skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a very good point. While at some point in the future it will likely be possible to buy 'beige box' phone hardware and run a hand built version of Android on it, it will in actual usage be a very different beast to the devices being peddled by Motorola & HTC because of the missing access to the propriety Google apps and services.

So if the 'Google certified' version of Android wins, I'm not sure how that is good for anyone other than installing Google as the Microsoft of the mobile age. In that scenario, I'm not sure why I should be rooting for one dictator over another, other than that at least one has taste.
Unevolved Brands
thoughtful, accurate and spiritual? Sounds like battlefield earth to me.
gilaniali, to answer your question, you do not need an SSL certificate to protect your PayPal checkout process. The security is all handled on their end. Sure, you could get an SSL certificate, but it seems like a waste of money to me.
Vote Early, Vote Often
I'd add another BUT... The real reverse application should show how you will bring value to the company. Why should they hire you, how will you make the company better, what do you bring to the table?

You have to understand that it has to pay to hire you, you are just not entitled to a job because you have a degree.
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Ask HN: Best tool for creating user flows?
I need to create some user flows.. Usually I'll use something like google drawing, or just a word doc. Anyone have something better?
Actually what do Resharper + VS miss? There was nothing in that list that stuck out to me as something I couldn't do right now.
Perhaps he could spend some of this conserved time learning to write at least a 10th grade level. This piece is so mangled it's difficult to read. Our strategic reserve of commas is being single-handedly depleted by this man.
Pitch until you're pitch-perfect. Definitely.

Besides sounding better, it's actually much more useful.
In my opinion, getting a technical cofounder would have been a great asset in helping him make the right decision in the first place. Unfortunately I don’t think he have learned that because the last time I check he was still doing something similar. It has to de with the thinking and respect he has for developers in general. I think his frame of mind is still in the era in which it was widely believed outsourcing could solve all problems. My take is if you want to build a tech company, you MUST have a tech cofounder to avoid dangerous pitfalls.
Agreed, as an occasional user of After Effects, I can state with certainty that buggy software in media editing definitely exists.
Partly it depends on the business cycle. From 2003 to late 2008 I was offered far more work than I could accept, so I felt free to turn down whatever I wanted to, confident there would be more. And in that situation, I preferred to overwork for stretches, and then claim whole months for personal projects. That was a personal preference of mine.

Since the onset of the recession, picking up work has taken slightly more effort, though I've been lucky in that corporations seem more interested now in developing with some of the web frameworks that became available for PHP, and I have a track record with frameworks like Symfony.
don't forget to make a wish when you blow out your birthday cartridge!
OK, I'll be the contrarian here but although their pricing/compensation structure is off for a small entrepreneur, I don't see anything morally wrong with the concept of this type of business.

There are many business owners who want to sell for a variety of reasons -- divorce, need a large amount of cash, tired of running the business, etc...

Almost every entrepreneur has a "price" at which he'd be willing to sell. If this consulting business changed around their pricing scheme and took a percent cut of a successful sale, where everything was transparent, there are many people who would find value in this.

For a smalltime entrepreneur, of course it doesn't make sense to drop $30k on the HOPE that these guys find a buyer. However, if your company is making $1M in profit per year, it may well be worth MORE than $30k upfront to hire well-connected brokers to get multiple parties to bid up a purchase price for your company.
I don't know if there are any hard statistics on how common this is, but here is a link to the NYT article describing the court ruling:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06E2DB143DF...
I agree with everything you say, except that Facebook, GMaps and a few other sites don't work very well for me. Hell, I just opened GMaps to see if they'd fixed it and the browser froze.
"But notice how much effort is put into making sure code is correct. We have unit testing, integration testing, fuzz testing, static analysis, formal verification, ... Games studios pay scores of people to sit around playing games all day. This is not seen in any other creative art."

You would have all of these things with or without a 'clone' tool that produces approximately correct code. As long as it produces code that is in some way human readable, can be debugged using standard (above) means, and doesn't make too many mistakes, it would be fine (no worse than me writing code, at least).

I think that your assumption that it would make a lot of mistakes and that they would be tedious and difficult to debug is just that, an assumption. It might be as simple as the programmer simply 'touching things up'. We haven't seen the tool, it doesn't exist, so arguing about what it would do is a moot point.
William Gibson: Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive
Orson Scott Card: Enders Game
Neil Stephenson: Snowcrash
Isaac Asimov: The Foundation (series)

I am not sure these qualify as space epics, but they are all good reads.
"At least I’ve heard IntelliJ IDEA is great, I’ve never used it."

That's like complaining about image manipulation software when all you've used is GIMP.

I'm a vim guy from way back, I always avoided big IDEs because of the bloat. IDEA is the first I've tried where the IDE doesn't feel like it's getting in the way, and actually makes the job easier.
Give a Hoot, Don't Give Root Passowrd Evils.
Docco, CoffeeScript, Underscore.js, and Backbone.js at DocumentCloud
Both you and bad_user are completely missing the point. The idea is that "openness" is not a universal. The statement 'X is more open than Y' does not hold unless you define open. I agree that your definition of open does indeed categorize Android as more 'open' than some competitors.

However, the notion that you can simply say that Android is more open than the iPhone, universally, is simply untrue. I'm attempting to promote a semblance of formal statement here, wherein the parties actually state their axioms as opposed to making otherwise semantically meaningless statements like 'Android is more open than iPhone'.
Paperless Office Tips
I think true visionaries show the trait when they're young. Steve Allen said that if you're not funny by age 11, you aren't going to be. I think that applies to this topic as well.

I want to point out that Col. Sanders didn't start KFC until he was 60.

I think were youth helps is that as we get older many of us get "set in our ways" and that runs counter to the aspect that makes us visionary. Agree or not?
I'd also add that you should try to list things in order of most importance. I would list something like the UCF Vision Lab work before "Operating Systems". I also concur with making it one page and losing all that extra ink.
We won't be closing anytime soon.

I'm the only tech guy and am basically already on call 24/7 for the software side of things. Being the only one responsible for hardware as well is not appealing.
At least add chrome frame. So IE users have a valid option to use your site.
Charter schools are more for the adults who start the school rather than the children. I grew up in a state that had charter school mania, and it was always something like, some weird guy with a master's degree had a boner for Medieval Literature and his interpretation of the Origins of the University, so he'd start a charter school focused on Rhetoric, Sums and Figures, Swordsmanship, and Court Jesting (NO JOKE.). Or, some muslim elders from Somalia would start a somalian school catering to the special needs of somalian students, while simultaneously catering to the special employment needs of the school administrator's family who just arrived from Mogadishu. Or, a guy in the midwest who couldn't get a job as a final cut pro editor (no kidding?) so he'd start the "Media Sciences" charter school, etc etc. The actual kids attending these schools were a total afterthought.
What does this mean to a person like me who is just aspiring to be a Linux developer/user and is looking for a good distro to start?
I understand your point but don't share it. What I have seen is that designers tend to ignore IE in their tests until the end. It is not like IE appeared suddenly and then you have to redo your work.

I believe those tests should be done incrementally in multiple platforms to make sure the design works in several browsers from the beginning, not at the end.
From another recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1768358

Favorite UX books

The Design of Everyday Things

The Humane Interface

Contextual Design
Or the tools that were supposed to "just draw" OO programs, nineties. There's a reason these things nobody uses today.
After repeated interactions with the biochem profs at JHU, I think that in their case, it wasn't temporary. Maybe it was due to spending so much time standing in front of a blackboard that it just stayed reduced... and they had slaves... er, I mean graduate students doing all of their research for them, so they probably weren't getting a whole lot of intellectual exercise.
so, what can we do about this?
OK, maybe I was unclear, because we're talking about different things. During your K-12 period, what you learn is more influenced by things like "do I have to worry about whether or not I'll be eating dinner tonight?" and "sweetie, you can't play your Gameboy until your homework is done" than by their teachers. If you're in a stable environment with parents who are involved in your education and who take you to the library or the museum or whatever, then you're going to be better off than the kid raised by the TV.
It's tough to use the arrow keys for JavaScript games. If you bind events to those keys, the web browser won't care and still use those keys to scroll. It's bad design since then you'll be scrolling and manipulating the game at the same time.

The reason that this isn't a problem for Flash is because Flash grabs and steals all keyboard and mouse focus away from the browser; not something anyone should re-implement in JavaScript.
I wonder if 37signals have replied yet
3 Boston RailsRumble Applications Make Finals
Evernote Secures $20m in Funding
Come on. Axioms? Formal statements?

It's pretty simple:

Where can I download the source code for the iPhone's UI?

Does iPhone have anything like Android's intents that allows me to plug my own stuff in?

Can I install my own applications on my own damn phone without paying Apple?

There may be some metric where iPhone is more open than Android, but I can't think of it.

There are plenty of nice things to be said about the iPhone: it really changed the phone game, it's beautiful, well designed, and so on. But 'open' and 'free' aren't really words I'd associate with it.
I think if you use a modern javascript framework (i.e jQuery), and test regularly, it shouldn't be that difficult / time costly anymore to support IE7 and IE8.

In my experience jQuery abstracts away most of the incompatibilities.
Not to nitpick, but that's a variable function call, not a variable variable.
Within a given discipline (eg web development), picking up the syntax new language isn't too difficult. Then you have to navigate the new libraries which also isn't too hard. Basically.. What's the [new language] equivalent of [some method call] in [old language].

The trouble is picking-up the idiom: If you're a Java guy learning Python in this manner you're going to end up with a lot of java-looking python code.

Nothing wrong with hiring a developer for a language he doesn't have a lot of personal experience with. But there's also nothing wrong with a company wanting to know which languages a developer knows. They shouldn't get a lecture for asking IMO.
4. Dirty code inhibits the formation of an ownership culture.

I've found quite the opposite. The dirtier the code is, the more you try to keep the same guy on it. You hesitate to commit him to any other projects if there's even a prospect of needing him to work on "his" code. Programmers love that shit, especially the ones who write dirty code. It makes them feel smart, important, and indispensable (which unfortunately they are.) Plus, nobody is going to be looking over their shoulder gasping and saying "no wonder it's always broken!" because nobody else wants to get their brain dirty in that code. If you're a bad coder, taking ownership of your own crappy applications is your ticket to escaping peer review and protecting your job.

By contrast, the most vital and hard-core piece of C++ code we have at my company has had contributions from almost half the C++ developers we've employed, thanks to a great initial design and good stewardship. It's nobody's code except whoever is currently hacking on it. That doesn't inhibit people from feeling responsible; the quality of the code inspires everyone to maintain it even though nobody has any real claim to ownership.
There is a theory that OO really caught on in the 80s/90s because of a generation that had first grown up with interchangeable identical building blocks of Lego bricks in the 70s
Or chip and pin.
Why would it not matter?

I don't understand why troopers being ex-military has any relevance to the issue.
For those of us who don't know what RDF means:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
But it would lead to an army of insatiable Lego Von Neumann machines taking over the universe.
I think this is awesome! These guys produce a service that has traction, has a loyal following, and AFAIK has never had an issue. I use it, love it, and recommend it. The greatest thing about it is how they have it on all your devices (almost) and I find myself branching out into their "life memory" strategy by, for example, creating a recording of my 15 month old son laughing. That's on top of the business productivity applications I use it for.

My question, though, is this:

Evernote has traction.
Evernote is growing.
Evernote has subscribers.
Evernote has partners developing plugins for it (Evernote Trunk)

What do they need $20m in funding for?

Is it that word of mouth adoption only goes so far?
Is it to speed up adoption by buying installs on new computers?

What would you do with $20m if you were Evernote?
"He is also quite strict about being hard sci-fi (no faster than light travel for example)."

Or rather, it was tried (in the Revelation Space series) but did not work out well...
Thanks, I hope Andrew is reading this but I am not him. I submitted it because I appreciated the ingenuity and thought HN would as well.
Banks and Credit Card issues beware - Apple just stole your business
I had a system like this in my high school too, but technically it's not "out of 4.0". The maximum possible grade is usually dependent on what courses the student takes. For example, if you took an "honors" course, an A would get you 4.5, B would be 3.5, etc. If you took a "high honors" or "AP" course, A would be 5, B would be 4, etc. If you know what classes you took, you can calculate your maximum score possible.

If he had said he got a 4.4 (or whatever) out of 4.6, it would convey more information than what he said on his resume for two reasons:

1) It would tell the employer at roughly what rate he took harder courses than he had to (this would be especially true if he somehow found the school's average maximum GPA).

2) It would tell the employer the actual ratio of his grades to the maximum possible score.
One thing I didn't like about the WFS is they did not give enough credit to "good" public school teachers. I thought they swiped everyone with one brush and made it seem like it's their fault.
Yeah, I wasn't as big a fan of Endymion - it was much more touchy-feely in its justifications than was the first series. Still enjoyable, but not in the same league as Hyperion.
> you can build your own unlocked Android device, and because of competition there will be phone manufacturers that will do just that.

Wrong. Because handsets are subsidized by the carriers and won't sell otherwise -- so all that competition is equally focused on pleasing the carrier as they are on pleasing the customer. Besides, it's been pointed out many times to me here that the majority of consumers don't care if the platform is open.
But he's looking for jobs after college. High school, for this guy, was 5-6 years ago! Even if he took IB or AP courses...so what? Tons of people have taken IB/AP courses.

A company won't decide to hire you based on your high school marks.
Tell HN : Today's the deadline for applying to Y Combinator
Do click that submit button.
I noticed something was not being conserved with the blue bird when I first tried out Angry Birds. My strategy was usually to explode the bird just before collision to take advantage of the extra force.

My assumption was that the mechanism for splitting 1 bird into 3 birds was an internal explosion. This would introduce a large amount of energy into the system and account for increased velocity in the resulting birds, and thus the increased momentum.

Of course there is a way to test my theory (and I realize it probably has little basis in how the game was actually programmed, but it satisfied my mechanical engineer side to reconcile what I was seeing with reality). You could launch the blue bird such that it falls just to the right of a standing piece of wood and "explode" it just as it's right next to the wood. If it is, in fact, an explosion that propels all 3 new birds to the right, then there would be an equal force directed to the left, which should knock the piece of wood over without touching it.
I was a decent recreational runner in my late 20s. But pain tolerance is not "the difference", just "a difference". I do not have the classic marathoner's frame, and at above 60 miles per week, I would start to feel twinges here and there, which likely would've developed into injuries had a continued to train at that level for more than a couple of weeks. Now, 60 miles per week is nothing for a marathoner, about half what the true stars run.

As with any form of highly competitive athletics, the best advice is to choose your parents carefully.
> Theft: the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent.

We all consent to PayPal's terms when we choose them over some of their competitors.
yeah - I wanted to get the quote right so I googled first.

"we will offer our students the ability to land the job of their dreams or create it."
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2010/02/09_hls.venture.fund....

At the end of the day, I think it's mostly irrelevant where they say it (Havard, Stanford, Berkley, Carleton, all, none, who cares?) - it's the sentiment that really matters.
Design: Take Shelter in a Human Habitrail
What's wrong with blowing stuff up?
I think people know what RDF is...I just don't know that it gets used much in the web space, much less the front-end side.

Is RDF used even as much as SOAP was/is?
At the vm-local level (i.e., not fork -> process memory COW, but rather immutable & persistant objects), you can make objects immutable via their metatables: set __index and __newindex to functions that do proxying. The former would lookup fields from the appropriate object instance, and the latter would set the (internal) object reference to a new copy with the updated field.

Come to think of it, that's almost a direct Lua translation of what you said: "In VisualWorks Smalltalk, I'd just start off by setting objects immutable and using a top-level exception handler on the mutation exception. Alternatively, one could also use forwarder proxies." The __newindex metatable field is a mutation hook and __index is like doesNotUnderstand. (Lua seems more like Self than Smalltalk, though.)

But, I don't think I'd do it that way - when going for immutable & message-passing semantics, adding syntactic sugar to make it look like stateful OOP seems misleading to me. You can stream plain Lua tables* over sockets pretty easily, though, so message-passing is probably much simpler. You can stream Lua functions, but not coroutines. (Streaming functions with closures takes a bit of debug API hackery, though.)

* Lua tables are almost identical to JSON.

FWIW, there's a port of Erlang's message-passing concurrency and supervision hierarchy programming model to Lua: ConcurrentLua (http://concurrentlua.luaforge.net/). I've only toyed with it a little bit, since I didn't really know Erlang at the time. It uses co-operative multitasking (coroutines), has localized mutable state (doesn't force modify-once variables within processes), and doesn't have selective receive (yet, though I keep meaning to add that). I'd rather just use Erlang for fault-tolerant-server projects (possibly w/ Lua behind ports), but it seems like a good library for distributed programming in Lua.
Some problems with this:

- Good teaching does make a huge difference. A large amount does get washed out due to other factors, but that doesn't mean it would make sense to purposely hire 'warm bodies'.

- Good teachers don't necessarily cost more than bad teachers.

- Teachers salaries are only a small part of school spending. I don't know the exact numbers, but my guess would be 30% of the annual district budget, which IIRC wouldn't include extraordinary expenses.

- Schools aren't the only component of education. There's also early childhood education, libraries, community colleges, etc.
Video: http://vimeo.com/9152251

PDF: http://bit.ly/cXpF25

Screenshots: http://bit.ly/bIZBrv
School District Agrees to Pay $600K For Using School Laptops to Spy on Students
Formalize CSS
> Because handsets are subsidized by the carriers and won't sell otherwise

In the United States. I saw an iPhone sitting in a glass case here for 600 Euro the other day.
We do support IE now, so those numbers should start to stabilise, but still, the percentage is very low. It probably is early adopters we're getting, but I don't think there's a way for the bookmarklet to work with IE in the way it works with other browsers. I've tried disabling all security settings, but IE still won't allow JS access to the iframe.
Ian M. Banks "Culture" series.

"Matter" might be a good one to start with if you're looking for something similar to LotR.