skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(I am not on the App Engine team, but researched it recently to give a talk about it)

If the request is going through a static handler (as declared in app.yaml), then the request won't go to the Apps frontend servers at all, it will go to the static file servers. So, no, the app unloading shouldn't be relevant for static files.

I made this diagram for a recent talk that somewhat shows that: http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/writing-apps-the-googley-...

EDIT: It looks like DryDrop may actually use script handlers, not static handlers, in the app.yaml, so app unloading would apply.
It does have speed dial, so you could put in the most frequently-used numbers.
Agreed in general. But: this form asks for your email address, if you post from your corporate IP the company is known, if you add in all the rest of the data then the company might identifiable as well, if you have posted stuff in fora from your email account and tied it in to your corporate identity then that can be put together. After all, how many companies with between 'x' and 'y' employers in such and such an area making profit with a market cap of 'z' have active members on HN.

You're not nearly as anonymous as you think you are and this is very juicy data.

On the whole transparency is a good thing but this is probably not the best way to go about achieving it.
Probably because they have the Apple Store app for the iPad.

However, the Apple Store app does not have all the configuration options for hardware that you get on the real site, as one example.
This information would be valuable. Unfortunately, getting such information reliably is incredibly difficult.

If life has taught me nothing else it's that people lie about their incomes even anonymously. Plus you have a selection bias to deal with anyway.

Oh and email validation is pretty meaningless.
A lot of university hiring offices collect this level of stats (although in less useful form) from recent graduates, and often republish.

Post from home, use a throwaway email address or at least a gmail-type address vs. @palantir.net work address, is probably enough. The most personally detrimental leak would probably be "I work for Yahoo and am currently interviewing with Google and Facebook" vs. that Google and Facebook extended specific offers, and in that case, you're already trusting the HR departments, recruiters, etc.
For 4 rounded corners you probably need to download 4 images. Thats 4 extra connections to the server to connect to, download, process.

It isn't the processor time that is taking longer its the transfer time.
This is yet another post on text entry system targeted to (area) limited devices. Rather than posting it as a comment on an old thread I decided to make it into a standalone post.

The video is long, but I did not regret watching it. Here David Mackay, an information theorist, explains how one may input text through space limited devices. If only I could explain theoretical concepts as lucidly and as well as he does.

What interests me is that, Dasher, when adequately augmented, is even more appropriate for inputting programming text than say English. Though English has been modeled by (stochastic) context free grammars, its only an approximation. Whereas programming languages, fit it to a 't'. Mackay mentions that English has an entropy of around 1 bit per letter and that a finger is usually capable of generating 14 bits per second. Source code, I believe, has significantly less entropy than English (this depends on the language of course).

I think lisp is a good language to target because the actual layout of the source code does not matter and can be automated. Also because it is such a thin layer above the AST and hence an ideal match for simple context free grammars. It is also advantageous that the first token of an s-expression has an overwhelming possibility of being drawn from a set of few key possibilities. Making the language's bit rate low.

There are several extensions that are possible. For instance given a code base, learn the coding style and adapt the model to it (including the style of generating identifier names). For new code bases, one may learn the model on the fly.

Finally, I like his analogy. Writing as an activity has had two dominant forms, (i) pushing buttons (ii) scribbling. Dasher is writing by navigating/driving efficiently through a library of all possible text. Depending on the style of your intended text one may re-arrange that library.

The only drawback I see is that it requires your attention, unlike say typing. But that might after all be a good thing.

Its released under GPL and available for free on iPhone as well http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/MobileDasher.html
You're on Hacker News complaining about people talking about tinkering (hacking) devices?

Yeh, people are gonna complain here - we're the people who like to break stuff open.
It's not so much the length as the sound. I'm profoundly deaf and can't really understand video.
SoundCloud’s frothy US entry
I create images because the inclusion of Paintbrush then MS Paint in Windows gave me access to the enjoyment and skill building to do so when I was growing up.
I wasn't excited about this until I realized it could be used to render a webpage to an image with a headless browser. I'm pretty happy about that.

Edit: The code for that is on http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/wiki/QuickStart
[deleted] wrong thread
If the operator of Ackwire used this data in sufficiently malicious ways, I think there would be potential civil liability (at least enough to bring a credible suit; maybe not to win).

I wouldn't trust a random person with this data, but I'd trust a member of a somewhat-meritocratic community like hackernews or quora, university alumni association, etc. It's fairly clear why this data is being collected, what is being done with it, and my potential downside risk is fairly capped. At some point, being overly paranoid is too much of a cost.

Yes, a technical solution to this class of problem would be preferable to social trust. (and is one of the things I'm working on, actually...)
12 Hours of free Azure training videos
Some of the points are only valid if your revenue model is a paid app. How about a free app + paid service?
I've a friend whose company released a decent quality branded App on the Market recently. It was backed by a good amount of advertising/marketing and was pitched at the correct demographic.

The total number of paid week one sales?

68
Novel design, although not something entirely new. Swedish telephony equipment manufacturer Doro has for several years had a number of "senior citizen" cellphones on the market in the same geist as John's Phone, some of them even simpler. A few models even include an assault alarm.

This model's design is interesting in how clearly it speaks about what demography it's aimed at: http://www.doro.co.uk/products/Mobile-phones-and-accessories...
I use GAE + Github for several of my tiny websites. I don't use DryDrop as I hadn't heard of it, and I like being able to control the app.yaml myself (particularly useful for when I have a sudden urge to port static sites over to Django, which happens surprisingly often). Also, it looks like DryDrop may actually use script handlers instead of static file handlers, which wouldn't be as performant for my simple stuff.

The trickiest part of using GAE for static files is setting up the app.yaml, since it's different from just FTPing files and having them show up on your server. Here's an example app.yaml for a completely static site, where the root redirects to index.html, and the rest is mapped to a static directory (with nested directories in it):
https://gist.github.com/774838
thanks, there's nothing too unexpected here.
Oh ! dont worry about that link, I guess the researchers let it expire and someone else grabbed it. This link would have more details http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

One can try it in one's browser here http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/TryJavaDasherNow.h... but looking at the video/demo helped in understanding what is going on. In fact I was surprised to find that it's actually easier to use than what it looked like in the demo.
If I were creating the service, I'd want the email or some other "is an actual credible person" credential, but wouldn't store it afterward. Referrer being hackernews might actually be sufficient to not require email.

The best credential would be something like "is a member of FB or LinkedIn with a sufficiently filled in profile" but nothing personally identifying.

For the traditional version of this (alumni association stats), you have a trusted third party (the association), or restricting access to people on 18.0.0.0/8 or who have kerberos credentials, although logging anything personally identifying.
> you have a public repo, you don't want to pay for CNAME support on GitHub and you are obsessed with the idea of running your site on GAE :-)

You don't need to pay anything for CNAME support now. It was not true previously but now only "obsessed with the idea of running your site on GAE" reason remains.
If I may, I would like to ask another question. Why a Rails CMS? Shouldn't the question be; whats the best CMS? If I needed a CMS, I wouldn't limit myself to something built on Rails. Sure, you may need to extend that CMS and you want not want to do anything in PHP, but you should be able to do small modifications easy enough. If you need anything big modifications, then perhaps you would be better off building something from scratch.

Also consider the goals of a CMS vs your own goals as a developer. A CMS needs to be flexible for non developers to handle a wide range of tasks. Your own system only needs to handle the basics but be easily extendable (something which Rails should largely bring by itself.) In other words, Rails is already a very basic CMS.

Otherwise, I can't answer the question of "what's the best CMS" in general because different systems are better for different needs. I imagine the Ruby / Rails options are the same. You would likely be better off trying each of those that catch your eye and making a decision from there.
I could talk for hours on this. Some things which amused even a jaded SEO:

1) Rebill scams. (Theft, basically.)

2) As a reward for winning this trivia quiz, here is a one month free subscription to $OFFER.

3) Review site: stars awarded based solely on affiliate commission.

4) Brand arbitrage. Many ways to do it. The easiest is "$BRAND is a scam. Don't buy until you read this!"
An extension of this which would be even more socially beneficial would be "graduate of x degree program and y university job offer stats"; ideally with some kind of actually trusted third party going over legitimate offer letters.

This data could be blinded at the level of industry or role (and thus not commercially sensitive to any employer), and then published to prospective students; knowing that Bentley College majors in Communications are offered $20-40k while Stanford CS graduates are offered $70-140k would be exceptionally useful to everyone, much more so than the 5-year graduation rates which I think universities taking certain federal financial aid programs are required to disclose.
Developing with the Force.com platform - ROI Calculator
I am almost deaf, but only on one side. I was about to suggest the recent discussion on deafness on HN, then I realized you have commented there. I really loved that thread. Thanks for commenting on it. I realized that it is so much better to be upfront about the difficulty especially when meeting someone new. For some reason that had not occurred to me before.

I tried to find a closed caption version of the video. But it appears that google has not enabled auto closed captioning on all of its channels. Apparently they are rolling that feature in gradually. So maybe sometime in the future the video will have closed captions.

http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/2006/09/finally-caption-play....
I posted the same thing yesterday, but it went nowhere. I guess I should have included the word "FREE!" in the title.

Anyway, here it is. As the blog post explains [1], I created a small Flask app that will let you host multiple static sites/domains on one GAE instance without having to learn Git or push to Github or anything. Just download the app [2], put the static files and media in the appropriate directories, configure the URLs and deploy.

[1] http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/easily-host-multiple-...

[2] https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static-appengine-...
I wish android did this.
Another interesting introduction I can recommend was written by a friend of mine. It focuses more on the semantic differences to other languages (e.g. prototype based inheritance) as to the syntax:

Javascript for people who are in a hurry:

http://kaijaeger.com/javascript-for-people-who-are-in-a-hurr...

Javascript for people who are in slightly less of a a hurry:

http://kaijaeger.com/articles/javascript-for-people-who-are-...
If piracy is as big a problem on Android as the article claims, the free client/paid subscription model is probably the most viable way to generate revenue. However, Android is not proprietary software-friendly - It's INSANELY easy to decompile APK archives and reverse engineer content.
While I agree on principle, Amazon is also a giant merchant who should know a thing or two about payments, and their Amazon Flexible Payment System is a horrible beast to work with.

Sometimes the "massive online store" domain knowledge doesn't seem to transfer over to the AWS team.
Please file this embedded graphics issue in https://bugs.freedesktop.org//enter_bug.cgi -> LibreOffice with an example attachment of your document (e.g. the logo).

Even better, save as PDF on MS Office as it looks, and a save as PDF as it looks to you, while you describe the difference. It is very hard to find the compatibility mismatches otherwise -- especially the ones you need: it would be nice to have documents to test the correct rendering.
It's good for old people and aggressive people that frequently like to throw their phones away, because they are cheap. Nobody else will buy it just because its got a "minimalist design".

The iPhone has only one button.. seems even more minimalist.
Apologies for answering in this fashion:

After looking into this earlier, I came to the conclusion that the best for my purposes was Wordpress. Clever use of Nginx configs let's it pretend that it is really on the Rails site, and you can use XMLRPC to transfer data if you need it.

Why? Well, basically, the WP ecosystem is ridiculously superior to that of Rails CMSes, and as much as I love writing Rails I would prefer to just drop in a prebuilt plugin rather than writing code that people don't pay money for.
Ask HN: Where can I improve my graphic design skills?
All the logos and designs I'm able to produce look like they're from 2007, are heavily gradiented, and lack subtlety. I would like to be able to make more modern logos and designs. Are there any good websites or books for learning how to design elegant graphics and landing pages? I'm working in Photoshop CS5 by the way.
I'll reword it for you. Well have a Special class. We'll pay an instructor to come in and give our devs a half day course on How not to Violate the GPL. GPL is another bureaucratic hoop to jump through, just like race and gender discrimination classes. Cost of doing business.
It appears to have a paper phone book in the back behind a flap .. awesome.
What comes after 11nm?
I always wanted something like the old Nokia 7280 for a second (small) phone for times when I don't want to carry my expensive smartphone but I could never get myself to buy a second phone...

http://www.livingroom.org.au/cameraphone/images/thumbnails/1...
"Neither markup nor JS have particularly strong OO characteristics and both are hugely succesful without those OO characteristics."

This is where I stopped reading...
Field Trip - Johnny Cupcakes and more
I think you're not being paranoid enough. The "HN member" in question has a karma of 18 (yes, karma does count), and I don't recognise his username.

The questions you need to ask yourself is:

1) is there any potential downside whatsoever to submitting my data here? If this data is on the front page of the new york times tomorrow, and everyone I know knows it, do I stand to lose anything because of it?

2) is there any real upside to submitting my data here? (seeing other people's data has obvious upsides)

Unless 2 is clearly bigger than 1, submitting your salary info here is an irrational decision.
And no SMS.. :( Would have definitely considered if it had SMS...
The dark glossy nav-bar gives me a Flash site template vibe.
Lua strikes a very sweet balance, almost to its own detriment: you have an Schemish language, with huge user-base, at 100k. OTOH, since Lua is always an option, people put off using it until "necessary", and start their apps in cruft like C and C++.

The ease of embedding is not a matter of sice; both Python and Tcl are trivial to embed, almost as much as Lua. But they come with relatively larger footprint, and the quality of the languages themselves are not up to par (i.e. not "Schemish" enough)

This is ALL subjective anyway; by quality I mean what would please me personally. I already code in my ideal language.
I would write a program/ build a device that will solve the problem...

Wait a second...

oh S#!T...

I would first check how much my life insurance will cover for """accidental""" death...
Although I won't buy that phone, I would be interested in a solid, beautifully designed phone that simple focuses on being a phone and doing that really really well.

Think Vertu, but not crap and designed by someone with actual taste and not stupidly priced and...OK, so perhaps not Vertu.
I've seen them, and they are very annoying. Not having an address book is annoying, and not being able to receive text messages is just frustrating. It's an awesome idea, but not for use in real life.
ever thought about a Ltd?
Actually, I mixed up the submitter and the creator (892 vs. 18); I agree I'd trust someone I recognized as a member of the community more than others, but I still think hn-member alone is worth something. So, I don't disagree with you.
Build real things, with real tools, using materials like wood and metal.
It's not that cheap actually, compared to other 'cheap' cell phones. Typically those are around 40 euros, this one is twice that.
I want one but I live in Japan.

I swear, i never thought it would come tothat. Dunno why it won't work if my iPhone works :/
This is a very good idea executed poorly. SMS has become a way of life and you'll be receiving messages that you can not read, also a paper phonebook requires that you carry a pen with you.

Play it again, John, this time with a pager sized (text) display and I'll buy one.

edit: added the (text), it does have a display but can't display text messages.
No problem -- I didn't realize that was you!

Definitely update us at some point with your progress; I'm always interested in hearing how people have surpassed it and led successful lives.
Perhaps not for use in your life. I'm not a smartphone user and don't do text messages. I really like the idea of this phone because it strips away all the crap that I don't need.

Granted, if I did have a smartphone, or was a "power user" of my current phone, then perhaps I'd feel the same way as you do.
Having played with the SES api they're just not the same thing. Sure ultimately they deliver email but the functionality you get from an app like SendGrid is far higher. SES might make sense for some transactional emails but for anything marketing I don't think I'll be moving away from SendGrid/MailChimp.
The article was not as good as I expected. There are arguments for achievement-like things in VS, for example unit test coverage. This article was aimless and negative.
Hi, a good resource can be found on http://psd.tutsplus.com/ but you need to practice practice and more practice, and by the way logos are usually created in a vector program like Adobe Illustrator in order for them to be 'print ready'
Who knows where Saint Helena is?
We'll talk about how useful that is when you're in a non-ideal lighting condition trying to find a phone number and typing it in on the front.

I used to remember pretty much all the phone numbers of all my relatives and people I'm in contact with, even the international ones but with the coming of cell phones something else has happened: people switch phone numbers far more frequently today than they did in the past and the ability to re-program the phone but keep the mnemonic the same is actually far more useful than a piece of paper.
It did not get a very good review from Engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/06/johns-phone-review-the-wo...
That's what asset versioning is for. I can't believe they don't concatenate their assets. Even their versioned PNG files use Etags... With proper caching and other optimizations they could probably get their site load times down to maybe 300ms (almost instantly) instead of 1.8s and at the same time fix such caching problems.
Someone finally found a fix for Chrome's anti-aliasing issues with text-shadow
i use this one ProFont
http://werf.ru/comment?id=129
I'm part of the WebOS dev community and its small but growing. I've sat on the fence for a while because I wasn't sure where Palm would be a year ago. And while I found the interface to be the best in the smartphone space (sorry iOS) the hardware it was deployed on was deplorable.

They are moving from Mojo (javascript based) to Enyo (C++ based) platform so quite a few developers are also waiting for the new SDK. Most of the apps that are currently written in Mojo will continue to work but I sense that most developers are in the same boat I am. No point in learning a framework that has one foot in the grave when the next one is right around the corner.
I think this is a good idea and has been executed pretty well, I don't think this is necessarily aimed at the HN crowd, but possibly at the HN crowd's grandparents.

I'm sure there are some pretty switched on grand parents out there, but I don't fancy the idea of sending my grandmother an SMS. I'd need to call her and no doubt visit her to explain the whole SMS thing.

I have a friend with a parent who is getting on in years, she described a device very similar to this "If only something like this existed" - I've just sent her the link, I imagine a purchase will follow soon after.
People often repeat that Eclipse is "unstable." I can use one Eclipse process for weeks, even months on-end with JVMs from Sun and IBM on Linux, and it never crashes or needs a restart (except if installing new plug-ins). The ADK tools don't have the polish of the core features, and I haven't used them as much as other tools, but what's causing instability?
I've done this twice now. I'm sure there was some important stuff in my "Archive all unread emails" click, but I sure as hell wasn't going to check.
In terms of simplicity and resistance nothing beats Nokia 3310 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3310), for me at least. I even threw it against a concrete wall once, it all dissembled into several pieces, but after I had re-assembled them back it was as new.
The old Slashdot design bothered me so much I proposed a minimalist layout last year: http://nylira.com/p/slashdot

Thoughts on this one:

Slashdot's homepage is much cleaner than before, but the thick green bars denoting each story is visually oppressive. I understand that it's a branding element, but it hampers readability.

The fixed navigation annoys me, but that's a personal preference: I don't think the menus are important enough to be constantly on-screen.

I see they still haven't added a max-width to text columns either. It's difficult reading comments on a 1440px+ screen.
Tooltips on the tab.
Chrome screws up text horribly in Windows when you use text-shadow. The text becomes thinner and harder to read. After a lot of searching I've found a guy who posted a fix that actually works. I tested it out on a layout I'm working on and it's like a godsend.
More expensive than a phone that can do more? Laughable pretentious rubbish.