skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't expecting anything. I started it, because I had the idea, I saw one dominant competing product which sucked and I just wanted to get a feel for the market.

Yes, these leads may be precious. But it's just a desktop app, just a one-time payment.

(P.S. If it were a webish app with $20/month price tag and 100 people ready to give it a try, I would be really busy implementing the stuff right now ;)
UberTwitter & Twidroyd Are Back Online
I think it is worth noting, because everyone seems to have forgotten, that this has always been the rule. I remember it from the very first reading of the terms and conditions (back when they were under NDA).

It has always been against AppStore rules to monetize apps outside of the AppStore. Apple has been lax in enforcing it, primarily because Apple didn't offer a subscription mechanism.

Now they offer a mechanism, and so now people can comply with the rule, and so now they are enforcing it.
Sharp review of trademark and copyright fundamentals (technical)
I don't think Google does interviews longer than 45 minutes for engineering.
I'm not sure it's reasonable to use the monopoly argument at arbitrary level of granularity. For instance, while Apple has a monopoly on iOS app by definition, Ford also has a monopoly on Ford cars. Monopolies are only a problem when there is no viable competition. In this case, the competition is Android et al. By saying you only want an iPhone, you are restricting your own choice. That said, it's perfectly fine to complain about the policies Apple implements. Complaints are part of the free market process, and in many cases bring about change for the better.
Dance India Dance Show | Current Affairs News
Alibaba.com CEO and COO Step Down
Stimulation of Music to Increase Baby Intelligence
awesome article!
especially for social sciences,such as anthropology the idea of modeling and algorithms would be very important in connection with taxonomies looking at the concept of culture.. and organising knowledge for sense-making..
You're over complicating things. Actually and this is the point it is not the 'in reality' part that is problematic, it is the 'in one second' part.

Your astronaut toggling the lights in their spaceship is experiencing time at a wildly different rate than the 'stationary' observer. We can't just say "well duh, just look at the watch or clock" because those are also slowed down by exactly the amount that the astronaut is slowed down.
Can you move relative to a point in space? Even if there are no objects around?
Motorola Xoom will ship without Flash support
> I've never had a good sense of why people are so desperate for Linux to take Windows' desktop market share.

Why?

Linux is a platform, and therefore depends on network effects: The more people use it as a desktop, the more software (apps, games) will be available. The more software is available, the more people will use Linux as a desktop.

Thus, market share seems to matter -- especially for those who aren't ideologues.

Unfortunately, the theory only holds if there's money to be made by developing desktop applications and games. This is still more complicated than it should be.
Chinese words being displayed incorrectly is based on a false assumption.

On Twitter, 140 Characters mean a lot in Chinese! why? In Chinese, almost every character is a word; In English, every character is just an alphabet, not a word, with minor exceptions of course. Chinese words are square blocks whereas English ones rectangle blocks. They shouldn't be of the same height.

I would argue that Chinese words convey more meaning per cm square. The same square space occupied by 5 rectangle capital alphabets is more than enough to display any Chinese character correctly.

BTW, you don't need to recognize every stroke to be able to identify a Chinese word. You can tell by its pictorial pattern, such as negative spaces.
That's different from good writing skills.
It may also have been your accent. I'm Australian but have lived in Canada for the last 5 or 6 years, so I knew of all the 'frustrations' that Anglophones feel when trying to speak French in Quebec.

Anyway, I was in a bar one night in Montreal and asked a waitress the best thing that I could do to improve my French. "In all honesty," she said, "you have an accent, so you're allowed to try". Basically, if you're Canadian, expect to have a hard time practising your French in Quebec. If you're not Canadian, however, have at it!

Now I don't know how true it was, but I did give it a shot and didn't do too badly... Oh yeah, and had an awesome time: I can't wait to find another excuse to go back!
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i don't think so. CompSci 101 is gonna be stuff like fizz-buzz. you're gonna learn the absolute basics: loops, conditionals, maybe even functions, depending on how the course is structured. but depth-vs.-breadth? calculating big O, or even what big O is? that's not intro level stuff. it's certainly important, and i agree that you should think long and hard before hiring someone for a senior role if they can't handle that kind of stuff. i just strongly disagree with categorizing it as introductory.
Actually, if you look in the Safari 5 credits, you'll find reference to the original Readability script. Here's the official Readability (arc90) blog post about it: http://blog.arc90.com/2010/06/10/why-we-built-readability/
Quick summary: The complexity of a project increases as the square of the number of people on the project, so if a project is behind schedule you may want to remove people from it, not add them. It's difficult to predict completion times for software projects but that won't stop non-technical people from setting deadlines, or from asking you to promise to meet deadlines. Waterfall development does not work.
Exercise #9: Output/Input Redirection With awk
Depends on the task at hand, but my day to day load out is a trusty mechanical pencil, a notecard, and my Palm Pre. Anything i'd need to note that wouldn't fit on the notecard is long enough to be worth whipping out the phone for (which is pretty snappy, with a minimum of effort put into tweaking it). Likewise, it keeps me constantly plugged into the 'net, so I can look up any data I need on the fly. Same if I ever need access to my home machine, or to remotely administrate any of the servers I manage. With a full terminal and access to a solid optware repository, I can even write up patches to my code in vim on any machine I own through SSH without carrying around a bulky device (like the MacBook Air cough).

EDIT: Fixes grammatical error
I didn't find any use in the article. Apparently, the useful information will be coming next week:

"Next week, I’ll give what I think is a potential plan for Montreal to take the lead in Open Source commercialization."

I hope he isn't going to ask for government money.
I think it's interesting that people here on HN are focusing on the pros and cons of Montreal as a city rather than the article's main point: that startup ecosystems outside of SF and (possibly) NY need to specialize to thrive. Maybe it's Open Source, maybe it's... I dunno... defense contracts, but in order to get that critical network effect, you have to be the best in something.
Ask HN: Any iOS developers out there looking for a side project for iPad app?
I'm looking for a tech cofounder for my startup - Shopmix - which is an ipad app for shopping, primarily fashion. The ipad and tablets are the perfect medium for discovering and purchasing apparel (think fun, interactive and social fashion magazine w/ commerce built in.)

I'm ideally looking for a technical co-founder, but willing to work with (and pay) for someone to do this as a side project.

mitalip[at]gmail[dot]com
http://thecurrentaffairsnews.blogspot.com/2011/02/dance-indi...
When he doesn't, and when he adds in-app subscriptions, will it cause you to revise your perspective?

Instapaper is exactly the kind of app this is directed at. It is a SaaS subscription. It would be foolish to turn away all the additional sales you'd get by being able to offer subscriptions within the app (something you couldn't do previously, forcing Marco to take paypal.)
iOS is like a magazine, Apple are the editors, and the developers are the writers. Apple has every right to do whatever they want with their channel, even if it's a stupid move. You wouldn't tell "Time" they have no right to publish who they want and keep others out, would you? Likewise, I don't buy a magazine and then demand that I be able to print my own stories in it. I buy the magazine because it has stories in it already that I want to read.

That said, Readability's claim that this "smacks of greed" is totally right. Apple is not acting in its users' best interest, because more than other moves, this actually affects their developers' business models, and it's going to drive high quality, innovative apps away from the App Store.

There are two viable moves Apple can make:

1) Allow subscriptions outside the app without requiring one in the app

OR

2) Lowering the 30% fee for in-app subscriptions

Both of these options keep value in the App Store while providing Apple with some benefit. If they don't adopt one of these, the long term viability of the App Store is in jeopardy.
The "nice" thing about writing for PCs was that even if our game was slow, if we took long enough to release it, the hardware out there in the real world would catch up a bit. (Of course, taking a long time to release the game creates other problems...) It still amazes me in retrospect that people were willing to play Ultima Underworld at single-digit frame rates, though. It wasn't really an action game, but still. I think our target "that looks pretty smooth" frame rate was 12 Hz, and if a super-powerful PC could get up to 20, that was insane. It was a different age...
Reddit has a lot more built-in spam protection than is apparent to the average user. Faking that a vote was actually counted for new or questionable users, getting your account flagged for mass-voting a certain way, etc.
WebSocket whiteboard with chat
Just something I built to play around with the tech. Its using EventMachine for the server. Because its only using WebSockets and a more abstract layer like Socket.IO it will only work in Chrome / Safari. (or if you have WebSockets enabled in FireFox but I didn't test it)

The board will auto-clear every 5 minutes.

Have fun!
I've been to a few networking events and, honestly, I feel like a fish on dry land when I'm there. I don't know who to talk to, I don't like the atmosphere, and I don't do alcohol, so typically I'm bored out of my skull and somewhat annoyed - not the best first impression to make on the others.

This is exactly what happened to me the last time I went someplace hoping to "network." The conversations were dominated by callow young guys (only a few years younger than me, but acting like teenagers) either making it clear how much they thought about themselves or making snarky comments about other people's architectures. With regard to the latter, I just stood there thinking, "You could be right, but you obviously don't know enough about the specifics of their technology to make a sound engineering judgment, much less convince anybody else," knowing that if I opened my mouth everyone would think I was an idiot who felt defensive about bad design. Personally, I do drink alcohol, and all I wanted to do was get drunk so I wouldn't feel so miserable standing there feeling out of place. To avoid that I just sat down and read a book on my iPhone until the technical presentation started. Total networking failure! I think I'm stuck relying on former coworkers to be my network, which is just fine with me.
Youtube videos that are SIC
These make no sense. Great post.
It's because in-app subscriptions are really just recurring in-app purchases that can be cancelled at any time.

If you accept that the 70-30 split is acceptable for sales of apps, by logical extension you must accept that the 70-30 split is acceptable for in-app purchases, because technically one could provide a free app with an in-app purchase to make it a full app, and anything less than 30% on Apple's take would gravitate the market toward this model.

If you accept that 70-30 is fair for in-app purchases, then you must by logical extension accept that recurring in-app purchases that can be cancelled at any time would also have this split, because technically one could provide all in-app purchases at a steep discount simply as "subscriptions" that can be cancelled after the first payment.

As far as I can tell, this is Apple's reasoning and rather inescapable at that.
Someone selling pills, I think.
That policy has been in place for 2.5 years, since the original AppStore terms and conditions. It wasn't enforced because before now, Apple didn't offer SDK support for subscriptions. People have had 2.5 years to prepare.
Is this why Google developed BigTable? Have other companies developed their own BigTable-like solutions?
The best paper title I've seen to this date was "Sexing Baby Chicks" (translated from Japanese). It was a seminal paper in its field, too.
I don't see why anyone should have a problem with this. Microsoft is well within their rights to disallow software with certain licenses in their store, just as developers are well within their rights to not use the GPL in their libraries. If it's really so egregious and untenable, developers will go elsewhere.

It's just another case of Free Software advocates trying to push their philosophy on consumer-facing software by sensationalizing the "bad guys" policies (i.e. Apple and Microsoft). Free Software != Open Source.
Now if someone would only leak Episode 3/Half-Life 3...
Just something I built to play around with the tech. Its using EventMachine for the server. Because its only using WebSockets and not a more abstract layer like Socket.IO it will only work in Chrome / Safari. (or if you have WebSockets enabled in FireFox but I didn't test it)

The board will auto-clear every 5 minutes.

Have fun!
As another person commented, it may be your hardware, but it's not your OS. You license the right to use iOS, but you don't own it. The app distribution channel is tied to the OS, not the device. If you want to install a different firmware on the device, and can figure out how to do it, there's nothing Apple can do about that.
Neat Algorithms - Flocking
When he doesn't, and when he adds in-app subscriptions, will it cause you to revise your perspective?

Sure, I'd be curious to see if it's economical to hand over 30% of whatever subscriptions he receives to Apple.
Montreal has some pretty good universities too. There a lot of graduates here that would stay here for work except Google/Microsoft ... are stealing all of them.
From what I understand, it's harder to actually sell on Android: there isn't (yet - Amazon are working on one) a store comparable to the App Store, and, perhaps related, the average user seems to be more reluctant to pay for apps.
I was required to take at least the basic/beginning class of every one of those disciplines. Can people actually graduate with an (equivalent of the US) 4 year degree these days not having done so?
Homeowner forecloses on Wells Fargo office, becomes folk hero
You think advice like "32 unusual ways to love ourselves" is bad advice?
Leadership: How to show it, and when to show it
I've been thinking about this for the past few days. It would seem captchas are an effective tool for screening bots etc out. But what happens once they pass the security line? (the body scanner didn't catch them before boarding the plane...?)

how do you identify a bot post in the wild? It seems to me that there is an equal possibility that a post could be from a bot as it could be from a real person... is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial intelligence to search for fingerprints? Another curious question, how do you test it? Is there any accounts that we for sure have spotted as "probably an intelligence bot"

EDIT: I just got another thought, maybe it would be possible to setup a honey pot?
You are right, I should've said Plato
For localization purposes, people in Montreal are experienced with issues that are required to translate software properly. They deal with this stuff all the time for local businesses.
> If you were reading a relationship advice column, you'd assume it was written by a woman. That's not sexism.

Um... in what way is it not a sexist assumption?

> I really wish this ridiculous and unhelpful "There's no women in tech because of evil men" meme would die.

Evil? No. Sexist: a thousand times yes. The culture of technology, and especially startups, is quite frankly vile in this regard.

Is it the sole cause of "no women in tech"? Almost certainly not -- but I find the rampant sexism plenty objectionable in its own right, regardless of (speculated) effects on diversity.
I work at Google. I have a BSCS from Ohio State.

If you're smart and experienced, your degree doesn't matter much for engineering.
It's not "very, very late" when you consider that only 1 in 4 American's own a smartphone [1]. The 75% that still own dumbphones are the majority & laggard adopters, who likely make cellphone purchasing decisions in store. The Nokia brand still engenders some goodwill and WP7 is reputably a decent platform.

Maybe a "dumb-smartphone" could be a big win in the American market. Create something that makes the non-savvy user feel smart, even if it means severely limiting features. Repeat Apple's playbook, but for an even lower level of expertise. Basically, create the SUV of smartphones. WP7 and Microsoft with Nokia are actually very well placed for this.
There are tools which allow you to subset fonts, splitting them up by character, so you could, say, produce a font containing only those characters that you have in your headlines for you headline font. For example, Font Squirrel http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator will allow you to chose particular characters to include in your subset; though that's not very useful unless you really only need a handful of characters that you can enter manually.

It's true that for practical reasons, web fonts are less useful for CJK characters than they are for languages with smaller character sets. I imagine someone will write tools to make it a little easier to deal with, but it may not ever be as convenient as for other writing systems.
One possible course of action:

email these 100 people explaining to them that while you have a good number of 'intent to buy', you can't launch the app in absence of more buyer interest. Next, ask/request their help in terms of getting more signups.

(As per Richard Bach's Cosmic Law,) Like poles attract i.e. people are likely to know others having common interest. If your app is useful enough, (hopefully it is,) the current 100 will help you get more leads.

HTH
Yes, you got it.

In my mind there is also a difference between fully adapted words like psychology and foreign technical words such as techne, gnosis and episteme the way you might use them in a class on Plato. This second class of words, along with names of people, should ideally have their sounds conform more closely to the originals. Of course, words will often start in the second class and drift into the first class. That's how language evolves.
HN is a pretty good alternative.
Abstract Classes Have Constructors | Extreme Java
A Comprehensive Guide to Mobile Statistics
C# is the number one tagged language on stackoverflow.com. I wonder if there is some tenuous correlation there. I'm not sure I'd ever buy a programming language book now.
In an unrelated note, why do some people refer to companies by their stock name? I mean, you're only saving one letter, and you have to keep shift pressed down all the time. Plus, fewer people will understand what you mean. What's the appeal?
Sweet. I've accumulated several decades of self-fulfillment. What exchange rate are you offering?
Why you really need to think twice before smack talking the concept of patents
What about charging monthly? If you could set a lower value than 20-50$ per month and your client life-time is something higher than 6-8 months, you can create something more interesting.
Somebody else is paying to convince you to buy something from them. If you aren't buying, they'll eventually figure it out and the whole scheme falls apart.

Advertising has been around for a long time and consumers know how it works. Consumer spending is still a vital part of the food chain.
Funny how O'Reilly's own "Learning Java" book hasn't been updated since 2005, though.
Google's Art Project is also an awesome synthesis of programming and the humanities (notably, visual art)

http://www.googleartproject.com/
RESPA ftw?

--snip--
He learned about RESPA which allows a Qualified Written Request (QWR), a letter that a loan holder can send to their mortgage servicer who is legally obligated to acknowledge within 20 days and take action within 60
--snip--
Thank you so much! This means a lot to us.
Through all of this I wonder if they knew there'd be so much angst and now they will "concede" to something like 15% with that being their plan all along. When you make a policy that's really really really bad to then scale it back to just being really bad, people think they're getting a deal.
I'd really like to hear Gabe's side to this story.
I was thinking you could look for mouse movement to determine if it's a bot or a human. Bot writers don't have any need to code this feature in, if the site they're targeting isn't looking for it.

But when the site evolves, the spammer will evolve too.
I believe this is what Aptana's Jaxer (http://jaxer.org/) tried to do. It didn't exactly take the world by storm...but perhaps it was too early...
Based on coroutines or threads?
There might be more Android phones out there, but you also can't get to them through the Android Market. Not every country that has Android has an App Store that will accept commercial apps. It's getting bigger and growing faster, but Apple is still ahead of Android.

Also, Apple's tools for developing are just superior. The Android SDK is an Eclipse/Netbeans Plug-in. Apple's is an 800MB-1GB version of XCode.
Sure, the hardware belongs to the people buying the device. They can sell it, give it as a gift, break it. But they can't use the device every way they want. The device does only so much. The fact is: everyone bought a device in the full knowledge of all its limitations. Before purchase, Apple never promised a stream of wonderful applications and content at a price that the customer deems appropriate. They did not guarantee a great App Store, they did not even guarantee that they won't shut down the App Store and let the device be just a piece of hardware. The customer knew the limitations and bought the device anyways.
Yobongo Will Be In The Running For The Addictive App At This Year’s SXSW
Thanks; I like this approach.
I have the suspicion - no, deep deep creepy fear that engulfs your heart - that E3 will become the next Duke Nukem. This might push me into insanity.
No kidding. I would love to hear Gabe Newell's take on this article. That kid was a hairbreadth away from spending half a decade in a federal pen. That had to be a hell of a "whew" moment he had in that police station.
If you're not motivated to provide suuport and it's not your dream project, I'd treat the opportunity more like a contract position: you're likely to be paid around $2k for doing a certain amount of work. If that's worth it for your time, then go ahead.

If you're concerned about support taking time, then think of time spent on support as time invested in getting more customers (since you're either improving a relationship that might lead to recommendations or improving your product).
3D Pong with Video Overlay
How I Increased Conversions by Nearly 20% with a Simple A/B Test
I haven't heard anything about this subscription model and Netflix. Will Netflix be able to continue to provide their iOS apps without giving a cut to apple? Seems crazy that they would have to.