skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a branding issue. You define it once, industry-wide, and blanket products with it. It's a challenge, but significantly different (and easier, in my opinion) than expecting that each separate device clearly labels which way the batteries need to be oriented in that device, in such a way as to be clear, and readable at an angle, like the parent post requested.
While this does do away with one more modal interface in side-by-side battery arrangements, judging only by the pictures, it looks extremely shock-sensitive. It would seem suitable for office/home use as long as it's not in a small child's toy or something like an RC car.

Additionally, "idiot-proof" mechanical contacts like this are commonplace, going as far back as '80s, in high-amp "industrial" battery chargers.
I suspect human nature is in the way. Isn't buying a phone for "0€" equivalent to buying stuff by credit card? I hear in the US spending by credit card works to get consumers to buy all the time.
Well, that's the problem, it's possible to be somewhat productive in PHP, even as a bad programmer. Sure, such people code notorious SQL injection flaws, but... well, I can't think of a but.
As with most comments on the internet, you have to be careful not to take it all as stated fact, they are moderated which is good but I doubt they go into the implications of code snippets on edge cases when approving.

I haven't found anything misleading enough in the actual documentation to remember.
Thank you for the links. These look like loads of fun.
IRC servers can have lots of clients that receive messages, and they have no problems sending thousands of messages to connected clients. Diaspora's nodes seems to be both server and client, but the mechanics are the same. When it receives a message, it's just like a IRC client, and when it sends a message it is like an IRC server.

Unless each physical server is overloaded with busy nodes, I think it will scale well. There is a limit to how many friends that subscribe to an average user.

A possible improvement could be to have "repeater" nodes for popular users with tens of thousands of readers. Instead of sending 20.000 messages, you only send messages to 2-3 repeaters for example. The subscribers would be connected to the repeater node, and not the original node. I imagine that this could be controlled by setting a privacy level on your messages. Public messages would go to the repeaters, while private messages would be sent directly to your closest friends and family
There seems to be some confusion on this in the linked comments too, even though the very first commenter hit the nail on the head, but:

You don't need to pay for anything, including phones, up front any longer. Credit is (too) easily available and basically guaranteed to be cheaper and more flexible if you unbundle it from the actual purchase. These disguised loans should really only be attractive to people with low incomes and terrible credit ratings, and they will be taken advantage of because they have no other options.

The fact that you seem to be repulsed by the idea of paying amount $X for a phone, but think that paying that exact same sum, plus interest, plus hidden markup is acceptable as long as it's made complicated and so hidden in plain view is mind-boggling to me.
Team USA Heads to Poland to Compete in the Imagine Cup
It's not an argument over which language helps a programmer produce better code. It's an argument over which language helps a programmer generate an almost-correct solution faster.

It's the same as Worse Is Better: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
The 'least employable' comment might be a little unfair. I think these statistics reveal the fact that the job market out there is harsh more than graduate employability.

It's not surprising to see subjects like Medicine and Education having 100% success because they're jobs (mostly) supported and funded by the government for public services
Apple letter about iPhone 4
HackIt 0x0d: Hacker meetup in Rome, Italy (Jul 2,3,4)
Are you a Mapper or a Packer? : The Programmer's Stone (Reciprocality Project)
Yes, it is that simple - you need some prepackaged basic stuff, like mysql connector, xml, json parser and other commonly used modules. You need dumb-easy install and integration with web server, and you need a quite large and active community. In that case all cheap hostings will support it.
PHP is coming with all distros nowadays, so newbies and managers makes a choice without thinking at all.
sudo yum install php-* - that is why.

btw, take the arc, add a buzzword (llvm) and easy api to write extensions with fast FFI, and it will get as much hype as clojure - llvm is better buzzword than jvm ^_^
If you like python, try NLTK http://www.nltk.org/
In the USA, isn't the real issue that you can indeed buy your phone unsubsidized, it's just a hassle (or impossible) to get your new phone's fancy features working on a carrier? Why would someone want to pay $700 for an iphone/android and then have half of the features not work, because they can't get a compatible plan?
The pool is enclosed and accessible only through a siphon.
The solutions are welfare and subsidies for education.

Creativity in business requires a fair amount of luck. The successful 1% will need to be drawn from a large, educated, middle class. Even if most people end up striking out, it will be in our best interest to keep as many people within striking distance as possible.
"This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid[sic], Nokia and RIM phones."

Droid phones?
Sometimes brainstorming is more about motivating people and getting them all on the same boat at the beginning of a project than it is about coming up with the next brilliant thing.
Honestly, this feels like Fallout with cars.
Increase Your Source Of Data By Way Of Web Advertising Blogs
Though it's very bad for consumers, it's very advantageous for the carriers. By locking you to a particular plan they're making it hard for you to move to another carrier with cheaper plans.
As another poster just put - credit. We accept the concept of 'buying on credit' for just about every other aspect of our lives, but somehow phones are exempt.

We could probably get cars subsidized if we agreed to only purchase gas for a Ford from Mobil stations, and Toyotas could only by gas at BP stations. But why would we accept that?

More to the point, if phones/service was truly split up, and the majority of people bought there items separately, there would be more competition to drive phone prices down.

Local BestBuy here has a Spring Palm Pre - the older 8gb model - for (IIRC) $99 - but buying it without the 2 year service agreement, the 'suggested retail price' is $749. But it's still locked down - I can't buy it and use it on anything except Sprint, and I can't get any service from Sprint except for a 2 year service agreement anyway (IIRC).

What's also interesting is that the 'retail' price of the Pre seems to have gone up over time - last summer I could swear it was $599 or $649. It was $749 checking today.

Yes, Sprint may be a bad example here, but the gist is the same. If the voice service plans truly are subsidizing the cheap prices, give me an option to buy a full price phone and get service without the monthly service subsidy built in. My $39 voice plan should be $29 or $24 monthly if I'm not having to subsidize the phone price purchase.

In the Pre example, there's ostensibly a $650 'subsidy' for the Palm Pre, but I still can't get a used Pre and set it up with Sprint and get a cheaper 'unsubsidized' service plan. Over 2 years, I should be able to save $27/month without having to subsidize the original phone purchase price.

We're not given those options because the status quo is a combination which maximizes profit for the companies and presents the biggest barriers to people switching or canceling service.
Couldn't agree more. The system they cook up will be one of many websocket wielding filesharing services. What will they do for browsers without websockets, flash supports sockets (cofounder Tyler hacked out a quick fallback).

Maybe it's better to just not suppor older browsers?
If he’s not interested in patenting the box and enforcing the patent worldwide, then Chinese manufacturers are free to make the box and sell it (or the Chinese government can give the boxes away as part of its own foreign-aid programs), whether Hoff thinks that’s a good idea or not.

Also, if it’s possible to design a variant of the box that farmers or unemployed workers can build for themselves out of locally available materials, then the locally built product may be competitive with the imported version.
yes it is ... :P nd thanks to CSS3 nd HTML5
I think a magnesium based paint would work better.
I will be buying an unsubsidized Factory unlocked iPhone 4. (Without paying eBay markup!) My current jailbroken 1st gen iPhone is entirely prepaid with $0.11/min calling and $0.10 for sending a text and $0.05 to receive, but I will switch to an Unlimited calling and text plan for $50/month. Mobile bandwidth is through WiFi through a Sprint 4G device, which will double as my home Internet.
Because he doesn't say it does suck. It's just not where he sees the industry moving. As any good executive, he tries to see where his market is shifting and makes the decision to go in that direction. It may cause some short-term pain but if he's right, then he's saved himself a lot of money by not having to do bluray development.
Biology is just a layer of abstraction on top of physics. It's turtles all the way down...
If you're overly confident, assume you're just average. If you lack confidence, assume you're better than everyone else.

I think it's a matter of knowing where you stand in the range of low to high confidence, and then trying to balance it out.
In my experience, there is one single point where enterprise software takes a nose-dive into an unusable mess, and it's access control. Access control ends up being all of a business' BS politics encoded. You end up with "requirements" like this:

* Bob can't see Sally's actions
* Sally can see Bob's actions
* Jim can see Bob's but not Sally's actions
* Jim can't do X, unless Bob says so
* Bob can't do Y, unless, Jim *and* Sally say so

It's all about politics and procedure, not the actual work to be done.

There's a cure to this: Make every action in the system open and accountable and let people get things done. If someone does something they aren't supposed to, then undo it and discipline them.

Obviously there are some areas where (like transferring money or publishing content) where permissions are perfectly reasonable, since you don't want disgruntled employees siphoning off money or publishing disparaging remarks. But, then again, we hear about management (the super-users of enterprise software) doing that kind of damage pretty frequently, too...
http://netlimiter.com/

http://tmurgent.com/Tools.aspx

http://furbo.org/2009/03/24/slow-ride-make-it-easy/

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/10/a_engineers...
Ask HN: Best Invoicing Software?
What's your startup favorite invoicing software?
Oops, our phone isn't broken, we just "mistakenly" said the network didn't suck when it did.
It's gotten to the point where the porn will find you. Try surfing intensively across a range of sites for a couple of hours without running in to porn. All it takes is one link to an expired domain.
Buy a mobile broadband device, and things work well. You don't get GPS, but the WiFi location is pretty darn good.
Well, I installed openvpn on a vps I happen to have sitting around.

If you're up to installing openvpn yourself head on over to rackspace and grab a 256mb vps. (Be prepared to spend a few hours reading some docs to set up openvpn.)

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...
I've stopped thinking others are stupid. I assume most people are smarter than me.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

"Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn from him."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I used to find myself thinking others were less knowledgeable or less advanced than me in a lot of subject areas. Now I always remind myself that if such a great person could always find something in others better than himself, then there's absolutely no excuse for me.
Techcrunch has Video Of Unreleased Google Voice Desktop App
Despite the claims PHP is ugly. It's very easy to use. I've seen newb programmers able to do simple if statements and read data from a database with little coaching. It's really a delight to use for simple websites. The other factor is it's standard on ALL shared hosting. If they started to make rails or django standard I would have started with that instead.
Apple says iPhone 4 algorithm is to blame, not antenna
Does the Droid have an antenna?

Edit: I didn't understand your original comment. Rereading it, yeah, that doesn't make much sense. Perhaps the dear leader only cares about the Droid family on Verizon. Well, more likely they just didn't want to acknowledge the existence of Android in a press release where they are delivering a mea culpa.
Braintree offers this. We call it Transparent Redirect. We've worked with several QSA assessors who have verified that by using our TR API merchants do not fall in scope for the requirements for transmission of credit card data and can therefore complete SAQ A to become PCI compliant. http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/credit-card-storage...
$27 for a plastic box? My city gives recycling boxes away for free, about the same size. No reason these should cost above a dollar or two.
It's great to see Apple taking on the problem head-on. I'd much rather see honesty from a company than have them deny it and sweep it under the rug as if it were never a problem.
This doesn't seem to jive with AnandTech's testing which ignored the bars completely and installed some software to read the signal strength directly.

Their conclusion was that the iPhone 4 had better reception overall than the 3GS for various reasons, (a fact which Apple seem to be clinging to like a life raft) but that the external antennae was still faulty even when held "normally" and if fixed would make a major difference in areas with poor reception.
France Calls Google a Monopoly
My palm is pretty big, and when i fully cover my nokia 1100 cell phone, not a single bar of network is lost. Stop Covering up Apple, and admit that you guys committed a mistake.
It also reminded me of my favorite quote:

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
-George Carlin
"As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund."

This is more pragmatic than bitching on the Internet (I concede a difference between investing and reporting these problems and merely bitching) or class action lawsuits[1]. Vote with your wallet, eh?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478105.
"Hig labor prices" = "High Prices"

Imagine the cost of a Big Mac in a hypothetical world in which fast-food workers are paid 10x as much.
Programmers who are able to evaluate their code every second (in a read-eval-print loop) are more productive than programmers who need to compile their code for a minute, and those are vastly more productive than programmers who write their programs on punch cards and evaluate them batched at night.

Lawyers, as far as I've been able to tell, only get to evaluate contracts every time a suit goes to trial, which is, what, every 10 years or so? And if Bill Clinton is right in challenging what "is" is, then any word's meaning can potentially be modified by any ruling.

The problem may be that the evaluation procedure is so much less straightforward than with running code. We got legalese because colloquial English is an even worse way of specifying precise documents, but I'd love to see law documents become computer programs like financial contracts can be. (See http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers... for a particularly elegant example.)
I particularly liked the reminder about the return policy. I think that was put in there as a hedge against those class-action lawsuits. It makes no sense to sue over a product that you can still return. And now, the issues are so well documented that I doubt anyone buying a phone now could claim to be oblivious to the issues.
I'm not seeing any C++ there, both lessons focus on C. Am I missing something?
Lacking confidence and thinking you're better than everyone else can lead to very bad things.
Wasn't his conclusion that the iPhone 4 had worse reception overall that the 3Gs, but better reception in areas of poor reception?
Having built websites in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure ... guess what? They all present you with equal challenges if you're not building trivial small websites on shared hosting.

I've built websites in PHP, Python, Common Lisp, and RXML/Pike. Some have been very small, and some have been medium-sized. I currently work on a several-hundred-thousand-line PHP codebase, and I don't think being in PHP has been a serious problem for it.

I do agree that language infrastructure is more important for small projects, and language power is more important for large projects. I think it's critical to provide good language infrastructure precisely because of this, though, since virtually everyone starts out learning a language with a small project! It's really easy to bounce off of CL, when you're first starting out, as easily demonstrated by a survey of c.l.l (at least, when I paid attention there 2003-2007), and it's not because of the language itself; it's because the infrastructure is (was?) severely lacking.

I think it's harder to build a good infrastructure with a more powerful language, ironically, because the power substitutes for things that would otherwise be infrastructure-related, and once you've learned enough of the language to work on infrastructure, you no longer care so much.
So you're also telling me that my 3G reception is actually worse then I had previous thought? All those places I get 4 bars are really 2? I guess this explains why I often got dropped calls when I have "full reception".

Wonder why they didn't mention the proximity problem. From what I have heard that's actually more annoying then the signal issue.
I originally started unscatter.com on Tornado, then got caught up in the whole node.js spin. I started rewriting the application using node.js, then realized I was rewriting large chunks of Tornado in javascript. I went back to Tornado and have since put up something that works, very quickly.

I use supervisord for maintaining multiple instances of the application running. I found it the simplest way to manage it. It also gave me support for watching and restarting any instances that hang. I'm also using nginx to proxy. Currently I'm proxying 2 instance of tornado on a 4 core box. I'm also running mongodb, memcached, and nginx on the same small 256MB ram box right now.

In the future I could see me moving to node.js in the future, but for any application that requires working with multiple APIs, Tornado was a much better headstart, and the framework itself was more mature and ready to use than anything from the node.js camp several months ago.

Unfortunately no one is actively supporting the auth portion of Tornado, and it could use a maintainer. I'd set up, but with a newborn I'm not sure when I'll get to it. I'll be releasing ( and have already done so in the past ) any changes I make back to the Tornado project.
I find it very encouraging that Pivotal is encouraging the Diaspora folks to focus on the user experience.
man ! they are good at that...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477924

jobs did exactly what I thought they would do. Change perception, not reception.
Agreed. They are really just punting the problem to AT&T at this point. At least we all expect/have gotten used to them sucking.
When Apple was writing the signal strength algorithm, they forgot to account for the reality distortion field.
It's got two! http://www.gomonews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/android-l...
Apple should have said: "Since AT&T has such a crappy reception in most places, we now give you the illusion of having an improved connection!" instead of "We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see."
it will be a costly lie.
Live tube map halted as TfL hit by 50-fold growth in web calls
Agreed. But consider the possibility that the lesson today was exactly that; a smart student will figure it out, just like we did.
No. Android phones receive radio signals with linux kernels, very small ponies, and magic instead of antennas.
All kidding aside, Club Penguin for iOS would be a hit. Parents could let their little ones explore their iPad or iPod Touch in the safety of Club Penguin. I believe Club Penguin is still in flash at this point.
upvoted you, because I don't know how to downvote...
Stored Procedure DB
This remains a big problem with the web: Timelessness. It turns out that the ephemeral nature of offline commentary is a big feature. If I say something offhand in a bar I don't have to curate that statement forever, going back every few months to add some editorial comment about how my opinion has changed.

It struck me the other day that this is why archivists have trouble with the web. Old links go dead all the time. Various people have tried to convince web publishers that they should take the preservation of old links seriously - we are destroying history! But it isn't just that preserving old links is hard work - which it is - but that history is a terrible burden for the living. You are forced to curate and disclaim it, or risk having it held against you. It's much more comfortable to just walk away from your history and hope that it biodegrades.

Forgetfulness is a blessing, and few online systems provide it in any well-thought-out fashion. Users are forced to use hacks to achieve it.
How very corporate ;-)
It took you less than 60 seconds to install Java, compile Clojure, and start the REPL? :) I haven't actually used (or installed) Clojure, but most of the complaints (here and on proggit) appear to be by people who don't already know Java, and so have to figure out enough of the Java build process to build Clojure in the first place, even though a touted advantage of Clojure is that you don't have to deal with Java.
OTAs use GDSs too
This is all kinda bad, but... really... if you're so convinced that your phone is b0rken, why not just stop yapping and go make use of your return policy?

add.: yes, YOU, DOWNVOTER! Solve the problem you're holding in your hand instead of just focusing on pointing your finger at Apple - enough people are already busy doing that 24 hours a day.
What is green, has four wheels, and is 4" tall? Grass! I lied about the wheels.
"taking on the problem head-on" - my reading of this was just the opposite.

They are attempting to put a different spin on the whole issue , its not that the phone has a faulty antenna or you are "holding it incorrectly" - its that we display incorrect number of signal bars, nonsense.

A correct- taking the problem head-on approach would be - "We apologize for the mistake and are aiming to rectify it in the next software update. Thank You."
Does anyone know what "AT&T’s recently recommended formula" actually means?
Now the important question, will it hurt frame rate if games are developed using Python instead of Java for android?
Sprint 4G device, which will double as my home Internet

Hope you have a backup plan. Since the Evo came out, Sprint's 4G is significantly slower than their 3G, at least in the places where I use it.
does not jive with my own exp using android, RIM, and Nokia..
FOrtunately! I don't have to use this app to get crappy bandwidth. DSL!