skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It definitely is a scam.

Here in Japan, text IS data -- SMS messages are just e-mail and every phone has a user-defined e-mail address, except for some cheapo phones that just have randomly generated strings.

Data is charged by the packet, with different tiers of pricing; for example, my plan charges by the packet up to a maximum level, at which point I can use everything for that maximum charge, which is around 60-70 USD depending on the exchange rate.

It's definitely a better deal than other countries seem to be getting...
This.

Its silly to rely on trusting the search engine provider to be secure, better be secure on the client side.
Awesome article. Goes to show that Netflix is one of the best executing companies out there, at the level of Facebook or Google. See also this slideshow:
http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
For all the Americans (and probably Europeans, I think LF is mostly a UK company) it's important to bear in mind that LoveFilm ain't Netflix.

On the other hand; it's the best we've got.

I have a love hate relationship with them - the selection is pretty good and the service is fine (with only a few hiccups which, given the state of our postal service is probably understandable). Although; their main UK depot is about 40 miles from me, and I have heard people out in the wilds have some issues.

On the down side the online streaming catalogue could be expanded (5,000+ films, but not always the latest releases) and I tend to have trouble getting popular disks (sometimes they seem to send me random disks from my list for no apparent reason).

I've been waiting for series 3 of Battlestar Gallactica for about 3 months now... :P

I'm pleased Amazon are buying them, that's a positive move IMO. Their easily one of my favourite companies and seem to manage to let their acquisitions flourish rather than die off. So... looking good :) (and if LF eventually merges into my Amazon account, win :D)

LF made a statement here btw: http://www.lovefilm.com/features/detail.html?editorial_id=32...

EDIT: their recommendations engine is pretty dire as well incidentally, that is probably the main difference from Netflix
This is basically the default avid-tech-blog-reader response :)

The only real trend is that Android is gaining ground -- which is no surprise, given that Android phones are the cheapest to make, and will only get cheaper!

Nokia/Symbian phones have just as many 'rich' features as their iOS/Android cousins. They're just not marketed as well, and they don't have the orgiastic support of the tech blogs.
That's the main reason I started with LoveFilm; getting stuff from, say, Blockbuster, was a pain for someone as forgetful as me :P

No late fees is, well, a winner - even if you have to wait a day or two for a new film to wing it's way to you.
Yes the penetration of smartphones is increasing, but I personally know a lot of people who don't want smartphone. For example, 2 out of 3 of my friends who owns iPhone said to me that "...but my previous nokia [dumbphone] was better", and are not planing to buy another smartphone. So it's still an open question what the ratio between smartphone and dumbphone will be in the future. But Nokia's dumbphones are certainly not going away anytime soon.
First off, although apparently a recent thread on HN showed others have more problems than me, I don´t pay for texting; I use a combination of IM and Google Voice with my smartphone to get the job done on one bill.

However, I was travelling in a Latin American country recently and was talking to one fellow who worked for the government who had been given a Blackberry Storm (it was the only smartphone I had seen there). I asked him about his data plan; he said he got 5MB a month that he basically just used for texting, e-mailing, and checking Facebook. Apparently this was some kind of combined plan, or he was mistaken one.
Kongregate app pulled from Android Marketplace
I would suggest to post a descriptive link here?
Quote from your link:

"VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”

I believe this was written before the update that acknowledges that VP8 has a partial analogue for B-Frames (which aren't present in Baseline H.264).

Another quote:

"The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264"

I guess it's arguable what he actually means because he's not explicit but I read both quotes together (and indeed the whole piece) as saying the VP8 spec is better than the H.264 Baseline spec. Whether that translates in the actual encoders, depends mostly on the particular H.264 encoder.
There's a big demo button on the top. Or you take the short way: http://pivot.apache.org/demos/
U.S. Officials Reportedly Said WikiLeaks Revelations Were ‘No Damaging’
Warning. NSFW.

http://www.incognitoblog.com/

As you might imagine, it's got nakedness.

Edit: Clarified. Not really _spam_.
Wow, that's interesting.
The example of going directly to a particular line is not a good one, IMHO.

I find myselft often doing stuff that I know that my editor can do faster. Scrolling is one, but there are other examples. This not only doesn't interrupt my train of though, but it also works as "time to think".
Programming is like sex: one mistake and you’re providing support for a lifetime
Programming is like sex: one mistake and you’re providing support for a lifetime
That's a great article, thanks for posting.
Facebook Releases Mobile App for Feature Phones
It seems the market is willing to put up with it... so not a scam.
"But work on something bigger - something you believe in - which gives you a big-picture outlook"

What is this "something bigger" and how is it any better than the goal of "living a nice, comfortable, intellectually-satisfying life"?
Betting against high-selling low-margin products would be like betting against Wal-Mart. You can co-exist with them but you can't beat them at their own game, and their game is around to stay.
I’ve just had a look around the providers in the UK - the most basic talk plans include at least 100 txts a month, but go one step up and you generally get unlimited. As for MMS, everyone I know just uploads photos to Facebook instead.

Email just doesn’t fit a usecase for my friends for the most part (and I’m talking as a 30-something, not a teenager). For short messages there’s a txt, for short broadcast and medium messages there’s Facebook and for long messages generally you ring. There’s obviously still a use for email in the workplace, but it’s confined to there.
Not necessarily. If you have a popular website you can put all your images and big content on S3 and just include the URLs in your HTML. It'll magically automatically scale then.
On Using Debuggers
Note that legally (at least currently) you can't watch the live streams on iPlayer without a TV licence. Watching them later, or downloading them is fine.

http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/...
I don’t really understand how that makes it a scam.
I live in a latin american country
THere is a fee for local calling (based on time only) and a fee for sending SMS (based on # of messages), and in the regular (only?) phone plan (which is about $8/mo I think) there are enough minutes/messages included in the plan that I never see more then a dollar or two in extra fees.

There's the blackberry plan on top of that (going away soon when my new iPhone arrives, yay) - but htat doesn't change SMS or Calling preferences - just adds unlimited data and the usual blackberry services.

Teh reason SMS & Data are different, historically, is because they are different. SMS was a way to cram a message in a single GSM packet. Very low-cost for the network to send. This was prior to data plans being available. No sustained network protocol for the end user -that's why there's a small character limit - it had to fit in a single packet. Providers globally reap huge profits on SMS, because actually sending SMS cost them nothing additional.

Data, OTOH, ends up costing them actual real bandwidth and resources
When first stars appeared they were made out of hydrogen. It seems that you have to wait for second or third generation stars (formed from rests of previous defunct stars) in order to have heavy elements that would form planets and allow life.

We could be the first, or one of the first civilizations in the galaxy. Trouble with the equation is that it does make nobody happy. As we are knowing better some factors (like how many stars have planets) it seems that life should be everywhere.

But it's enough that one the still unknown unknowns is worse than we think, to make the density as low as a few dozen civilizations in the galaxy. That's too far for us to communicate in a 10.000 years scale.

BTW, I find this 10.000 number is cruft from cold war era. Some people love the extintion idea, not sure why.
CloudTalk Raises $5.2 Million For Social Communications Tool
People find ways around it, for example for a while Flash didn't respect incognito so ad networks just used their cookies instead (I think at one point html5 storage was being used too, but could be wrong).

There's been various HN posts about how people circumvent browser privacy settings to track you across websites and even tricks such as generating an almost unique key by hashing together browser, fonts installed, IP address, etc.. I'm not sure of the current state of play in that war though.

I guess if you really don't want people to track private searches with your accounts, use a whole other browser where you're not logged into Google in incognito mode.
I just got a Nokia N8.

Installed Opera Mobile 10.1 immediately last night.

Still, i cannot find any menu which allows me to access it.

Not kidding you.

But best built piece of cellular hardware i've had since the 80s. The camera sensor is better than most compacts, and how on earth do they make speakers in this thing which shame laptops? (only took an hour to find out how to launch the FM radio . . )

Yours,

darned confused why i cannot even find a proper menu on my N8 . . .

- j
Because it's easier than adding value.
AT&T iPad Hack Legal Complaint v. JacksonBrown and weev [pdf]
Put me in the 'automate the crap out of it' category, too.

We had a sysadmin that spent most of his time on 2 tasks, 1 was an internal maintenance task, and the other was email.

When he quit, those tasks fell to me, the sole programmer at the time. THe internal maintenance task, I did it for about a week before I decided that it needed to go away. So I wrote scripts and an interface for it, tested it for a while, and turned it over to customer service, which was the department that was requesting it anyhow. They were ecstatic because it meant they no longer had to request it and wait... They could just do it instantly. Much better for everyone.

The email was easier. We just moved to Google Apps.

The remaining tasks that the sysadmin did were now just a tiny fraction of my time.

As the company grew, those tasks increased until management realized they needed an actual sysadmin again, and they hired one.
Betting that learning an app development framework plus Mandarin to sell apps on $35 phones probably isn't the best strategy for developers is more reasonable though.
Trivia:

She got trolled hard on Sina Weibo, too. In the picture of the OP's article, she presents of Chinese/Kanji text calligraphy requested by her fans on Sina Weibo. But,

1. The thrid item on the second column (from right to left) means "Japanese people", but also implies "fuck yourself"

2. The last item on the second column (RTL) 达菲鸡[1] is Internet homonym for masturbation.

3. The 3rd item on the 4th column (RTL) is Internet metaphor for "long enough fucking creats feelings", the original meaning is "Staying together long enough creats feelings"

4. And the last item on the last column (RTL) is popular satire for Mao Zedong's grandson's famous terrible handwriting[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures#Da_...

[2]: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en_US&query=%E4%B8%80%E5...
Makes sense. But there's a difference between staying and growing, especially in financial terms. It's the reason Nokia's shares have dropped 70% in 3 years.
I have a Presonus Firebox audio interface, take a look at the headphone volume scale. I suspect it's capable of destroying low impedance headphones at even lower settings.

http://www.presonus.com/products/detail.aspx?productid=4
Whilst on the subject of it being a scam, who can forget this little nugget of information... http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/05/12/1419204.shtml
I used to work on Symbian (C++ code) for a few years, and the fork and eye comment from nobody_nowhere sums up my experience. [ We did have quite a nice product, http://prosessiongolf.com/, but I guess it was too much too soon in terms of people spending money on applications for mobile phones. ]

More recently (last year) I wanted to test an app concept, and built it with PyS60, i.e. Python for S60. Working with that platform was really nice, very good for rapid testing, but getting the installer right for some beta testers around the world was already a pain -- wouldn't want even to try a full commercial release. Also the UI APIs are quite lacking. But still, really nice working in an environment where you have the Python console running on the phone, connected to your PC via Bluetooth for running commands directly.
Yes, perfectly.
Try listening to Brendan Eich about what Mozilla is using Zaphod for, might give you some insight.

Using Zaphod to make Harmony available today: http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20110110

General overview of Narcissus and Zaphod: http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101011
And often, most important: Time to market.

A working solution in PHP today may may often be far more valueable than a perfect solution in Java next week, next month or next year.
Lightroom or Aperture?
Edison famously quipped : Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

What's not so famous is that this was during a live radio debate with Tesla. His response was

"If Mr. Edison thought a bit more, he wouldn't have to sweat so much."
It has ONLY nakedness.
Joyent Introduces Next Generation Cloud Operating System
Wait until the internet capabilities on smartphones get realised.

On a bus for 30 minutes? Use the phone to browse HN. etc
Facebook launches mobile app for non-smartphones
That is correct. If you watch or record live broadcasts in any media (ie, a laptop needs a licence as much as a tv) then you're required to pay the licence fee. But since there's so much historical UK tv we hadn't seen before, we have plenty of free catch up to look forward to!
Google Ventures backs LawPivot, a legal Q&A service for startups
Actually, sensationalist theories aside, I typed in a headline on an iPad long after copying the URL to clipboard in a different app. The omission of the original author's weasel word was unintentional.

No, I do not know that in that context it meant "stolen". That's not the conventional meaning.

I stand by the assertion that compromised means compromised, and that information in that article makes it clear all accounts were compromised (had their security breached), while unknown which individual accounts were stolen.
I think this is a really cool idea but I also think it is horribly awkward to take out your phone and scan a QR code printed on a receipt. I imagine myself standing in a line at starbucks at 8:45am with 20 people behind me and there I am pulling out my cellphone trying to snap a QR code pissing everyone else off who just wants to get coffee and get to work. I just do not believe the mainstream user is ready for that (or QR codes in general). Find a better way to record the purchase and you'll win users like me, until then I will keep using the card in my wallet.
The article doesn't consider India where Nokia is the dominant player. But most of the phones they sell here are low-end to mid-range. They aren't that popular for smartphones. I don't have any statistics to show for this just my experiences.
Broken - Cracked Screen Repair and Replacement Services - Ireland
Our laptop Screen Repair Service include LCD screen crack, LCD is missing lines. We offer jack repair and motherboard repair also.
The difference there is that software isn't sold, it's licensed. Hardware on the other hand is a physical object which is bought.
Not If You Hurry - some musing on logic, language and programming.
Music for Shuffle features music designed for the iPod shuffle
47 New APIs: Quora, MapQuest and Google
Discovery provides new drug targets for malaria cure
The future of social networks?
SMS is cheaper considering the battery of your mobile phone. Receiving SMS on a regular GSM-phone does not add much to the power drain. Compare that with an open TCP-Connection to receive emails (or XMPP-messages). Or worse with polling for email.

And you can reach about anyone with a cell phone with SMS. Most people to not read all their email on the go.
I eventually cancelled my lovefilm account when I moved out of london, and I had been on a waitlist for up to a year on some items. Recently I've been thinking of signing up for their online service and this backing by Amazon may have just convinced me.
That's something bigger. And if having to (e.g.) constantly code HTML in IE6 interferes with that goal... you need to stop constantly coding HTML in IE6.

The underlying fallacy of the original essay is that the life of a programmer consists of a semi-infinite series of programming tasks that only stop when you die. Well, yeah, if you think like an assembly-line worker this is true, but you need not do so. In real-world projects, you do have to deal with HTML, but you don't have to do so to an infinite extent. You only have to write enough HTML to make all the web pages you need to fuel the rest of your comfortable, intellectually-satisfying life. (For some, this is "near zero": PG wrote all the HTML for this site five years ago, probably in less than two hours, and it's working out just fine.)

HN has been over this many times. If you don't enjoy ritual grunt work, get out of the piecework business and solve a problem. [1] Nobody really knows how much work, say, the folks behind the scenes at 37signals do. We don't pay them by the hour, or by the line of code. We pay them for their product. If they can produce the product in half the time, they get the other half of the time to invest in other things. They don't have to spend that extra time programming in systems they hate.

---

[1] This ties into my Programmer Aging Hypothesis: Old "programmers" are hard to find not because their brains wither and die, or whatever, but because most of them have learned enough to brand their work as something other than "programming".
Yeah.

If nagios were written in ruby/python/javascript I'd be a lot less miserable right now.

I demand executable, object oriented configuration files! It is my basic right as part of the pursuit of human happiness, as the OP has now shown conclusively.
Android phones are getting pretty cheap, too.
Fast and Free Facebook Mobile Access with 0.Facebook.com
No. But they can go after every patent is raised against them.

This is the primary reason patents are mostly talk -- sure, MS can claim that Linux infringes a hundred of their patents. It probably infringes some of those, and some of the ones it infringes are probably even valid. But actually testing it in court would put the patent portfolio at risk -- and at least for now, they have valued not putting their patents at risk more than they have valued attacking their competitors.
Really interesting! On a constructive note: The font on your website is weird on Windows/Chrome.

I really see myself using that.. the big problem right now is that no business use it where I live.
Year 2 of a startup is a whole different ball game
HTML5 Gets Logo, Zillions Of Hilarious Parodies
With Jawbone Era, your cellphone headset becomes a motion-sensitive computer
Super awesome engineer needed at Metabroadcast
What you pay per megabyte for an SMS is ludicrous.
This is the standard flash video player used across the BBC, most notably on the iPlayer but also as seen here on the news site.

It has always gone up to 11, ever since the flash version of the iplayer first started its beta. It makes me smile that they have still managed to keep it, this many meetings later :)

This is the kind of 'eccentric' stuff that british people self-consciously obsess over though. As a nation we think it makes us 'interesting.' I imagine if they did change it so it only went to 10, they would be inundated with more letters of complaint than they could open, both ironic and terrifyingly serious.
Very much agreed. The real trouble is, the automate-everything mentality is unfortunately very rare due to the simple fact that if successful, you've just made your own job unnecessary. I actually want to work my way out of a job, but most people are far more concerned with keeping their job security.
I've gotten into a habit of summarizing my work after a programming binge, and lately I've been modifying the way that I write comments (using different symbols to indicate different things) to facilitate automated documentation generation for my code. It's saved a ton of time.
Yeah. I hate cellular pricing as much as the next guy, but it's really just whatever the operators feel/have data will bring in business × whatever they feel/have data the market will bear. Comparing per-byte transmission costs makes about as much sense as comparing per-calorie cost of a cheap fast-food place with that of an upscale restaurant.

As an aside, one of the big three Canadian operators just announced text messages not covered by a plan will soon cost 20 cents. They charge for both incoming and outgoing.
Please dont forget to mention that an official review will be ordered in order to satisfy the regulators that the transition from 11 to 10 will not affect civil liberties.
iPlayer is just the bbc's name for their flash-delivered streaming video service. It's not a technology itself.

Just try and imagine a great big socialist hulu, but without the syndication part.
Yes and no. what that means is that you don't have SMS, you have email only and that is indeed packet-data.

SMS is basically a hack which lets us transmit non-control data over the GSM control-channel, normally used top setup calls, channels and specific time-frames required for calling to work.

This means that SMS has second priority and is treated as a when-available transport.

In conclusion SMS is different and charging differently for it follows naturally.
M28sx: un worm per Twitter
Questo worm utilizza dei link brevi di tipo goo.gl e reindirizza ad una pagina html che si chiama m28swx (m28sx.html).

Un certo numero di utenti dicono di aver ricevuto messaggi di spam da amici che hanno incluso un link al sito web utilizzando il servizio goo.gl di "URL shortening" di Google. Controllando il link "maligno" si rivela che conduce a un URL che termina indirizzando la pagina 'm28sx.html'.
Mi raccomando è assolutamente necessario che nessuno clicchi sul link.
Sure, but how does that make it a scam?

Prices for text messages are well known and there are plenty alternatives available. I’m quite happy that those who frequently write text messages subsidize me. (Competition between carriers is relatively brutal – at least in Germany – so I’m pretty sure that I’m not overcharged.)

Were SMS to use email I would see a pretty clear net neutrality problem (still no scam) but if you are using GSM, text messages are technologically very much unlike email.