skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Predictions for 2011:

- Apple releases iWeb, a google search clone, signs deal with Verizon to make iWeb the mandatory search engine for all Verizon ISP users.

- Apple sells 25M Verizon 4G iPads for $99 each with 2 year service contract ($20 per month)

- Apple announces record profits from search advertising.

* Google's core search business is easily cloned in 2 years. How to get market share? A deal with large ISPs. Most of Google's profits come from search advertising, and Apple now has a cutting edge mobile ad platform which is stronger than Google's. It's time to act. Search is not hard anymore.

Suppose Apple did this deal with Verizon and possibly Comcast. Google's share of search advertising would fall significantly.

Google's floundering with Android (try a device before you dispute this) has emboldened Apple to act fast to hit Google where it hurts, right in the core search business. As Apple moves to the cloud and Google builds devices, Apple and Google are converging rapidly into competitors.
management. that is where the death of something successful is always born.
Online dating with asialove.datingbuddies.com - Front page
Ask HN: iAd vs AdMob. Which one is best?
I am trying to find out which ad network to use for my iPhone applications, so far I have just seen the $1400 a day claim by an iPhone developer talking about iAd.

Can anyone offer comparison/experience on these two or other ad networks?
Shameless plug for our startup: Quizlet, which is trying to make learning languages -- particularly vocabulary -- easier. We've got some cool audio features coming out soon.

http://quizlet.com/
Ask the average joe (the majority of Internet users) if they know what a web browser is, also ask them what Net Neutrality is. Do you think 15% would know and explain what either is?

If all of us care about the Internet and are appalled at this proposal then for this type of protesting/campaigning to be effective it needs to be better sold(marketed) to the majority. More so then 50 to 100 people standing outside Google protesting.
Migraine phases and stages
Same thing happened with the term Architecture.
Suddenly everything could be "architected".
Vibram partners with Injinji for toesocks: http://www.injinji.com/tetratsok/outdoor.htm

I always wear socks with my vibrams, they provide slightly more insulation, and it's just generally more pleasant not to wear the rubber shoes directly.
> Apple and Microsoft will be thrilled by this development.

No kidding! Apple, especially. To the extent that Apple has suffered from developer frustration with it's App Store policies, this is a mitigating factor. Apple is fickle about approving apps, but who knows what will happen with Dalvik.
Can I add "men's fashion is painfully boring and expensive compared to the endless variety of cheap, interesting clothing available to women"? It's a small, small thing compared to these but man how it bugs me. And the US is even worse than Europe in this regard.
4Food: Restaurant adds game mechanics to lunch
“I once said I never intended for Illumos to compete with Solaris. That was true, but if Oracle forces the issue, then even despite their vast economic resources, I say, "Bring it!"”

Insane.
What does it mean to be the default search engine for an ISP? Google transcends deals like that now.
Gee you guys are weird

I get -4 for asking what something is

and he gets +5 for saying what it is

never mind that if I did not ask a lot of people would have been completely lost
> The argument for evented concurrency assumes threads work. Async design isn't a reaction to MRI's crappy green threads.

Truly? To my understanding, event loops require inversion of control (and likely callbacks and broken exception handling). This is a large cost that requires a benefit to be worth it. I understand that benefit to be: you don't have to deal with threads (or bad implementations of such).

This blog post comes to mind: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2010/08/multithreaded-rails-...
Agreed, listening is fundamental. By listening, grammar rules can be picked-up easily and "naturally", it helps to develop an ear for the language and absorb its structure, something that will be also useful when you'll try to speak the new language.

I liked how the previous poster highlighted the need for a concise grammar, focusing too much on grammar rules can be fatal and a huge time waster.
This was one of the mistakes i made while studying english, this and the on-off attitude, the lack of material and many other errors that now can be easy solved using the net. Things will go a lot differently with my 3rd language (japanese, that i'd like to use in the future to learn mandarin).

The main point that emerges from this great thread is basically that you must leverage the high amount of quality and cheap language-learning material that is now available.
Try everything, discard what doesn't work, and as soon as you have defined a plan stick to it.
might be tl;drs in here. Best thing I learned here is the app ANKI! http://ichi2.net/anki/

Simple flash card app that's amazing for vocab. Good luck, man.
Photo metadata? Messages about important parties?
Yes.

I can obviously quit fb easily, but I would miss it. And it would make no sense for me to join a different network instead, where my friends aren't (or only a fraction of them are).
What Apple did for the Mac in the late 90's saved Apple from dying in the run-out-of-money sense. The iPod and Mac OS X in the early 00's made Apple a relevant, high-growth company again.
"In his five years at H.P., every metric Wall Street uses to judge companies had gone in only one direction: up."

And this is the problem. Cutting jobs/salaries/benefits/projects leads to the type of share-bumping profit and cost-cutting figures that Wall Street types love, all while destroying the culture of a company and its chance of long term success.
I'm 100% certain you've read things that are more factually incorrect. Also, you're quoting a quote from the article, whose alleged factual incorrectness doesn't make the article itself incorrect. Granted, the article's author also refers to the Google-Verizon proposal as a "deal" just above to the quote, but here's the thing:

I actually don't think it's unfair to call the proposal a deal, since Google themselves describe it as a compromise. This is very much a deal between Google and Verizon over what position they could jointly support. The tricky thing is that this is a political deal, not a formal business deal, which is what you typically expect a "deal" between two companies to mean. The person you've quoted, Craig Aaron, may actually recognize the distinction (e.g., the first sentence is about the political deal, the second about subsequent business deals), but using the same word for two distinct meanings can easily give the opposite impression.
The String Theory - David Foster Wallace on Tennis
This is the key point. Users don't care.

Back in the days of Alta Vista, Google offered better search. Today, search is a solved problem and easy for many companies to clone. I'd estimate that 80% of internet users would fail to distinguish between the search quality of Google search and a pagerank-based index of the top 20 websites (which could be hosted on a laptop).

This is why Google attempted to innovate via legislation by trying to get net neutrality passed to prevent its competitors from taking market share via deals that shared profits with ISPs.

Google has failed to stop it, so it must now engage in its own dealmaking to block its competitors from "taking" search traffic (and ad revenue) via non-neutrality ISP deals.

The biggest threat to Google would be a deal between Apple or Microsoft and Comcast or Verizon.

Google's deal with Verizon is an attempt to scuttle any such deal. I'm surprised Verizon found a win in it, but who knows. We will soon see what sort of QoS Verizon gives FaceTime on iPhone 4.
Isn't it all nylon or polyester, though? I bet it's less comfortable and possibly less durable than you imagine.

Durable, of course, directly mitigates against cheap.
By damaging their own reputation? Yeah, right.
Impressive. You should write more about this on your blog.
One thing that bugged me tho. Why android? Symbian did that years before android. IPhone too. Even simple Nokia/SonyEricsson not-so-smart phones were able to do most of those listed tasks years before android. We realized that statement that 1-task gadgets/tools will sooner or latter die long time ago.

Edit: Spelling
Very interesting to hear such an unusual perspective from a chap who's been on both sides of the fence. Thankyou Internet.
Sadly, I was considering including just such an appeal with my original comment. If you find some, let me know?
If an ISP had a deal with Bing, it could simply map all search traffic intended for Google to Bing...

google.com?q=snookie => bing.com?q=snookie

Bing could offer the ISP a percentage of ad revenue, and if users didn't complain then (without net neutrality) there'd be nothing to stop it.

(I'd guess that most HN users wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Google and Bing results if the styling were identical and they didn't notice the domain name)
I don't know how preaching to the choir can be considered "evangelism", and Certainly Free Software is an ideology, but I'm not sure why you are using that term pejoratively.

The blog is written for and from within the FOSS community; what kind of disinterested lawyer do you imagine blogging about legal matters related to free software, and what kind of programmer would want to read a bunch of dry legal analysis?
Regardless of their goals, that Oracle found it suitable to throw Java into kamikaze attack on Google, shows how little they really value it.
Not being a patterns guy or a Fowlerite, I can't tell you whether async "requires inversion of control". Apropos nothing, I'm also unlikely to recognize "dependency injection" when I see it, as my first language was C, not Java.

Async code isn't "likely" to require callbacks; it will almost certainly involve callbacks, those being a central design feature of async code. You should play with the idea for a bit before forming an opinion about it.

I don't know what you mean by "broken exception handling". This may be a Rails-ism I'm unfamiliar with. I'm very familiar with Rails (we ship a fairly large product built on it), but I've never tried to shoehorn async I/O into it; like Twitter and presumably every other large site, we do Rails on the front-end/UI and fast things on the backend, in our case with EventMachine.

Like I said: I'm not arguing that Rails threading is bad, or even that Rails should have better async support. If I cared that much about the performance of my front end, I probably wouldn't be serving requests directly off Rails. Rails developers may very well be better off with threads. But that fact has little to do with the merits of threading and async as concepts.
Claims for Facebook making billions seem exagerated to me.

You can see that Google is more or less established not because they are making billions but because there's an "eco-system" of companies who make money along with Google and can be expected to keep pushing that money long term back to Google. The same might (or might not) be said about the iPhone. But you'd be hard pressed to find anything like a stable ecosystem grown-up around Facebook. The only thing that grows on Facebook seems to be social games and those depend on FB's own growth. The claim of social network sites has been that they can sell focused eyes. But I haven't seen evidence that they can sell social eyes that will do anything.

It seems like even without a competitor, Facebook will become Yahoo in a few years - not dead but a site that can charge very a premium for ads or experience.

But hey, I'm just guessing...
to be fair, programmers overuse the word too. nobody writes code or programs, everyone says "I'm an XYZ hacker" or "I hack on XYZ". the word means nothing, it's just trendy in an odd sort of way.
Painful to read. The standard whine of modern American victimology. It sounds like a woman.
Probably just the ADHD, but I find myself running past this limit all the time.

What really annoys me about it is that they don't limit the characters in the text box - you can happily paste a novel in there if you want. Just when you go to post, an error that you're over the limit (at least they do say by how much).

It's clear that they use JS on the box (if you don't wait for the page to load, the box won't auto-expand as you type) - why they don't implement a simple script to stop typing beyond the limit is beyond me...
Keith McCullough: US Economy Near Point of No Return
I wonder if Google's protest-base is similar to the WalMart's ones in still using their products? I'd wager so.
CreateProcess can't implement fork() semantics. To my knowledge there's no good way to fork() on Windows.
First PG post to ever reach -2?
Best way I've found to defunkify my Vibrams is to soak them in Oxyclean (yes, "as seen on TV" Oxyclean) overnight and then wash them in the washing machine and air drying.

This is with KSOs. With the Sprints, I've never had an odor problem, but they can air out more easily.

I suspect that if you had some kind of warm-air (~35C) device (e.g., a heat gun) to gently blow air through them post workout, one could keep the odor on KSOs down.

Don't tumble dry them though -- the glue melts.
The End of Outsourcing (As We Know It)
Some people still had smaller screen resolutions at this time. I had 1024 by 768 but 800 by 600 was still known and there were still some people with 640 by 480 as well.
Surrender Monkey or Not, Google Remains Last, Best Hope for Net Openness
Nothing new, really. Others have already suggested these tactics. But this is my story:

I grew up in a bilingual home but was not raised bilingual. I used to nag my mother incessantly to teach me German words and I picked up some vocabulary that way. I also used audiotapes some. When I was 16, a friend of the family got married and several of her relatives came, some of whom spoke no English. I finally began speaking German during the month they were visiting. I later lived in Germany as an adult -- not really in an immersion setting, though, because I mostly interacted with American military families and mostly spoke English. Still, living there did improve my spoken German a good deal. I speak conversational German but really can't read or write it that well and can't much follow the news because they use words I don't know. I studied French formally in school for a time. I read and write it a little bit but really don't speak it fluently and never developed an ear for it. Growing up in a home where I heard German regularly meant I started out with an ear for it, and that really helped.

FWIW: My mother has said she learned English by watching TV. I have found that helpful with trying to pick up a little Spanish but I am really not persistent enough with it.
'I don't know what you mean by "broken exception handling".'

Take the following Python-esque (but not Python) psuedo-code in a threaded language:

try:
header = read(socket, header_size)
if has_short_flag(header):
return read_until_closed(socket)
else:
handle_message(header, socket)
except SocketClosedException:
log("lost socket while processing headers in packet")

The evented equivalent of this code will have to be chopped into pieces at each of the read calls, and it is impossible to wrap the second read calls in the same exception handler like this. You can manually route exceptions around if you're careful, but that is definitely a pain in the ass and is sometimes very hard to test (hard to test exception handling for an exception you can't really fake for some reason). (Of course you can't always test it in threaded code either, but it's radically simpler there and therefore less likely to break, you don't have to test the plumbing.)

This is one of the reasons I've spent the last few years fleeing event-based code towards things like Erlang, rather than running towards it; I've been doing event-based code for non-trivial work and things well beyond "demos" and the plumbing just explodes in your face if you want to build actually-robust software where simply crashing in the middle of a request isn't acceptable. Despite my best application of good coding practices and refactoring you still can't get close to the simplicity of something like Erlang code.

(By the way, if you are stuck in evented land, one of the things I have learned the hard way is that anywhere your evented API has an error callback, you absolutely must provide one that does something sensible. I now always wrap such APIs in another layer of API that does nothing but crash as soon as possible if no error callback is provided. If you can't figure out what your error callback for a given such call should be, that's your design trying to tell you something's wrong.)
RTK has quite literally changed the course of my life. I more or less gave up on kanji before I found that book.
The internet does not need 'saving' by a bunch of people chanting outside Google with picket signs and petitions.

If the internet were as fragile as the neutrality-activists thought, it would have never gotten where it is today. Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL would have won.

And the neut-advocates very worst nightmare scenarios -- rampant blocking and throttling by the last-mile incumbents -- would quickly provoke a necessary next-step emergence of new competitors and route-around technologies.

That is, if the nightmare scenarios ever happened. Which they won't, because even in a local duopoly, being known as the option which gives you less of the internet will be profit-destroying.

The alternative neut-advocates offer -- the FCC riding in as a white knight with new rules to save us -- is a dangerous child's fantasy. Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC -- just like the Google-Verizon talks, hosted by the FCC!

Any rulemaking by the feds will generate stacks of hard-to-interpret regulations that inconvenience everyone -- but hinder novel services and upstarts that are hard-to-classify the most, so the giant incumbents won't mind them so much.

That is, neutrality rules would freeze into slow-changing, confusingly-enforced law a currently-fashionable, romanticized notion of the internet that manages to make big companies and the political establishment comfortable.

It only 'saves' the internet in the same way you could 'save' a wild animal by putting it in a cage. Don't let the FCC neuter my internet!
I believe GNU sort is a single-threaded external multi-pass/multi-way mergesort.

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

The reason to split is not to replicate mergesort, but rather to get around single threading in GNU sort. Of course, there are better options if this is a regular task, but GNU sort just happens to be really common and easy if it's a one-off.

I do wish I had a better split (since split seems to read the whole file) and a better sort (that was parallel and reasonably common) though.
Three small sales tips that you really need to know
A small article I wrote about three sales ideas that you can try to implement elsewhere...let me know what you think.
This site seems pretty good for arabic Karaoke:

http://www.shawshara.com/wiki/Main_Page

The page for the song I linked to above is:

http://www.shawshara.com/wiki/Ayami_Beek_(song)

Edit: although looking at the (English) lyrics reminds me that karaoke is a particularly good way to learn to say how much you like somebody, which is useful but not the be all and end all

Edit2: The world cup Waving Flag song is fun and is translated into lots of languages. Here's the Arabic version with subtitles and translations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apeVbw02nzc
Quite so. Quite aside of the various problems inside the USA (sentencing disparities, resources taken away from other crimes, families and careers wrecked, and worse), our current policies create terribly perverse economic incentives - and not just in Mexico. Check this out: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-07/wachovia-s-drug-hab...

The sad fact is that every time we or the Mexican government removes a top-level dealer, there's a gruesome competition to take his place because the market is worth billions of dollars. Even a vanishingly thin slice of such a huge pie is worth the risk of death to many people. The more of a high-risk occupation we make it with aggressive enforcement, the more marginal and unscrupulous the individuals who will be attracted to it. The sort of people who are willing to decapitate their competitors or massacre civilians are not rational actors who are influenced by the calculus of deterrence; as we've seen in Central and South America, the net effect of escalating the conflict into paramilitary activity is to just bring drug suppliers and illegal arms dealers into closer proximity.

If you have the hour to spare, I felt Judge Gray had a very pragmatic and persuasive approach to overcoming the political and legislative inertia, but it's going to be an uphill struggle. While the Obama administration has finally altered national policy a little (eg by supporting legislation to eliminate crack/cocaine sentencing disparities and taking a hands-off approach to state policies on medical marijuana), more fundamental changes will require the voters to demonstrate where the safe electoral ground is.
Is it? Well I guess I know where I'm getting my elective surgeries from now on.
Please oh please let it be a Java-based iOS SDK instead of the archaic shit we have to use now.
huh. Boring, okay, I'll give you that; but expensive? I always thought that the lack of change in men's fashion was an advantage. I have a bunch of generic brand levis 510s that I bought at costco for $20 each during the .com boom that I still wear- I mean, I wear them while running wires through crawlspaces and, heh, lifting heavy servers (the costco store brand, generally speaking, is very high quality) I bought a bunch of "calvin Klein" brand jeans at the same time and they lasted about two years of the same usage patterns. (those were a bit more baggy, and almost all of them suffered catastrophic failures while I was lifting something. I hear a 'riip' and suddenly I feel, uh, much better ventilated. Embarrassing, and requires a trip home for new pants.
I did it so that I can tell everyone that I have been living on the edge. /s
You don't need new net-neutrality rules to prevent such shenanigans; existing laws against fraud, trading on another's trademark, and monopolistic tying are plenty.

And even the hoi polloi loves themselves their 'Google'; it wouldn't take much to generate a consumer backlash against such a practice.

To the extent an ISP's heavy promotion or nudging might encourage people to try another search engine they might like as much or more than Google, that's a good thing. We need more search competition; a new entrant ought to be able to buy enough attention to get a fair look.
Documentary reveals the unhealthy profits of the pharmaceutical industry