skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“It’s a tragic ending to what was once a warm and fuzzy Silicon Valley story,”

Many believe that eBay has violated the sacred tenet of the “level playing field,” which its founder, Pierre Omidyar, established as one of the company’s basic principles.

Sounds like with all the discourse amongst its users, and as it changes its business model, now is a good time to start creating an alternative to eBay.
Erweiterungen für Google Earth und Google Maps | tefly.net
I've given up on reddit as I can't stand the new interface. I gave up on digg a long time ago. Both are too slow w/ their fancy javascript fadeouts and there's not enough stories per page. I liked reddit better as I felt there was a stronger technical community but today I think it's just another platform for SEO companies.
Google Now Displaying Code Search Results
ebay have just opened up the playing fied...
This is absolutely great.
A close look at three Rails 2.1 bugs
IPhone 3G - Will It Blend?
I'll get to your application in a minute - First, we need to build the framework
Foo Camp 2008: Shangri La For Geeks
The CSS is the display, not the HTML. The HTML should be capable of being displayed in many different ways by just changing the CSS.
Check out F#. Many new C# features are trialled there first.
I thought he was a self-styled usability expert, not a "designer."

I much, much prefer Steve Krug, when it comes to self-styled usability experts.
Many of the people who critique Nielsen don't seem to appreciate that he uses empirical measurement (rather than aesthetic judgement or opinion) to determine what is "good" or "bad" design.

His column is about usability design rather than the veneer of beauty that obsesses many graphic designers. Whether it's good methodology is a different question, but not one that I see people who dislike his advice address.
The mighty hacker would make a three-liner bash script to pull all images with wget, echo a .tex file with graphicx image figures, and pdflatex it.
Yes, but as I said, the HTML should be data to be displayed. eg the content. NOT arbitrary data used in the program.
1.4 billion clients,billions of dollars in sales - Are you IN ?
The article mentions quite a few thefts in Paris, too.
In munich they had a system where you would get money back if you cycled from the outer circle into the inner circle.

I still don't think those bikes became a great hit, mainly because signing up for them was too much hassle (in my opinion). They are still around, but I can't imagine that they make a profit.
Ironically, that's exactly contrary to his first point -- to write about something you care about.
Interesting that Amazon is investing in them... they're sort of an EC2 competitor.
USANA
USANA founder makes offer to take the company private - good idea!
Great programmers and great chefs
I want to create another instance of myself so it can play this game all day while the other one works.
Apx Alarm
Apx Alarm Home Security System's are professionally installed and tested by trained, and experienced professionals.
Increasing your Taxes via Handouts for the Rich
While Fannie and Freddie will need some assistance, this is a case of the elites saying one thing, doing another and the now they'll bail out their friends at your expense.
I don't think that framework building is necessarily a bad thing - it's no conceptually different from bottom-up programming. The problem occurs when no top-down programming occurs at the same time, so there are no actually working features until the framework/DSL is completed. This is mainly about a PM who didn't keep a grip on what the team were doing - just another reason that non-technical PMs are a bad idea.
There is a lot more to John D. Rockefeller than the article can ever summarize. I would suggest to anyone who wants to find out about the entire history, politics, discovery and wealth surrounding Oil and oilmen to read Daniel Yergin's The Prize.
IPhone: The New Personal Computer
How The Malaria parasite hijacks human red blood cells
Is blogging dead?
> "but with the platform iPhone becomes the new personal computer .... Every major service, Amazon, Netflx, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, is already available, or will soon be, ... this is powerful and unprecedented

Unprecedented? Surely not. Windows Mobile is a platform that allows you to do all that. Blackberry is another mobile platform for developers. iPhone may yet be the best mobile platform (the jury's still out), but it's certainly not the first.
USANA
USANA Stock of the Day on CNN Financial News.
If you get friendly with engine yard, the price can be flexible, and they can also host things other than RoR apps ;-)
NB: egrep (where available) has expanded regular expressions, including some extensions from perl.
Flagged as advertising spam...
I think Jeff's off-base here -- but he makes good points.

The problem is that all programs _should_ involve some generalizations and framework-type activities. It's just that it's never the focus of the actual project. There are all kinds of interesting and complex situations to consider when considering how much of a framework to build and why, but he never gets into those nuances, instead opting out with the easy "customers pay us for software, not for frameworks"

Well gee -- that's pretty self-obvious. What's less self-obvious is how the right amount of framework activity can super-charge the entire bag of software features.

I felt like I got a slogan, not real advice.
Cloud Computing Infrastructure: Secure Remote Access
"... Also, I hope people don't misinterpret his advice to show lots of information at once and turn their web applications into huge-ass spreadsheet-like grids of numbers ("more information!") or something ..."

Good observation.

People underestimate Tufte's brilliance in both graphic and information design, take his advice and fail miserably. Maybe because they lack any background in technical graphics and it's unique problems.

"... Where is the clarification to come? I don't get it. ..."

The clarification comes from recognising the limitations of small display screens and how to organise and display enough information users will find useful. Then find a way to compare and improve upon them. Comparison with printed examples allow you to emulate the best qualities of print (see the 3 points in p 150 in Visual explanations). There is no magic formula. These are the kinds of problems that Cartograhphers have been dealing with and solved in print. Now craftsmen like Tufte are working on solving them with digital constraints.
Get Firefox to do NTLM
New features every week? At that rate, you're bound to make yourself quite a mess. With almost every project I've worked on, the complexity becomes so unbearable, I end up refactoring everything into half of a framework. I would dare say that you'd need a lot more than that to get flexibility from a language like C#, which this particular blogger seems to be supporting.
I'm not sure you can excuse the language totally.

To stop code standing on other peopoles toes, namespaces and encapsulation were invented. In this case, there is no way to encapsulate the change to Class.inherited, it must be Global, because the language does not support anything else. If the language did support other possiblities, then the social problems would have been less acute.
50 most bizarre social networks
Right. But, with the ability of 3 party developers to develop applications for the iphone(and make some money) creates lot of interesting applications unlike Blackberry or windows mobile.
FJCore source available: Client-side JPEG resizing for Silverlight 2 Beta 2
Is Fan Fiction Legal?
SVG on the iPhone would be a big plus. All the web-based clients use flash so can't be accessed on the iphone.

I'm sure there's a SVG->VML javascript toolkit out there somewhere.
In Changing Face of Beijing, a Look at the New China
New Rejection from Yahoo Sets The Stage for Ugly Fight
Er -- Windows Mobile is an open platform. Developers have been developing apps on it for many years now.
No problem. If Lively becomes popular it's still not going to be in the same market space as what the OP is doing. Not all Virtual Worlds share the same market. Google don't want to take over any and all VW, they want to be the platform that VWs are built on.

Lively's just a tech demo. Google are competing with Metaplace and Metaverse, not the VWs that are built on them.
Brain scans show "sleeping on a problem" at work
Didja Know? Targeted Advertising on StumbleUpon
The Windows Mobile is over a decade old as a platform for apps. The Blackberry also allows 3rd party apps.

As a platform, there's nothing new here with the iPhone except lots of hype and a slick UI.
Building a cheap beowulf
More MSIE 6 Mayhem.
Did Apple set developers up for failure?
Newton, Palm, WinCE and the Blackberry can all add 3rd party applications. However, having developed for 75% of those platforms, I can tell you that it wasn't easy.

What's missing from this article is the impact of the iPhone App store. It makes it absolutely trivial for a user to install new applications -- directly from the phone.

Compare the iPhone:

1. Click on App store

2. Search for the app you want

3. Click Install

to what we have to do with all of the other platforms above:

1. Find the app you want (ie, no centralize directory)

2. Download the app to a laptop/desktop.

3. Move the app to whatever machine this particular device is already mated to (yes, you can often do it on a guest device, but good luck.)

4. Unpack/Unzip/Untar the application

5. Open up the syncing/install application

6. Move it to the right directory or select the correct collection of files from the syncing application

7. Plug in or dock your handheld

8. Sync.

How often do you think that the latter occurs? While Palm boasted of having hundreds of thousands of apps, a tiny fraction of devices had any of them.

This integration is important. The handheld ecosystem goes far, far beyond "well, you can develop for it!"

It is a lesson that I'm hoping the Google folks are learning.
My school had us read Slaughterhouse Five. I wish they gave us one of his other books though.
Project Cassandra: Facebook's Open Source Alternative to Google BigTable
Interesting, I've myself built too many frameworks.

There are good frameworks available for ruby and python. For java and php the frameworks are too big and cumbersome so people build their own 'frankenstacks' to get away from the code bloat that comes from programming with a c style static language (talking about java here) for a generic problem, and focusing the framework for the current problem at hand. I'm not a good framework programmer so I'm perfectly happy using rails and trying to forget all crappy PHP based frameworks I've built myself in the past. :)
Is there something that has changed about grep in the past several years that makes mention of its existence news?
8 Innovative Design & UI Elements That Make Sites Better
I can only speak for mobile Java applications, and they definitely can be installed over the air: type URL of app or browse to it in the phone's browser, install.

I also don't see how having only one store is an advantage. There have been no good stores for mobile applications, that is true. But that seems independent from the just one store problem. If there was one trustworthy store for applications, the other bad stores would be irrelevant.

It also remains to be seen how good the iPhone Appstore will really be. Why should it be better than the other stores for mobile applications out there?

Also, wasn't there a store for Palm Pilot applications from Palm Computing back in the day?
TCP Tuning and Network Troubleshooting
The Wonderful Awful Browser
The reason is that iPhone with its application platform is a better personal computer

Holy shit, that's the stupidest thing I've ever read. The iPhone couldn't replace the Commodore 64 for the bulk of its uses.
Rewriting String.Left()
USANA Health Sciences
USANA develops and manufactures high quality nutritional and personal care products that are sold directly to Preferred Customers and Associates around the world.
Minda ICT: Installing Vista Fonts in Ubuntu
As an iPhone dev, I'm sure iPhone OS 2.0 isn't perfect. They pushed 8 beta builds into the hands of devs since march. They've been working on hugely aggressive timelines. There has to be defects. In all, however, I'm glad it's released.
Definitive Proxy Statement on Yahoo
Apx Alarm
The latest news, videos and blog posts about Apx Alarm.
More on Google and Day Care (pricing out smaller providers)
GitHub implementing Erlang git-daemon
Right on. I'm working on a contract like that right now, and our "lead developer", so to speak, is doing exactly this (i.e., do BDUF, write the framework first, and I'll get to your application when I get to it). The money quote that really stood out to me:

Frameworks are better harvested from several applications
that ended up using similar patterns.
WolfenFlickr 3D - An unlikely mashup
Beware of World War III Hoax | Tech Jaws
Copyrights and the Internet | Tech Jaws
Microsoft Backs Yahoo into a Corner | Tech Jaws
Unfortunately for the left-handed, due to its era this book makes no allowance for chirality. If you're a lefty who furthermore hooks your hand over to write, well...

This occurred to me while reading through the theory book. What if you made a pen that, instead of continuing straightly from the handle into a tip, curved inward? It seems to me the real difference between writing left handed and right handed is that lefties have to push and righties can drag.

If the tip of your pen curved inward, lefties could do a lot more dragging (and maybe all dragging, if you held the pen right).
New features every week doesn't mean the features are badly built.
Reblogging Music
I suppose that selling your app through iTunes is the first example of one of these providers creating a distribution and sales network for your 3rd party apps though.

But winmobile and blackberry platforms have been in existence for years and years.
If so, I'd guess that the business of selling educational material to corporate customers is probably ripe for something disruptive.
Paying higher rates to day-care teachers doesn't seem so evil to me.
I think this thinking is what got them into a mess. Sure it sounds like a great idea to create a framework, but for a one-off project it just doesn't make sense.

I think you would be much better off in that scenario trying to build great components that are well defined and contained. This would enable you to re-use them in future projects, or when you build your framework later at some point.
There are so many assumptions that go into the framework that some of them are bound to be wrong.

For example...
I used to develop for mobile Java, which took a long time to mature (not sure if it has matured, actually). They had a problem Apple doesn't have, inconsistencies across the thousands of devices. Still, I wonder if developing for iPhone would be like going back to the start again, with yet another immature platform.
good stuff... the amazon dynamo paper should be required reading for people contemplating implementing these "eventually consistent" data stores.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dyn...
Sometimes i have a very hard time going to sleep, and i am at what i call the middle ground. Some random thoughts go through my mind while i try to sleep and sometimes i think of problems and get to something like a solution. Usually its just a subconscious hint that i understand in the morning after thinking about it. But i don't remember my dreams, so i rarely get to solutions in my sleep, just some hints in my middle ground. But who knows, maybe i get some work done and don't know it.
There are lots and lots of platforms for buying mobile applications. Not sure if there is one explicitly BY Blackberry, but still.
Yours is. Yikes.

Fix your CSS so we can read your article in IE7.
Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer
There is a difference between exceptional and revolutionary. You don't have to change the game you just have to build something that's better that what is out there, look at google and search or flickr and photos. Neither of those were revolutionary by any means but they were exceptional examples of what they did.
Veoh Targets Video Ads Based On Past Viewing Patterns
Is it just me or others agree that submitting Seth's posts on HN is a bit of cheeky karma-earning hack? Almost everything Seth writes is 'worth' submitting but given the high frequency of his posts, it's almost pointless to post them on HN.

I'm not one for bans, but I'd request people to take it easy on those Godin posts.
USANA
USANA Health Sciences produces the highest quality nutritional and personal care products available.
I like ack better for searching code: http://petdance.com/ack/
InGameNow Launches Post via Gtalk and AOL Instant Messanger
Scalability: I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Does
BigTable and Why it Changes Everything
Mobile Java is a freaking mess on the Treo. I don't have experience with other platforms. But the apps are second/third class citizens.

You've missed my point on the store. It isn't that it is a single store, it is that the shopping experience is seamless.
Hot Water Costs Money
Given not enough time, and too many eyeballs, all bugs are possible :D
Thank you for letting me know, I am going to get right on it!
Ack is a beautiful tool.

http://petdance.com/ack/
Probably because that's a myth. Read Joseph Frazier Wall's biography of Carnegie -- he went to Britain and saw the new steel-making process, but so did many other Americans. Like Carnegie, they were unimpressed, because it made small batches of steel for which there wasn't a ready market.

He got into the steel business about a decade later.

But that story isn't as fun as the legend of the rapacious rapscallion, who only got rich stealing an idea nobody wanted and everyone knew about, ten years later.

The tariff point is correct, though. He would not have been so rich. But he was the low-cost producer, anyway, so he wouldn't exactly have been hurting.
8 Treehouses
Public data put to good use
Andy Grove on energy and getting off oil
What's Guy? That's the first time i've seen Alltop and I quite like their UI. Supremely simple and easy to understand... and very unique. Difficult to be different whilst maintaining simplicity.
http://www.popurls.com
http://www.guykawasaki.com
One reason why IE sucks
Some were then allowed to sleep while others were not. They repeated the same tasks the next day while having their brains scanned.

So are we talking about letting the test subjects nap or keeping the control group up all night?
I feel obligated to comment just because I pass by that monstrosity every day. It's not obvious from the title, but this is primarily a piece on several of Beijing's new architectural showpieces, while trying to interleave China's "growth" and "changing landscape" into the commentary. Since I don't know too much about architecture, I can't say whether it's a good article or not, but I really didn't learn much from this.
As I said, you can install J2ME applications over the air, no need to download to PC and then sync.
Exceedingly unlikely. EC2 will never be EngineYard. EC2 is when you want a raw box to configure how you want without having to deal with the capital involved in buying machines which will depreciate and such.

EC2 has great Ruby support - as good as any Linux distribution has. What you want is for EC2 to become managed hosting rather than having to administer the box yourself. Managed hosting is expensive. If you want managed hosting, you can't get EC2 pricing.
I think it's been fixed, at least with respect to spaces. I checked, and many of their applications don't come up as having spaces anymore.
QuickRef
Apple's reality distortion field is in full-effect - I think of not being too far from religious fundamentalism (in terms of how people love to preach about the product). It's impossible to separate hyperbole from Apple - it's fundamental to their ethos.

The Razr was one of the best-selling phones of all-time. We have to give it props. However, how many people would stand in line for the new Razr (for four hours)? The Samsung Instinct? Or even for the still-in-development (touch-screen) Blackberry Thunder?

I own (and am very happy and even happier with the 2.0 firmware) the 1st generation iPhone (since I upgraded from an ancient Nokia 8265 it was going from the horse-and-buggy to a limo).
Yahoo Angrily Rejects Microsoft’s Latest Offer
Classic marketing stuff. Definitely applies to the web but i do think the rules are changing with behaviour evolving so rapidly. Back when I was a brand consultant we often encountered situations with clients trying to launch new products (or innovations, as we referred to them in marketing breeze!), with the objective of changing the category.

The general learning was that changing a category or changing consumers' behaviour in a category can be done but it's important to maintain "hooks" in the existing category norms.
Texas Startup Blog
RubyNation Conference
A few of my coworkers have organized an annual Ruby conference serving the Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC areas. If you're interested come check it out.

Is anyone on HN attending?
C++ Guru of the Week Archives
Can an app developer get paid for them just as seamlessly?
Short (5 mins) bit of market research for our startup please
They Called Her Styrene: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0714840114

Yes, the print on the right; no idea about the print on the left.
But who in their right mind would want windows anywhere near their phone?
It's not fun writing for something like that.
Enough with the FUD already

Let's have a look at what a BlackBerry has to do:

1. click on google.

2. search for the app you want

3. click on install.

And unlike the iPhone, you don't have to get prior approval from RIM to sell or distribute your wares and you certainly don't have to give them a 30% cut.

What's more, non-apple platforms are far more open as to what you can actually do - background processes & listeners, better access to the system etc.
PG recommends sending drafts to friends for revision. Does anybody know of a website/forum/mailing list where one can do this?
Too Much Quality..
It depends on the store. Actually you could program your own store and get paid VERY easily (if you stick to paid SMS as payments).

I am not claiming that there are any good stores for mobile apps. I am not sure if Apple's store is good, either. What is supposed to make it good? If they have thousands of applications on there, it might become impractical?
Hm, too bad. I think the first one to create such a display will become very, very rich.
Apple's "botched" shortages get it access to the
scarcest medium of all: TV news.
All of the TV news broadcasts here in Toronto
had a big story about the Canadian iPhone launch
because long lines with ecstatic and dejected fans
are perfect for TV. Using the Internet to form a
queue wouldn't get TV coverage because there's
nothing visual or emotional to show.
The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.

Man I hope China turns out a nice super power. Like a more populous Canada or something.
Umm, alright, this is ever so slightly outdated, no?
I think the new CCTV building is great. That being said, I'm reminded of a comment I read ages ago. "Spend a day in China and you can write a book. Spend a few years and you can't think of a single thing to say."
Taking The Plunge: Learning CSS