skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to have one of their older Symbian phones and my impression was that there was a lot of potential there but ultimately they couldn't pull it off.

This certainly isn't good news for Symbian, but I will hardly miss Sony Ericsson: regardless of the OS, they somehow manage to screw up a perfectly good smartphone.
an interesting story... ruined by... the editor's criminal overuse... of ellipses
Wireless 802.11N

Its got plenty of bandwidth for most internet delivered video purposes, without hogging your entire house's bandwidth. Theoretically it could pipe full Blu-Ray streams across your home network though YMMV

I've had an old Linksys WRT54G for years running DD-WRT and thats the reason I'm upgrading.
I do agree with you on that one. You have to realize that Buffalo has a business relationship with DD-WRT. DD-WRT licenses their firmware to Buffalo. So part of the promotion dove-tails a lot with Buffalo. But, there are two different manufacturers here, but the Netgear is priced as more expensive.
It is a specialized computer - if the new model is faster and the old one isn't fast enough anymore, you upgrade.
DuckDuckGo implements HTTPS Everywhere
The Genius of the Tinkerer
You've had to be careful about this for years. There has been 10 revisions of the WRT54G and something like half of them don't work with DD-WRT/OpenWRT.
My wife submerged a digital camera about 1/3 of the way into salt water. I partially disassembled it (the outside casing, but not the lens / sensor area) and rinsed well with distilled water, scrubbing away some salt deposits with Q-Tips. I wrapped it in paper towels and put it in a container full of rice for a week to dry. It worked fine afterwards.
Wow. It's oversold shared hosting, but for memcached!
It's all about developers baby http://metrics.admob.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/appceler....

All the developers are over at iOS and Android. There are still some developers left over in the RIM and Windows Phone camp.

I am an iOS dev, Android dev and Windows Phone dev spending my time in that order. And most of that is on the one with the best market.

All the coup de tats in technology, an initial phase is stealing/attracting developers. Then comes the apps that people want. Then come thy platform and market. Rinse repeat. It is no longer just a phone strategy.

Symbian, Thy Game is Over. Nokia can maybe re-emerge as they still sell well, but seriously setback now.
I'm in the same boat as you. I like to have fun at work, but that's mostly because I want to work where my tasks are rewarding. Fun people also add to the mix of course. But there is a limit; sometimes you have to get stuff done. That's when I enjoy the job the most.

You say that this office regularly pulls long hours, but doesn't progress. To what extent is this true? If its literally 100% fun with no progress (ie nothing that will later lead to cash inflow), then something will have to change very soon. People are the biggest cost in most companies, and if they don't justify their expense, it's a matter of time before the inevitable.
It would be so much more effective if people they polled represented a uniform distribution (or any known).
To see examples of things makerbot, thing-o-matic's younger sibling, built you can check out thingiverse.com
My first thought reading the heading was it's similarities to the Ice Bath "fix" for the Xbox 360 red ring of death:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UN7MrhQaAc

Read the description, it's quite funny that people fell for this obvious hoax.
I would find that big open space very distracting. I'm all for letting employees walk away from a hard problem and play some Wii Bowling to clear their head and decompress. I like that kind of environment and culture.

However, for those periods of super-productivity when I'm "in the zone", I don't want to be interrupted by an impromptu Nerf Blaster war.
Impressive efforts can still come to nothing, and so far the numbers aren't favorable. I got and started developing for the N900 when it came out, because I absolutely support the effort of truly being open source that Nokia is betting on.

It's just not working out so far. There are no users, the platform is immature, the N900 is not a good phone for users or developers, and most importantly: the Ovi Store is terrible. I released one piece of open source software and gave up on the platform after that experience.

Absolutely, anything can happen and Nokia do still have massive market share. I just don't see how they can catch up to Android and iOS at this point, massive effort or not.
Developers only has 1 p in it.

The ideas for the games don't excite me.

I am an avid gamer and I only signed up for Facebook for the games. (I have since left.) I had 'completed' Mafia Wars in that I had done everything you could do in all 3 or 4 areas that were available. (I forget how many now.) I played many other games.

I own every game console currently on the market, and I buy and rent games avidly. I play everything from casual Hidden Object games to hardcore FPS's.

So don't take it lightly when I say that your game ideas fail to excite me. I like games.

Now, it's possible you haven't explained them well enough, and they could be fun... But so far, they do nothing for me and when I leave this page, I'll have forgotten about them.
I saw the name Dave McClure and put on my sun glasses before clicking play. Totally necessary.
the single best stress reliever is have a mission.
1 or 2 years? No. Lots of cheap (and some that aren't even all that cheap) Nokia phones here in Italy still are still sold with S40, which is the step below Symbian. And that's still in "the west". I don't know what phones are like in places like India, but I assume that the low end is fairly low end...
A certain amount of churn is required to continually inform new users. Yes, too much causes the older users to leave from boredom. To little, however, and the newer users cannot gain an appropriate grasp of the common knowledge expected, so references and assumed points will pass them by in conversation.

The other option is the one humans generally end up with. Knowledge barriers between generations. There would need to be different versions of the site every year or two so that new users could go through their learning period uninterrupted, and older users could be secluded to their advanced topics. This makes it harder for older users to educate newer users, and leads to rehashing of debates once closed. The older users will peter out over time, while the newer will waste time spinning wheels they could easily have been advised were explored and pointless.

Complaints are only needed if there is an excess of redundant articles. The occasional rediscussion simply keeps ideas alive and flowing.
Jack Ganssle is an embedded guru and a great writer, check out everything he's written - books and online.

Start here: http://www.ganssle.com/startinges.htm ("How to become an embedded geek")

Get yourself a simple all-in-one hardware/firmware environment, like the one my company (Silicon Labs) makes: Look for the "MCUniversity Kit", it's $55, here: http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/MCUniversity.aspx

Or check out http://hackaday.com/2010/08/11/how-to-launchpad-programming-... for info about Launchpad, a cheaper, similar solution from TI.

I've actually used Silicon Labs' MCU University kit, and I highly recommend it. I don't get any money directly from it, but Silicon Labs does pay my salary.
Obviously, that remark is a bit tongue-in-cheek... that said, Omega should be accessible to anyone who's motivated, and able to get through college mathematics. And in some cases, the benefits seem clear and very worthwhile.
Again, as has been said over and over, it's a lot cheaper for Intel to target 2 markets with the same product and just charge extra for unlocking the full potential.

It's exactly the same thing they are already doing when producing multiple chips, except that this is a lot cheaper for everyone. If they didn't do this, all the chips would be more than $50 more expensive.

Everyone is winning.

And yet people feel the need to complain about this. If must be psychological, because it sure isn't logical.
I wonder how one of the major problems with these things will be solved. We have a Stratasys ($30k+ unit) 3D printer at work and while it does a great job of making a prototype overnight, the feature size still isn't small enough to not notice ridges. I'd guess that the features are well below 0.01" but you can still see a "pattern" on the end product that wouldn't be there if it were, e.g., molded or machined.

RepRap is doing some interesting research with using multiple types of materials like embedding wiring in the product, but the technology has a long way to go before it's consumer-ready.
Yes, I agree. I was replying to the other commentator who asked memcache as a service. Memcache on public network will kill the objectives because latency would then be the main issue.
Products For People Who Make Products For People
The work eventually has to get done, and it generally happens in 14-hour-day crunch sessions right before a deadline, where people basically live at their desk and food is brought to them. There were a couple projects I wasn't even told about until the day before they were due, and was basically told I'd be working all day.

The company is the biggest of its kind in the region, so they get a lot of clients and charge a lot - but I also think they're ripe for being picked off by smart competition.
HN is always talking about metrics, scalability, and engineering, here's my take on this from that perspective:

Imagine a twitter engineer working on the redesign was looking at data from the homepage, looking for something to remove.

It turns out that the least clicked on thing on the entire page is the client attribution.

He looks at eye-tracking data too, and it turns out the only people who look at the client names, are developers!

The engineer opens his iPhone's calculator, and finds that by removing attribution he is reducing dynamic stream content by 33% (tweet, time, attribution) for 100M+ users.

What kind of engineer is not going to jump on this? Especially for a piece nobody except developers is going to complain about losing?

A cleaner, faster homepage is better for users. Sorry developers, the world does not revolve around you.
Oh, my. Just as I was about to shell out for a Makerbot as well. Damn.
The fact that they responded to your jest in sincerity gives hope to the "little guy"

HackerNews: battlebots for geeks who can't build an ashtray without a makerbot
They're not doing well, but they have 41% of the market share? Apple and Google dream of having that kind of market share.
As someone much smarter than me once said: "Work doesn't necessarily make you happy but it may give you the means to do something to make you happy"

Diversify your portfolio. Don't be all tech. Go sit in a park, learn how to draw (really, more learning how to see), take art or music classes. Realize how rich the world is.
What is the bottleneck here? I am surprised that the CPU utilisation is just 2%, which means, either the disk or the network is the bottleneck. Both these aren't discussed. And of course, one shouldn't forget the fact that if CPU is the bottleneck, we need "true" concurrency and there should be threads on every single core. :-)
Mistake numero uno when it comes to consumer grade networking equipment: thinking that brand means anything.

Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, Buffalo, pretty much any brand you can think of do not really do the heavy lifting of the design work on anything you're going to find on the shelf at Best Buy. Instead, they take reference designs from chipset vendors like Broadcom, Atheros, or RALink then brand the firmware and put the whole think in whatever plastic package they want.

What really matters when it comes to consumer networking gear is what internal chipset the manufacturer is using on a particular model; this can be tricky because manufacturers have been known to do things like completely change the internal hardware while retaining the same model number. Either way, the chipset is what's going to determine what the unit is capable of, whether it's hackable, and what problems if may have. Whether it says Netgear or Linksys on the box is of relatively little consequence.

(Though I will admit I tend to look at Buffalo gear first when I'm shopping simply because they're pretty good at putting out inexpensive, hackable hardware. As others have noted, their factory firmware on some newer models is actually a branded version of DD-WRT).
I was a moderator in #xkcd-signal (the original channel ROBOT9000 was run on) for awhile. In the past 12 hours, #xkcd-signal had 55 messages. #xkcd had over 4,000. Its a fun attraction, but not much more. And not something people stay around for.
Just as map and reduce in Python is "unpythonic", interfaces that mint new temp strings to process what should be a simple charstar are un-c-like, and should be avoided.

That's not what I'm doing at all, though. I'm just giving char *'s and size_t's for portions of the original character array, not duplicating subsections of the array at all.
Software unlocks of hardware are nothing new in this industry.

IBM has done it with their mainframe processors for years.

Qlogic does it with their fibre channel switches - you can buy one with 8 ports active, 16-20 physical ports, and have to buy up to use all the ports.

Cisco, SonicWall and others artificially limit their routers in the number of DHCP or IP addresses that can be used on the network, and a variety of other features.

Is this an annoying PITA that I wish would go away? Yes, absolutely. But it's not some affront to humanity, any more so than other licensing restrictions (and thus, why the FSF is against it).
What phone do you have? It might cost a dollar or two, but, chances are that there's an IRC client for it already.
I'm a perl hacker from way back. I put a few things in CPAN back in my day. But honestly I've not written perl in a decade, so when I got a really amazing job offer for a position doing Perl, I gave it some thought.

Perl is not only not the sexiest/hottest language, but watching and waiting for Perl6 and getting the OO model cleaned up is like waiting for "Duke Nukem Forever". So do you really want to ride on that train? Do you think it will look good on your resume, improve your skill set, or help you think in new and better ways? For all practical purposes the language is dead (FINE, a perl6 implementation is out, but still if the growth is that slow it IS all but dead).

I get offers pretty much constantly to do work in Python, Ruby, and even Java. It would take a lot to make me want to backtrack to an environment that wouldn't help me to grow and evolve as a developer. So the answer for me was "No thanks, thats not really what I want to be doing".
The newer routers have more memory. I think that was the main problem with the router crashing.
My lady friend's laptop was immersed in a fine Italian port wine for a few hours during an unfortunate incident on a plane ride home from Italy. She didn't turn it on, and quickly removed the battery once she realized what happened. I immersed pretty much everything except the harddrive, LCD, and battery in isopropanol for a few hours, and, then in multiple baths of distilled water. I skipped the hair drying step, but used compressed air to get most of the water off. I then waited a few days to be sure any excess water had evaporated. In the end, everything worked except the LCD screen, which was easy to replace.
I don't care how awesome or successful this guy is; his slides are impossible to go through.

Great stuff too. Don't do a start up if: (1) you love your kids or (2) you love your spouse.
Great tip. Unfortunately I lost the Apple earbuds on a trip to Seattle last month.
I have no trouble at all imagining that 100€ (unsubsidized) Android phones will be available soon. You can buy a 210€ (unsubsidized) phone from HTC right now on Amazon. That’s not far off.

That’s not a sudden death – I’m pretty sure that you will be able to buy Symbian phones in two years – but I think that there will be far less dumbphones in the future.
In case people take what the first person in the video says combined with your quote from wikipedia but don't read the entire wikipedia page I'll quote this:

The left half of Bugorski's face swelled up beyond
recognition, and over the next several days started
peeling off, showing the path that the proton beam
(moving near the speed of light) had burned through
parts of his face, his bone, and the brain tissue
underneath.
You are, in other words, reinventing strspn?
Reminder: Startup School application deadline is today at noon Pacific
The OSS revolution is far from over; rather, other fields are being infected. There's Open Source hardware and that field now even has conferences. Biology and biochemistry are going "open source." Media is being released under Creative Commons licensing, etc.

Children of Revolutions always go for the buck. The revolutionaries are the idealists, the pioneers, the groundbreakers. Once the field is prepared, that's when commercialization happens. This is not news: it's human history.

You say you're not fascinated by "...offspring of cell phones." Really? You're not amazed that we have the technology to remotely diagnose your car when it breaks down miles from a service station? That an amateur can put together a device that sends him an SMS when the river level is high enough to go white water rafting?

Having learned the technology for the last ten years, the next step is spend ten years applying the technology to change people's lives, not to idolize it simply for its own existence.

You're an engineer? Go build something!
For $45,000, you can get rid of the steps:

http://www.solid-scape.com/t66_roi.html
Book Cheap Flights Online | Around The Globe
What does that mean? I love my wife and 4 kids and have 2 startups (one old one new). One is doing great, the other is going to do great.
Yeah, the ridges were really noticeable on pieces I've seen before. It'll do for very utilitarian purposes, but aesthetically it's a deal breaker.
where would I work/what is my dream job?

dream job:

- running my own company from local office. I almost don't even care what I'm doing. I want to be an entrepreneur. Just trying to find something I really care about enough to be good at it is the current issue, and have family and bills to pay.

second best:

- telecommuting full-time/contract from local coffee shop

why do I hate my current job?

- IT, not a real dev shop. (lesson learned- if you like development, don't work anywhere with IT in the name or the dept. or organization)

- political. disorganized. unmotivating. no accountability. low morale rampant. (lessons learned: ask about these during interview. Consider not working for a large company, non-profit, nor educational institution if you like the idea of owning your own business and like business)

- don't care about business/money or doing what is best for customer (lessons learned: ask about this during interview and don't work for a large company, non-profit, or educational institution)

- no ability to create change. (lesson learned- don't work for a large company, nor larger mid-sized)

- hate the culture (lesson learned- do your best to understand culture via research of org you want to work for)

- hate the location (I took the job because it was convenient to interview there after previous company moved, but they had moved to a location I didn't want to work at)

- hate the commute (this is hard to avoid)
From the title I thought he was referring to Siebel Software being bought out by Oracle
Thank you. This is a convenient caricature of everything the valley stands for. It should come in handy in pointless HN arguments. Reason #484893 not to move to San Francisco: people will assume that you think like this guy does.
Notice the Bin 38 logo at the bottom left corner of the title slide. A Bin 38 meeting is what kicked off "AngelGate": http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/so-a-blogger-walks-into-a-b...
More collusion in Silicon Valley: no-poaching agreements between major firms
Check the second comment on that post. I'm glad someone else looked at that guy's C and thought "Whoooaaa, oh no."

How can we take posts like this seriously?
This is pure entertainment. If you got something out of this you probably haven't read much of anything else.
Speaking of range issues: Is there a good way to do multi-WAP installs in a house? My router is situated right in the center of the house, and the fridge blocks out the backyard.
That really sucks that the price increased. I've been waiting patiently for years for the price to come down.

Btw I don't think it actually made that platic rabbit in the picture. I've seen things the reprap has made and that rabbit is way too advanced looking. Anyone know?
Technology has been something that inspired me since childhood, and programming in particular has always seemed deliciously close to real-world magic.

However, a lot of the business of technology these days is ugly, cynical, narcissistic and shallow. It's a pity when you think what could be accomplished if all this brainpower were redirected. There must be a thousand bright ideas like Kiva just waiting to be plucked.
In your example: if person A slept with person C before B did then B has an exposure to A, but A has no exposure to B.
Re: Baby Doesn't kill its host

Not to minimize the seriousness of STDs, but I'm pretty certain there is a very long laundry list of STDs that have a lower mortality rate than pregnancy.

The best data I could track from the CDC is from 2007:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/womens_health.htm

"In 2007, a total of 548 women were reported to have died of maternal causes (Tables 33 and 34). As in previous years, the number of maternal deaths does not include all deaths occurring to pregnant women, but only those deaths reported on the death certificate that were assigned to causes related to or aggravated by pregnancy or pregnancy management"

"The maternal mortality rate for 2007 was 12.7 deaths per 100,000 live births. Black women have a substantially higher risk of maternal death than white women. The maternal mortality rate for black women was 26.5, roughly 2.7 times the rate for white women (10.0 deaths per 100,000 live births)."

Of course, there are varying rates at different ages, so...

From: http://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_19.pdf, Table 11, pg 37+ (unfortunately they don't have a breakout for women at various ages, but I eyeballed Table 12, to see if there was a gender bias and noted)

All Causes for ages 15-24 (all causes 79.9 Deaths per 100,000)

Syphillis: none
HIV: 0.4 (2.5x greater chance for men)
Pregnancy: 0.4 (Always female, so 0.8 per 100,000 for a woman)
Motor Vehicle Accidents: 24.9 (2x Greater chance for men)
Suicide: 9.7 (4x greater chance for men)
Homicide: 13.1 (4x Greater chance for men)

If we can reasonably double the rate of death by pregnancy for women, 15-24, to be 0.8 deaths per 100,000 then a girl, 15-24, is probably more likely to be kill by pregnancy than an STD, but is dwarfed by a Car Accidents (And is actually much smaller than Suicide and Homicides as well)

Admittedly, this is just a statistical survey, and actions like proper medical attention can sway these statistics (though that is the case for STDs as well as pregnancy)
Communication skills training by Dogbert