skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
not sure why you're being downvoted on this, you bring up a very good point.

Facetime on iphone 4 uses open standards including SIP, STUN and ICE. These are mature p2p technologies heavily used and deployed and are the same used in xmpp jingle specifications.
open standard p2p already won this battle which skype will persist to fight.
Nearly: '"father" in Georgian is მამა (mama) , while "mother" is pronounced as დედა (deda). "პაპა" papa stands for "grandfather".'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa#Caucasian_languag...
One thing that really annoys me about all the official Skype clients on various phones is their complete ignorance of multiple sign-ins.

This could be an issue with the protocol itself, but it's still annoying.

When I am running Skype on my iPhone or now on Android and at the same time having a conversation on the PC, my phone will notify me for every incoming and outgoing message happening on the PC.

Now, on the PC, a conversation is something happening quickly and in abundance. This basically leads to my phone constantly vibrating.

Jabber, even back then, recognized this. When you log in multiple times, it registers multiple presences and once you send a message from one location, all other clients will not be notified any more until you start a new conversation on that device.

This is a requirement as always-on mobile-clients are appearing.

Now, on the iPhone I can at least quickly start Skype, make a call and close it down using the easily accessible task manager.

On Android, while still possible, it's a really big tour through nearly every screen the OS can throw at me before I finally can close down the application for good.

Also, Android Skype insta-crashes the WhatsApp beta and seems to be constantly sending/receiving data (the background sync icon is constantly on until I uninstall Skype).

Unusable. Sorry.
LightSpace (Microsoft Surface without the special table)
Ask HN: Review my app, Gossipopolis
It seems a little silly, but I've been working on a celebrity news aggregator for a little while now, and I would be curious what your thoughts are about it. It isn't a mind-blowing concept, but it is my first solo webapp/iPhone app, so don't be too brutal :). I was trying to keep the design clean and functional because the others in the space are pretty distracting. I would also be curious how to make the landing page "punchier", because I think my lack of designer-y skills is hurting me.

You can see the site here: http://gossipopolis.com and the iPhone landing page is here: http://gossipopolis.com/app.
I find the call quality the same as Sipdroid, if not a little worse. Sipdroid is far too complex to get going but works fantastically once you have it setup.
"Which is one of the reasons it works so well going through firewalls etc."

I don't understand why the fact that Skype's proprietary makes it 'work [..] well going through a firewall'.
"That, by the way, is roughly how Amazon.com sells you books for so little"

What? You mean Amazon makes some sort of "margin" off the sales they make? How does that system work? I thought they'd make money selling google ads. I thought they pay the cover price and then get a little from the shipping
Skype is easier to set up than SIP, doesn't require firewall configuration, or server addresses. You install it, create an account, add people to your list, and insert money when you want to call a POTS line.
If this goes through, I predict the operators will offset the losses by jacking up the data fees to unprecedented levels of ridiculousness. When the lower caps came into effect this year, Vodafone UK responded by increasing the data roaming fees fivefold while having the nerve to claim they were making it cheaper. Roaming outside the EU is also likely to become unimaginably expensive.
>Luckily that's not quite how it works

Luckily? Democracy (direct democracy being a specific kind of democracy) has it's own issues as Thomas Jefferson pointed out (51% holding 49% ransom) but the problem with anything else is that it is not direct. In the US you can vote someone in for their stance on some hot button issue and when they get in office they can do the exact opposite. What do you do then? "Hold them accountable" by voting them out. But they've already done the damage.

Contrast this with Switzerland. The reason Switzerland isn't in the EU is because the citizens don't want to be and will not vote themselves into it.

>but all-in-all we're not doing too bad.

Really? Your phone can now be tapped and a warrant requested after the authorities have found something they think is incriminating, if you are suspected of being a terrorist you forfeit your rights, nearly all of the new candidates from one political party are openly on the payroll of one company [1]. What exactly would have to happen for you to say "well, it's not working so well at the moment"?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/opinion/04krugman.html
Most people's main computer won't be a computer, it'll be a games console and a Tivo-niche filler (maybe the same thing, it's Sony vs Microsoft vs Apple vs the cable and satellite companies, and a pox on all their houses) paired with a smartphone.

Why do most people need a computer? I can't remember the last time I had to send a personal letter - all my bills are electronic and if someone really needs my signature they send a form. And my entire extended family does email.
Killing 100 is less bad than killing 10?
Even they have to sit down to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then at home, what are they doing between the hours of 6pm to 10 or 11pm that they're not doing some form of sitting with their family? And even at work, the professions you mention, I have to believe are sitting at the very least half an hour throughout their work day, not including lunch. So that plus meals is already one and a half hours minimum, meaning at home at night, every night, they're spending 1.5 out of about 4.5 hours sitting. And remember this is every day. So what is a person, after a full work day doing for those 3 non-sitting hours. And if you say goig to the gym, even gym rats are sitting a considerable amount of time during workouts. And I didn't even include the possibility of sitting while driving, though I guess you could give the possibility they are standing on a bus or train. But really, in all honesty, I cannot imagine but an incredibly rare number of people with an extreme non-sitting lifestyle would exist.
Pay With A Tweet
I suggest doing a "Kindle Edition Deluxe Pack" that comes with a physical snap-on cover to turn that thingy into a 2 column "DSKY" approximation with battery powered lights.. :)

(No, I didn't remember the visuals of that component and was inspired by the Wikipedia entry..)
I generally enjoy Gladwell's writing in the New Yorker (haven't read any of his books) and enjoy hearing him on Radiolab, but there has been at least one case before where he has made oversimplifications. When noticed, they pretty much upended his thesis.

His article "How David beats Goliath" asserted that smaller, weaker competitors beat their stronger, better equipped opponents by dramatically changing or breaking the rules of engagement.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_...

One of the examples was average or weak high school basketball teams using a full court press technique to defeat the best teams in the league. The other example is Lawrence of Arabia defeating the Ottomans at Aqaba. In letters which were published later that summer, readers pointed out that a full court press is used by many "Goliath" teams, and that the Ottomans were actually the underdogs since Lawrence of Arabia had the support of the British Empire.

I'm not a basketball person or a historian, so maybe the letters were off, but the New Yorker did publish them, and they certainly did make me question the article which I had so enjoyed a month before.

The letters in question:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2009/06/08/090608m...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2009/06/08/090608m...

Maureen Tcacik wrote about him in The Nation, and was generally critical of his style and methods, but also a little admiring. Interesting read.

http://www.thenation.com/article/gladwell-dummies

And just for HN, I dug this up because it made me laugh:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html...

"He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. "
1GB is 1GB of RAM. It doesn't seem to have onboard ROM, but SD slot surely will support up to 32GB. And it has 10/100 Ethernet besides USB, though latter is probably suitable enough to "connect a lot of disk space".
Black Duck Software aquires Ohloh
CouchApp Walkthrough
Depends how well you can actually write programs.

ASP is a platform, not a language. Its runtime languages are VBScript and JScript and others (PHP included I think). Their modus operandi is very similar to PHP. I prefer JScript but VBScript is simpler. You probably know quite a bit of Javascript already from PHP so it should be easy enough to migrate to that.

All the imperative languages are pretty much the same. X = Y + Z; If X then Y else Z; While X do Y; For(X in Y) do Z.
The most different from that list to PHP I would say is C++ because it introduces the dreaded MEMORY MANAGEMENT.
How about Obj-C that eliminates all of the memory alloc/dealloc and runs in the JVM? ;) Ok, that sounds just awful as I doubt much would port well. But, it doesn't seem to make any sense to reinvent the wheel. Recent JVMs handle garbage collection fairly well.

How about ditching all of the Obj-C and rewriting Cocoa (for OS X and iOS) in Java? Easier said than done.

I say just embrace the fact that everything in OS X/iOS today is using a somewhat fast but somewhat archaic language, and just make XCode better able to spot memory leaks in code.
Rock stars not rock musicians in general.
The Mediocrity Principle
I subscribe to adexchanger's news letter which covers industry trends and what-not.

There is a lot of noise, but good coverage of the big players / industry level news.

www.adexchanger.com
I was technical editor of the (dreadful) Practical OCaml, for which I made £650 (about £450 after tax) for months of work:

http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/
It already went round the HN mill last year but just in case anyone finds it interesting now, I wrote something similar (but about 50x longer, for various reasons) about my book, Beginning Ruby: http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/

Intriguingly, it seems from this post that Apress offers better terms than O'Reilly..
Tell HN: Buxfer (YC07) is down again
This is all very nice, unfortunately, I couldn't find any information, when a real human with a boring project will be able to buy one.

Only thing I got was that early adopters will get some at the end of October.

Usually, one gravitates toward something inferior shipping(BeagleBoard XM in this case) to something superior, which is unavailable.
I was going to self publish, but then realizing what Amazon wanted it's kind of ugly.

It's not strictly necessary to have your book available in Amazon or at other bookstores (or even in print form at all) to make a successful "book." HN's own Amy Hoy (ahoyhere) has made more from http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/ - a $39 e-book - than I have from selling > 10,000 copies of a print book published with Apress.
I love people who argue "the market is always right" and then conviently ignore what long term interest rates are saying right now.
I don't think it's so much standing versus sitting so much as how much movement one does throughout the day. A person could be standing in a fixed position which would be far more unhealthy than a fixed sitting position. I remember reading a quote from an extremely old man who said the secret was simple to "keep moving". Movement seems pretty clear to me the most important activity, since it keeps your cells active and fluids flowing. Any state of immobility will eventually put strain on whichever body part is taking the most pressure or work.
AWS Announces MySQL Read Replica Support for RDS
Ah yes, that's true there is a karma threshold for that too, I'll add that right away. Thanks!
Don't forget to bite the head off a bat and trash the place on your way out.
then rather than just type one url in and get redirected, they have to remember to type in a url, then type in a word. its easier as it is.
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Rethinking user interface test automation
But still, no matter how long your snorkel, you're not going to average more than a few breaths of fresh air per minute. Will that make a noticeable dent in the 8-10 hours of snorkeling you're doing? :)
Clive Thompson on the Power of Visual Thinking
The Frog That Learned to Fly
I think most of us would love to see your take on that. However, in case anyone's interested, a book like that does already exist:

http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture-...

I haven't bought it yet but it's in my wishlist pending an Xmas purchase ;-)
I'm curious how you would have gone about it. Would you have tried a more underground path, generating movement slowly with more emotionally invested users? Or withheld the product months or even a year after it was promised to make sure it was beyond peoples expectations?
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I think they should take that money and see if they can get a real development team to use it as seed funds, and then keep a below market slice of equity.

Some people forget that, like Gates, Zuckerberg was actually a pretty good programmer. Its unlikely that Facebook would have gone anywhere had he not been. These Diaspora guys probably aren't as passionate about programming as Zuckerberg was, and thats what you need for a complex project like this. Talent and passion for knocking out tons of high quality code.

Give the money to someone who will use it wisely. There is a clear market opportunity here.
I was expecting disappointment, but hoping to be pleasantly surprised. Since it doesn't exactly seem to have set the world on fire, I'm mostly wondering what the current leader of the field is now. Gnu Social?
Wow, there's a name I've not heard in a long time, Marimba and Castanet were once the poster children of the Java revolution. When all monolithic apps would be broken down into install-on-demand components... Wonder what happened to that Kim Polese.
If you want to find the income from the top programmers you would need to include people like Bill Gates. While he spent most of his life as management most of his wealth from stock gained while he was a programmer.
As pointed out by others, the US isn't a democracy and never has been. Having said that, I don't think the problem would be being a democracy but rather consisting of 300 million citizens. I personally think that's far too big of a scale to have a reasonable government.
but can it open a u-lock?
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A VC: I Told You So
Well, everything. In short, his system of coming up with a folksy sounding counter-intuitive theory, followed by a couple of interesting anecdotes and a tame scientist which "prove" his thesis, does not tend to consistently lead to truth. Or in fact lead to truth at all.

In the cases where he is correct (if only by dumb luck,) it's still not helpful since you don't know which ones they are without doing the legwork yourself.

It is intellectual slop, ideally suited to the best-seller list of a major sunday newspaper, but it is not true or even some approximation of it. If that's how you like your social science, then have a bowl of Gladwell.

For other people's takes on him, try:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063576

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/how-to-write-malcolm-gladwell.ht...

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point...

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/gladwell-...
Amazon RDS: Announcing Read Replicas
And when they say "freshers" they mean novices.
A Hacker News button?
Many of my blog posts get voted up here and the associated discussions have been fascinating. I'm wondering about linking from the blog post to the HN discussion using some sort of button (like, say, the reddit button but without the ability to vote).

What do people think?
Construction workers often eat standing up. But time spent driving is far harder to avoid.
Windows is arguably 'easier' to use than Linux .. it doesn't make it better.
Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon RDS: Announcing Read Replicas
How the C64 version of CuBase works [pdf]
Until recently she was CEO of Spikesource: http://www.spikesource.com/ .. but is now just on the board. Her bio suggests she's not lacking for things to attend to:

Kim serves on the executive council of TechNet, a bipartisan coalition of executives focused on the growth of the technology industry and economy, on the board of the Global Security Institute and on the University of California President's Board on Science and Innovation. She is a Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Engineered Innovation.

I have a bit of a weird hobby for checking out where previous "bright lights" of the Internet world ended up. It's surprising how many of them deliberately try to stay out of the limelight and hold NED board positions or work at quietly profitable enterprise-focused startups that don't get much press.
> perhaps the success of Skype shows your ideals are out of touch with the world around you

I can't imagine what kind of confusion would cause somebody to type that.
Hmmm - overkill, why make a dependency on json_decode?

If they are going to use such a heavy duty regex to grab urls, just regex the response for the single answer (shorturl) you are looking for too.

Fsockopen alternative could also be supported with about 5 lines more.
Adobe AIR + Intel = AppUp developer program (interesting move)
I am one of the disappointed people. The reason is, that they think a lot about making that "chat mechanics" work. But the plan of Diaspora is not to write a software, but to offer a social connection service that does not take away the control over my data. That is quite a difference. And I think even a prototype should be concerned about that, not about making that chat like message system work. (And even that does not work at the moment)
Reserving judgement until there is a release for users. Until then, cautiously optimistic.
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Although I'm congratulating both of them , it's a prize for engineering achievement not a physics discovery. Shows how the physics field is stagnant.
Boy, I'm glad The Geek Atlas didn't get reviews like that! The worst anyone has said is "An interesting idea, but the author's choices seem overly idiosyncratic to me."
> In contrast to other large Western industrialized societies, the United States had the highest crime rate, the longest working hours, the highest divorce rate, the highest rate of volunteerism, the highest percentage of citizens with a post-secondary education, the highest productivity rate, the highest GDP, the highest poverty rate, and the highest income-inequality rate; and Americans were the least supportive of various governmental interventions

Perhaps part of the reason the USA is a statistical outlier among WIERD societies is simply its size. It has by fa the biggest population of any WIERD country. This means that most of its cultural influences come from within the country, whereas for a smaller country, a larger proportion of its cultural influences come from outside it -- meaning that smaller countries are less likely to be outliers.
Well, not quite. I don't think the conclusion applies at the scope of individual people. I think it's saying either that

A) Successful behavioral patterns will flourish (which is what Hayek says in The Fatal Conceit, and also reminds me of the ideas of The Selfish Gene); or

B) Societies that display successful behavioral patterns will themselves flourish.

(or both, of course)
"These Diaspora guys probably aren't as passionate..."

Have you met them and talked programming or is this just hyperbole and conjecture?

They were out at the Web 2.0 Expo Startup Showcase http://blog.web2expo.com/2010/07/get-your-fledgling-company-... and in the conversation I had with them they seemed very passionate about Diaspora the project.
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Amazon Web Services announces Read Replicas for RDS
Too bad Matt didn't get some actual meditation instruction-- I think it would have been more interesting (and beneficial) for him had he done so. Unfortunately, his description makes it clear that he didn't really know what he was doing:

First, it was difficult (impossible?) to turn my brain off. I’m accustomed to using my brain all the time, every day. I don’t like to turn my brain off. I definitely struggled with that all month.

Meditation is not about "turning your brain off."

Someone recommended counting, for example counting leaves on a tree, as a way to help. That worked very well, but it also felt like counting was keeping my mind busy rather than clearing it out.

Some meditation traditions use counting-- but not like that. Counting the leaves on a tree might be a nice thing to do, but it's not meditation (at least according to any tradition I've ever heard of-- and I'm reasonably well schooled on the subject.)
Actually it is not just air. You can submit native apps just fine.

edit: Native apps for windows work fine and not just AIR. In the future, they will accept C++/Qt apps for Meego too. AFAIK, all you need to do is make sure that you use their license management API.
How about not promising it so early in the first place? Giving a real timeline instead of something crazy?

Or maybe being realistic about what you're promising? They didn't give a featureset, they just promised a first version. That means something different to everyone.
When do ‘tech companies get so big they lose the ability to plan cohesively?
Perhaps you should have alluded to an ability to produce code without physically interacting with a computer system, and to control the minds of the weak-willed--like department VPs. I'd be interested to see how far you could push it.
Boo. I liked Ohloh. OK, it was a proprietary web service, but it had neat things for people who write code.

All the notes in the blackducksoftware.com/ohloh/ page talk about making it easier for corporate people to consume free software, not providing services for free software developers.
People's behavior evolves (independent of people's genetics) to suit the surrounding culture, in cultures that permit people to adopt and benefit from new behaviors (I suppose as opposed to formally stratified cultures that would just beat you down for trying to leave / rise above your station).
Cubase64 demo: audio manipulation on the Commodore 64
Ah, that reminds me of something. I was browsing the reviews for your book a few weeks ago having seen the book linked on your site and noticed the "worst" review you got (still 3 stars, though!) was written by a "P. Cooper." Paranoid as I am, I feel the need to note that this is/was not me :-)