skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google doesn't manufacture ereaders, phones or tablets. It sells a mobile OS and it's the proprietor of one of many app catalogs for Android. It also has little control over which ereader apps are shipped with Android devices (except for the one Samsung model they sell).

As for its ebook store: they launched it less than two months a go; it's impossible to tell what their plans are. Outside of the US, they only offer books that are in the public domain. Even within the US, they don't seem very interested in selling ebooks: 'Google eBookstore' is only one of dozens of available retailers within the Google eBooks app.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/discover-more-than-3-...
HackerNews OnePage for Safari
You mean like how Microsoft helps Apple by allowing iTunes to run on Windows and allow purchases?

Maybe Apple should block purchases on Amazon.com on Safari on the iDevices and demand a 30% cut. After all, isn't it helping Amazon?

The point is that the iPhone becomes more valuable because of the apps. For example, the iPhone would be more attractive to owners of Sony and other ebook readers if the app was approved.

I think Microsoft should stop helping it's competitor Google by allowing it to work on Windows machines. They should just pre-install a redirect from google.com to bing.com in the hosts file.
I've personally observed huge boosts in the number of concurrent connections a machine can handle with Apache-worker vs Apache-prefork. I've personally observed PHP applications going into fairly high CPU use, and then settling down a lot once I installed APC (which prevents the machine from having the parse the PHP on every request). It's not conjecture, it's observation. I also know that due to the nature of how .NET apps work, they never have that kind of problem. Neither do most other modern web frameworks. Sorry I don't have the graphs-- I don't use Microsoft apps any more. Good day!
Is there a precedent for conditions of a uniform voluntary agreement being considered "predatory"?

Edit: The parent comment did not deserve downvotes, folks.
As a token of appreciation for anyone who takes the survey and tweets it out to their networks, anyone who RTs the survey with my twitter name (@adam_conrad) will be entered to win a $10 iTunes gift card that I will announce February 13th!
> I really don't think that Google wants to get into a fight over who sucks up users click streams to advance their business...

Presenting your competitor's clickstream as your own takes it to a new level.

> Those who live in glass houses really flick boogers.

And bloggers!
Apple doesn't care nearly as much about being the single login as it does about being the single currency for digital goods.
Microsoft was a monopoly. They tried to leverage that monopoly by winning a new market. The monopoly was not illegal. The leverage market share in a new market is not illegal. The leveraging a _monopoly_ into a new market share was what they were found guilty of.

Apple has had the tablet in the market for less than a year. Let's see how things work out for a few years before we call them a monopoly, shall we?

I think Apple would be very, very happy to exit 2012 with 75% market share in tablets - the point at which they can't really be called a monopoly anymore.
Speaking of non-sequiturs, I'm still waiting for someone to establish this link between 'emotional news prevailing in the west' and 'feminism'
That's a good idea. Thanks! I'm curious at what the usual pay is like though - do startups really try to compensate you with more options/equity than with salary?
Key point from deep in the article:

We have no idea how to build such a system at the moment...

This is a proposal at this point more than a project.
True, but how many of those people are there in a given cable provider's market?

A la carte seems like a huge incentive for the cable companies to drop channels, and offer a lesser product for what comes out to be a higher price.
NPR does a great job at talking about stuff that's already in the news, but they aren't really a news service.

BBC has reasonably good coverage of American politics, but it's not written for Americans so there's a lot of cognitive overhead. Because of this it doesn't really make sense to read it like a newspaper, though their take on specific issues is often good, albeit brief. Many of their article are barely more than headlines.

And PBS is decent, but it's mainly targeted at people 60+ and retired. Waiting until 7pm for news from last week just isn't viable for people who actually need to know what's going on.
That's funny, I thought it was just the opposite. It's amazing how far out of his way Gruber was going to avoid any criticism beyond the harmless dig at the rules changing without the rules having been changed. He even went so far as to suggest this would actually improve the user experience!

And Amazon did specifically get critiqued for strong-arm tactics in that post, so it's not like he was just in a cheerful mood and didn't want to say anything negative about anyone.
I tried to find him, but my usual method doesn't seem to be working: http://maps.google.com/?q=Wael%20Ghonim
I LOVE the idea behind this app!

If released, there's a small chance it could become a running joke, especially if you'd promise to donate 50% of profits to charity or something. (Maybe iDonate would be accepted?)
Thanks! Are there any neighbourhoods that I really want to avoid?
Does anyone know what mechanism Sony's app uses for book purchases? Is it all in-app? That seems a clear violation of the rules. The Kindle app doesn't work this way, all purchases are done through the browser.

Until this is clarified (by Sony or Apple preferably), how can anyone get all uppity about this?

Maybe Sony's app blatantly violates the existing rules.
Does anyone else find it ironic that much of the Apple store is powered by one-click purchasing, a patent that Apple licensed from Amazon?

Jeff Bezos must be kicking himself over that one.
Lies, damned lies and statistics: Most popular Help Desk Software in the world
Ask HN: What meetups am I missing out on (in NY)?
I'll be having a lot more free time soon, and want to attend more dev/tech related meetups. What are some of the important ones you can recommend to me besides the H&F one?

(Those with beer are the best, but not a necessity)
There's also an official bookmarklet: http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html
I know there isn't much HN can do about it but can we stop opinion-based voting?
I do realize this issue has been touched a number of times but I don't believe it has ever been truly addressed.

I will go ahead and mention the comparison to reddit because I know it will be brought up. I stopped visiting that site for this very reason. There's nothing more annoying than seeing a legitimate, well-thought-out comment offering perfectly capable intellectual stimulation... downvoted because it doesn't agree with the general population on HN. It's counter-productive to HN's cause (progression, which can't come about without some opposition of current standards)... and every time I see it I lose more and more hope in humanity. I upvote these types of downvoted comments every time I see them. I'm tired of it and I may end up putting HN behind me like I did reddit.

So can we please all just come to an understanding and agreement to not downvote comments you don't agree with? And better yet, upvote comments that provide intellectual stimulation even when you disagree with them.
We weren't upset because other people got away with something. In fact, I don't think anyone has created a remotely similar app.

We were upset because it demonstrates that Apple can effectively make up reasons to block your app when none previously exist.

Moreover, it shows they clearly have no sense of humor.
If he's available, Microsoft is in the market.
Metered Bandwidth Is About Preserving Old Media Business Models
Most of the transfers are to old people, a group which is disproportionately unlikely to be poor or to engage in a violent uprising.

Of course, if the poor are truly as evil and dangerous as you say, wouldn't it be better just to wall them off from the rest of us? For the cost of welfare, we could triple the money we spend on the police.
I think it's an interesting question, but I think it will be technically difficult to differentiate between a person using data (say, with a plugin that indexes everything they browse, or a separate program that indexes their browser cache) and something like the Bing toolbar.
You mean it cost millions to approve and sell Angry Birds? Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days and most apps are quite small.

>As for the $99/year developer fee, there are costs involved in providing support, moderating forums, and approving applications

I am sure Xcode costs a lot to develop etc. But Apple still gives it away to developers and has free documentation, examples, forums etc. Why?

You're excluding the benefit of the Apps which make the iPhone more valuable to the users and are a big reason that people buy iPhones. No wonder Jobs like to tout the 300k+ app number every chance he gets.
Profound issues of right and wrong are rarely this entertaining. Conclusion: this isn't serious. But holy smoke is it fun to watch.
Had feminism not prevailed in the West, the West would be a male-dominated society, and things like the news would be controlled exclusively by men. Additionally, men would have continued to abide by traditional gender roles (which would have not been questioned or undergone change[1]), and the traditional male gender role is less overtly emotional. Hence, the news would be less overtly emotional.

That's a perfectly reasonable and straightforward argument which raises eyebrows only because it hints at the idea that feminism had some negative effects.

The comparison to Al-Jazeera might not be sound, however--masculine emotional reserve is a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic/Northern European culture, not necessarily Arabic culture.

[1] Feminism, as a natural consequence of advancing the position of women in society, questions gender roles by necessity. This is what makes the reference to Thatcher so inept--Thatcher advanced in a male-dominated profession by following a masculine gender role; Thatcher's Britain was willing to accept a woman PM, but only so long as she governed like a man. This is a far cry from what feminists would like to see.
I agree. I enjoy that you get answered so quickly and if you are rep whore, you can just ask good questions, they get up-voted and you get points.
But I really don't see any point, it's a serious Q&A site.
They only seized the DNS. They haven't shut down the site.

Try http://88.80.11.29/
most of the benefit of the technique comes from recreating google results

I'm not 100% sure this is the case.

Consider that an user wants a chicken enchilada recipe.

1. They go to a site that they trust for high quality data.
(I like food&wine, saveur, epicurious, rick bayless for mexican, ...)
2. They search for "chicken enchilada"
3. They select the most appealing result (not necessarily the first one), based on author, snippet, rating, photo, etc. Domain knowledge.

If you can associate (via the referrer) "chicken enchilada" with that page, you've encapsulated a lot of information - manual selection of site, manual selection of a page within that site. It's potentially useful (especially for long tail - people who have to go directly to sites because search engines fail them).

Is there too much noise? Perhaps - you'd really have to look at the raw data to find out. Maybe you only want to look at "q=", "search=", and whatever phpBB, etc use. Maybe the signal that rises out of that noise is valuable.

One big downside is that the results would be biased towards the preferences of people who install toolbars. :) The other downside is that SEOs could game the system by feeding MS bad data. (True if they're only looking at google data, too.)
I am highly amused that the colloquialisms applied are exactly opposite to reality.
EHow goes to Facebook registration and login only.
It's not even the fact that Ron Paul was essentially just deleted from existence by every mainstream American news outlet. Remember, this was the period when McCain went from 2% support to winning the Republican primary in about a month after CNN, Fox, and the NYT teamed up to swing the electorate.

They basically figured out that they were only going to get paid for this cycle if there was a Republican candidate who actually had a shot at winning, so they buried all of McCain's opponents and completely censored the entire grassroots movement.
If this is the case, then it's rather easy to stop Microsoft from doing this. Just use POST instead of GET in the search page if you detect the browser is IE8. The referrer will always be the generic http://www.google.com/search with no search term information.
I doubt this is the point of the article. To me it is about rejections with no grounds on violation of any specific rules involved. It's about the ambiguity, or the lack of meaning thereof, in the "rules" itself.
Which is why simple voting sucks!
See http://frankhirsch.net/nbtsm.html#nbtsm
Julia sets with HTML5 and web workers
Just make sure you're the one selling and rating the bonds, easy money!
The guy in charge of Al Jazeera English used to run news at - wait for it... the CBC (that's the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). (http://english.aljazeera.net/aboutus/2007/12/200861501043226...)
This isn't a case of "copying" though. That would entail reverse engineering an existing product, which Bing is (according to this post) not doing. They are instead importing the search results themselves from Google.com.
There's a saying that "an armed society is a polite society". If people know you're going to be armed, they're much more cautious about performing potentially threatening or violent behaviors.
I've been using Arq for a little while now (former Mozy user) and can recommend it. Arq is substantially better than some of the other S3 backed storage solutions as it takes steps to minimize S3 traffic, keeps incremental backups of recently changed files (ala Apple Timemachine), and an open sourced (Github) restore client in case they go out of business and you need to restore your files.

If you're worried about cost, you can also use their Reduced Redundancy storage which would save you a chunk out of that.
Can someone familiar with Matplotlib comment on how Sho's Python plotting utilities[1] compare?

This looks cool; still trying to wrap my head around what's fundamentally new vs. what is packaging together existing Python libraries and letting it all talk to .Net code (not that that isn't neat and useful in itself).

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/sho/...
Looks like "R.Net" - which is great, since I've never been a fan of the R language syntax and the available documentation
Searching for viagra 
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So there’s no such thing as "red with a little green" -- there’s just a less intense red. The brain physically cannot see "greenish-red" because the filter removes that information.

Under ordinary circumstances this is true. However, it has been shown that the human brain can be made to see reddish-green, yellowish-blue, etc. Scientific American published an article about this strange hack of human visual perception just last year. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seeing-forb...
And Google seems to be happy that their search engine is accessible by IE users.
There is no "responsibility that comes with leadership." There is fiduciary responsibility, which they are doing a good job with (which may include "jerking other companies around"), regardless of market position. There is responsibility to your customers, because no company can survive without that (which also may include "jerking other companies around"). But if there isn't clear monopolistic behavior, there is no responsibility to other companies.

Apple may have 90%[1] of the mindshare in the market, but they can't use that position to keep somebody else from entering the market and they can't use their position to control another market.

I want to be able to read books using the Kindle app. I will be pissed if I can't. It will make me seriously consider whether to get an iPad or an Android tablet when they get good enough (since that will be my primary reading platform at that point). But Apple has every right to do that. They aren't keeping Amazon from entering the electronic book market in any way, and I can find dozens of devices roughly equivalent to my iPhone that I can read those Amazon books on.

Kicking ass does not a monopoly make.

[1] Yes, I made this number up, but I think it is a reasonable approximation of something you could never quantify, anyway.
I'd use it if it had better tools support. Great language though.
I just read your thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095500 ...and that's a great idea. It would be very difficult to implement accurately, but definitely not impossible.
It really depends on what you're interested in because there are a ton of neat things to check out in NYC, but often the most interesting and entertaining one is the Web Performance Meetup.

http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-NY/
"Amazon isn't going to lose any sleep over pulling their app from the Apple App Store."

There are 160 million devices that run Apple's iOS, including 15 million iPads. Amazon has sold less than 10 million Kindles. Amazon customers want to read ebooks on their mobile devices, not on a desktop computer. Amazon knows this, they can't afford to leave iOS. In the most extreme scenario they'll offer a web app for MobileSafari instead of a native app, circumventing the App Store.
I'm not sure Google wants to get pulled into a conversation about automated tracking of user search data.

PR "wins" can become PR nightmares in a blink.
I voted for this post because I agree with it, we should definitely stop opinion-based voting.

;-)
Check out serveraday.com from OLM - while todays deal isn't something to jump on, they often have commodity servers for $30 a month, and occasionally for $25 a month. These are decent servers, and give you full access to a dedicated machine for a very reasonable price. Additionally, their servers have been reliable and their network has been more than satisfactory.
Poll: What was the first programming language you learned?
Actionscript (Adobe Flash)
Scripting Language (PHP, Javascript, etc.)
They should have made one of the nonsense queries something like "westealourresultsfromothersearchengines" and linked it to something like yes.com just to make the copying easier for non-tech people to understand.
Look into the cheapest Rackspace cloud servers.
Isn't this basically covered in every legal agreement since time began?

"Apple reserves the right to refuse..."

I'll bet there's a line in the developer agreement to that effect. A catch-all defense used at times like this. Shouldn't come as any surprise.
I made the mistake of learning Visual Basic 6 first. That's like starting a race in last place.
Didn't Apple say something along the line of "No more fart apps anymore" when they updated their App store approval guidelines last time around?
netflix has it right: purely based on market rate at your given percentile. your percentile reflects your abilities, personality, hard work, etc.

which ties into...

there's a saying that the only way to get a raise in technology is to jump ship. i'm doing that right now and it's worked out to raise my salary by 21%. i'm in new york city. the place has seen a spike in 2010. the money's floating around again after a few tight years, there are plenty of people who think they have a good idea, and the only thing missing is more developers. all of you new yorkers out there, go get your raise. and don't accept any excuses.

ps: throw-away account.
Look into these guys:

http://wpengine.com/
Although I see the cheese of sarcasm in your statement, but AFAIK, official Apple App Store policy (this time, written down), is that you can't have a "donation" application. Which is why you don't see a "Give to the American Red Cross" or what have you application.
Good point - I am interested in development (all kinds), scalability, databases, etc.

Adding Web Performance to my to attend list!
Another example like this that has just come out - Qwiki by Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of facebook. The new search engine pulls data for its results directly from Wikipedia and adds it's own flare. The open source text comes directly from Wikipedia.

Qwiki - see contents
http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/George_VI_of_the_United_Kingdom
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_vi_of_the_united_kingdom
Ask HN: If you weren't going to be a web tech entrepuener what would you be?
@silverstorm - That's bad, but I think FOX may have topped them with this: http://plixi.com/photos/home/73294801

Step 1: Locate Egypt on a map...
While I feel your pain (and cringe on your behalf), I will say that many winners of NASCAR races started in last place.
The perils of the walled garden: Apple can take their ball and go away anytime.
Gruber hardly ever gets this close to criticizing Apple.

This comment reveals a level of self-delusion that's perhaps unhealthy. Especially seeing as Gruber has a pretty long history of strongly criticizing Apple's policies for the App Store...
The idea was worth the try, but I'm not surprised it was rejected.

As an iOS developer myself, I respect Apple's power to police the app store as they see fit. It's their platform and they have every right to set the precedent on what content is allowable. Approving your app would spawn numerous clones and obviously Apple doesn't agree with your utilization of in-app purchases.
Bluefin Labs Reveals How It Is Tying Social Media To TV
How Serious are You About Writing?
this is brilliant. all those years of "innovation" ruined by a simple MiTM tap.
My assumption has always been the primary reason for the $99 cost is the code signing, similar to buying an SSL cert. There may also be a bit of a filter-function involved: if you aren't willing to spend $99, they don't want you in the playground.

Honestly, I really doubt they are making much money on developer tools (unlike, say, Microsoft). Remember, you only need to pay the $99 to publish (not to develop) and only one person per company has to pay it, so of those 300k+ apps, the actual number of developer subscriptions is a lot lower.
In this case I'm going to call it an admission of incompetence. Best to head that bad boy off at the pass.
Audioscribe Egypt - Help transcribe speak2tweet
30,000 customers makes a piece of software "the world's most popular?" Wow, the help desk market is way small.

I wonder how they missed all the traditional help desk vendors (like Remedy) from the picture ;-)
Yes, it would be a challenge to make it work, and work fast! Lots of numbers to crunch! But it's definitely possible, you could e.g. use idle threads to collate data in the background while not handling requests, and serve results leveraging the collated database.

The simplest way would probably be to cluster the users according to their preferences and serve your results according to which cluster a user belongs to. More complex mechanisms, like detailed preference correlation graphs might be possible, but would consume huge amounts of storage.
But I really fancy this idea, and I do seriously believe it to be one of the next big breakthroughs which are going to happen.

Unfortunately I do currently not have the time to handle such a big assignment, so I decided to throw the idea out there, free for the grabs. I want to have that thing, and I don't care much who's gonna make the big bucks from it!

But try to convince anyone that an openly touted idea is actually worth something. People still seem believe that if you're not secretive about your ideas, they probably suck... :-(