skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The IP issue is probably the top question from companies we talk to.

It may very well be the killer for this webapp, and we don't have a good technical solution at the moment. However much we encrypt, the customer's IP is going to sent to our Cloud anyway.

This reminds us of Dropbox in a way.

The non-technical "trust" factor seems to be very important here. Why would one trust a consultant or a design service company with one's IP? Because of a legally-binding contract and because of reputation / past interaction? That probably plays a big part.

Some strategies we came up with:

If users don't trust us with their most important IP, we'll ask for their not-so-important IP.

A support person probably has to meet the customer on a day-to-day basis, which would somewhat defeat the purpose of a webapp, at first.

Yes, we would be selling computing power in a sense. But we're also trying to do more to simplify working with FPGAs.

It's true that cost of parts is very important; that's why we're working on reporting chip cost and availability too. Octopart is very helpful in that respect!

Thanks for your comments!
Nick Denton, our first Internet Week panelist
Publishers want universal e-books; won't cooperate to get them
Awesome, will check out ritual rooster as well.
Is there really a way to make OpenGL development simple and consistent across a wide range of GPUs and screens? It sounds to me like he's complaining more about how hard low-level cross-platform graphics programming is, not Android itself.
So many talks on Android fragmentation. Don't remember any when iPhone 2G was left behind iPhone OS 4.0 wagon.
Once he develops some stuff for non-Android, non-iPhone devices, he'll laugh at how minor his complaints are.
Before I started working on this webapp, I tried running the FPGA tools on Mac OS X without much success.
That was in the days of PowerPC Macs though.

Getting the necessary libraries to play nicely was a great pain.

After Virtualbox came out, running FPGA tools on my Mac became possible.
It would be good if Micro Focus released an Eclipse plugin too.
I tried adding a submit button with firebug, but that didn't accomplish anything.
You can get some pretty good deals on ebay.
Me too. Tried base64 decoding the viewstate value, looked like garbage to me. Also tried changing the stuff in formbox to inputs, no luck. Anyone get passed step 2?
Academic turns city into a social experiment
I think the puzzle is why they used ASP.
Maybe he is on a global warming kick, he also played a part in The Thaw http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/
That's typically just general ASP session tracking stuff. They might sneak something in there, though.
Is someone trying to imply that Cells isn't a sophisticated version of the Game of Life?

Yes.
You can chop a T-mobile sim in half and use it with the iPad, though you'll be limited to EDGE 2g speeds.

edit- I believe T-mobile may also sell micro-sim cards. Shouldn't be necessary, though, as you can also get a micro-to-regular sized SIM adapter for your modified micro.

This is a great reason to sign up for the unlimited iPad plan now, and hold on to it; the micro-sim works in any device with the help of an adapter.
Take a close look at the img-tag in the source code...
The UI looks very crude. Slow, jumpy, graphically unpolished and unappealing, and gives a very bad feeling about the over-all product, but this should very well be expected considering how astonishingly short time this knock-off has been brewing since the recent release of the iPad. Very agile development indeed.

But the important, related questions are, with this short development time in mind, what underlying quality in the hardware and software can we expect, and what backing-up of the product in terms of support etc. can we expect from the producer?

My experience is that these Chinese knock-offs are always crap akin to just being "use once" gadgets (have to cost next to nothing to develop and to manufacture), always short-lived, always made only to follow the current hottest buzz, just to sell shitloads, and then quickly being discarded as per the traditional way of Chinese business - once money has changed hands, everything is just great, couldn't be better, and the deal is flawless, done and over with.
look at the image src... what would you expect it to be?
This is actually a pretty common "idea" (not a bad one, just it comes up a lot :)) that an accused comes up with when I meet them. The same argument, really, applies to anything transmitted over P2P - you usually only download a small chunk from one person, encrypted or not.

My response is usually: "were you uploading copyrighted stuff?". Answer: "yes". Me: "well then..."

Saying "but I only gave him a small piece of data - what he does with it is his own business" doesn't stand up because clearly your intent was to give him part of the file so he could construct the file (this argument has been used for centuries to try and get out of things and almost always fails :P)

Seriously? I think people should just suck it up, admit they did something wrong (currently wrong anyway...) and then fight the idiotic fine.

Ultimately the law is not really about the exact bits you exchange (one of the few things I agree with, actually) but about your intent and facilitation of the shared file.

EDIT: to clarify/extend something. I think it is a dangerous road to bring the idea of what the individual bits you send mean - because that starts to open up the idea the a certain ordering of bits could be illegal (take a CP case - if a certain ordering of bits makes up the left breast of a child if interpreted as part of a Jpeg is that illegal if randomly occurs within a music file you own. Or perhaps the bits in an MP3 appear by random occurrence in a video file you own. This is a dangerous weapon to hand people :P)
Yeah, I've used like 3GB since mid-January, and I regularly tether using one of the hacks to enable it.
sigh- I suppose I really may have to dump my iPhone. Tethering was a promised feature in the 3gs.
Which principle?
You can generally get cheap buckets of Lego at people's yard sales, eBay, etc... The good thing about Lego is that it ages well, The bricks don't become obsolete.
For more specific parts you could try BrickLink - http://www.bricklink.com/
Shortcut me now
Carrier pigeons?
> The problems start when they are designed in China.

I think the problem is not in "China" but in bad designers.
In its current form it isn't evil, it's just scary. I'll try to explain:

It is socially accepted that companies may speak about their products in a onesided, strongly biased way, called "advertisement". This is in contrast to balanced, objective reports as expected from e.g. journalists and scientists. And it is also in contrast to honest, uninfluenced personal opinions as expected from e.g. friends and blogs.

In return, those "advertisements" are expected to be explicitly labeled as such, or to be so exaggerated that they are obviously visible as such. That's how we try to ensure fairness.

In a sense this is the case here, because the "blog entry" is shown under your website's domain. On the other hand, it is a user report of someone (i.e. you) who is using and testing your software, where one usually expects the honest and uninfluenced personal opinion of a user.

It is okay as it is. But if you changed one detail, it wouldn't be okay anymore. (e.g. write about another website rather than your own, or put it into another blog at another domain, or remove the exaggeration in the title as well as the text.)

So it is scary, because it is close to the border. But I think it is still on the "good" side of the border, not on the "evil side".
Various researchers have found that, with a few exceptions, innovators do not think that patents are very useful either for excluding imitators or for capturing royalties in most industries

By this, do they mean that imitators are typically able to operate despite patent protection or that there aren't attempts to imitate? The latter does not really support the concluusion that patents are not useful/effective, since a lack of imitators is something we should expect if they were (though it also is not proof that they are). The former suggests some problem with the legal situation surrounding patents, since it is exactly what patent law is meant to prevent.
In terms of them predicting markets with search data lots of commentators are saying no way, but I strongly disagree.

Google can predict flu-like illnesses within 92% accuracy of CDC data which is dervied from labratory testing.

Furthermore trading stocks seems to me to be a behavior that would be easy to predict through Google's "intent-based" algorithms used for serving advertising.

EG - For instance knowing how many searches there are a day for "is AAPL overpriced" vs. "is AAPL underpriced" you'd have data that would begin to correlate to market value - with enough data points you could make some pretty darn educated guesses about what a given stock would do.

Toss in a hundred PHDs, a few dozen traders from the greediest depths of wallstreet and the question shouldn't be CAN they do it, but WHEN will they do it.

Reference:

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/18/how-accurate-i...
Ad Spend Trends
URL is broken - here's the right one:

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.11/01-mockus.htm...
I'm working on the language math. Seems to take quite a bit of time just looking things up!
American-Made Cigarettes May Be More Carcinogenic, CDC Finds
From Lego. For generic blocks, you cannot really beat their "brick buckets" -- the deluxe version (http://shop.lego.com/ByCategory/Product.aspx?p=6177&cn=2...) has 650 blocks for 30€.

From the supermarket, you can hardly get a 50-brick model for those 30€.
Yes, if this trend continues Apple will fragment iPhone OS devices once every 3 years. Awful when you consider that Android is fragmenting every month with the introduction of yet another device.
Google blocks Tetris clones from Android market
They do... Hopefully there should be a community knol on that as well in the near future.
We are building this very thing at www.nixty.com. Benwerd, I'm familiar with Elgg and have actually consulted with Harold Jarche a few times (several years ago). If either of you are interested, then I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Please send me an email at glen at nixty dot com.
Macs under attack by high-risk spyware
Dallas - Fort Worth Area Startups Are Hiring
It seems pretty similar to RTV silicone sealant (used in construction for sealing panel boxes, etc.).
That was my first thought, that ye olden days of windows and/or dos programming were much worse.

But the market was also much bigger. And software sold for higher prices.

Android market is too small and prices too low for the platform to be so fragmented.
It would be useful to have an API that'll provide device optimal settings given a set of minimum requirements. It wouldn't help with the bug based problems, of course, but it's a start.
I like #5 quite a lot. You could probably monetize quite well by selling print versions of the online content they generate. The one caveat though: it's got to be simple enough for grandma/grandpa.
Dongguan is a prfecture-level city (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefecture-level_city), which is "below a province and above a county" in China. It sounds a lot like a major metropolitan area in the US.

Los Angeles city, for example, has a population of 4 million, while the Greater Los Angeles Area (roughly the triangle with points at Ventura, Riverside, and Santa Ana), has a population of 15 million spread across 6 counties and 60+ cities.
(DLS2010)Factor: a dynamic stack-based programming language
Anyone Interested in Articles on Using PyPy to Create New Languages?
Gluecon Slides
YouTube - ריאיון עם פרופסור נועם חומסקי Noam Chomsky
have you ever heard of https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/ ?
White rock houses
New Options Realty is a local real estate company in White Rock. We provide listings real estate and properties in White Rock and surrounding areas.
Provide one screen resolution. Change that resolution infrequently. Provide only high level access to the graphics capabilities of your platform regardless of how much the underlying hardware changes. Do not permit developer access to private APIs. Hmm, sounds familiar...
> Advertising is only evil when it is deceptive.

... or when it isn't clearly visible as such. However, this one indeed seems to be labeled clearly enough. Still it looks like a personal user report at a first glance, and that's kind of scary.
I hope Apple gets hit hard on this. Either they didn't sign a contract with AT&T and got blindsided, in which case they're guilting of creating a carrier-locked device that enabled this to happen, or they were fully aware of the upcoming changes and decided to misrepresent the product back in February. Would this have happened if the iPad was T-Mobile 3G compatible? I really doubt it.
I'll work as a "self-employed" and earn whatever my work make me earn and not go for a full time job with annoying co-workers and under a boss. I may consider working for a big corporation if it's worth the shot (fun, money, experience).

This may be the reason why Americans are heading towards "self-employment". Freedom is priceless.
I Don’t Get the Buzz about Buzz – Do You?
It would be interesting to hear the comments other developers who had written an app that used stock UI components and didn't do anything too crazy. Games aside, a large percentage of the other apps on the marketplace do relatively sane things with common components.

I developed a very simple app (BenPaper); it runs fine on 1.5, all the way up to 2.2. It handles things like device rotation without me writing any code to deal with that because all the layouts are liquid etc. etc. Admittedly it's a very simple app, but on the whole I was impressed with the defragmentedness of the platform.

Compare that to writing a J2ME app, where you have to use a build tool like Polish to build 18 different binaries, run 6 different emulators on your development machine, keep an up to date list of devices and their hardware characteristics...
Did you check out the whole OP?

I feel the dev's complaint was more nuanced than complaining about fragmentation.

The dev was saying there were tons of easy back-ports left on the table that could make the fragmentation much easier for developers to deal with. I walked away feeling that some released Android versions were neglected, more than fragmented.

[edited last sentence to distinguish neglected versions from not caring about the whole platform, which Google obviously does.]
Apple: Make a desktop, your iPad app is toast
Can you back that up? I know all those vegan carbs have to be going somewhere...
Also mentioned:

- iPhone tethering will cost $20/month. And it only works if you have the 2GB/month DataPro plan already.

- This is set to take effect on the same day as Jobs's WWDC keynote, June 7th.
Save the clues, maybe you need them at the end

t-h-i-s ...
I was quite fond of Charlie Stross's Accelerando, but I don't know if it's what you're looking for since it may be too far in the future in parts. However, it's available as a free ebook or just plain html, so that's an advantage.

Also, I think he posts here occasionally, which I found interesting.
Despite the fact I stopped at the first 5 minutes, telnet StarWars looks awesome.
> There are a couple of caveats. When I don't have a ticket, e.g. because I forgot my wallet, I'm on a constant lookout and the train ride becomes really stressful. If you get caught several times they might press charges against you, so it is not feasible to go without ticket on a regular basis anyway. And last but not least, I'm using a service, so I pay for it.

I used to ride without a ticket a lot when I was in school. You are right about the stress. (On the other hand, riding with a ticket afterwards is much more boring.)
I've also have some experience in J2ME/ Symbian development. Reading this guys story made me cringe, it brought back some bad memories.

My feeling is that it seems minor now; but it should be focused on. You can't let something like this slide for too long before you've got a piece of junk.
Here's one example that Xorg needs to be updated, if not redesigned.

Many recent laptops bear two graphic cards (ex: Asus u30jc, ul30a), one which is an on-board, weak card that will do the light work and one discrete card which is there for high-definition videos and 3D. The OS should control the activation of those cards using a switch (for NVidia it's called optimus). The point is to save battery life while staying performant.

X does not support the live swapping of video cards (not without restarting, at least). According to the dev guys, we're not going to see that supported until one or two years. And of course, since xorg does not support the switching, Nvidia won't design any drivers for linux - why would they do all the work?
JQuery Tag Editor Plugin – Transform a Textbox into a Wordpress Style Tag
jQuery Tag Editor is a jQuery plugin that that allow us to transform a textbox into a Wordpress style tag editor. It is really useful when you need users to submit tags or any other list of items.
I think they're entirely different markets. The iPhone OS needed some real competition, and Google stepped up. What is Chrome's market? Is the competition that bad? What will Chrome bring that its competitors don't?
heh, over thinking
Since she would starve to death without the client, her situation is indeed improved. Do you consider death better than prostitution? Even if you do, she doesn't, and I take her opinion on the matter more seriously than yours.

What you call dogmatism is merely logical consistency.

You are merely substituting an emotional judgement for reason. Starvation is a bad situation, but unfortunately you have no one to blame. After she engages in a transaction with someone better off, you've now got someone to point the finger at. That's great if you have an emotional need to blame someone, but in your hypothetical there is no guilty party. No one has harmed anyone else.
Hmm... seems true, for example, in Japan we found that inter-company relationships also matter a lot in FPGA decisions. Scalable support, alas, would be hard for a startup like us to provide.

We are working on adding dev kit details for hobbyists though. That's something which seems useful, like what you said.

So it seems like convenience rather than chip selection is something that we can possibly get people to pay for? Specifically the convenience of exploring different technical options in an automated design space exploration kind of fashion.

It seems like we have features that people might like, but we have to position it in ways different to what we currently believe would work?

Our webapp is pitching a minimalistic way of doing things, in that what the libraries and TCL scripts that you mentioned do, will be done automatically. Hopefully this will highlight the convenience factor more than the "change-in-working-methods" factor.

Testing and verification definitely is a big market. Figuring out the port and sensitivity list in Verilog/VHDL code doesn't seem hard, but coming up with good test vectors automatically sounds pretty daunting (and interesting).
I am asking in all seriousness, what about this venture seems moral? This screams sleazy personal injury lawyer to me that wants to sue for car collisions where the paint didn't even chip.
I'm leading a project doing exactly this, building an open source social learning platform on Drupal. You can check it out at http://eduglu.com. I made my second release yesterday - http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second-release-e...

Things are early on still so if you wanted to pitch in, you could be a lot of help.
Waterfall vs. Agile: Can they be Friends?
Like Symbian? Just guessing, i'm interested in knowing more
For some perspective on how low 2GB is, this isn't just about video, it is audio streaming too...

Pandora uses 64 kbps for normal quality and 128 kbps for high quality.

64 kilobits (Kb) = 8 kilobytes (KB)
8 kilobytes = 0.008 megabytes (MB)
0.008 MB per second * 60 seconds = 0.48 MB per minute
0.48 MB per minute * 60 minutes = 28.8 MB per hour
28.8 MB per hour * 8 hours = 230.4 MB per work day
230.4 MB per day * 23 work days in a month (max) = 5,299.2 MB
5,299.2 MB = ~5.3 GB

Double that if you are listing to the high quality stream.
I think they're just studying the isolation and group dynamics
> If they wanted to, they could have made WebKit closed source, eschewing the use of KHTML entirely.

Yes, I understand what you're saying - Apple made a choice about what product to use and was aware of the licensing implications.

Apple got to make one choice: use KHTML or something else. As soon as they chose KHTML, the choice of licensing was made for them. Saying 'we open sourced it' implies Apple made the choice to open source it. They did not. They were obligated to by the fact the people who made the code licensed it that way.

Linksys got to make one choice: use Linux or something else. As soon as they chose Linux, the choice was made for them.

Job's already mentioned that Apple chose to use an OSS app. Saying they 'chose the licensing for it' is wrong: they didn't, someone in the KDE project made that decision. Apple abided by the rules, they didn't create them.
Yeah, I know - that's why I was sort of surprised that he seems to compare rpm with Portage. Portage isn't like rpm at all; if you're going to compare the Portage system with anything in Linux, it should be Aptitude, anyway, right?
I can't help but wonder why this keeps happening. Rejecting this app seems a bit ludicrous to me. But I have to wonder if this has anything to do with Steve Jobs and Apple policies, or just some of the people who work at Apple enforcing the "Apple-way".

There are quite a few Apple fanatics out there. The ones who say Apple can do no wrong and the Apple way is the right way. They would do most things to make Steve Jobs happy. So it's not a giant leap to think some of those people have made it on to Apple's payroll and possibly hold senior positions at Apple.

So is this a case of Apple being a bit ridiculous with its policies, or people within Apple following the Apple-way and policies a little too closely? This might just be a staffing problem.
Ask HN: What to do about competitors on my mailing list?
I'm posting this under a ghost account because I don't want to draw the attention to my startup. I'm currently in the "landing page phase." As such I have a newsletter signup form on the page to keep people updated. I haven't sent the first newsletter out yet, and I'm not sure if I want all my competitors keeping track of my progress. I've confirmed at least 3 direct competitors who have joined the list as well as another in a similar space (possibly looking to move into my territory). Today I'm preparing the initial newsletter to send out.

What would you do?
That is why we need better search on HackerNews. I am glad it was reposted because I couldn't find the link again to share with my partners.
For starters, they could use what might be called
“earnings insurance” that would pay for up to two
years part of the difference between what they earned
on the old job and what they earn now on their own.
Employed workers would contribute to the insurance fund
through their payroll taxes, as they do with unemployment
insurance, but the total bill for benefits would be
unlikely to rise because earnings insurance would get
them back to work quicker and thereby reduce the number
of weeks they relied on unemployment benefits.

Wow, what a terrible, terrible idea.
Is the last part really true? If you look at wealthy U.S. industrialists of the late 19th century, many of them now have 4th or 5th-generation descendants who are still wealthy-- Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Mellons, etc.