skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to be getting a tough reception here. Seemed pretty good to me, basically delivering various things that I geeked up myself with an Acer Revo running Ubuntu and XBMC, but with vastly easier setup, a better interface, and better integration with US cable TV and DVRs.

The key elements they've got right as I see it is that it's based on HDMI passthrough, so you're not switching between HDMI (or other) inputs and back again which is a major stumbling block for my family, particularly as we control the cable with a remote that can change the TV volume but nothing else. With Google the picture slideshows, last.fm etc. just appear on top of the standard video signal and they appear to have IR blasters to pass through all kinds of controls to other devices, which is hacky but necessary unless you want to buy the entire ecosystem from your cable provider.

They're also building it into TVs and Blu-Ray players, which means one less control (and box) to worry about. Integration with iPhones/Android is something that geeks already do to various degrees (e.g. setting recordings while out and about, flicking through or searching your video library on your phone) but it's good to have it built in from the start, particularly with voice activation for finding that rarely used channel.

On the other hand searching the web while watching a program is something I do right now with my iPhone or netbook, so I don't really see the benefit of that, but then it kind of comes for free so why not?
You Can't Have IT as a Service Until IT has Infrastructure as a Service
For 4) she did say they'd have an App store, I think she actually said Android App store, so I'd imagine all your app requests are likely.
I'm not a Django user myself, but why use a solution like this over let's say Hoptoad via http://sjl.bitbucket.org/django-hoptoad/ ?

On first glance it would seem it offers exactly the same functionality with the added benefit of your errors already going to an external location.
Top 20 iPad Apps to Keep You Healthy and Fit
Wikipedia's Iraq War Page's History Printed is 12 Volumes Long
because in part they are the cassandra authors, I'd say. They have been contributing code to cassandra for quite a while.
what's the relevance of that comment?

is your claim that dasher does not predict well?

or rather, that google scribe predicts better than dasher?

it would surprise me: dasher adapts to the linguistic habbits of the particular user. it learns in real time.

google scribe doesn't appear to do this. it doesn't know who i am.
There are also a lot of iPod touches out there.
Even partial refunds are said to uninstall the app from the users device - tho I have not tried this so I don't know if it's true.

I can't believe this. Customers would essentially be paying some percentage of the app cost and getting nothing in return if they obtained a partial refund. That's just wrong.
Video of Knuth as an undergrad programmer, circa 1959
An interesting parallel. I guess the novelty is that there is no intermediate expanded file -- no config.h, etc.
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I think he means that his competitors run AdSense, showing for keywords that he bids on, so in effect they're just channelling part of their traffic to him. Since it's a competitor, there's a great efficiency in the traffic since the people are actually looking for his product.
You value them based on what somebody is willing to pay.

So, you ask these folks to make you an offer. If it is more than the £450 you're looking for, you can take it, or hold out for more, if you think they have deeper pockets and desire.

If they turn around and sell it on for more, that's no loss to you; you got what you thought was a fair price, and weren't willing to put in any additional sales effort.
Trashing the field isn't sexist. Bitter, maybe.
It's entirely possible that he did. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity#Formation_of_ge...) says that "studies estimate the age at which gender identity is formed at around 2-3."

It's probably both cultural and biological in this case, I'd imagine. (it could be that he'd learned that dresses were associated with females through cultural conditioning, but he mentally knew on some level [maybe subconscious] that he was male, or something along those lines.)
The End of Human Specialness
there is a lot of anger towards the agile movement because it was sold as a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose, rather than a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility.

the interesting thing is that the agile movement started as exactly the reverse of what you said: as a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility, not a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose.

If your experience is the opposite, you've been had by someone, and you're blaming agile.

whenever unit tests or test driven development comes up the proponents act like anyone not doing things this way is incompetent. I think the reverse is true

The reverse would be "anyone doing unit tests in incompetent", which is not a defendable statement. What are you trying to say?
Are you in the business of writing software that never gets used? I have, and I hated it. Quick feedback means quickly finding out if you're building the right thing.
Oh, it's not mine. But in any case, I think there's a special invite link:

http://streak.ly/auth/twitter/start?secret=showhn
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I go every day at lunch and workout for an hour. At first people viewed it as wasted time. Now about half my team leaves for an hour at some point during the day to workout. As soon as people feel low energy they leave. The change in their output has been remarkable. What we found was that people have low energy at some point and the change in energy level after causes them to be more productive and clear headed.
yeah and how many of those people completely cut their children off from all external culture?
Already exists on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/leanback

Edit: Just noticed they showed Leanback in the demo.
Me too. I have an iPad, but the wife has stolen it, and I really really have enjoyed reading books on it. I don't want to buy another one (yet) and so it's worth looking at the alternatives. I considered a Kindle but I like doing other stuff other than just reading books on the iPad
From what I know, the statement "You only need to drink when you're thirsty" is incorrect. Also, you are unlikely to "drink too much" when you just have water at your desk.

Toxins? Again, no specific answer, but the food is not necessarily "clean", so that's what our kidneys and liver are for.
Seedcamp and the Rise of Europe's Super Angels
Eating meat is barbaric, not civilised.
How about being called Mr. Wanker or Mr. Tosser ?
Buying lottery tickets is the extreme end of the spectrum. It's not for everyone. It's not for 99% of people probably. But if you're Andrew Whittaker or Geraldine Williams or Harold and Helen Lerner[1], it turns out that you can do better than the guys patiently working at startups.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_jackpot_records
Not so unpopular in the UK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7897...
Yes, but that does not hold true for a free app that just enables some functionality that was supposedly present in the phone when I bought it. You don't need a google email account for turn-by-turn navigation with voice instruction.
Skip Class Calculator Makes The News
http://perldoc.perl.org/pstruct.html takes this a bit further (but less portably), and compiles the code to assembly and parses out the debug records to find the information about the structures.
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It does require changes in the app, but app authors who need this kind of performance benefit will be willing to accept that hit. The solution is far better than the alternatives:

- Allowing users to flush manually (people screw this up real bad)
- Changing the rack spec (allowing for #each on the body to be lazily yielded, and terminating on nil or the like)
- Moving to an always async stack (totally kills most users)

Yes, there are plenty of issues with this, and I agree with your concern, but it is also something which can have a marked effect on performance for users. It's also worth noting that a well componentised partial can render an error in-place of the partial itself, for example, rendering a page that contains the whole layout, and a single red box of errors (say a render of the _new partial can be added to the buffer after a _create fails, instead of rendering the success box). Yes, that requires some refactoring of the application (rather than using for example, the standard 302 approach).

It's also worth noting that a larger class of applications that would find this actually useful should generally have reasonable test coverage and code maturity. Whilst this isn't always the case, we also don't protect users from eval, and other evil tools, in ruby or rails.
Little known iTunes 10 benefit
Pedestrian death rise blamed on iPods
Not a recommendation, but a store that sells them (scroll down):

http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.android

I can recommend the above website. I buy lots of gadgets from them.
Average price of laptops drops to $1,000 (2005)
Irrelevant to the proposal of the blog article that raising girls like boys would produce more female technologists.

Maybe if you could pull it off for every single family in the country.

Many women in eastern Europe seem to be in tech, maybe that is worth looking into.
Dijkstra, Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges
That is it! So the problem seems to be a complex one. Some part of it I think is an ordinary Java issues - what happens when there is not enough memory, and system start use swap, what happens when a connection rate is too fast while system is doing a heavy IO? What happens during recovery of network operation or replication failure and so on.
The second part is the complexity of the software itself, but not the complexity of the algorithms or tasks - it isn't a rocket science, but added artificial complexity due to all those CrappyFactoryManager().GetSpecialShitFactory().instantiateANewCrap() and so on - seem like no one can comprehend the whole mess itself.
In the other hand, this failure probably will cause some improvements or at least more attention to Cassandra project, and everyone who uses it will benefit.
Oracle Responds to HP Lawsuit
Put it up on Sedo or another service with a reserve price of £450, and invite the guy who approached you to bid there. A buy it now price might also make sense. I'd go for £2-4k for the whole set.

Remember you're not selling it to cover your costs, you're selling it because they're valuing it at more than you value it.
Wow... what I take from that is:

A really well argued way of agreeing with my point that perldoc pages should start with a reference to e.g. a page on perl.org with the present best practices for that perldoc page? :-)

Or maybe as close as possible to get of a formal proof? :-)

>>[Moose] still is adopted by only 5% [of CPAN] [..] It would be premature to expect the industry to recognize let alone promote Moose as the de-facto standard.

The counter argument is that new work generally seems to use Moose. But, of course, new work use the CPAN modules.
> while git tends to get me in trouble

Likewise. On the other hand, once you've blown off your leg and if you have time to waste (your probably do, seeing as you're now missing a leg) it does give you tools to sew the stuff back together (see reflog). It's much easier to wedge your repository in Git (for reasons you don't understand after invoking a command which seemed straightforward at the time), but in my experience Mercurial doesn't Mercurial doesn't always provide the tools to dig you out of your holes.

What that says about each VCS, you'll be the judge.
I have been a professional software developer for 10 years now. Today on my way to work I have realized once again that in all those years, I have not held a single job that was any fun at all. (Not for want of switching - the longest I ever lasted at one company was one year).

Programming is fun, but programming jobs suck. At least the vast majority of them. Save for starting my own business, my hopes are close to zero to find a fun programming job in the future.*

Maybe women are just better than men at figuring such things out and going for jobs that are more fun.

This would also explain the decline of women in tech since the eighties. I suppose cubicles and all that only appeared around that time.

* I would like jobs like Data Mining for Backtype or TheSixtyOne, but jobs like that are rare. I also don't have the required portfolio yet.
Good point. An unobtainium rod as JanezStupar calls it, would be the immovable object, stuck in the universe's gullet gumming up the works. I wonder if God would be able to move it after he created it.
My self Hariom Rajput, I am a(SEO) Search Engine Optimization specialist.I am working on Call From India Company, present time in Agra.My blog=http://blogs.siliconindia.com/hariomrajput
I'd suspect Pagani or a PR agency are running it, not him.
I don't know that they have. Rejected apps are a very small minority and so far my reaction to every rejection I've heard about was "why did they think this would get approved?".
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Google, Apple Battle to Bring Web to Your TV
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Ask HN: How do they do it?
Most of the A/B web services allow you to load your website and change the elements in real time.

How's that done?
Poll HN: Do you dress up for board meetings? 
My cofounder and I have this (perhaps strange) habit of dressing up for our board meetings, even though our board meetings are on Skype, and sometimes even just the telephone.<p>This morning, as I put on a button-down and slacks for the first time in several months, I thought to myself "this would make a good HN poll".
YES - I dress nicer for board meetings than I do for a typical day.
NO - I don't wear anything different than I usually do for board meetings.
Good points, and I agree. Sending 200 OK before you know if the response truly is OK is problematic, at best. I'm not sure I agree with you about authentication / authorization. These should do their job before a controller gets a chance to render / first flush a view and would thus get a chance to send other headers. In the extreme the first middleware would flush a 200 header right away and then call down the middleware stack, but thats not how I read this proposal.

Anything that might happen while actually rendering a view is a concern here (and as your get more lazy that could be quite a lot), but you'd normally sort out auth before actually rendering/flushing anything.
A little bit of HTML5 makes the medicine go down
It's a good guess, but I really don't think the download counts have anything to do with it.
IPhone Apps for SEO Experts. Useful info for HN readers?
First, I recommend viewing the slides on slideshare proper (http://www.slideshare.net/bokardo/designing-for-social-tract...). Some of the slides were hard to read for me on the smaller embed.

Secondly, wow. This is a seriously worthwhile click. I'm only about halfway through it, so there's still time for it to go downhill I suppose, but while some of the tips are more commonplace (delay registration as long as you can), others were downright insightful (Instead of asking "Can people fill out our sign-up form?" Ask "Are people motivated to care?").

It's long, so save it for later if you're in a hurry, but I recommend against skipping it altogether.
It sounds like they already know about it, you know from all the times it has happened already. Unless HN is hugely influential I don't see how this will change their behaviour.
Good point. From the literature I've encountered it also folows that nonfat icecream is not the solution, it's the problem.
So eventually you publish the final app as a new package and update the beta with a nag screen that points to the new package. Or am I missing something?
I basically wrote this ebook with HN readers in mind. I'd like any input on the idea, the landing page and clarity of the message.
That breaks caching, as pointed out by judofyr. I can imagine having to remove caching will eat up the performance gains pretty fast.
I think the NT and OSX updates were absolutely required due to architectural reasons which impact security, 98/ME and MacOS 9 just simply weren't suited to types of threats on the internet (no support for dropping process privileges, file permissions, cutting direct access to hardware etc.). If you think XP is bad in 2010, think what Me would be like if widely installed still, one program crashing the whole machine, boot sector viruses etc.
Well they're all engineers right? Except for that guy that walks around spouting how he knows everything about everyone and you shouldn't do anything bad if you don't want it to get out. You know ... the CEO.
Good dancing may be sign of male health - "Disco DNA"
Gee, now I feel like an idiot for buying a portable media player that just mounts as a USB drive.
Wicked cool replies, thanks. =)
Did the upvoters actually read and understand this post and its errors and decide to up it just because it was an "interesting" boneheaded post?

Or maybe it is all the anti-TDD folks upvoting first and then maybe checking the whole thing actually makes sense? :)

Submodules, if you find you must depend on external libraries at the repository level (for patching, perhaps).
From the post:

For Rails 3.1, we wanted a mostly-compatible solution with the same programmer benefits as the existing model, but with all the benefits of automatic flushing

And from there he goes on with very specific implmentation details and the only caveat is some API change. This gives the impression that this is something you can easily enable for any app.

I just want to point out that 100% automatic flushing is pretty much impossible with the current state of Rack/Rails, and there's still plenty of work before there's anything near flushing support in Rails.

In addition, everyone should be aware of the trade-off you're making with flushing (potentially sending 500 responses as 200 Ok etc.)
Arguing With Peasants Shows a Lack of Self-Discipline
Link to single page: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/05/...

I hate having to click a bunch of times to view a single article
Let's agree that Git has more momentum, and GitHub the best hosting interface available. The main reason to choose Mercurial in the face of this is that it's command line interface seems far more well thought out than Git's. Given how much time you spend interacting with the repository on the command-line, this is hugely significant.
Don't worry, you still can't copy music from a device back into iTunes. I mean, obviously the bits representing the music flow from the iDevice into the computer, but the computer doesn't belong to you anymore, so you don't get access to them. Silly user.

USB devices fail in that they rely on the user to make his own decisions about whether or not to copy his friend's music collection. Apple devices let some music execs representing bands I've never heard of make them for you instead.
That's a pretty big feature change... is that a mistake or did they somehow slip that past the record labels?
My school has 5km of (heated!) tunnels connecting all the buildings on campus, but since they're open to the public they don't feel eerie at all.

I'd like to see your pictures if you ever put them online. =)
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What would you prefer to write web applications in? C++?

Most languages used in web programming are divorced from the hardware, and either use a virtual machine (e.g. Java, .NET) or an interpreter (PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby).

Virtually no-one uses a low level language for web programming, and the benchmarks say that the virtual machines are faster than interpreters. Java is very fast and efficient once it's running, but initial start-up time is often slower than interpreted languages due to the JIT compilation, but servers rarely "start up". If you're really hitting a barrier with Java's performance, just as with other non-native languages, you can write the performance critical section in C.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan...
Oh okay, as in they are an AdSense partner - ie they have ads on their website?
Strategical Thinking Practice.
Osama bin Laden dead or alive xtreme beach volleyball.
I don't get it. What prevents him from writing a simple shell/python/whatever script that uses a simple hash-table with tag associations for different repositories for synced checkout via git hooks?
I absolutely agree with you that it is cultural influence - that's my point! There is no specific relation between gender and colour, it is entirely culturally-induced.

Parents may say that they have raised their child gender-neutral, but that is to some extent impossible since gender-norms are all around us, often unconsciously so. When they see their child craving gender-specific toys, it's more likely an indicator that they have not been as successful as they would wish to be.
Ask HN: The Price is Right.. or is it?
Hi, I am relatively new to HN and really like the quality commentary that the community provides. So here's my first question.

I realise this question may have already been asked, but we are launching a new product which will be the first product we are attempting to monetise. Ideally we want customers paying for the service on a monthly basis. Our first question was simply 'how much should we charge per month' which now feels rather naive without making other considerations. We have therefore started discussing pricing strategy.

I am particularly interested in how other HN'ers have tackled the launch of their product in respect of pricing. Has it been a gut feel type of thing, or have you invested a significant amount of time in creating a pricing strategy and, for example, related the price of the service to the cost of the infrastructure and the expected number of customers? Thanks in advance for your thoughts, suggestions or otherwise.
I use the 5Ghz band. Both my Time Capsule and Macbook support 11n over 5Ghz.
hey but we have iPad and not to mention the cool new iPod Nano [the touch one] , and plus iPhone 4G with FaceTime. Plus we are a better generation we don't buy cheap P.C. rather we have hypnosis inducing Apple Mac Book Pro's.
<responding to troll> though of course you can copy music off an ipod by copying the mp3 files off it like any other mounted disk, except that they are in a folder with its hidden attribute set.
Can you provide a concrete example of DAG editing which you had trouble doing with Mercurial?