skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt that anything is really final in google's hands. just look at how fast android is changing and evolving. Google will do what it needs to do to reach their goals, even if it means that they need to break backward compatibility. This is a company with so much resources it can probably design its own reference hardware implementation of vp8 at whatever stage of its evolution, regardless of backwards compatibility - and also persuade chip makers like TI and Qualcolm to include it in their product line at a moment's notice ie within 4 months or so. In this respect, I think the "finality" is overrated - the reviewer / x264 developer is thinking too small.
You must sync a new iPad (on a computer with iTunes) before first use. I don't know if that still applies for the iPhone (though it probably does, for activation). The iPod is worthless if you don't have a computer, for how would you get music on there otherwise?
Nope, but all of these people do: http://railsplugins.org/plugins/161-paperclip

Railsplugins.org has been an invaluable resource for me to figure out what's happening with plugin and gem compatibility.

Now if they just added a JSON layer so I could automate the process of checking my projects' gems...
You appear to have misinterpreted my sentence as some sort of insult. There's nothing wrong with being "all over the place"! No two minutes of soccer are exactly alike, but that is scarcely a bad thing!
Yes.

(though "win" is a relative term - "further their aims" is more realistic)
I guess sooner or later the random mutations may make these string "corrupted".
Over 90% of Etsy users are women. Their market isn't underserved by just eBay–but rather the entire web.

My wife loves Etsy. She's tech-savvy, loves to craft, loves fashion, and loves to shop.

My guess is they overcame the chicken/egg problem because a lot of their sellers are also buyers–which allowed rapid initial growth. Mix in some good PR, people complaining on Ebay forums, VC connections, and there you go.
As I hinted at in another post, I think the campaign is trolling using a lame excuse.

The free speech / censorship argument really doesn't hold water for the South Park episode. Comedy Central/Viacom is a corporation. They can choose to show on their air time whatever they want.

If you get killed because you drew Mohammed, then,

1) you totally had it coming

2) you were a victim of a criminal offense (poor you, you're dead now)

3) but, SURPRISE, your free speech was not violated! (remember, the goverment is the only one who can violate your free speech rights)
> Chris Munns, Etsy Sys-Ops Team.

Wow, where'd you hear that? :)
That's pretty lame.

Fortunately who needs to carry porn these days?
My 2c on Etsy. My mother is a freelance artist by trade and I witnssed a radical change in her web savvy and understanding in her first 6 months on Etsy. The reason was that she was participating in the Etsy community forums which provide a lot of technical direction. Generating facebook leads, optimal posting strategies, how to make white backgrounds on photos of inventory, etc. In short, they have a passionate self-training community that increases seller efficiency rather than just punishing the inefficient.

One odd side effect of this passion and sense of community is that sellers see selling on Etsy as a hobby rather than a profession, and their effective compensation reflects this.
How We Built iTeleport into a Profitable Business on the App Store
An Open-Source Scanning Tunneling Microscope
It is a toy for you. It's also a toy for me. But, it's a easy way to check email and the web for my wife, a way to learn letters and numbers for my 3 year old, and a video player for long car trips for my son.

To me, that's the most incredible thing about the iPad and perhaps a factor in its success: the incredible versatility and extensibility you can get from a small flat screen with one button.
> Ebola, HIV, the flu de jour all quite terrifying, all 100% natural.

If you can't imagine anything more terrifying than those, it is a failure of imagination. See Jared Diamond's point about how when humans and large animals coevolved gradually in Africa, the animals could gradually adapt, whereas when fully evolved homo sapiens were introduced in the rest of the world 40,000 years ago, almost all the megafauna were killed off almost immediately.

> They will keep evolving and trying to kill you as fast and as hard as they can,

Thankfully, this is wrong. Diseases that kill you quickly are at a severe disadvantage.
Selling mp3s may not be the point. This may just be a really great feature that helps sell phones. Certainly, iTunes integration is a major selling point for iPhones.
And then there's @zachklein, their chief product officer:

"Google TV, yawn. The most interesting bit from their presentation today was the hint of a cloud-based music service."
This just may be the start of the DIY nanofabrication movement...
Did you ever start "Spandex"? LOL
That's a good idea; thanks!
iPhone OS 4.0 addresses some of the email limitations (unified inbox), 3.x had tethering (apparently, it's coming to AT&T with 4.0), 4.0 has a form of battery-saving multitasking, etc. It's a horse race and there's going to be endless one-upsmanship back and forth.

What Froyo has that's great is over-the-air download & built-in intents-over-the-air (e.g., send a URL or a map to your phone, something I've longed for on the iPhone since forever; I guess someone should make an app for that plus a browser extension).

It'll be interesting to see if Apple can shift quickly enough in the two weeks before WWDC to address some of the remaining advantages that Android has over iPhone OS. I suspect not. They're known for establishing a course and pretty much following it inexorably.
I have one here on my desk

That may be the issue. Put it on your nightstand or an end-table by a frequently-used chair or couch. Or your kitchen counter when you're cooking. Or at the kitchen table when you're having breakfast.
I'm not even going to read the article and just tell you all that an iPad is like 1/3 - 1/4 the price of a Mac, so in that alone we should conclude that it'll sell more.

Not only that, there isn't really a competitor to the iPad, whereas I can go out and buy 2-3 laptops for the price of a Mac.

Finally, for most situations, I can imagine the following happening:

Customer: Yes, I'm looking for a computer.
Apple Store Guy: Okay great! What will you need it for?
Customer: Um, checking my Facebook and Twitter, doing some email, and playing some games?
Apple Store Guy: Okay, well you can get our entry-level touch-screen toy of the future, known as the iPad, for $499. Or, you can get a Mac for anywhere between $1500 and $3000.
Customer: OMFG drool iPad please!

The customer just saved hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, and now has a fun way to check email.

Case closed.
Looking for radical patent reform - look again (Patent Reform Act of 2010)
The Sex Party is actually pretty sensible and, under our voting system, worth a vote. Unlike the US system (as an example - not sure where you're from) we can vote for minor parties and then preference our preferred major (Liberal or Labor) party.

Australia is not overly religious, generally speaking, but both major party leaders are reasonably prudish, Abbott (Liberal, in opposition) very openly so. Many other politicians don't really show any outwardly obvious signs of being religious.

The lobbyists and so on must be more powerful than we realise because this "censor the internet" and "search for porn" pressure is coming from no one I know and comments online seem to mostly favour the "This is ridiculous" line of thinking.

Very sad to see what is a decent country take these backward turns for the worse.
I'm getting a little tired of this "open" vs. "closed" debate.

Someone should ask Richard Stallman what he thinks about writing C# on Windows. There's only one platform on which the millions of lines of C# using Window's CLR are going to run well. Truly open means your software can run anyway, with a bit of effort. Mac software doesn't port well to Windows, native Windows software doesn't port well to Linux. Mac and Windows are walled gardens, they're just bigger gardens.
The same thing can be said about HTML4. If the website was designed for mouse-hover and not rewritten... guess what?

The bottom line is that the end user should be able to choose. Arguing against that is just silly. Shouldn't Apple block HTML5 since it will waste more CPU than normal sites? Other than the occasional restaurant website, what are you missing?
Good point, but careful not to exaggerate: 13" MBPs and 21" iMacs start at $1200, and Mac Minis can be had for $600 if you already have a monitor or a large-format TV.
Is there a man-made process that can restore oxygen from carbon dioxide more effectively than photosynthesis? It also has to be reasonably cheap though ...
Not quite; Google makes the software but the boxes will be sold by Sony, Logitech, etc.
Sounds like a fun dev team to work on when they name the staging area princess.
What strong community communication tools are you referring to?

As far as I can see, actually cultivating community has been a big shortcoming for Etsy. The 'teams' section of the site is very underdeveloped (it's been the same for years and isn't tied into the rest of the site very well). The forums are frequented by the a small group of focused people, mainly all sellers, and the tone on there has been very negative for years. The in-house messaging system ('conversations') is extremely lacking, with no serious organization tools for your messages. The shop/item favoriting system doesn't function as a social networking 'friends' system, it's geared only towards shopping.

Etsy sellers tend to network through their own blogs (mainly on blogger), independent craft blogs, and use Twitter for communication.
Hackers and Founders & Meetups in Hacker Dojo are great places for physical meetups in the bay area.

We also launched a product called HelpaStartupOut.com where startups and founders can post feedback, post educational articles, jobs etc. It's a simplified classified service for startups.

@jaytee_clone check it out and would love to hear feedback, the project is still very new chris [at] thestartupdigest.com
Seven Entrepreneurs Who Bootstrapped Their Way To Success
I've heard they're targeting RailsConf - but it's really anyone's guess. The frequency of commits doesn't seem to be decreasing.
What does the average Joe do with their computer?

Email, Web surfing, Music, Videos, Casual gaming

Seems like the iPad is a good fit for this simple usage pattern (and much cheaper than a laptop or desktop). I imagine that writing code / hacking around is pretty far low on their list of priorities.
DOW -= 376
It is possible to make improvements without changing the spec.
Except here you could say "both are correct" or "neither are correct", whereas in the original question those also cause a paradox
ElBaradei Follows the Steps of Obama & AlQaeda’s Al-Zawahri With Online Debate 
Nobel Peace Prize Winner ElBaradei and Former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency is taking another step in social media to engage more Egyptians in his bid to over take the presidential seat form the current Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. http://ask.elbarad3i.com/ a domain which redirects to Google Moderator site in Arabic...
Selective (private/charter/magnet) high schools. Otherwise, yeah.
Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived
Free Idea: Calcul.at/or (Giving Away My App/Startup Ideas)
I just started posting my ideas... feedback is always appreciated. Hopefully this community of hackers will find inspiration in something I post and make it happen.

(I'm a YC funded startup founder with a ton of ideas and little time for side projects... so rather than file ideas way in notebooks... I'm posting them online and giving them away. Some are small app ideas, some full on "startup" ideas and some fall somewhere else in the creative landscape. No need to steal these ideas, I'm giving you permission to take them. Good luck!)
It seems social media will help change the political seen in the Arab world?
I've wondered about this as well. Consider the offline world...if I wanted to open a fast food burger chain, how different could it possibly be from McDonald's, Burger King, et al? Maybe I improve service, food quality, or speed, but the basics are all the same.

Online, if you want to create a new auction site, search engine, or video sharing site, it will likely look like Ebay, Google, or YouTube. Is it just the code and business processes that are protected?
I've enjoyed reading your posts over the years, thanks for them.

You're correct that a message queue isn't necessarily a job queue, I was referring to job queues.
But the next steps looks more like software on a computer: You'll have to fix all those compilation-errors on first run, then look out for bugs in the software. Finally, when you ship the software, people use it and report other bugs. And since you can't update running processes at the current moment, you need to terminate and replace it.
Very well put
Which phones / providers is this possible with? And also, how close to the metal can you get? Baseband?
You're welcome, that's what those Ask HN posts are for right :)
Hard to imagine anybody treating developers worse than Apple :-)

I only catch glimpses of the MS world when I have to use common libraries originally developed by our Windows experts, whose design decisions often leave me puzzled. I am curious about what you think about the idea, that OSS culture incentivized creating architectures conforming to fashion trends, while MS culture incentivized to finish feature X until Y - no matter what it takes (just do it Scotty).

e.g. in the OSS world beginning of 2000 J2EE spawned heavily over-engineered solutions, which were displaced by the convention over configuration trend exploding (mostly due to Rails) around 2006. And now the TDD/BDD crowd are fighting it out with the Architecture & Patterns gang with the DDD and DSL tribes assimilating the surviving concepts...

A member of a currently hip fashion trend will have a better staying power in a nasty flamewar caused by a random design decision about the color of a bike shed in an OSS project than a lone warrior. So you start having design styles competing for followers.

Meanwhile in the MS world (wild guess following) heavily funded 'central planning solutions' (from frameworks to design styles taught for certification purposes) offered by MS stymied competition of alternative approaches. A focus on - if I understood your correctly - usually very risk adverse business needs, while keeping the actual code of produced solutions hidden from outsiders additionally put developers under pressure to avoid experiments.

Would it be reasonable to say that we have an evolutionary system of small actors competing for developers interests (OSS) fueled by <insert book about OSS phenomenon> vs. a central planning approach of a major corporation backed by a huge war chest?
Are you sure? The general consensus among sellers is that the search tools are lacking. They are great at finding fairly random collections of items, and some of the tools are fun toys, but it's not the best if you're actually looking for something specific. About half of the sections on the page are fairly useless for serious shopping.

The number of items on Etsy has increased by 100 times in the past few years, but the lens through which you can see the items has stayed the same size - search pages of 20-30 items. Few people are going to page through more than 20 pages of results.

Basic search has improved significantly since Chad Dickerson came on board, but I think even the tech staff acknowledges that there's a long way to go.

One major problem is the tagging system, and the lack of true categories. It used to be that your first tag functioned as the 'top level category', but they didn't make this clear in the listing creation step. You could (can?) also choose contradictory tags/categories with no problems. The top level categories are rather disparate conceptually, and aren't particularly well chosen (i.e., 'Quilts', with 24k items, has it's own top level entry, same as 'Jewelry' with 1.4 million, and art, with 500k). Also, the tags and titles are completely in the hands of sellers, some of whom mis-label items inadvertently or intentionally. It's a bit of a tricky deal.
Well ... what was it that they did totally scrap two years into the project, restarting with a Windows Server code base?

WinFS was part of the the general Longhorn set of projects, but I didn't get the impression it was inextricably linked to the Longhorn next version of Windows project.
Your experience is extremely abnormal. Which is fine, it's your experience. But you can't use that to reason about others'.
I think he was using the term internet loosely.
What is your source?
China’s largest tech conference will be livestreaming on TechCrunch
Unless you have root on your phone (you don't on most phones unless you exploit a security hole) then you can't access files owned by applications.
They also completely bypass the chicken/egg problem. The site can work with a small number of sellers. If I'm an artist I can set up a store on etsy and use it as my professional website. I then give out the etsy link to people I meet in the "real world" to buy my work online.
Google does exercise control over many Android phones (http://mobilespoon.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-google-exper...), so it wouldn't be a stretch to mandate OS upgrades.
We'll see whether he sticks with Android over the next few months or switches back. Even though he has some good reasons for switching, I think it really comes down to the fact that he got two free phones and might as well give them a try.

Also, as an investor, Brad can better do his job if he's familiar with both platforms. He doesn't really get at that in the post, but it seems to me that it should be an important concern for him.
The new act conspicuously avoids revisiting the vague definitions of what qualifies for patent protection. This is rather surprising, considering the ongoing contention over patents for semi- or intangible things (eg software, business methods).

Do you have idea why that is?
Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized for Asperger’s
The NDK is only needed for including native ARM code in Android packages (APK files).

The Android kernel and system libraries have always been native code. This includes Dalvik itself, and WebKit and V8 (or JavaScriptCore), and many other libraries like SQLite, Speex, BlueZ, BSDiff, and zlib. They are installed directly on the system partition, not in APK files, and this has been true since before the NDK existed.

The "Browser" app is an activity written in Java, but it uses the Android WebView API to embed WebKit, which is written in C++. The Java code handles the browser "chrome" - menus, toolbars, everything except the page content. (This is similar to Firefox which uses the C++ Gecko engine with JavaScript/XUL chrome.)
I suppose "Subversion (svn) is GReat" would be a good way to memorize that weird name.

Edit: HN title says SVNGR, actual company name is SCVNGR
Scala vs. F#: a comparison of functional programming features
Well, I'm certain that the code is protected, but I think "look and feel" is a slippery thing. Regardless, even if it's completely legal to copy the entire look, I still want to be as ethical as I can.
I think this is big for online video advertising. The price (I believe) is substantially less than regular TV now. But put in online video advertising being on a TV in front of the average user and you gain a ton of potential dollars. I'd actually be surprised if the only thing that Google TV doesn't ask from you is your zip code for giving localized ads.
Zynga Enters Asia With Acquisition Of Gaming Startup XPD Media ...
For me, the mini performs other tasks.

It's always on, so it's a great home storage server (I have a Drobo w/ 4.5TB of storage attached via FireWire 800).

It downloads torrents & podcasts nicely.

Also, the shared library support coming in Plex/Nine looks killer. I'm looking forward to running Plex on my MacBook without having to maintain a separate metadata library.
Two bits:

1) The pragmatics of the platform means that iPhone == AT&T. You have to get both, so it's fair to box them together.

2) Mobile flash runs great on my Nokia N900. Even streaming full-screen video.
Thanks for that. I was curious how they are getting depth information with only a single camera; it looks like they are using knowledge of the size of the users hand to infer depth.
I see zero practical difference between knowingly causing offense and intentionally causing offense. Either way: the vast, overwhelming majority of the people you're offending agree with and uphold our social contract. But at least you feel better now.
Ask HN: Do you develop Ipad Apps?
Hi guys,

I'm the owner of the www.twitter.com/ipad account and I would like to use it as a channel so developers that create news ipad apps can reach potential users.

If you are interested please contact me. Email is in the profile.

I haven't done much with the account (it was my personal account since 2008) so there are not so many followers. Plan on shaking it a bit to see how this goes.
relevant - Soulver http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/
Your experience is extremely abnormal.

How do you know this? Can you point me at some hard data?
Nice straw man. It's also legal for the KKK to march on Skokie. And, hey: they were crusading for free speech too!

Nobody's talking about legality.
Not for people over a certain age.. I'm never getting those nights and mornings back. :) It's really just retina-searing, sorry.

Other color options would be most welcome.
I meant "really creative browse". :)
That's a really excellent point. Displaying other contact indicators (surface deformation?) when virtual objects come into contact with other (real or virtual) objects would probably also be beneficial.
You might say getcrafty.com was a golden egg that Etsy was smart enough to pick up and run with. In 2004 getcrafty was already drawing _many thousands_ of passionate (mainly female) crafters from all over the world, the smartest of whom were already experimenting with online sales.

From a 2007 NYTimes story:

"Getcrafty was filled with project ideas and how-tos as well as discussion forums, which played a crucial role in building the craft-as-community idea that Etsy would later tap into. “Knitting is part of the same do-it-yourself ethos that spawned zines and mixtapes,” Debbie Stoller, editor of Bust, a pop-culture-meets-feminism magazine, declared. Stoller wrote a series of “Stitch N Bitch” books, which became part of a trend toward the formation of social-crafting groups across the country. More Web gathering points emerged, like Craftster and SuperNaturale. Offline, a communal make-stuff group called Church of Craft formed chapters in several cities.

Crafting had attained a subculture status by 2004, when Railla hired a New York University student named Robert Kalin and some friends to redesign Getcrafty. Kalin had been studying philosophy and classics, but, he told me, he was pessimistic about the job-market value of his degree and was looking for something more entrepreneurial. While he had a bit of woodworking experience, he and his friend Chris Maguire were basically techie types; they hadn’t known much about the handcrafting movement that was bringing so many young women to Getcrafty. “We were the only guys around,” Kalin recalls.

Soon he had an idea for a different kind of site that this burgeoning craft community might find useful: an online marketplace. By that time, plenty of crafters were not simply doing it themselves — they were selling what they had done. There’s nothing surprising about people who enjoy doing something (playing guitar, writing poetry, knitting a bikini) wondering if maybe there isn’t a way to make a living at it. But the scene that Kalin stumbled upon turned out to be brimming with entrepreneurial spirit."