skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tired of Apple's rules? Build your own touchscreen handheld
It's worth noting that M-PESA is spreading outside of Kenya. Last year it had a highly-publicised launch in South Africa, backed by the country's largest mobile operator and fourth-largest bank.

While the country has a well-developed and high-tech banking system, its banks serve mostly the middle and upper classes and the business community and have been unable to come up with viable banking products for the approximately 13 million people without bank accounts. It's hoped that M-PESA will fill that gap.

This isn't the first mobile phone payment system to have been tried in South Africa; although the only one to have achieved any level of success was MiMoney, backed by another major bank. But the level of support behind M-PESA is massive and early indications are that it will see a similar level of success to what it achieved in Kenya. Already a number of major retailers are adding it to their systems as a valid payment option or have already done so.
Honestly, as a customer I'm getting tired of having to install apps for everything I use, I'm getting tired of something not having the app on my Droid because it's only for iPhone and so on...

I think the HTML5/JS approach still has a way to go before the user experience will really catch up to native apps, and for some apps it will never happen. But the same could be said for desktop apps vs webapps and we all know how that turned out...
I'm not sure New Twitter is good model in its implementation however. I don't think I'm the only one who's noticed that the new interface is a client-side pig, taking all the CPU time it can grab.
Let’s agree “not hiding” is what is in the demo video. TOS… we all know they could add that you sell the soul and the virginity of your mother in there, no one would read it.
This sounds like the work of an editor. Some editor probably saw "ramen profitable" and decided that the august WSJ reader would have no idea what ramen was, so they changed it to pizza, not knowing that pizza is a huge luxury for many ramen profitable companies.
It depends on what your definition of is, is.
I work as a developer at Lulu. I had forwarded this to my colleagues and asked around and the general consensus is that code should not be look fuzzy. If the source image is fuzzy (say a screen shot of code vs fixed width font) then it would end up being fuzzy in print.

You book has been marked as a staff-pick now. Hoping that this will help in spreading the word.
CSS Variables, Mixins, Nesting and Modules coming (eventually) to Chrome
Ballista, scorpio exist only in re-enactments and are far from the functionality of the originals. The originals required human hair, it was the springiest, had to be processed very particularly and it's very labor intensive to recreate, so re-enactors have not. Their historical range is ~400 meters, replicas do ~150.

Complicated specialized tech made in large urban populations is the place to look. Many things went extinct only to be reinvented once large urban populations arose again. But sometimes there was alternative technology, people did not remake the ballista because there were guns by the time urban populations bounced back in Europe.

Greek fire, Roman concrete, Egyptian concrete lost and reinvented. Damascus steel - exact process lost, Japanese made something similar. Egyptian block built ships are lost http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/building-pharaohs-ship.... but ships for the same purpose were reinvented and drastically better. We don't use large wooden ships today, except for re-enactments. Siege towers not used, city walls not built, but we have tanks and trenches.

So it depends on how you categorize it. Functionality of tools remains, but some specifics are drastically different, so it gets subjective.
Ruby typically uses it pretty heavily (and to great effect) alongside its metaprogramming capabilities.
Our definitions of high status seem to be quite different. Which is fair enough, considering how subjective that term is.
Yes, 15 to upvote, 125 to downvote. Asking a few serious questions is bound to earn you the three upvotes (you get rep for your questions being upvoted) required to be able to upvote. Honestly, I don't understand the fuss. You really only need to use the site as a consumer to gain enough rep to participate.
And bad pizza is more expensive than bad ramen.
Problem not solved. A savvy attendant just checks the tickets on the end of each roll. If it's a winner, go ahead and buy it. Otherwise, wait until a customer buys the loser first.
tl;dr :

Marshall Kirkpatrick editor Mashable got his start at a content farm while working at a convenience store.

Then got hired by TechCrunch after his stories got lots of traction.

Then got hired as editor of RRW after TechCrunch.

He sees AOL's content strategy creating a similarly powerful platform for great writers to rise from the depths to the top.

Kind of an interesting counter point to current criticisms that AOL is only going to produce "quantity over quality..."
I've been using backblaze for over a year and it works great:

http://www.backblaze.com/
Seems lots of ancient medicines and herbal plants with special effects were lost like Silphium[1] and Nepenthe[2].

Who knows what other amazing things perished with the Library of Alexandria[3], House of Wisdom in Baghdad[4], Library of Pergamum[5], and Imperial Library of Constantinople[6]?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepenthe
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Pergamum
[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Library_of_Constantino...
Samay One
2 Years And 10 Million Users Later, Google Latitude Locates The Check-In
The problem is not javascript, the problem is server round-trips. Local HTML5 is practically indistinguishable from a native client - but that's not what they are doing. They are making a proper server based system.
>For example buying 2 pastries instead of one gets you an extra one for free.

Do this, but check the numbers based on what people currently buy. If most people currently buy two, offer four for three, as opposed to just giving away an extra pastry to most of your clientele.

This can be especially good for larger quantities -- if someone comes in every Friday for a box of muffins for work, give them a second box for 50% off. Or offer them a 20% off if they commit to getting a box every week.
Regarding point 2, it might be worth checking out if any local university has a public library with journal access.
Once again Microsoft is bitten by expecting case insensitivity.
"Choose an existing account to sign in with (click one below):"

I don't like dicking my accounts! :-P

EDIT: epic fail, but honestly it looks like dick: http://imgur.com/c44Hf
Again this drives home a solid point that even if you're doing mechanical-turk-esque labor, if you strive to be the best in your field you'll get noticed. Content farms are, as he said, the minor leagues for a bigger tech writing gig.
Also, RRW is looking for a writer (in some ways I think this reads like a job advertisement).
Dropbox? Carbonite? MobileMe? There are other options out there.
Thanks! Is funny that I'm not the person that has posted the link, I've just read the article and I've found it makes a point :).
MTA BusTime Unveiled (w/ API)
I would gladly swap 50% of the typical HN front page material for more stuff like this.
Let's assume that they have invested since the beginning of YC with the 250 startups:

250 * 150 000 = $37 500 000

So far, 20 YC companies have been acquired generating $401 500 000 (data taken from yclist.com). If the investors own an average of 5% of the startups, their current position would have been about 50% loss:

401 500 000 * .05 = $20 075 000

I don't think this is a bad position to be in since there are still great companies that have not been acquired or exited. The $150k investment may also reduce the failure rate.
There is a bit of a survivor bias in this challenge, as the tools that are no longer being made corresponds well to tools which nobody remembers.
hiring engineers is not a good idea, your startup team should have enough talent to do 90% of the work. Some use of the money could be for design art work, or marketing (free swag). For example if you were planning to launch your startup on iPhone only, you can now use the money to contract someone to develop for Android, WP7, blackberry, this money can make the startup more complete at launch.
ha! unintentional freudian font choice? will investigate a better option :)
I meant that it is surprising that they don't hide the controls that you can't use.
Not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if the law that creates and regulates the lottery doesn't include a clause to make buying tickets by an algorithm illegal or something like it.
Mubarak to step down after his current term.
You might need to hold in your hands the ethics of the webspam team at a major search engine, though.
link http://www.localmind.com
Naive and erroneous input. Boring code. Interesting output. Yep.
I think the point he's trying to make is that in the general case, boring code is safe (boring in the eyes of someone reviewing your code, that is). That's not to say boring code is better. Remember the fast inverse square root gem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root)? Definitely not boring, but optimal in the situation that it was in.
Salesforce picks up its 3rd company in 2 months with Manymoon
Barefoot in a Blizzard
No they won't.

This isn't something Amazon (or another big player) can do, they simply don't have a large enough profit margin to support giving apple 30% of the full purchase price.

This will end up being nothing more than another straw on the camel's back. When (if?) a true competitor comes out, it seems that the best marketing for the new device will be done by Apple themselves.
Reddit joins the Free Software Foundation Help design an ad for FSF
I think I disagree with the premise, which is that 37Signals is making some sort of strategic mistake by not implementing native apps. My perspective is that back in the '90s, I wrote internal desktop apps for corporations when the web came along, setting back the user experience a decade (at least). Web apps have only recently begun to offer the kind of user experience that desktop apps provide. Because of this, I was surprised when web apps won, and won so quickly and thoroughly. But it turns out that the user's experience - although important, and especially so for consumer apps - is only one of many factors that drive technology adoption, even in the consumer market.

Certainly 37Signals might pick up some users with smoother client apps, but at least for the time being, they have to balance that against the cost of developing those apps. My guess is that most users will care about clunky HTML vs. smooth native apps about as much as they cared about clunky HTML vs. smooth native apps back in '98. Which is to say, hardly at all.
really? which developers said that to you? pretty stupid thing to say if you can't back it up
"Model steam engine profitable?"
easily solved:

Buy this book for 10$ on amazon.com
Buy this book for 13$ with your itunes account*

*explanation
This isn't correct. The color space is horseshoe-shaped and cannot be represented by a triangle of three additive primary colors. In addition, standard color gamuts tend to be quite a bit smaller than theoretically possible. Check out: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gamut . This is why hi-def TV is defining extensions to the usual colorspace.

Furthermore, the laws of physics don't particularly care that humans perceive three color dimensions, and surfaces and lights are allowed to absorb or emit whatever wavelengths they please. When you have a light source with a funky spectrum, this can cause colors to look very strange, as a surface might not reflect a funny, spiky spectrum the same way (w.r.t. the human 3-dimensional color space) it will reflect a smooth color spectrum of the same color. You've probably seen cars seemingly change color when the light source is primarily those orange-ish streetlights. My parents' red minivan, for instance, turns a red-tinted grey.
You clearly didn't read the whole article. If you did, you clearly didn't understand the article. Step back a little bit, fanboy. Microsoft wasn't copying anyone here.
Machinima: The Most Impressive LA Tech Company since MySpace
No Ad NY: An Effort to Remove All Visual Advertising From Times Square
Right, but the nonsense word is part of the referring URL for the link that the user is clicking.
Faceoff: ExpressionEngine Vs. WordPress (It's not what you think)
You do realize that they can't just grant anyone the right to edit questions or answers and that they don't have magical insight into your abilities? I don't know how you propose to solve the problem of automatically allowing those that have ability to bear responsibility, but I don't think there is any site that does it better than SO.

It sucks for the casual user.

I'm a casual user (I have 1.5K rep and subscribed reasonably early, so we're talking about 10 decent answers per year) and I don't think so.

Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the
first place.

Then SO is not for you, because SO only makes sense if its users want to help others, for whatever reason. I personally like trying to explain something clearly and concisely and I like solving the problems that are sometimes posed. I answer questions for my own good, but it is gratifying that someone else also profits.
That doesn't mean it's not a problem worth trying to solve...
Easy solution : Allow the pirates to run wild on IPv6. Everyone else will follow.
The problem here is not asking a clear question. There are millions or billions of tools that are no longer being built today. I made one just now as I was writing this post, it will never be built again.

Yes it is a cute conclusion, it outlines an interesting social phenomenon. But 'Tools never die' is not correct.

Also, Fred's steam engine is no longer built, it was unique, if you show me steam engines, it is not Fred's steam engine.
I think they are complaining because it could be far more widespread: it would actually be easier for the head than the long tail. Where it‘s harder is for News, and Bing appears to lag for recent results.

I remember that when Bing went out, everyone was wondering how close to Google the results were (and talked about it as a good thing).
There I've added it for you. It's nothing elegant but should validate most entries, other bogus entries are filtered and sent straight to /dev/null ;)
I've been a casual via-Google user for 2 1/2 years. I have 5 answers and 2 questions with a total of 1 upvote. My rep is 11. Whenever I go to SO I go in with the mentality of not even trying to participate because anything I try will be denied.
i don't have a lot of experience with vanilla GWT, but i have been using vaadin a lot lately and it is very frustrating to look at the (bloated) html that vaadin generates and not to be able to do anything about it (without designing new widgetsets).

Also i have found with vaadin the client side rendering times can be a problem. ( though my whole team is new with vaadin so there's a good chance that that is our fault)

I definitely see the appeal of vaadin, but i think that ultimately its not the paradigm you want for web application development. I think that for many cases you really need to know exactly what will run on the client side and what will run on the server.

Back when i was doing lots of silverlight development there was a very clear division between the client side and server side code. However, because they were both implemented in the same language i was able to factor out shared components (models mostly) into seperate projects that i could individually compile for both sides (for smaller chunks of functionality such as some socket protocol validtion code i just linked the files into multiple projects). This allowed for good reuse as well as good seperation. I think that this is ultimately what you want: the ability to share some code between both sides not to blur the line completely.
London Ruby Podcast: Interview with Abdel Saleh of said.fm
Oh, and the unboxing!
Sorry to disappoint you, but color theory is in fact anything BUT simple. For starters, RGB are not "THE primaries in light." In fact, primary colors aren't a property of light but of the way you perceive light. You could just as successfully choose a different set of 3 primary colors and still be able to represent [an approximation of] any other color. That is, of course, assuming you're trying to represent color to a human with 3 types of cone cells - otherwise things only get more complicated...
> This is why Cassandra is now offering counters as an API feature

This is specific to Cassandra, where the development team chose not to implement optimistic locking via version vectors. That said the counters patch essentially implements a vector of counters, very similar conceptually to a vector clock.

That said, there are some scenarios where quorums (in absence of an agreed upon view of the cluster e.g., a zookeeper-based failure detectors) could mean concurrent vector clocks, which means it's up to the application to reconcile it.

If your application can not reconcile a split brain scenario on its own and depends on a total order then yes, it's not a good fit for EC.

As I've said, I also think that serializable consistency is easier for applications to deal with (they can assume a total order) than eventual consistency but provides the strong benefit of read availability (something, quite frankly, most Internet applications require).

Most complex applications have points where consistency can be relaxed (either somewhat or fully) and points where consistency is needed.

In "we chose consistency" and "we chose availability" cases, the applications will have to deal with the consequences of those choices: much as developers may handwave the implications of an eventually consistent system (since it returns right results most of the time, not thinking whether or not their application is sensitive to a non-serializable order) they might also implement ad-hoc, poorly thought out HA solutions on top of strong consistent systems -- often times losing both availability and consistency.

The typical usage scenario of masking MySQL failures and latency by using memcache comes to mind. VoltDB is very correct to remove the need to use memcached for read latency (a caching layer in front of a database which already a cache which sits on top of a file system with a cache is a caching layer too many), but in many cases I've seen memcached used to accept reads (and sometimes writes) while the underlying database is unavailable.

Finally, the whole debate about atomicity is quite meaningless if (like many applications) you're fronting your data access layer with an RPC framework (your RPC call may go through to a database and perform a write even it times out to the application i.e., implying non-atomicity).

The CALM paper is a big move into the right direction: being able to determine synchronization points at which ACID transactions (or weaker forms of synchronizations if permissible e.g., quorums and version vectors) can be used. Incidentally, I also think a declarative language (whether like Bloom/Bud or closer to SQL) is a good way to express the constraints and let a system (which may not be all that different from a query planner) determine whether those points occur.
Hey Sam -

Excellent work on the app. It's fantastic.

A nice work around to the uploading files issue would be to piggyback your existing email solution. So after posting a message you could show a little "Attach files" link which would show an email address to mail the files to (or open a mail client if that makes more sense).
I also think it changes the game for YC participants. Part of what keeps all entrepreneurs hungry (at least early on out of necessity) is creating knowing that nothing is guaranteed at the end. Now it seems that every participant will get $150K whether their product/business is viable or not. From a competition perspective it may entice more people to apply but the bad ideas will get weeded out no matter how much money is on the table.
How a Remote Town in Romania Has Become Cybercrime Central
I'm with him on most of this, but I just can't agree that frameworks like Sproutcore or Uki are good fits for all or even most of the the web apps out there. We've spent years showing off the beautiful things you can do with HTML & CSS and most web users have come to expect that.

Sure, the desktop-in-browser approach works in some places, but ignoring standard elements and replacing them with non-semantic, inline-styled <div> elements, and script handlers (e.g. inspect elements on http://ukijs.org/examples/core-examples/controls/) strikes me as cavalier and reminiscent of how SOAP treated HTTP.

The DOM is not something to be coerced and abstracted upon: it is the presentation structure for the largest aggregation of human knowledge ever. It deserves some respect! :-)
As a soon to be poor student very likely to be studying in the UK, what carrier might this be? All I can think of on the low end are Tesco and 3, and both those have decent CS.
Boston snowfall vs. Shaq (infographic)
An illustrated guide to the internet
You put what I was thinking more succinctly than I could. I don't like the witch-hunt attitude when there's no proof that they directly focused their metrics on Google.
Developers in Montreal.

Hiring developers in Montreal. Full-time job with benefits, we pay well, and you get to work on startup-y projects (ie. agile, small teams, etc.) You get lots of freedom, ownership (projects are starting from scratch, no legacy projects here) and little corporate crap.

Specifically looking for:

- Javascript person: you should be really good at javascript, jquery etc. You'll be writing from scratch a gmail-like browser app (simpler though), using something like Sammy js, accessing data from a json backend api. When applying, show me something you've done in this spirit.

- Windows, Mac developers. You'll write a Dropbox-like app that runs on Windows and/or Mac. (It's pretty different from Dropbox but that's the closest I found.) Make sure it doesn't crash or slow down the computer. Make it Just Work. Show me something you've done when applying.

You must be located in Montreal. Contact info in my account info.
I don't like that you show accounts for Twitter and Google and then just say they aren't available...I understand the reasoning behind it but just show the images and don't provide links.

EDIT: On a 13" MBP the "Have an invite code" link is below the fold and was difficult to find at first.
Any company that is really hot will have people offering them money at a cheaper valuation than Yuris offer. Cos the other investors already know the line they have to undercut.

So the ones who take up the offer are the ones that don't appear hot enough for anyone to undercut that offer.
I'm surprised there was no mention of WebSharper in here, it's almost exactly what the author is asking for. And it's implemented in a functional programming language too...
I wish, it was like a mutual fund.

I would happily put let's say $10,000 that will give me a .17% share of the total 40 companies.
Principle of Least Astonishment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

Applies to code every bit as much as UI.
Also, don't ask for phone number...
I initially put that in there to measure (using mixpanel) how many people wanted those, to avoid overbuilding. Learned pretty quickly that people want a Twitter auth option. While we build it, wanted to at least acknowledge that they are on their way.