skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oops: Android contains directly copied Java code, strengthening Oracle's case
I use RSS heavily; and I do keep my feed list in Google Reader, as well as in RSSOwl. Which I use at any given time depends... on my personal laptop, when I'm home or working on Fogbeam stuff, I tend to use RSSOwl. When I'm at $DAYJOB, I pull up Google Reader every now and then (if the firehose that is HN gets boring for a bit.)

All this "RSS is dead" talk worries me, as it's an important tool that I use a lot of... I'd hate to see a trend away from it, to the point that people quit publishing useful feeds!
> Microsoft doesn't charge you to develop for their PCs and neither does Apple.

Yes I know, I tried to address that in my comment. I postulated that there are more iOS users than OS X users, just as there are more Windows users than XBox or WP7 users.

For the purposes of my example, I picked the OS from each company with the greatest number of users. I definitely think my example is valid here, despite the differences between "PCs" and tablets, phones, whatever.
CodeIgniter is a very entry level framework. You get up and running quickly but by the time you're halfway through building your site it starts to annoy the hell out of you. Go with Kohana (version 3) instead. Its quite easy to get up and running with, isn't bloated and comes with a very good ORM (ActiveRecord based) that takes care of 95% of the CRUD functionality.
An example app running in app engine: http://lift-example.appspot.com/
Please notice that comet (and actors in general) does not work on app engine. If you are comfortable in linux it is pretty easy to copy jetty and a war to a vps like linode.com.
For a more app-engine like experience the newly announced amazon beanstalk might be a pretty good choice, but i have not tried it yet.
Who reached out? What is the guy's title?

Drop me a line if you want to ask more specific questions.

A lawyer would definitely help. I can recommend a good one, depending on where you are.
You are funny!

(To add a bit more detail: Package managers are awesome but not in any way easy to understand. They are more elegant than other methods of installing software but not easy.)
Arduino Software open source directory
Example of a jQuery Mobile app with a slick custom theme
champing at the bit.
Is there something more to that story? I have plenty of consumer wifi gear (<$50 routers, <$20 usb adapters) that have 100% standard antenna connectors. In fact, I don't have a piece of consumer radio gear that has a non-standard antenna connector.
Tests are shipped with code, not binaries. Why would one ship tests with binaries?
This article also seems to ignore the many, many "techies"/programmers who love Apple products. As if programmers don't care about experience, and are all hardware hackers.
Yes and no. It solved the problem for those distributing a fixed set of free software (i.e. other Linux contributors). Anyone who wants to either make money from software or release new versions on their own schedule (not with the next OS release) is not really catered to.

Not to mention that each distribution has it's own package manager (or at least its own package servers) so the "market" is horribly fragmented.
They're tackling ease of use to the common man. I just pray that Apple doesn't become ubiquitous, their software is pretty walled up.
Relevant:

Non-Apple’s Mistake

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=132
Wow--already sold out...
I think that before Facebook has the chance to monetize the information they have on their users they will need to start lobbying for less privacy and we have already seen the pushbacks from its user base.

That being said, I have to agree that Facebook still has a lot of places to go, but I wouldn't put it past Google with new leadership at the top to come out fighting and bring a few new tricks to the table.

I look forward to what the future brings. Just for all that is holy get rid of the damn Facebook connect crap.
The ipad has a wireless interface that an app can use to transit arbitrary strings of data. This can be used to interface with medical devices, among other uses.
Yes that's true, but they don't have equal cost to transmit over the wire. Why should I transmit the larger, more expensive tree when the character frequencies are a smaller representation of the same information?
Thats a little unfair. I mentioned existing products, and I use them, so I can't fathom where you get that I ignore them.

I've used KeePass for years, but I have to manually open it and copy/paste passwords. I've just started using 1Password, and "integrates nicely" is not how I would describe its interaction with Chrome. Even the 1Password site has a list of a half-dozen bullet points of critical things the Chrome extension can't do.

In the very first section, I explain how I'm doing the exact same thing with multiple browsers, and that "works" (not well) until you get about 3. I have 4 AWS accounts for various projects, and remembering which browser is which is annoying. What I want is a single button in a toolbar or menu to pick a different account for a single website, without having to leave my preferred browser.

I feel like you're sticking your head in the sand. "I've found workarounds to all the problems he mentioned, so nobody should spend their time trying to make it better!"

I don't mean to be personal, but you just skimmed out a few things to nitpick, without really reading the article.
It was a series of reading comprehension problem-solving problems with short answer response.

One bit was five documents relating to an environmental issue in a small town. The exam asked the student to analyze the documents, looking for biases the sources may have and flaws in their reasoning.

It did a good job of measuring ability to synthesize and analyze sources, but it definitely would be harder to recognize more focused improvements in reasoning ability.
That was really, really good. I hope you guys run this on TV at some point (in some shortened fashion - there are 60 second slots, though)
Oh please, it's not just the experience it's everything: the hardware, software, UI, materials, industrial design, aesthetics, and peace of mind. Apple has become a 'trustworthy' company in a marketplace of untrustworthy corporations. By that I mean, if you by an iPod/iPhone/Macbook you know beyond any doubt you will get software updates, that if a problem occurs there is a reasonably easy way to fix it, that the materials and hardware (this includes the case and hinges) will be superior to what else is available. Why would someone by a Creative mp3 player or Archos when there is no guarantee the company will stay in business or that the company will ever bother updating the software. Samsung is in the business of selling phones, not building a software platform. So again, why would I buy a phone that costs as much or more for as an iPhone but may never again be updating?

Think about it, how many different types of laptops does Dell of HP or Toshiba sell? It's absurd. It's like the difference between the GM when there was Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Saturn. There were just too many overlapping products that confused their customers. They (GM, Dell, HP, et al) spread themselves too thin. Look at who ended up doing well: those companies who narrowed their product scope down: BMW, Honda, Acura, Scion. Maybe companies need to think about staying ahead of Apple instead of just playing catch up.

Apple isn't just selling an experience, it's selling security and peace of mind.
jQuery Plugins for Images
Excellent. I've just added a link to an early preview of my library: Sparkles - SPARQL for Cappuccino.

https://github.com/66laps/sparkles
Being reasonable and pragmatic is the most important thing to do in this situation. There are a few things you should keep in mind. 1. Interest is just that...interest. They may want the app but they may have other motives such as assessing the market, costs, etc. So be open but keep this in mind. 2. Don't waste too much time on this. This company could be in talks with other companies with similar apps so make quick decisions. If you are open to sell don't deliberate to long. Pick a number that would be a multiple of your time/money invested (say 4x's) and offer a 1 year fixed price consulting agreement with said company that insures you income for another year to move on to your next venture. It also gives said company help with the transition. 3. If it doesn't work out don't fret. It tells you that you are on the right track if you continue to push forward. Consider it validation and toast to the moment any damn way.
I guess I could expand upon that in the 2nd bonus point. Certificates would make an excellent extension to HTTP Auth, as long as end-users can self-sign, like SSH, and not have to pay a $100/yr extortion fee to a company like Verisign.
Clickable link, hope you guys like it:
http://escoz.com/githubby
The most productive periods of your life are those where you act crazy.

Why?
this was discussed in an earlier thread and it seemed like the idea of finding the "original" gets really messy and game-able (and potentially oppressive if curation were used).

the primary input to search engines comes from web crawlers...the idea of "first" when it comes to duplicated content is already difficult to determine, and (I would guess) it would get much much worse in the inevitable arms race if something like this were implemented.
IIRC, isn't this the case with Google as well (with the triumvirate holding 1/3 each of the voting shares)... the public shares aren't voting shares at all.
on the topic of serendipity and doing the unexpected, please find the following resources as useful as i have:

http://www.zippythepinhead.com/

http://www.subgenius.com/

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/index.htm
Why not?

I mean, why does it matter that it's a javascript timer? And that it's a website? Or what the picture is? Why should any of these things affect how seriously you take what it's trying to do?
Lisp Conversation with Gábor Melis, Google AI Contest Winner
Fujitsu ScanSnap
The problem is that science is being essentially undermined by funding battles. The lay person or even casual scientist can't make substantial fact based decisions and can't trust the summaries. Hence the doubt about any study.
I agree. Although it is simpler to intend to act crazy than to actually act crazy. But then again it also starts with the little things. Maybe you don't need to start by quitting your job; instead search for the small things. That way, it is less of an overcoming, too.
I figure there's no room for Facebook to grow with 500 million users - unlike Groupon at 25 million.
Mathematical Finance Lecture PDFs from U.Chicago
Please do not distribute this content in an unauthorized manner.. http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lalley/Courses/390/
It doesn't imply Hackability at all. You are projecting your tech knowledge into hackability. The commercial is demonstrating that a medical app runs on the iPad.
To say Schmidt turned Novell around seems a pretty generous reading. Certainly Novell didn't return to broad industry relevance as they were trying to.
If they didn't include the water sensors, you'd still pay for the non-trivial resulting increased cost of service that Apple would take into account when pricing their product.
It's not a DMCA violation, but it does violate the EULA, the legal ramifications of which are unclear. And of course it also voids your warranty.
Exactly; it's not like domain names or IPs are expensive.
That is sheer propagandist nonsense. You do recognise the basic unassailable physical difference between copying something and removing it, don't you? The differences of economics follow from the differences in physical fact.

Consider this quote from Landes and Posner -- one of the primary orthodox authorities on the matter:

"Copyright protection -- the right of the copyright's owner to prevent others from making copies -- trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law."

Is that how physical goods, and theft, are understood? No. To say there is a tradeoff is to say both are good: that is, copying is good.

Read it: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html -- and learn something.
Teaching Robots To Walk The Baby Way
I think I explained it pretty well in the post.

The more you challenge yourself to break out of the mold, you'll find that instead of things happening, you make them happen.

PG has a similar take with his definition of an animal, although it's not 100% the same thing:

> What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.
Tags in news of News.YCombinator.com
I think that could be very useful to have the possbility of tag the publications here, to order and search by interest.
> Respect them for making good products, not for avoiding competition. Respect them for persuading you to buy their products, not for preventing you from having more choice.

Exactly.

It's interesting how there are also plenty of people that would respect them exactly for their smart use of what the law allows. That's a sad thing, really and it would be nice if apple would find less restrictive ways of dealing with the consequences of more user freedom. For instance, I can see that they seem to be sensitive to a possibly reduced user experience on non-certified hardware, but I can't believe that a tech savvy company like apple wouldn't be able to set up a certification program to mitigate such concerns.
> Regulate the industries that need to be regulated of course - finance, health care, etc.

Well, most regulation is really about building Maginot lines. Sarbox didn't prevent the financial crisis, and Finreg is unlikely to prevent the next one.

Similarly, health care regulation can't solve the fundamental problem, which is that we have access to life-saving technologies (like heart transplantation and brain surgery) which require too much in the way of hard-to-make machines and highly trained personnel for us to mass produce on a very large scale.

Over time, cutting edge technology becomes mass produced/cheap (like cars, cell phones, computers), but with health care it particularly stings when you can't afford the latest model. Note that routine healthcare checkups which are based on direct patient-to-doctor payments have always been affordable -- it's the high-tech stuff that can be priced out of reach.

Regulation can't solve that fundamental problem of scarcity, and causes many structural changes that are likely to make it much worse.

Here is a great example:

http://mobihealthnews.com/6932/interview-the-iphone-medical-...

“We have determined the device is not substantially
equivalent to devices marketed in interstate commerce
prior to May 28, 1976, the enactment date of the Medical
Device Amendments, or to any device which has been
reclassified into class I (General Controls) or class II
(Special Controls).

This decision is based on the fact that your device has a
new indication for displaying medical images for
diagnostic use on a mobile/portable device…that alters the
diagnostic effect, impacting safety and effectiveness, and
is therefore a new intended use.

Furthermore, your device has new technological
characteristics that could adversely affect safety and
effectiveness and raise new types of safety and
effectiveness questions…

Therefore, this device is classified by statute into class
III (Premarket Approval), under Section 513(f) of the
Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (Act).”

For those who don't speak FDA-ese, what they are saying is that a simple iPhone interface to an existing, FDA-cleared piece of imaging software will require class III approval -- the highest regulatory bar, the same bar as pacemakers and implantable devices, costing more than $250,000 in application fees alone plus countless millions in regulatory consultants.

All this for a free iPhone app which won the WWDC 2008 award.

Obviously it's not worth it for the developers to pursue that kind of clearance, as few iPhone apps will gross enough to justify a $250,000 investment, let alone a multimillion dollar one. Moreover, if you noticed, the FDA language is all based on "precedent" -- so once you take the hit and push something through class III for tens of millions, someone can follow your precedent and get class II clearance for "only" a few million.

So that's a concrete example of structural disincentives to innovation caused by regulation.

And the following study by Stanford professors shows that this kind of action by the FDA is more the rule than the exception:

http://www.advamed.org/NR/rdonlyres/040E6C33-380B-4F6B-AB58-...
Major websites (gov,mil,edu) are hacked and up for sale
I suspect he defines 'crazy' as being unconventional and different and 'productive' as 'great success'. With those definition, I think he means to say that your chance of success significantly improves if you attempt something unconventional and different.
His strategy is similar to the many epsilon greedy strategies in CS.
Reasonable don't you think?
The title of the website filled with keywords, making no sense at all isn't all that reassuring either.

The colorset also makes half the site unreadable.

That, and all of the above: no thanks.
Many LH posts support piracy, albeit indirectly.
I actually find that to be more awkward than ctrl+tab, which is Firefox's default. I just find J and K to be less of stretch for my pinky.
Everything you just mentioned can be summed up by the word experience. The customer experience Apple delivers is the sum of all of the different ways that we interact with the company's products, from hearing about them, shopping using and disposing.

Marketing sums all this up in the oft-misued word 'Brand', which is the sum of the experiences we have with a product or company.
The about.com example shows how hard distinguishing quality algorithmically gets at the margins. You do actually find stuff on about.com now and then which is pretty decent--not great but decent. You might even say the same of ehow, albeit at a much lower rate.

So you don't want to just say "these are spam."
In the short term. Content begets reputation.
Any real-world search engine is going to be analyzed until enough of its internal mechanisms are laid bare to allow gaming to some extent.

Typically you pretend the search engine is a black box, you observe what goes in to it (web pages, links between them and queries) and you try to infer its internal operations based on what comes out (results ranked in order of what the engine considers to be important).

Careful analysis will then reveal to a greater or lesser extent which elements matter most to it and then the gaming will commence. Only by drastically changing the algorithm faster than the gamers can reverse-engineer the inner workings would a search engine be able to keep ahead but there are only so many ways in which you can realistically speaking build a search engine with present technology.

Your ideal, I'm afraid, is not going to be built any time soon, if you have any ideas on how to go about this then I'm all ears.
In the long term, this three-paragraph blog post everyone is rapt about will be completely forgotten.
Ever used Delicious.com, Yahoo! Answers or Yahoo! Bookmarks?

Then you've used a site built on the Symfony MVC framework. Make sure you check that out as well.

http://www.symfony-project.org/
I have to agree that it doesn't seem like R00fus read the entire article or if he did then he completely failed to comprehend the intent. It's not about reinventing the process, it's about moving forward to something better and more useful that doesn't require you to have open every browser known to man as part of a normal work environment.
I'm glad you found it useful, but yes it was already posted back in December.
Yeah, there are some issues with this, usually because the address is ambiguous or downright wrong. People throwing up stuff on CList aren't always very careful about their data entry, unfortunately.

Flagging helps with this somewhat, but that's dependent on high usage, which isn't the case in all areas. There is some automatic stuff that runs to filter obviously wrong things out, but I plan on looking more into that.
They know they love it, but have almost nothing intelligent to say about it. I'd consider that a virtue as opposed to the alternative.
It's not too often that you'll have a server that runs two applications. Sure, if that were the case then you would be using RVM in which case I would recommend following the guide already linked.

But if you've got one application running one version of Ruby, then this is definitely a perfect way to go.
2) they're using CopyCatX, a drive duplicator, instead of the disk utility. Does this matter?

It matters; Disk Utility doesn't create a bootable image.
> Why would someone by [sic] a <company> or <company> mp3
> player when there is no guarantee the company will stay
> in business

So Apple is the only company that is guaranteed to say in business? Then why don't more people buy Microsoft mp3 players?

If we assume your claim that Apple is guaranteed to stay in business, then we also have to accept the possibility that Apple being the dominant player in the mp3 player is what is driving the other companies out of business. In other words, the fact that people are buying Apple mp3 players instead of other brands is the only reason that Apple is guaranteed to be in business while the other companies (according to you) could go under at any moment. This seems like a feedback cycle to me, and this probably has less to do with the quality of Apple products than it does with feedback cycle itself.

tl;dr If Apple is 'guaranteed' to stay in business while others could fail at any moment, then it has more to do with a feedback cycle of people buying Apple products than it does with the quality of Apple products.

You're also not realizing that (as far as the iPhone is concerned), most people get new phones every 2 years (in the US at least) because they just pay the subsidized price when they sign a new contract.
If you know it's a pdf that you're looking for, you can add filetype:pdf to your query.
I got computerus...
I am familiar with the stock market, but I am far from a sophisticated investor. One thing I always had trouble understanding is what is value of holding shares in a company like Google? You have no voting power, no dividends, and an event like liquidation or sale of Google is very unlikely and would only happen in the case of a serious problem (which would have caused the share prices to fall drastically). So what is the tangible value of holding a share in Google (other than the fact other people also want to own this item that to me seems to not have any intrinsic value)?
Under the transaction’s terms, Facebook had the option to accept between $375 million and $1.5 billion from the Goldman Sachs overseas offering, at the discretion of Facebook. While the offering was oversubscribed, Facebook made a business decision to limit the offering to $1 billion.

One has to wonder if the fact that Goldman excluded U.S. investors from the round had to do with Facebook not raising the full $1.5 billion (which would push the total investment to a whopping $2 billion).

They quoted a statement saying it was "oversubscribed" and that, had Facebook wanted to, they could have chosen to take $1.5b from it... and then analysed that to mean that they were unable to raise $1.5b. What?
Nice video. How do they/will they make money? Printed versions of their pages?
I'll bite since no one else has asked.

What makes type-safety the most important property of a DSL for querying a database to note when introducing it?