skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are not the only one.

> Its really up to developers to stop this developer lock in, and refuse to build native apps.

Well, many developers has found that is easier to make money on mobile apps, than with their web counterparts. Why would they give that up? Is again a conflict of interest.

I hope the web will came back stronger after the native apps crisis, till them I will try to make money in both ends of the spectrum.
>I'm guessing whoever has downvoted me is pretty young and/or still in school. […] I guess those early days seem to be a bit touchy because you feel like you have to prove yourself or something. :)

I don't think you're helping yourself…

You don't have to be young to find the following patronising:

>No cheating! :)

>If you don't know how to do this then I'm actually right about my assumption.
Space Solar Power System
It really is a shame that we cannot count on an automatic veto from Obama. This is an area where I really would hope for some change.
It's not hype if it works. Web apps are hyped because they over-promise and under-deliver.

If I had a penny for every comment on HN that said how web apps are going to take over the world... finally someone woke up to the reality and wrote a TC article.
Spotify background (in case others were ignorant like me):

* 10 million free users can stream any song in the 10 million song catalog to their desktop (Pandora-style ads)

* 750,000 paid users - no ads, support for streaming to mobile (Android, iPhone, etc), better quality stream

* Paid 45 million Euro to labels in 2010
As someone who lived the Tunisian revolution, I'll give you my advice. It's very unlikely that you can cover all the news by your own. I'll guess that you are going to Egypt, it's very big and you can't be where the news is. Another thing to remember is that you don't have enough courage to get yourself in danger.

I would advice that you get some cheap cameras ($100) and know people that you can trust and can bring the news for you. There are also people that bring videos and photos to Facebook, it would help you more to know them and figure out if you can trust what they bring.

They can bring lot more information than you can. Some citizens in South Tunisia helped French journalists break security checking (through other secret roads) so they had special coverage for the events. That's unique and amazing. You'd better find such companions and I'm sure they'll be happy to help you.

Good luck.
Could this be a funding hack? It creates an economic incentive for the founder of the startup to give each of his friends $5 (say give 20 friends), to 'prove' that he has traction.

For $100, he can secure an angel/seed round of $100K.

Wouldn't be surprised if that is one of those unintended consequences that further inflates, what honestly looks like is becoming, the resurgence of a new bubble.

Good idea though, just wondering about the macro implications.
In Brazil they must unlock it upon request. The subsidies are tied to the service contract - if you break it, you pay a fine. I believe carriers are no longer bothering to have their phones locked up.
> You shouldn't be using list on raw unicode strings.

Why? I am using list only to show what are the values of s[0] and s[1].

What I am saying is that it returns the list of characters of the underlying representation, so a list of wide chars (possibly surrogate) if compiled with UTF16 or a list of 32bit characters if compiled with UTF16.

Are you suggesting that all the string processing (including iteration) should be done on a str encoded in UTF8 instead of using the native unicode type?
Bean Bags with a designer difference
Don’t call these beanbags! Bean bags can really be designer furniture. The evolution of bean bags and bean bag chairs into sophisticated lounge seats.
Frankly, I don't think most people care, either. They just want a phone that works, where they can find the features they use, and maybe some useful other things, like syncing contacts with gmail.

Most people I know with Android devices have never downloaded apps, some have downloaded a few in the first few days they had their phone, and only my most hard-core tech friends download any regularly. Most studies seem to confirm this behaviour. Most people don't even know what a 'phone update' is, and are caught off guard when their phone asks them about it.
Locked Phones are the norm in Germany too.

You forgot to add that this is only the case for subsidized phones. Nobody stops you from going to Media Markt to purchase an unlocked, uncrippled phone for full price.

In addition: SIM locked (i.e. only able to use a designated network) is not quite the same as a crippled phone (like in intentionally crippling the Bluetooth stack to force users to use a crappy service to upload photos for a couple bucks a pop).

I can't speak for Germany, but in Switzerland the only SIM locked phones are the ones that you buy together with a pre-payed deal. And then they have to unlock it for you after a couple years.

Personally I perceive the development of locking down devices as rather disturbing and I really hope that this trend doesn't swap into European mobile phones. That's why, yeah, I feel that Nokia matters a lot.
When biblical authors wanted to talk about genitals, they sometimes talked about “hands,” as in the Song of Solomon, and sometimes about “feet.”... When he is teaching to college students, he writes, someone inevitably asks about the scene in Luke, in which a woman kisses and washes Jesus’ feet—and then dries them with her hair. Is that author speaking about “feet”? Or feet? “As both modern and ancient elaborations suggest,” Coogan writes, “sexual innuendo may be present.” Scholars agree that in this case, a foot was probably just a foot.
Fair enough, I will pass along these links to my friend.

Thanks :)
Increase your prestashop module
Spotify is not available in Germany. Neither is Pandora.
It's not a store, it's venture capitalism writ small. Just like Kickstarter, Sellaband, etc.
You version. Move the old version to url/oldversionnumber and tell that client that they can keep using the same old same old at that url.
> There is no such thing as a free Android, except if you tear the whole Java user space away.

Isn't that part BSD-licensed?

> the Android UI is not GPU-accelerated

It's a bit hard when you have to support more than one device, but I believe it's a matter of time. As more and more hardware gains hardware acceleration, I assume it will come (if not already in the latest 2.x and 3.x series)

> the entire OS is still immature(see the embarrassing bugs with the SMS or the browser security holes)

Don't confuse the OS with the programs that run on it. You don't blame Windows when SharePoint eats up all your intranet, do you?
If your goal is to provide for a nice developer experience, sure. Thing is that developers are paid to do non-pleasant things in order to maximize the end user experience. Most web apps are crap on the desktop already, but not enough to be worse than desktop apps (because of other advantages); but on a mobile, they're 10x worse and in almost no cases equally good let alone better than the native app.

What web apps do you know that work great on a phone? Maybe my experience is skewed, but the slickest web-based phone app is the mobile version of Reddit, and that thing still sucks when you actually use it.

Color me unconvinced - native dev isn't going anywhere just yet.
See https://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed/blob/master/_docu...
Have kids (or are YOU a big one)? Kindly draw on our startup X-Worlds
X-Worlds is a new hang-out for kids which let's them bring creatures to life!

We've just launched a sneak peak of whats going to be a very cool business model.

For now I'd love to ask any Hackers with kids to let them loose on the site and let us know how they react!

Drawings and donuts appreciated! :)

Thanks a million.

http://x-worlds.com/?s_id=hn
http://twitter.com/x_worlds
http://www.facebook.com/X.Worlds
And this is clearly and publicly documented behavior, as quoted (but not linked) by swift above:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/...

> In low-memory situations, image data may be purged from a UIImage object to free up memory on the system. This purging behavior affects only the image data stored internally by the UIImage object and not the object itself. When you attempt to draw an image whose data has been purged, the image object automatically reloads the data from its original file.
Good, healthy observations, thanks.

Avoiding a full-page REFRESH only makes sense when the current page does NOT change (e.g. doing login

User navigates from "A" to "B" Some or even most content on the page changes. Scenario 1: New page is fetched from the server. Scenario 2: Content is fetched from the server via AJAX and rendered with a template in the browser, then injected into the current DOM.

I assert there are technical benefits to the second scenario. Whether they outweigh the disadvantages is not my argument. My argument is that there are technical benefits and that "because it's cool" is a straw man argument.

if the overhead is in the server-side processing done, then offload that processing making it async and cache the results. Why is that so hard?

Yes, and one such strategy is to offload it to the user's browser. Again, I am not arguing it is the best strategy, as I am not responsible for Gawker Media or your application.
tldr (actually, it's quite short and worth reading) - practice sub-verbally as much as you can. If you see a cat, you think "there's a cat" in your head.

2 advantages I think this has:

1) It's good practice.

2) You will find holes in your vocabulary, and that that will encourage you to fill them.
...Seriously?

I'm in town through Thursday evening, and would love a chance to play anyone who works there. Email me or hit me on Twitter?

ryan@venodesigns.net
@ryanmcgrath
Actual Utilization of Business Essay Format
The writing of business essays is often considered the toughest form of academic writing. The writing of business essays requires students to adhere to the business essay format. Failure to do so will result in a bad grade for the business essay.
I would strongly disagree with "It’s like feeling that unexpectedly, you have a button in your brain. When you push it you can get thoughts straight to your target language." being the level of "at least being able to interact with locals".

In my personal experience, that's a point well beyond that. I was speaking fluid english for considerable time before being able to think in english on a whim. I can (usually) get my point across in german and russian, but thinking in those languages? No. I'm still translating to and fro in my brain, still formulating what I want to say in a language I feel more confident with.
> phone manufacturers not playing ball with its customers

They do. Their customers are the telcos. most phone manufacturers will do whatever they are told, without much regard of how much this will affect the life of their users.

As long as we prefer to buy locked-up, subsidized phones from our telcos, this unfortunate arrangement will persist.
Nice work there guys!

Can't wait to see my creature come to life!! :)
PS3 'jailbreak code' retweeted by Sony's Kevin Butler
Well, yes, I agree in the grand scheme of short-sighted bad decisions from 15-20 years ago it's fairly low down the scale. But I'm still firmly of the opinion that the desktop CD burning revolution was decidedly foreseeable even then; I remember a UK Amiga mag editorial from the period ('94, I think) making that exact point having a disc sitting in front of them, about just how much this soom becoming a commodity product would shake up both the computer and music industries.

I suppose what this really boils down to is:

* Win32 predates Microsoft really thinking security was important by at least 10 years, and much of the industry by not much less

* IT as a whole is terrible at looking into the future, seeing what will be viable tomorrow and designing around that.

It'll be fun looking back in 2025 to see what obvious mistakes we're making now :-)
I like seeing more and more software extensible by Lua, which is a very decent language. My very favorite is LuaTeX (luatex.org), where you can access all ugly TeX internals from Lua and even create a complete typesetting system without using the rather complicated TeX language, which is based on macro expansion. I am not so sure if I'd use Lua Bash, for bash has always been "good enough" for me.
The 7 Personality Types of Bloggers Today
We have looked at the different types of designers, developers and clients in previous articles, but there is one viewpoint from which we still haven’t looked at ourselves.
ضرب تامر حسني
Mind vs. Machine
Making Friends
Well done to all of the winners. We (Geomium) got so much out of just taking part, and I know the other teams I spoke to did too! I'd definitely encourage other startups to apply.
nor is netflix, gamefly, grooveshark (or is it by now?) and uncensored video games.

i think a service like netflix is about time to hit europe and esp. germany with all the traffic you want on 50mbit lines in every house and over 85% online connectivity over all 10-18 year olds.

anyway.
im not sure if that article isnt just made up by someone to support spotify. people here in america dont even know what grooveshark, last.fm or pandora is but people know about spotify in the countries where its available to an extend that its the second largest source of income of _european_ labels.
most big labels are US anyway... either they are US or they have their HQ in the states.

besides the fact that 2.2 million euro in income is pretty much nothing. at the end with sweden and finland combined we're talking about around 15m people - you just cant move much with it.

i call BS on that one and vote for an edit of the title to:
"Spotify Could Be Second Largest Source Of Revenue For Labels In Europe"
You can also pay half and forgo the mobile streaming.
It's odd not to at least mention Native Client and WebGL in this context.
The LinkedIn URL here has no target: http://labels.io/mediademo

As far as I can tell it is a nice way of trying to find employees by matching them. I have not tried your system yet, but if it works like that it does sound interesting.

However there is a lot of competition in that space, so unless you have a real driving force behind marketing or really good reasons for companies to use your service it will be pretty tough.

Also do you support "Web presences" like stackoverflow? I can imagine that developers want to use that as resumes, too.
With that money, the district built 15 new schools and renovated 54 others. Included were nearly five dozen magnet schools, which concentrated on such things as computer science, foreign languages, environmental science, and classical Greek athletics. Those schools featured such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge's chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability.

Looks like they were spending money just to spend it. What did they demand from the students? parents? teachers? Were disruptive students (what I consider the biggest problem) isolated and punished for bad behavior? Were the parents required to review the child's work, meet the teachers, provide a proper meal? Were the teachers asked to give feedback, meet goals, try new techniques?

The main thing the report wants to speak about is the Imperial federal judge (typical for a CATO report) while the real problem lied in the way the district was run. Shitty management doesn't get better with more money. Money just makes it worse.
It's been running for over an hour now, and they don't seem to be getting any better. How long is it supposed to take?
Exactly the reason why i didnt like the 4 Hour work week by Tim Ferris. I enjoy what i am doing and would rather improve my work experience if i wont find it enjoying anymore than to travel around the world todo "fun" stuff while other people earn money for me.
Did they do any sort of beta testing on this before they rolled it out?
There are at least one reputable source that claims it is false: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/the-nok...
StageVideo in Flash 10.2 dramatically reduces CPU usage with video
> that's because Samsung doesn't have a clue

Maybe they just want to focus on selling profitable phones... Not every business model should depend on a single software platform.
Ask HN: When do you show your project to potential evangelists and advisers?
Hi all,

I've been lurking here for a while, not really got involved yet, but recently took the plunge to turn to self employment and startup life.

I quit my job and moved to a lower rent area so my savings would last a little longer, and decided to turn my long time hobby project into a full-time startup with the help of a friend. Now a little over two months in, the demons are starting to gather and I'm beginning to question my decisions.

The project is an in-browser Canvas based circuit design tool. Allowing users to create electronic circuit schematics and embed them on their blogs/forums/websites. The key feature being that the schematics are 'live' so can be zoomed in/out and are a lot more interactive than a static screenshot.

I came to want to solve this problem after running into it myself last year while trying to design an electronics project with a friend. It was really hard to collaborate and it was equally hard to get people to help out when we had problems, purely because it was hard to share the circuit design with them in a readable form.

We have come quite a long way with this project, its probably a couple of months away from having a minimum viable feature set. (Still lots to do after that of course). It is right now far from polished, and has many rough edges, and is mostly full of test data. But we feel a need to get it out to some eyeballs other than just ours.

So my question is when should you start showing potential evangelists and advisers your application?

I have some people in mind, people who have fairly high profile within the hobbyist communities, and people who have experience with electronics circuit design tools. I have contacted some of them already to see if they would be interested in trying out an alpha release and have had very positive feedback. I'm just afraid to show them the application too early, when its still very much unfinished.

I know the general rule of thumb is to get feedback early and often, but when an application is not even at an MVP stage, does this still apply?
Except Apple is a bad example as it makes it's own OS and own the end to end user experience with out a dependency on a 3rd party?
A helpful tip for those arriving late: Skip the entire article and read the email directly.

The article is longer than the mail, says less, and says it less eloquently.
20+ Free Vectors
Vectors are commonly used by graphics designers in their printing projects because the resolution of vector doesn’t expand at any dimension. Today i have posted 20+ vector packs for you.
He suggests little flash cards as a way to casually practice language on a daily basis, I have a bit of a more geek-oriented suggestion: change the language of your browser.

You'll start seeing sites you use every day in the foreign language (like Google products), and become very familiar with the words and phrases used in the UI. You won't be practicing the same sort of phrases you'd use in every day spoken conversation, but you'll definitely learn something. (And it shouldn't be too annoying for you to use the translated interface if you're already used to the product).
Programming-in-the large versus programming-in-the-small
GOOGLE: Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems
Thanks - I misunderstood the point you were making.

On the point of interacting with the hardware, at least on iOS, you can get location data into your webapp and there are cunning ways of getting access to the camera.
This is an interesting thought. My wife rubbishes most of my ideas, but there is one that she keeps brining up as her example of an idea she thinks is actually worth trying.

It's not an idea I'm particularly keen on, perhaps even though I try to be objective I'm being mislead by the lack of shiny tech, but maybe I should focus on it for a bit and give it a chance.
No worries, always happy to help! If you or your friend have any more questions about ethics-related concerns feel free to send me an email :)
CD Recovery Software
I'm aware of the 1EUR contracts (I live in Germany). I was just surprised that most phones in such contracts were supposed to be netlocked.

I've bought most of my mobile phones of the past on eBay to use with my prepaid card. I've seen Vodafone, O2 and T-Mobile brandings on them, but I never had to contact the seller because of a netlock problem. I've also found footnotes like "this telephone can only be used on XXX network, wait 24mo or pay us 99EUR" on brochures and paper ads, but only for prepaid contracts.

If there is a common practice of netlocking most German 24-month-contract phones, when did it start?
What native app do you use? I use Apple Mail since IMO it has the best IMAP support of the lot, but archiving and filing under labels is a pain. Apple's way is to use drag and drop, which doesn't rock my boat.
BitNami Cloud Hosting Launched
I did this as a Spanish refresher before taking a month-long trip to the Dominican Republic. Worked very well! This especially helped in learning "tech" words, which are rarely taught in formal courses. Came in handy when helping troubleshoot wireless connectivity issues at the hostels where we stayed.
Junior Developer needed to help build immersive mobile experiences
Hey HN, I am the Lead Developer of a new Melbourne startup, Two Bulls (two-bulls.com). We are currently looking to expand our small team by hiring a junior developer.

You don't need to be experienced, just passionate and excited by coding and building stuff. Our team gets excited about creating beautiful architectures, using meta-programming techniques and pushing the boundaries of augmented reality. I figured Hacker News was a perfect place to find other people like this.

You will be developing iOS applications for some of the world's leading brands as well as our internal IP such as the award winning AR game Hidden Park. You will also have an opportunity to work with Python and Django.

If you are interested send your resume to jobs@two-bulls.com or visit our website to find out more http://two-bulls.com/2011/02/hiring-junior-developer/

Be sure to mention that you are a Hacker News reader :)
First off congratulations to the winners.

I have a question about SeedCamp around the signalling effect by participating.

So with SeedCamp's model that a round of startup get to go through their program but only a few get funded. What happens to the startups that don't get funded, are they negatively signaled? Almost like how if your current investors don't follow on the next round and they have the money, then it signals to the market that something is very wrong.
Sparrow (http://sparrowmailapp.com). Its quite literally, a godsend.
http://www.cyber-ark.com/digital-vault-products/enterprise-p... is something I've worked with, though I've never seen what I would consider a well integrated deployment
Robot Orders a Scone in Mountain View (Anybots)
Some soccer players in Europe who transfer clubs to another country will get sticky notes and paste them to everything in their apartment to get used to nouns. Of course, there's always players like Eric Cantona who used to deliberately talk in French to the English media to throw them off.
And just at the time when I discovered a nice comic books selection at my local library (Wimbledon), for when you're "working".
Bedroom painted and decorated to look like Super Mario Brothers