skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) What problem does Twitter solve?

I've been a big proponent of this methodology - build something people want, the product will have an inherent value.

However companies like Twitter and Zynga are proving that isn't the only methodology out there.

One could argue that Farmville + co solve the problem of "how do I entertain myself"/etc, but that's fairly contrived. Social/Casual games don't solve any problems and are popular mainly because they are addictive (in the same way roulette doesn't solve a problem but makes casinos a lot of money).
ScraperWiki - an online tool to make scraping simpler and more collaborative
For Java reloading, I'd recommend you check out http://www.zeroturnaround.com/jrebel/
"Why on earth should anybody pay for it?"

Because you don't want to deal with ads. You want to listen to music away from your computer. You don't want to use up your Internet cap re-streaming the same content over and over again. Maybe you occasionally have some times in your life where you don't have Internet access 24x7. Maybe you want higher quality audio. Maybe you like albums and don't want to live in a single shuffle world. Maybe you have exotic tastes in music and these services don't offer you the content you like.
The two people that I know that upgraded (from G and GS) both say that overall reception is better than before and they love their phones. We're in a hilly area. The phones are still sold out in many places, I can't believe there is any significant financial hit over this.

Certainly any revisions to later production and next model antenna design would have no impact on the timetable of whatever OS X and iOS projects are in the works.
If anything siphons talent within Apple, it'd probably be those continuing to improve iOS for iPad in particular. Although the iPad is doing extremely well, being so new they're no doubt working very hard to make things better yet. Apple is working hard on many fronts. Their projects are planned, so there's no reason to expect any significant unforeseen migration of engineers between projects.

Realistically, the biggest thing that drives some people away from the iPhone is AT&T. (on a personal level it is about general dislike of the company not any actual service problem, it's similar to how some have grown to feel about Microsoft. I had the feeling even before the iPhone came out) If Apple can expand to another U.S. carrier without a significant loss due to changed AT&T terms, we could see a real change in the financial picture... more growth.

The comment about "many of us are awaiting the latest OSX iteration" puzzles me a bit. While I'm sure Apple will add some cool new things in the future, without knowing what they are can you really be chomping at the bit?
Apple certainly does work on development of many things at one time. Release timing is determined by many factors beyond engineering.

As far as hardware updates go, I think more people are interested in watching Mac hardware iterations as improved Intel chips come out. But for the bulk of consumers the existing chips are plenty powerful.
I'd probably most like to see third parties (including open source projects) make more use of the excellent support for using multiple cores and GPUs in the OS. In particular I'm thinking of VLC and ffmpeg (which is the basis for many video utilities).
Matching Innovators With Shoppers : Daily Grommet
It does solve a real problem.

In order for people to maintain more than a few friends, it's nessasary for them to know what those friends are doing. If you have More than 100 friends/acquiantances, then talking to them say once a week or once a month is not time efficient.

Personal blogs and broadcast emails helped solve this problem, but the time taken to compose posts means that they are often infrequent and irregular.

Twitter (and Facebook) solved this by lowering the barrier to publishing by allowing it work from mobile and be short with no text formatting. Facebook was focused on a closed group of friends which left a gap for Twitter to target people who want publish to a wide number of people which includes very many people who have their own companies or otherwise see a lot of benefit from being well known.

I think Twitter executed well with the following:

- 140 character limit which forces people to be direct as non-professional writers tend to go on too long.

- Raising money early and therefore having a big team to build the product.

- API, this allowed massive innovation to happen outside twitter and to fill in the long tail of applications for this service in a way that no other site could match and they would have not been able to do internally.

- Keeping the product simple to use

- Publicity
Yes, if you spend no more than 10 minutes with them daily, it stands to reason that you're not addicted or have your addition well under control. Unless you have a TV. ?
I'd pay a premium for a age 30+ server. That would apply for most multiplayer games…
It is a great game, especially the paid survivor mode, although beware, it's a huge timesink in every mode. Very addicting, gives one a sense of complete freedom to build and hack almost anything he desires. If you search youtube you'll be astonished at how much time and passion people have put into their creations. It gives me a feeling of an old school game, before graphics became the No.1 reason to play a game.

What's even greater is that Notch (the sole creator and developper), apart from being very dedicated to the project, is very accepting to users' feedback and completing requested features.
Thanks for the comment, appreciate it.

I've tried Bespin, they've refreshed it and most of the features that made it awesome are now gone (for the time being). As nice as the editor is, I don't really have much faith in the project anymore. The problem (and also aspect that makes it good) with Bespin is that it uses the HTML5 canvas element. Slow as hell but it's only going to get faster.

I know what you're saying about speed. The goal with my editor since day one was to have it as speedy as possible. I won't settle for mild slowdowns under 5000 lines on a netbook. This is unacceptable considering it is a big portion of the market.

I like the tagging system, it's pretty innovative but I don't think anything else is ready for it yet. Plugins are a good idea too. Everyone likes to write code in their one way.

Thanks once again... :-)
python + arduino = crazy upvotes
I would have agreed with you a few months ago, I loved how easy it was to buy music of iTunes.

Then I got a new laptop and installed Linux on it - now all that music I brought on iTunes is locked and I can't use it.

So take that "ownership" with a big helping of NaCL.
This article featured perhaps one of the greatest lines I've ever read in the Economist:
"Schumpeter was tempted to visit some creative destruction on the book with a blowtorch."
That's the implication is there is a DDoS attack on your DNS provider, but I think FooBarWidget was inquiring about the implications of a DDoS attack on your website, and specifically if you would be charged for the bandwidth consumed by the attack.
Back in the olden days of IRC, there was times when entire regions of the internet were taken offline resulting from a ddos for personal vendettas. For exactly that reason too - they attack the weakest link and often it isn't the host directly.

In this case - it really could be anything. The cost of one of these attacks is next to zero. Rarely will the botnet owner lose any machines resulting from an attack. The unfortunate thing after one of these attacks is you have no way of preventing it or going after the source.
No-one in Australia is having antenna issues. (We can get it to drop 1 bar maybe). Blame AT&T (Or the SF Hype chamber).
Hmm I never heard about those. Will have a look.
I'm thinking of adding twitter. Say, you have a twitter account. You enter your twitter name in your profile info on PeopleSmart. You'll then receive notifications on Twitter (also, or only, as you wish). What do you think ?
Awww posterous is breaking for me:

Uh oh, we had an error.

Something to do with the DoS attack they were under?
Isn't everything DRM free on iTunes? Maybe you bought it before it happened.. is it possible to download the DRM free version from iTunes if you owned the DRM version from a few years ago?
It is easy to say that now - would you have said that about US cable modem accounts 10 years ago?
Why is it that school is so important for an MBA? School is certainly important regardless of career but there seems to be a strong emphasis when it comes to MBA degrees. In Engineering or Computer Science, if you go to MIT that is going to be awesome. But if you go to a state college you will still be able to get almost any job that an MIT guy can get. Besides, skill is far more important in these fields, as per my experience. Any comments?
i've never had an issue organizing/managing music that i've bought.
From Gruber's comments in http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/07/papermaster , it appears like some folks at Apple are spreading the word that Papermaster was fired and that he was responsible for the problems.

It is unclear whether Papermaster will respond to the rumors or whether he'll ignore them.
huh! Ruby is a lame language, no one in corporate world wants it. They prefer python. Twitter had a bad experience with it.

It just another crying session by ruby hippies. I cant wait for the day their language is dead.

Python runs so nicely on windows that no one would even care if iron python was scrapped. It just shows that Ruby is being developed by unprofessional people who have no practical plan and cant even port their language to the most used platform in the world.
How is a young person with little or no work experience and no college education "underemployed"? That is basically the least qualified group possible.
Compare that to Python. Nearly all libraries work very well on windows. Thats why Python trumps ruby it is developed by much more sane and professional people rather than R -rated Apple Fanbois
Is there anyone here who gets Spotify where it's available? I wonder if you could relate your experience and if it's changed your attitude towards music and particularly iTunes and downloading music.

I ask because people don't seem to have a problem borrowing books from a public library but never buying them after reading. So why is music different?
All the music in the iTunes store is drm free now. If you would rather have an mp3 than an AAC version of the file, you can use iTunes itself to do the conversion.
sure, if you have the skill and you can show the boss you have the skill, you can get the (technical) job... that's what really matters.

However, assuming you don't have (or can't show me that you have) the skill or experience I'm looking for yet (this applies to everyone who is just out of college, who didn't do significant work as an intern or significant project work, e.g. most recent grads.) I'll take a programmer from MIT over a programmer from woodland community college.
Least qualified for what? In previous decades young people with little work experience and no college education had a solid blue-collar track available to them.

Nowadays, not so much.
Permutations in Google Translate (PHP-Script)
My point is if you're lucky enough to get a solid union unskilled blue-collar job, great. If you get stuck doing a similar job without a union for much less money, that sucks but it isn't underemployment.
thanks ! Which browser are you using ? (Safari ?)
Interesting ideas though I don't know enough about kernel and language design to know if there are any revolutionary ideas in this or just an evolution upon current thinking.

Anyone with a CS PHD want to highlight some important points for the rest of us?
Blogs existed well before twitter.
Blogging also sends messages to nowhere.
BBC News iPad app re-done in HTML5
err they created few best languages out there C# and F#
and Python / Java run like kinfe through butter.
Ruby Programmers are incompetent apple fanboi's.
But they can't be used on both sides - you port your ruby program to windows and then you start using .NET libraries (and there are a ton of them, many of which are good). Initially it might just be a couple to make a simple GUI, then you add more and more and in the end you have to rewrite the program if you want to get away from Microsoft.

So I don't get their problem.
It isn't like Microsoft made it particularly easy for developers to use IronRuby though. Look at these two popular Connect issues to have IronRuby and IronPython integrated with VS 2010:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/...

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/4...

While its sad that it takes IDE integration, the truth is that it really does and that Microsoft knows it. So its hard to say it didn't have the enough people using it, when they never did the 1 thing they really had to do to give it a chance.
You're right about Twitter hitting the missing square in the periodic table. I think you glaze over the importance of the short nature of Twitter, though.

Yes, you can write arbitrarily short blog posts. But you don't, because you feel like you have an obligation to make your official blog be a well written, safe-for-future-eyes snapshot of your personality. Most of us have started a blog with grand intentions and given up after the effort of crafting essays carefully became too much.

Twitter requires no more commitment than a minute of your time. The simplicity of the medium (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360/) is its greatest strength, and it is also why nobody else was able to make it. It takes a special sort of daring to provide a product that does so little. I'm sure users are constantly clamoring for the 140 character limit to be lifted, for new features to be added, and for more in general. But if Twitter had been created with no emphasis on short, simple messages, it would've been just like all the other blog ecosystems.

The impact of the small commitment goes beyond the importance to the average user. I think that one of the huge factors in Twitter's success was all of the hype generated by celebrities. What better way for celebrities to connect with their fans? They can do it in the privacy of their home, it takes nearly zero effort, they get extra points for being tech-savvy, and they cut out the middleman of the media. For the star basketball player who think he's misunderstood (e.g., @TheRealShaq), this is perfect. No more media twisting his words, just one-on-one conversation. Except it's better than one-on-one, because the whole world gets to see how you treat your fans.

In short, I think Twitter took off because even though they didn't know it yet, people yearned for a low effort medium of communication.
Nuclear Reactor Renaissance
I only started buying music after they dropped DRM. That’s when I decided to switch from buying CDs to buying files.
Ask HN: good examples of P2P payment sites 
I am designing a website that encourages people to post specific items and sell them to shoppers. The website would take a cut of every purchase.

What are some good examples of other P2P sales sites, and is there a recommended open source platform for implementing such a payment process?

Thank you.
It is, actually, but it will cost you 29 cents (didn’t matter for me because I bought about 5 songs or so as long as iTunes still had DRM).
I've been using a normal, free account on Spotify for about a year. The quick summary:

The upsides: fast, and free - and I don't mind the occasional "radio ad" being played.
The downsides: not everything I like can be found there as the assortment is heavily geared towards contemporary popular mainstream music, and there is no guarantee that something you find will stay - it has happened plenty of times that a single track has been pulled from an album on Spotify, as well as an entire album being pulled from a represented artist's selection.

I consider the product genial, but as long as the assortment isn't complete (nor guaranteed), I will keep downloading (as well as buying).
Because what matters is not what you learn there, but your rolodex. As they say, it's not what you know, but who you know.

If you go to one of the top MBA programs then you'll meet some of the people that will be hired by other big corporations and you will be either competing against them or negotiating with them.
Weren't you recently complaining about the MVP selection process? If non ms platforms are so superior, why do you spend so much time flaming MSFT? Seems like it's time to move on
The script will translate a given text from one language to the next for all languages that google supports.

- Invoke php -f translate.php "TEXT" > translate.html
- Open translate.html in Browser.

An example (in German):
Ehefrau->Frau->Weiblich->Männlich->Mann->Ich...
(wife -> woman -> feminine -> manly -> man -> I...)

Fun to play around with.
That is probably true, but I think saying one country is a better colonizer than another country is not saying that much, especially if that other country is spain.
(Brief) discussion on webhostingtalk:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=970837&hi...

Another 30 gbps attack, discussion on webhostingtalk.com:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=966658&hi...

Edit: interesting thread, apparently the reason it's 30gbps is that it's maxing out the link from China telecom, so legitimate Chinese customers are getting traffic dropped. FBI are involved. Suggested solution by some is to get traffic routed over more intercontinental links possibly via peering agreement with China Telecom, and beyond that political pressure.
I think it might be more accurate to say the legal system is broken, because that's what makes patents so dangerous. You can't afford to participate in the legal system unless you have lots of money, and patents are just one way incumbent companies can force their competitors into litigation.
Windows 7 also includes Powershell, which is a pretty capable dynamic language in its own right.
US West- it's possible it was different elsewhere.
I choose Python, it just happens to be dynamically typed.

Not having used static typed Python I can't say for sure but I believe significant indentation, std lib, and how language generally follows "the zen of python" are at least as if not more important than static typing.
I suppose, but it will cause deflation, and whatever you want to call that deflationary pressure, we're getting dangerously close to it.
Installing A Swimming Pool And Things That You Need To Know
Please review my project......
I posted it here before so I made some changes. Any feedbacks or criticisms are highly appreciated. Any suggestions for advertising this site? http://jamafriend.com
The Upside-Down Logic of Taking on Google at Search
I'd like to point out that, in addition to SICM and SICP, there is also a SIQM - Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

Always hoped there were going to be more of these books.
One of my bigger uses for private browsing is online banking, and I think it's a use that a lot of people would benefit from taking.

Sort of like hashing the entries in your .ssh/known_hosts, it's better that someone who has access to your laptop not know where you bank.

And for extra security I tend to use private mode in a secondary browser.
Sorry, those are just ones I had bookmarked as advice. Not a search.
If you really want to be pedantic, it should be:

if isinstance(obj, basestring):

So that it works with unicode in Python >= 2.3
True, your first job may cost you a bit more work to get. Once you get past that challenge it pretty much disappears forever.
Hey Qz, if you're into new indie music you might like http://mixest.com/

We're still improving it, so if you have any feedback, shoot me an email.
Considering that you do NOT have vesting agreement and have serious troubles in communication with one of key founders -- you should consider your company dead.
Try to cut losses: dissolve the corporation, distribute the funds, save your time, and start another company with the remaining founders you trust.
Did you read the article in full? I know its a rude question to ask but it really seems like you didnt because youre falling prey to exactly the type of thinking it highlights as the problem. The solution doesnt "feel" right, and we humans are without peer in justifying our discomfort avoidance in cloaks of righteousness, truth, etc. That the correct solution just happens to coincide with the solution that avoids self-doubting discomfort is serendipity. Even this serendipity is so rarely noticed, let alone questioned, doesn't this seem odd?

Take for instance healthcare, its spiraling costs. A doctor ordering what some would call excessive tests for a patient is doing the right thing. It is better to be safe than sorry after all. The trial lawyers, insurance companies, government handouts and so on are the reason its skyrocketing.

What about the human fault of judging ones own immoral actions and impropriety on a relative scale of those around us? What about compounding that by generally giving everyone an "i am a good person" foundational belief. To examine it with no intention of challenging it will cause most people to feel a tangible unease because they're treading on some dangerous ground, a sense of fear that its best not to mess around in this place in case you break something accidentally. Each human with an intact "i am good" core applies goodness to all their actions by default, meaning if a person is not truly judging their motives or reasoning they are deemed to be "good" actions with pure motives because they are good and nothing specifically shows they're doing "bad" right that moment.

When the city with one of the fastest rising health costs in the US was examined it was found that the rising costs had a partner along for the trip, medical procedures and tests were rising as well. The doctors were doing nothing illegal, and obviously none of them thought they were doing anything wrong. So why the rise? It was just doctors increasingly exploring that grey area that doesn't challenge your central belief of your own goodness. Patient complains of headaches, and worries about something they read online about brain tumors, the doctor thinks its unlikely but its better safe than sorry, and imagine if he does have a brain tumor not only would i have missed it i might be sued too. Repeat this process over and over and goalposts move, more behavior is acceptable such as "ok so maybe she didnt need hip replacement surgery right now, but she definitely would have needed it soon, and im a far cry from Doctor EvilCompetitor, i cant believe he talked that poor shmuck into allowing brain surgery!".

Consider the complicated medical conditions that homeless contract on the streets with illness on top of illness requiring weeklong ICU visits, it becomes drastically reduced if a person is living in a home. A single avoided hospital visit of that kind alone can justify the free apartment for year or two or three.

Im trying to find that article again, will post link when i find it.
Looks pretty interesting. What did you have to buy exactly to get XML Stream?
I would echo the comment on performance with your app and Bespin. I mainly use TextMate and Xcode and they both still have incredibly annoying delays when syntax-coloring largish docs - and that's running native Obj-C/C on a 2.8GHz C2D desktop.

So although I wish you luck and am hopeful that we will perhaps one day have a usable cloud-based IDE, still kind of doubtful that it can happen with current JS engines.
http://www.audiocoding.com/index.html

FAAD2 is an open source MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 AAC decoder, it is licensed under the GPLv2 license.

It's been much longer than a few months since iTunes sold DRM music.