skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If this pans out it may prove to be one of the most interesting changes in the mobile landscape for awhile. Nokia has the hardware capabilities and while I don't personally like it, MS has come up with a pretty good OS which I'm sure is only going to evolve rapidly. Don't think anything I've seen yet will pry my Android out of hands but I would love to see his pan out and form another big mobile player. I think the market can easily support 3 solid platforms.
Why I'm dropping out of college and you should too.
How 3 Companies Are Using NoSQL Database Riak
This has already happened to me. Right down to the infographic image on a homepage! Basically, bright people see the same problems and draw similar conclusions.
Sorry to be mean here, but I'd like to know... Why would you spend a butt-load on a lawyer to create a C-Corp when as soon as you've done that your money will dry up?
css-tricks.com has a ton of great snippets for when you've gotten more comfortable with HTML/CSS/Javascript. Chris Coyier is very knowledgeable and writes great tutorials.
How about a drinking straw, perhaps one off a child's drink carton (I used one to make a hinge part for a NDS recently), to pop the spring and then a small magnetic screwdriver poked through the straw (or gravity)?

Oh, must go and try this ...
I'd prefer it just redirect to the top of news.ycombinator.com/. The ranking of stories change over time, so at some point "more" has no meaning when the underlying list has changed. Since everyone who sees the expired link page, goes back to the top, the site should redirect there for me automatically.

I guess another option is to have the URL be like:
http://news.ycombinator.com/items?start=31
then clicking "more" sends you to whatever the current items 61-90 are.
Ugh... input elements are the worst when it comes to compatibility across different browsers and operating systems. I've wracked my brain for hours working out various techniques to get a simple newsletter signup for working right across the majority of my visitor's platforms. I think anyone who has dealt with that can feel for the guy. ;)
One reason not to use CDN-hosted common scripts is to not share visitors statistics with the CDN. Believe it or not, but it is a valid concern for many businesses.
Ask HN: Best iPad Browser?
What browser do you use on iPad? Safari, or a 3rd party browser like iCab? I'd love to know which browser you think is best on iPad, and why. For me, Safari falls short since it doesn't cache pages very good at all, which makes you have to reload pages when you switch back and forth. I know iPad is best for one task at one time, but I really want better background tab/page management. Before I actually buy one, I'd love to know what your thoughts on iPad browsers are. Thanks!
I know that MediaTemple is very cozy with the design community. Other than that, I can't glean much from their web site that would separate them from other hosting providers. I am curious for any insight on this as well!
Facebook tests features among small pools of users to see how they interact with new interfaces. If they receive positive feedback and meet usability benchmarks, they push the change to the entire userbase.

Short answer: yes, pretty much.
Yeah. Doesn't everyone just whip out their HP 41CX?
How would you characterize 10k monthly paycheck for a fulltime ruby-developer?
Hi,

I am interested in what quality of work I should get for 10k monthly paycheck. How many hours would you put in for that kind of amount?
good point. I'll look at making a random URL function
I'm trying Terra right now ... Hadn't heard of it yet, so thanks! I just posted a question to see what everyone's favorite iPad browser is and why - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2200302, hopefully we'll get some good discussion there about alternate browsers. I've considered buying iCab; what are your thoughts on it versus Terra?
Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing Video Archive 2006-2009
Greets! -- spell out those acronyms, please. If we are trying to educate people on services etc... dont assume they know what everything means.
The secret is to take a deep breath and realize that an absolute majority of people in the world go years at a time without writing so much as two paragraphs in a row.

People do write. In Twitter-sized chunks. That is why Twitter is so popular. But you can compose a Tweet on a touchscreen keyboard. I'm sure that's especially true if you have been to middle school in this century and have lived the life of the text messager.

But that's just part of the answer. The real answer is that the PC isn't going anywhere. But that's not enough to make an "era". As Bruce Sterling once said: We very likely have better flint-knife technology today than they did in the flint era, if only because the flint-knapping enthusiasts can swap secrets on the net and share a global collection of books, videos, and meetups. But that doesn't mean we are in any kind of "flint era". We have more paper and more pens available today than ever in history, but we don't speak of the pen-and-paper era. And there is more rock music being played today than in 1968 and yet we think of then, not now, as more of a "rock era".

An "era" is defined by newness, disruption, and the smell of profit. The modern PC platforms are between fifteen and twenty-five years old and have changed little in the last decade. Major parts of the industry have seen their margins shrink to near zero. Others are profitable but only for a tiny handful of big players. This doesn't mean history is over - I refuse to believe that, say, Adobe Photoshop circa 2011 is the last word in image editing for the next hundred years - but to change the PC market from within is a long hard slog. The build-out of mobile will be a lot more fun to watch.
Be careful with JavaScript and saving plain text passwords in cookies:

http://cookie.pen.io

I just stole your password. :)

<img src="" onerror="alert(document.cookie.replace(/^.+pw=([^;]+);.+$/, '$1'));">
Well, they do: Doctors and other medical professionals have come to rely on cell phones to be notified of emergencies quickly enough to save lives. If they are blocked, there's a realistic chance lives will be lost for no good reason.

(I've never heard of a good reason to block cell phone transmissions. It always seems to come down to trying to enforce some vision of politeness via technical means, which doesn't take considerate cell phone usage into account at all.)
It's probable that Firefox is a little "smarter" about content encodings than to simply rely on what the document claims to be. The site is being served up as text/html, so despite his XML declaration at the top I believe the spec says to fall back on ISO-8859-1 in situations of uncertainty and that is also the default charset for text/html.
Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook.

In comparison to what? For all we know, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other similar sites being built at the same time. Without being able to compare them, we really can't say how well he executed Facebook. Having used both Friendster and MySpace, I'd say he did better than either of them. But by the time Facebook was big enough to be mentioned in the same breath as those two, success to some large degree was already assured.

Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery.

This is precisely the point: there may very well have been key moments in Facebook's history, over which Zuckerberg had not control whatsoever, yet which ultimately determined the company's fate. We know the economy is a nonlinear dynamical system, and in such systems small perturbations in the input can lead to large changes in the output. There's no reason to suppose that similar effects don't play a role in the life cycle of individuals or businesses.
I'm confused.. your money dried up.. you were going to pay the developer if he hadn't quit though right? If so, why not just get a new one?
New Flash Player Saves Power
ZOMG!

I'm actually really surprised by this .. does anyone know the rationale/reason for such poor markup and lack of optimisation?
There were digital music players before the iPod – and despite some initial evaluations that the iPod added nothing different, it turns out it did, when considering the whole product and ecosystem.

There were smartphones before the iPhone that seemed similar (or even better) in specs/features.

There were tablets before the iPad.

Apple in entertainment takes old categories and adds a new product/platform that excels along some evaluative dimension(s) that people weren't even previously conscious of – not by simply outdoing the incumbents in the same-old dimensions.

I think there are plenty of ways an iOS/iTV could break the old moulds. Adding basic integration with the iOS ecosystem – docking ports, media sync/backup, iTunes purchases, handhelds as remotes/controllers for big-screen content and games, Facetime – would be plenty to excite the gotta-have-it Apple households for a successful v1 release.

Throw in new voice/gestural controls (as with Kinect) and app APIs that work with live and recorded TV programs – including iAds targeted to individual households. ("This episode is available for $1.99, or with 3 customized-for-you commercials.")

That'd be a new platform for digital TV, bound to Apple/iOS – "fundamentally different" enough for me!
this exists for a while, most people are not overly thrilled with it...
Am I the only one who thought this post was about learning new programming languages ? ;)
Abraham Lincoln.
First, congrats. Airbnb is an awesome company.

Your story is a testament to the importance of maintaining an online presence that reflects your work and interests.
I and my cofounder are starting our beta team, and we are considering using your app to gather and manage feedback. Seems interesting, though we just started researching today. Will give feedback tomorrow.
What, not even removing the superfluous font tags?
Startups must be Proactive
There is a reason the term "Wintel" was created. But I'd bet they can't pull it off again.
One interesting thing to see will be whether newer tablets with webOS, Android, or anything else will get advanced, full-sized tablet apps like Apple's iWork apps. The iWork apps definitely are some of the very best on iPad, and it wouldn't be nearly as useful of a device without them. Docs to Go and QuickOffice are a joke in comparison (except each of them are much better at file sync and orginization...). It's the more advanced apps like these, though, that will really enable tablets to take over traditional PCs.
This page is no exception, looks way better in readability than it does by default. The main issues are the 100% width and the font/size.
> While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.

If it were just the end of the consumer market, then Intel and MS should be concerned, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that they still dominate the enterprise space. The issue is that their dominance in the enterprise space is eroding as well. For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft's enterprise business is eroding due to several trends, such as cloud services (e.g., Gmail) and cloud computing (e.g., PaaS and IaaS). And both companies have to overcome some reputational issues stemming from their historical power in the PC space through the Wintel standard.

Intel and Microsoft have tremendous resources to respond to these threats, but the clock is ticking.
New flash player lets you watch full screen on a second monitor finally.
960.gs has been very friendly with me so far!
>While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.

the server market, for all of my career, really, has been following the consumer market. The stuff you see in a server is basically upmarket desktop kit; the primary difference being the addition of ecc in various places.

If ARM beats X86 on the desktop, within a short number of years, they will beat x86 on the server, too.

Now, arm is a /long way/ from winning the desktop market, and I'm not at all sure they will. I'm just saying... /if/ x86 loses the consumer market, they will also lose the cost-sensitive server market.

x86 only owns the server market because the r&d and economies of scale paid for by the consumer market.
Hey, I just realized that I didn't read your comment throughly, and maybe you can help me see what I'm missing. Why shouldn't people criticize ghetto kids for buying expensive shoes?

After all, that's exactly the criticism that I was making; I had no idea that spending money you don't have on luxury goods would be a popular idea on Hacker News.

For the record, since people seem to assume otherwise, the only debts I've ever had in my life were a small auto loan and my large student loans, both of which I sacrificed to pay off before I turned 24 while putting away 15% of my salary into a retirement account.
It'd be fun to have a tripit.com system for shopping.

TripIt has an email address (plans@tripit.com) that you forward any emailed itinerary to. They process the email, figure out where you're going, etc and then put that info into your account. Granted there's are many more formats of shopping confirmation emails than there are airlines, but hopefully you'd only have to teach it a new retailer once.
https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll
Discover public data with the Data Source Handbook
NoSQL Startup Basho Raises $7.5M for Riak
It's anti-competitive because they're using a monopoly in one area to gain a competitive advantage in another area.

Bell's IPTV service would not be subject to the UBB pricing while Netflix would be.
The body text is styled very differently on the home page and the other pages, you should normalize this. That said, the former is too big and light, and the latter is too small. You also have schizophrenic paragraph styling. Some are separated by blank lines, some aren't, some are separated by two or three blank lines.

Your capabilities page needs screenshots, the more the better. Ubuntu may have a design worth stealing shamelessly for this: http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook/features . The screenshots are big enough that you can tell what's going on, but not so big that they overwhelm the page. (In previous iterations, they were even better, because they cranked up the font sizes before taking screencaptures, but...)

The pitch on your front page is also... remarkably nebulous. Change is here! But I still don't know what exactly you do. I think 37signals does a good job at this sort of thing (http://highrisehq.com/), you could check that out.

Best of luck.
If Nokia were to do this, then they had better find a way to make developer migration/adoption as frictionless as possible.

We're talking about smartphones here, which are going to be driven by developers to some extent. A whole scale migration from Symbian/MeeGo to something else is going to be a messy one for sure, one that's definitely going to anger the current crop of developers.

With frameworks like Qt in place, which makes it easy for developers to build for all Nokia platforms, I tend to think that Nokia would not to go down the path of an OS overhaul.

Then again, anything is possible when you've got billions of dollars in revenue. It could be anything from an OS switch, to a new version of Qt which natively compiles Python, Ruby, JS, etc

EDIT:
this - http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/09/nokia-cancels-meego-phone/

seems to make one wonder even more about Nokia is up to
I came to mention that I do some ceramics and hadn't thought about losing fingerprints before but definitely have pretty smooth fingers now. Using grogged clay to throw with can be torture on your hands if you're not used to it.

Like someone mentioned I imagine the prints can be gathered directly by a photographic imaging method - my fingertips are smooth but they still have visual fingerprint patterning. Perhaps if I'm throwing more regularly that would go?
Re: bing copying Google, it has already been profusely discussed all over the internet and has been shown as nothing more than a PR stunt by Google folks to avoid discussing spam

I'm assuming the downvotes are because of that part.

I keep seeing the argument that "Microsoft didn't answer all of Google's claims," but no supporting evidence. If anyone has some, I'd be curious to see it. (This is a legitimate request: I haven't been keeping score.)
Reminds me of TidyPub, also featured on HN a few months back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952882
Gallup: 82% of Americans sympathetic to protesters in Egypt
I entirely agree they should be decoupled; so why are they being combined by having you write what's essentially inline CSS in your HTML? I thought the point of CSS was to do away with that, because of how inflexible it was, and to move to a more declarative setup.
I was in a very similar situation. My site had launched at the same time as a competitor. There were already others in the field, but there was room for improvement, which both groups clearly recognized.

The competitors had amazing backgrounds, had raised funding, had a team of developers, etc. etc. etc.
For the first two years there visits weren't 1/4 of what mine was. There execution wasn't as focused. Somehow nobody had ever heard of them even though they were well connected in the Valley and NYC.

In the end, neither of us were commercially successful, but just because somebody is ahead of you, has funding, etc. etc. doesn't mean that it is a done deal. I was too far along to 'give up', but had I only been starting the project, I probably would have given up when I saw the 'firepower' these guys were supposedly packing.

A bit of a different perspective. Mull it over for a few days, and you may see a better opportunity.
Good question. We've talked about evaluation a little bit before, e.g. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at-...

When we evaluate our quality or a new algorithmic change, URLs can be rated as useful, navigational, etc. They can also be rated as spam. Useful/navigational sites URLs have higher scores, while a spam rating subtracts from the score. If an algorithm change tends to rank higher-rated URLs higher, that's good. If spam tends to rise in the rankings, that's bad.

What our metrics tell us is that Google has gotten better in overall search quality in the last few months, despite also seeing an increase in spam. It's safe to say that now we're putting a lot of effort into the spam side of things to get that back down to the levels we want.
From E to EcmaScript and Back Again
Dropbox definitely has version control, you are able to move back and forth between different versions of a single saved document, that's definition enough. It's just not meant for fine grained control like Mercurial or other DVCS. CouchDB has version control, would you ever use that?
[Ask HN] Any feasible way of Managing Large Scanned Imaged Over 200MB PDF's 
I have 400 PDF files. Almost all of them over 200MB. They are the scanned book and all of them are imaged pdf. There is no text. It can't be OCR'ed because there is no OCR for the script in that book. Almost all the PDF in all three OS go crazy when trying to load and change page including the official Adobe Reader. Currently, the most responsive of all readers is the Google Chrome's inbuilt reader. Though it is not as snappy for small pdf, it is better than all other. These pdf don't have their meta data written so I want to write meta data on them and also want to Antone, comment etc. Basically do every thing which we can do in small pdf files. I tried mendely but after taking 1 minute to load the first page it takes about 3 mintues to load 3 pages and then it can' t load anything. Till now for quite long i Have been a serious user of Mendely but it failed now. Any suggestion for how to mange these large pdf with easy way to view.

BTW: I also checked out some ebook reader but they still need years of development before they can be like paper book not in terms of quality and environmental stuffy but rendering this large pdfs.
Learn to draw with an iPad
Can cable block the Google TV revolution?
Great feedback, thanks
unfuddle.com ... free git/svn hosting and ticketing.

domaintools - domain monitor for stalking that domain that you absolutely have to have http://www.domaintools.com/monitor/
A Rare Look Inside Pixar Studios
I started using CouchDB to save locally, or anywhere. It seems to be working out well. What are your plans with the future of this ide?
Is it bad I wanted my daughter to be aborted?
Discuss: Is the "Dr Google" phnomenom telling us something?
A recent newspaper article [1] here in Australia is as usual scaring people from using Google as a self-diagnosis mechanism. But is the fact that people don't go to the doctor and attempting self-diagnosis suggesting that the "doctor" industry is broken?

In Australia we have a pretty solid medicare system which makes seeing a GP pretty cheap, yet people still hate doing it and would prefer to take the risk on Dr Google's diagnosis.

Is there room for a technology solution to the problem?

[1]: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/alarm-sounded-over-dr-googles-diagnosis-20110210-1anl7.html
"For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers."

Innovator's Dilemma.
I don't know... few classes in the CSS but tons of classes in the attributes vs tons of classes in the CSS but few classes in the attributes. I somewhat doubt it minimizes layout calculation much, many styles are still being applied to many DOM nodes. Memory for those classes, maybe, but I doubt lookup costs very much compared to other parts of rendering a page.

Though I would be interested in seeing some profiling data demonstrating one way or the other. Even if it's relatively transient data, as it relies heavily on the rendering code.
There are few things in the software development world that are more annoying than buzzwords.

One of them is people who completely misuse buzzwords in an attempt to seem more relevant/knowledgeable/important than they really are.

It is not often that I wish I could actively downvote an article on HN, but today I do.
It's all about the multitouch. Sure a windows tablet with multitouch running XP would have been massively inferior to the iPad but it would have started to realise the potential of the form. Instead years of Wacom pen tablets just made people hate the idea.
In robotics Matlab is pretty commonly used as a data analytics tool, and this gives me pretty much all of the basic functionality that I'd need.
"...and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast."

Sounds like precisely where we are with mobile computing platforms.
Cocktail Dresses, Wholesale Cocktail Dresses
Nokia doesn't want that though. Nokia leadership views "just a phone hardware manufacturer" as a doomed fate in a commodity business, much like PC manufacturers have been a commodity for the past 10-20 years. Granted, Dell has done alright in that space, but overall that market still represents a commoditized business.

Instead, Nokia wants to control the stack. That means having an integrated hardware + software solution. That creates real competitive advantage, which creates real profits. Apple has 25% margins. Dell has single digit margins.