skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that's a logical extension, personally.

However, I think Apple could say that a subscription purchase was 85-15 or 90-10 and they would have gotten this in with little push back.

Or even required that subscription apps cost $9.99 for the initial purchase ($9.99 is a number from my head with no basis in reality) and a following 90-10 split, or requiring that apps with a free initial release go to a 70-30 split on subscriptions. I really think they could have done that and not had a major revolt on their hands. They may not have made the same in the short term, but I think they would have had a better response and a better long-term hold on small developer and publisher loyalty to their platform.

I would personally buy a Palm Pre 3 if it had Instapaper and Kindle and the iPhone 5 didn't. I would venture that their are numerous other consumers who have similar preferences.

[Edited for clarity]
It is not different that mail-archive at all. You bashed mail-archive in your comments because it doesn't provide an added value. markmail doesn't provide an added value either.
How can Spanish Learning Games help you
It's - as I think of it now - genuinely a desktop app and therefore somewhat difficult to set monthly price tags.
Perfect reference.
Lisp on Lego Mindstorms [ps]
Ask HN: Portfolio or Internship?
Hi, I'm a student at a technical college for Information Technology program and I'm going to be doing programming concentration for next year. As part of the program, each student is required to do a COOP term, however we can have the option of working on our portfolio instead.

So here's the backstory, recently I've applied to a few tech companies around my area to be their intern, but so far I haven't heard back from them. I probably should mention that this area is somewhat barren of tech jobs. I'm not keen on the idea of working for someone for free, especially when I have bills and school to pay for. So I wanted to get started with a few webapp ideas of my own this summer and put them into production so that I could make passive income while I'm in school, and as a bonus, beefing up my portfolio.

But here is where I'm hesitant to go forward with the portfolio idea, should I keep looking around for tech companies for internship or go ahead and work on my webapp ideas? Would I be hurting my chances after graduation by forgoing internship?

Thanks HN.
Funny how everyone used to say that Apple was benevolent due to their actions in the PC space. My argument was always they've never been in a position to really be aggressive. Now that they are in a borderline position they are quickly being a lot less benevolent. Does anyone honestly think if they had 90% PC/browser share they'd be "nicer" than Microsoft?
Memory address layout vulnerabilities
5 would generally mean you do one 45 minute phone screen and one in-person interview where you meet with 4 people for 45 minutes each.

Given the cost of a bad hire, I personally don't think that's enough.
Ha! Fond, fond memories of VB for Word 6.0.
The App Store terms have said that subscriptions had to be offered though Apple since the App Store was launched? As far as I'd heard, this was just added...
DHH, if you're reading, is this what you were talking about?
I can't count how many Rails fanboys have written this same article. What do they think big companies, banks, government agencies -- organizations with huge databases -- use? What kind of database do the RoR developers think the real world runs on?

Claiming that SQL databases don't scale, especially using MySQL as the example, is simply ignorant. Oracle, DB2, SQL Server all scale to handle databases orders of magnitude bigger than anything the most successful RoR app is running.
Seven Theses on the Internet Dictator's Dilemma
Considering that he's been sentenced and assuming he has served the term of probation, if he were to set foot on the US, could he be tried and sentenced again, or does Double Jeopardy protect him even if he already had proceeded through the German court system?
Why not? Don't you think local government has a stake in building the startup ecosystem in the city?

I think there's some serious opportunity for some jurisdiction to pwn Open Source startups with significant tax incentives for Open Source development.

What about tax incentives on salaries for developers who release code under an OSI license? Incentives for "soft" Open Source work like community management? Infrastructure like an accelerator space, business development aid?

Building a market helps, too. Vancouver has made it city policy to put Open Source software on an equal footing with proprietary software.

http://eaves.ca/2009/05/14/vancouver-enters-the-age-of-the-o...

Other governments have chosen to use OSS exclusively.

If there's not yet an established Open Source startup hub (and I think there's not), there's an opportunity for cities around the world to claim that mantle. And that's going to take the contributions of all stakeholders.
A normal onsite interview is 45 mins and yes, a normal start is the phone screen which counts as an interview too.

I work at Google and have interviewed O(250) people there.
Why don't they adopt click-to-play trick to get the best from both worlds?
So here's a question. Suppose a 1000 consumers get together, and petition MSFT to buy a copy of the Windows du jour.
Will MSFT give them the same price as a 1000-user company?
I think TFA gets it all wrong.

It's not that SQL databases do not scale per se, they just can't arbitrarily scale.

Most applications today manage pretty well with nothing more than sharding and replication. Sure, it's not the optimal solution, and it's not easy - but it gets the job done.

Facebook, at the very core (behind all the layers of cache), run, arguably, the largest MySQL landscape in the world - and they seem to be doing pretty good.

Until Heroku comes up with a better solution (or a better question), TFA is no more than flamebait.
What's the app? What platform are you targeting?
Great Design: Army Jeep torn apart and rebuilt in 4 minutes
Nowhere to Hide: Assessing Your Work Reputation Online
Dynamic Digital Resumes
ha cool . . . pretty similar to something I crudely put together awhile back:

http://hackskimmer.heroku.com

it uses viewtext to make things 'readable', which unfortunately seems to be choking right now

I wanted to put something together to let me get through hackernews quickly when i didn't want to get caught up in the comments.
Can we please stop with these ridiculous "SQL is utterly hopeless" and SQL vs NoSQL articles? Saying that SQL is not scalable, full stop, is ignoring decades of real-world evidence. There's a right tool for every job, and SQL isn't always that tool, but articles like this aren't helpful in the slightest.
http://gigaom.com/ - It's really got tons of high quality content, though often focusing more on enterprise tech.
To elude encoding, run length.
To allude to run-length encoding, zip.
Mechanical calculator: http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm
The Next Web has been pushing out some really high quality content lately. Highly recommended.
> But it's just a desktop app, just a one-time payment.

In which case, consider building a feature or time limited freeware version initially, without support, offering users to buy/upgrade, and submit it to all the shareware/freeware joints out there. That should get you a decent number of potential buyers, a good percentage of which should convert.

Test the waters this way and if you still don't get enough numbers, ditch the idea of full commercial version.

HTH
This seems similar to some of my thoughts:

Networking for networking's sake: Bah.

Networking to get something done (it can just as easily be (genuinely) helping someone else out, as my own project): Yay!

Networking for networking's sake I find to founded on the wrong purpose; at least for my personality, it puts the cart before the horse.

OTOH, I can engaging in interesting, and deep, conversation with a wide variety of people and topics. But as soon as I start thinking about "what's in this for me", it all goes to crap. And people who approach me with that attitude just make me want to take a shower (euch, get it off!). Actually, I feel a bit torn between wanting to be helpful but knowing I'm being manipulated (hopefully not too successfully).
In a system with a GUI (Android, Web Browsers, old school X windows) I often do a variation on pong but instead have a bunch of (round) bouncing balls with a simple Newtonian physics engine.
Bytecode to bytecode adaptive optimization for Smalltalk
> is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial intelligence to search for fingerprints?

Yes. :) I wish I could say more, but I don't want to give away the secrets to reddit's spam detection.
Transformers 3 - Dark of the Moon: Nuevas escenas son divulgadas
This interview of Frank Zappa, 'explaining the eventual downfall of music quality and talent' is so poignant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0
Currently, the musicians on the top of the charts don't right their own songs and aren't every good musicians. The label's shape them and prop them up. Frank Zappa saw our current condition very accurately. The techdirt interview/article shows how much he wanted and needed to subvert the labels.
'A plough, and animals to pull it.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6H-w9Rm46o#t=4m
Site's down, text-only Google cache view

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:T1eI3Z6...
Dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859468

And here too http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690656
Minecraft Documentary coming in 2012
To draw a parallel:

A law is only as good as it is enforced. There's a huge amount of laws out there that would be very controversial if they started getting enforced. For example, many states still have crazy/puritanical sex laws on the books.
Heat A Nanotube, Make A Nanolamp
Small things I immediately noticed:

- When initially loading, my map started out over India and I had to zoom out a bit to find where my markers were starting to drop. I don't list my current location on fb, which might explain that, but I do list where I went to school. Perhaps this could be used as a fallback for the default map center?

- The tooltip text for the markers have <b></b> markup tags in them that don't actually get rendered. Not huge, but it was a little distracting.

Other than that, cool toy app. It was fairly easy to use.
Anyone else think that nearly the entire financial industry is ready to be replaced with a lot of very short shell scripts?

It seems to me that their value add is negligible compared to how they're rewarded.
I have to say, as someone who has to deal with the same problem every day, I feel bad for the Digg folks. They are a good group of engineers, and spam is truly a hard problem -- much harder than most people realize.
I found the story to be quite tragic. This kid really saw the people at Valve as his heroes. Valve knew this and totally abused of that fact. They tricked him and was planning to hand him to the FBI, despite the fact he was (still is) their biggest fan and that the leak was accidental. I would have really hired him if I was in Gabe's position. He had both passion and skills. I think he would make an awesome YC applicant if he directed those to creating a web startup.
MySpace uses SQL. If that isn't a vote for SQL scalability then I don't know what is.
Well, in fairness, it's not like Java's been updated since about 2005 either :) Java 7 might be the Duke Nukem Forever of programming language releases
Well, they don't scale indefinitely, and you do run in to Brewers Theorem at some point. While you're right in saying that if you have enough cash and horsepower to throw at SQL databases you can get a very long way, there is some point where anything which must be consistent is going to have an impact on availability.

This gets especially critical once you stop assuming that data can be centralised. Once your required transactional context needs to scale large areas (geographically or logically) then the overhead of this is mighty. 2PC itself does not scale indefinitely, and while interesting research is being done in alternative transactional approaches, it would be tough to argue that any are acceptable solutions to the problem.

Also your example of banks is perhaps not an ideal one. While banks may indeed run some very large databases, they don't run one HUGE database which is expected to be always consistent. Things like ATM systems etc. run based on eventual consistency and tolerance favouring availability precisely because a simple horespower approach to a transactional database (whether SQL or not) wouldn't currently work in this domain.
Pretty cool. It'd be nice if you could change your color -- I was yellow and that was hard to see.
"It's just another case" of very complex software licenses which depend on nontrivial assumptions about distribution and runtime architecture meeting up with equally complex business requirements and legal agreements.

It's so weird how so many comments are from people completely convinced that this a result of some grand scheme by MS to destroy "Open Source".
Is it customary for this kind of companies to take that little?
From 5 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681967

Substantial amounts of discussion there. One conclusion is that this is not a standard jeep, but has been sepcially stripped down and modified for this "demonstration."
It's not insufficient information. I've disregarded resumes before because of a single typo. Usually in situations where I have more than enough candidates to choose from, but still. A one page document that is your primary and in some cases sole reference upon which to have an employer judge you, should be proofread multiple times and should have no errors. There's really no excuse. If you don't have sufficient skill to ensure there are no errors by proofreading it yourself, then have someone who can ensure that proofread it. Come on, it is the single major document you give to someone to evaluate your potential as an employee, and in most cases it is (or should be) a single page, so it's not like you're editing a book here. "Attention to detail" is not only important, it's crucial when evaluating an employee. Even one typo on a resume can demonstrate a lack of that vital skill. I wouldn't blame someone for overlooking the error or not, it's a judgment call, but as to whether it's "unfair" to toss someone's resume because of it, the answer is unquestionably NO, it is not unfair.
Maybe that was because you were trying to apply AD ideology to GNU/Linux, i.e. do things in "Active Directory-way"?

I don't know about AD, but implementing a single sign-on authentication on GNU/Linux is simple. Just configure PAM and roll the configuration to all machines (with rsync or whatever you prefer). I've never tried authenticating against a LDAP database, though. However, I believe if I'll see a Windows machine and be asked to set up a simple SSO configuration, it would take ages to understand (not just step-by-step copy some tutorial from the net).
Great commercial!

Wishlist: Android version
KDD Cup from Yahoo Labs - Learn the rhythm, predict the musical scores
Blackberry Internet service website -bold 9000
blackberry internet service website -bold 9000
1. User ID: Enter the name of the log in your account. Form the first part of your default handheld email address for your user name.
2. Friendly name: messages sent from the field, enter the desired name. If you do not want to give your name,

blackberry,internet service website,bold,9000
IBM has a Natural Language Purpose
Chai Wah Wu - IBM T. J. Watson Research Staff Member
First positive article on Eloping Nokia, eh?
Doesn't work in Firefox 1.5.0.6. Not that I expect it would - nothing whizzy does. Mind you, that's part of the reason why I use it.
If GPL code was going to compete with Microsoft's products, it would be competing with Microsoft's products already.

In some cases it is (particularly in the infrastructure department), but in many cases it is not in any significant way.
If you work on your portfilio, essentially working for yourself, you preclude a lot of chances for learning from others. You get to work on what you want and you get to work how you want to, but you're never going to be sure if you're doing something "the best way". Those learning opportunities have the most value early in your career, which is the big win for an internship. On the flip side, if you aren't going to get those opportunities and are just going to be cheap labor for some sweatshop, the internship will just be experience on paper and probably won't have done much for your actual development.
That's probably the reason he gives specific examples of ways to shake things up. None of these are likely to result in fines, jail time or death.
Nice alternative: http://mrdoob.com/125/Multiuser_Sketchpad_HTML5
Is this dead too?
14 Addictive Free Online Games
Isn't that what Oracle RAC is for? If you are managing that much data, and you don't want to go the specialty DB route (nosql, for example) RAC scales.

It's also hellishly complicated, but so is the problem.
Considering how good Valve is making fanbases, the number of hackpplicants would then be untenable.
How will Montreal represent a bridge to anyplace besides France?

While France isn't nothing (60 million people with a bit less disposable income than the US), USA+Canada+France is less than 20% bigger than USA+Canada.
What do they think big companies, banks, government agencies -- organizations with huge databases -- use? What kind of database do the RoR developers think the real world runs on?

CICS and TPF on z/OS?
> There are no natural contracts.

Do not kill?
I wonder why Valve didn't offered him a job. He was naive but talented and passionate about gaming.
This is pretty interesting... We haven't seen that to be the case at all for companies that use http://feefighters.com. Also, the merchant account fees (even for the smallest of accounts) on FeeFighters are significantly lower than what this guy has reported.
The colors are assigned based upon a mod of your SID. So just refresh the page if you want a different color
Believe you me, I want these guys to succeed as much as anyone else, but... wouldn't keeping the payment processing for subscriptions OUTSIDE of the iOS app solve the issue? I must be missing something critical to the functionality of the app?

There are no non-profit or even strictly business-related terms under the umbrella of the App Store as far as I know. There are no corporate/business iTunes purchasing accounts, no escalation to root-level privileges allowed for apps in the MacAppStore(postponing backup and other more powerful apps). This seems like another oversight on Apples part due to treating it as a lower priority.

And although they have every right to be proud of their achievements, it seems a bit like "you owe me" to remind Apple that they used the Apache-licensed Readability tech for Reader. Their proposed app could stand on its on.
Risky Business Becomes Riskier: A New Playbook for How Artists Are Compensated
There is a small code snippet that has to be inserted into apps that registers downloads on the site.
We hear that, send a great android programmer our way!
Great then!
I don't think anybody would buy a Time magazine app for $9.99 (or whatever the offset amount) just for the option to purchase a cheaper subscription, let alone spend an extraordinary amount of time becoming informed about the various price differences.
I hate Klout scores. HATE. But once they evolve, so they're less gameable, those in charge of hiring will definitely pay attention.
http://pluggd.in
I can't resist it. I know pedantry is to be discouraged here, and I apologise in advance. But...
"a century old 6 bedroom 3 bath Tudor home"
grates against the part of my mammalian hind-brain responsible for breathing, basic motor control and throttling estate agents. Downvotes will be sadly accepted.
Isn't reddit's code open source? https://github.com/reddit/reddit

Or are there parts (like the spam detection algorithm) that are kept secret?
Personal income tax may be higher, but the advantages far outweigh the cost.

I'm thinking about: free healthcare, extremely low electricity cost, cheap rent (pretty much half as much as SF's rent) and everything that comes with living in a major city.

RE French: Ever learned a new programming language to go work somewhere? What's the difference? You don't have to be fluent in French, you have to understand it enough to read signs (which are usually just street or landmarks names with a symbol). I see this more as a great opportunity to become a better candidate in the future - by knowing another language.

I completely understand your reluctance, but you have to look at the bigger picture.
Most likely because the browser on the device will be positioned as the real “full web” when it’s upgraded to the 10.2 release. A useful feature that runs counter to a marketing strategy will always get cut.

This is part of the reason Flash was blacklisted from iOS: features have to wait on Adobe’s schedule to be enabled, instead of being available out-of-box.
Cool. only one wiener on the whiteboard now. I can see this descend into chaos in a few hours.
I don't think so. Just imagine Microsoft try to apply the same terms to Windows ...
The Best Birthday Cake Ever (Angry Birds Edition) [video]
Shove It
Analyze your Social Media Value
No, they've both chosen a distribution model which is incompatible with any software containing GPLv3 code. Sure, if the code is 100% yours, you can do whatever you want with it since you own the copyright. But if it has ever accepted contributions from anybody else under GPL terms, then it can't be done without breaking those terms.

They could work out a process for developers who want to contribute GPLed apps, but they've decided not to.
I think an important aspect of the internship, as touched on by bartonfink, is the social connection. This decision isn't as easily boiled down to whether you'll make more impressive things at an internship or on your own.

I don't think forgoing an internship would necessarily hurt you, but your portfolio would have to really stand out to make up for it.

I would say continue to pursue internships and see what turns up. If nothing viable or attractive comes up, then plunge into your ideas.
yeah,

but you can program your bots to train the spam filters. Nothi8ng annoys the user base more than false-positive spam filtering.
Adding to your point, it is very important to note that France French != Quebec French. When a Montrealer goes to Paris and starts speaking French, the Parisian will get confused and respond in English if they know it.
Use Google Apps APIs without writing a program
Smart Solution to Traffic Problems
...hm. What would happen if the bill of rights applied to the stronger side in any relationship with a massive power disparity, rather than just the federal and state governments?
Wow, a lot of dislike of SQL, and a bit biased in their description of scaling SQL and sharding. Again, use the right tool for the right purpose, not what you think is intrinsically better.

Our app does double entry accounting, and considering the relational structure of accounting ledgers as well as that every entry needs to be posted in an ACID manner, we don't feel comfortable building out, say, a banking system in NoSQL.

Yes, SQL is painful to scale, but it can be manageable. We partition it in a scoped schema way (e.g each company account/tenant has its own set of tables on one of the shards with the server of the fewest consumed resources, or if it's a tie, a coin toss). Scaling it in an arbitrary manner such as by names beginning A to M, N to Q, etc simply seems like a bad way to do it. If your app is like a 37 Signals app where it doesn't typically require access to another account's data, this might be a good way to do it.

One of the programmers I hired was dead set on trying to use CouchDB for everything. I told him don't try to use it for everything--it's good to use for the audit trail and document revisions on invoices, orders, etc, but not on actual double entry journals.