skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The smart installer is like the .NET or Java runtime installers. It works in practice.

Preloading the framework in the firmware works even better though...
Psychology. Knowing how other people work is a fantastic multiplier, especially for entrepreneurs.
LivingSocial didn't skip server-side validation - they delayed it. Now they can identify cheaters who were suckered by false reports of a loophole. Doesn't look so dumb to me.
You might want to re-save that article's image, it's half a meg. You can get it to 10th the size with just saving it as JPG, at ~65% quality.
Just out of interest, all the people typing resume instead of resumé, is that because they can't type the accent, or is it actually pronounced resume?
Parts of Wildfire live on under the commercial ownership/guidance of Jive software:

http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp

There are quite a few interesting products over there.
That was the creepiest thing ever. I am glad they banned you.
"Gamification": A Growing Business to Invigorate Stale Websites
Ask HN: Please Review My Mobile Web App Development IDE - Basic/JavaScript
I'm looking for feedback on my new development tool. Many of you know a lot about the underlying technologies and will be able to spot ways we can make it better.

Here's how it works: The IDE has a drag and drop design screen for your widgets. It is integrated with a code editor. The code can be in JavaScript or a (large) subset of Visual Basic, which case it is translated to JavaScript.

It creates an HTML page which can be loaded and saved on iPhones, iPads and Android devices. The apps can be saved to the home screen and will run without any internet connection. Apps can be distributed without going through the App Store.

Underlying technologies are HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. The apps are optimized for WebKit.

All comments are welcome.

Here's the link:
http://www.nsbasic.com/blog/?p=187
New math theories reveal the nature of numbers
Some options to step out of the technology/science/engineering courses:

* A business course or two could be extremely useful depending on the course content -- you probably want to talk to a course counselor in the Business school about this.

* Take at least one art/design course. As a developer, I cannot tell you the number of times I've wished I understood design a little better. If nothing, understanding basic design principles will allow you to creatively contribute to a designer at some later date.

* Learn at least one new language. You haven't mentioned which country you're from (your profile doesn't say much), but Spanish is a good choice in the US. Personally, I wish I learnt German (I'm Indian and I find German a lot similar to Hindi and other Sanskrit-derived languages).

* Take a course that furthers your hobby: Photography, Art, Snowboarding, Archery and what have you.

* Take a course in the biology department. Preferably one that tells you more about the human body -- yourself. At the very least, you should be able to read your doctor's professional diagnoses or reports and understand what they mean. Know proximal vs distal, dorsal vs ventral and so on.

I'm sure there's more. I haven't had enough coffee to think right now though.
#1 – Ignorance Is Bliss..fully Productive

No, this gets you fired. At a startup, this gets you bad PR or worse, your servers burn in a fiery death as they get Slashdotted to heck and back while you "work on something important."

#2 – It’s Not Your Todo List

Actually, it is. I use Outlook's task pane to mark things for follow up. Without it, I'd forget a lot of things.

#3 – It’s An Excuse To Lack Direction

If you get enough email that this buys you enough time to get so distracted you can't work, then you need a better spam filter, or a more private email address. There is no reason you need to be on the front lines all the time. Intelligent filtering can help.

#4 – Reaction vs “Proaction”

Sometimes you need to react, because you didn't pro-act.

#5 – Searching For Excuses

If the excuse is good enough to stop working, perhaps you need better work.

#6 – There’s No Set Time Limit

So? Communication is more important than most menial tasks. Its the basis by which things get designed, built, and maintained. Don't underestimate the power of communication as a tool. Don't try to avoid it.

#7 – It Builds Expectation

I don't always respond to people immediately, but I do like to think before I reply. Sometimes I'll go off and draft have a reply, save it, and come back to it. If its out of "working hours", I can leave it be til the next work day. Otherwise, I top out at a couple of hours for latency. Why? Because I want that expectation; to foster good team relationships and dependability.
Well, the difference between sold iPhones and other iOS devices clearly is “statistically significant” and a 51 to 49 majority in the Senate is also “statistically significant” (but the term does not make any sense if applied to Senate majorities). So yeah, most it is.
It's because they can't type the accent.
I hope so too... I know that when I'm busy working on client projects, my homegrown stuff doesn't get the attention it needs. I know that for me, a revenue stream would ensure that one public-facing free project I run would get a lot more love.
This is the equivalent of patenting the concept of product endorsements - i.e. if Wheaties had a patent on celebrities endorsing cereal. It seems that this patent would infringe on the freedom of the "celebrity" to choose how they want to connect with their fans.
>I think you're overestimating the patience of the average web user

I know a lot of semiprofessional musicians who would be the target audience for this kind of thing, and while they are creative, technical people who operate complex software and hardware to create their art, they are largely NOT of the same obsessively inquiring mindset we know and love here.

Creating music requires and encourages a different attitude to technology than programming. Lacking a full, deep understanding of your tools is almost a bonus a lot of the time. In fact it is necessary to prevent yourself from going too deep into each tool, if you want to successfully create any art. Music is all about results. There are no 'best practices' in art. This is why I keep failing at learning music production, I focus too much on trying to understand what I'm doing and never manage to create any actual music.

Understanding this fundamentally alien (to hackers) relationship to complex technology is IMO of paramount importance when marketing tools to musicians. They are already having to struggle to understand so many things, and the successful ones have learned to only dig as deep as they need to in order to realise their visions. Therefore you should be careful when offering them such complex tools, they may not use them the way you expect.

They are used to hammering their tools with unexpected inputs and combinations of inputs, until they get out something they like, and then they run with it, with no care whether they are doing it 'right' or not. If it sounds right, then it's right.

Understanding this mindset is key to making products for musicians.

(Disclaimer: This may not apply to other musicians, especially those making 'proper' music. YMMV)
Tim, you need a beautiful landing page with lots of graphics and info. Don't fight against that golden rule. Even if you like simplicity and functionality, leave that for the app once you sign up.

Kudos!
So I hope you understand when I take exception to you suggesting that we didn't take on enough responsibility.

Where did you take on responsibility? You went in to a situation where responsibility was required and when even the slightest hint of responsibility was necessary you said "I am not responsible, I am not even an adult". When you were clearly responsible and clearly an adult. Helping other is admirable. Flipping out and disclaiming responsibility at the slightest hint of trouble not so much.
Definitely take Econometrics if you can talk your way around the pre-reqs. It will teach you how to actually apply what you learn in stats 101.
Writing! Programmers need to be able to make themselves understood by other humans. You need grammar, style, structure, and lots and lots of practice. If you confess to your advisor or an English faculty member that you're not terribly interested in literature, but you want to do what it takes to become an effective non-fiction writer and communicator, they can probably point you in the right direction.

(And if your school should happen to offer a rhetoric class, take it/them.)
FTA: "It saves me over and over again when dealing with code I don't understand. Not having it would be terrible."

Perhaps that is the problem. What are you doing working with, using, or writing code that you don't understand

To me this is a bit like the folks who randomly change their loop conditions until they get the desired behavior. Sure it works correctly now, but they have no idea why their changes made it that way.
What happened to the 11 employees of Microsoft in the 1978 photo
This article misses the point entirely. LivingSocial just acquired a shit-ton of users for $10 each. Period. That's an extremely low acquisition cost for a lifetime user value of $50 or more. They now have more than a million credit cards and email addresses that they didn't have before.

http://www.lifeinbeta.org/2011/01/why-living-social-can-sell...
PDFZilla Time-limited Giveaway (PDF documents to editable formats converter)
I would use this, most definitely. Sign me up. I don't think Google or Mozilla would do it.

I think an interesting option would be to have a "what you can know about me" table in the browser that you could fill out. Location, interests, etc. -Your web experience is customizable, but on your terms.
I agree it may not be very clear, but as far as I know every carrier allows you to block all incoming and outgoing messages. Most people just don't actually want that.
- The trend is against Nokia when it comes to US tech-blogs and web sites or US analysts.

- Nokia's margins vary depending on the model. I would expect margins on the N8 to be entirely different from margins on 5230 and both of them are smart phones.

- Nokia has been making smart phones since before Android or iPhone were invented, their relevance is in communication technology.

- iPhone is the king here. I've heard of success stories both from Android and Ovi.

Horses vs cars has nothing to do with iPhone/Android vs Nokia. Nokia high-end devices might not have the nice iPhone UX/UI, but they compete more than adequately on other features. And that's just Symbian, the OS that is "supposedly" dying. I'm curious to see what happens when/if MeeGo is done.
This is an odd request for Hacker News. Everyone here knows that the liberal arts are stupid. Focus. If you have time to take courses outside of the CS department you should be using that time to write unit tests for your homework assignments or think about how you can work in SEO optimization strategies into next semester.
Definitely. This is the only reason I won't use GV as my primary number. I don't call often, but when I do, I expect it to work.

(However, after reading some of these comments and using my noggin, I'm not sure I'd trust something as critical as my phone to a company who's notorious for no customer service.)
It might be a good name in the UK, but almost everytime I tell someone here in Germany about lovefilm, the first thing I get asked is "So, it's a porn rental thing?"
I think a lot depends on the teacher. If there is a really good teacher which challenges their students then any course can be a great learning experience (even beyond the material covered). Obviously, it will always be different between schools. If I were you, I'd ask fellow students to see if anyone has taken a truly interesting/challenging course.

I took a Negotiations course my senior year of college and it was easily my favorite class of all time. There was a lot of roleplaying and class debate, but the teacher played Devil's Advocate and poked holes in everyone's arguments. He truly required us to think creatively and analyze a situation thoroughly before speaking/writing, or else he'd rip us apart. It was a breath of fresh air after many other classes were purely focused on learning concepts, rather than applying them creatively.
Its a tool, like a yellow hammer; useful when you need it.

Since I write time-dependent C++ code I must test/debug the 'release' build. The debuggers universally screw up almost everything related to dynamic symbols (locals, parameters), so I have to read the assembler anyway to figure out what's where.

Naturally this makes it much quicker to use prints (logs actually) than struggle in the debugger.
Japanese people need to do a bit more to show it then. Anything to heal the wounds, really.
I don't think this is true anymore.
Just check out http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-n...

There's an unofficial Qt android port too.
http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/
It's a fun post, but "per byte" is a funny way to calculate the costs on a system that cost billions to deploy.
Cutlery and meat have nothing to do with debugging.
A great programmer writes Lisp programs to generate code in the languages he doesn't like but is forced to use :-)
There's a vitally important lesson in this for all startups - pricing is about value, not cost.

It might cost a billionth of a cent for a network to handle an SMS, but that's largely irrelevant. If you're running late to meet a friend, ten cents to send a message of apology is a stone cold bargain. If you're a hypersocial teenager, $10 a month is a small price to stay in constant contact with everyone you know. Rates charged for SMS aren't set relative to their cost, but relative to the price of a voice minute - for a short message it is invariably cheaper to text rather than talk, which seems more than fair to most customers.

There's a whole class of high-margin products - SMS, soda, razor blades - that people regard as overpriced when it's pointed out to them, but buy anyway. You could call that a scam, but I just see it as an artifact of the complexities and contradictions of how we think about price and value.

All too often I see startups charging what they think is fair rather than what their target customers are willing to pay. From the perspective of a geek who likes tinkering with technology, any price is too much for something you could hack together in a couple of hours. The average end-user neither knows nor cares whether a piece of software was a trivial bit of scripting or an epic production of Duke Nukem Forever proportions. Their sense of value is calibrated completely differently, based on what they are used to paying for products and services. In many industries, the worst possible mistake is to charge too little. The value of your work bears no correlation to the effort or technical sophistication that went into it. The multi-billion dollar value of SMS is proof positive of that.
If I could go back and do it all again, I'd definitely do more stats courses.

Also if you're interested in data science in general, some basic linguistics (syntax/semantics) would be useful. (Saying this as someone with a PhD in natural language processing, who had to self-learn all the linguistic background the hard way)
Learn to write!

And not just in the baseline required rhetoric class that require little more than a pulse and a spellchecker - find a composition course that will actually demand something of you. Fiction writing, poetry, etc., something that makes you really learn how to communicate.

On that note, if you can find a presentation-heavy class, consider that. There's a lot of accessible comm classes that force you to get up in front of a crowd repeatedly - this could be invaluable in an entrepreneurial career.
Technically speaking, I believe there is an appeals process you can follow if you believe you are received unwanted messages. That makes it only slightly less of a crock, and I think applies mostly to actual spam rather than unwanted messages from real people.

As for the CRTC, well, good luck to all of us.
Apple’s diabolical plan to screw your iPhone
Agreed. By far my favorite single class at U.S.C. was the first semester introduction to classic philosophy.

One of the special things about that course was it was a special program at the school to introduce underclassmen to the best professors the school has to offer. (Often, you don't get to the most prized professors of a university until later.) So that's actually another way to select classes-- look for programs that are unusual in their approach but still give you credit.

You might also consider other things depending on where you want your career to go. If you're interested in web design, for example, you might want to consider photography so you can learn more about composition, color, light, and other aspects of art.

Two other extremely rewarding classes that might seem a little out of the ordinary to you:

1. Mechanical engineering drawing. You'll learn how to draw neatly and precisely, which is of tremendous value over your career. Turns out, this and other aspects of art are surprisingly mostly about craft, learned skills, discipline, and practice as they are about talent. Come to think of it, just learning that concept alone is worth the price of admission. ("If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."- Michaelangelo). You'll stand in front of a whiteboard or notebook tens of thousands of time in your life, and this single course will forever change and enhance the way you do anything on paper.

2. Digital electronics, (EE101 and the like) teaches you about digital logic, gates, flip flops, and so on. Even having already built all kinds of circuits, this was still very enriching because it shows formalized systems for how to optimize digital circuits down to the minimum number of components in ways that are kind of mind blowing (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map).
Google Approaches Its Breaking Point
I was a "pure programmer", programming for the sake of programming for a long time. Then I started pushing my boundaries by learning new languages for every new project, not necessarily because it was best suited but because pure programming can become dull if there isn't a real impact behind it. Now, I've moved positions and am programming in one of the first languages I learned (PHP) and although I feel the limitations of the language, the project is something I believe has potential to impact a lot of people in a beneficial way and am sold out behind the idea. It is my "something bigger." And, unfortunately, I don't necessarily have the "nice, comfortable" part of life down.
Other than the business courses mentioned by others...

Technical writing courses, if available, are invaluable. Being able to write and explain things clearly is an amazingly helpful skillset to develop.

Linguistics classes can be useful for helping you think about both computer and human language construction and use.

Engineering courses can help develop problem solving skills.

On any classes you take, I'd try to dig up syllabi from previous semesters to see if they're worthwhile (try to find the same teacher/course combination).
Some people do annotate in the margins. Especially non-fiction books. At the very least I've been known to add a bookmark (i.e. shred of paper) to a particular spot with some notes written on it.

My criticisms of the Kindle are for its page transitions and poor interface. The Kindle is really like the Blackberry of of digital readers. The interface is beyond clunky compared to simple taps and swipes that much more closely emulate the act of reading a physical book.

My best hope is that Mirasol comes to the Nook Color sooner rather than later as I highly doubt the iPad will come with a non-backlit display for several generations.
An In-Depth Look At Huffman Encoding
Scrolling is still very slow for me until the top section is off of the page. I'm referring to everything from "What’s happening?" through the Timeline - Lists tabs.
I understand this - debuggers are useful (especially when going through code you haven't written), but if you're writing an entire program yourself, you understand how it works completely, so a debugger is much less necessary (not unnecessary).

I haven't fired up a debugger for a long time, partly because I'm in to defensive programming big time. If you have something as simple as assert(ptr != NULL) in a function, if it fails, you get hit with an assert failed message, the file, line, function and condition. Most of the time this results in me thinking, "oh, duh" and immediately correcting the problem, sans debugger.
Abstract Algebra, it will change the way you think about mathematics and data structures.
Any philosophy course will help you a lot. Whether it's for thinking, or just to appease some of your wandering thoughts. A general Intro, Ethics or Epistemology will do you good.

A course on art history will open your mind a little and get you thinking about design, aesthetics, and much more.

If you don't read classic literature, take a course on classic English or Russian lit. Most of these novels are timeless and could provide an important impression on you.
Agreed. There is obviously a huge Nokia/Symbian user base, but it would be interesting to learn more about the demographics/buying habits/Internet-usage habits for those users. If many of them are in rural or developing areas, their ISP may only offer a capped bandwidth plan which may cause them to shy away from using data-intensive apps, or they may just not be as motivated to use some apps that ultimately lead to revenue generation (either directly through app purchases or down the line via upgrades or services that compliment the initial app download).
Queue 1000 comments from people gloating about how they too are "too good for debuggers". I work with a number of people who don't use a debugger, primarily because they never took the time learn how to use one. They often spend hours and hours inserting print statements, recompiling, redeploying, etc. for problems that can be solved in 5 minutes by using a debugger. Print statements are fine if you're debugging your "vending machine" project for CS101, but they don't work well for large, complex projects where you only work on a subset of the codebase. Don't let me dissuade you, though -- you guys keep using your print statements, and I'll be the superstar getting the same work done in a fraction of the time.
They generally do a mediocre job at best.

Interesting. Twitter seemed quite enthusiastic about their two "Pivots": When we began working with Pivotal last year, we knew they'd be a big help but we didn't expect how much they would contribute to a healthy and attractive work culture.

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/pivotal-means-of-crucial-imp...

On the other hand, Pivotal's price is steep, and you have to hire their programmers in pairs: It’s about $15,000 a week for a pair. And so what we came up with was, “Look. You don’t have much money...” But we came up with this idea that if we do a six week run, and he gave me a very slight bit discount, so like a six week was going to be $84,000 we could get a minimum viable product up and launched.

http://mixergy.com/oneforty-laura-fitton/

Given the price of hiring Pivotal Labs, it sounds like Twitter and Laura Fitton were pretty enthusiastic. I wonder how to reconcile that with what you've been hearing—has Pivotal Labs gone through a growth spurt in the last year or two?