skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's where pragmatism comes in! Some words are grandfathered into the language and that's that. For names of people that have yet to be entered into dictionaries, I fight my little fight to have their pronunciations conform more closely to the original.

To prove my dedication to pragmatism, when I first moved to the US many years ago, no-one was able to pronounce my one-syllable first name, to say nothing of my last name. After a week or so I gave up and started introducing myself as 'pair'. When I later lived in Korea, a country whose language is deficient in diphthongs, I introduced myself as 'pae-uh' and wrote my name accordingly in Hangul.
It looks like there's two directions for a language's type system to go:

1) strict typing, but with lots of constructs (e.g. inheritance, interfaces, generics, extension methods) to work around that strictness so that you can do what you want, if you understand the rules and syntax to get it to compile.

2) loose, "duck typing" so you just do what you want, but without compiler checking that it's possible, and with the posibility that it fails at runtime if the right method isn't found.

C# is in the first direction.
I'm happy to see that, while he did something wrong, because he was honest and openly remorseful throughout, he ended up not going to prison. The cops even seemed cordial, they let him get breakfast and a smoke.

I wonder how differently things would have played out if he lived in the US.
Who? The Facebook resume guy?
Going by the title, yes, that's (sort of) how Opera Mini works, but going by what he wrote, no, not really. He seems to be talking about browsers as servers on the client side, not turning browsers into glorified image viewers.
Every Opera can use Opera Turbo to get recompression of pages. The author is talking about something more than that, though, he's basically talking about VNCing to a server.
SQL Databases Don't Scale
>you could visit places long before you were "meant" by mountain climbing with stairways constructed from objects out of your inventory (my favourite was using books and loaves of bread).

This was significantly more meaningful in Ultima Online - finding new and exciting ways to break into houses was probably the most popular pastime. One such method was to make fairly particular stacks of objects (IIRC it involved books, tables, and assorted food items) into stairs and walk up onto people's enclosed balconies. I heard that, in some cases, people even walked up over the roof and drop right on through.
If someone asks me, I'll donate what I can (or what I feel like ATM). I stopped worrying about where the money was going and how it was to be used a long time ago. I figure karma will sort it out eventually.
2 Comp Tickets for Unleashed Talent 3/10 in SF (normally $595)
We have an upcoming Unleashed event on the subject of finding talented people and building world-class teams. It is March 10th in San Francisco and we have a great lineup of speakers and panelists and a solid roster of founders attending (see here: http://unleashedtalent.eventbrite.com). I have two comp tickets that I'd like to make available to people within the Hacker News community (normal ticket price is $595). If you're interested, please comment on this thread and we'll choose two of you and post the recipients here in 24 hours. The only criteria is that you must be a founder of your company to be in the running.
It still doesn't beat the "Objective-C Only" fiasco..does it?
Increasing antipathy? Since say the late nineties? Seriously?

Increasing indifference, maybe ...
It's also possible that they might have closed up shop, or stumbled in some way (ala Digg) that meant they ended up selling for a lot less.

As likely as it is that they would almost certainly be worth more today, the appropriate line in that article is " Aaron Patzer [..] knows more than any of us do about Mint’s prospects" -- it was a free service whose revenue prospects were limited to affiliate deals. I don't know how much (if any, Crunchbase tells me nothing here) funding they'd taken, but it's just as likely that they were running out of runway and needed to sell.

Does anybody know if they were even profitable?
Here’s Doom - Running on a Graphing Calculator
Dude... seems like literally Everybody is on HN :)

You guys (Looking Glass) were THE heroes. You got me into computing for real. Massive kudos to you sir.

My first PC gaming experience (aged round 7-8) was UW2 - and I remember how I managed to get into sewers, wandering in the dark (who would know to use a torch) and then ran into a headless. God did that first sewers level freak me out. I couldn't bring myself to return to playing for a month I guess.

I'm still waiting for that UW series remake. Gothic came pretty close, so did Oblivion in a way, KOTOR and Mass Effect got a lot of magic - but I'm still holding out for the real thing (shame on EA!).
For reference, as of now, here are the recent Libya stories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237053 : Libya blocks Facebook, ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237424 <- Dead

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237787 : What happens to bit.ly?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238267 <- Dead

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238272 : Libya disconnect

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238274 : Death toll mounts

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238407 : Libya shuts down internet

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238664 : What happens to bit.ly?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238768 : Libya blocking internet access

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2239405 : No, it won't kill bit.ly

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240056 : Internet restored

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242320 <- Dead
http://www.venturebeat.com
http://www.readwriteweb.com
http://www.fastcompany.com
Original article title has "probably" in it, though I agree that what the article says seems like it justifies something stronger than that.

Incidentally, has anyone ever seen any accurate stories come out of Conceivably Tech (the source for the earlier claim that the URL bar is going away -- though it seems like lots of other places have quoted the same story), that aren't also everywhere else?
This headline should really be "Google lowers the bar"
I think they have associates too, Venture Capitalists websites are famous for being hilariously slow to update.

The USV fund isn't that large either, under $250M per fund and under $1Bn under management in total - for 3 partners that is a lot of work, but manageable.
Radio Cubes Killing the Base Station
You will always have trouble getting things power, thus power strips, and extenders.

I have a bunch of 1' m/f power cords, for keeping wall-warts from taking up too many spaces:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?p_id=5296

I also picked up some of these with a right angle passthrough connector - you can put them into a wall, cord comes out parallel with the wall:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812339...

Great for small clearance areas.
apparently it's a collection of statistical flukes: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2011-02000-001/
The article claims that this is irrelevant and that you cannot distribute a GPLv3 app for iPhone/Windows Phones anyway (read "tivoization"), because of the license restrictions itself. Whatever Microsoft says.
aka Browser as a Service -- This is something I tought about a few years ago. It's becoming a reality with Opera Mini & Skyfire. http://virteal.com/UltraLightBrowser
I think the German police clearly thought he was not going to get justice from the US (hence the remarks about how lucky he was that they got him before he got on the plane) and saved him from falling into the FBI's trap.
I grew up bilingual and although I sometimes felt 'snappier' than other kids, when I was young (don't you get bored with just one language?) - I today enjoy single-tasking.
That's pretty neat, but doesn't it make more sense to use before_filter in your controller for that stuff so that you can properly handle errors instead of showing a 404?
I'm fairly quick to defend Apple, because a lot of the flack they take is BS, but in this case I'm really struggling to find the upside.

Richard says that their 30% would account for a tiny sliver of Apple's overall revenue, but lots of tiny slivers start to add up eventually. The problem though, is that if the cost of those slivers is to drive the developers away from the App Store, then those slivers disappear. Considering that third party apps are possibly the most important feature of the platform, it doesn't seem like a smart idea.

The 30% cut on App sales is understandable, because software generally has high margins, but it doesn't sound like the same is true for content subscriptions. Maybe it's a case of trying to keep their policy too uniform (i.e 30% on everything)?

Does anyone know where the subscription content comes from? From my understanding, the subscription content will usually come from a third party, rather than Apple's CDN, so there's no marginal cost to Apple.
Considering that almost nothing happened when the iphone was released on Verizon, Apple is at an extremely weak position and can not only not dictate terms but they are very far from being at a point where they can.
God I hope R eats SPSS for lunch.
Motorola's iPad competing Xoom won't immediately support Adobe Flash
Possibly the difference between "Computer Science" and "Computer Studies"?
"OtherOS" class-action lawsuit: GeoHot, Sony now share same charge
It's a strong second place then if it's not the first. Good thing is, Apple backed down on that which is why I was just today trying out Airplay SDK on Windows. Hopefully they'll back down on the subscriptions plan, too.

That said, it really should require us all getting up in arms over it for Apple to stop stuff like this. They shouldn't have made such a policy to start with! Very worrying for the future of the platform...
Getting Yanks to Montreal is easy as long as (a) they are single, (b) they are married and the spouse doesn't work and there are no school-age kids or (c) the spouse knows French and there are no school-age kids. Getting a work visa at the border merely takes a CV and an offer letter. School-age kids require French schooling, and customer-facing positions require French (both of which might be show stoppers).

It's a great place to live and work, but we fall into one of the above categories.
Tries to say something encouraging and gets voted down. Nice.

@grief-voter: WTF dude? Care to explain?
Ah ok, I think I see what you mean--- you're willing to adapt for phonemes that don't exist, but not otherwise. It seems that's easiest to do when going between scripts, because the transliteration step lets you rewrite the word phonetically in the new language, as close as possible. But between languages like English and French that share a script, you have to keep the same spelling, which then will typically imply a different pronunciation in the target language, unless you apply special "remember, this was a loanword" pronunciation rules.

An alternative would be to do transliteration even when going from Latin->Latin languages, taking a French word and respelling it so it reads phonetically in English, but I suspect people would like that even less. I believe French actually does do a little bit of that when borrowing English words, but in that case there's an official language academy to invent the new spellings.
What I understood is that the author wants the browser to run on the server and then stream the video, VNC-style. That's a profoundly silly idea, since you'd have to basically get one server per user for any semi-CPU-intensive rendering, and to what benefit? I don't know.
This may be a stupid comment to make, but one I feel should be added to the conversation. Why are people so willing to develop for Apple when Android is now the larger platform, and has a far easier barrier to entry?
As a senior manager type, I hire people for Human Resources to prevent disgruntled employees and intentionally bad outcomes to my decisions with people and local governments from taking everything we've built in some over inflated complaint or class action. You'll see how easy it can happen after a few mistakes are made.

Lawyers and HR aren't required to be nice, just act nice. Finding a creative and caring HR professionals that can help your organization grow in a positive way, in full compliance with thousands of little things (and with as few impacts to the employee, manager and investors lives) is actually a great investment for any company, especially one growing up with a strong financial reality.

On hiring: I haven't used an HR department to hire since 1995. I've typically worked with outside parties to gather pools of resources and my best method of hiring has been through self-directed job advertisements that I handled from first to last contact. When I can't handle it, or I don't have really the right skill set to evaluate deeper understanding in the candidate, I delegate the hiring decision and help the hiring employee complete the process properly.
MSFT is totally happy to use BSD licensed code in it's own products - but GPL code might compete with it's products.
Share HN: Hacking Music
We have one of these topics every so often; I'd like to share some music that has fueled much coding in recent times. I found a couple of these in the last coding music thread we had!

I think a lot of these can be classified as "post-rock", but I don't know too much about genres.

God is an Astronaut

Exemplary song: "Coda"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Gk2kaaFxY

All of their albums are available on Amazon MP3 except for the 2008 self-titled "God is an Astronaut". Similar to Explosions in the Sky, if you've heard of them.

Uyama Hiroto

Exemplary song: "Stratus"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohPXwonrU14

His music's hard to find; I have only one album, "A Son of the Sun". If you were enchanted by "Stratus" and can't find the rest anywhere, contact me and I'll be happy to share.

Abakus

Exemplary song: "Last Summer Dub"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQUmkxKXVvs

deadmau5

Exemplary song: "Strobe"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKi9Z-f6qX4

Varied music; not all of it is great for coding, but Strobe has a very meditative feel to it.

Neotokyo OST by Ed Harrison

Exemplary song: "Annul"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM6eZJRurFk

Available on CDBaby.

Various mixes by "bob42jh"

Exemplary song: "Yeti's Lament"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGS9J-cEL4I

I don't know who this guy is, but he finds incredible music, and you can download the mixes on http://www.thewordisbond.com .

Here's the one that "Yeti's Lament" is from: http://www.thewordisbond.com/archives/6370

At first I was uncomfortable with the questionable ethics of publishing unlicensed songs for free, but I've bought so much music based on the singles in the mixes that it's no contest.

The Album Leaf

Exemplary song: "Thule"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7LJtJA4Eks

Relaxing ambient music in the style of Sigur Rós.

The Six Parts Seven

Exemplary song: "Stolen Moments"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ9BozEN_LE

Guitar & brass with a vaguely "jam band" feel. Their stuff all kind of sounds the same, and I'm okay with that. All available on AmazonMP3.

That's all I got for now! I hope everyone enjoys.
The issue is that Apple is artificially tying their channel to your hardware; they sold the hardware to you, but they sold it, not leased it, so its still your hardware. However, they've artificially retained control of the channel via DRM, software that doesn't allow you to install whatever you want on your own hardware.

If you had the option of buying apps through another channel, this wouldn't be a problem. Most people don't have much of a problem with any of the Android Market's policies, since you can install other apps or even other markets on your own phone if you so choose.
Not exactly. If you haven't read about it, Readability (Arc90) has a new subscription model[1]. That's the point of contention.

(Not that it's any less stupid.)

[1]: https://www.readability.com/learn-more
The Unclear Path
When I say 'in reality' I mean physically. Say the rocket earthbound and is 2x300kkm from the earth, the question again, will the photon collide with the earth or still be 300kkm from it?

The problem I have with light as a unit of reference is that 'perception' is not the same as 'reality' in the physical world.
if anything it's an advertisement for OStatus, the successor protocol to OpenMicroBlogging. This protocol allows anyone to run their own tweetish site on their own, and allows for decentralized, federated communication.

StatusNet is a self-hosted solution, so you basically can run it as you see fit on your own. It is licensed under AGPL terms so you know what exactly your service is doing.
Nice work there on UpOut.com, congrats. To increase conversions, you might want to consider pulling an IP to geolocation thingie on the home page and say something (subtly) like Hi, welcome from <City>, <Country>. -HTH
What exactly is the situation? You've got 100 people interested in buying your product based on a landing page.

I take it you were expecting more? How much more? You've got 100ish leads on your project for sales that should be easyish to sell to (at least compared to random people). You won't get it, but if you get all of them at the bottom price, that's $2k a month.

By all accounts, I can only see this as a good thing, especially if your landing page indicates that there's cost involved. If the landing page gives any indication that the service might be free, it's easier to discount some of those leads, but if you're advertising a for-pay service and got 100 hits, I think you're looking pretty good, from my perspective.
Briefly amuse yourself by clicking "Show HN: A different interface for reading Hacker News" in each nested frame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_BookScan

(edited to add: is the canonical source of this kind of data)
Agreed. When I finally went to college after years of programming, I picked religion as my major. It's a great jack of all trades major in humanities. You get history, language, philosophy, and more. I even got a trip to India out of it.

After years of programming I felt I would gain little by studying CS. Sure I would learn, but only after going though classes that would teach me nothing or little at all in order to get to the good stuff. If I was going to throw down the money for a degree I wanted to learn something new.

I eventually went for the low hanging fruit and switched to IT with a software emphasis at a school where I could graduate much faster, this was more for fiscal reasons though. I feel what I picked up in my brief time as a religion major was extremely valuable and I came out with a lot of knowledge and better understanding of a lot that goes on in the world.
TAT co-founder on how technology turns us all into replicants
Revenue on iOS devices is far greater than on Android devices: it seems people paying for Apple products are far more eager to pay for apps.
It isn't Apple's hardware; let us not forget the hardware belongs to the people buying the iPhones and iPads out there.

Sort of. It's all a matter of licensing. Technically, you might own the hardware, but you are licensing the OS running on it.

A better argument would be if you took your iOS device and wrote your own stack for it. In that case, I don't think Apple would have much claim to what you could/could not run on "your" hardware. But in the current scenario you're buying iron-wrapped software (or I guess plastic-and-glass-wrapped software). Apple is really controlling what happens with the software, not the hardware.

This is an importnat distinction, IMO, because I don't believe any of the "I paid for it so it's mine" arguments out there really pass muster until you also create your own (not jailbroken) software stack.
In high school my best friend and I decided to have a fight just because we had never been in one (there was alcohol involved). He hit me, I hit him, he fell down. We went back to drinking.
Possible Apple's side: App revenues may not make for a sizable part of their revenues as of now but they are expecting a humongous growth in both - iOS devices sales and Apps sales (and hence In-Apps sales). They feel the need to get in right now or before it's too late. They might also be contemplating Apple Television and more iOS based form factors. This can be huge.
Examining The Design Process: Clichés and Idea Generation
Aristotle was a very smart chap, but it's hardly the case that everything he said was unchangeable truth. (Random examples: his fundamental physics was really, really wrong -- see http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/aristotle_dy... for a very brief summary of some important errors; he said that men and women have different numbers of teeth, which they don't; his distinction between "substance" and "accidents" has been pretty much abandoned for ages, with the possible exception of the Roman Catholic Church's teaching on transubstantiation.)
Glad to see it had a relatively happy ending.

At the risk of repeating a tired Internet cliche, I think the leak may have helped Half-Life 2.

If the project was already months behind schedule and had a year before a GM build would be ready, having the source code leaked may have given hardcore gamers reassurance that the game was actually coming along and would be finished at some point.

Of course, there's also the newsworthiness and buzz coming from the leak itself.
Also as a comment to another item, and largely for reference, here are the recent Libya stories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237053 : Libya blocks Facebook, ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237424 <- Dead

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237787 : What happens to bit.ly?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238267 <- Dead

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238272 : Libya disconnect

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238274 : Death toll mounts

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238407 : Libya shuts down internet

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238664 : What happens to bit.ly?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238768 : Libya blocking internet access

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2239405 : No, it won't kill bit.ly

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2240056 : Internet restored

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242320 <- Dead
In part because Android's many devices/configurations make it a less predictable development platform. (I'm not saying there aren't reasons to develop for Android, but you asked for one reason people don't do it more.)
I wonder if there are anti-trust concerns here.
I don't understand why Apple is putting themselves in this situation.. Bad for business. Apple HAD the market, then Google came along with Android, now they're being snobs and just forcing their own users to switch to Android powered phones just because of this exact thing. Shame really.
I could be wrong, but I don't think Apple actually used their technology, but rather implemented a similar feature into desktop Safari.
All contracts are artificial constructs. There are no natural contracts. So the question is simply whether the kind of contract Apple has with its customers is legal or not and if it is whether the law should be changed.
Businessman's success helps launch startups
The only channel possible on iPhones without jailbreak is Apple's.

Users own the iPhones bought. Therefore Apple should either let users subscribe to third-party channels, or release their channel in the hands of users (i.e. let them approve or ban apps).

Otherwise, if there will ever come a day when Apple will have a monopoly on his hands, a big lawsuit will also happen.

And really, I can see why Apple wants to control their channel, but why should I be restricted to their channel only? Why should I jailbreak my phone, which is dependent on kernel / various other exploits and risk bricking my device and losing the warranty if I want to be freed from Apple's channel?