skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(disclaimer: I realise HN is full of people who really like their Android so I hope not to get downvoted just to give a different opinion.)

I think the problem with Android, which is behind what the author (a bit confusingly) presents as evidence, is its licence agreement. The iPhone did not improve the freedom for the user, but Apple had managed to distinguish between manufacturer and provider.

Basically the iPhone (and all the others that would have followed: WebOS, WP7, etc...) had put the manufacturer back in a position of strength: "Do you want to have a 'modern' mobile on your network? Then don't mess with it".

Once the Android came out though, and it got embraced by Motorola, HTC and Sony, the situation change completely. By far and large there is nothing unique to any Android phone. All manufacturers can access the same CPU, the same screens (actually here Samsung has a slight advantage), etc... This past year has shown the result: a fast dynamic hypercompetitive market.

Just like for the PC before, companies were left with only one real way to compete: price. And it's this that has suddenly put the providers back in the driving seat. Verizon can request specific changes (like not-erasable apps) and they either accept them, or they lose the massive subsidies.

I don't think Google did this with any bad intention. Indeed, and kind of ironically, it seems to me that the Nexus One was the second step of Google's strategy and was a complete failure _because of it_. Google found itself with no power over the mobile providers: as the article say Verizon waited for a similar speced phone to come out and quickly moved to sell that one instead.

Android is in a way so good, that now the mobile phone providers don't need to beg the manufacturers to come to them: they know they will always be able to have custom made Android phones, and Android phones are so good that they can survive without an iPhone or a Pre.

In the end I think Google tried to avoid having a new Windows (one OS with a massive market share). But they didn't realised that rather than giving the power to nobody (everyone competing) they gave it to the guys with the money: the providers.
They obviously haven't gotten to step two... writing the code.
Acer exec says Apple's 'closed' iPad will drop to 20% market share
so every time an app gets refused we have to whine and blog about it? bloggers are becoming obnoxiously louder every day.
Restaurant matching engine
Has anyone heard of a Pandora-like recommendation engine for restaurants? The premise is that you enter the name of a restaurant as a proxy for the "experience" you are seeking. The restaurant could be in any city, neighbourhood, etc. The recommendation engine then gives you the closest "match" within a set of parameters that you define (e.g. price, city, neighbourhood). The matching is based on the overall experience of eating at a particular restaurant vs. something more specific, such as the food itself.

I'm currently working on this as a side project and would love feedback.
A side effect of doing this is that it is much more fuel efficient to not have to go into a cycle of breaking and accelerating again.
Amazing that people are able to find what they want to see but don't want others to know that they wanted to see and be done seeing whatever they saw in as little on average as 10 minutes of time.
I don't see the problem. It shares the variable across all instances of the current scope.
Wait... how about, "Stress-test before the changeover so that you see the bottlenecks before your customer does?"
Such a declaration is worrying because I come here and generally trust the upvoted things, and as such, I've incentive to toss your declaration out as the biass and the spin.
So, as though you were talking to someone who doesn't know enough about the smartphones to make an informed decison (me), please explain your position.
And this follow-up in Python:
http://codeblog.dhananjaynene.com/2010/08/clojure-style-mult...
Yeah, and that's the problem. The moment Samsung says no to Verizon, Verizon will simply stop the deal and ask HTC. And the same is true for Apple or closed OS too: most normal people still don't know pros and cons of the specific OSes. The Android looks close enough to the iOS that I don't think many will care. So if Apple starts being a bit too picky, the provider will just snob them.
IMO I think "The dirty little secret about Google Android" is that it's not actually as open as people assume it is.

Yes, Android is more open than iOS but that's not really saying much.

The comparison I tend to make is ("< is less open"):

iOS < Android < MeeGo/Moblin/Maemo

In a similar way to:

Windows < OS X < Linux

For example, while OS X is based on an open platform (FreeBSD) it's got a whole pile of proprietary stuff on top which AFAIK is pretty much how Android operates also (in terms of core applications etc). Not only that but my understanding is that the Android kernel is so different from when it was forked that it is also no straight-forward task to port features (e.g. drivers) from it back to the mainline kernel. And AIUI Google has shown no great desire to anyway.

In comparison with Maemo (which I've had more familiarity with than Moblin/MeeGo but assume there's similarities) where Nokia (over time, admittedly) worked with upstream projects and companies to get a lot more of the system into existing open projects.

By way of example, "getting root" amounted to checking a box, installing a terminal and executing a shell command. All with warranty intact.

Getting root on a Nexus One requires voiding your hardware warranty.

Without root access you don't even get complete read-only access to your phone's filesystem. That's not open. Even with my proprietary PalmOS Treo 650 I could at least read every single file off the device if I wanted (well, there were some "no copy" settings for some apps but I'm not sure if the non-official tools obeyed them anyway). Particularly in this aspect Android is a huge step backwards.

Of course, the problem with MeeGo/Maemo/Moblin is that outside of the N900 you can't buy a phone with it--so its openness is somewhat of a moot point.

Okay, rant over for now. :)
New Korean Android Ad puts on the pressure
The top ten js1k submissions in one app will demolish any 10k submission.
Because he was probably downmodded (appropriately) for his comment, and considered it an embarrassment.

I'm not fond of such deletions, but I think it's good for people to be able to retract their statements when they realize they don't reflect well on themselves.

Perhaps a better solution would be to allow the original comment to be "retracted" such that the author information is removed but the comment remains, so people can still understand the thread of the conversation.
Automotive nitrous oxide systems are also fairly safe because they're well-tested mass-produced consumer products. Homemade, modified or improperly installed automotive nitrous systems can and do explode. There's a series of photos well-known on just about any car-related forum of a Nissan Maxima that had a nitrous bottle explode in a garage; the level of destruction is impressive.

Oxidizers are dangerous - in many cases far more dangerous than the fuel. Of course, most people are going to treat something labeled "rocket fuel" with respect.
I also wrote a .NET pomodoro timer. Should I release it?
> You check those sites

My apologies if I was unclear: I don't check those sites. Also, this insight you have that people are basically social animals, that's not exactly a revelation. But I would contend, along with OP, that our natural sociability is not best served by social networking.
Ask HN: Beating spam
The startup I'm working on requires a support ticket system thats currently receiving vast amounts of spam.

Anyone have any suggestions / know of any systems for getting rid of spam that do not lose legitimate emails?

I've been considering grey-listing, but delaying some support requests would just make our support seem worse than it is (generally we get < 10 minute responses). I've filtered through GMail before, but occasionally their filter chokes and starts marking lots of legitimate emails as spam.

I'm considering writing my own system combining other ones I find (automatically white listing known clients). Does anyone have any experience with sending human verification messages?
I know occasionally I'll be sending them to email addressed faked by spammers, but I'll check SPF records before sending (and if people get annoyed it should really be their/their isp's responsibility to get the records up?)
There's a rebuttal here. I don't know if you'd consider it a "strong, data-based counter-argument", but then I don't think the Fables paper does a "pretty thorough job of analyzing (and demolishing) the "research" presented" either, rather it reads like the politically motivated hit piece that it almost certainly is.

http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/dissent.html
Facebook didn't fix email with its Facebook 'mail', it did it with wall posts, comment conversations, and events.
Often Wrong, But Never in Doubt
Does that mean that this massive spam ring, which Google hasn't bothered to deindex and which Ning hasn't bothered to delete, is going to go away?

http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=ning+tax+preparation+bette...

Because if so, I'm all for it.
As an example of a project that was written with RDD in mind (I wrote this while I was writing this blog post), see http://github.com/github/gollum. This is my notion of the scope and specificity that a nice Readme should have.
In my experience, this is similar to the notice I got when they wanted the submission to include information for login without registration. A resubmit with a dumby account satisfied Apple in my case.
They're not rid of those freeloading networks just yet. They extended the deadline to opt in to a paid plan to August 30th this morning.
> Maybe it is just hard to grasp for people who don't understand the concept of "pay forward"?

So ... so I'm a bad person if I don't use Twitter? Seriously?
For a long time people have psuedo-individualised themselves through the products they associate with. Facebook makes this as easy as clicking 'Like'.
No, but maybe for not tolerating people who do use it.
I love how when they're not trumpeting how Macs are "only %1 of the market!" windows fans are claiming that Mac users are unthinking drones who are slaves to rigid conformity.

Of course, never both in the same post, though.
Seems that mojombo practices what he preaches. First commit by mojombo (from march 29, 2010) of Github's Gollum wiki reads "readme driven development!"

http://github.com/github/gollum/commit/c7875704971be998a5399...
Do most PC manufactures ship a different UI skin on Windows?
They do that to slow or stop traffic when there's debris or an accident ahead.
Lesson #0.1 make sure she has experience with high load situations.
Serious question: What does TDD, BDD, Extreme Programming, SCRUM, Standups and all the stuff in the first paragraph have to do with writing a library or app with proper documentation?

I'm completely lost as to how doing Extreme Programming means you don't have a good Readme for your Git-Powered wiki with sweet API?
Unless they made it better.
My guess is that the idea to put that in the commit just came to you. So you didn't necessarily go against his advice:

> Don’t try to be clever, witty or funny.

I've worked with someone who did sit around thinking what to put in a commit, and believe me, he didn't commit as often as he should have.
Yes if you haven't played those, or GemCraft I and II, or the original Desktop Tower Defense, I don't see why you'd touch this. (Not to mention Plants vs Zombies if you are willing to pay ten dollars for a fantastic game.)
If you would read a bit closer, my suggestion was simply that users be allowed to delete those apps if they so desire.
Alternatively, a 1 minute quiz on the constitution and/or your countries system of governance. Get all the answers right and you can vote!
<dimension name="arousal" value="0.0" />
Mind if I ask what browser you were using. We are using HTML5 audio tag, so if you are on IE - it probably will not show. I did add your other suggestions (download link, standard rss tag), thank you. They slipped through the cracks.
The problem is very simple: What passes for "Economics" is political propaganda. The government wants to spend without limit and wants to believe the economy is "strong" and that they made it "strong", so they call for forecasts that the economy is recovering and they call for economic policies that justify government spending.

Obama actually said "Some critics have said my Stimulus package is just a bunch of spending, but what do you think Stimulus IS?". Equating government spending (which does damage to the economy) with "stimulus".

So long as your doctors are giving the patient poison, and telling you that health is just around the corner, of course they're going to be wrong and you're going to be confused.

Economic is really straightforward. It is just that economic reality is not convenient for politicians.

Less spending, less regulation, and preferably go back to a gold standard or somehow structurally stop inflation.... and the economy will eventually start to get better.

What we have now is a near dead patient whose being injected with ever larger doses of amphetamines to keep him moving and "in recovery". Eventually it will kill him.
The series of steps that allows something with such a large attack surface as a Windows network to operate as last resort air traffic safety shutdown system.

It's IT Dept. incompetence. I'd go so far as to call it negligence, maybe even culpable.
They said the same thing about the iPod and the iPhone.
For an off-the-shelf system, I find SpamAssassin pretty good. Unless you crank up the threshhold really aggressively, I haven't found it to give false positives, though it does sometimes give false negatives.
Writing Node.js Native Extensions
Get Your Job Done Through Custom Bumper Stickers
They are mainly known as custom file folders, full color paper cd sleeves, cheap door hangers, product labels, and customized envelopes.This is the age of competition and rivalry. Everyone is fighting hard in the race of survival to the fittest.
Thanks, this is what I assumed I'd be getting from the original link.
> It's true that this industry hasn't yet seen a software

> solution, but that's not because they hate computers,

> but rather that it hasn't been possible to address

> that market with software. Now it is because (pick one):

A question to the author of the post: why the "pick one" qualifier?

Is it because any one of the reasons given should be sufficient?

Is it because more than one could be dangerous or at least counterproductive?
Wow, it's a timer hardcoded to do 25 / 5 cycles. You know, I like the idea of purpose-built things, but come on...
It's called "running a break", and I've only seen it used to clear debris or disabled cars out of lanes, or so that a construction crew can close a lane. It'll freak you out the first time a cop car swerves in front of you across 5 lanes of traffic.
You can always argue that you can predict weather for next milli or micro or femto seconds, why stop at weeks?

The reason that I've heard for stopping at weeks is that that is the time frame for perturbations to work their way up from the quantum scale to the macro scale. We cannot, even in principle, measure what is happening everywhere on the quantum scale.

Of course as soon as you merge quantum mechanics and chaos theory, life gets very, very weird. See http://www.iqc.ca/publications/tutorials/chaos.pdf for more.
Faster than grep? Old age and treachery beat youth and skill every time.
Something similar for product development:
Working Backwards - http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backward...
Although, it has not entirely worked for me.
It is one of the curious facts of modern culture that the people who love technology the most also seem to be the most opposed to electronic voting.

I think it's because the people who most understand how computers work also understand that no data can be considered trustworthy if somebody else has been in possession of the hardware. Yet governments continue to trust the impossible promises of the people who make voting machines that their machines are secure, despite a continuous stream of demonstrations to the contrary, both intentional and accidental.
It can be that bad. Such a chart can be gamed (like any table or chart). It can also be a crutch. Do you need the chart to show your differentiation versus the competition? If the perspective customer would otherwise not know how you're different, then you may be better off investing your time work on the message.
Social Media Strategy for Small Business: 5 Easy Steps to Get Started
One thing I wonder about CouchDB is whether writing scales.

Assuming you have a cluster of couchdb nodes. They all replicate, so you can spread reads and writes over the cluster. As you add nodes, read performance goes up. Initial write performance should as well.

But when you write to node N, then that data needs to be written to nodes 0-(N-1) as well. So every write goes to every node (thru replication). Since writes on CouchDB are syncronous (Eg: only one write at a time) then there is a fixed total write bandwidth on each node. Since a write on any node needs to be replicated, then, assuming the cluster is using identical machines, the total write speed of the cluster would be the same as the write speed of a single node, right?

This is probably not a problem for most cases as reads outnumber writes for web businesses. But it seems this is an area where couchDB isn't scalable.

My assessment is based on the perception that writing data coming via replication is exactly as expensive as writing data coming from the web. Replicated data goes thru the filters, and replicated data has its views recalculated as well.
I stopped reading when I got the moon question pretty much dead on.
Some thoughts about READMEs in the context of open source projects:

There's no need for the README to excite me and make me want to dive deeper into the software if there are good blog posts about actual use cases. They would lead me to your repo where I could find out how to install it, what the dependencies are, what kind of things can be accomplished in just a few lines of code, and how to contribute.

But, as a developer, I don't necessarily start a new project with exactly those points in mind -- and why should I? Most of the time, I intuitively start somewhere in the middle and move up and down from there. It is only after some time that I recognize what this thing actually is that I'm building. From my point of view, that would be the appropriate time to write a README.
A Rough Guide to Quantum Chaos
The story of Andy Mueller, the creative behind Art Dump, Girl Skateboards
In the context of Hacker News (i.e. smaller web startups), keep in mind that Title VII (and the ADA) only applies to companies with 15 or more employees. A tremendous amount of hiring flies under Title VII's radar.
Not necessarily anything -- it's only when Agile practitioners take "your documentation is your code" a bit too literally.
The post this comment was a reply to has a few examples: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/guessing-the-truth/
All of those things are approaches to crafting better software. It is my observation that a lot of projects developed with these methodologies still lack proper documentation. And I see documentation, especially in the form of a good Readme, as critical to the design, usability, and longevity of a project.
Mind you, this could be because they were

- spending years on certification and legal compliance of hardware to many jurisdictions

- already had an old and tried platform that is powerful enough to do the job

Before anyone cries "obsolete", be aware that e.g. your Canon digital cameras run a DOS clone (ROM-DOS) on similar CPUs. You don't really have to have quad core everywhere just because you can.

But of course it doesn't address the whole seals fiasco.
It's actually pretty amazing to see how many people don't really put their systems in any kind of stress to validate their performance needs. The place I work at now never took the time to do it and things exploded. Good buddies at start-ups launched sites with no performance metrics and exploded.
No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup
Verizon's open 700Mhz network hasn't materialized yet because they're busy rolling out LTE on it. It will be very interesting to see what the manufacturers do when they don't need carrier approval.
MP3s are for the birds.
I don't know that we're opposed to it in theory, it's just that every single implementation thus far has been terrifically bad. Making the code open source would go a long way, I think, as would establishing open working groups to establish security standards. I may be an optimist, but I do believe that theoretically (at least information-theoretically[1]), it can be done well.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Information-theoreticall...
(1) I personally filter my facebook stream to weed out all the "spammy auto-updates..."

Forcing users to 'prune' their status updates is in fact a symptom of something broken in the user experience. I check into Facebook every now and again, and I shouldn't to have to act like a gardener who has ignored his back yard for a month. A lot of status updates are incredibly frivolous too - Facebook's culture is not suited to my taste I guess. Virtually all of my (Facebook) friends are not hacker types and will post "I'm bored" or "feeling tired" or something equally awe-inspiring. Granted, this is something that Facebook would have never solved as they are trying to appeal to the mainstream, not early adopters. I love the fact that by logging onto HN I often learn something new, and quickly learn to a) write well and b) only talk about stuff you are knowledgeable about. Anything else and you will get caught out pretty quickly.

(2) The whole thing about the Dunbar number

This had occurred to me also when writing the original comment, but I didn't mention it as I don't see a decline as inevitable as an online community grows in size - I believe HN is proof of that. By deliberately appealing only to a narrow segment of the internet population through a strict, human-enforced culture (see HN guidelines), and allowing users to only maintain very loose ties if any with each other (contact info in your HN profile for example), it's possible to have meaningful, no-spam interaction on an online community. Pg mentioned recently that HN now gets something like 60k uniques per day. I've been on HN for quite a while and I think the quality of article and comments has been consistent over time. I think the Paul Buchheit philosophy of building something that a small number of people love, and that most people would hate (HN), rather than something that tries to appeal to everyone (Facebook) comes into play here. See my below comment on the 'tribes' concept for a possible solution to this problem in a social networking context. I believe it would work as it models how people organise themselves into groups in real life.