skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could build a device that's a lot smaller / less obvious than a cell phone for less than $20.

With an SMD AVR microcontroller, you could power it direct from the USB port, and the device would be not much bigger than a USB stick. In fact, you could embed it in a USB flash drive case (I suppose that bonus points would be awarded for also operating as a USB flash drive).

Example: http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/hidkeys.html

[Edit]

Some quick googling shows that this is not a new idea:

http://www.taranfx.com/pc-mac-usb-hid-hack

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

$18 for a 1.2" by 0.7" USB-enabled ATMEGA32U4 -- and the only reason it's so 'large' is that they break out the atmega's pins to support prototyping, incude a SPST (switch), etc.
Do you know of any recent comparison of hbase vs. hypertable?
CanvasXpress has got some pretty cool examples. I am currently using a not-free-for-commercial highcharts (http://highcharts.com). It is pure javascript, depends on jQuery or MooTools and I like it.
I couldn't imagine coding C# without a debugger (Visual Studio).

I couldn't imagine coding Ruby or PHP with a debugger.

Maybe I've just not been incentivised enough to learn how to properly debug Ruby/PHP though.
GitHubby - my new free iPhone GitHub client
Hey guys, I'm the developer. Apple just approved the app last night and I decided to make it free for a while! Hope you all enjoy! This is my 4th app, 3rd in the AppStore (the other one is an enterprise app).
The app was created in about 20 hours, spanned over 3 weeks, using MonoTouch and JSON. Even though its a real app, not an HTML-based one, all the views you see in the app are driven by JSON data.
This is just the first release, I'll include a lot of new features over the next few releases, including organizations support, fork/follow, etc..
I can gladly answer any questions, and would love to receive feedback on this app!
That's fine because people who do visit the site will know what it is beforehand. It isn't for you. I'm more interested in criticism on its functionality (the actual app) rather than comments on the purposely limited landing page and judging a book by its cover like most people here seem to be doing.
As someone who doesn't own an Apple laptop, I think it's completely outrageous they don't let you in to the MacBook battery. Laptops are fussy, and have the worst possible circumstances to contend with, and sometimes they really really need you to pull the battery to fix them properly (ie. very cold boot). It's certainly happened on my higher-end Lenovo.
Boomers, stop ruining Facebook for your kids
Interesting debate - simple starting point, deep waters. I'll leave those for another time - thanks for the pointers.

And thanks for the compliment - appreciated.
Fair enough. If I could edit my first post, I'd change it to "Netflix of the UK is an apt description"

Apologies to all you other Europeans.
Often when you pay a lot for something you convince yourself that it was worth it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Nokia has always made great hardware so they should have bought Palm. Would have been a match made in heaven.
What if no one is there to press those keys, or there's no keyboard? I recently did a project with a USB HID interfaced microcontroller pushing data into windows, and there would have been no way for anyone to hit keys that weren't there.
What I don't read much about, but depend on, is using a debugger on new code when there aren't obvious bugs in it. Just walking through it, while viewing variables, gives a wonderful sanity check to verify that code is doing what I think it is doing, and this catches a surprising amount of non-obvious bugs, and lines of code become easier to reason about precisely sometimes when you have visibility of the specific state of the program at that time. This is not a substitute for unit testing obviously, but it can catch problems that wouldn't be obvious or easy to unit test for.

For me, this is also a wonderful way to get accustomed to someone else's code, seeing exactly what it does first before spending the brain cycles upfront to reason about exactly what is going on.
So far, the best way is to feed the result of App Studio to PhoneGap, which can then create an apk (for Android) or an app that can be submitted to the App Store. Both of those solutions require that you download and configure the SDKs for their platforms. In the case of iOS, you'll also need to deal with the App Store.

OTOH, many apps work nicely as web apps, and it's improving all the time.
Maybe it was just the class I took, but I took macro and wished from the first day and ever after that I had taken micro. I felt like one class of micro might have gotten me some information I could actually use in business, whereas one class of macro was far from enough to get a handle on current events or monetary policy.
No offense, good comment. But the same is true for the Plumber, the Framer, the Project Manager, etc.

To a Programmer, the Owner who pushes back on the customer is a good business person.

To a Project Manager, the Owner who squeezes the programmers is a good business person.

To the Customer, the Owner who delivers on time and delivers routine upgrades is a good owner.

To a Manager the Owner who doesn't place unreasonable budgetary constraints and work-load in his/her lap is a good Owner.

I wonder sometimes if Carpenters, Doctors, Lawyers, etc spend as much time talking about this stuff as Programmers do. A short distance removed makes it all seem incredibly self absorbed.
For those of you who prefer not to play the ad maze game:

http://www.forbes.com/2011/01/19/norway-denmark-finland-busi...
I thought emulators were explicitly not allowed in a number of places of the App Store terms? Did they convince Apple this is only like Capcom's Arcade app?
Maybe make the default/hint text for the input say "Band" instead of "Group" -- considering all I see when I visit the website is "RELA - Group - User - Pass" at least this would give me an inkling that it's for musical bands.
Or you could just bring a keyboard and mouse with you and take control of the computer the old fashioned way. I'm sure it would be much easier to type on than the android on screen keyboard.

Also, there are USB keyboard replay devices out already that are much smaller than an android phone, if the goal was to automate the process.

I really fail to see why this is noteworthy other than the fact that someone developed a USB keyboard driver for android which is cool. It doesn't open any new attack vectors. I mean really how many computers are out there that don't have a keyboard and mouse but have accessible USB ports AND that it would look suspicious to have brought your own keyboard and mouse, but it wouldn't look suspicious to plug your phone into it.

I suppose the one thing it would enable is a social engineering trick where you convince the persons secretary to go plug your phone into the computer you don't have access to. Maybe something along the lines of "<insert boss' name here>, needs you to plug his phone it's running low on battery, can you plug it in?" and then come back a few minutes later to get the phone.
Oops - sorry - here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2123469
True - I probably should have described it as a "temporary budget move" while I build my business here in London. After all, even free legal downloads of great programs can create the same problem as illegal downloading in regards to the producers not having enough money to fund future great programs.
Digital Ghosts Exist
Clickable: http://www.nsbasic.com/blog/?p=187
French being my mother tongue and having had to go through 3 painful years of Latin in high school, I can definitely tell you we don't use much Latin words ;)
Hey guys, I'm the developer. Apple just approved the app last night and I decided to make it free for a while! Hope you all enjoy! This is my 4th app, 3rd in the AppStore (the other one is an enterprise app).

The app was created in about 20 hours, spanned over 3 weeks, using MonoTouch and JSON. Even though its a real app, not an HTML-based one, all the views you see in the app are driven by JSON data.

This is just the first release, I'll include a lot of new features over the next few releases, including organizations support, fork/follow, etc..

I can gladly answer any questions, and would love to receive feedback on this app!
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.

Marketing - If people don't know that you're selling something, it won't get bought.

I agree with a lot of the Philosophy comments people are making, but in general you should try to avoid as many people as you can if they are not your customers.

Your direction usually dictates your education. Your ability to learn new shit is far more important than your inherent knowledge.
[Full disclosure: I make heavy use of both debuggers, and printf debugging, in my work.]

A debugger gives you a detailed picture of the state of your program at one moment in time, or (when stepping) over a short period of time. Other tools -- logging, monitoring, etc. -- provide a different slice through your program state, making it much easier to observe the flow over time, but relatively little detail about any given instant. Each approach has its uses.

Logging has a number of properties that make it relatively more useful for experienced programmers, mature codebases, and/or "infrastructure" systems (compilers, operating systems, libraries) that are used far from the developer's workstation. That might explain its popularity among the group interviewed in this book. For instance:

1. Programmability. The nature of logging -- both generation and analysis -- lends itself to building up a library of utilities. An experienced programmer develops a toolkit -- part code, part knowledge -- that makes logging more and more useful to him/her over time. There's also a learning curve for debugging techniques, of course, but it flattens out sooner. I've been programming for 35 years, and my logging techniques are better than they were even 5 years ago, but my productivity in the debugger plateaued decades ago.

2. Accumulation. If you work on a single body of code for a long time, you can continually improve the usefulness of its logging. Eventually you reach the point where many bugs are quickly obvious from the log, because you'd previously invested a lot of effort in logging exactly the data you typically need, in the most convenient format. Printf debugging can take a long time if you're starting from scratch (the program contained no relevant logging to start with), but in a mature codebase where attention has been paid to logging, the story can be very different.

3. Universality. Logging tends to work in a wide variety of environments, from manual testing on the developer's workstation, to production servers, to installations on a customer's computer. If you spend your life tracking down hard-to-reproduce bugs reported by other people, logging is essential.

4. Repetitiveness. Tracking down problems in a debugger tends to involve a lot of boring, repetitive actions -- "aha, this is null because that other flag had been set, let me restart and walk through the whole thing again to see when that happens". It's still sometimes the best tool for a job, but it has a time-sink flavor that probably pushes some people away.
I still think that paying sales tax _only_ in the district where the business is based isn't right either because when a company gets large enough (Think Walmart) that's a ton of money going to one town. However I don't see why you can't tax based on where the product is shipped from, or the closest company office to the buyer. That's no worse than a company that has stores in different districts and spreads the revenue closer to what it would actually be in a retail store.
Wow, I'm amazed how few people seem to be reacting the blog post the way I read it. Did the text change?

His argument isn't about good or bad programmers, it's an observation about programming: the annoying stuff can't be automated. Good programmers automate whenever they can. Therefore, the author believes, annoying stuff will eventually dominate their whole day.

Maybe your Ruby on Rails, or Scala on Snowshoes, or whatever, framework makes it trivial to create a functional site from twelve keystrokes. That just means most of your day is spent in customer meetings, gathering specs, and fixing obscure bugs.

There's some truth to this, but I also enjoy designing and communicating, which are also non-automatable. Perhaps the author doesn't like that stuff, but if so, that's sad.

And there are always ways to automate more and more; you may have to leap to a different paradigm to capture the essence of truly thorny problems, but this should be fun for a good programmer.
> ... Bertrand Russell ...

wat
A Startup is always work in progress
In Turkey, CV is used interchangeably with the turkish "özgeçmiş" Resumé is almost never used.

By the way, does anybody remember the CodersCV.com? It was a great site for displaying the CV but it no longer works. For a sample shot of that site, see http://img365.yukle.tc/images/2880Coders_CV_-_Resume.png
Hey, we still keep a prepaid Nokia around for basic phone calls. If you're just needing to call someone, they still get the job done, and oddly enough, the calling experience is often better (better sound) than on a smartphone.

Plus, it has a built in flashlight. Who can argue with that? ;)
I watched his housing rants he gave (a couple were on C-SPAN) where he was talking about loans being "too hard" to get. How banks needed to loan to poorer people. This was before the collapse and we all discovered the opposite was true. His voting is pro-Hollywood and he seems to have an influence on MN's other Senator.

It isn't ad hominem when he votes and speaks to the point.
I think you're missing the point of the quoted statement.

A debugger is a great tool to help you understand unfamiliar code. Drop me in to a breakpoint in somebody else's codebase, and chances are I'll quickly be able to figure out what's going on.

Assuming you didn't write all the code in your organization, debugging is pretty much your most valuable skill. Be it looking at a stack trace and digging in by hand, or using the tools available to you. Your worth revolves around being able to immediately dig in to an unfamiliar system, find our what's wrong, and fix it.

Debuggers help you do that.
Ah, true. Sorry ... I guess I just assumed you were using one of those two. But this is Hacker News, after all ;)

So which is it: Linux, BSD, or your own hand coded OS?
Thank you, and I can appreciate that position. However, I think it is a search engine problem because search terms often contain sensitive personal information and they're embedded in the referrer, whereas HN links don't contain such info.
Has anybody else had a completely horrid experience with google voice? I've consistently had a problem where a large percentage of text messages sent to my google voice number from AT&T customers simply don't show up. (either in the web interface or on a handset) This is a terrible problem as no indication is given to the sender that the message wasn't received.

I requested help via their web forms and never got any response. Eventually I had to stop using my google voice number. Any other horror stories?
Couldn't agree more. I'll always remember the mean/median difference because of my Grade 6 teacher. He was about 6 foot 6, and he made us do the math on "Average heights in the Grade 6 classroom".

We had a small class size, so the results were demonstrably different and therefore memorable!
That's my point. Mathematic terminology is expected to be different than plain English.
Cybercriminals shifting focus to non-Windows systems
That was a cheesy joke that fell flat. So I took it back :-P
Yes, I do take notes in books, but as they say, the margin is too small for some of my notes. I thought this would be one of the big pluses of Kindle for me, and it still is, but using the 1980s style interface really is a killer.

Bookmarks work as you say, which is counterintuitive is one is used to how bookmarks use in real books, i.e. generally one or two points are of interest on a page. On the Kindle, with different pagination, a sentence you like may not be on the bookmarked page anymore. There's no easy solution to this problem, I guess.
Standup desk converter?
Sorry if this is not the right place; I am just hoping something like this exists and that I just wasn't able to find it... or that it might exist as something else which I haven't thought about.

What I want is basically a platform with a lever; as I pull the lever the platform goes up. That way I can put my two monitors and a keyboard on it, pull the lever, and have my regular desk converted into a stand up desk
> whither validation?

You can validate using the HTML5 validator (http://html5.validator.nu/) - which presumably will be renamed to the HTML validator.
Not that I've ever seen referenced. You don't really see the YARV name thrown a ton these days either I guess, but MRI means C-Ruby to most I think. YARV is a VM and from what I understand Matz had very little to do with it in the period leading up to 1.9.

Maybe it was behind the scenes, but the original status pages for YARV gave the impression it was a one man job up until it was official.
I've gotten to where I hardly ever read from my latest-gen small-sized Kindle Wi-Fi. I prefer the touch screen interactivity of the Kindle app on my iPhone4. This makes me think that reading on an iPad would blow the Kindle away, with the only caveats being battery life and nighttime reading where I wouldn't want a back-light to keep me awake.

Anyone else feel this way?
Cuomo Weighs More Than 10,000 Layoffs
I had this conversation about a decade ago at http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=48495. Unfortunately most of the links in that discussion have gone dead. Here are fixes to the most important ones.

The Kernel Traffic summary: http://kt.earth.li/kernel-traffic/kt20001002_87.html (sections 1 and 4 are relevant).

Linus' "I'm a bastard": http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0009.0/1148.h...

Richard J Moore discussing IBM's experience: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0009.1/1307.h...
How is this promoting their own product? I think its a genuinely effort to put forth a real life story before you. Most of the SM gurus would say that feeding these trolls is usually a waste of time; instead, monitor quietly to gauge the response to the comment. For a bigger brand, it might not hurt at all, but for a startup, the impact would be much higher. The approach taken by Beevolve as a whole is certainly a better way to tackle this issue. If otherwise, I am hoping someone here might be able to at least point me in the right direction.
Microsoft passes the blame re: Phantom Data
Proper logging > debugger.

There is absolutely no point single stepping through code, setting up breakpoints, inspecting variables etc, when you could instead just insert an extra log statement to see what is going wrong.

If your logging is good, often solving a bug is just a case of looking in a production log and seeing where things went wrong.

The other fact is that the majority of bugs I've seen in my own code have been caused when under load, and it's not feasible to run a debugger on a production system.

I've tried debuggers a fair amount, and they end up being completely useless to me.
Not a week goes by without another piece of news revealing the idiocy (or evilness) of patent law.
Any p2p requires a native app as the browser can't act as a server.
what does it do?

Edit: OK, not that I know what it does, what do you use it for on your N900?
They're basically saying they have exclusive rights to people disclosing biographical information about themselves in an online community.
Exactly, which take quite a bit of getting used to (see my comment above), because it doesn't work that way for real books. In fact when people cite references with page numbers, they usually give the precise editions of the book, since different editions may have the sentence or point being referenced on different pages. So it's important for the "bookmark" to hold the information about the whole text that the user sees a that time, I think.
Graham Dumpleton: What new features would you like to see in mod_wsgi?
We started directly on Google Apps and now for security reasons we will have to go to Exchange... Hell is coming...
Facebook Billionaire Eduardo Saverin Leads Qwiki’s $8 Million Round
Question is: what happens after 90 days? Who's paying who?
Which makes it impossible to do anything other than read certain books straight through. I wanted to skip around in Infinite Jest, but since the chapter names are meaningless and all the book guides have page number references, it's impossible to know the book's outline.
Universal Donates Master Recordings To Library Of Congress-Keeps The Copyright
Nobody is ever satisfied with being "satisfied." That's why "satisfied" people complain about all the minor annoyances they bear, such as the whole point of the original article.

If you think hard about it, you'll realize that you'd rather be engaged than "satisfied."
(Disclosure: I work at Twilio.)

International SMS is a really nasty landscape. I know firsthand that it's very hard to put together an international SMS product that is anywhere near what we would consider reliable. I imagine if Google offered it, even more people would complain about its unreliability than are complaining about its current absence.

This is a problem that Twilio is actively trying to solve.
I've never had a substantial delay in an "outage" situation when I call support, and I've never, except once, waited more than 2 days for a service / technical issue that's not resulting in an outage via email support. The one time the delay went longer, I called our account rep and had a response within a few hours. I've also seen changes to services based on suggestions we've made. I can't imagine the Education support is better than the Business support.
That's why you use proper logging :/

If you're making something of a reasonable size, you should be logging tons of stuff.

If you've made sure your logging is solid, often fixing a bug is just a case of looking in the log to see what went wrong.
Here's a wild assertion about why some programmers - some good programmers - prefer printfs: good programmers prefer to solve problems only once, rather than repeatedly.

When you have a question you want to answer about the state of a program, a debugger gives you powerful tools to answer your questions right now, but doesn't leave any permanent record of your investigation. Each time you subsequently want the answer to that same question you have to run the program, hit that breakpoint again, and cast whatever incantations are necessary to reveal the relevant program state.

If you used printfs instead, you would probably have had to iterate a few times to get the answer the first time; first you print one thing, then another, moving your prints around until they tell you what you want to know. When you're done, though, you've probably left some log output hanging around. So after you're done investigating, say, how the data access layer works, you have something to cross reference while you're poking around the user interface code.

I think this is a more useful technique for unfamiliar source. Comprehending a large hunk of source typically requires integrating your understanding of several sections of code ranging widely across the codebase.

Anyway - a good debugger is a wonderful thing. I can't stand up straight sometimes for leaning on them, though.
The Great Tokyo Michelin Sham
It depends. I am not a lawyer, and certainly not an American torts expert (or a tort expert in any nation) but I believe that certain states have statutes in place that allow the judge discretion in assigning the defendant's legal fees to the plaintiff, if the defendant wins the case.
Ah, the pleasure to see an interactive widget like the ones demonstrating the algorithm, right clicking and finding out it's not flash.
What are the main weaknesses of Python as a programming language?