skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My main concern with NFC is the security, and I must say I'm not reassured by the "Security" section of this article:

> NFC is considered to be inherently secure since two physical devices must be brought together in such a short range.

I don't see how that makes it "inherently secure". In the first page, it's written that "the spec does allow for maximum distances of up to 20cm, though 4cm or less is common", I don't know how small NFC readers can be, but if I keep my NFC-enabled card in my pocket someone in a crowded bus or subway could certainly be close enough to gather the data.

Next, they go on to say that "encrypted communication is not a requirement of the NFC specification". Wow. I do hope credit cards and such at least are/will be using encryption.

I don't quite get their last concern however:

> Probably the largest possible threat for most users will be theft of an NFC device. If someone steals an NFC-enabled credit card, for instance, there's nothing to stop them from waving it at compatible pay terminals until the card is reported stolen.

This is not really a problem of the NFC technology per se, if my current visa is stolen it can be abused on online websites the same way. Does it mean that NFC forbids the use of a PIN to allow the transaction? If so, I think it's braindead, it's easy to steal cell phones and if it means that you can go to any ATM and empty my account if you can steal mine, I definitely don't want to use that.
Ya, but that comment is not bullshit-free.
> woo a lover

And suddenly I remember Valentine's Day is almost here.
Do we have to see a new variant on this every week? Or every month? It's fun to watch, it's cute, it's cool, but it's getting tedious.
I hope you read the post anyway despite the looks of my blog :D and if you are available for hire to redesign it and make it prettier, and won't cost me a fortune, let me know! :)

At the very beginning of the post, before anything else, I said that I am not a designer but a developer. I even admitted that "I may sometimes struggle to choose two colors that fit well together" ! :)

I actually explained that I have written the post on usability, SEO, performance and security aspects of techniques for web typography currently available; I do believe that many "designers", instead, often just care about the looks of what they do, while completely ignoring the issues mentioned in the post. Either because they don't care, or more likely because many, if not most, "designers" just lack for what I can see the kind of basic technical knowledge on usability/accessibility, SEO, performance, and security required to even understand those issues. I don't think that being able to make a stunning layout out of a PSD makes anybody, say, a "complete" designer.

As for the purely aesthetic aspects of the techniques I've mentioned, or of anything related to web design in general, I haven't even touched them, because I wouldn't have much to say.

So I am sad that the very basic layout of my blog has perhaps distracted you -and possibly others- from the contents of that post. I should perhaps get a designer to make a proper custom template for me so to avoid this in the future, since I plan on writing more on "non-aesthetic" aspects of web design :)
Although you'll not hear about it on Engadget (as it's not interesting to high-end gadget hounds, they barely mention the low-end Androids, which are high-end by world standards), Nokia got demolished at the low end by a bunch of companies you've never heard of. It was basically coincidental that at the same time they missed the bus on the new portable computer (with phone capabilities) market that Apple invented.

Pretty bad luck for a company that was raking in billions selling lots of different low-cost phones to developing nations (which you wouldn't even believe is possible if you went to the John Gruber School of Business). Unfortunately those billions insulated them from the shocks, much like Microsoft happily ignored the internet for years. But the perfect storm of Apple, Android and low-end commodity competitors hit them hard from multiple directions (nice hardware, open ecosystem, low prices were all previous Nokia advantages).

Elop mentions it though, so at least Nokia is aware of the problem: "Let's not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally - taking share from us in emerging markets."
The Diaspora that wasn’t, and the way into the walled gardens.
Thanks apu, that makes sense. I am kind of new around here, so I hadn't noticed that yet.
I'm sure the intent wasn't to be demeaning, but surely you can just go down and talk to people, if you're interested in this sort of thing? Do you have to video them and publish them to the world?

My recommendation would be to interview them, but then anonymise and write them up as a series of blog entries rather than have a series of published videos.
JAVA DEVELOPER /-CONTRACT- RTH | New York | eBay Classifieds (Kijiji) | 8954705
The Ada Initiative — increasing participation of women in open tech and culture
I haven't really had to scale a system up like this before. As a freelance web developer moving to a bigger slice? on linode has been good enough for any wordpress blog or simple site.

That said, I didn't realize what a massive undertaking it could be like this describes.

Anyone had any similar scaling challenges with less conventional web-stacks? Im particular I'm wondering how a node.js/mongodb stack would do this same thing.
I hear you liedra, but I respectfully disagree.

I am sure there are many others that would be interested in learning their stories too.

Who knows, maybe one of them might go viral and it can change their lives. Who knows?

It would be kinda selfish to hear their stories and not share them, don't you think?
Another difference between Sweden and the US is that in Sweden if you're studying CS then you spend 4 years taking basically nothing but CS and Math classes. Sure you can take classes outside of those departments, but it's neither necessary nor actively encourages.

In the US it seems that most people take a far wider variety of courses. So even people who major in CS have dabbled in some Humanities, Languages and/or other sciences.
True. Which is why the Netflix app is basically just an HTML app with a thin native wrapper.

When native means only iOS then it make sense to just write a native version instead of a mobile web app, but when it means having to write a version (or two) for iOS, one for Android, one for Blackberry and one for Windows Mobile 7 then it makes a lot more sense to write a mobile HTML version that works on all of them.

And then there's the same old update headache.
English, Tamil and Malayalam.
I think one of the problems is that the milk trucks and the rest of the industry do respect DST so if you lose one hour the milk might spoil. At least it's what I heard a farmer say on the TV a couple years ago.
One of the big problems with Android at the moment is phone manufacturers not playing ball with its customers. Samsung have repeatedly neglected their phones in favour of releasing more new Android phones. At the moment, HTC is probably the king of Android phones, and most non-casual Android users will probably want to go with them, or with a newer hyped phone.

If Nokia were to enter the Android market and promote their open ethos throughout the Android community then the company could make a mint. Something as simple as releasing driver code for their phones so people can modify code to be run on their phones would put them miles in front with the Android community. If Nokia were to do these simple things then projects like the GAOSP wouldn't be so relied on to provide a usable phone with support.
Maybe that's what your read, but you could also read that Lady Gaga has more income from iTunes just because more copies were sold there. And ofcourse this has nothing to do with Spotify. They just have a contract with the labels. How labels distribute income is up to the labels.
At least in the US they'd be free to fire the dead weight. The laws in Finland are made to protect the workers, and a previously fired employee must be considered before hiring somebody new. This might be a reason why Nokia have so many external contract workers.
Even not considering that HTML5 History API, is it hard to just consider "/1234/spam" and "/#!1234/spam" synonymous and use the latter when you navigate with JavaScript enabled?

I.e.:

1. You visit "/1234/spam", and get served full HTML page with some (optional) JavaScript for progressive enhancement.

2. You click on "/4321/ham" link, but JavaScript hooks it up and replaces URI with "/#!4321/ham" (if your browser don't support HTML5 history API, of course). Yes, there is one full-page reload.

2.1. (Alternative) Or - even better - you can be redirected to "/#!1234/spam" on step 1, so you won't notice the glitch on your first click.

3. You continue to navigate with AJAX, now without reloads. You can bookmark pages and so on (and if you somehow happen to lose JavaScript support you could just remove "#!" to get a valid URI).

Very simplified implementation cost:

1. `$("a[href]").attr("href", function() { return this.href.replace(/^\/(?!#)/, "/#!"); });` on every page

2. `if (location.pathname === "/" and location.hash.match(/^\/#!/) { $("#content").load(location.hash.replace(/^#!/, "/") + "?format=content-only"); ... }` on / page.

3. Ability to return undecorated ("article-only") content on `/1234/spam?format=content-only` requests.
Half of all the CS classes I've taken were at a 2 year community college and I still learned things on a more physical level. Not to mention physics and such were prereqs for some of the classes, and most definitely for transferring to a 4 year program. These same community colleges offered courses on assembly and logic and circuits and more. 2 year. I'm not even talking about universities at this point (which, also, I've attended and I don't see any variation from the above either).

Us CS majors with our heads stuck in code and theory may have never reached the depths of inner workings as you may have in a full 4+ year CE program, but that doesn't mean you get to demean an entire field of study thinking that people don't learn these concepts that apparently make you and other CE majors gods. And yes, no matter what your intent, you are definitely coming off as someone that is being incredibly snobby to say the least.

I have learned and I know at least a good smattering of basics on a physical level and have seen such curricula at all kinds of schools of higher learning. I would hope that anyone that intends on using their knowledge somewhere would care to understand just as much if not more regardless of their major or education. People that think it's acceptable to store phone numbers as integers clearly didn't.
Seedcamp London 2011 Winners announced
Of course, you will just use an abstraction which detects if that feature is available and falls back to hashes. Feature detection and graceful fallbacks is par for course with JS.
That is pretty cool. I would love to see more.
No, I say it because none of the points I mentioned are relevant on mobile. At the moment I'm never without good Internet access. The biggest advantage of web apps is the idea that wherever you have a modern browser and a net connection you get the same experience. But that isn't true on mobile since most sites have dedicated mobile interfaces which aren't as usable as their desktop equivalents due to hardware constraints. In addition, since I'm never without my mobile, a native app is by definition always available, negating much of the advantage of the ubiquitous web model.

On the other hand, I do expect my native apps to either sync or act as a client for net based services.

At the moment I use precisely zero web based apps on mobile with the exception of gmail, which I resort to only when searching since the iOS mail client search is useless.
It's interesting that all the docs and APIs are open and they advertise that, but say nothing about the platform. It's great for the client to be open and for users to own their data, which presumably is RDF and very portable, but risky to invest in building anything that's dependent on a closed platform. I suppose it comes down to what service level agreements are provided for the service.
Google is not delivering a truly open handset because it's in their corporate interest, not because it would detract from the user experience.

I'd rather wait for one company to try to and get their UX together than wait for Google to do an 180 on their data collection policies or for Apple to tear down the walls of their garden.
Passphrase-protected SSH keys on an encrypted disk. The latter is key - it makes mistakes so much less likely.
Most likely there'd be somebody offering to do the dishes instead. Or so I'd hope.
There is no such thing as "Symbian feature phone". Every Symbian phone is a smartphone.
Well, you should use whatever rocks your boat. Personally, I think its a little weird that Twitter Web consumes a lot of CPU as compared to the Desktop app. As for GMail, I find switching between labels (on the web interface) very slow, if you have a ton of labels/emails. So instead of setting up Gears or something, I just started using a native app.
From the perspective of a small (web-focused) dev shop that is getting lots of RFQs for mobile apps, I think there are really two main reasons why our clients and prospective clients want to have a mobile app developed. Either they:

1. Have something (a website, a business, a city department, whatever) that they want it to be "on mobile", i.e. they need a mobile app just because they need to cover the mobile angle. However, the mobile app itself is not usually the core revenue strategy, it's just part of the bigger picture.

2. Or, they want to sell a mobile app that is not suitable for building with HTML5. I.e. the app is the revenue-generator, and it must be performant/integrate closely with native hardware/etc. (such as a game).

I think we can satisfy the people in category 1 by building HTML5 apps, and using Phonegap if they want them to be available in app stores.

I think we can satisfy people in category 2 by developing native iOS apps for sale in the Apple App Store, since from what I can tell, this is the only App Store that really generates money.

People who want native apps on non iOS devices, for whatever reason, are probably people we get a subcontractor to handle, or even take a pass entirely.
Sending a e-mail does not add any real 'content' over telegraphing the same message. It's just a change of presentation layer. I still would rather send e-mails.

And the same way I would rather create JS-driven sites. It allows me to be more creative with the presentation, while staying in the comfort zone of HTML/CSS/JS. Offloading work from my servers to the computers (that, based on my experience, are near-idle while browsing) of end users is a nice benefit.

Oh, and I would disagree about the 'There is nothing "lower latency" here' statement. I visited lifehacker.com out of curiosity, and noticed something: with JS navigation, I could scan headlines in the sidebar while the article was loading, something I would not be able to do while a 'traditional' page was rendering.

Of course, it's not a general rule. There are projects where you support IE6/7, and then there are projects where you don't give a damn whether it works for anything but edge versions. Same with using JS as presentation layer.
This article is really out of date, and only describes a problem with older browsers.

This problem will be mostly eradicated with the new pushState and replaceState functions in HTML5, which allow you to rewrite the URL without needing hashes. So while the URL will be changed by JS as you navigate a web app, if someone saves the link and puts it on their own page and Google spiders the link, it will work fine (so long as you send the entire page when the request is not via XHR) because the entire URL is sent in the request, unlike with hashes.

The problem is with Google visiting your site and trying to spider it. There are other solutions for this though.
Thanks for the feedback.

I agree that "installing" an offline web app on something like the iPhone is a bit odd - largely because there is very little you have to do. You can just install it as a Bookmark or on the Home Screen (where it can have it's own logo etc. - like a normal app).

I'm more targeting getting structured (or semi structured) data onto a mobile device, possibly make the content editable and allow changes to be sync'ed back to the server to be shared with others or collected via an export or API.

e.g. I can take an Excel spreadsheet, turn it into an offline HTML 5 app, allow users to edit the data, sync all the changes and export it back out as a modified spreadsheet.
There is no such thing as a free Android, except if you tear the whole Java user space away.

And I'm REALLY curious about why you and 14 other people think that Android is such a good mobile OS. The VM is both a legal and speed liability, the Android UI is not GPU-accelerated and the entire OS is still immature (see the embarrassing bugs with the SMS or the browser security holes).
WP7 isn't shaping up to be anything. Nokia sold more N8's than all the WP7 manufacturers combined.

Secondly, there is room in the market for other players as indicated by Bada's success.
>All of that adds exactly zero to the actual content of the blog. You know, 'content', the stuff I actually visit blogs for.

Who cares? Only you. Gawker cares about lower latency = more pageviews per visit = more $$$ from ads.
Please stop thinking like a HN-er when discussing the entire market. If Nokia were to enter the Android market they would be just another Android producer. No one cares about drivers except hackers.
And in Russia timetables on all railway stations throughout the country are Moscow time. Even in the Far East regions.
Cloud-Tiered Architectural Models are Bad Except When They Aren't
Converting the phone number to hex and then storing them as character bytes as opposed to long integers, might save even more space on disk at the cost of hex-decimal conversion :)
In France, I believe you can get it unlocked after 6 months, even if your contract is for 24.
People don't care about different drivers, but they care when they want to download the Twitter app, only to realise that their new phone is on 1.6 and that they require 2.1, and Samsung will not upgrade their phone. A lot of open-source projects for community builds of Android get plenty of casual users wanting to get the most out of a phone they're currently tied to that the manufacturer has effectively dropped support for.

These problems exist because manufacturers have not thought about these issues, and would rather line their pockets with new customers than provide support for existing customers/suckers.
Here's the thing with Spotify: The major four all own a share of the company (around 4-6%, if I'm not mistaken). For them to be willing to license their music, they negotiated a sweet deal: They get a lot more per play than indie artists (or artists on labels not on the major four).

So, if you're a Spotify customer, paying 100 SEK ($15)/month and listening exclusively to, say, Santigold, most of the loot will still end up in the big four's pockets.
Study maps teens' social status in relation to aggression
Spotify cannot be compared to iTunes and amazon, or traditional CD sales. It is more equivalent to royalties from FM radio play. Lots of people don't seem to get this.

The smart musicians realise they can do things like put their album on there for the month before the release, leave it on there for the month after its release, then yank it away and watch the MP3 sales climb. I see this quite a lot.

Planet Mu records in particular seem to have a subset of their extensive back catalogue on there that is constantly in rotation. This practice has basically forced me to buy music from them on more than one occasion. It's like the mythical practice of drug dealers giving kids free samples to get them hooked :)
Cross Platform Scalable Vector Graphics with svgweb
Winter, snow, and solar panels: A mixed forecast
With many people in the U.S. bemoaning the punishing winter weather this year, solar-panel owners have their own special gripe: sun-blocking snow and ice. But at the same time, very cold temperatures have given some owners a power boost.
Whistlepig: minimalist real-time full-text search
> but normally those things are governed by EU laws

There are EU laws, but each member is free to add its own rules.

In Belgium, tied sales are illegal (or were mostly illegal until very recently), and subsidized phones linked to contracts are considered tied. Which makes them illegal in Belgium.

And nobody is going to buy a locked phone for the same price as an unlocked one.
Sure! This is why I suggested writing them up :) But I think it's also very important to respect the people you're interviewing. They're a vulnerable group for a reason, and you need to take particular care with vulnerable people.

Here are some useful articles on the subject:

* http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/social_scienc... (homeless young people suggest that offering cash incentives is not a good way to go about research)

* http://www.homelesshub.ca/(S(yoldjoie4yd15x45fir1sn3t))/Reso... (a set of research guidelines for dealing with homeless people)

If you really want to help homeless people out, share their stories, and contribute to improving their quality of life, you should respect that there are some serious ethical principles that you need to be aware of and keep in mind. Otherwise, all you're doing is "entertainment".
I don't know anything about the future, but the future is accelerating, innovation happen unexpectedly (Egypt revolution, Google, Ipad ...). So let's expect some new agent to appear and dominate the market.
Well. given how completely and utterly useless Java is, it's incredible that it's ended up powering so many major internet sites and important systems like banks. Obviously, successful internet companies like Google are all idiots and don't realise that <Scripting Flavour of the month> is the only solution for their issues and if only they'd adopt that, then they'd be really successful. After all, the REAL issues in large scale software engineering are how few characters we use to solve a toy problem. All that actual software engineering being done in Java doesn;t count because Java was hyped 15 years ago (all those business running on Java don't realise that their success isn't actually real, and they're all hype too).

Message to HN: Grow the fuck up. Ruby / Python / Lisp are cool. I like them. They're not the right tool for everything. Java is extremely good at things it's being used for right now and it maintains that position by being better than other language / ecosystems. That will undoubtedly change at some point but not yet.
I went for the quick fix with fewer opacity for now. Will look into restructuring the screenshots into a row later.

Thanks for your feedback! Glad you like the website :)
Phones are usually "bought" for 1€ with a 24 month contract attached. At the end of the contract, the lock is lifted and you can use your phone on all networks.
"When it comes to sex, the Bible is often divided against itself," writes Knust.

Can't really sum up the Bible better than that, in all aspects, not just those of a sexual nature.

There's some really beautiful writing in the Bible, and more importantly (in my opinion), Biblical texts have inspired some of the must amazing music ever written. That, for me, is why it is so culturally important.

Anyone who reads it as a guide to life is going to end up being very selective with chosing what to follow and what to ignore.

FYI, I'm an atheist.
Androidfeatures.co.cc