skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. We'll handle everything except treasuries and compliance.

What makes you wonder about our "no fee scheme"?
Except you don't give Google $2000 to sync your Android phone - from somebody's point of view that could be regarded as a huge failure!
Anecdotally, we depreciate most commodity software over 3yrs. Enterprise software (ERP, MRB, etc) is usually 5+yrs.
I can say that I absolutely will be using it. Frequently.

Typing on a touchscreen keyboard is not enjoyable, and this makes the device far more usable for casually looking up restaurants, getting directions, etc. Android already had a wide range of voice recognition, but this (from at least a cursory set of tests with it -- experiences might sour trying to use it in the real world) seems to be a HUGE improvement.

Do I think people will use it in public places or at the workplace around peers? I certainly hope not. But in the car, in your own house or office...this is a killer application.
I've been hosting a server on a Hazenet VPS for $7/mo for the past few months, which is unmetered @ 5 mbits. Seems consistent/reliable so far.. http://hazenet.co.uk/vps.html
Read Founders at Work. You'll find that the founders of Yahoo thought of it that way.
I had exactly that impression, but having tried it -- it really is that accurate. They did speed up some of the segments (cutting out the "processing" bit and the confirmation delay sequence), but it was very honest about the accuracy.
MySQL? BerkeleyDB?
2010 Dyson Award
Practically everything that is not .NET
He did?? Does he know the iTunes Music Store contract is a whopping 23 pages long, with some 112 sections? At least, it was as of early 2009, which was when I A) really read the thing and B) decided I was done with iTMS. (Full details at http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html .)

(EDIT: iTunes ≠ iTMS)
On the flip side, how do you know you wouldn't run up against those limitations on a phone that used OpenJDK? I don't do much mobile dev, but I've had friends that did JavaME development, and they didn't seem to like it any more than Android. Dalvik was designed specifically because Sun's JVM performed poorly on memory-constrained devices.

In other words, your issues may be caused by mobile development, not by Android development.
Note that Dalvik is essentially just an alternate stack-based virtual machine for bytecode that's been converted from the standard stack-based JVM bytecode. You still need a standard Java SDK to develop Android applications in order to compile the Java source code to JVM bytecode.

So far Google has been able to get the best of both worlds by leveraging the vast Java tools ecosystem but then in the final step they convert the standard JVM bytecode to run on their own Dalvik VM which means they don't have to pay license fees for the standard Java runtime. IMO this is what is really annoying Oracle. (To be fair there are also good technical reasons why they created Dalvik.)

I can understand where Oracle is coming from legally, but business-wise I think this lawsuit is bound to backfire. Google has the resources to defend themselves and move away from Java in the long term, but in the meantime Oracle has created serious uncertainty about the openness of the Java platform which will scare technically innovative players away from Java that don't have the financial and legal resources that Google does. So Oracle turns Java into the new COBOL, a technically moribund backwater that is only kept alive for legacy purposes.
What does this mean for the almost-but-not-quite-JVM implementation in GAE?
If you read the complaint itself (http://www.scribd.com/doc/35811761/Oracle-s-complaint-agains...) it becomes clearer - see Count 8, copyright infringement: The Java platform contains a substantial amount of original material (including
without limitation code, specifications, documentation and other materials) that is copyrightable
subject matter under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.

so because the Android platform APIs also include the Java APIs Oracle thinks there is a case. I'm not aware of any precedents that would indicate the likelyhood of this succeeding, but its possible there could be a problem here.

Note that http://developer.android.com/reference/packages.html contains the java.* API's, and in the past Sun was pretty strict about companies not hosting that Javadoc itself publicly (eg, they stopped one site that was building interlinked Javadoc references).
TLDR Version: Its really not bad. You'll make pretty good money, in what is otherwise a 9-5 job in a large company. You won't get to use as many toys, and you'll sometimes be told to leave your own toys at home. The job will also involve dealing with people and politics.
I think this is much bigger than just Java. The patents in question relate to the whole field of VM implementation, not simply Java VM implementation. On the surface this really appears to have very little to do with Java the language.

For a start, Dalvik is not a JVM implementation at all, in fact it's quite a different beast. See, e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_application_virtu... which lists Dalvik as a register machine rather than a stack machine: definitely not a trivial difference.

Google's toolchain converts from JVM bytecode to Dalvik bytecode, which is probably what Oracle are going after with #5,966,702 but the rest of the patents are much more general. If anything Oracle are turning VM implementation in general into a patent minefield, not Java alone.
More likely, they find a few dozen patents that they own that Oracle is infringing, and turn around and counter-sue.
C# might be a better language than Java, but the JVM is hugely better than the Mono VM.

Anyway, Google isn't using the JVM in Android - they use Dalvik.
I wouldn't feel stupid if I never had to repeat myself. For example, I use iPhone voice dial all the time. Even on really complicated or foreign names, like my wife's for example, it rarely makes an error. So rarely I can't think of an instance in recent times. The search space is really small, but it takes advantage of that in a way that makes it useful.

Android does not do a good job with this. When I use it to do a voice dial, it has two major problems. First, it must be connected to the internet, because the sound or a signature of it is going to be sent over the wire. Especially when I am in a low signal area or on Edge, this is a deal-breaker. The second problem is that it's much less accurate than iPhone's voice dial. It typically will only get one word of the name of the person I'm trying to dial -- the surname. As a result, if I'm trying to call someone in my family, it pops up an alphabetical list of all of their names. So I would never use Android voice dial when I was on Android, because I invariably had to repeat myself or interact with the screen, which if I'm already doing that then why use voice dial at all.
Nice bouquet there:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/search?orderBy=...
I may be reading it wrong, but it sounds like a px is a pixel—until you zoom in. If you define a web page’s default font size as 12px, and it stayed at that no matter how much you zoomed in, it wouldn’t be much of a zoom feature, would it?
Not only that... When it comes to our startup (http://historio.us), I (I can only speak for myself) find that a small piece of negative critique, or a new, better funded startup launching that is remotely related to what we do, can lead me to becoming demoralised and think that it's not leading anywhere, even though we've hit 3,000 users in two weeks, have tens of subscribers already, lots of positive feedback from users and even some people asking to invest...

This post was very good for telling people things they might not already know, but which are indispensable. For example, when I'm demoralised, I regularly find myself saying "okay, it might feel bad but in reality people find the service very useful", and then the rational part of my brain kicks in and tells me to keep doing what I'm doing because it's probably worth it...

Many thanks to the author, the post was very encouraging.
If Google drops Demand Media from the search engine as spam, Demand Media is dead.
Ye gods, please no more Courier New! Maybe, just maybe if you're trying to reproduce 1950s police reports or something, but there's so many much nicer monspaced fonts available these days. I'd start with:

"Consolas", "Menlo", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", monospace

...but you might want to include Andale Mono, Droid Sans Mono, Inconsolata, Lucida Console or Monaco as well.
Nice user name.
Yep and the other major figure, along with Elon Musk, who first made his fortune in software, and then later leveraged that to get into making innovative rocket ships. Imagine Carmack and Musk getting together on some project, maybe throw in Dean Kamen, and tremble.
Exercise routines and tips are provided by us
We provide you Exercise routines, weight training workout routines, information and tips about supplements, diets, nutrition, fat loss, muscle gain and motivation.
Ask HN: Is there a Heroku-like stack for Django apps?
I was contemplating starting a Django application as a means to hone my Python web skills. Immediately I thought about how great it would be to build the app and scale it with something like Heroku, but then after a short amount of Google fu I realized I hadn't heard of nor could I find such a thing. (Barring Google app engine's implementation.) Has anyone heard of something like this?
In our case, we became profitable. When all you need is money to pay for a small server and can get consulting gigs to pay for food, becoming profitable at two weeks (so far so good, anyway) really puts your mind at ease that what you're doing will at least hopefully be self-sustainable.

I realise this is useless advice for most other startups, but hey, spend as little as you can (but not too little), and you're doing the best you can.
He thinks that it's a layer on top of a bank account from some other bank, so the fees would technically still be in effect. How do cash deposits work for BankSimple?
My experience has been that the Helvetica Neue shipped with OS X is better-adapted to on-screen rendering than the version available for print and graphic design from Adobe.
I felt so cheated. I thought there was finally a Gruber piece that I might be interested in, but it was a complete bait and switch.

In my apparent quest to get downvoted, I propose that Gruber should be a unit of measure for fanboism. Usage:

- "Did you see the new iPhone? I went from 0 to Gruber in under 4 seconds."

- "... all the way to eleven on the Gruber scale."
You need to massage your data to get more meaningful results.

It might be interesting to compare your word counts with the word counts from a general-purpose word corpus, then pick out words that appear more frequently by a statistically-significant amount. Something like Amazon's statistically improbable phrases algorithm.
Oh come on, not enough social information? How much more social information do you people need? Want to know what someone listens to? No need to trawl their car's floor for album covers -- not only do they have their favorite albums on Last.fm, they have a scrobble of every play made in the past couple weeks. There's already a "favorite books" section in Facebook, how long until ebook readers have live integration with the rest of that?
Actually, rescaling pixels is part of the CSS specification:

If the pixel density of the output device is very
different from that of a typical computer display, the
user agent should rescale pixel values. [...]
It is recommended that the reference pixel be [...] one
pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units
PiCloud dev here.

Currently, our users are mainly scientists and researchers that leverage PiCloud's parallelism to expedite their computation. A lot of the use cases are simulation and equation solving related - in areas such as finance, geology, hydrology, and biology. Many of the algorithms(especially monte-carlo methods) used in these fields are computationally intensive and embarrassingly parallel (http://bit.ly/dj3qQm) and benefit from PiCloud's compute power.

On web apps, wile we cannot host web apps, we can benefit them. Some of our customers are using us as a web scraper for their backend. Encode videos (http://bit.ly/9JkLph) also works. Ultimately, any background task can use PiCloud; we for instance used it for an automatic Facebook photo tagger app. If your app is already on the cloud (esp. on AWS), you will no latency difference between your own machines and PiCloud's ; PiCloud will save you though from the headache of managing servers for background processing.

With crons, we are aiming to offer the community an easy and realiable way to run periodic work. While you can run a twitter bot on your own computer, it stops working when you power-off your computer or disconnect it from the internet. PiCloud's cron scheduler will always be running 24/7. And if you have multiple compute intensive crons, each will run much quicker by being spread horizontally across our cluster.
Security holes present an interesting challenge. Since we allow authors to blacklist their code at the uuid level, it's possible to issue a network-wide advisory that revokes execution rights for that specific uuid.

This can instantly close the hole until a patch is released. This keeps users safe and gives application authors time to test against their application with the new library before re-publishing.

In many cases, application authors are the only people that are qualified to test interactions between their applications and the updated library.
That's actually pretty rad.
I think he worries that since the banks "under" banksimple are already taking a good cut of the "interest gap" between the rate you can lend it out at and the rate you pay customers, there won't be enough left for you to cover your costs.

P.S. get a real username?
Go Vs D (programming languages)
Without making any promises, it's hard to imagine any programming system becoming successful without being largely open source.
I think there was some progress on the n900.
Very different costs involved for the library. Instead of loaning some 7 year old kid a 5 dollar paperback, you gotta lend him a much more fragile 200 dollar Kindle. Not to mention you need to stock enough Kindle for every patron who might want one in addition to purchasing licenses for the books.

Right now, every book can be lent out individually. A library might have lent out all it's copies of a specific title, but as long as there's a single book left in the building, they've still got something to lend. It seems like that simplifies capacity planning quite a bit as opposed to the model of having to provider readers as well as ebooks.
When I was in gain/build mode I was using brown rice and pea protein.
What good is Java to them if they can't control it? They don't have a monopoly on expertise.
Ask HN: Telehealth market trends?
Does anyone know what are the technology trends in the telehealth (remote medical consultation) industry? What would be the best direction for a remote physiotherapy application? (Mobile, WebService, Device, Tablet, etc?) Thanks!
That would be reasonable, but the CSS standard says:

"If the pixel density of the output device is very different from that of a typical computer display, the user agent should rescale pixel values."

It then goes on to define a "reference pixel" in terms of arclength subtended within the user's field of vision. On reflection, I suppose this is sufficiently different from pt/in/cm (which measure absolute length) to merit its own separate measure; I just wish they hadn't used the term "pixel" for it. Because "pixel" already means something else and the arclength subtended by a pixel in a "typical computer display" has changed considerably over the last twenty years.
EnterpriseDB is essentially an Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, however, its not open source. I guess Google can buy them and open source their software just to piss off Oracle.
Geesh! How out of touch with reality are you?!? Do you have any idea how many families in the US can't afford $40 bucks a month? That's assuming that the parents are supportive of buying a computer and an internet connection. If not, the kid on his own is fucked if he's gonna need a computer and 40 dollar a month internet connection to get access to the library.
there is an old joke: "how can you tell if a salesman is lying" - answer: his lips are moving.
Hacking Forums
Helvetica Neue isn't that much better than Helvetica for the screen at small sizes. It is fantastic at larger sizes in lighter weights (I swoon for Helvetica Neue Light)
$99 has been my price point for it all along. If the kindle books were cheaper I'd spend a bit more for the reader -- but at $9 a book (and you can't share them like you can with a nook) I want a relatively inexpensive reader.

Also note that other publishers do publish books in kindle format, Baen books for example has their free library which includes every format under the sun.
Precisely.
Also concerned that the underlying banks could be jerks and change terms etc to make their model not work or cause problems.

I'm not against trying it, just concerned about how well it will play out.

I haven't been looking forward to switching banks before. So far every time I have switched banks it has been to get a local branch to deposit checks. I'm really hoping BankSimple is the last bank I'll ever need but I'll need to see how it works in practice.
Whoops, looks like twitter's real-time search is less than real-time; turns out there can be 10+ second delays. The bot's first search (after you posted) failed to return your tweet - and when your tweet showed up in the next search a minute later, the more than one minute old tweet was ignored. Updated code is on our blog.
I'd suggest, as a simple heuristic for ranking words for improbability/relevance, contribution to K-L divergence from the frequencies in the general-purpose word corpus:

Pln(P/Q)

where P is the frequency of the word in the narrow corpus (HN titles)

and Q is the frequency of the word in the general-purpose corpus

(formula doesn't work if Q is ever zero; this won't happen if the broader corpus includes the narrower one, as it should, but as a practicality, just make Q:=(1-a)Q+a*P for small positive a to simulate merging the smaller corpus into the larger)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_diverg...

Anybody with more time than I have at the moment want to code this up?
What exactly can Apple's new Liquidmetal do?
الحلقة الاولى من برنامج دوام الحال, الحلقه 1 من دوام الحال
Sure, there's others with a very high degree of skill like Carmack, but it's his consistent ability to come up with amazing stuff over the last two and a bit decades that gives him legend status.

It's not just ability and skill, it's also impact on the industry (which, obviously, requires a degree of luck and circumstance). It sounds pretty hash, but it's kinds hard to be considered a legend/god/whatever if no one's heard of you.

But you raise an interesting point. For those people how do make an impact, to what degree is it due to circumstance, and to what degree their own skill? There's loads of very highly skilled people in any given field, and yet only a very small number of them will ever make much of an impact on that field. Why is this, and what differentiates the ones who do from the ones who don't?
> Your point is a good one, but not one that anyone wants to hear.

That's why I left Reddit—the tyranny of the majority. I guess it's here now, too. Where to next?
I've talked to people who currently work at twitter who are pretty open that a large part of their job is paying down the technical debt from the early days. The engineers who were at twitter in the early days were by no means bad but it's pretty open within the company that they weren't "world class"
Installing the 7zip front end Q7Z in Ubuntu
My guess is that "they will make it up with volume".

Controlling large sums of money that can be moved around behind the scenes to the capture the best rates may provide the consumer a better deal than they can get with their more modest sums. BankSimple passes some of that back to their customer, and keeps the rest. My assumption is they will try to squeeze the margins down from the banks doing the heavy lifting, just as Walmart does with suppliers.
well, to be fair he never said what's the dimension of "the page" ;)
Fatal Flaws in Deolalikar’s P ≠ NP Proof?
So where do atheists go to find a nice atheist boy/girl to marry? :P
Hmm yes, that's basically exactly my point above. It's well suited for scientific work or MC methods, but I would instantly have an order of magnitude more uses for your service if there was a data store I could write to, even if that were just a queue (so I could upload a bunch of data and not have to go back and forth through the entire internet all the time).

All in all, it sounds like a very useful service, and I'm really looking forward to you guys adding more and more features. Hopefully one of these days I'll find something to use it for, because my invitation code has been gathering dust (it's been that long)!
Come Christmas season 2011, the e-reader market is going to look like the MP3 player market in 2005. You're going to see Coby-branded e-readers with horrible silver-painted plastic and 90s-budget-PC industrial design at Menards on Black Friday for $29.95.
I think we'd be far more likely to see some sort of "Go-Mobile" released.
Zed Shaw and a hobo announce a recommendation for Google
i'm willing to let your remarks on carmack's "ego" slide, but only because you're such a paragon of humility yourself
Read. The. Claim.

And no, the CLR is not totally different from the JVM.
Good question, but the last time I did a cash deposit was when I sold a car. And the time before that was when I sold another car. That's two times in about seven years for me.
At $100, I'm definitely getting one for Christmas. My wife's and my own miserly tendencies are nearly obliterated at that point.
Oracle is suing Google over Java. There’s just one tiny problem…
So what does this mean for Backtype and Tweetmeme?

I gather that Tweetmeme has some kind of partner deal... but what are the particulars? Is it short term or long term?
I have done freelance work through oDesk and the longer projects were quite valuable. Rates are low but not that low. According to oDesk's stats, the average rate for a web developer is about $16/hr.
Ah, O.K. Fair question. Unfortunately, I couldn't provide you with a satisfactory answer until we announce our partners. I expect we'll be doing so sooner than later.
Pretty sure most banks don't do too much physical money storing. I've used cash once in the past couple months; someone gave me a 20 to pay me back for something. I got rid of it ASAP.

But yeah, they're using other banks for their existing infrastructure like ATMs and treasury dealings. I'm curious about their revenue margins with that setup, but I've got to believe that there's a place for profit there.
What I got from the post was how arrogant Google has become. Anyone notice that they dress up their opinions with wasted "MYTHS" & "FACTS"? And while the myth statements & facts maybe be true, they don't actually dis-prove the point of many originating myths, which Is why they follow each Myth/Fact with an opinion.

I don't mind Google having an opinion worth fighting for, but Google is a private company trying to push their private deals on government acting like they are doing everyone a favor.

I personally don't appreciate what they're doing and I'm noticing a trend where I'm beginning to like Google as much as I like Microsoft, and I hate Microsoft.