods are cached after the first lookup and unless you are doing very dynamic things the subsequent messages find the corresponding method rather quickly. This is old stuff and you'll find it in Smalltalk, Self, and since Rubinius is based on the blue book I bet even Ruby. It's called inline caching[1]. If you need performance in a tight loop or something you drop into C, and this is encouraged. If your Obj-C code is too slow then you optimize it. In most cases this is entirely unnecessary or has been done for you at a lower level.

Without some numbers you can't expect anyone to take these claims seriously. Obj-C has been around for 20+ years. That's plenty of time for optimization and even micro-optimization, by some of the best in the industry.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_caching

It's nice to see Dalvik perform so well, just spare us the BS speculation about performance.

(I'm also not convinced that Android development is "just Java" considering how vastly different it is from more traditional Java development, but I'll leave that one alone for now.)
The site times out for me.
give me some context; how many meters per a person are we at currently? / Then give me some focus; what will it be at in my life span... 50 years?
I was at TC Disrupt this week. A few observations:

1. The Soluto guys and UJam (runners-up) had the most polished, finished products.

2. The Soluto guys were completely at ease, had a good sense of humor, and had answers for every question asked of them. They also had funny, winning accents.

3. The Soluto guys were addressing a very clear pain point and had very strong branding, including the catch-phrases and slogans that accompanied their product "Anti-frustration software" and "Every family has a CTO. We're building this for them!"

4. There seemed to be a strong Israeli contingent at the event that were sold-out for Soluto. They were the only startup all week that always had a cheering section anytime they were mentioned. To the casual observer who doesn't know it's the Israeli contingent cheering, this can look like popular support and start to sway people on the fence. By the end of the conference, they were pretty much the only startup anyone would mention if you asked who they thought was going to win (YMMV).

5. Also, as one HNer pointed out shortly before the winners were announced, Soluto's presentation was the only one to inspire defensive questions from all the judges. Each one of them asked questions about how their business would impact projects and areas they were working in themselves.
Definitely worth watching the entire series, but for those looking to save time: the first video covers the main point and the subsequent videos in the series just reinforce its significance.
Google creates a Charts Tools API
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Indeed, examples would be nice!! What's the domain ? Since you already have it you don't need to be shy about it.

If you do an 'Ask HN' it helps if you provide enough information to actually answer the question ;)
I'm curious what the average price of gall bladder surgery is now. In it his students project 25K by 2000, which we are obviously quite a way past. If you're uninsured, this amount sounds about right likely these days.

Great video. I'm on part 2 and I'll finish the rest in the morning.
It's not as easy as giving them contraceptives. Culture and pragmatism both frequently encourage large families.

For example, farming families have major incentives to have large families so that the kids can help with the farming tasks. So you'll need a China-like child limit or some other way to incentivize them to actually use the contraception you provide.
It's my name reggi.com
The whole Ken Thompson thread is fascinating.

http://www.google.com/moderator/#15/e=7f3&t=7f3.44
Same for me. And, though it did already index the page as well as this HN thread (which I found somewhat impressive), Google does not offer a cached version yet.
My understanding is that most "public" data is not copyrightable, so scraping it is fine. For instance, scientific data is public, but access to databases can be charged for. What Macy's phone number is is public information, but Yellow Pages can charge for access to it. In these cases, scraping is fine unless they have a 'Terms of service' that states otherwise. Sites often have terms of service that you wouldn't notice unless you cared to write a scraper for them. Google local for instance has a terms of service that makes it clear it's not for scraping.

I have scraped a number of sites to 'repurpose' in other ways. If you're betting the farm on it, talk to a copyright lawyer. If there are lots of sites with the same data, I don't think anyone will notice or care.
This post does a great job of highlighting how clean tech is more than just a new industry buzzword. There are real, interesting problems that software developers can help to solve in this space. Hopefully, more people will make the jump.
Binary search revisited
Cool, ok in that case I'd go for the blog, it immediately ties your blog content to your person and that's more or less a natural match.

I can't easily figure out an association where 'reggi' can be made in to a stand-alone item either. On top of that a blog can be moved to a section of a product site later, so you don't actually lose much if you decide to change tack later on.

To prepare for that you could do:

http://reggi.com/blog/

And redirect the homepage there for the time being. If you change your mind later on all you do is drop the redirect and provide a link to /blog/ .

Hope that helps!
... possibly even more of a transformation than
paper-based magazine publishers are attempting as
they rejig their content models towards the iPad.
Words like "para-narrative," "nontextual," and
"extra-narrative" certainly suggest this.

I hope it's a little more thought-out and realized than the last hypertext revolution.

Rather than try to tell everyone how cool and game-changing this is supposed to be, they should just do what they're going to do and let people find out (or not) for themselves.
Impressive...the first time it's had problems in a while. Fixed, thanks for the heads-up.
If it's at all feasible, it will happen first in the retail Apple stores themselves. If not even Apple bother to showcase their own products in this setting, you can safely guess it's unworkable.
Yeah. Syntax highlighting plugins take effort to write for any highlighting library, so usually a major decision factor is the plugins already available.
Same happened to me, HN can give you a lot more traffic than you expect sometimes.

Thanks, will read the article now.
If it's going to be under a layer of glass anyway, there's little point in using an iPad. Just put a digitizer on top of the glass and a regular LCD screen underneath, hooked as IO devices to a small-form-factor PC hidden somewhere.
Meta thanks for submitting the full page / print view link!
Just for fun, I made a quick calc for you: http://tinyurl.com/3xl32bx

In 50 years at 1.3% growth we'll basically double our population, and go from about 8000 m^2 per person to 4000 m^2 per person. After 780 years, the growth starts adding up, you can play with the numbers.
I would think so to, but there has to be a good way around this. My guess is that you bring the device out to place the order, so it never leaves your sight. I'd also expect it to be inn high end restaurants, so theft seems less likely than say pizza palace.
The HealthCare Blue Book tells an interesting story:

* $16,435 for traditional gall bladder removal, somewhat below the estimate http://healthcarebluebook.com/page_Results.aspx?id=75&da...

* $6,934 for the modern minimally invasive equivalent, far below the estimate http://healthcarebluebook.com/page_Results.aspx?id=74&da...

More evidence that projecting trends without considering technical progress is bound to result the sort of overly pessimistic results that Malthus made famous.

For example, Dr. Bartlett's two-column view on population assumes that people will need some certain number of square feet of land. But why wouldn't we build up, ala NYC? Or settle the ocean (http://seasteading.org/)? Or colonize the stars? Or perhaps even transfer our consciousness to some more efficient representation?

Yes, exponential growth presents problems, but exponential progress in technology has the power to solve them. That's where we (and others like us) come in.
TIOBE is crap. See Tim Bunce's analysis of TIOBE (http://blog.timbunce.org/2008/04/12/tiobe-or-not-tiobe-lies-...) for details.

Why do people keep quoting TIOBE like it means something?
I agree with the figures for the most part, the scary bit in their proposed 'gifts' is the 'free phone support', they have 700 people in that bin and I really wonder how they expect other people to pay for phone support in the first place.

Their product shouldn't need any phone support.

Manning a phone for 3 months with just a single person would already set them back another 6 grand, and will probably lead to a pretty overworked person. Since their donations were accepted from all over the globe the general public may expect that phone to be manned 24 hours per day.

I think you over estimated the cost of the stickers by a bit, but that's fine, it will probably be offset by underestimating something else.

Taxes have already been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, probably this will fall under 'gift tax', which is owed by the giver not the recipient so diaspora may luck out there.
Yeah, bolting down won't work. Restaurants only service x tables at a time depending on time of day. They also only have y percentage using them at any point for the ordering process.
I think you've picked a poor analogy with regards to email. It's actually the perfect analogy for a distributed social network. With email you can host your own, use your companies, use a free provider (hotmail, gmail, etc) or use your ISP.

It's not possible for one company/person to get across all your email because you can have it somewhere else. It's not possible to store Facebook info outside of facebook.

I imageine a distributed social network being a woven fabric where some people host their own, some use their companies (think bands using their labels server), a lot of people use free ad-based services (think hotmail or yahoo diaspora). However, no one company would ever have all your data, and couldn't hold it to ransom, assuming some type of export facility is built into the design. For I can import all my emails into a different server, but I can't export all my facebook data. Once switching costs are reduced to negligible, then competition for features, usability and, yes, privacy, wins out. Same way as plenty of people decamped hotmail and yahoo for a shiny new gmail account when they had better featurs and an import facility.
Those submissions really need to take into account the economic credentials of Reagan Republicans. Which would mean having MONKEY DAY in March, not December, to provide a necessary retail boost.
The population will increase by a factor of exp(.013780) = 25336.5

So we should be at roughly 25,336 meters / person currently. (But remember that plenty of that is more-or-less unlivable--Siberia and the like.)

In 50 years, the population will have increased by a factor of exp(.013 50) = 1.91554, so in the next 50 years population will roughly double, so that number will go down to about 13k meters/person.
I'm not usually a fan of long talking-head videos but this was absolutely worthwhile. What's most chilling is the story of the bottle and the bacteria, and the realization that somehow finding a whole new planet would only tide us over for a couple more generations, after which we'd need two more....
I disagree--we should instead continue what appears to be the current trend, namely, putting 4chan in charge of the national political discourse. This seems likely to substantially increase the amount of honesty, intelligence, and common sense involved in the whole process.

This message paid for by Friends of Longcat.
Looks to me like this app is a relatively simple scheduling app that in no way comes even close to the features and functionality of a full LMS such as Blackboard or Desire2Learn (or the other dozens-odd major players)

Not even close.

It will not kill Blackboard.
Wow, instacalc is pretty awesome.
I know he spent serious time on it. I don't know how many hours per day. But it is worth noting that he started with a good memory, had learned several languages before then and has studied mnemonic techniques. I doubt I could sustain a rate anything like his.

He was learning Japanese while living in Canada, so I'm pretty sure that he doesn't need an immersive context for that rate. However I doubt he could pick up on the finer nuances without being in an immersive context.
Upvoted. People interested in this discussion should also read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, which discusses the surprising vast amount of research on various aspects of happiness, and that research draws on a fairly diverse array of methods (self-reports, random beepers, inferences based on statistics, etc.).

Gilbert puts the dollar amount closer to $40K, rather than $60K, and points out the Mencken quote in action: most people think they need to earn about 20% more than they do, almost regardless of how much they earn. But people seem more satisfied by work they find meaningful, a good sex life, and social connections (not necessarily in that order).

I mentioned Stumbling on Happiness in my list of influential / important books to me: http://jseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-that-... , though perhaps I should've said more about it.
I always thought it would be difficult to have an intimate relationship with someone you weren't already fluent in the same language with. How do you even arrange that?
The whole site has been trolled to hell now. There was one "idea" that was something like "This is more fun that 4chan".

It's also failing pretty often. I'm sure the GOP will calim that is a sign of success: "x million visitors in the first 12 hours"

It's sad that sometimes I can't work out if it is trolling or serious. Eg: http://www.americaspeakingout.com/questions/4441/first-ensur...
Inline Caching is awesome, and Apple's ObjC runtime has some very cool stuff.

Perhaps I misunderstand what inline caching is doing, but how would that end up being faster than direct invocation? The java compiler can remove all indirection entirely, without violating any language semantics. As much as specifying all those types is tedious, it does give the compiler the capacity to do that.
Self Repairing Software
For the startup I founded, I prefer Tech Support Lead. It's more reflective of the day-to day. :)
Some people argued that there is Sun's enterprise support for Solaris and blah-blah-blah. =) Where is the [Open]Solaris now? (Do not even try to tell that it is alive - no activity, no community support, no device driver updates or even patches - the very dead. =)

two hints: There is the CentOS, which have a much cheaper support (free updates + community support). =)

Fedora 12 (even 13) is pretty stable and actively supported system. They got less hype than Ubuntu (they don't have so
much money for promotion and advertisement) but it is not just a testing branch of RHEL (look at RHEL6 beta - it is Fedora 12), it is probably the best distro available. (Think about it to become a RHEL with maturation - this is the main advantage over ubuntu which will become only yet another ubuntu. =)
three possible ways to address your concern:

1. You're paying for the infrastructure that the support volunteers need to do their job.

2. You receive value for it. If the answers help save you time and money, do you care what motivates the people providing them?

3. You and the volunteers are both supporting a broader effort.

There are plenty of organizations that rely on volunteers that also charge user fees to support their mission; any museum with a docents program, park guides, ushers at the symphony, schools that rely on PTA volunteers to cover unfunded positions. It's not exactly radical.
Using data from the 2000 US Census, Manhattan, the United States' most dense city, had 25,836 people per square km or 0.025836 people per square meter.
A note on the rest of the series: He spends the remaining time outlining some impending Malthusian catastrophe / peak oil scenario.
For a counterpoint, check out anything by Julian Simon.
At my startup, we give ourselves fancy titles, but we still wake up every morning and do the grunt work (who else is going to?). In fact, we rarely even notice that we have fancy titles.
> so it never leaves your sight.

Let me guess, you've never waited tables :) ?

Keeping an eye on a $500 gizmo that's laying around untethered and that just wants to run out that door is a lot harder than you think. Just take a look at trade shows where there is on-site security and all kinds of paranoia and still the weirdest stuff gets stolen. The only relatively safe place in a restaurant is behind the bar, anything that gets carried in to the store is at risk.

And you can't exactly do a pat-down of your clientèle even if something is missing, a good number of them is not going to come back after being insulted like that. Lose-lose.

Just having those things on the premises is going to attract people that will try to lift one.

And if you 'nail them down' you can expect them to break because people will try to pry them loose.

Restaurants lose all kinds of cheap stuff, plates, cutlery, even the flower pots and the props occasionally disappear.

And then there is this problem:

http://www.mercsystems.com/article_employee-theft-restaurant...

$500 items attract a crowd of people that will want to take them home.
"We" won't need to give "them" food aid forever, population growth levels off as wealth increases. Possibly the best thing that could be done for Africa is to end farm subsidies and argicultural tarrifs in the developed world.

Here is a great link to the farm subsidies recieved in Manhattan, it's odd how one never notices the wealth of family farms surrounding central park.
http://wildgreenyonder.wordpress.com/2007/10/
I was about to quit posterous for my technical blogs because of the bad code posting support, and then they come out with this. It's like they read my mind, and feedback.
btw, anyone tried to use clang as a system compiler for android - it probably would give another 10-15%?
I didn't use Posterous because it lacked markdown support. Funny though, that a little over a year ago, "Gary Tan" (company rep) said the company wanted to implement this "soon".

http://getsatisfaction.com/posterous/topics/markdown_or_anot...

Better late than never, eh?
>I very much doubt he's joking. It's actually subtly insulting that you think he is.

I also doubt that he's joking, but it is not insulting to assume so. The suggestion that "the world should all switch to English as the default standard language" is rather naive and, to many people, downright offensive. Assuming that the suggestion is a joke is actually being generous.
For a 2 man company, "co-founder" is perfectly appropriate for email signatures to most recipients.
For most restaurants in the US they are just too expensive compared to the alternative of having a low paid employee walk 15-30ft to a cash register. There's also a problem of paper receipts which many customers still demand. I have seen mobile POS devices with receipt printers. (ballpark $2-$3k as of a few years ago. Basically a Windows Mobile PDA attached to a little Epson receipt printer)

Total guess: Do waiters and service industry workers in Europe get paid a respectable wage? If you're paying someone a living wage saving the time spent going back and forth to the cash register is probably valuable enough to justify the cost of a mobile POS. Maybe the same deal in Japan?
There is no generosity in imputing your own beliefs onto other people's reasoned statements.
I think the iPod Touch is too small to be effective as an order taking tool. Maybe something closer to a Nook size. After all, if you're a server and you need to take down kitchen instructions or find a drink fast, a slightly larger device is exponentially more useful. But in terms of weight and price point I think the iPod Touch is perfect.
Google trends issues hot media: Eurovision 2010: How to write the winning lyric
Doesn't do anything for Clojure.
Thankfully Slicehost resizes fairly quickly...some more RAM can't hurt.
Dude, if it's 1/10th as mindblowing as plain-text Anathem, I am first in line to buy this thing.

The downside is that even if it is transformative, that only tells us one thing: that Neal Stephenson can do this. It certainly doesn't tell us the average magazine publisher can carry it off.
The closest I can think of is http://edufire.com/

I'm building an open-source online community software package based on Drupal. You could use it to build your own community site like you want. Check it out at eduglu.com
Tuna Salad Recipe
A modest proposal: the Continuous Client
Howto: Unobtrusive JavaScript with Rails 3
for the hundreds time now. That's why i want to see the numbers. I am writing since the first comments now, that the most interesting information would be numbers. But we don't know them...
I think you may be overestimating the benefits of retirement in practice. Many retired people feel directionless and purposeless, and die sooner. By your argument, unemployed people living off the dole ought to be very happy, but it's actually depressing.
Interesting how Apple actually charges you more to fix a cracked screen if you have more memory.