skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Um, this number sounds high. My recollection is that there is a $20/month difference in price so you are effectively paying an extra $480 towards a phone over two years. If the difference in up-front cost for the device is less than this, buying off-contract is cheaper.
Sprouter - Social Network for founders
I upvoted this only because of its delightful title. I don't even need to read the article - the title alone has made my day brighter.
Yeah, but adding a whole organization for each open source repo? I have tons of small gems/libraries that solve one specific problem, and all enjoy their share of users/

I don't want to setup a bunch of organizations just because they might change owners at some point in the future.
Kill hashtables, get shorter code.
What about conversions that take some time to happen? The post didn't explain their typical/average time between first contact and sale. Assuming it's more than the 48 hours they ran this for, this experiment might still get better ROI numbers.

Are they tracking this metric? It's an important one!
Hackerspace Member Survey and Analysis
Ah, a kindred spirit, I too am an assembly/ISA buff. However, if you pay attention you'll notice that this article is precisely not for ISA buffs: as I've written, I wouldn't have mentioned conditional execution if not for the debugging side effect. It is aimed at ordinary iOS developers who may be carrying assumptions from desktop architectures and not realize some ARM specificities that may impact them; I titled it "[…]things iOS developers ought to know[…]", not "hey, did you know about that cool thing?". Hence why I didn't mention free shifting (and it's the second operand that can be shaf-- er, shifted, IIRC).
Life was so much simpler back in the olden times when people worked 6 days a week, there wasn't the same demands on time.
Their questions answered, they would go home and order their gear online
I think that the length of the campaign had a lot to do with the substantial difference in numbers.

Even though the actual amount of money spent may be the same, I saw the DuckDuckGo advertisements countless number of times. In addition, it also had strong upvotes and positive feedback in the actual comments of the ads.

On the other hand, despite browsing reddit for likely a few hours over those dates, I never saw the Whiteyboard ad once.
No, that is the crux of his statement. Complaining about a situation as it doesn't exist, is akin to a straw man.
And Ubuntu Lucid made people freak out about the change of sides for the window buttons?
>On the other hand I don't see how the CIA could work without secrecy. It's nuts.

Whether the CIA is a net benefit to society is debatable.
If i rewind correctly
Especially for karma-whoring. Bit tacky.
My impression is that Google thinks that the Nexus One was successful; it's just the direct sales model that failed. Also, they have to have ADP4 (maybe running Gingerbread) for developers, but it doesn't make sense to develop a phone only for developers; I expect they'll sell the same phone under a different name through T-Mobile.
Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown
(edit timeout) I get your point cjoh - you're right, but I have real doubts about what can be achieved by an individual in a 2 year term, especially when set against the many other unrelated needs of constituents.

Many countries run parliamentary systems with party lists, such that candidates for office may be experts on a narrow range of issues rather than needing to appeal to a particular geographical constituency, but the US system is structured against that.

On a related note, it is interesting for those of us in California to watch how the candidacies of Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are playing out.
Blogging Rules: Should I Care?
> I was pointing out that there are very good reasons at times for keeping certain things secret, such as the "red button" [...].

I'm sorry, I still don't understand what you're suggesting. What would it mean for the "red button" to be secret? Do you consider it to be secret today? Why or why not?
I can make meaningless statements too! "Here's the list of iPhone apps I can install on my iPhone without Apple's permission: {}"

Incidentally, 2.2 (via the CM6 test) runs just fine on my Sapphire. The joy of Free Software is that I can fix my own device that is no longer the flavor of the month. T-Mobile will never give that device an Android > 2.0. But the community can, and it works much better than the stock image.

(Android 2.2 sort of works on my EVO 4G. The 4G doesn't work, but then again, since the EVO came out, Sprint's 4G hasn't worked in Chicago anyway. So I guess 2.2 works fine on the EVO, actually.)

Anyway, it all comes down to how you define supported. If you mean, "in the form of a bloatware ROM filled with ads for your carrier", you're right, Android 2.2 is not supported by anything. If you mean, "I can check it out from git, compile it, and load it onto my phone", well, pretty much everything supports 2.2 now. Pretty awesome, if you ask me.
If your carrier charges for tethering, your not leaving $$ on the table.

The other point, not being able to handle it first, I agree with, although it didn't stop me.
Microsoft puts IronPython, IronRuby under an Apache license
I think you miss the point of functional hardware vs highclass design. Thinkpads dont really scratch, or atleast you dont see them, they arent flimsy like so many HP's and Dell's ive had to repair.

When i make my gin and tonic and im not in my kitchen i use the top of my thinkpad as a cutting board for my limes, i mean thats an extreme case, you cant see a single scratch.
I don't think this is necessary. The solution is to go to your project's mailing list, irc room, ask your twitter followers, or whatever, and ask for a new maintainer. Even messaging the users who actively report issues can be a good idea.

Once you have a new maintainer, announce it, open a support request in http://support.github.com asking them to re-root the network to the new maintainer's fork, and then change the description of your repo (a one click change) to something like "this is no longer maintainer, check http://github.com/otheruser/repo

Yes, it takes a while, but then when you solve it, you give the community a new maintainer. So I think it's a better solution than just marking it as abandoned :)
Well, I made someone smile. Did you ever read my article "Tonight, I'm going to write myself an Aston Martin"?
Microbial world’s use of metals mostly unmapped
Oh, but it would picture them fighting for the small guy. That's something representatives like. It would be far easier to de-regulate an industry that fights for the small guy, wouldn't it??
We are a reseller of the Laserfiche suite of document management products and we do a lot of work in the SMB space. Our clients use Laserfiche for document management, tracking, and versioning. It's a really great tool for dealing with audits or regulatory inquiries. If you want to learn more check out our website http://www.aisww.com

It's affordable and very powerful!
Suing Posterous for calling them dead.
From their Terms of Services:

Some of the Services require payment of fees. Subscriber shall pay all applicable fees, as described on the Site in connection with such Services selected by Subscriber. Tumblr reserves the right to change its pricing and to institute new charges at any time, upon ten (10) days prior notice to Subscriber, which will be posted on the Site and e-mailed to Subscriber along with a link to the modified fee schedule so that you can review it. Use of the Services by Subscriber following such notification constitutes Subscriber's acceptance of any new or increased charges.

--------------

Or, it could just be that they're making money by raising it from VCs.
That can be good, though - so many compiler texts go into heavy detail about LALR parsing algorithms, etc., and it's hard to get a sense of how it all ties together.

Abdulaziz Ghuloum's "An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction" (http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf) is great, too!
The best thing going for the N1 was the expectation that you'd be able to run the latest Android release. With other handsets you're lucky to get one upgrade before they EOL your phone. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect at least two years of upgrades when you're expected to lock into a two-year contract.
Turing complete model train (1967)
This is awesome, I'd love to see it done with mario mushrooms =P Progressive mushroom abuse leads to one long never ending trip...
Beyond Social: Read/Write in The Era of Internet of Things
What do you mean? An African or European 747?
The Betterness Manifesto: So you want to build a better 21st century. But how?
Hey, I like CL, it's one of my favorite languages. But the community just isn't the same as the Haskell or Perl community. Haskell and Perl people love building tiny pieces that all work together. Lisp programmers love building huge apps that work exactly like the original author wants.

One is nice for the individual, one is nice for the community. Lisp is a language for individuals.
I quite agree, but that's why I own an Android phone rather than an iPhone.
Ask Alexis Ohanian, he designed it. I like the MS Paint look
could something like this be done automatically? No commits in X months leads to auto-abandoned + fires off email to owner asking them to commit something to unabandon it if they want.
ASK HN: Review my latest deal for web designers
While it isn't surprising what these people have to see, I was still somewhat caught off guard at the emotional toll these jobs can take.
What will your references be like if the project ends up going up in flames? (Through no fault of your own -- but who's going to know and/or admit that?)

And does the company even provide references, as a matter of policy? (More and more don't.) If you're concerned about having references, as others have suggested here I'd suggest cultivating references personally amongst your colleagues and contacts. Pick the ones you respect and who respect you. And do it now, before you begin a break up -- or the company does. (Beware of tipping colleagues off -- where such may be detrimental -- though, given the nature of the immediate situation you're describing.)

If you want to make your departure seem "less personal", tell them you have an opportunity you can't pass up. You don't necessarily have to tell them what that is. (If they ask, maybe tell them it's in stealth mode? -- or some term that doesn't sound as hokey or potentially bs, depending on your background and what would or would not seem plausible.)
The Taiwanese News Animates the iPhone 4 Antenna Saga
How much is porn? Not criticizing, just wondering...
I agree. I'm going to test this. Thanks for the tip Alex
I only looked at diversity and no other factors. I did a survey which I also published here on HN and in total got back 67 usable results. Quite a small sample but enough.

I checked for a total of 7 different kinds of diversity that can be split into two broad categories:

1. Ascribed Characteristics - Things that are "visible" and others ascribe to you. Here I checked for Gender, Age, Nationality, and Race. Hypothesis here was that diversity in Ascribed Characteristics has a negative effect because it fosters non-task related conflict.

2. Achieved Characteristics - Things that people have worked for. Here I checked for type of education, level of education, industry experience, functional experience. Hypothesis here was that diversity in achieved characteristics enlarges the overall knowledge available to the company and fosters task related conflict which leads to better decisions. Therefore diversity in achieved characteristics should have a positive effect.

As mentioned before while the results trended towards what I expected the results weren't significant enough to reject the Null-Hypothesis in all cases but Nationality diversity which had a small negative effect.

To summarize what I found: The effects of diversity in founder teams of internet startups are so small that they are outweighed by many other factors that are easier to achieve than to fine tune the composition of your founder team.
>if they have the choice between two potential hires of equal ability, they'll choose the one who's a better writer

There's a modifier missing in "equal ability" to make that sentence logical. Writing is an ability itself.
With all due respect, you're going off another tangent.

Froyo, aka Android 2.2, was released on May 20. It's now July 19th, almost two months later. The fact that only one phone will support an OS for more than two months is a problem.
Nah. It's just not being sold direct anymore. It's still being sold.

And it's a great phone, esp. with 2.2 on it.
Not All Bloggers Are Journalists, & Not All Journalists Are Jerks
"Television Is Not The Truth. Television’s A Goddamn Amusement Park."
All these other blogging services sometimes forget the basics: People write because they want to be appreciated. Tumblr has very good 'appreciation' and 'feel good' triggers in there. So it grows.
fixed that, thnx
From the article:

If I was an entrepreneur or developer, I wouldn't be thinking about social anymore. I'd be thinking: How can I use all of this data and build on top of it?
Those companies (except maybe Yahoo) had the advantage of being the first to get-it-right in markets that tend toward natural monopoly (due to network effects).
I went through this series several years back and it was very good. I just wish Jack had finished it :(

I always enjoyed his writing style (embedded systems programming magazine - programmer's toolbox;, e.g.,http://www.eetimes.com/discussion/programmer-s-toolbox/40269... )
It's not that much about the "fun" but more the way you want to live your live. I mean, our goal might be to work hard and save money for later.. or it might be to enjoy each days of our life. So it's all about what you want to do.. if working for a big company makes you happy, that's the way to go. But if working in a startup is what you really like, I think it's more important than the amount of money involved.
I don't know. I don't even know, if it was a lack of creativity that held him back, or not being able to focus, or maybe something else.
Yes, I was hoping that with a high bid like that, it would have received awesome priority placement. Alternatively, I found out that Reddit accepts whatever bid above $20 per day that you commit and however well the ad does, is up to the readers. At the end of the day, I agree I should have prolonged the campaign, but I wanted to see if a limited deal would have appealed to the readers.
I'm not actually. How do I track this?
Tell HN: Cambridge UK meetup details
Our first ever HN Meetup in Cambridge UK is confirmed for Wednesday the 28th of July at 7pm at CB Bistro, the upstairs room.

CB2: http://www.cb2bistro.com/

This followed discussion on the mailing list ( http://groups.google.com/group/hn-cambridge ) and the doodle poll ( http://www.doodle.com/ktp4gyrnvgnvcgdp ).

Any questions/ideas either post here, or the mailing list, or email me as per my profile.
I can't speak to how fragile Mint's technology is internally -- although I think the duplicate transactions showing up in my account for weeks speaks to that -- but it's worth pointing out that acquiring the transactions for a consumer is fragile and fraught with peril.

Mint uses a 3rd party called Yodlee for their transactional feeds. Some (most?) of the time, Yodlee acquires their transactions using screen-scraping of Home Banking websites. In theory, OFX could be used as well -- but -- there is no good way to auto-discover a FIs OFX feed via a well-known URI, or otherwise.

Quicken uses a proprietary db to link a request for a FI to a URL. This is their secret sauce.

I died a little inside when Mint is was purchased by Intuit. By leveraging their Quicken users, Intuit forces banks to purchase a branding identifier (BID), otherwise Quicken won't download or parse OFX transactions. There is no good technical reason for this. It's a classic embrace and extend: Create format (OFX) with industry players. Modify format (QFX) and leverage existing marketshare to force adoption. Make money at both ends.

So, yes, one could probably get the data from Quicken. But it makes very little sense to invest time in such a squirrelly method that /still/ depends on Intuit. (Remember the Palm/iTunes fiasco?)
>and repeated words

One of the things I hate most about English (and this is by no means a rant on how stoopid English is) is that "that that" can be grammatically correct. It's a minor thing really, but I could swear it's mocking me some days.
Apple MultiTouch for Desktop
Actually, our bounce rate is awesome. I agree though, we don't do a stellar job of explaining the product and we are working on a way better commercial. Should we keep the same girl?
Ask HN: Do you use "friend marketing"?
When you release a new web app or smartphone app, do you, in addition to commercial avenues, also "advertise" your new app to your friends?

If yes, has this been successful? e.g. do they try it out, give you feedback, spread the word, etc?

If no, do you avoid it because it is tacky or because it doesn't work?

Anecdotes appreciated in either case.
I never thought about it that way. That's quite clever and out of the box!

Guy Steele gave a very good talk about the problem (basically, "tail recursion considered harmful") and solution ("divide and conquer") at ICFP last year: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:bBDVKW8DP6UJ:l...

APL-style operators (map/reduce, paralations, NESL, etc.) are definitely the way to go. Not only do you get parallelization "for free," but optimizations like map fusion (see http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/02/10/map-fusion-an..., and Rich Waters' earlier work on SERIES: http://series.sourceforge.net/) become easy - something like that is almost impossible to do with loop analysis. All that, and you end up with clearer, shorter code. Due to all these reasons, I'm convinced that automatic loop parallelization is the biggest waste of time in parallel computing research.
Just got 80,000 visits... Now surprise me!
detex is easy to use and strips the latex out of latex files. You can also extract the text from a dvi using catdvi, and from a pdf using pdftotext, so I think you could probably afford to support latex :-)
People have been buying established businesses and improving them and profiting for a very long time, so whilst the "entrepreneurial spirit" doesn't sort of feel right with buying ideas, it is certainly a viable idea.

Delivering a basic upvoting type system for ideas would probably be interesting to a lot of people. Getting good ideas out of people (especially for free) could be difficult, and finding a way of getting only positive feedback (comments etc) on ideas also difficult (working on the assumption that you want ideas from the public rather than just from an internal team), but solving difficult problems is what it is all about!

I've passed on a lot of ideas that I have had because I don't believe they could make enough money to be viable for me (I live in an expensive country etc) but having an income of a couple of grand a month might appeal to a lot of people in other situations and those ideas could be useful for them.
I use VoIP for almost all calls on my N1, but any Android phone will allow you to do it pretty conveniently. For instance, I have two friends who are doing the same with their G1 and Moto Droid respectively. We use the sipdroid application with gizmo5.
Any Canadians here that can comment about your country's postal service?

Rates, delivery times, etc.
Comments if any welcome and very desired... =)
OK. But then, even if somebody is using `return', and its tail-recursive, it should be optimized. (`return' should just not raise an error, if it's not tail-recursice.)
Whiteyboard looks cool. I might have even bought one if it was very apparent that it could stick and re-stick easily. By the time I found that, I was off of the purchase page, and I had decided I didn't actually _need_ it.
$80,000 prize for the first team to build a better RepRap
I would argue that one needs a Board of Directors that IS an Advisory Board.

Then and only then would I appreciate and respect my Board.
I was a zip.ca subscriber for a couple of years. The service itself was okay, but I eventually cancelled when half of my returns started going 'lost' in the mail.

There are some postmen with suspiciously great DVD collections out there.
If they're going to compete with Apple though, who's now firmly waltzing into Google's territory (see iAd and all the new cloud services)...

...don't they have to be interested in playing this game?
And that requires implementing every feature addition at once?
4Chan's Sad War To Silence Gawker
The UK is braced for a new breed of High Street banking chain
Every user a developer, part II
My guess is that the existing software is too cumbersome for a smaller business to use? I've been looking at this problem, too.

Law firms tend to use this software, but it really should be adaptable to anything that has these requirements. We use Autonomy WorkSite: http://www.interwoven.com/components/pagenext.jsp?topic=PROD...

But there's bound to be a better way. Web apps with solid frontends or separate desktop apps.
Could you share the source please?
Wow... this book is exactly why ALGOL languages suck. They create too much of a barrier between the mind and the computer. With a LISP much of this is not even required, because you create the syntax tree directly.

Infix notation for the fail.
Let me fix this for you...

you don't need apple's permission to install anything. the developer does indeed meet a requirement to be included in the App Store, but, you never need to ask Apple if you can install x, y, or z from the App Store.
Personally I don't think that Google tried very hard.

I don't think Google tries very hard at anything these days. Just as it historically took companies decades to reach Google's income level, Google has also accelerated the normal process of growing into a fossilized incumbent.

Say what you will about Apple, but at least they still act like they want to win.
If you do, please have her practice applying it without bubbles. And get rid of the nails. It looked quite amateurish, and her not really being able to hold it didn't help.
For what it's worth, I posted a little analysis of the platform about eight months ago that I think still holds pretty well today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961523
Ask HN: Collecting all HN member "side projects"
If you are like me then you enjoy the side projects that HN members develop and announce on HN. I would like to collect a list of these so I can publish new ones each week on www.hackernewsletter.com. I can grab newly created announcements (but feel free to add them as well), but projects that were announced before this month I don't have.

In addition to adding them to my newsletter, I will also publish the results so that everyone can get access to them.

The form is located here: http://simplerise.wufoo.com/forms/hacker-newsletter-side-projects/
How about if the original link is small enough to fit in without truncation (bit.ly), then show the original link as well as a bit.ly link to the comments.

I hate losing the domain information in bit.ly links, and the @hackernewsbot (http://twitter.com/hackernewsbot) does a nice job of showing the original URL when possible.
Take a look at parsers. E.g. Parsec (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Parsec). They probably have lots of tail-calls, and wouldn't look nice with loops. Some parsers also make use of continuation passing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style), which only works with tail-call optimizations.
I wouldn't call it a problem; it's an artifact of a completely different ecosystem. If it wasn't an open platform, and was all built by only one company, it wouldn't have been announced until just before it was shipped.

I'm sure some people are frustrated by it, but following "publish early and often", and all that goes with it, is how open source works.