skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lol! No Should probably just put one X - meaning could be any word. I'll edit the title with quotation marks now. But thanks for the comment, I wondered how whitehouse.com got away with it
I think they could've made a bigger splash if they'd had some particularly fancy must-have hardware to sell it on - at least one model with something absolutely outstanding about it.

As far as I've heard (admittedly I haven't followed it very closely), all the Windows Phone 7 phones [wow, that's awkward] are pretty similar to existing handset hardware, so this just feels mostly like an OS release. An OS that has some interesting features (and a few important things missing, too) and very few apps. And a shitty (at least from a dev standpoint) browser grrrrrrrrr.
IE8 does support a few of the less sexy HTML5 APIs like cross-document messaging. But no <canvas> games or Flash-less <video>
One's intuition works if you think about it like a heavy brick pressing on a slippery wedge shaped object between the brick and the floor. The wedge will "squirt" out the side at several times the velocity the brick is moving towards the floor.
Highlight to Search Browser Extensnion
Silverlight is only option for WP7 development now so no alternative browser in near future.
It's about moving the generation of HTML to the client. The concept of rendering the UI (using HTML) on the server was a step backward right from the beginning of the WWW. Servers are simply not needed to construct HTML.

I predict within a few years everyone will agree that all server-side HTML template languages (PHP, eRuby, JSP, Django etc) are obsolete. There will be a great normalization of server-side frameworks -- Ruby, PHP, Java, will essentially only be for shuffling data from your database to your client. The way it should have been all along.
"While this is obviously true, the point in your business's life at which you decide to stop coding is of critical importance."

Just to clearify, when Rand says "grunt-level work" he means SEO and not coding. Early on at SEOmoz the coding was done by a guy y'all might know as "The Oatmeal."
I had the same experience at first -- reached for my mouse to handle inventory, etc.

Once I found the "help" button (which was actually useful!) and the keyboard shorts ... I found I preferred the game mouseless.

Primarily because it brings back memories of playing games like this on IBC XT PCs in the early 1980s, or funneling quarters into the arcade equivalent (eg, Gauntlet).

So while usability is important, consider this post a vote to keep the game keyboard only.
Little does Schneier know about the TSA's plan to outlaw clocks on all flights.
Google gifts: free airline wifi for the holidays
Downloading another browser isn't possible – at least if you don't want to use the IE rendering engine. UI development for WP7 apps is C# and Silverlight only. This is why Mozilla isn't making Firefox for WP7, for example.
Oh ok, I had assumed it was possible to move diagonally.
Computer Programming Skills That Will Put You in Demand
A few days ago, the guys over at LangPop.com did a survey on the most popular programming languages based on the number of Internet pages on which each language was mentioned.
Stop! There is no reason why you have to assume the project risk just because you chose a more sensible metric to quote the price with.

Provide a top-line project cost number as an estimate, and then add an "additional time can be added to this project as needed at a rate of $XXX per day" clause.

The question of who assumes project risk is orthogonal to the question of how you choose to break out project cost.
Cold Call Strategies When Selling to Big Business
Opera Mobile is the real mobile browser for smartphones. However, Opera can't develop O Mobile for iPhone due to App Store's TOS.
Opera Mini can't handle modern websites using AJAX etc. because it can't render anything locally. It simply parses the data sent to it by the servers, which are responsible for rendering the website and compressing it.

Also, the speed benefits are significant, only if you are on a slow connection.
FWIW, it sounds like the OP is in New Zealand.
Hmm.. Intellij's been working fine with the Android emulator for me. What kind of problems are you running into?

That was actually one of the main things that caused me to look for alternatives to Eclipse, is that I kept running into weird bugs where Eclipse would refuse to re-build my project. :-(
It might have made sense to use base 12 in the first place, but it certainly doesn't make sense to switch from base 10 to base 12 now.
Interview with EMC's Scott Lowe on Cloud Computing and vCloud Director
That's the funny thing about the server market, Steve, companies just don't buy them as often.

For example not a year goes by I'm not replacing scores of Apple desktops, iMacs, MacPros, Minis for all our users.

Meanwhile, the Xserves in the server rack are older than most of my friends' kids. There's no business case for replacing them as they do exactly what we need.

I understand all that Steve. The part I'd like you to understand is how creeped out my sysadmins get when we have to stuff our server racks with ill-fitting boxes such as Mini-servers and full-sized towers. I'd expect a company that pays as much attention to aesthetics and design to have at least picked up on that by now.
I should add that (market-price) trades aren't completed in an all-or-nothing fashion, unless you specify this (which brings another set of costs and risks). E.g. if you want to buy 1000 shares, it might happen in several chunks (say 200, 200, 600), with the price going up each time.

So, the process of buying or selling moves the price, which is another reason why trading with real money against competitors is different from training against historical data.
If you Google for "windows phone 7 html5" you'll get relevant results where Microsoft announces their intentions to specifically not support HTML5 on WP7.

This is laughable and will of course change, but it just puts them further behind the release curve.
I think yes, serverside web frameworks may be becoming less relevant, to a certain extent; I just finished a monitoring app for a small company that is entirely in JS, with data stored on the server and computations (graphs, etc.) done on the fly by the client (it's an internal business app, so I get to tell end users what browser to use, etc.)

- - -

A counter argument is that it's considered "better" to bring the computation to the data than the data to the computation: ie, make the server calculate everything and serve it to a dumb client, because:

1) the server is more powerful than the client

2) one never knows what the client is capable of (the developers don't control the clients), there are many clients and just one server

3) usually, any given calculation only uses part of the data, so if the server computes and sends the results, it makes for smaller data transfers

There is however a big counter-counter-argument: I pay for the server, you pay for the client. When there are many clients that ask for results that are not easily cacheable, I think it can be much simpler to just have a dumb server that serves data, and compute on the client.
Maybe i didn't make myself clear. Sorry, I'm not a native speaker.

I asked how hard it is to make a game, specifically html5 one, that occupies the whole area of a browser window.

Secondly, f11 doesn't work for this specific site.
Has this actually happened anywhere or are we just trying the experiment of getting the ridicule out there ahead of the policy?

(Which may be a sensible experiment, since after-the-fact ridicule has proven to have little effect.)
It would be the best for consumers and developers. Passing AcidTest + html5 support would be great.
Opera mini tends to jumble pages in unpredictable ways. The way it works is they transform the page into an intermediary format and transmit that to the phone. I don't think Opera has ever documented in depth what kinds of changes happen in the process.
BlackSheep add-on detects Firesheep on your network
Shhh! The TSA thinks the terrorists don't know that a clock at altitude appears to run faster than a clock on the ground thanks to gravitational time dilation. So clocks are safe until the terrorists figure out how to adjust. Then we'll get all excited and lock the stable door after the horse has bolted.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gravitational...

Remember: If we outlaw clocks, only outlaws will have clocks!
Help us map the UK's technology startups
Too bad it's behind a paywall.
You are right in being excited about it. It's a huge step up from the default browser and even Dolphin HD.
i can't tell if i love it because its an in-joke or if its because its actually a good one.

intellihancer.com

i've tried to do a few terrible things with it in an attempt to actually use it, but nothing's really worked out.
> This is where the main discrepancy comes in. You guys are talking about two different things: 'value' within a capitalist framework and 'nobility' within your particular moral one. Neither one is necessarily 'better', but that's the core difference.

I think this is something that is confused all the time, even by people who realize the distinction. It is something I (and I suspect others) find hard to keep track of without actively thinking about it.
Haven't seen it, will try - thanks!
BetterMeans - Open and Democratic Project Management
I'm also having some difficulty with this article. The explanation seems to make sense in hindsight but "create a new market" is also a viable business strategy. Isn't that what creating "blue oceans" is about? where there are no sharks that cut each other up and bloody the water? Where you can rake in insane profits for years if you manage to pull it off? I vaguely remember reading some HBS article about this. Examples were Cirque Du Soliel et al
I've made this point on HN a few times, but "space weather forecasting" has become an industry in itself. A lot of scientists have made predictions for the next cycle. The big problem is that cycles last 11 years, and the predictions are of the form "Very strong cycle", or "Abnormally weak cycle". You can see why "This researcher has correctly predicted the last two cycles" can easily be attributed to luck. Given that a research career spans at most 4 such cycles, it's hard to demonstrate one's ability.

There's a few respected solar scientists who have written papers to the effect that such forecasting is way beyond our capabilities (there's hints of chaotic behavior in the sun). But these papers don't get any citations, because if they're right, most of the money in this field will dry up. No one wants that to happen.

With that said, Cringely speaks of a two-year forecast, and I don't know if that is short-term enough to be feasible. Still, I'm skeptical of the impending doom predictions, because it takes only one known scientist willing to beat the drum for the government to worry about its space-bound investment (and quite reasonably so).
And you save bandwidth and gather stats...
After launching? Not to nit pick, but I'm pretty sure nearly all of these should be done before you launch.
Another pretty good Clojure library for for scraping is enlive which is normally a templating language based on selectors. But using the same model you can easily scrap the web in an idiomatic way in clojure.

https://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial this is probably one of the best places to start learning.
It's interesting how someone spends the time and effort in maintaining a blog and writing long articles about something he/she doesn't like. If I don't like something I just invest my time in something better.
Firesheep countermeasure tool BlackSheep
It is quite easy, you just need to specify the size in the cs (or set it with js).
phone numbers also play into the concept of chunking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)
I wonder if Gogo inflight can also fall victim to Firesheep? If I recall, it uses no security other than a authentication webpage.
It kinda does. With the technology they have right now, I'd take interactive-javascript-capable Opera Mobile over proxying Opera Mini any day. But if in a year, Opera Mobile can make, one way or another†, Facebook or new Twitter or Google-Wave-of-the-day or any modern website noticeably faster, I won't care much if it means my data is going through Opera's servers, just like I don't care my email is on Google's servers.

[†] super-effective image and content compression? Elimination of multiple-server DNS lookups/requests/transfers? Compiling Javascript into a device's or Opera-internal "native" code on the server? I don't believe we've seen the last yet.
This is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, isn't it? Which came first: the ability to remember 7 digits, or the decision to make phone numbers 7 digits long? It seems more likely that 7-digit phone numbers became common because that was the highest number of digits that most people could remember.
My (unofficial) Startup Quote
The iPhone is not about processing power, the iPad and the MacBook are not about processing power. The iPod neither.

Jobs knew that if was to fight the how fast is it battle he would lose. So he changed the fight to one of ease of use and style.

Changing the positioning of the Xserve is what Jobs should have done, he didn't. So yes in the end it was about the Xserves lack of speed and power. But you miss the point (Jobs too) that it never should have competed on speed and power to begin with.
Just because it's interesting -- The University of Illinois has a cluster of 768 G5 Xserves: http://www.cse.illinois.edu/turing/. It doesn't appear to actually run OS X though (Fedora instead).
Google Sponsors Free In-Flight Wi-Fi for the Holidays
Practicing Ruby, The Newsletter
"1) It's made by Apple. If the Tivo had been made by Apple it would have sold vastly better."

It really wasn't that long ago that Apple was the pariah of the technology world. iPod might be a better comparison. At the time they introduced iPod, the people buying Apple products because it was Apple was a small, rabid cult following, not a sizable part of the general public.
I evaluate sites on two levels -- as a designer/developer and as a customer. In the former mindset I will "look down" upon you if I notice it's a template. In the latter, not at all. In my "getting things done" mindset, I'll applaud you for identifying an nice clean template that enables you to work on other stuff.

The only one of those hats you should care about is your customer. Esp if you're consumer targeted, they will never notice that you used a template. Heck, most of them wouldn't know what that means even if you told them.

Don't worry about it. Worry about your business.
How we broadcast our weekly live engineering show
1) Write a blog post about your launch
2) Let others know
3) Monitor Twitter for the chance of mentioning your product
4) Contact influential bloggers

ADD: most importantly, understand why "they" don't come :)
"With the technology they have right now, I'd take interactive-javascript-capable Opera Mobile over proxying Opera Mini any day."

Take a look at the Turbo feature in Opera Mobile. It's similar to the Turbo feature on desktop. Once again, data is being sent through the server and it is being compressed. However, Turbo is capable of handling interactive-web-content (JavaScripts) because the rendering part is still being done locally.
Perhaps you could clarify or point me to some more information on this? Even as a (somewhat amateur) jazz musician, musical pivots have always eluded me.
Windows 1.0 turning 25: First experiences recalled
exactly. but it will be all important to the person committing the crime at the time and hopefully that will be the lesson they need.

and perhaps it will be a lesson to parents to know what their kid is up to. Its the mom thats really complained here and again, its better to suffer the embarrassment when its about something minor
Morally? No. But it's reality.

If everyone was acting all nice and fair and happy, all it takes is one person who really gets how to manipulate public opinion to their own ends and they'll rise to the top... so unfortunately, it's reality.
Be careful with these robots.txt suggestions.

Disallowing your css/js files in your robots.txt is probably not a good idea - Matt Cutts said as much himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU

If you're running Wordpress, disallowing your /uploads/ directory will nuke your Google Image Search prospects, as Googlebot won't be able to crawl any of your images to begin with.

Also, submitting to a paid directory such as Best of the Web or the Yahoo! Directory would be a much better use of your time. DMOZ is still a valuable directory (for a lot of reasons), but the likelihood is small that they will review, let alone add your site to the directory in a timely manner (if ever).

A few other things worth doing:
- Create a Twitter account for your site.
- Create a Facebook page for your site.
Counter examples are easy to find.

Apple seems to be doing rather well out of promoting the iPad as "magical" and "revolutionary" rather than a "widescreen iPod Touch" which everyone would be familiar with. I seem to recall the early iPod adverts were aimed at creating a market rather than promoting it as a "better MP3 player". Twitter wouldn't have attracted the early-adopters with "free public SMS". The web itself took off with hype about being an "information superhighway" and not simply "connect to documents on other people's computers".
I run a free online training program, Ruby Mendicant University, in which I spend several days each week talking with intermediate developers while they work through the course exercises.

There are surprising amount of folks who run into similar problems, so I decided to start this newsletter to help others explore these topics and learn about them so that they can be more well-rounded developers.

I am hoping that my unique opportunity to spend a lot of time with intermediate coders helps me understand their problems so that I can help solve them for a more general audience.

I have mostly quit my consulting work to focus entirely on RMU, so any proceeds from this newsletter will help offset my costs.
i wish he will earn more money doing this way. there is a news here about Quoc Bui and Mike Moon from thefreeapps.com who did earn 80k/month by ads from their iphone apps.
i hope android apps will yield the same.

Thanks Kreci, you inspire me
Bad news for this guy: http://haswifi.com/
Ask HN: Review my webapp PCPartPicker: pick parts, build a pc, compare prices
Hi all,

I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community on a webapp side project I've been working on recently. In the spirit of November launch month, I'd like to offer up PCPartPicker:

http://pcpartpicker.com

PCPartPicker provides computer part selection, compatibility guidance, and multi-part pricing comparisons for DIY PC builders.

I originally created it to solve a problem I had at my day job: quickly pricing out cheap systems for a small cluster I was building. After talking with friends and colleagues it appeared there might be utility for the PC building community. I was encouraged by feedback to a HN comment regarding hard drive prices (here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546145 ), so I decided to continue on with the concept.

My target audience is DIY PC builders who are building systems of moderate complexity. I think with some work I can target both novice builders as well as more serious builders/gamers. However, I'd like to validate the concept further before investing considerably more time.

Any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Philip
Will the U.S. Enjoy a Swedish-Style Rebound? Don't Bet on It
yes at $5m they will get nothing, but at $4m they won't be in debt.
5x is really a rip-off, but 2x (double-dip) is quiet common.

Liquidation preference at its core is an instrument to protect the investor. Imagine the following scenario:

An Investor gives you $1m for 50% of your company. A year later it sells for $1m (because it wasn't a hit).
The investor just lost $500k you made +$500k.
The list on the right that is visible at all times is hinting that it might be clickable, but it isn't.
Absolutely. I think it's a common trap that we all fall into; I know that I do, for sure. We assume that something doesn't have any value unless it solves a hard problem. In reality, there's a ton of low-hanging fruit out there just waiting to be exploited.

As the web matures, I think we'll look back and realize that this is an era where the problem space looks like a tree: a trunk has sprung up of problems that we're solving, and then we're going to the highest levels of difficulty, branching out. Eventually, more will start doing what some people (like kreci) are just starting to do: working on easier problems. There's a whole world out there of things that we can easily be doing to help people with their day. They may not be 'noble', but even fart apps have their place in people's lives.

Numerous fortunes have been made from pornography, professional wrestling, and soap operas. We'd do well to remember that.
The key consideration with Blue Ocean is that it is based upon an existing Read Ocean; you take some features/functions/value propositions from an existing market, reduce some, enhance some and drop some etc. etc. to create your blue ocean. e.g Cirque Du Soliel = Circus - animals - multiple simultaneous acts + more acrobats + (new)musical element etc. etc.

You can't parachute in a new market from the sky ! ( however , I have argued that it was poor execution strategy that doomed Tivo and not marketing --which they blew as well.)
This is close to a common solution seen in authentication and access control components in web frameworks. I'm currently in CakePHP, so I'm looking at it's security component. It has a security level that you set in your app, to low, med, high. If it's set to high, the session is regenerated with each request, meaning that the session hijacking probably won't work.

However, it gets complicated when you look at the following situation:
user authenticates, gets session id of 1234.
attacker steals cookie, now has session id 1234.
----
next request comes in, session is regenerated by the server. Next request comes in with session id of 1234 (invalid). Server recognizes this and invalidates all sessions for that user id (1234 and the new one). Have to invalidate all of them, because you don't know which is the valid browser request.

That's all well and good. But it will also log out any other browser that I had logged in. In effect, it will annoy your users and greatly degrade the usefulness of the "remember me" cookie.

Is it worth it for your site? Tough to tell. But it will prevent your users from staying logged in across multiple browsers, which is something to take into account. Probably worth it for protecting my bank account (if they didn't use SSL and many other security measures). Probably not worth it for protecting my Pandora mixes.
To be quite frank, I found that Opera Turbo rarely sped me up noticeably, and sometimes slowed me down. Just one user's experience in North America today, but there's definitely room for improvement.
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