skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But yet he mentioned the number of total phones sold (1.3b) while talking market share so he didn't mean smartphones. Apple has a tiny sliver of the total phone market and that's what he meant. Microsoft has an even smaller sliver, but he said he wants/prefers a large chunk of that total market:

> But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.

He was exactly right about Apple's position but there's no obvious way Microsoft will be able gain mass adoption. Google will.
No, not everyone's phone number. You could opt to have an "unlisted" number, and it was easy to check whether or not the book was revealing your number to the world.
bookback if you are so set on using "book" in the name.
I know it's experimental but how stable is it in practice?
I think it was the 'grasshopper' that did it, it's funny in one way but it makes it seem like you're talking down to someone. He asked a very valid question and there is tons of really good advice in this thread, indeed, it may not be 'the answer' but it can help and 'you need to find it out for yourself' makes it seem as though that advice is worth nothing.

Self-help books have limited use they are too general, but the situation between HN'ers in the same profession as the OP is so comparable that it is possible that some concrete tips will in fact materialize.

Even I learned a lot from the answers in this thread and I really hope that such questions keep coming. No such thing as a stupid question.
BookPal.com

]> host bookpal.com

Host bookpal.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

HOWEVER: NetworkSolutions search says it's taken
I don't think ISP cannot see what I'm searching for if Google allows me to use HTTPS. When we use HTTPS, data is encrypted. But URLs I'm querying are still open for anyone. If someone knows that I queried, for example, http://www.google.co.uz/?q=google, it's pretty easy to understand what I've been searching for.
Corrected; thanks for catching that.
Hostel part 2. Because the heroine of that movie is incredibly goal-oriented. By the end of the movie she becomes the shrewd, decisive, powerful woman she was meant to be.

Oh and also that movie about the clash, Rudeboy. But that's mainly because we do a drinking game, and take a shot every time Ray Ganges acts like a victim, or slurs his speech. This helps with downtime. Or maybe it helps create downtime?
In non-enterprise sales often there is no prospect before someone becomes a customer – i.e. they just sign up. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that's the case in most web startups. As such there's often an (ideally small) segment of paying customers that are outside of the market you can service well with your offering and if they become pushy (i.e. begin making requests / demands that pull you away from your target market) it would be better if they were not a customer than for the company to lose focus trying to make them happy.
Touching the Void - I love this legendary true story of two mountaineers' first ascent of a peak in the Andes for the survival aspect of it. Grit, determination, and patience are three qualities I truly admire. It is a must watch even if mountaineering/climbing doesn't interest you.

Apollo 13 - for how ingenuity, teamwork, and a calm head can help you overcome the most challenging of problems. I wish I was born in that era and had the opportunity of working among that group of people. The pursuit of a cause greater than oneself.

Shawshank Redemption - much has been said about this movie.

Forrest Gump - odd choice I know, but it's a remarkable story of serendipity. We often fail to realize just how much of life is purely a matter of chance.
My most pushy customers are my best customers, they really care about the product and want to improve it themselves, the 'outlet' I give them is they can mail me directly and I'll always take them serious. If something is not feasible I tell them why.
Google is upping the ante on the iPhone here, though, by adding cloud-based data backup for Android applications

How many apps will actually support this feature? It doesn't sound like it's an OS level feature transparent to third party apps. Am I going to have to keep track of which apps support it and which don't?
CheapAssBooks.net

.com is taken
They could just lose money, up to tens of billions, for a decade while working their way up to a solid 3rd place position.

Worked for Xbox.
Of course, it makes sense if you interpret it right -- but it looks at first glance like it's comparing absolute sales figures, rather than change from baseline for each.
sounds like you should pivot. http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump...
Yeah, I tried torrents. It didn't work out, possibly because I'm not really savvy about that kind of thing. The few times I was actually able to finish downloading a torrent, it turned out to be unusable files or porn. Getting porn was scary because the only reason people would distribute porn under the guise of Star Wars torrents would be because it was illegal in some way. Maybe I just fail at torrents :-/
> they're one of the few who actually understand irony?

I think IBM would be one of the last companies to do that.
I live in a smallish city in Indiana, pay $56 a month for < 5Mb cable and it's often down for hours at a time, and from my own experience is better than the alternative DSL in available in the area. The reliability has improved over time, in the past we've had occasions where it would indeed be down for days at a time. Wireless/Cable => apple/oranges maybe, but doesn't sound vastly different from North Africa from where I'm standing.
Not only that, but sites like ExpertExchange abuse the referrer header. Since EE uses the referrer to build the content (or at least it's part of the process), can this be a problem to their business?
Similar artists and genres? Boring.

I wanted some tech like Midomi's ou Soundhound's music fingerprinting mixed in with this. Show me new artists that sound similar to artists that I like. Better yet, similar to a mix of artists that I like. Now that would be nice.
And that makes me somewhat sad. I've been a user of Nokia for 10 years and I allways loved those devices. When I purchased my last phone, 1.5 years ago, I gave them a vote of confidence and got an E71 instead of an iPhone.

I regret it every day. Stupid E71.
Ask HN: Moving MIDI
I've been working with a friend on this project to basically get rid of his hardware general midi tone generator and have a software version do all the work, AND be able to send MIDI data to his crazy Biofeedback application on the same computer. We wrote up a text to better explain, here it is, any help would be awesome:

We currently have an app running in Windows that is sending out basic general MIDI commands to a COM port, which in turn is driving via a serial cable a Edirol SD-20 tone generator. Our needs are pretty basic, we're doing just general MIDI, picking various voices (clarinet, oboe etc). What we want to be able to do is drop the external tone generator and re-route/pickup the MIDI traffic that's on the COM port (i.e. Device Manager -> COM1/2/3/45 etc) and then route that basic GM data to a software based tone generator. We don't need or want a super sophisticated DAW ( Microsoft GS Wavetable synth may be enough). Our client bass are health care professionals, so it needs to be easy, intuitive for the uninitiated.

I've been in IT for a long time, but never worked on something like this before. Thanks for the read. If the above text isn't clear enough, please let me know.
I'd like to hear Apple's side of the story. This topic has been all over the Internet today. Is the candidate just trying to get free PR?
Why do you think AT&T would let Nexus One tether before the iPhone?
Participatory design is not about having your customer design for you, which is a common misconception. If it was, then every PD project would end up like the Homer Simpson car.

It is about engaging the user as an equal and not treating them as a abstract problem you are designing for. As I said, it's about including them in the design process in a way that you come up with a design that truly suits their needs.
I know of a fair number of people buying iTouches for their kids exclusively to play games - to keep them off their iPhones, basically.
Safari 4, built entirely with valid HTML5 and CSS3. Nary an image was used.
Oh no... I like the folks of human resources that read my resume. I don't want to kill them.
I was in a very similar situation a few months ago. I ran a URL shortener and got tired of the upkeep, but more importantly, I realized that it's a not product but a feature. I sold it, eventually. Here is how.

I blogged saying the site is going to shut down, and I started making plans about what would happen in terms of data export and keeping the URLs working. The community responded VERY loudly: we like it, don't shut it down, at least give it back to us or sell it. This told me something very important that I didn't realize: no matter how fed up you are, no matter if you hate it or like it, there are people out there that value your work. You just don't it yet.

So I wrote up a brief post about the vital stats with vague ballpark figures, and gave an email address for serious bidders to get in touch. A lot did. Some were not serious at all (easy to tell) and some were very professional and clearly serious about wanting the site. In the end more than one bid was on the table from people that not only wanted the site, but really cared about the users.

How it was valued: an auction. Best bid wins. I kept it anonymous (under the trust that I don't inflate the price, and I never did). If I were to do this again, I would put it up on flippa or sitepoint or ebay or elsewhere.

The biggest problem you'll have is people knowing about the sale. Like anything, market it. Your users are the most likely group to produce the buyer.

The second biggest problem is spurious bids.

And sell everything related to the site. You need to sit down and make a very thorough inventory, and be very careful not to include things you cannot sell (check the licenses) and be sure to include everything you can sell. Included in my sale was a handful of domains, full source code and the whole database.

People will want proof of whatever numbers you give them. Screenshots are OK to a certain extent. Eventually they'll need full access to verify things, like to Google Analytics or your site's admin area. A good way to do this is show them screenshots and agree the sale. Get paid 1/2 or 1/3 upfront, give them access, they verify everything and then you get the rest of the money. Even better, use an escrow service.

Drop me a line if you want more help. Details in my profile.
For me it's the lack of uplink speed that drives me insane. As heavily data driven as we've become with 22megapixel digital cameras, HD video cameras, and then just our normal backup requirements, I would be happy with 100mbps up, and 2mbps down.
RetreadBooks.com is avail!

ps. did a lot of NetSol searching: wow, domains with 'book' in them are hard to find avail
The main problem is that a lot of people see PD as a philosophy rather than a method. I tried to suggest concrete methods you could use PD to build better products. The research is here - http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~tch/
1) lines of code and time don't matter at all.

2) yes, if they're any good.

You need to figure out who might get value out of what you built. Those are the people that might by it.

Once you've done that, you need to build competition for the buy.

Why not tell us what the product is, so we can give better advice? It doesn't sound like you're going anywhere with it in any case.
Proposed privacy control UI for Facebook
HTTPS doesn't send the URL unencrypted. The intermediary can tell that you access google.com from the DNS records and from the TLS certificate, and it can analyze the lengths and timings of the request and response, but that's it.
Take the current URL from your PC web browser and push it to your device, over the air. If it’s a web page, it’ll open in the Android web browser; if it’s a Google Maps URL, it’ll open in the Android Maps app.

Meaning that now, not only can spyware pop up porn on my parents' home computer, it can also push porn to my kid sister's cell phone? Ditto for apps... I imagine spyware is a thing of the past for most Googlers, but it certainly isn't for the majority of users.
Skip lists and splay trees, two frequent suggestions on this thread, are "lesser known" for a reason: skip lists because for any given skip list implementation there is most probably an encoding of balanced binary trees that outperforms it, even in concurrency, and splay trees because every balanced binary tree outperforms them --- and, in order to avoid writing and testing balancing code, you have to trade off the fact that reading the tree modifies the data structure.

Judy arrays came up once too; there's a really excellent critique of Judy arrays here:

http://www.nothings.org/computer/judy/

(Long story short: you can get comparable performance from a straightforward hash table, and Judy Arrays have to be tuned to the microarchitecture).

Favorite data structure not cited here:

Aguri trees, which marry a bounded-size radix trie (like you'd use in a software routing table) to an LRU list, and automatically synthesize aggregates (like, 10.0.0.0/16 from 1,000 observations across all IPs) from the pattern of insertion. They're best known in traffic analysis, but we've used them on in runtime memory analysis as well.
Book.io and books.io will be available in less than a month based on what nic.io says.
I didn't know that. Thank you so much.
Apple TV is a good point...Don't know why all other Apple devices don't follow the same process.
The vast majority?
Even for urban areas, sometimes the options are less than thrilling.

A perfect example is Boston. Since Mayor Menino won't give Verizon a significant tax break, Verizon refuses to consider a FIOS deployment. Surrounding cities such as Cambridge and Somerville (which are next door), Quincy, Watertown, Waltham, Newton, etc... they all have FIOS. In Boston your options are the incumbent Comcast or being limited to DSL via Verizon. We're the hole in the fiber donut (ferrule). http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/boston-a-cop...

It's probably not as bad for students since the number of well-regarded schools here is very significant, and all of which have far superior options. However to live in one of the bigger tech hubs in the country and to deal with these sorts of limitations is nothing short of ridiculous.
Seems like it. I'd guess that it's ~90% of mp3 player customers in the US, but maybe I see a biased sample.
What’s taking so long, Mr. Babbage?
Wikileaks appeared on the internet three years ago. It acts as an electronic dead drop for highly sensitive or secret information: the pure stuff, in other words, published straight from the secret files to the world. No filters, no rewriting, no spin.

No spin? So here's an article about Assange and Wikileaks that doesn't actually even know much about Wikileaks.

Incidentally, if Julian Assange isn't his real name (unlike "proff", his #hack handle from back-when), it has been his not-real name since the early '90s, long before Wikileaks.
How can you get a data plan with that? Is that included with the pre-paid SIM?

(I don't know because I have a very simple phone--but good to know for when I get a smartphone)
Why would any computer automatically run programs on USB sticks? It just seems like a really obvious security hole for negligible benefit.
Although people who buy iTouches love all the apps and the ability to browse the web whenever they have WiFi, in the end, they're buying an mp3 player. They're buying it so that they can listen to music.

I don't think you are right.

The touch music player interface is good, but not as good as my old 40GB iPod Video. Man, it has been almost two years now and I still miss the clickwheel.

I got my iPod touch because of the large screen, the wi-fi and the apps. I don't even hear as much music as I've used to because I really hate unblocking the screen to skip songs and change volume.

Clickwheel, I miss you.
I agree, there are tons of good suggestions here and although I'm sure I'll face this situation countless times again, the most positive thing that I've realized from posting here is that lots of other people have this same problem :)
Steven Frank of well known Mac development house "Panic" blogged about the details lost trying to sync contacts through Google instead of MobileMe:

http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/618349003/here-are-some-thing...

His summary: "If you’re contemplating this change, I highly recommend setting aside a few hours for research first. You may be unpleasantly surprised."

Some more issues are discussed in today's TUAW article, "Sync Wars: Address Book vs. Google Contacts":

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/05/22/address-book-vs-google-contac...
Or just:

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://isohunt.co...

And pretend that nothing happened...
I'd say point #1 isn't 100% the same. In your analogy search engine referrals might be akin to the shop you just left putting a sticker with their name on you.
We are the extinction-level event, but many people don't grasp that. Society is what's at stake. Humans can migrate and adapt as they have in the past.
I figure someone will eventually ask this so I guess I'll go ahead and do so: How much did you get for cli.gs and did it make your time invested in the project "worth it?"
Being coerced (psychologically, physically, or otherwise) into sleeping with someone who "pays for everything" or into stripping for money is sex trafficking.
Anyone know what the story is on a UK Vodafone Nexus One? My wife might be buying one and I hear the upgrades on Android can be disruptive so I'd rather get it done sooner rather than later.
This is EXACTLY what i did (and do now)!! A 100-dollar refill lasts me 3-5 months. Low cost compared to other USA options.
Sorting Out Chess Endgames
Good idea! But I also want people to understand what I'm talking about to some degree :)

This is actually quite difficult to do. First you need to identify which features of a song are representative of its genre (a song might have 3 million of them). Then you need to build a model that can classify songs accurately based on those features. This has to be done in a speedy way, because you know, you don't have time to wait for a few million songs to process...

Relevant MATLAB code if you want to try your hand:
http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/resources/matlab/finger...

Relevant algorithm you might want to try (Hidden Markov Model):
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.131...

Company that does recommendations based off audio fingerprinting pretty well:
http://www.bmat.com/
Number has never been disclosed and I agreed with the seller that we won't disclosed it. I'd like to keep to my agreement :)

Was it worth it? Absoultely beyond the shadow of a doubt. Two things made it worth it: financially it was good, and more importantly, the friends I made and lessons learned are priceless.
Indeed; I might extend the old saw that "Ideas are cheap" to something like "Ideas are cheap, except when Myhrvold patents them and then asks you to do the hard work."

Has anything major and good come out of IV?
I think he's saying that certain topics allow everyone to participate because no one knows anything. If specialists were in the conversation, it would become shop talk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Ivankov

I come from an area which has a much worse crime (organized and otherwise) problem than Brighton Beach has ever had. I still see a lot of locals who refuse to acknowledge the problem. Not knowing much about Brighton Beach, it's hard for me to know whether you're right or just don't have first hand knowledge.
MIDI-OX might be able to help you: http://www.midiox.com/

It runs a Windows Scripting Host interface, which you should be able to use with most scripting languages to send the incoming data into MIDI-OX, and then route it directly to Microsoft GM.

If I were doing this project I would probably try going down this route, using the ActivePython distribution and pySerial. There might be simpler alternatives but this way looks pretty straightforward.
Maker Faire comes to life (photo slide show)
As a university student fairbooks.com seems the most appealing to me, since most of the time the cash I get back for selling my books on campus is anything but fair.
The headphones on my iPod touch give me the ability to skip forward/backward and change volume.
Gruber's thoughts can be summed up as: Google vs Apple, bring it on, but where's Microsoft? While he isn't wrong, it's not exactly much more than some common sense.

I also think he _seriously_ underestimates Microsoft.
How on earth did this make the front page? This is hardly the first or best meta-collection of icons. A lot of the sets here are too inconsistent, amateur, cutesy, or small to be of much use. And any round-up of free icons that skips Silk is irresponsible.
Vacation Rentals
What's the matter with you guys? THe PacMan thing was great. What a fun surprise. I've been to Google now 10 times in the past two days-- and I usually only use their serach engine once or twice a day. Stopped me from going to dogpile......
Yes, fair point, but other scenarios are deemed acceptable too: referring shop giving me their business card to give to the destination shop, or them calling ahead "to check" if what I wanted is in stock, or telling me to say "Joe from Shop X sent you" and they'll take care of me.

Also, two companies can partner and Company 1 can give a special discount to its customers to buy from Company 2, using a special promotion code.

My point still stands I think: there are many kinds of referral tracking we deem acceptable in the offline world.
I want to dig out the code for it - if I can find it - and see if I can make hour long versions of other songs to see how long it takes the Mrs to notice ;-)
Personally, I feel more comfortable having total control over my data first, and then choosing what I want to share with "the cloud". The direct personal control over syncing to a device I also control is the more critical factor over not requiring a separate computer for me.
Maybe I'm less anti-Microsoft than most (disclaimer: I worked there for a summer), but since WPS7 will be out before my current iPhone/AT&T contract ends, my plan is to switch to a Windows phone. I think the UI looks great (though practical usability is still in question), and I've always preferred Outlook to Gmail. My main gripe would be using an IE7-based browser, but as long as I can install Opera Mobile that shouldn't matter. I also wouldn't mind switching to the Zune platform - I've heard good things about the Zune desktop client, and iTunes has numerous problems. (I don't think Android offers any support for smart playlists, which would be a real pain for me.) I guess it might be obvious from the above that doing the core tasks well (email, browsing, music) is more important to me than how many googols of apps are available...plus, by using XNA as a dev platform, I suspect the learning curve for creating WPS7 apps will be lower than for iPhone/Android, because there are already tons of XNA devs.

Of course, this is all predicated on WPS7 meeting expectations, the pretty UI actually being usable, etc. Otherwise, Android. So I guess the point is that, at least in my case, Microsoft is still in the game, but they have only one chance to deliver.
Unbelievable, and rather disturbing. I never thought Gates would promote a patent troll. Either he's aware of it and ignoring it, or he's unaware and truly believes IV is a force of good.

Both possibilities send me into cyclical-wtfs.
Eight Principles of Uncivilisation (2009)