skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Feedback on my startup www.dojolearning.com
We're now ready to launch our new startup, with the press release going out next week, and wanted to get a bit of feedback from the HN community ahead of that for any last-minute glaring oversights or suggestions that might improve things. The site is:

http://www.dojolearning.com/

Our idea could be described as the Basecamp model/philosophy applied to training, which makes online training affordable to a much wider range of companies and trainers.

Beyond that, I'll let the site speak for itself :)

Thanks!
And here's a clickable link to the site:

http://www.dojolearning.com/
10.5 was quite a step backward [edit: from ubuntu] in terms of development environments. I don't think the battle is over yet :-)
I meant, do they count for purposes of this poll? Because that is probably the option most of the 1960s equivalent of News.YC readers chose at the time.
At least Apple is up-front that you need Quicktime when installing iTunes, Adobe just installs the kitchen sink...
The latest version of Opera continues to outperform Firefox 3 in terms of speed. IE7 is ugly and bloated, but it isn't terribly insecure or buggy. On Mac, Camino is a good alternative to Firefox given that it uses the same rendering engine but it uses native Cocoa APIs. I personally use Firefox 3 most of the time, but I also use Opera and IE7 for occasional browsing and testing.
Looking forward to reading your paper, thanks.
Iranian Parliament to Debate Death Penalty for Bloggers
war is an essentially human experience that may not exist for much longer

Not likely. It will just get more specialized. In a way, that's a return to its origins.
You're telling me that a computer cannot simulate steps of a turing machine, one at a time? it can't store the current state of the turing machine, and the rules, in memory, and use the rules to get from one state to the next?

Are you really saying that a computer with too little memory can't do it, or something like that? because it seems blatantly obvious that a computer can simulate a turing machine.
Ooops, I didn't see the link to the original (http://b.lesseverything.com/2008/4/30/rules-for-business); thanks for pointing it out.

I don't agree that it's spam though. The rationale is that you get the content in your RSS reader without having to follow the link.
Happy Independence Day!
Happy Independence Day!
The quality (and curriculum) of comp sci courses in the UK varies dramatically. I know of Comp Sci graduates who don't know how to program. I also know of Comp Sci courses that don't expose the students to anything like client engagement or general business skills.

Another question worth asking is what exactly is an 'IT Job'? From the sounds of things the IBM chap wants a Comp Sci degree to mean an IT Consultancy Degree. How useful that would be to some other business that wants really good developers is another matter.
Hmm... the application I spend all my time on doesn't include credit cards. :)

Neither does Reddit.

Neither do most web apps I can think of. They might be billed services, but that's why we have credit card gateways and prebuilt billing systems.
> Really? You think passion for medicine is that rare? I sit in biology classes with my mouth wide open, in absolute awe at the principles that guide the human body. Then, when I think about applications of that knowledge in clinical settings (especially relating to the brain, in the same way that V.S. Ramachandran practices and researches), it excites me.

You would probably be more interested in learning/research, not practicing.

> I don't know how someone can endure the torture of medical school, residency, and then a practice without being passionate and absolutely in love with what they do.

$
Stop waiting for your big idea, learn to get shit done
can you show how it can be done in perl ?
I installed a firefox 3 beta some time ago and hated it. I'm still using firefox 2, though I guess at some point soon they're probably going to abandon the branch and push firefox 3 on me via automatic updates. I'm not terribly looking forward to it.
"a linux-based operating system designed for the 100,000,000 MySpace users"

I'm glad I wasn't on the R&D team for that.
I don't know. Once the elite encountered a generation who had practically all used recreational drugs, that ceased to be a disqualification.

But, strangely enough, it would probably be a good thing if all the clever outliers were rejected by large organizations. Then they'd go off and start things of their own, which would be good for both them and the world.
"You would probably be more interested in learning/research, not practicing."

If the research/learning and the practicing of anything were mutually exclusive, we'd be in really big trouble.
No - this guy actually put together some code.
Bash Microsoft, and all proprietary software: ✓

Refer to DRM as Digital "Restrictions" Management: ✓

Point out the Linux kernel is one "small" part of the GNU operating system: ✓
Code is more like literature than software.

What code are you talking about? All of the code I have is software.

It is wrong to take it without prior owner's permission.

Is that always the case? It certainly isn't always true about literature. As an american I'm happy my country's founders didn't have to worry about getting permission to use the ideas that went into the literature of our government.

Algorithms, and software ideas, however, are like math.

They aren't just "like" math, they are math. They may be other things as well.

Code is the property of whomever wrote it, and thus it may be copyrighted.

Not all code is or should be that way.

If you're going to compare code and literature, please keep in mind that the early history of literature was almost entirely devoted to maintaining social order and mundane matters of business transactions.
A Turing Machine is an idealized computer. But no computer/TM can find out which of the possible 61.519 4-state TMs can write the longest string of 1's on a blank tape before halting.
Steve Andler, vice president of marketing at Networks In Motion, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based firm that provides GPS services for Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ) Wireless, Sprint (nyse: S - news - people ) and Alltel (nyse: AT - news - people ), says the problem is that iTunes ties applications to a user's iTunes account, as opposed to a device. For instance, a customer could have "three iPhones synched to the same iTunes account, and thus would only be paying for one copy of the application, but using it on three devices," Andler says.

Regardless of the rest of the article, that is a ridiculous complaint. First of all, the number of users with multiple iPhones is probably very small, and second, even if someone had more than 1 iPhone, why should they have to pay multiple times?

It's this mentality of the wireless carriers (and related companies/services) that they should squeeze every last penny out of their customers that I hate. I can't think of any other industry quite as bad.
I would estimate that the vast majority of IT jobs are not programming-related. Most are in technical support and admin. And an employer is just as likely (maybe more likely) to employ a liberal arts graduate to do technical support, as hire a graduate of a computing-related subject. I've worked in several smallish companies (circa 500 employees), where I was the only person in IT who had a computing-related degree. Furthermore, I was the only one who had any interest in IT per se, and the only one who had any knowledge of IT beyond what was required to do the job (even in that knowledge some of them were woefully ignorant). The truth of the matter is that there is a wide gulf between a university education and what employers actually want/need.
A computer can try each TM one by one in the same way the humans did.

If you're talking about the halting problem now, humans also don't know whether the TM they are manually simulating will halt eventually.

And you still haven't said specifically what the thing is that the humans do and computers can't.
I'm actually not that happy with my FF3 experience so far. (FF is my primary browser)

They've changed something with how the browser loads pages, and I find if I'm loading a particularly unresponsive page, it hangs and I have no access to the stop button. It' really quite annoying.

It seems to crash randomly without any input from me. Previously, FF would crash sometimes if I opened too many tabs at once, now, FF crashes while I'm moving my mouse.

The behavior of the bookmarks menu to me is completely counter intuitive and very annoying. You basically can't access your bookmarks without automatically creating a new one for the current page. That's wacko.

I'm still not happy that it's such a resource hog either. It's the number one memory user on my pc right now... outpacing IDE's, email clients and MS office. It's a fricken browser!

This could just be my experience, and FF is still my goto browser, but overall I'm not that impressed with the direction Mozilla is going. I'd love it if they licked the RAM issues and just kept things as simple as possible. I don't need the "feature creep".
Prominent Mathemathicians Rebuke Recent Riemann Hypothesis Proof
Energy Transitions Past and Future
No, a computer cannot do it, due to incompleteness (Once there was a man called Kurt Gödel...) Bringsjords experiment proves that humans can "hypercompute" uncomputable functions. The great majority of functions which exist are uncomputable.
PR: Pitching TechCrunch, Scoble, and other Influentials
Google Files "FriendRank" Patent (identifies the most influential of a circle of friends)
Gates didn't steal his money - he made it a way that Richard Stallman happens to disapprove of... there's a big difference.

Not only RMS would disapprove. Big difference.

Backgrounder: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/19/ballmer_eggs/

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451

How about spending those EU funds directly to cure illness and not let MS and lawyers chip away at it???
After citing my confusion as to why OSX doesn't have a decent package manager, doesn't ship with apropos, doesn't come with gcc, etc. to my friend Nick, he stated that 10.5 was quite a bit more fussy. I haven't used 10.4, so I can't be sure what has changed, but it's a fairly grumpy environment (for backend development, at least) compared to Ubuntu.
Why can't they allow you to add in these features if you want these features?

There's no reason why the users should be forced to install all these bloaty features.
As a person who was born in a present day US colony, I can personally prove you wrong. These people make poor people suffer the exact same way as the Mafia and other villains. You can call it white collar crime, creative accounting, aggressive business practices or whatever euphemism you are comfy with. But the end result is the same: extort wealth from the defenceless.
kinda misleading, since it seems like it just gives the bare bones on the type of investors there are.
1) Facebook
2) Myspace
3) Youtube
4) Wikipedia

I'd say that's about it...those are the only ones where everyone knows what they are because they are constantly talked about in the mainstream media
Adobe is a Joke
Ask YC: Sign-up Form Usability
I'm looking for opinions on whether an implementation detail on my website home page is reasonable or not.

I want users to sign up initially and subsequently login when they visit the site. I am gathering the absolute minimum of data - an email address and a user-generated password.

I figure rather than have a login form and a sign-up form I would instead use the same two-input box form for both functions. In the back-end I check for the existence of the credentials against the Db. If they exist, log the user in. If they do not, sign the user up and log them in. Seems like the simplest possible method, to me.

I am uncertain on this simply because there seem to be no other examples of sites doing this, so I wonder whether I have missed a major usability point here.
This mentality is very similar to that of the record industry, and look where it's got them!

Personally speaking, I can't wait to get my hands on one! I want to write an app that helps me record my food & exercise, I find it hard to remember later on, but the iPhone is a perfect device to help do it there and then.
Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms
Yeah, but that's not the point. It's about which address points to which place. An array always points to its 0th member in C by default - that was the point. Declare int• j = i; and you can do as much pointer shuffling as you want.
At least that was also a crime.

Ah yes, those were the days my Friend...
Yes, thanks for reporting!. It's fixed in the version we deployed today.
I misinterpreted your comment to mean that 10.5 was a step backwards from 10.4.

That said, it is a viable development platform, and Apple does provide gcc with XCode. If you want a package manager, there's Fink available. As far as apropos, I've never used it so I don't know.

My personal setup is the best of both worlds: work on a Mac and SSH to a Linux server when needed.
Ask HN: What software has made you go "wow?"
What software has really impressed you, which has made you realy think, "wow such an elegant solution!" or "wow how did they do that!?" etc?
Can be any piece of software(games, webapps, dekstop adds, languages, everything)

some on my list:

* Diablo (Blizzard's game...)
* Firefox 3
* First contact with Linux
* Emacs
* Python
* YouTube (yes I'd gladly pay a monthly fee)
* Wikipedia
* Erlang (not so much the language but the philosophy)
That's a simplistic conclusion to make - how do you back that up?
FWIW, Stallman wrote long time a piece saying that it might be simpler and braver to make dozens of copies of expensive commercial software and giving them away on a street corner. He didn't do that and instead tried to create alternatives. But it was some kind of "what is wronger" question.
European Parliament rushes towards Soviet Internet
Earning revenue from YouTube videos just got easier
"Fortunately, Dr. Li's proof fails alongside a respectable graveyard of previous attempts."

Why fortuneately and not unfortuneately?
How to replace an original iPhone with an iPhone 3G
It's important to make clear that this form does more things than every other form in the world that looks like it.

Also, there's a reason why "confirm password" is a standard -- unless you're sending them their password plaintext afterwards, you run the risk of locking people out due to typos.

Objections aside, though, it strikes me as elegant.
except for people outside US.
Celestia - http://www.shatters.net/celestia
OK, I changed it to Happy Independence day.
Cool article, but I wish they got the point at the beginning, instead of the end:

"It's only possible to advance when you understand the whys behind the what happened - how can you get to the moon armed only with the knowledge that things don't go up? Just observing patterns and saying you're done is what came BEFORE science."
I took care of the memory leak. Should be fine now.
Ask HN. Do you know of a web based Python IDLE?
I am not sure if I am asking this question properly, but I would like to know if there is any web app I can use to write, test and save python applications?
Dtrace progress
It works on Ubuntu 8 kernel (untouched by human hand).

ftp://crisp.dynalias.com/pub/release/website/dtrace/
I agree, that argument didn't make a lot of sense.

If it's true that you can't really sell subscription-based services through iTunes, however, that's a much stronger argument.
done.

http://ycfeeds.com/feed/popular-submissions
Montenegro domains available for pre-order.
In all fairness, if the read me contains information about what to do when you can't get the application working...

It would be a huge WTF if the only way to find out why you can't read PDF files is locked inside a PDF file :-)
What happens if they've registered before, but upon another visit, they login with typos?
I wish I knew. I installed it, but when I try to start it up, nothing happens. (OSX 10.3.9, Powerbook G4)
Why not do what YC News does? The Login link asks you for a username and password. There's no email address required.
Most recurring billing providers handle the credit card numbers for you. So after you pass them along to their API you never need them again.

Isn't it more secure not to reinvent every wheel yourself? I'm much rather let others deal with their core competencies than spend all my new feature cycles making yet another create/confirm/forgot authentication boiler plate.
so the more popular (or 'influential') I am the more ads I'll have on my profile?

filed only a year and a half ago -- pretty quick!
The Android which really made it: Openmoko reopen now
Openmoko is a project which encompasses two related sub-projects, with the combined aim of creating a family of open source mobile phones.[1] The project was founded by FIC.

The first sub-project is Openmoko Linux, an open source Linux based operating system designed for mobile phones, built using free software.

The second sub-project is the development of hardware devices on which Openmoko Linux runs. The first device released was the inconsistently-named Neo 1973 or Neo1973[2][3], which was followed up by the Neo Freerunner on the 25th of June 2008.[4] Unlike most other mobile phone platforms, these phones are designed to provide end users with the ability to modify the operating system and software stack. Other Openmoko supported phones are listed here.
For about 15 years, Stallman had several programmers on paid staff for the Free Software Foundation. I don't think he's expecting developers to work for nothing.
No. What IT really wants is "problem solvers".

That's simply not true. I agree that that is how it should be. But the vast majority of companies hire by key/buzzwords on a resume. You could be the greatest coder in the world but if you don't have "10 years Visual X+#" you won't even get past the HR screen. Everyone loses in that scenario, you don't have a job, the company doesn't have a worker. Sucks, but there it is.
The landrush period has already passed it seems (doh) but there are still many good names available for preregistration at the various accredited registrars. I'm wondering what a good strategy might be to acquire a couple of names; do I go to several registrars and register the same names to increase my chances? Assuming a limited budget of course.
Laptop Losses Total 12,000 Per Week at US Airports
Y2K bug causes Mac Office 2008 users to lose data
I disagreed with a significant portion of the article, but I did mod it up. While it's headline was unfortunate, there were a number of good quotes from the traditional GPS industry that the writer managed to track down. If the Editors had change the title to be: "Traditional Geomapping Industry threatened by iPhone", and dove in a bit deeper into which revenue streams would be threatened, then the value of the article would have been somewhat clearer.

Initially I though Andler's comment was silly, but then I though - How much of "Networks in Motions" revenue comes from selling multiple licenses to the same user? If greater than 15% of their revenue stream comes this class, then the iPhone does present a material risk to them.

Of course, the greater threat is more likely to be their existing revenue stream being reduced by iPhone/Google Maps, but that's a story for another day. July 11th, to be precise. :-)
I thought Google was against software patents.
Good concept, but rehashed here many times. This time lacking in details or interesting anecdotal evidence.

It is a very tough thing to do though - getting started. I am currently trying to help a friend get going and he is really struggling. After university working about 1 hour a day, and then in his career for the last few years doing the same he is struggling to put in enough hours to get anything rolling. If someone has a tutorial for that - I would definitely appreciate that and forward it on.
> Noone was arguing that closed source isn't profitable. "Proprietary software exists" isn't an argument for it's existence & many are unhappy about it.

There is definitely slippery-slope rhetoric in the GNU propaganda. Thus far, no slope has existed. That's all I meant to say.

> I hope you're not saying OSS isn't innovative.

I am not saying this, but it is historically true that lots of different fields have been pioneered by closed-source or closed-license-source and that kind of funding. It may shortly thereafter become open-sourced in some fashion, or take longer.
This is pretty much the most valuable advice anyone could give. Ideas are worth nothing, implementations are worth everything.

(Of course, in my broad over-generalization we have to include the fact that people who ship are people who succeed).
"Then there's the competition factor. Developers speculate Apple has plans to build its own navigation applications, so they're wary of investing in the iPhone despite the handset's popularity."

Aren't they just referring to no "real-time route guidance" to solidify their Google Maps (hence Tom-Tom & Garmin complaints in the article) or is this something else?
Kids these days don't want to be programmers, they all want to be "Certified Enterprise Solutions Architects" and whatnot.

Think about it, when was the last time you saw "programmer" as a job title? At the very minimum now it's "developer" or "software engineer". No-one actually wants to get their hands dirty with code. And I'll tell you why: in today's modern culture, nothing is right or wrong. Lines, boxes and clouds on a whiteboard and just someone's opinion, no more valid than anyone elses. But code, that requires you to say "this is right" and "this is wrong". Kids these days can't face the pressure of making definitive statements.
The only downside to them, in my opinion, is that disk access is not super fast. This makes running databases on them much slower than a properly set up real machine.

That said, I fully expect amazon to fix this, just as they have already added high memory and high cpu instances. They seem to take feedback seriously and have addressed most of the major complaints to date.

Being able to provision new machines with a simple command is reason enough to use them over more traditional places.
It's just a provisional application so far => not so quick.
Probably you just just need to get to know your way around the ASDF system better.

Or, just switch to Scheme:
http://docs.plt-scheme.org/net/pop3.html
http://docs.plt-scheme.org/net/smtp.html
What's the right phrasing/terminology to make the distinction between the thing you are pitching and who you are pitching to?

I read this and by the first paragraph was wondering why I'd try to convince anyone to invest in or give attention to TechCrunch or Scoble.
What a biased article. It actually looks like a paid-for piece, paid-for by companies writing turn-by-turn navigation software, obviously. Most software houses are crazy happy about a way to easily sell to millions of users.
And suddenly Stallman doesn't sound so crazy.