skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel it's worth pointing out that they haven't killed the phone, just their retail channel. Theoretically the thing could finally become available in carrier stores now, although they probably won't bother after Google's rather poor handling of the marketing and publicity.

Sad to see them giving up on challenging the carriers, but with no retail 'Google stores' where people could examine the thing before paying ~$500 for it that's not very surprising. I still like mine, even though I might have saved a few $ by buying a Droid or something.
At the very least-- one of "us" in there could educate us on what's happening in there.
Thanks for providing this link. I was not looking for this information but now that I have it I know I will use it. I have always wondered how compilers work and know that I will get a great amount of value out of this book and several others listed here. This is why it pays to hang around HN. Every once in a while gems like these show up.
Sugar is sugar. Honest Tea is no healthier than Coke, at least not because they use sucrose instead of HFCS (maybe it is because they use less of it, but that's not at issue here). At least when people drink Coke, they know they're doing something unhealthy.

Fuck Honest Tea and all of those other natural beverage peddlers that try to trick people into thinking that their bottled diabetes is somehow healthy because it's natural. There's nothing natural about drinking megadoses of disaccharides.
Ask HN Developers: Portfolios for Job Interview
I have a job interview with a consulting firm on Wednesday, and they have implied very loosely that I should have some work samples to show them. I've never had an interview in-person before that has asked me for these things; they have all pretty much gone along with my resume and any references I may have provided. How should I prepare for this type of interview, what should I bring, etc.? I'm thinking of going to Fedex Office tomorrow and getting some screenshots of applications and sites I've done printed up on 8.5x11" paper in full color, but will this be enough?
I've found that with complex systems, the biggest correlation to programming productivity is the amount of debug information available, not the size of the code.

I don't think this point is made often enough. Brevity is a virtue certainly, but ultimately what counts is not LOC, bug counts, iterations/sec etc but features delivered to users. Worse is better reigns supreme here which is why you so often see engineering and design disasters like php, craigslist, myspace, and windows brushing aside far more elegant but less engaging alternatives. For most of us the pride we take in our craft makes this a very hard pill to swallow but swallow it we must.
Stamps are as follows:

$0.57 Nationally

$1.00 To the United States.

The delivery times vary from a single day to week, depending on the destination.

I do not believe that Netflix will ever ship dvd's from the states as Custom's Brokerage fees are quite high.
Uh, there are obvious differences between different versions of the iPhone and/or iPod Touch that lead to new version envy. Otherwise why would anyone upgrade?
Thanks for posting the numbers.

Online commerce is interesting in part because it's so darn fickle. I saw your product awhile ago on HN and shrugged. Then just saw it again today, and bought the largest size. I couldn't really tell you a good reason why.

If I had to guess, I'd say that "Free shipping" is probably part of it, along with "limited time" but just a couple weeks after seeing your original ad, I have different ideas for office layout, and suddenly your product fit that void nicely.

Good luck with it!
Best in terms of what exactly? Baseline snarkiness?

Most customers don't know, much less care about, the exact version number of their phone's operating system. They care about what the operating system can do for them. But I suppose if Gruber were to compare the actual capabilities of currently available Android systems vs. iOS 4, he would have much less to be snarky about on Apple's behalf.
There was a lot of grumbling about the $40 shipping charge to Canada too. I probably would've bought one if the shipping charge didn't more than double my total.
Note that {} still means an empty dictionary, not an empty set.
BookLiberator Lets You Make E-Books Cheaply
It's pretty clear that the engineering work behind the press conference was well underway before the Consumer Reports video hit.

Google for "apple responds to consumer reports" and the top hits are from Consumer Reports' web sites, then some other stuff, but nothing that really says it happened.

Was there something in the press conference?
... despite all the engineering effort that's gone into speeding them up.

Implementing and optimizing a language are big projects. They benefit a lot from sponsors. See Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Opera. (I don't know of a single company which has sponsored LuaJIT, but it's worth mentioning.)
I hate it when I see code like that. It's so much harder to maintain. You've saved two lines of code but made the intent at least 10x harder to infer. I've been wading through the Rails codebase lately and this kind of thing gets to be annoying fast, particularly when you're trying to debug a function that's littered with these kinds of expressions, often nested.

Honestly it's this kind of thing that makes me wonder if the Pythonistas don't have a point about clarity vs cleverness.
I'd like a pony.
Nah, it's not significantly different that Apple announcing IOS before it's available on a phone. I mean, are your parents waiting excitedly for the features in 2.2?

It's not a problem, it's a trade-off. Given the rapid advancement of Android lately, it can be argued that it's an appropriate one. Pick your poison, eh?
I haven't either -- I always just point people to my web site, where I maintain a portfolio. Paper is probably good in case you are meeting in an area with no computers or internet access. Better to have stuff with you and not use it than vice versa.

Could also bring code/screenshots on a USB drive too, though not everyone is going to want to load up an unknown drive.

I got a 404 on your resume page....
It seems like that is secondary to them. They maybe doing well enough.
Is there any idea when are applications are going to be open for YC W11? When do they usually open for winter sessions?
I assume that the OP was using "red button" as a synecdoche (wow, I finally found a use for that word) for the entire procedure by which the US nuclear arsenal is launched. Which may or may not involve an actual red button at some point. (If I were designing the system, it damn well would.)

Now, I assume that launching a nuclear missile is more difficult than ringing up NORAD and saying "Hi, this is the Preisdent, the launch code is XD8-3342-9982", but let's not take that chance, shall we?

(Man, I hope I didn't just guess a real launch code. That would be difficult to explain to the nice men in suits.)
Amazon sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books last quarter
Only downside is your phone is 100% better and you get the occasional bug you'd expect from an RC1. I've been using it daily and side from my hardware issues(my battery shorts) its absolutely great.
It looks like Listiki isn't picking up my Twitter OAuth. After I authorize Listiki, nothing happens. Are they forgetting to get an OAuth access token when their callback URL is triggered?

I really wanted to add my favorite PG essay: "What Business Can Learn from Open-Source" to that list. Oh well.
Oh, I know it. And I would never put it in a project I'd expect other people to read, much less in a large project. I've got stuff like that in some of the easier Project Euler solutions, because I don't want to solve them in the most rational fashion.

edit: my most-epic-single-line is a range definition, and I actually use this one as-is with a description of how it works:

[((left=prefix*10*scale-1)==-1 ? (scale==0 ? prefix-1 : prefix) : left)..((right=prefix*10*scale+(10*scale-1))==-1 ? prefix-1 : (scale > 0 ? right-1 : right))]

If passed a prefix, this iterates over all array entries where the index matches /^prefix/ (one-based, I have a zero-based too), entirely skipping non-matching ones. Just need to increase scale appropriately, and loop until it finds nothing. It was fun to come up with.
Good catch on the resume. I just moved servers; the .htaccess files must have not transferred. It's fixed now. Thanks!
What Business Can Learn from Open Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html
Yep, that or create a simple web-app where users can log in (using OAuth preferably) and configure the number of stories they see a day or the karma threshold and then spin up a custom RSS feed for them.

Might be a fun weekend project...
Regarding Haskell, yeah I thought as much. When writing this code I thought, "This would all be better, or maybe nearly automatic, in a purely functional language".

Regarding Arc, there's still a distinction, since as you point out you can't enumerate the domain of a function like you can the keys of a hashtable. (And you also "call" a hashtable in Clojure.)
Their are several phones that are very easy to root. I know this doesn't pass your cut but no carrier is going to give up control of a device. The droid x debacle is a good example of this.

Galaxy S takes 1 file, 1 reboot, 1 click and its rooted. Just as an example.
It's true, I mocked up basically the site you see there in a few minutes in Photoshop, sent the png to Jason and he asked for the PSD... I didn't know he'd actually use the draft as the final version - hehe. It's got a certain charm to it, I suppose...
Do you not have any problems with dropped calls due to data being the lowest priority when the cell tower is processing heavy traffic? I have had this problem with data in general (when I go to a concert, for example, it's almost impossible to use data reliably, moderately difficult to use voice, and SMS works perfectly).
One of my favorite features of Coffeescript (and other languages) is destructuring assignment, which lets you use pattern matching over an object to pull out values from nested structures. It's way more useful than this proposal: brief when you want brevity, but you still get the full object returned from the method when you need to debug, and apis don't have to be adapted or rewritten with the usage pattern in mind.
However only small part of heap is directly referenced by stack/registers

But those few objects referenced directly may keep a lot of other stuff alive. It's not that uncommon to have left-over pointers on the stack that are no longer live, but still reference a large graph of objects.
Sorry for the delay. I do wish HN would add notification of subordinate replies to one's comments. (Although I understand the arguments against.)

Anyway, send me an email (see my profile) or I'll send you one, and I'd be glad to share my absurd little hack. I see from your profile that you spend a fair amount of time in Windows. Me too -- particularly when I wrote the thing I'm thinking of -- which is why I turned to VBScript (it's also doable in JScript aka MS Javascript. Hmm, maybe it is in Jscript...). I wanted a dialog that would force its way to the top of the window stack (Z order).
It's a problem in that the old phones should continue to be supported and get the new OS's in a timely fashion. They shouldn't need to worry about which OS is on there, but I think the OS should continue to get better over the life of the phone regardless. I'm not saying it needs to be out there right now, it's more of a question of whether a random model x will ever get it. Some probably won't, even if they can support it, and I would say that's a problem.
Well, that is an interesting theory. Perhaps Google wanted both the travel business and Needle?

I would love to know how much work it takes to build a custom Needle schema, set it up, etc. for a new domain. Anyone tried it?
Ask HN: Downvote. What are you saying to the other guy when you downvote?
I frankly have tried to wrap my head around the concept, but I just don't get it. I don't remember ever downvoting unless it was an accident. I find it quite similar to throwing stones at someone and hiding when you do it.

Assuming a comment is not insulting, what do you mean to say about yourself and the other guy/gal when you downvote?

Would you still downvote if the other person would know you did?

Thank you for responding.
That's a pretty old debate. I think brevity does a lot for clarity, and the more you work at making your code brief the better you'll be at reading brief code.

Of course if other people are reading your code then you should consider what current programming practice is. But the current practice in Clojure is, for cultural reasons, to make things really succinct. So you can assume those reading your code are ok with that.
Fortunately, though, you can buy other HTC phones which are unlocked and w/o a contract from online stores like newegg.

Since many of those models are also sold in telco retail stores, you can do your research there, and buy the unlocked version online.
An Interview Essay to present a better Feedback 
Any sort of interview can be nerve racking as one has to answer the questions skillfully and even write different types of essays surrounding the topic spoken. Therefore this can be a hard task for interviewer and interviewee.
I'm chaneling Palin here.

Yes I meant what you said - hairdressers, etc. My bad. Need more coffee in the morning.
Yay. A marginally competent hosting company just released the code to their mostly unsuccessful cloud! This is like IBM open sourcing OS/2 a year after they admitted defeat to Microsoft in the desktop operating system market.
And the second Makespace Cambridge pubmeet is this Thursday:
http://www.meetup.com/Makespace/calendar/13976904/
How We Visualized 1 Billion Dollars
Moving services? New furnishing for that bigger apartment?
Ask HN: Why did Wikia Search fail?
http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/31/jimmy-wales-deadpools-wikia-search/
I completely understand the appeal of "quick blogging" like Tumblr and DailyBooth (for photos) for mainstream folks. Both are serving the masses i.e. people who have a lot to say, but don't necessarily have the substance to back themselves up.

They can quickly and easily post their thoughts to the world and get the instant feedback they need to feel heard in the form of hearts, pageviews, reblogs, photo comments, regular comments, etc. The feedback acts like a drug. All you need is a taste and you're hooked. If you don't get enough then you'll bother your friends to "please heart/comment/etc, my post". The act of asking and then receiving this drug is what keeps people interested. And that cycle never ends.

Tumblr (as much as I respect the hell out of the business they're making) is somewhat detrimental to people. I've seen it suck up peoples' lives like World of Warcraft or another game. I guess the same could be said of Facebook, MySpace, and others, though. Sorry for the harsh reality check.
Sometimes what I'm saying is that I would prefer not to have more metadiscussion about downvotes, but would rather discuss interesting technology trends or science news that satisfies one's intellectual curiosity.

I take every downvote I receive seriously and try to figure out how to make my comments better. New submissions can't be downvoted, so for those I can only learn from which ones (mine or other people's) get the most upvotes.

It's not a big deal. It's best to come to HN without a lot of ego invested in karma. Just try your best to post thoughtful comments and the karma (and especially karma average, something I still have a lot to learn about) will happen in its own time.
Too bad san francisco is a "Invalid city" :(
How did you get the Eagle? They were useless when I called them.
nice, thx
This is a standalone version of a new overlay that was added to PadMapper. If any SF natives spot anything that's obviously wrong, let me know?
The front end looks similar to Metaweb's open source Freebase Gridworks. http://code.google.com/p/freebase-gridworks/
From guidelines:

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
By the time you have a board of directors it's not your board any more.
I once asked a bank rep how this worked, and was told that at the end-of-day settlement, all deposits and credits to the account are processed first, then debits and withdrawals.

I believe the bank was Wachovia (now Wells), but it might have been BofA. I assumed then that it was an industry-wide customer-friendly standard, but maybe policies vary?
We hear this a lot. Hopefully we can keep improving startup times, but when it's possible to use either Ruby or JRuby, it makes a pretty good combination.
Please update your emergency contact information.
This morning while out running I came across a woman who had collapsed on the sidewalk. Another runner and I performed cpr until paramedics arrived. We were able to contact her husband through her iPhone. I don't know if this story has a happy ending yet but I realized I didn't have an emergency contact setup on my phone. I probably could have dug through her contacts but because she had her first contact as "Emergency Contact" it made things just a little easier.

Also, you might want to take a few minutes and read up on the latest cpr techniques. I had a few training courses about 20 years ago but the paramedics pointed out some things I could have done better - faster chest compressions than what I was taught, for example.
The problem with the "monthly" concept is that it forces me to estimate how many notifications I am going to get each month, and then choose an appropriate plan. For me, that was pure friction. In addition, I try to avoid recurring charges on principle.

So, from my point of view as a potential user, I'd be much more likely to just pre-pay a fixed amount.
Thank you for sharing your experience!! Any issues with overheating?
Yeah, I've been checking periodically for a mature 2.2 ROM. Right now I use CompleteEclair, and I like it because everything works. I used OpenEclair before but quit because it was too non-functional. Everything working well on cyanogenmod 6?

The biggest thing that prevents me from trying out lots of ROMs is that I really don't want to wipe the phone. Does anyone know a good way to backup/restore after a wipe without paying for one of the backup apps? I don't have money, as mentioned earlier.
Something significant for the HN crowd:

"[ SMC Business Councils President Tom ] Henschke foresees another unintended consequence of the new reporting provisions: that in order to cut down on tax forms to be filed, businesses will trim the number of vendors they do business with. "I've actually heard businesses talking about consolidating their purchases, going from 150, 200 vendors, down to less than 100," he said. "That will most certainly lead to some small businesses being swept under the door."

"The [ official IRS ] taxpayer advocate's office shares that concern. "Many large vendors already have computer systems that can track purchases by customer. They are likely to advertise that they will track each customer's total purchases and send them a report at the end of the year that business customers can use to comply with the Form 1099 filing requirement," the office wrote in its report. "Small businesses that lack the capacity to track customer purchases may lose customers, leaving the economy with more large national vendors and less local competition.""

One fun bottom line:

"[T]he Joint Committee on Taxation -- a nonpartisan Congressional committee that analyzes pending tax legislation -- estimated that it would bring in only about $2 billion a year in new tax revenue."
I am not complaining. I really would like to understand.
I think Firefox 4 will have typed arrays:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript_typed_arrays

http://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl...
Impact of Structured Data on Travel Search
Compete comparison for Tumblr vs Posterous vs Wordpress

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tumblr.com+posterous.com+wo...
My ever expanding bookmark titled "Reddit For Programming"

http://www.reddit.com/r/python+javascript+ruby+cpp+haskell+l...
The lack of retail stores wouldn't have been such a big deal if Google offered a similar, if not better, return policy than phones you could hold in your hand before buying.

A 14 day/$45 restocking fee policy is pretty bad. When it's for a $500 device you can't play with anywhere before purchasing, it's abysmal.
actual capabilities of currently available Android
systems vs. iOS 4

So how many devices are shipping now with Android 2.2 and how many are shipping/getting updated with iOS 4?
It looks like they did a nice job with the image capturing infrastructure, but the side note about using OCR to process the text is misleading.

Most OCR packages, including the ones cited, do a bad job of text conversion, even with high-quality images.

There's usually a significant amount of proofreading and retyping that needs to be done.
Work towards your own standards of excellence, not others'.

I found excellence to be too much work, and now aim for adequacy.
Hack yourself a webcam
Do you also tremendously respect people who work for the mafia in order to change it into a charity from the inside? Do you think that is a productive endeavor?

Politicians really want people to believe it is. Then they can bring all those people who want change into the gov't and neuter them by convincing them to wield the power they detest, suffocate them in bureaucracy and the inertia of (for example) a $3.5 trillion "large company" (as PG put it), quagmiring them so that the people in gov't can keep their power and violence.

And it's been quite successful at doing that. The light to this is that gov't is stuck with its own inertia, and eventually drains its host society of so many resources that the society cannot sustain the gov't anymore. An informed society could then start operating on a voluntary basis instead of organizing systems of violence.
I don't down-vote for disagreement. I down-vote for comments that I think are seriously detrimental to the goal of maintaining high signal-to-noise in HN.

For example, imagine a comment that just said "LOL!". Yes, I would downvote that, and it says "Please don't make empty comments like that. If you like it, upvote it, and be done with it".

I also downvote for flagrant wrongness, and I mean really mean flagrant. For example say there was a post on geolocation and somebody insisted in all seriousness that the Earth is flat. I would downvote that for the obvious reason.

That said, I think the general guidelines do not frown on voting for disagreement and many people do.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect I downvote once for every 50 upvotes or something of that order - it's pretty rare.
"Copyright (c) 2010, Zed A. Shaw and Mongrel2 Project Contributors."

Couldn't this be some sort of loophole that "Mongrel2 Project Contributors" isn't defined right there in the license?

I know, it's BSD license, not much point in finding a loophole, but still.
Vote for the best idea to improve global health. Or submit your own.
I wonder if legacy saas products could switch to a user owned/funded model.
The bloody atrocious sound quality is what I noticed. I've had better quality Skype calls than the voice quality in that video.
Self could be your mind/attention, but there's no reason you can't expand your idea of self to include your ego, mind, entire body. I suppose the question is: will you take responsibility for what goes on within your skin?
I thought I would throw this out there because I am sure someone here knows this.

The article said Qualcomm is working with Apple to make a chip that would allow the iPhone to operate on both AT&T and Verizon networks. Does that mean the chip would also work with Sprint by virtue of it also using CDMA or is there more to it than that?
Coffeescript is certainly cool, but Clojure has sophisticated destructuring assignment as well.
Reasons to Envy the French
Digital garbage? Wasting usernames?