skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If openness is good than radicalization is necessary. With out Stallman and his breed the conversation becomes:

100% closed vs some openness in some cases.

Which is a conversation clearly biased in favor of closed.

Right now 100% closed is seen as completely sane and normal and reasonable, but 100% open is considered crazy extremism. So as of today Open is still losing, and Stallman is still good.
I don't think there's anything wrong with strict personal adherence to an ideology. I greatly admire Stallman for the sarcrifices he's made in this regard (for instance using a terrible laptop only because it's got open firmware, see: http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/)

Where it all comes unstuck is when someone tries to force their strict ideology on others. Stallman calling me immoral for not open sourcing my code gets roughly the same reaction from me as some guy on the street would if he screamed at me that I'm selfish for not donating all my stuff to charity.

Or when Christians tell me to repent or I'm going to burn in hell.
Yet another time I wish HN had a Batman spotlight we could shine into the sky to get grellas to analyze something. ;)
Surely not in the Netherlands!
I got a G1 17 months ago on T-Mobile in the UK. During this time it has been upgraded OTA to 1.1, 1.5 and then 1.6. Also during this time, I've never come across an app which required a version of Android which I don't have. I'm not disputing they exist, just that they're very rare.

Next month, my contract comes up for renewal and I'll probably get a Desire. I think it will come with 2.1, but will be upgraded OTA to 2.2 shortly afterwards. I expect it will have several more upgrades before my contract comes up for renewal again.

I don't see what the problem is. I don't feel as though I have an obsolete device and it still runs all the apps I've tried for it...
HTML > PDF > Flash

This document isn't available in HTML (I guess Scribd hasn't gotten around to converting everything), so PDF is the next best option.
Couldn't the fact that he's leaving after 19 years be because.... he's been there for 19 years?
I have bought hardware just to run autocad, when i see that they make it to run autocad add-ons to run then this will work for me.

autocad $3k
add-on software $5k
laptop $2k
It's not just selling - when you stop measuring your personal productivity in lines of code, it's amazing how much you discover can be outsourced or bought in. Efficiency vs effectiveness and all that.
"Talk doesn't cook rice."
I disagree that it is just about "trust", as someone above asserts, although that is a big part of it. Many people indeed are upset mainly about the violation of trust rather than the underlying privacy issues. (The intrusions are not advertised, explained clearly, and the amount of interconnectedness is quite beyond most people's understanding.)

However, one component of all this I find distasteful is the more or less explicit coercion into revealing private information to use a service which, in some cases, is perceivedly or de facto necessary for one's livelyhood, social life or whatever. In particular because the offline equivalents or predecessors never needed such. You can argue that a teen does not need to use a virtual (no pun intended) monopoly like Facebook, or that no-one really needs to use unencrypted e-mail but that is just not realistic.

The (soon-to-be) ubiquity of the WWW or internet in general means that it cannot for long be allowed to go so radically against people's privacy expectations (some countries already offer better protection than others). The solutions may well be created by the private sector - say, making HTTPS and encryption for e-mail or equivalent the defaults.

Disclaimer: For this and other reasons I have avoided Facebook, MySpace et al., do not exclusively use Google's services, handle my own e-mail and so on. I am under no illusion that I am particularly secured against a concentrated effort, but I am satisfied I have limited my exposure somewhat.
Tweetie Extension for Chrome
While the article suggests that he is leaving due to cancellation of a project that he was involved in, after 19 years anywhere, a person might consider moving on just to see what else is going on in the rest of the world.
Sunday: I have 5000 new registered users and no way to efficiently send newsletters. I'm finishing the code to handle this today. Note to sendgrid or critsend: you guys really need list management tools/APIs!! I know, I know, your working on it...
I fail to see how this will work the way you are presuming. Considering the median family income in the US is ~$50,000, roughly 3/5 of which is attributed to the father, what will the point be in a mother working 9-5 to make $20,000 and ship their child to school for $20,000 the government gives them. Rather than simply stay at home and pocket that $20,000.

Either way the family will be making $50,000, only one way their expenses are $20,000 more and the other involves the mother being at home 40 hours more a week, accomplishing more household tasks and essentially returning us to the 1940's.

It wouldn't necessarily be the wife however, as in my household I'm the one earning the 2/5ths and would have little problem being a stay at home daddy/teacher. In fact, being an uber-nerd I have a strong feeling I'll be teaching more math and science skills to my offspring than any educational facility anyway, and having worked as a writer I know I'm going to be teaching far better English skills at an early age than any primary school education will give my kids at a 30:1 child:teacher ratio. So being paid $20,000 to stay at home and do what I'd be doing in my free time anyway, seems like a win-win.
Probably different sets of people. I always preferred the original PDF over whatever Scribd could give me (usually long loading time and lower usability).
SNP workers surround Geo, Jang offices
KARACHI: The workers of little known Sindh National Party (SNP) have surrounded the offices of Geo and Jang at the behest of government, Geo News reported Sunday.
There was a similar thread on reddit 2 days ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/c6o1t/i_created...

I pointed out a bot that I run there: http://twitter.com/twatterhose

Here's the code: http://github.com/avar/bot-twatterhose

And the Markov engine powering it: http://hailo.github.com/
HP: WebOS slate on the way, don’t expect a WebOS netbook
Thank you for that. It's a different article with different information. The comments are complimentary.

This is a case where I wish HN has some sort of correlation or coalescence system.
have you ever talked to normal people about technology. not to teach them, but to understand how they think? you could figure out how accurate your belief is.

geeks take the basics for granted. For example: here are normal people answering the question "What is a web browser": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ.

talk to normal ppl about IP addresses, privacy settings, open graph, API, etc etc and their eyes glaze over. in my experience, most of them have no clue. (not because they're dumb, mind you - it's because they don't live and work online like most of us.)
Ask HN: Starting iPhone developer salary for new grad?
We're a small iPhone/iPad development company and we're considering hiring someone just out of college as a iPhone developer. We already have a couple senior iPhone developers on our team, so this new hire would be focused on a few of our existing apps to improve them while our more experienced developers work on new ones. We're looking to hire someone right out of college to save costs and also so we can have a part in the growth/development of the new hire.

I'm wondering what would be the salary range we should expect to pay for a programmer right out of college?

a. 25k-35k/year
b. 35k-45k/year
c. 45k-55k/year
d. 55k+/year
Hmm, I know I'm thinking about the famous Scientific American column. I thought it was before Hoftstadter took over, but it's hard to be certain.
No idea, as I don't play Go very much myself. I learned the basic rules and have the odd fun game with a good friend. I'm currently working on making a pass-and-play game that supports a wide variety of rule variations as well as the standard game.

As of this moment, you can actually play standard Go with a friend or play a variation called "One Eye Go" where you cannot play into an intersection without liberties unless it extends one of your own groups that has other liberties.

I'll be adding other variations soon, next up are the games that have standard rules for capturing stones but where the objectives differ from taking territory. For example, to connect two sides, to create a line of seven stones, to make the first capture, and so forth.

I just want to be able to take out an iPad and use it as a Go board that remembers plays for analysis.
Wow, I'd love to hear about his experiences. Can you tell us more?
Strangely, I get a server error in the browser every time I try to use this. Also, Windows (7) has taken to asking me if I want to give the browser admin privileges every time I launch.
8 biologists on the meaning of synthetic life
It's about the market, We used to use Autocad on sun workstations because PCs couldn't compete.
Then we switched to PCs and Autocad dropped the unix version. If they had kept a Unix+OpenGL version then a mac port would have been trivial.

Now if they want to get into architecture + interior design market where the users have macs they have to offer a mac version.

ps. This leaked product could just be a viewer, it doesn't mean the whole Autocad range is going mac.
Take an Avatar-like robot for a test drive [video]
amazing. before I had to text the link and then click it. But now I just have to send the link and no click needed.

yeah, thanks, but no. having things sent from the network launching on my phone seems not worth avoiding the work of touching the screen.

but I will try it and see for myself.
Similar idea but implemented w/ a bookmarklet:

http://pagestackandroid.appspot.com
Is it just me or does that thing look like a headcrab: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/54/Headcrab.jpg
Most of the AutoDesk products tend to focus on 3D modeling design. You can do a research on products information. I bet this news will stimulate Apple's future Pro sales at least 10%. There are so many 3D designers (ex. Architect, Civil Eng..) can't switch from Microsoft to Apple because of that (my brother included).
Next advancements of this technology:

- running

- jumping

- seek and destroy
How nice of you to ask, Matt. :)

All you need to do is make a http post to my api with the details of the work you want completed* with a url for me to post back the answer to. I take care of dealing with the mturk api and qualifying answers.

* Title, price, and a form partial which provides instructions and the form inputs to be answered.
Someone's been watching too much BSG...
5/21/2010 — Due to heavy server volume you may experience
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I like how they end the video with the perspective of what it will look like when you're being chased by one of these guys.
Fifty Londoners, One [Thought Provoking] Question.
High quality workout wear for $5.00
Indeed. Imagine an 8 foot tall version coming at you. Tanks of the future?
The latest problem I hit seems to be related to logging. It goes away if I replace line 99 in buffered_logger.rb to read:

@log.write(old_buffer.join.force_encoding(Encoding.default_external))

Without this ad-hoc "fix" (well it's not a fix, I was using it just to confirm the source of the bug) I'm seeing:

Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: "\xC4" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

all over the place (every time the log is flushed).

p.s. just to clarify, I was testing an app that currently runs in production on ruby 1.8.7 + rails 2.3.5 with rails 2.3.6 and ruby 1.9.2-head. 30 or so tests fail and about 70 have errors. I'll be sure to report any new bugs I find.
This might be possible since I'm the one making the requests to mechanical turk. I'll look into their terms to see if there's anything preventing this.
Actually, I'm a AutoDesk Inventor addict. I design prototypes and sketch out ideas for testing on there - I just hope AutoCAD on Mac will open a doorway that lets them port their other tech over, too. After all, the technology powering all their software is practically identical, so far as I can tell.
The link is to the nonfiction list, yet the title of the post says novels.

Here is the list of novels: http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
For iphone development, b
Also, in my experience, most engineers who use AutoCAD use at least on third party domain specific plugin. If those plugins aren't also ported then they still won't be able to move to Apple. In fact I know many people who would be happy to give up AutoCAD for something else, but can't because they need certain plugins.
I find amazing how difficult it is to successfully perform apparently trivial tasks such as walking.

There's more information about the 'LittleDog' on the Boston Dynamics website: http://www.bostondynamics.com/

I was really impressed 2 years ago by their video of the 'BigDog':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww (check out t=40s)
Because this article covers a lot of ground, it really struck me that the term testing is ambiguous: it can mean unit-testing or user-testing.

In prototyping sprints, TDD seems to acknowledge that unit-testing slows you down and creates rigidity, and therefore encourages you to just get the basic thing working without unit tests. You can throw it away, or fundamentally change the outcome, or the architecture, or the structure of the code. User-testing is how you test a prototype (including just playing with it yourself).

But in building a codebase that you will live with for sometime, that will be built-on and modified and bug-fixed and tweaked, unit-testing becomes really helpful.
A culture of innovation is a culture of play
Ask HN: How do you begin the process of developing a web application?
I'm curious about others processes for beginning the development of a web app. It's always hard for me to "just dive in" and start, so I'm curious to get some feedback from the community.

After you have the initial idea, what's next? Start defining features? Draw up a mockup on a piece of paper? Start writing the DB schema?
This is a rather fun idea, I like it a lot :) So far I'm using a mix of PHP, C, and more PHP and have just set the bugger live here: https://twitter.com/markov_chains
> I no longer trust long chains of reasoning from seemingly self-evident low-level principles.

The correct principle is not to "trust" long chains of reasoning which one doesn't understand in their entirety, especially ones with strong conclusions. The problem here isn't long chains of reasoning (we could hardly do without any of those), but rather failure to hold them to high standards in how understandable they are, and failure to put in the effort to understand the whole thing before accepting it.
The column that introduced Lisp is from Hofstadter's era. It's collected in his _Metamagical Themas_.
This only gets you part of the way there. Icons, some menu options, the built-in browser, and I believe even the keyboard are still 'Sense-ified'.
yep .. that worked .. thanks .. waiting eagerly for google to release the webstore soon
You are right this is about the home interface but to me that is one of the bigger disruptions. I will see what else we can switch off.
Immagine they are not controlled by humans. Even more scary.
Her hair coincidentally bears a resemblance to the Firefox logo
Yes, the way it recovered from that kick is incredible.

And, if you'll forgive me, here's one additional link for anyone who hadn't yet heard of Big Dog. (Unlikely, I know...) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc
Future Mario, Twitter Demographics And Worst Phone Ever Win Disrupt
I usually work in phases.

-explore possibilities that challenge my sense of the problem space (closely allied with reading stuff on the internet, that leads to HN, etc.)
-try out various different ideas
-come up with a pretty cool idea (using a two-dimensional array for double dispatch -- b/c you can create a nice text table of which functions are being invoked...)
-that cool idea encourages me to really solve this problem well
-i realize that at this point i really don't need to do something that extensive
-i solve it simply using closer to the bare minimum of what was needed
-i solve other simple things that i've had queued up

and repeat. in other words, there are two types of productivities that i think we as developers go through. exploratory, expansive stages. and synthetic, work stages. this probably isn't news to anyone. but they really are two different things, and you really have to balance both to be efficient. too much 'getting it done' and you'll lose interest and miss large steps figured out by others or by yourself. not to mention you'll lose the expansive 'energy' that comes from solving things abstractly and in a new way. on the other hand, too much of an 'exploratory' attitude and you not only won't get stuff done, but you'll lose the confidence you had about how well you can solve things in small steps, that build up, etc.

anyway, that's just my sense. there may be more than just two 'phases'. and the phase change is more a calibration of emphasis than an all-or-nothing switch. when i'm going through the exploratory phase i'm much more sociable, taking breaks, etc. and then i pwn in the work phase. or something. i also download and watch a fair amount of tv.

but i think part of what makes one developer more experienced than another is that they have larger phases. they've had the confidence from experience to not need to get to that work phase quite so quickly. of course, you can make mistakes, and not be ready for quite so large an explore/work phase balance -- and have to reel it back a bit, but generally speaking, one's threshold sort of increases (the more features are delivered on time, the more projects are delivered, etc.). anyway.... more important than anything is probably being honest with yourself (if you are the type who naturally tries to self-improve). anyway, this is all a bit off topic...
Looks like two people have already produced firefox addons for this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161940/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161941/
Richard Sears: Planning for the end of oi
Looks ideal if you need a lot of DOM with dynamically generated structure.
I find it surprising that javascript gets so much traction as a hidden jewel when really it's a pretty poor language compared to python, for instance.
It started off being pooh-poohed (including by myself) by those who thought that it was some sort of cut-down 'scripting language' version of Java.
Then Douglas Crockford pointed out that you could do closures in Javascript and it became kind of cool to praise Javascript.
When I started using it (after programming in C, C++, Lisp, Java, Python, etc.) I discovered an interesting language but too many pain points (after the joy of python coding) to consider it anything special.
There's all sorts of private content available to approved people via the internet that's not available to the public.

Entire organizations use it as such.

The idea that everything on the internet must be public simply ignores reality and is shallow thinking.
Jordan Mechner’s Multiplatform ‘Prince of Persia’
... and coincidentally that's another reason why I hate Wikipedia: articles that contain completely pointless semi-quasi-pseudo-factoids which are, nevertheless, technically "notable" because someone wrote it somewhere.
There are a ton of JSON stringifications libs for Java, some of which can handle complex object graphs (circular dependencies, etc.). Have a look at Google GSON. Once you can turn your jobs into JSON strings and vice versa, persisting them in a document store should be trivial.
Out of curiosity, is this shoe design patented or could nike/adidas/reebok/etc come in and change the market with their own version?
Anyone with some robotics experience able to explain more about the floating base inverse dynamics control system and what sort of accommodations make it so much more powerful than PD?
Is the fractioning of Android a problem? A person has to go through a fairly non-intuitive process to turn of sense, requiring a guide to figure it out. It will not occur to most people that this is even an option.

The new phone sounds pretty amazing, but is it a problem that people are going to have to relearn how to use their phone?

I'm speaking from an average consumer point of view, not us hacker geeks here on HN. Most people are not as adaptable to new technology as the audience is here.

Apple is now lagging in terms of features, but the user experience is consistent across devices. I know when I buy my new iPhone next month, the transition process will be seamless. Nothing will have to be re-figured out or relearned. I will know exactly how to do everything I need to do. This quality user experience is hard to quantify on a feature list, but I believe is very valuable nonetheless.
It doesn't even do anything, its just a icon?
I'm a mechanical engineer, my personal preference for 2D drawings is AutoCAD but 3D CAE is Solidworks. I'm not sure I could personally make the switch until Solidworks was availble because I spend about 90% of my time in Solidworks but only 10% in AutoCAD, but if Inventor went to Mac that's pretty close to Solidworks.

(Is Pro/E on Mac? I know it is available on Linux)

My brother is an architect and his primary tool is AutoCAD, he could absolutely make the switch to a mac if that were available, in fact having to boot into Windows most of the time anyway is the reason he did not spend extra and get a Macbook Pro last time he bought a laptop.
I found a link to the implementation details, you are correct:

http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/02/01/understanding-clojur...
... and this is one reason I hate Hacker News: theres always one person who rains on all the parades.
The 'readers' list of novels is a big a crock of shit as the non-fiction. I might be a little pessimistic, but of the top ten:

4. THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
6. 1984 by George Orwell

Are the only credible novels there. I'm sorry Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard are not and never have been popular enough amongst the populace to hit 7 out of 10 of the top 10 spots.

Radcliffe's Rival 100 Best Novels List (http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100rivallist.html) doesn't have Hubbard anywhere and has Rand's two most read and best respected novels. I'm a wide reader and I can say every novel on this list has been recommended to me by someone or has gotten itself known to me by its own merits. No one has ever recommended me Hubbard, save for once at a garage sale when someone tried to sell me a dozen of his books for a quarter; I opted to pay $10 picking up the Red/Blue/Green Mars series, some Heinlein, Asimov and Clark. The woman joked that she doubts the bookstore will take them; incidentally I've got friends who've worked at Savers/Value Village and they can't shift the books and don't accept them.
short video to our presentation which shows the other hacks -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMNtrLcbCNk
If I may offer a contrary opinion: he's a dweeb. John Dvorak called him that 15 years ago. NM was raving about how MSN was going to be the first time people used modems and PCs to interact in communities, unaware of the long history of the BBS and places like The Well.

Now he wants to own the building blocks of software development and tax anyone who dares to use them. Er, no thanks.
Ask HN: What are some of the best Startup/WebApp conferences to attend?
Hello HN people. I recently quit my job as a web developer to pursue a startup idea, so i'm pretty new to the scene. I haven't been to many conferences, but I want to know what's out there. Which conferences have you attended, and which do you recommend?