skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any word on the battery life on these? I'm in the market for a 7" color PDF reader (I wish Apple made a mid-size iOS device!), but all the Androids I've seen are in the 2 hour range.
I like how they are listing businesses in the letterbox. Although, in that part of downtown Seattle there are 10 times more Starbucks than what they're showing in the video . . . and I'm not exaggerating.
Superuser.com and ubuntuforums.org have worked well for me.
Gary Vee being a genius on live TV
Overkill as art: Ars reviews the Cyborg R.A.T. 7
Lerter.ly Is trying to make charging for email newsletters easier. I agree that it's not right for every market though, we polled our audience and less that 1% were willing to pay $5/mo for the content. In the startup world there is just too much free info to justify paying for it.
But it's only for English speaking users, and as you say it's not even out yet. Also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556075
Sure, that looks interesting. I'm aiming for more of a layer built specifically for asynchronous, job-based requests though. In that chat example, it's handling the message routing itself, for example, and it doesn't appear to be using a separate connection for responses. What I'm looking for is a layer that handles these things for you, and you just deal with processing the message.
Turning an ATM into a Slot Machine
Google Alarm
I haven't read the actual study - just the presentation in this link.

However, I would be REALLY hesitant to conclude anything from this other than Celera chose uninteresting things to make patent applications on. The "outcome" for innovation in this study was whether or not a gene test exists, and that is not what Celera was trying to get IP on. They were trying to find drugs or drug targets - and that is a difficult process.

The fraction of good drug targets in the human genome compared to the total number of genes is very, very small.
To be honest, I thought it was rather obvious to those of us in this thread that if the primary technical skill for the job is communication, then having good communication skills is having good technical skills.

I believe the topic however centred around communications skills as ancillary to other technical skills that were part of job description.

Sorry if I caused confusion.
I don't know why this got down-voted. It's mere speculation. If you know something about Google's software development practices that I don't, please chime in.
Your reasoning is sound, but the fact is, lock-picking thieves are nearly nonexistent in reality. I suppose it's something to do with the mentality of people who are willing to take the easy way out, regardless of ethics. But, whatever the reason, lock-picking abuse is incredibly rare.
I completely disagree with the assertion that the supposed 90% of iPhone users who keep their phone out and visible are doing so for fashion cred rather than for more functional reasons.

Other, much-more-likely reasons:

1. The iPhone isn't some tiny device that fits comfortably in a pocket -- particularly when seated. When I'm at a restaurant and wearing jeans, you can bet your ass I'm going to take my iPhone out of my pocket and put it on the table. Why would I leave it in my pocket? So I can struggle to fish it out when it rings?

2. Since the iPhone does more than just make/receive calls, it's often handy to have the phone out for email, text messenging, web searches, and other functions. (While none of those are particularly socially-acceptible behaviors, they are probably forgivable when the other member(s) of your party take a bathroom break.)

3. Crikey -- do you really need a third reason? ;)

Of course, this would likely apply to all smartphones that have similar form factors and data communication abilities -- including Android-powered phones. Since I find it hard to believe that owners of Android-powered phones are somehow unaffected by the above factors, I left with no other reason for your contention other than a distorted lens.
The patents are for the use of these molecules as drugs in order to treat a disease. That is a very non-obvious and inventive process to figure out which of the 25000 genes in the human body will be useful as a drug - and what the exact composition of that drug should be and how to make it, administer it, etc.
Predicting entrepreneurial success: Got what it takes?
If the language isn't enforcing the encapsulation, how is it encapsulated?

For me, encapsulation comes down to "What I hide, I can change. What I expose, other types may couple to in an inappropriate way."
The most important thing I think is that you are able to have programmers understand that they will be working on interesting challenges, and understand the contribution they will be making to the company.

You say you want somebody to 'manage your software systems and support the investment process'. Well, from a programming perspective that isn't exactly inspirational. Manage and support are the things that need to be done, not the reason we come to work exciting about what we can deliver at the end of the day.

If you look at the Bain Capital example you provided it doesn't say anything about managing systems or software, it is all about creating. It's an energizing job description, you've almost got me applying to work for them ;)

At the same time, don't oversell yourself if that is what you are looking for. If you need existing systems to be managed and supported, with maybe the odd update here and there, then you maybe looking for a IT systems manager more than a programmer.

If you are looking to create systems which allow you to trade more efficiently, recognize patterns across trading opportunities (AI), then you want a programmer.
My only problem with Shapado is that, I don't know how to say that nicely, it's just simply hideous (in my opinion, at least). I'm not talking about major things, I mean a bunch of minor things such as things not lining up perfectly to the natural grid of the page, inconsequently used font sizes, etc. Nothing a professional graphic designer couldn't fix in a day.
Problem, yes. Engineering problem to solve. The real issue is that these companies don't feel they need to innovate much, and so we're still stuck with technologies invented in the 19th century.
I feel like this article is missing a lot of information. The "Email Mafia" is listed, but only a few mention total subscriber counts -- which in itself isn't an important number until you talk about open and clickthrough rates.

I also didn't see the newsletters that I regularly get in my inbox: Groupon, LinkedIn, Mint, Yelp, etc.
> At $150, though, it would cost less than a third
> the price of an iPad while offering many more
> features than a similarly priced Nook Wi-Fi.

It's cheaper than a Porsche, and has more features than a similarly-priced Ford Focus! Shouldn't you stick to the same comparison here? Otherwise it seems rather much like indirection to say "Cheaper than Product X while having more features than the similarly-priced Product Y?" The "cheaper than Product X" is essentially meaningless.
I was jokingly referring to the overrated GoF design patterns book.
Really, I've been waiting for a good Android pad for a long time, and these crappy "$150 iPad rivals" just don't cut it...
I am also saddened that there is only one woman in the list. If you're interested in following more women in tech on twitter, mashable published this list today: http://mashable.com/2010/07/28/developer-hacker-women-twitte...
> Your view differs from some of the OO language designers.

Oh come on, that's not true at all. C++ just happens to use access modifiers to provide its brand of encapsulation. However, languages without the `private` reserve word can still provide encapsulation -- they're not the same thing.

What if Java had no notion of private? It would be very difficult to provide data hiding (not that they're hidden anyway, but that's beside the point), so instead you would be forced to put little flags on your names and warnings in your documentation delineating the parts that people shouldn't touch. If they did then that's their fault no?
I concur. Padmapper gives me a quality of life advantage over my peers since I can find exactly what I want and monitor for deals while they're getting the luck of the draw off CList.
Looks like the City of San Francisco and I employ similar strategies for fighting crime:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
Feel free to submit patches http://gitorious.org/shapado
I believe that is the SD card notification, which the tablet has. It shows up whenever you put an SD card in or take it out or hook it up to the computer via usd. Anything regarding cell phone stuff is displayed next to the battery icon.
As a (mostly) .Net developer, I was curious, so I looked it up. Yes, you can use reflection in Java to invoke private methods and access private fields in much the same way you can in .Net
Plus mechanical locks are inherently more fire-resistant!
I am incredibly glad that I majored in English and not CS or something "more practical." English in particular and Humanities in general teach you the most valuable skill there is: effective communication.

Indeed. Norman Mailer believed that the highest moral good was to follow your own passions -- and if you happened to kill a few people along the way, so much the better. Serves 'em right for falling lockstep into the dangerous and dehumanizing machine of American culture. But despite this moral reprehensibility... damn, what a communicator he was!

(Yes, one of my undergrad English profs was a total Mailer fanboy.)
This kind of thing interests me as a geek, its clearly pretty cool, but I dont think it adds that much to the standard street view.
As a user, the standard street view is 80% of what I want, they have added another 5% on top of that which is nice, but oddly enough I dont feel (at the moment) as if it is actually that compelling.
Its a weird perspective, I love the tech, but I dont think I will ever care enough to go out of my way to use it.
Cringely: When cookies fail (forums for neighbors)
> EC2 only came about because Amazon run their servers on it, and they had so much spare capacity, so they sell it.

False.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/20...
I don't believe genome patents require you to show how you've invented a process to use the genome- only the string of letters on a piece of ticker tape.
I have this set [1]. Though mine has a plastic handle so it was about half the price listed there. It's a nice set, quite small and very pocketable.

There's something deeply satisfying about picking locks, hearing each pin tick and feeling the barrel give just a little bit more than the last time you torqued it. I love it.

[1] http://www.southord.com/Lock-Picking-Tools/Jackknife-Pocket-...
The Stack Exchange version has literally just entered private beta today.
#define struct union
Twitter in real time [Videos]
Bumping can leave distinctive grooves inside the barrel and on the pins that a normal key wouldn't. They may consider these traces to be destructive even though the lock remains operational.
One of the points he makes is that VMs are obvious for the purpose of language interop. Seems like C and Lisp (and D, another language he mentions) have been interoperating with each other without a VM in common for quite a while.
The great part about having exactly one drum and banging it all the time is that every time other people bang the same drum they give me credit!

Seriously though, that is exactly what I would do. (I would prioritize occasions, people, and styles of rosaries way above what types of Mysteries there are, simply because I think the average American Catholic is going to be much more conversant with those topics than with the latter.)

One obvious choice for an atom of content in this context is a photo of a finished rosary. Have a bunch of adjectives which you can apply to a photo. Check them off like boxes: this is an [Asian style] rosary with [black beads] made of [mahagony] that was given to [a boy] on the occasion of his [First Communion]. With a few dozen madlibs templates like that you could fairly easily turn every handmade rosary ever into a web page, without necessarily duplicating anything.

Incidentally, you do rosaries with names on them, right? You know Catholics have a quirky cultural tendency to name their children after saints, right? And that the list of saints is very well enumerated, right? So if I were to pick the most outlandishly obscure Catholic name I can think of to name my daughter, you could already have an entire set of web pages for her baptismal, First Communion, etc etc rosaries ready to go, right?

By the way, John Paul II was a really big fan of praying the rosary in general. Find some of his writings on the matter. Put them on your website. I mean, seriously, you'll be in the running for "most credible endorsement of product category in the history of the world."
While steganography may be part of a new kinder, gentler copy-control policy for many content producers, I have my doubts as to whether it will be very effective, for a few reasons.

Even if you assume that the techniques are not discovered before distribution, this doesn't actually impeded copying; it just helps you determine the original source. At that point, you are again faced with an enforcement problem. It's already quite possible to determine the source of pirated files using bittorrent, but even with thousands of lawsuits filed, use is not noticeably diminished.

But steganographic source determination is significantly weaker than bittorrent as far as enforcement and chilling effects go. With bittorrent, if you can make the expected cost of a lawsuit high enough to the users, you might make a dent in the wholescale copying of content. With steganographic techniques, only the original user is at risk. As soon as a single copy is out there, the rest of the sharers take no additional risk in spreading it far and wide.
" Those who pay attention to details probably have noticed that since late 2009, Apple has been going in the direction of ATI’s OpenCL acceleration architecture, the competitor to NVIDIA’s CUDA."

It isn't really "ATI's OpenCL", NVIDIA supports OpenCL also. According to NVIDIA:

"NVIDIA has chaired the industry working group that defines the OpenCL standard since its inception and shipped the world’s first conformant GPU implementation for both Windows and Linux in June 2009."
There's no secret, it's just a eye-candy veil over several very basic and simple tricks. There are lot of definitions of what 'web2.0' is, and personally I despise that term...

The user interface exposed to the user would extensively use javascript to make the web pages interactive. By using Ajax, the webserver can send and receive data without making the user go to a whole new page (eg. clicking the upvote button on HN), this makes the webpage act more like a application. This can be done via javascript, which can send and recieve json/xml/html. You can use libraries such as jQuery, mooTools, YUI which allow you to more easily and cleanly implement these. You can also combine these with flash do even more nifty things (eg. graphs on google finances). As far as getting ajax stuff to work on the server side, all you need to do is have specific urls return json/xml documents instead of html.

As far as looks, it's all about the stereotypical pastel colors, rounded corners, gradients, minimalistic looks, beautiful typography, and usually accompanies with a 'beta' label no matter how early or finished the product is.

As far as server side, sites like these are also expected to have a API exposing the web page's functionality to the outside (eg. a desktop screensaver that uses flickr's photos).

Another aspect is making the so called web2.0 site also more connected to 'social' networks such as facebook/twitter. This can be done via the web APIs exposed by facebook/twitter on the client side, or you can connect those site's server APIs using your own web server.
This is the best thing to happen to Java. Hopefully, this gives that community a ladder to catch up to the innovation around true open source communities.
Before giving more benefits to one type of business, how about tax all companies at the same rate instead of giving loopholes to large companies while small companies and individual contractors end up paying all the taxes.

Everyone should just be taxed at a flat rate.
If you can't deal with a reasonable level of cheap, don't apply at a startup. You don't get rich by spending other peoples money on hotel rooms.
Good point on the fashion bit.

> I feel a bit pretentious when I have my phone out on a table/bar, (...)

But why? People have been pecking away at their blackberries for years, who gives a damn if you have a modern smartphone on the table?
Very cool. Apparently prostitution is strikingly localized (which makes sense). It also seems that Hunters Point doesn't have much/any crime represented there either, yet it seems like people think of it as a very high crime area. I wonder why.
ATM hack gives cash on demand
It would be more interesting to take HN interest divided by follower count.

If 100 HNers follow someone with 100,000 followers, that's sort of interesting. If someone has 100 followers, and 80 of them are HNers, that's more significant.
I wonder if Squid's priorities are now less useful than they were when Squid was designed, and if that's a source of the derision lately.

Many products designed in the 90s and early 00s took compatibility very, very seriously. Things had to run on everything, and a lot of engineering effort went into patching over the differences between platforms. So you got things like Java, autoconf, Squid, Apache, Linux, various GUI abstraction layers, etc.

Now, it seems like the pendulum is swinging towards performance, simplicity, and ease-of-use, and people are saying "fuck compatibility". Since so much software has moved to the server side, people are just standardizing on one type of server (usually some Linux flavor), saying "We'll develop for this", and ignoring everything else. And as a result, products that used to be essential because things really needed to run on everything are getting a lot of hate for their byzantine config options.

I see this most with autoconf, another project that has had lots of abuse thrown at it, but it seems like it could apply to Squid or Java as well.
Interesting that there's only a $50 premium for the 3G Kindle, whereas the 3G iPad is an additional $130 over the Wifi model.

Different licensing agreements? Amazon taking a loss? Typical Apple markup?
No apology needed - thanks for the clarification.
Damn iPhone autocorrect: I meant "arxiv physics papers¨, not "archive ..."
I think that having actionable content would be the key. People who work in politics have a lot riding on being in the know, so Hotline succeeds. I think this is also part of the reason why WSJ can charge for their website, but USA Today can't.

Thanks for the tip on letter.ly
I suspect you're thinking "desktop" and btilly is thinking "server", and you're going to end up talking past each other. Or, if you are thinking servers, then you're thinking "one server" and he is thinking "one million servers".

In a highly-scalable webapp, that infrequently-used functionality lives on another server, called via RPC. Instead of paging it out, you simply provision fewer machines for it, and then only make calls to it as necessary. Paging out one component of a large distributed system is dumb: you're potentially slowing everything else down because you couldn't spare one machine to keep the whole binary in RAM.
I don't know about the layman, but it's definitely a good way to explain them to programmers who haven't been exposed to them.
Valley VCs: Why So Glum?
Most dynamic languages use convention, which seems to work pretty well in practice. My take is that if other developers are accessing the encapsulated parts of your library, then your API or your documentation is broken - possibly both - and you should, like, fix that. Not use language features to lock them out.
Lest anyone get carried away here I'd like to say that my Eng Lit Honours degree from a prestigious British university consisted of writing 2 papers every 3 months, listening to seminar presentations which were often copied wholesale from Wikipedia, and participating in 'discussions' where 90% of the people had nothing to say but still graduated. The idea that it turns you into an elite analytic/communicative essay writing engine was in my case pure fiction. I did write some high quality critical essays but it wasn't exactly a habit. I think I got by on previously acquired abilities. I deeply regret taking that course.
Alignment Between Entrepreneurs and VCs
He's obviously made significant contributions, but I find his distain for industry off-putting. I wish we could separate computer science into theoretical v. applied research to clear up differences in the way the topic is approached.
Now this is starting to get closer to a sweet spot. I'm curious if E-Ink is starting to lower their licensing costs now that there's a lot more competition in the space, or if manufacturing the screens is just becoming cheaper.

Design looks more polished too.
Is open source music a particularly big phenomenon?
Spotify playlist where all song titles are reserved JavaScript keywords
> How does a flat-out falsehood like that get to 9 points?

Well, my comment was more than three words, and those three words you picked were not meant to be taken completely literally.

> The fact is, a smartphone of any stripe is a status symbol.

I don't think most people feel that way.

> The thing about most Android phones is they blend in and tend to look just like feature-phones.

With the exception of the Droid, the Android phones I keep reading about tend to look like iPhones.
Bathmate and Sport Shrinkage
It's very interesting that Amazon has gone with a WebKit-based browser.
I have an innate fascinated horror of the C preprocessor already, but this really drives home exactly how horrible it can be!

(While being quite funny, mind you!)
> A secondary curiosity - how do they manage to hire such great researchers

From what I can tell, it's in large part because, post-Bell-Labs, nobody else offers a similarly nice job for senior researchers, where you have wide intellectual freedom, a nice salary, and few restrictions on publishing. I assume junior researchers can't just start their own projects, but it seems they let the famous researchers do more or less whatever they want.
Another case where tethering makes sense.
The doubly great thing about this article is that maybe Steve Yegge will start blogging again. :)
Completely different city but with lots of hills (seven to be precise): Lisbon. The most dangerous areas are near the top of the hills in places like Bairro Alto, Sé, Alfama, while the main bottom of the hill, Baixa, is much better.

I believe Lisbon has a very low crime rate (for european standards) and my theory for more crime happening on the higher streets is pretty simple: on the bottom the streets are really big and there's lot of space while the streets on the top of the hills are really small so easier to be seen by the police when you're doing something evil.

I like thinking about these kind of relations though!
Not only that, you need a separate data plan for the iPad, right?
http://www.floatingsheep.org/2010/06/mapping-crime-in-city-b...

//related