skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Handset developers must urgently seek new sources of differentiation to offset the huge pressure on margins. Their search will need to consider their industrial designs, user experience, the richness of available applications, and new business models"

-I will give it to android and ios, it has caused handset manufacturers to start making phones that don't suck as much they used to. Think, the last cool phone that motorola made was the Razr (2004), now they're coming out with some pretty cool handsets. Overall, this is going to only benefit the end user
After playing around a bit, I suddenly got an error message:

"This Account Has Been Suspended"

Is this a bug, or some kind of procrastination prevention?
Sorry, I deleted my post because I was being unfair. I did some poking around and saw that the application developer had posted on twitter asking for upvotes if people liked the application.

http://twitter.com/#!/robhawkes/status/1304012481630208

I could see that causing something that looks like sockpuppetry even though it was not.
The demo video doesn't clearly explain how it works. You mentioned that there is a weblerr bar but no other info on that. Without asking us to signup, could you show us how it will work? How will we make friends; if we are gonna import our contact list and such.
WSJ: How to profit from the U.S. fueling an emerging markets bubble
IPhone commands 60% of Japan's Smartphone Market
I'm the developer of the game and I can assure you that Twitter is only used to assign a username to your rocket. If I ever add the ability to tweet from the game I would ask for your explicit permission each time.
I use Ruby on Google AppEngine. I was running out of resources on Heroku (free plan). It's good and has some community support. It does start up slow, so you have to be prepared to run a cron to hit once a minute or so. http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/

That being said, I wouldn't go overboard creating your own blog engine (which is what I did initially) you can just end up dumping countless hours into a site lacks features and data that's difficult to migrate. I agree with the sentiments of one static page with links to a word press blog, Twitter, Facebook, Github, etc.
It seems like a lot of those sites focusing on funny pictures and videos of people getting hurt have tons of content that they don't own nor have the right to put online to earn a profit.
No, he makes the claim that "inequality we’ve now reached may actually suppress growth" and as evidence he cites a study that shows areas with inequality have more bankruptcies.

What does the rate of bankruptcies have to do with growth? I would expect MORE bankruptcies in a place that has high growth.
Very cool! (Would be nice to be able to just get a random username instead of logging in via Twitter though..)
Icey, I only asked people to vote if they like the game. They get nothing out of it if they do, and I'm not forcing them. I jokingly said they may get a hug if they did, so shoot me if that's illegal.
HDNL AFAIK has no actual delivery staff: all the drivers are contractors (franchisees?) who are paid 50p per package delivered. This is an obvious misalignment of incentives...
1i + 1i = 2i

Cannot have Magic without the i
Steven Levy basically repeats Stallman propaganda. Others have different memories about that time.

Also not only Stallman promoted free software in that time.
For example the Common Lisp community had extreme benefit from what was done at CMU. CMUCL/Spice Lisp was released as public domain software and has been used widely in derived implementations, like SBCL or even commercial software.
There were several other prominent Lisp hackers from that time which promote free software.

Stallman did a lot, but please make him a saint - when people like Scott Fahlman had much more impact in the Lisp community.
Liquidation preference is the number one way that founders end up with nothing. Works like this: VC invests $1m with a, say, 5x liquidation preference then if they company sells for, say $6m the VC gets the first $5m and the remaining $1m is split according to equity. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/ has some really, really good articles on this kind of thing.
It indeed sounds very reasonable but is hard to put into practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
From what I read, and from what I know personally, being able to take an arbitrary shopping cart of items, and select the most efficient box is a huge advantage. You can absolutely improve your margins by trimming your shipping costs to a minimum. Although the article doesn't mention it, I suspect UPS is doing most of their carriage. Anyone know for sure ?
I don't get why no one offers the option of no delivery - that is, just keep the parcel at the post office nearest to me, and drop the notification in my mailbox. Better yet, notify me per SMS or email so I can pick it up on the day it got there. That should be significantly cheaper. People who work outside of their home are never there to accept the delivery anyway and end up getting it from the post office, but after having paid for the attempted delivery.
I'm using Twitter to give people usernames and ensure there aren't duplicate players. Eventually you'll be able to to play the game as a guest without Twitter.
That is in the pipeline for the game :)
> Any time there is a power outage in our HPC cluster

I don't like the sound of that, how often do you have power outages ?
I think their webhost suspended them :(
Can the world somehow figure out how to sync up their "smartphone market share" reports? I feel like every week there's a new article about it from a different source. Things can't have changed much in a week.

Someone should figure out a way to group things like these together. A mashup of articles reporting essentially the same thing. Then some can produce a mashup of these mashups in an RSS feed.
The frequent posters on this site end up being boiled down to bullet-point caricatures based on what I remember from their posts.

I guess yours would be:

* Knows lots of technical details about security and cryptosystems.

* Voice of reason to balance out the usual internet opinion of "the sky is falling and its Microsoft's/Google's/Apple's/the government's fault".

* Likes cooking, especially whole pigs and sous vide, although not necessarily together.

* Friends with Patrick.

I hadn't noticed mechanical_fish's name before, but I will now remember him as the guy who makes pie crusts with vodka.
You're living your life in fear! <g>
As far as I know, that's totally fine (in that people do it all the time); I had made a comment that the number of upvotes in such a short amount of time seemed suspicious. Afterwards I discovered your twitter post and realized I was wrong. Unfortunately, I didn't delete my comment in time and someone had replied to it, so I didn't want to leave the phantom reply hanging out there.
Monetize that shit with partner linking baby!
You could at least make the "about" page reachable without logging in.
How to get attention, coaching, and mentoring
Having lived in London for 2 years (2003-2005) we were very frustrated with parcel delivery. The Royal Mail was pretty good as the doorman at our building held packages for us, but other services such as DHL were hit or miss as they largely used independent contractors etc.

That said, a "reliable parcel delivery service in the UK" would be hard to do unless you first start with portions of the UK and not everything. There are quite a few locales in the north that are quite out there and difficult to get to, some requiring one or more ferries etc.

Not saying it can't be done, just not sure if it can be done without substantial investment.
The only thing that I would fix in Java Generics is the syntax, the use of angle brackets is what makes me reject the whole implementation.
Not learning self-discipline when I was young.

Not learning musical fundamentals when I was young.

To a lesser extent, pursuing a whack university degree :)
Automated Program Repair through the Evolution of Assembly Code
"The application Rawkets by would like the ability to access and update your data on Twitter."

I think I'll pass.
Brave (and true) post
Royal mail have lost 25% of my post sent to India. So I would not suggest using Royal Mail either.
We have to break our cron jobs down into single datastore queries for them to succeed near 100% of the time. If you want more complex logic, use a cron job to trigger tasks that process smaller bits of your operation.

Even our cron job to compute the top users on our site (a simple query + ordering) uses one second of CPU time between the application and the datastore. It's just something you get used to in AppEngine.
I think there is a good lesson in this post: your "network" is valuable, and may be quite important to you in the future, so don't discard it on a whim. For example, if your twitter is too noisy... unfollow some noise, or stop reading it at all... but don't delete the account!
Twice in the last year. Our infrastructure is all on UPS, but we decided not to do so for our compute cluster. Additional hardware was deemed a better way to spend our budget. In the event of an outage, people lose the job that was currently running. All their data is safe. They just need to relaunch the job and they are back in business. Most jobs take just a few days, so it really isn't that big of a deal. Either users wait in a queue for an extra day every time they want to run a job, or once or twice a year they have to resubmit a job that died in a power outage. We chose the latter.
Sorry, I meant the internal application statistics. You can visit your dashboard to view "milliseconds per request", but the data doesn't exist from before this maintenance period.

One interesting aside: our nightly datastore backup (using the remote API) no longer causes 500 errors! Hooray!
You're missing out. It's just to log into the game, I'm not going to tweet from your account or anything stupid. All the code is on Github as well so I can prove that.
I think you missed the bit about Pylons being a 'glue' framework between other packages. Those packages have gotten quite a few new features over the years, and they continue to get new features regardless of whether Pylons users use them.

This is the kind of nice thing about using multiple open-source packages that are in heavy use throughout the Python world beyond just web frameworks (unlike web2py).
A wise idea, thank you. The game is still in the proof-of-concept stage so there is much to be made better.
Agreed, the Mapper API is the best way to deal with processing large numbers of entities from the datastore.

AppEngine requires careful thought of application design at this point. Everything is an HTTP request and subject to the same restrictions.

I've heard rumours that they'll be launching longer-lived tasks at some point in the future, but I have no idea when that will happen.
Not to worry, thanks for clearing it up :)
I don't think free is the way to go - I provide a bunch of services for game developers and that stuff really adds up if you get traction - I have almost 4 gigabytes just of leaderboard data with xxx,xxx new submissions a day and a whole lot of requests to show scores.
Perfect legendary anecdote.

What sort of customisation do you do to an axe to make it cost $5,000?
Marx called it in 1867. This is how capitalism works.
I don't really think you would, but it still seems strange to me. If you want to identify people somehow, why not use openid?

By the way, that's not proof of anything. Unless you give me root access to your box, so I can verify that you are in fact running the same code there. I promise I won't abuse my root access ;)
That's why I wrote "can have" instead of "will have" - elapsed time is an upper limit but individuals may do something else with that time.
São Paulo's first fail conf, "ffffuuuu Conf" on Nov 20th
Ask HN: Anybody need an Android Developer
The short version:

I took some years in mobile and lamp/enterprise and made the switch to Android. Now with me assuming part-time care-taker duties for some
family members I cannot relocate.

However, my Git/Hg skills are sharp and so is my
rails framework skills and I have lowered my
month expenses so that I could take on some
remote work at a more reasonable startup rate rather than the $150 per hour freelance rates
for mobile development.

Do you know of a startup that may be in need of
porting a mobile application to android and would
not mind having it completed remotely?

Side Note: my github user-name pages with demos, etc go up on Monday(shareme.github.com nothing there now).

Thanks, HN user community..
One thing that the article notes is that it's not a good idea to trust gatekeepers, no matter who they are.

They could be government bureaucrats, politicians, or corporations. They're all humans and that they are all corruptible.

It doesn't matter how long your regulatory rules run. If people can abuse, get around, bribes, they will.

For example, people can limits a lot of bank runs by simply switching away from factional reserve banking. That would vastly increase the fundamental soundness of banks. However, people decides to wrap it around with government insurance instead.

The ideal system is a one that can be run by devils, not angels. That depends on the right amount of rules, the proper rules, the proper incentives, and so on.

What people end up though, is to make lot of well intentioned laws without considering the consequences in detail. They think decrees will make the problem goes away. They often done, and the problem often become worse. Then they make new rules to fix problems with the old rules. It's a pervasive cycle.

That's not surprising, given that the system relies on people electing officials to office. There's not going to be enough time in the day for the population to become an informed expert in everything that governs our lives.
http://www.barefootsworld.net/prophesy.html

Thomas Jefferson -- The Debate Over The Recharter Of The Bank Bill, (1809)

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies . . . If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] . . . will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered . . . The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." --
And I'm not interested in going and reading through a bunch of source just to test out a web-game.

IMO, the web is getting a little too crazy with linking all the various social networking sites in to everything. I am a game developer, I would very much love to try out your game. However, I am not interested in doing so by providing this much information. I have no reason to trust you at all, your site won't give me any information until I give you mine first.

Sites need to provide value to me before I provide value for them. Because even if it's just a twitter ID, it's still value to you that creates a lopsided situation.
From Wikipedia's article on the (Nintendo) Game Boy Color[1]: "The processor, which is a Z80 workalike made by Sharp with a few extra (bit manipulation) instructions, has a clock speed of approx."

From Wikipedia's article on the (Texas Instruments) TI-84 Plus Series[2]: "CPU: Zilog Z80 15 MHz, with 6 MHz compatibility mode."

Does this mean that a simple program written in Z80 Assembly could be run on both V4Z80P and Game Boy Color and/or TI-84 Plus with minor to no modifications? Does anybody know of any examples of this?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Color

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_series
The term 'Edupunk' being as vague as it is, this article could also be focused on auto didactics. Punk meaning individualism and free thought.
This isn't something new at all! Chemists have been using computers extensively since the 70's, and this can be evidenced by the fact that several physical chemists at my university still use Fortran. Computers have been used in science from their inception. Only now are they becoming indespensible for molecular biologists--but they still have a long way to go in both terms of parallelism and the related tools to be really practical for the intense intermolecular interactions we deal with.

Why don't we publish our code? Do you publish one-off shell scripts or database migration code? The only important code is already open source or is (unfortunately) commercial in nature.
On your site on that cell phone pic on the right you're not closing the img tag which is making the rest of the page a hyperlink:

.....position:absolute; right:100px; top:340px; width:270px"</a>
Awesome game Rob, but, related to the comments about the twitter login, next time it would probably be a better idea to use a different login system even if it's just a proof of concept.
Yes, this is very true and was a mistake on my part that I am learning from.

I was on multiple ruby lists, lists from various conferences I have been at, etc and when I started looking for work again I realized I was stupid to delete it.
Where in MI are you located? I own a rails consultancy in Ann Arbor (http://www.alfajango.com). Feel free to email me (email in my profile).
That's true, but if I'm working for $1000/mth in Poland and my colleague is working for $8000/mth, I probably wouldn't stand for it.
On a related note, the same author performed exhaustive testing to replicate the flavor and texture of McDonald's fries at home.

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...
I agree with this to a point. You should produce code in whatever language you are most proficient/comfortable with, pending that language is suitable for the domain in which you are producing code in. I wouldn't want to try to produce a web application in Assembly.NET, nor would I want to develop a low level component in Ruby. Depending on the domain, language becomes a bigger issue, which may result in you not having the ability to be language agnostic. But, in the overall sense, I do agree with what you're saying.
Doesn't that reinforce his point? CMUCL & SBCL were released as free software and are still around. Genera isn't.
The reason I'm using Twitter is because there will be tight integration with Twitter in the future. If you don't want to trust me then I can't help that, but it's not a problem with the game.

However, in the future I will be allowing guests to play without a Twitter account, and I will be making it more obvious why you need to use Twitter if you want more from the game.
Behemoths cling to relevance as spotlight shifts
I definitely agree with this. Besides, the code itself is an insignificant part of the process. Any paper will include more than enough evidence to back up its assertions and provide a path for duplicating its results.
I forgot that Ann Arbor actually has...tech jobs and...tech companies unlike the Detroit Metro area.

I actually live in Roseville right now, but may make a change to that sometime soon.
How will you make money?

If it's free for developers to use, and you don't force them to run ads, or sell/use the user data (which I don't see mentioned anywhere on the site, so I presume you don't), how do you plan to at least cover your expenses?

Also: in your TOS, you say "we reserve the right to modify or terminate mogade.com service for any reason, without notice at any time". If you want people to rely on your service, this won't fly. If I'm making, say, Android game, and rely on your service to provide leaderboard, I have to have confidence in you. At least to the point that you'll notify me well (in months) in advance, so I can switch to another provider or roll my own, update my game, push the update to my users and hope most of them updated. So, I wouldn't use something like this without at least basic SLA.

As codypo commented - if your service adds value, don't be afraid to charge for it. That solves both of the issues I mentioned :)
I don't think the financial crisis would have occurred, at least not to the degree it has, without the problematic credit ratings of the toxic securities -- from major ratings agencies like Moody's, Fitch, and S&P.

This from the article catches my eye:

The seeds of today's problem were planted long ago, and its forgotten history holds important lessons. In 1936, as part of reforms under the new Banking Act, the U.S. government mandated that federally regulated banks could no longer hold securities that weren't rated investment-grade by at least two ratings firms.

I believe that could be re-worded like this, and essentially mean the same thing:

In 1936, as part of reforms under the new Banking Act, the U.S. government mandated that federally regulated banks could no longer hold securities that weren't rated investment-grade by at least two [kindergarten kids with crayons].

Why are rating agencies, who appear to be unaccountable to anyone, given such a key role in banking law? This law appears to be in place to protect the stability of banks, but what happens if the rating measurement system is flawed? I was listening to comments made by Warren Buffet post crisis on the rating agencies. His position, to summarize, appeared to be, well, the agencies may not be perfect, but the market has need of their services, so we essentially need to have them. I'm not so sure this is the wisest course, at least not without some form of accountability added in. If individual investors can do their own research on investments, then banks can too. As the article points out:

The record was so unreliable that it would be "still more responsible," Mr. Palyi growled, to "stop the publication of ratings altogether."

An interesting read along with this article is another one entitled Bad Credit: How S&P, Moody’s and Fitch Helped Cause the Housing Bubble.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/financial-business/bad-credit-how-s...

An excerpt:

If large financial firms masterminded the scam, stuffing junk mortgages into securities, CDOs and other instruments, the credit agencies were their able shills, rubber-stamping whatever paper came their way with an investment-grade rating.

As Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., said this morning in a congressional hearing on the role of the rating agencies, “The big thing that was missing was the referees on the field.”

Or more accurately, the referees were paid off.

The ratings agencies business model is based on a flagrant conflict of interest — they’re paid by the firms whose credit they evaluate. That makes them vulnerable to pressure from investment banks and securities issuers, which naturally want a bullet-proof rating in order to attract investors.
Fair point. The game originally started without Twitter integration and people asked for it, so I can't please everyone just yet. However, I will be letting people play without a Twitter account in the near-future, once I suss out the best way to manage that.
I think every aspiring entrepreneur likes side and bootstrapped projects. Meet-ups have all types of people.

I've got one or two go-to guys I've met over the years. Whenever I feel like I want a new side project, I give one of them a call. We shoot the breeze a bit, and usually by the end of a 20 minute conversation we come across something intriguing. Often, it's a simple proof of concept we want to develop. A technique of social marketing, or a simple web app. Nothing has really taken off yet, but we're patient and have fun trying these random projects.
Hair Stylist – Hair Colourist - Glass Hair Salon in London UK
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Night of the Living Fed
An all time favorite of mine! (:
An elaboration would be nice.
Great Definitions of Winners vs. Losers
I used to regret a lot of things, now I don't. You learn from every mistake you make. (As I like to say in my own geeky way "Every failure == +1XP")