skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Legal, fair and ethical. You're offering a potentially better product to exactly the people that need it.

However, before you hawk your brand and wares, try to imagine yourself a good Samaritan and introduce yourself. You might get more information about their needs and wants than you can ever glean from a bug report. This stuff is called Solution Selling and it's a more conversational approach to sales:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_selling

N.B: the references in that page contain wacky commercial products. A better sales advice might be "just be human and be honest". Commercial SS includes variable pricing stuff you don't need.
Mathematics (and certain sciences) are one of the few fields where actual facts exist.

Most news, though, deals with with humans, humans' interactions, and so on. You can never know what other people are thinking or feeling when they do something, and oftentimes they themselves don't even know.

If you want to see how bad most reporting is, just see how bad it is in fields you understand. Most reporting about the computer industry is terrible. Just as one funny example of a "fact" by an expert (and ironic who I'm writing this to), pg's article on PR has a footnote about how the damages figure for the Morris worm was calculated.

Great read in any case, which sorta makes some of the same points: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html.
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> Still the best precision text selection device I've used on a mobile.

I've had no problem with the iOS method so far, and haven't been longing for the return of the trackball at all.
In Chrome 6.0.453.1 dev, neither the "Submit an Entry" nor "View Entries" button works on this page:

http://musikpitch.com/songcontests/pump-up-music-for-warm-up

You can click them all you want but nothing happens. It essentially makes the site unusable.
How to avoid the assignment statement
As an Australian I can confirm that the AUS to US latency (or AUS to anywhere really) does indeed suck. I REALLY notice the difference when I on an Aussie site.

However hosting over in the US is a lot cheaper than it is to buy locally. Still, I'd urge application developers to buy hosting in the country of your target market.
You could be proven right, but I don't think we should be alienating the education system, anyway. Education, regardless of it being public or private, exists for a reason, and that reason wasn't always babysitting and patronizing. Lack of many values fundamental to our educational systems in favour of modern capitalistic societies has brought us here today. A parent today rarely has the luxury of spending as much time as they'd like with their children. Our cultures rarely gives us any (meaningful) amount of time to spend with our children or loved ones; in fact they want as much out of it as possible. Spending money to rethink and redesign education, update the teaching materials[1], set transparent procedures for staffing schools etc. will not only lead to more creative students, but also responsible and enthusiastic teachers.

[1] I apologize in advance for paraphrasing. "Propaganda is passing as history" would be true if the winner didn't always write the history books. The important factor here is critical thinking: if a kid is given the chance to develop it instead of being spoon-fed whatever is passing off as fact, then (s)he could tell subjective from objective, and could relate to "the other side" when dealing with historic facts.
> HTC have UI designers. Apple clearly don't

Wait, what?
My (admittedly shallow) knowledge on Android's speech recognition is that it's being done server side. In other words, I suspect the reason Apple's not doing native voice recognition on the iPhone is that they don't have the processing power (either on the phone or their servers) to do so.
I was invited to join SGI by a Japanese co-worker. He told me that if I joined and simply did this chant everyday, I could get get anything I wanted. Like, anything.

This seemed like a great deal, so I actually went to a meeting with him and two of his "senpais" in the organization. Of course, I had no intention to join; I went out of (morbid?) curiosity.

Apparently　I was a sort of strategic "target", so to speak. They wanted to expand in Brazil so it would be nice to teach a Brazilian (me) about SGI. They showed me a video of Ikeda (the founder) in Brazil and how a believer was cured of cancer thanks to SGI. They also talked a little about the Buddhist origins of SGI, but didn't enter into details. I'd have to join and start doing the chant thing. Only then I'd learn more. They were really friendly, but somewhat creepy.

I even toyed with the idea of joining and doing a write up to be published later under a pseudonym, but eventually decided against it.

SGI is (at least nominally) internationalist and pacifist, so it's only natural that the nationalist and militarist Uyoku don't like them.

I won't claim they are as evil as Uyoku, but they're definitely not harmless.
I worked at a porn company and built probably the exact same thing you are building ( http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-ame... ), so:

1) Yeah, if the salary is good, and

2) Friends: yes, Family: maybe
> When it comes to text selection, how often do people use it? I ask that in sincere curiosity.

I do that pretty regularly to quote in mails and forums on my iOS device. But I think the issue isn't about how often it's used, but how seamless it is. If you can do it without thinking about it, it's good. If you have to stop when you need to select text, it's not.
I would call that screenshot "tacky" rather than "beautiful". It's a jumble of mismatched UI elements.
I'm afraid that if this parallel becomes common, it will backfire. An unlicensed public performance, which receives a penalty of 2x the license fee, represents the song being played one time, to a limited audience. If one extrapolates from there the number of potential hearers/hearings from a shared file....
Why is this on CrunchGear?
Oh sweet mother of interface chaos. That screenshot doesn't even come close to the interface clutter I get on my Android when running a few apps. While backgrounding is nice, I wish developers would resist the urge of throwing an icon in that top dock-thingy for every single process running.
I found 960 grid system framework quite helpfull.
It htlps you set up a layout with 960 px wide.
http://www.960.gs
If you lose it you might look on amazon, where you can find this book with four different covers. (!)

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Cp_27...
From the article...

"2. Failure to touch. I can tell whether an attempt is going anywhere within about a minute even if I can’t hear a word of what’s being said, just by watching the “physical conversation”. Make her comfortable with your touch from the first minute, even if it starts as a tap on the elbow to illustrate a point, and she’ll respond in kind."

Please, don't be going around touching every girl you would like to hook up with. The first minute? Geez, that sounds like asking for trouble to me.

What's #3? Stalk her and go through her trash to find out more info about her?
I agree.. I would think that a more highly advanced technology would start to resemble organic life. I'm no engineer, but I'd say we're still a long way off from this in most regards, am I correct?
New List of Skilled Occupations for Australia
The Japanese have been using a hybrid system for some time now. I guess the number of Chinese characters they use regularly has become somewhat more limited, but it's been holding steady for quite a while now. They did try to get rid of them once, only to find out that it wasn't going to work very well.

You're right that the Koreans have pretty much abandoned logograms entirely, though. Now that they use hangul, I understand that there aren't many people remaining who can read anything written in their older writing systems.
Comet: the New Communication Platform?
Maybe it's a preventative measure against the money given to Afghanistan going into the wrong hands, i.e. more terrorism.
Has anyone noticed a pattern yet? We get a sensational rumor. Then we get a flat denial. Over and over.

Someone trying to cast doubt on their viability in hopes of getting people to stop funding them?
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>Rule 2: Customer service is understanding

No, if you read this section, rule 2 should be that if you accept credit cards, you have a very liberal refund policy, like it or not.

You can choose to be an asshole about giving the money back, and make the customer go through the credit card dispute process, or you can be friendly and give the money back upon request. But the point is, you are going to be giving the money either way, so you might as well make it a less painful experience.
Google gestures sounds awful lot like iOS Spotlight - it too indexes apps, contacts, calendar and contents of some applications. Instead of full screen drawing it gives you the default keyboard. Swipe right on home screen to access it.
I was thinking the same, but more along the lines of 'Why is this on hacker news?'
Drawbacks? The difference could also be positive. Think of toki pona, an artificial language with only 123 words and their compounds.

http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/What_is_Toki_Pona%3F

When you see a bug, you a bug, whether it's a cockroach or a spider. Thinking becomes clearer and simpler (or so they say).
I don't see any content, just a seo spam like website with many similar questions.
Although this isn't going to replace programming by any means, I think its a really cool idea to get people interested in app development. Obviously, the next step for them should then be to learn some real programming, but a lot of people are never going to get to that second step if there isn't some easy way for them to build that first app, without any prior experience. This is especially true for younger kids who have a great idea and don't know where to take it.
No it can't.

This is utter nonsense.

To the seabed there is not the slightest difference between oil leaking, and oil being captured from an active well.

Why do people believe/post such stupid things?
But they're looking at actual infringements. 1 download, 1 infringement. The size of the audience, potential or otherwise, is here nor there.
You can't trust anything you read on TechScrunch or CrunchFear. This is bogus science by a guy who believes in a lot of weird shit.

Another article from the same original source re: the alien starchild:

http://m.www.helium.com/items/1618071-mystery-of-the-alien-s...

Have fun.
Thanks for the link. Actually closer in spirit to another site mentioned in the comments of that post:

http://www.heatseek.com/
A C programmer's reparsing:

"Initialize right away" --> "Make it hard to figure out what your variables are by mixing up code with their declarations."

"Construct new values" --> "Manually do what the first pass of the compiler already does. Except don't use the const keyword."

"Make functions, not procedures" --> "Don't check for errors. Don't even make it possible to check for errors."

"Make your objects immutable" --> "Let's see how much time we can spend in malloc!"

"Use purely functional data structures" --> "Arrays and hash tables are often the optimally performant data structures... but you shouldn't use them."

"When you can't help it" --> "If all your other attempts to sabotage your code fail to provide the required performance degradation, you can always slow your program down by copying data around unnecessarily."

In all seriousness, just like the famous "GOTO considered harmful", the author's "assignment statement is harmful" is an assertion which is valid in some situations -- quite possibly most or all of the situations he personally has to deal with -- but most definitely not valid in all circumstances.
It can also be useful for very useful for aggregators.

Hmm...HN + Embed.ly + Userscript?
I don't really know how old I was when I learned to read - certainly I was reading by age 4, and probably reading at a standard of age 10 when I entered school at age 5.

But that's a guess.

And it seems to me that I have two modes of reading: fast and "normal." In both I have trouble with misspellings that create alternate or near alternate parses, and yet in "normal" I do "hear the voices in my head."

So it's not just that.

At this point I'm reminded of the tennis player who was losing a match, and during the change-over he said admiringly to his oppenent: "Your serve is the most fluid, flowing and graceful serve I've ever seen." "Thank you" replied his opponent. At the next change of ends he asked: "On the ball toss, do you breathe in or out?" His opponent didn't reply, but did lose his next 6 service games as he wondered.

I probably won't think too much more about exactly what happens when I read. Besides, I've heard that double-blind experiments in psychology and linguistics often produce results contrary to those produced by introspection.

I think I'll stick to math and hacking.
True, but the goal here is not necessarily "make programming more accessible".

The goal is "make it possible to create an app with NO programming knowledge".

The ability to create "trivial" apps and then run them on your cell phone can be exciting for many people. I think this will increase the appeal of Android as a consumer device. Of course, a big flood of trivial (tool-created) apps in the Android market may reduce some of that appeal, but overall, this seems like a good move by Google.

It will be interesting to see if more people buy Android phones because they can now create and run their own apps on their phones
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Well, for instance, if oracle contacted me 'cause i was on RedHat boards, I'd find it pretty creepy and irritating, especially if they started going off about redhat not respecting my privacy; I put my email on there myself. for someone else to go and assume that I didn't actually mean to put up my email would be kinda insulting.

But then, i'm not the sort of person who responds to sales solicitations. (In fact, I do my very best to avoid buying products that require negotiating with a salesperson- it's usually the mark of a higher price.) so you might not want to listen to me.

However, if you are poaching from a semi-open-source support form, you might want to keep what I say in mind.
You do know that every temporary storage of a an object in python causes an increase of refcount which is a write? Each of those writes causes a 4kb block to be copied, and they are eventually scattered around enough to matter.

What we've done is mmaping multi-gb files into memory by separate processes. It works, but it's a cumbersome workaround which makes you do way more work than you would ever wish to be able to use multiple cores.
... in Pythagoras's dreams. It ain't so in our universe.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980327b....
Chicken soup inhibits neutrophil chemotaxis in vitro
How so?
Just to pick one out of that list the linkedin one there is an answer from a previous employee of linkedin. Seems like content to me.
But, it should be! Programming ought to be the new literacy, and the phone, which many already have, is an excellent platform to get started.

Sure, their approach might be amazingly ignorant of history, but you can't fault them for trying.
Do not be fooled, right now Python 3 does _nothing_ to increase parallelism of two python codepaths being able to be executed at the same time.

It just fixes some pathological cases where GIL behaved even worse than it should.

Unladen doesn't try to fix GIL either and it is doubtful than it will be able to do so, PyPy has a greater chance of achieving that, but it's still not on the roadmap.
Looks like http://www.flashdevelop.org/ is an alternativ.
Does anyone else have good experience except just using a text edit?
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It's a big problem on phones that use touch sensitive keys placed directly under the screen. Your back or home button can be uncomfortably close to the spacebar on the keyboard.
Scientists Have Discovered Antibodies That Can Protect Against AIDS
Yes, sports news is generally held up as the highest-quality news by media critics. They think it's maybe an outlet for people's intelligence, where very sophisticated analysis is common and the audience isn't afraid to disagree with coaches and other experts.

(I guess we could say that there's a bias in favor of good sports news and against good political news.)

When trying to look for unbiased news, it's useful to see what the filters actually are, and the basic business model of media corporations. Prof Bob McChesney is knowledgeable, and even has a radio program about it. http://www.robertmcchesney.com/

The typical analysis is that the business press often has the best coverage, as they need a tolerable view of the world. For example, at least pre-Murdoch (I don't what people think now), the Wall St Journal was considered by critics to be be informative, aside from the over-the-top editorials. And in the New York Times, they recommend you read the articles starting from the ends (rather from the beginning), as editorial filters are loosest there.

The usual recommendation is not to worry so much about "biased news", and instead consume media with an awareness of the biases.
Well as a counterpoint, my father returned his Droid for a Droid Eris because he liked the Sense interface much more than the stock Android one.
B is for Billion: Wordnik passes 9 billion record mark with MongoDB
I agree with most of what you said, but:

"Initialize right away" --> "Make it hard to figure out what your variables are by mixing up code with their declarations."

No. Putting all declarations at the top of a function makes it hard to figure out. If you can use C99, you should keep declarations and initializations together and hopefully as close to where they are actually used as possible.

One thing I'd add about the article: naming a function "move" and then having it return the sum of two vectors is bizarre and worse than the original implementation. At least, move as part of the Point class actually moved the point.
Agree.

When I was going through K&R I was always thinking to myself, "did they just know all of the variables they would need before hand?".
Reading this article, I immediately thought of this prediction, where a Russian economist predicted that the US would break into six separate pieces by 2010:

http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/us-to-split-into-6-pie...
Most definitely true.

I think things like ringtone customizers get slightly more mindshare, at least in the circles I've been following, because people are used to doing that on other phones -- it's rare, so far, to be able to customize input methods on most phone models, so that's not something people commonly look for. When I've told people they can get a different keyboard for Android, they've been surprised.
It appears to be working for me on Google Chrome 5.0.375.99 beta, if that is of any help for you.
Colbert.
Here's a list of Australian VPS providers. http://www.vpsau.com/

Unfortunately they don't all provide self service and some even have a setup fee!

The amount of traffic you get varies. For $40/month I've seen 5GB up to 60GB traffic on a 256MB VPS. I'm one of the people shocked by the true impact of choosing cheaper overseas hosting. I'm also running 12 VPS's at home on a DSL connection and they're super fast for Aussie users.
Thank you for your feedback, I will amend my entry.

> "Make functions, not procedures" --> "Don't check for errors. Don't even make it possible to check for errors."

I will make my tutorial clearer on this point: errors can be embeded in results. Option types can do wonders. Of course, this is not easy to do in C.

My opinion is that programming in C means either dealing with legacy code, seeking utmost performance, or being nuts. I think that leaves plenty of room for reasonable programming. I never said that my assertion is valid in all circumstances. Actually I agree with you here. But I would be extremely surprised if my advice couldn't be followed by most programmers, most of the time.
> Spending money to rethink and redesign education, update the teaching materials[1], set transparent procedures for staffing schools etc. will not only lead to more creative students, but also responsible and enthusiastic teachers.

The problem is, public education chokes out private education the same way that public roads often choke out railroads and water transport. It's hard to compete with free, but it's possible by offering better quality. But it's near impossible to compete with already-been-forced-to-pay-for-it; it means any parent who wants to privately educate their kids needs to pay twice - first through property and income taxes, and second through private tuition.

I know more about the American system than the UK one, and I'll tell you - I'm pretty sure if the U.S. announced today that they were going to scrap the entire public education system at the end of 2010 with no transition at all, there'd be a better system in place by 2011. It's that bad.

The most frequent counter-argument I hear is that the poor couldn't afford it, but the poor are the ones getting the worst out of the current cookie-cutter-centralized-managed system. There's been lots of experimental design in charter schools and custom tailored programs that work, but it's impossible to make ground in a politicized arena. I say scrap it all and let the citizens come up with something better - it made sense to have central education for a while after the Industrial Revolution got underway, but the system is outdated now. I'd be comfortable seeing government spending on education close to 0%: give tax credits for education spending and let parents and private organizations sort it out. They'll come up with something better. They'd be very hard pressed to do any worse than it currently is.
The problem with attracting "developers" with a limited skillset is you're asking for low quality applications.

I'm not against the idea, and if this kind of tool attracted people who care deeply about human factors, interaction and graphics design I'd in fact be totally in favor of it.

But this doesn't look like much more than Visual Basic or, as Gruber put it, Hypercard.
On Friday I discovered a simple thing that shows 'clunkiness' on the Android.

Basically... from the home screen drum your fingers across the screen. If you've drummed them from left to right it will interpret the multiple finger input as a single swipe from left to right and it will move the screen to the right. Drum from right to left and it will read that as a swipe to the left and will move the screen to the left.

This differs from the iPhone 3 & 4 (which I also have on my desk). On the iPhone a drum of fingers isn't interpreted as a swipe... only an actual continuous movement from one side to another would be considered a swipe. On the iPhone the first finger is counted as the input, and the others are ignored as noise. So whatever app was under the first finger of your drumming would open up.

This is a very minor thing, but it does show that the Android is misinterpreting and not handling touch input very well. The iPhone correctly determines that a drum is not a swipe, and the Android does not.

I don't have deep knowledge of how either the Android or iPhone handle gestures, so I can't comment on the internals.

As to whether it matters... well I'm using an Android and love it more than I did my iPhone. So I would argue it doesn't matter to me (I value cloud + choice above the polish). But I also wouldn't defend the Android against charges of clunkiness because it's pretty visible throughout the system.