skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see absolutely zero details about the actual configurations of either system. No replicability means it's just another opinion paper.
Isn't it in all ways better to watch the bigger stationary screen while on the couch?
I thought "I admire them in the same way I admire the work ethic of serial killers" was pretty funny. That probably says more about me than the article though ...
Same for the kindle.

At first it's this completely super-cool thing and you wonder how you could live your life without it.

Then it just becomes a piece of stuff that you have to carry around because it does a couple of things better than all the other stuff you already carry around.
What empirical data do you have on that?
That's what bothers me really. It will be a gift; people want it, but are having problems to justify it. I don't really have problem with people buying it, but this trend is a bit dangerous from the global perspective... Apple is good at releasing limited functionality devices, but where's the minimum limit with that? If it's good, people will buy it anyways, because people like "having" stuff - it's hard to say how many specific devices are enough 4? 5? How much limited functionality electronic waste do we have to produce? How much money do we want to spend on N polished devices instead of 1 general device, which will be always cheaper than N in reality.

Edit: Almost forgot - some universities are already testing iPads as "give away to students" devices... Seriously, that's a path to another "Hand in as .doc file", only a thousand times more dangerous.

We've already got game consoles, handheld games, laptops, smart phones, music players, video players, etc. all basically targeted at the same general group of people. I'm waiting for the second wave of generalised devices now - I want only 2 of them: pocket player / communicator / game (apart from games, my N900 does a good job here for now), dockable general laptop.
> thought in certain conditions Java could dispense with the vtable lookup even in interpreted land

Not for calls to virtual methods, especially those call done through an interface ... you can't infer the right method to call at compile time when you don't know the object's real type. And in Java you can also load new classes that implement a certain interface at runtime ... and this also makes optimizations more difficult.

Now of course ... for calls to static functions or for calls on methods marked as "final" Java can and does dispense of the vtable lookup.

Unfortunately in Java methods are implicitly virtual, as you have to explicitly mark them as being final (for performance, although as far as language design for the stuff I do, I like it).

> Please no. C# has, unsurprisingly, evolved into an absolute soup of a language

I meant ... just as high level as Java, but with lower level capabilities here and there (where it matters). I don't think having your custom stack-allocated values or having pointers in "unsafe" portions of code (which really is a lot safer than doing JNI) is that big of a deal, and can help a lot in constrained environments.
Understanding SharePoint 2010 Claims Authentication
HTML5-based Graphic Apps and Sketching Tools
The program also seems to work if, in the loop header, you replace “i <= strlen(z_terminated)” with “z_terminated[j] != 0”.

I don’t understand why I have to put j in the index there, rather than j-1: after the string-ending null is copied, j is incremented, right?
Aha! I was mostly commenting on the wings being useless though (until it slows down)...

Well...not useless, but not really being used to generate any lift.
Such a public is particularly receptive to spin. Such a public is also ill suited to examination and oversight of it's own institutions. Such people can think they've performed such oversight, even though they've been fooled. As such, they are more easily innoculated against the truth with disinformation and propaganda.

A public which is not informed resents the withholding of information. They will seek the truth if they can and resent those who withhold the information.
Nor does http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinWright.html?Personal - though I'm not sure that Colin Wright even wrote that, given I've yet to find a link to the article from the root, and the article doesn't have the author's name ...
Show HN: Create better Habits using StepSet.com
Hi all,

I recently built this web app for myself to help me create better habits sustainably.

Have a look at http://stepset.com and, for example, my personal training at http://stepset.com/habits/a8111d14-4670-11df-92c7-2770d5fce33f

It's very basic but I couldn't find anything as simple and stripped down like it, so I just built it. I had found 43things, but it wouldn't let me do what I needed, and just learned of HabitForge.com which looks decent.

Right now, I havent' reached out beyond a couple of friends who are using it to learn new habits themselves, but I'd love to invite you to try it out.

Anyways, I would love your feedback on:

* Your general impression?

* What you like and don't like about it?

* What kind of Habit would you be interested in learning for yourself?

* Something that jumps at you screaming "aaaaaahh! wtf?"

On a sidenote: As you'll see I started out using Facebook connect, but am currently considering to scrap it and go towards an internal user system.

Thank you for any input and with best wishes,

Alexis
http://www.thinkwiki.org/ is a good resource for figuring out Linux compatibility.

I also recommend Thinkpads. The T and W series are good too.
I use soccer world cup - wm2010 for the next soccer world cup in south africa.

I also use the Mint app (productivity or finance)

my tracks
Students in Colombia live in slums, learn nanotech with atomic force microscopes
Well I did roll my own signed cookies using http://gist.github.com/416030

Just a note, that cookie is used by created by rails and used dokuwiki using a custom authenication class I made. (dokuwiki verifies the signing)
Yeah, I'd read about them sometime in the past, but to see it so visually is jarring.
The more scarce oil gets, the more money oil companies will make selling what's left.
I'd call up Derek Sivers. He was in a similar spot. He gave his away, and if I were you I'd be extremely curious why he did that.
"simply because previously it only allowed developing for Windows Mobile which is, honestly, something nobody really cares about"

It's something nobody cares about now, but back in 2007/2008 (when the last version of VS was released) it was a sensible choice. The iPhone was new and there was no app store yet, there were no android headsets yet, and the palm pre didn't exist. Granted, things have changed enormously since then, and that's yet another knock against Visual Studio's slow release schedule.
There are two parts to this one, weather it's a success as a open source project and secondly as a business.

I think the two parts conflict.
Arizona man is first to take artificial heart home
And I'm sure that there will always be people who will want a computing device they can tweak and program. There will also be tremendous profit to be made selling to people who just want the easy utility.
I think a recruiting campaign centered on that point might actually be effective. I'd like to see some non-profits use it.
There's a difference in magnitude and importance between doing your own landscaping and managing your own $5 million dollars of net worth.
AVIS' advertising philosophy
Demographic? Figure out the cohort!

(Specific subgroup)
Ask HN: Has your startup affects your relationship with your wife or girlfriend?
I'm bootrapping on a long project and this has heavilly affects my relationship, thanks God my partner understand what it's about. But she stills complain sometimes about me, spending too much time behind a computer, never going out and almost alway cancelling or forgetting a lot of things! Have you experienced this? how do you deal with it?
I think O2 does it with their joggler: http://yourfamily.o2.co.uk/o2familyjoggler

They even advertise it as "your new fridge door".
Which if he had would have meant instantly calling him a socialist for interfering with a corporation's business.
Please check the profile, it mentions the AntiSpam measure (adding HackerNews to the subject):
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RiderOfGiraffes
Awesome Customer Service can be Profitable
In my opinion since you don't know what to do I'd do the following.

1) Go on holiday and chill out sit and mull things over. It doesn't have to be over the top or anything

2) Forget all this reading books crap, whats the point they will in most cases be dated advice, better you go talk to someone and get some advice maybe from a few people not just one so called expert wealth manager.

I think for someone your age you should think about
a) preserving your wealth
b) building a portfolio of investments albeit a small one just to start off with (a % you'd be happy to lose in the very worst case scenario)
c) you're a founder so possibly think about starting another company

But in all seriousness, take a holiday, I think you deserve it.

Lastly, well done man
I think the reference to the liberal media was tongue-in-cheek.
Do you notice that the countries with the lowest population growth were severely battered in wars during the last century?
Even if VS is better than Xcode (and I have no problem believing that it is), I don't see how that's a win for Apple. First off, Apple isn't in the game of admitting that their products suck, and they certainly wouldn't encourage people to go out and buy PCs.

Secondly, Apple doesn't make that much money off app store sales, they make by far the most money off of the hardware. This includes (though with decreasing relevance) mac hardware sales. This may not discourage all that many mac purchases, but will it really increase iPhone purchases? It isn't like Apple is having a hard time getting apps on the store as it is, they are already dominating in terms of volume. Not to mention, this would be reaching out to a world of developers that Apple has spent the last decade insulting as being incapable of producing quality products, exactly the kind of "crap" the "review" process and 3.3.1 are designed to "prevent".

The only argument in the back of my mind that strikes me as particularly persuasive is that Apple is gearing up way ahead of anyone's predicted schedule to simply stop making macs altogether, at which point they would need a solid alternative development platform.
The Stanford GraphBase, written by Donald Knuth.
You can play the stock market, and you can put money back into investors pockets.

If you want managers to play the stock market, your comments are spot on--but you shouldn't restrict them to buying only shares of their own company. If they are good at predicting when valuations are high and going lower, or the other way round, you should open an investment fund and profit from their expertise.

Most companies aren't in the business of playing the stock market.

If you just want to transfer money from the company to the stock holders, you can either issue dividends or buy back shares at any time there's excess cash. Apart from taxation issues, there's no difference between share buy-backs and dividends in terms of getting money back to the investors.
After reading this, one could ask Jobs the same thing he once asked Sculley: Hey Steve, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling overpriced toys to rich ne'er-do-wells, or do you want to change the world?
Are you ready for the big Internet crunch?
I think the core question is, would you have been more satisfied not doing it and going with the next best option. Hopefully the next best option is something stable, so you can make a useful comparison.
Ask HN: Which is better? co-founder vs first employee
Do you think its better to "find" a co-founder or hire somebody as first employee?

PG states that the idea number is 2 co-founders, but I'm still looking for a co-founder.
I must admit, I don't understand this. What do US presidents, or for what it's worth, US governments, know about how to stop oil spills 5000 feet below the surface of the sea?

What reason is there to assume that BP is not trying the best it can to stop the spill, and to them being the best experts on the subject?

Also, hasn't the government called in a panel of independent experts already?
So the Windows coders who balk at a several hundred dollar 'Apple tax' are going to instead shell out several hundred dollars for a VS2010 license?

Or is the theory that Microsoft would let a feature like this wind up in Express when their own tools to develop for Windows Mobile are only available in vs2010 licenses that cost more than a macbook and app store license combined?

EDIT: Which isn't to say that it won't or couldn't be plausible. But if it does happen, it will be all about enterprises: The sorts of places that wouldn't blink at the cost of a Mac, but would balk at having to train, staff and support a completely different toolchain and environment.
The reason people use facebook is because everyone is there. Get rid of that network effect by kicking off 90% of users, and facebook has just suicided.
The website is really impressive. But is HootSuite a problem for you guys, branding and trademark-wise?
The Java -> Cocoa Binding was so poor because of the dynamic nature of Objective-C. I wonder if C# would fair better?
It's actually very simple. Hard to do but simple. There is no sophisticated insight or knowledge or process you need to know. It's simple but hard.

Suppose you have an idea for some software for travel agents. Before opening an idea or writing a single line of html you go to the phone book and find the number of a travel agent. You call them and say :

"Hi can I speak to the manager please. Hi there, my name is Sam and I have an idea for a computer software tool that might be useful for Travel agents, I'm not selling anything but would you have 15 minutes available for me to talk to you and get your feedback ?"

Do that 20 times. Talk to 10 different people. List any repeated phrases, objections or suggestions. Ask each of them "Do you think this would be useful to other travel agents ?".

Now if you have the guts to do this very simple but difficult thing enough times that you actually talk to 10 different potential users you will know whether there is a market and if there is you will already have real beta testers lined up.

People may want to pick holes in this "what about..." "what if...". Yeah, you can analyse on the internet all you want but the fact remains, if you do this the chances of you building something people will buy goes up dramatically.

And the reason people don't do this is almost always fear.

(note: I was the Sam Howley in the article)
How about giving the OP an opportunity to respond?
The developer did not place any illegal restrictions on the app. Those are all imposed by Apple's store.
Apple needs some positive publicity to help calm the ruckus over 3.3.1 changes

I don't see this as an improvement. It just reinforces that their approvals and rejections are completely arbitrary, based on whatever they feel helps their business model.

But yes, it would definitely help Apple and Microsoft. It's in both their interests to kill Android and set up a duopoly where we get the "choice" of which closed platform to use.
> there's no real downside to letting developers on non-OSX platforms build iPhone apps.

To fully enjoy network effects you need to control the whole stack. This is the problem with this rumor: Jobs may be anything but he's not suicidal.

Allowing iTunes to run on Windows helped increase sales of iPods and music and preventing those who already had PCs running Windows to considering the competition.

Allowing VS2010 to target iPhone/iPod/iPad would increase the number of developers who could develop for the platform, something that I don't think Apple really needs.

If nothing else, Apple could raise the bar on apps a bit. This would only lower it.
Been using this for a while... It's great when you want to see a working example of how to use a specific module/class/function
Problem is, the amount of work it takes to maintain a group of rentals is huge. My old landlord did this instead of investing in the market, and it turned out way better for him in the long run, however he works his ASS off maintaining, finding tenants, evicting, fixing stuff after bad tenants etc etc. Doing it in a college town? It's asking for $3k in expenses every year as a new group of party kids move out/in.

Don't jump into landlording without having experience with contracting and home repair, or at least without a family member that does. A single rental is fine, but managing five? Huge time sink.
the most painful complaint you can make about the modern military's role in information security is their lack of involvement.

On the contrary. Given that the Internet is the creation of DARPA, indeed, was once called "ARPAnet", they're already up to their eyeballs. And to their credit, they've done an excellent job. I don't have citations handy, but I recall reading over the past year about many supposed "cyber attacks", yet for the most part, we all go about our business and surfing without even noticing that anything was going on.

The folks that designed the protocols on which this network runs (everything from ethernet through TCP/IP through DNS) did a phenomenal job. The network just may be the most robust thing ever engineered by man.

So perhaps they've already done their job. The front-loaded engineering gave us something that can withstand huge amounts of abuse, and so doesn't require an army (literally) to babysit it.
I don't think HN's sarcasm tags are rendering correctly today.
Not everyone lives with silver spoons in their mouths.

(In fact, not everyone has the luxury of parents with good finances, or parents with jobs, or parents at all.)
"Reshare" in Google Buzz
This is something that could feasibly happen. But still, I'll believe it when the words come out of Ballmer's mouth.
It's kind of like a gateway drug once you find out about CPAN ;)
You and I aren't having the same conversation. I tend to agree with everything you just said, but the issue isn't the government's role in running the Internet. It's the government's role in offensive and defensive computer security. In other words: it's preventing China from paying 20 year olds to shut down the power grid (note: plausible) and directing research that would allow us to do that to China.
At first blush, I dismissed it for violating 3.3.1, but now that I think of it, you're allowed to use Objective-C, C or C++. Visual Studio already has a C/C++ compiler so they don't even need to introduce a new language into the mix.

Section 3.3.1 also disallows using "compatibility layers" to access documented APIs. Since the Cocoa APIs are Objective-C, you wouldn't be able to write an app using only C++ without violating it (except perhaps in the case of an OpenGL game).
Thanks.

As for HootSuite: not really. A couple of users have been confused so far, but that's it. We're using the owl because it's a bird (and we're using Twitter) and because of the associations with wisdom/learning.
Sorry, I have to take issue with this approach. You're tying 60% of your total assets to the market indexes of countries that are likely to decrease in value over the next several years. You're tying 20% to real estate indexes that are also extremely overvalued.

You're young. Stick it in a money market account or something safe for a few months until you can get some real financial advice.

Personally, if I had $5 million I would probably leave it in money market and safe CDs until this period of global deflation and low interest rates is past us. I would wait until the inevitable inflation that is coming in a few years, and when interest rates are over 10% (hopefully), put a couple million in fixed annuities that will pay out monthly for the rest of my life, put 1-2 million in safer investments, and invest the other million in risky stocks with a high potential payout.

That way, I have guaranteed income for the rest of my life from the annuities, enough to live off of, and can hopefully see some better returns from the rest of the money. A good financial advisor can give you a better strategy.
I think we could really use a Ruby DSL for naysaying.
The most important feature of the iPhone is the App Store. Many iPhone commercials and ads are simply showcases of apps in the App Store and this is not a coincidence. More (good quality) apps in the App Store means more iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad sales for Apple.
Your question falsely assumes that HN readers are all male.
Actually, Windows Phone 7 tools come in an express edition, so it wouldn't be too strange for the iPhone version to come in an express SKU.

(Tools available from http://developer.windowsphone.com/)

But the tax is more like a thousand dollar tax, as it requires buying a Mac. (Is a Mac mini a reasonable development machine for the iphone?)
Adidas Match Tracker: Experience Soccer Games Like a Data Geek
I think the problem with most of the unbelievers on this thread is that it doesn't make sense and it doesn't seem like a move Apple would make.
* the purpose here is to have a military commander to point the finger at*

Well, a commander and 30,000 airmen. That personnel budget must total at least $3 billion, fully loaded. What's the point of that?
When I read this I thought you were over exagerating, but on first glance of looking at there website it certainly wasn't clear it was an investment product (however the statement next to the SIPC insurance makes it fairly clear if you read all the way to the end).
Multitasking (exactly for the kind of apps like Pandora) is coming this fall (with iPhone OS 4.x ported to the iPad), Apple says.
The point was highlighting how long it is taking them to do something which presumably is simpler than porting the whole (massive) program to a different OS.
That's just it, though: the long-term outlook is irrelevant. The relevant part is the difference between the long-term outlook and what actually happens in the long-term. This is what speculative investment (which is what he's doing here) is all about: capitalizing on the difference between what is expected and what actually happens.

This is also why non-professionals (like myself) should not make purely speculative investments. You really need to have a finger on the pulse of expectations, in addition to what's actually going on.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

void condense_by_removing (char *z_terminated, char char_to_remove)
{
int i, index;

for (i = 0, index = 0; i <= strlen(z_terminated); ++i) {
if(z_terminated[i] != char_to_remove) {
z_terminated[index++] =	z_terminated[i];
}
}
}

int main ()
{
char dt[] = "Now is the winter of our discount tents";
condense_by_removing (dt, 'u');
printf ("%s\n", dt);
}
Why I Switched from iPhone to Android
> I call BS - if something sounds to good to be true it usually is...

I have to disagree with you, but only partially.

It doesn't sound good.
You may fix http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/may/03touch.htm
Read his HN profile.
Your second graf is very sensible and raises many of the big questions here. At the same time: the threat we're talking about is very real --- it may be the most cost-effective way to hit the US today. We've done much dumber things in the name of national security than anything the "Cyber Command" could possibly execute on.

We're way behind the eight ball here --- at least in terms of the stuff we're allowed to know about --- and I think it's probably best to reserve criticism until we actually have something up and running to oversee.
Unfortunately, if you took that advice back in 2000 you're probably still underwater.

Index funds are great over long period time frames like 25+ years, but as always, you need to time your entry and exit strategies. Index funds work great overall for 401k and retirement funds because you're buying in every month so fluctuations up or down help you out. Just don't stick 100% in an index fund in the middle of an overvalued bubblish market.