skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The field of invention attracts a lot of paranoid kooks who will die in obscurity because they won't connect with people to validate and develop their ideas.

I know a guy who's invented a cat toilet and thinks that he invented the white LED and got cheated of the discovery because somebody stole a suitcase out of his car in Manhattan.

If somebody's got an idea and they don't want to talk about it, I start to suspect that there are mental health problems involved, and I'll make sure to steer clear.
ObjC binding I think and things like that HotCocoa

http://www.macruby.org/trac/wiki/HotCocoa

http://www.slideshare.net/reborg/writing-apps-with-hotcocoa-...
Even if one accepts his conclusion as correct, he did not explain how he came to that conclusion very well.

While I can, in fact, guess why he concluded that, I am merely guessing because his reasoning was not explained very well.

I really hope that I'm wrong in believing that about half of his problems are with the use of political labels. The very meaning of all political labels is contested: people abuse them constantly for their own purposes, so they do not carry the same meaning for all people. For example, "socialism" can be anything from an oppressive government that ruthlessly punishes success to neighbors banding together to help each other out in times of trouble. Or it can be used as a simple insult.

The problem isn't that these words have no meaning, the problem is that people are fighting over what these words should mean. As Lewis Carroll put it, 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'
MacRuby allows you to write native Cocoa apps and call C/Objective-C directly without a bridge. Basically, it's an Objective-C replacement using the same runtime but a different language.
FYI - I just got an email back from Shares Post.

| Unfortunately all investors must be accredited investors

| as defined by the SEC in order to participate.

| Thanks,

| Team SharesPost

| On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:09 AM, SharesPost <no-reply@sharespost.com> wrote:

And apparently the SEC definition is here:
http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm
Obese xor Smokers consume less healthcare
A bit of both. When everything hyped around you is the next "social thing" or Google, or Web x.0 app, it can be hard to look beyond that. Now add in that most young developers don't have much exposure to anything beyond pure software, and it leads to 80% chasing the same 5% of application domains.

This is arguably one of the advantages of experience: you're more likely to have been exposed to a wider set of problems, many of which are not being addressed (well) by software.

It's not at all a difficult box to break out of, but the easy part is finding an application domain that you can build stuff for. The harder part -- without having experience in that field -- is figuring out how to reach your prospects. Many of these areas have little to no web presence. It's easy to say "just look at a few forums" but that doesn't help if your customer base isn't online at all.
Agreed. I bought the MEAP for "Joy of Clojure" in August 2010, and the MEAP for "Taming Text" a couple of months later (November) -- no updates for either book since the initial purchase. I was glad to get the early content, but I've lowered my expectations for future dealings with Manning.
From the abstract

With a simulation model, lifetime health-care costs were estimated for a cohort of obese
people aged 20 y at baseline. To assess the impact of obesity, comparisons were made with
similar cohorts of smokers and ‘‘healthy-living’’ persons (defined as nonsmokers with a body
mass index between 18.5 and 25). Except for relative risk values, all input parameters of the
simulation model were based on data from The Netherlands. In sensitivity analyses the effects
of epidemiologic parameters and cost definitions were assessed. Until age 56 y, annual health
expenditure was highest for obese people. At older ages, smokers incurred higher costs.
Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest
among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate
position. Alternative values of epidemiologic parameters and cost definitions did not alter these conclusions.
When a company gives you Sat. and Sun. off, they're doing it because it's the normal thing to do -- it's not even a decision. When a company gives you Friday off, they're doing it because they've calculated that it will enhance their business somehow. If you come along and decide to treat the day as if it were a normal day off, you're missing the point.

It's like if a company gives you free sodas, it's not the same thing as a Coke van on campus giving out free twelve-packs, you're not supposed to load your backpack full of sodas every afternoon when you leave work, just because they're "free".
I hope this serves as a wakeup call to Apple, that their position is not so unassailable that they can continue looking for new ways to drive away partners and developers without consequences.
Ask HN: A data structures book
I know there is CLRS but I am not particularly fond of its style, so I am looking for an alternative. Something similar to Algorithm design manual but with more focus on data structures.

Thanks
The haskell implementation has a web command that presents a nice html page with summaries of every account along with the ability to filter by date or account. It is a nice way of quickly analyzing the current state of affairs.
Please email us at sc@socialcam.com; thanks!
Why do you think BBM will be any more successful than Kik? I think brand recognition here is actually a disadvantage.
One big problem with the rare diseases is that there may not be any science on a given subject. By that I mean not merely that nobody may have studied it, but that papers are quite narrow, so there may only be published research on two or three possible therapies out of several that may be promising. Yet you must make decisions relevant to your disease and life in general; maybe diet changes, maybe exercise changes, etc. If you can't have science, anecdotal evidence and personal conversations may be all you have. I would be cautious and skeptical, but on the other hand, you may have nothing else to turn to.

I love science, but no one can avoid having to function beyond the light it casts, the moreso for those with rare diseases.

I've got Celiac; whether it meets the fewer-than-200,000-in-the-US criterion depends on who you ask, but it's certainly less well covered by science than I'd like. Yes, there's a relatively easy treatment for me: Don't eat gluten. But I also am having children, and the science on what's best to do for them is very unsettled. There's hints of the importance of breast feeding, but, suppose my kid has all the genes and is breast fed and ends up with the condition masked by it, but still present. Is that possible? Is it better or worse than the obvious manifestation I experienced? Should I just cut them off from gluten entirely preventatively, or might that make it much worse if they ever accidentally get some anyhow, which is inevitable? Nobody knows, the available science only provides somewhat contradictory hints, yet my wife and I have to decide something.
In his post he says that "the paperback will be bound and available sometime in mid-March to book retailers," so I'd assume it will arrive within the next couple of weeks at the latest.
Ambient music and live LAPD police radio. What's not to like?
It's interesting to notice that in the past couple days, this topic about the notification system on iOS re-appear. The most recent if I recall was:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2275227

Clearly there is a need for iOS to improve the notification system which is currently terrible. I really hope that iOS 5 will have that topic revisited, and more important provide a third party API to hook into it.
Congrats. Mixcloud would be coming in @4 although not eligible :D
The guy who released the Twitter worm is discussing it on reddit
I'll dig deeper into your UI in a minute, but have a usage scenario for you to consider. Suppose this thing catches on in the Las Vegas tourists context I mentioned earlier. There might be multiple people queuing up with the same origin and destination. How do you identify your rideshare partners? Second question: Suppose there are people who have heard of this now-ubiquitous app but gasp don't have a smartphone with them. Can they jump in and share a ride? For both situations I think it might be good to have a big distinctive screen-covering photo of the place you're going (if the destinations are among a top list), or the destination spelled out in text with distinctive foreground/background pairs. I'm thinking of this as akin to buying theatre tickets in front of the venue just before a show. Then the prospective partners who have phones can stand around with their smartphone screens not-so-subtly visible, and other prospectives (having smartphones or not) can scan them visually very quickly instead of asking a bunch of people "are you my ride"?
This is not the only NoSQL-injection issue. Extra fun bonus warning: nobody knows what the quoting domains are for all the NoSQL's. Be extraordinarily careful with your keys.
"rich kids don’t fear the boss."

So true. And if you start acting like a boss, you'll start being treated like one. Of course, this is a tricky business (as Michael mentions), and a lot depends on your role and the company's culture. But with the right approach, a mix of social skills and "knowing your stuff", it's possible. Especially in the field of technology.
"Always validate your inputs" is unfortunately one of the least useful bits of security advice given to developers; it is only epsilon away from "never make mistakes".
Congratulations, nice idea.
Interesting. One of the side effects of having the zero sum rule for all transactions means that graphs can be superimposed on each other and also get a valid balance-sheet graph. Cool! Are loops possible? What do they mean?
UIDickBar for iOS apps
They're under certain obligations of the Ruby license, no? Wikipedia claims MacRuby is "based on Ruby 1.9." Ruby 1.9 is distributed under GPL and the Ruby License, which states:

2. You may modify your copy of the software in any way, provided that
you do at least ONE of the following:

a) place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise
make them Freely Available, such as by posting said
modifications to Usenet or an equivalent medium, or by allowing
the author to include your modifications in the software.

b) use the modified software only within your corporation or
organization.

c) rename any non-standard executables so the names do not conflict
with standard executables, which must also be provided.

d) make other distribution arrangements with the author.

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/LICENSE.txt

Not sure how this is compatible with "Apple apparently decided to not share MacRuby with other OS X developers" but I do not know much of MacRuby, maybe someone else can weigh in.
I recently became aware of ledger when Wiegley was interview on the floss podcast:

http://castroller.com/Podcasts/FlossWeekly/2140974-FLOSS%20W...

Worth a listen both from a general open source development perspective as well as for an overview of the system itself.
Do they know 'git gui'? Imo the visual view helps to commit several unrelated things separately.
Put differently: "we're all doomed". Squares with our professional experience.
It seems like we get this story every week.
Black-on-dark-grey is a bad combination for aesthetics and accessibility.

Speaking of accessibility, blind people are big users of cabs. So that might be another market to focus on.
I think you've conflated "not trusting" user data with sanitizing it. To use an analogy from SQL, using prepared statements/parameterized queries doesn't sanitize user data, but it also doesn't trust it (as it doesn't treat data as code). More generally, blacklist sanitizing is a losing game from the outset, whitelist sanitizing is hard, your best bet is to not treat data as code to begin with.
You're forgetting about the significant overhead imposed by every process having its own copy of the necessary libraries loaded into memory, and having to load those libraries from disk every time an app using those libraries is started. If those apps were all using a version included with the OS, all those pages could be shared between processes and only loaded once.

But maybe people don't care about apps starting fast on their macs anymore, since a lot of them come with SSDs :)
I always liked Robert Sedgewick's books.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rs/
I am fearless because I was poor and it ain't so bad. Being born middle-class must suck.
#1 in volume doesn't always mean #1 in profit.

I'm guessing Apple is trying to grab hard onto the market segment that brings in the most profit, while Google is going for the commodity, high volume, low margin option.

The good news is that both models can coexist in the same market. After all, Nintendo's strategy is a bit like Google's, while Microsoft and Sony's are more like Google's. Nintendo has been quite profitable for a very long time even when they didn't own the entire market.
Investment banker: Work hard where you're at and then steal the client list to go start your own shop. If you're really better than the boss you hate people will flock to you. Make sure the clients see you as a go-getter.

That investment shop will have every banker arguing that they deserve a gigantic compensation package. Add's a lot of overhead that you won't have starting out.

Accounting:
Like most professional services the web has revolutionized accounting. You can now trivially have your accounting done anywhere in the world. How about you start your own shop by hiring and managing overseas workers? Or how about a cadre of accountants based in a low cost area of the US? Since 1995 other industries have been transformed by technology MORE than the tech sector. Netflix/iPod/Kindle anyone?

You've got me on pharmaceuticals, but it seems that regulation is the key here. I doubt communism would help with that.
Speedtest.net updated today with a new look
If you’re a real accountant reading this, please forgive my simplifications; if you spot any mistakes, please let me know.

There is one pretty important section of the P&L / Balance Sheet that's missing . . . taxes.

On that note, I am hosting a tax workshop on 3/15 @ Hacker Dojo in Mtn. View (very close to YC's office)

http://www.transparentaccounting.org/self-employment
Ask HN: Final Year CS Degree Project
Hey HN

So this week I need to choose a project for the final year of my Computer Science degree at the University of Edinburgh.

We have been given a list of ~150 pre-approved projects with supervisors and asked to select 4 top choices. The list has some very technical options such as: "Parallel hashing memory vs content addressable memory", "Static and profile-based parallelisation in the LLVM compiler" etc

These are very theory based and while that is computer science, I'd like to do something more practical. Infact if possible I'd like to kill two birds with one stone and come up with a startup idea that I can use for my project. There are some relatively good pre-proposed projects such as combining travel routes for taxis, spelling correction for twitter etc. However I don't want to rely on trying to get one of these projects.

It's quite difficult to propose your own project as you need to find a supervisor to back your idea. However I think i'll put far more hours in if it's a project I genuinely am interested in and that I can possibly turn into a business.

Any suggestions?
Agreed. Waiting for (real) linux on tablets from them:

http://www.rasterman.com/

(Rasterman is the creator of the enlightenment desktop enviroment, very solid, problem was it does not use Gtk either Qt, Android either).

As an openmoko engineer he knows about phone business, now at Samsumg I expect something great.
I love the idea, I would use the idea... I'm not ready to adopt the current version. The UX has way to much going on. I was expecting/hoping for more of an instagram like experience for video. That would be more interesting to me.
> Apple is trying to grab hard onto the market segment that brings in the most profit, while Google is going for the commodity, high volume, low margin option.

Hardly. Google doesn't make phones.
Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law
Airtel
The good news is that they can't have a negative market share.
Accounting courses are horrific, but in fairness they try to get you up to speed on the basics before diving into the detail.

A typical CSI 101 course is often like this -- you learn about operators, etc without understanding how things actually work until later.
Loved this post. Starts to convince people that Accounting really can be beautiful, in many of the same ways that software can be beautiful. It does tend to get overrun with terminology, edge cases, and other necessary issues given the consequences of ambiguity, but at the lowest level, accounting is just telling a story. Wonderful post!
I don't see where Matt Aimonetti is breaking the NDA. He just refers to information someone else posted in public. Considering that someone else had to give him (a core developer of MacRuby) a tip that MacRuby is included in Lion, I would expect that he didn't sign an NDA.
Such a cool product. The Wordpress for Facebook pages. Great stuff. Hats off.

Some small hints while using it.

* When editing your page it automatically saves, at least that is what the message tells you. But after clicking the upgrade banner top left and going back, my changes are lost. Using the latest Chome stable on Mac btw. After publishing the page, my changes were there though.

* Open the page result in a new window, so I can easily go back and tweak more

* When clicking on a header in the final page, I would like for it to close so I can easily open the next one.

* I am missing a feature to delete the whole page

* (Pro version?) I would like to rename the page as well as the page icon

* (Pro version?) Would love to add and edit more pages

* (Pro version?) Be able to change the style of the page (colours, fonts, borders ,..)
Will that automatically takes the top 15 if 5 links are already visited?
Compared to everyone else, Apple is miles ahead - and I'm not talking abou features and specs. Hearing from some of my hardware friends, Apple's hardware is built like a tank - in terms of design, manufacturing precision, and use of materials. Crack open a Samsung phone and you'll find lots of plastic, lots of empty space, lack of structural rigidity, and even things like antennae haphazardly taped down to the casing.

I don't think this is a case of can or cannot, these phones, laptops, and tablets are coming out of the same factories Apple products are - it really seems to be a matter of priorities. Apple spends an enormous amount of effort on making their machines beautifully designed, inside and out, whereas most OEMs seem merely content with the outside.
Do you have numbers for other markets? I gather in some of them Symbian is still going strong.
welcome to a 10 year old problem fixed through build-in odm like driver.

raw mysql_query vs MongoCollection Obj.
The world market as well: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/31/us-google-nokia-id...
This is a deliberate design decision in OS X in general, it's been this way for a very long time. OS X is not into the whole DLL Hell Thing.
In light of the Mac App store they probably will :/
> Each modification generates a new version of the document. (...) we don’t need it, and there’s no way to disable it (...)

Note that there's a `_revs_limit` setting available: <http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_database_API>. It's very beneficial for a use case like yours.

(Though I've seen CouchDB performing rather poorly when taking really heavy read/write load or compacting big datasets, on occasion.)
10-Year-Old Talks About MakerBot At Ignite Phoenix
You should meet Kenny Tilton from comp.lang.lisp - the writing style of your comment made me think of him.
What are you interested in?

Maybe someone on HN can steer you towards something if they know more about where your interests lie?
Related:
http://blog.duh.org/2011/03/so-google-voice-sip-is-actually-...

Hopefully they'll fix the security issues (4 digit PIN to log in...), or at least SSL wrap it soon.
"Investment banker: Work hard where you're at and then steal the client list to go start your own shop."

That's actually the one action where a non-compete is universally and trivially enforceable in all 50 states. As I understand it, IANAL. Additionally, it's unethical if you believe in that sort of thing. So, bad idea.

Not sure what communism has to do with anything. At all.
Basically, MacRuby is an MRI fork with the object system replaced by the one present in Objective-C (which is pretty similar). Integration is its main strength.
Looking for feedback on my start-up..
I've been coding the site and hustling to forge partnerships for the last year.. check it out at www.hoursales.com .. Any feedback from the wonderful YC community would be greatly appreciated!
Google Remotely Uninstalls Malware Infected Apps from Android Phones
People's laxity towards Apple's NDAs more or less reflects Apple's laxity in deciding whether to declare a piece of software is under NDA. I mean, the iPhone SDK was under one for months after it was released to the public. As one developer put it, "I'm sitting in a public conference session hearing about the iPhone SDK that anyone can view on Apple's website, but I can't talk about what I'm hearing to the guy next to me."

Apple isn't remotely selective in applying NDAs. When anyone can get at the information, there's nothing actually private about it. If there were any kind of secrecy to begin with, people would be more concerned about preserving it.

It's like when folks post to mailing lists with signatures reading "THIS MESSAGE IS CONFIDENTIAL AND ONLY MEANT FOR THE NAMED RECIPIENT." People start to take it less seriously.
MacRuby being private doesn't matter if the code is still open-source - just build your own version and ship it. You don't need to use Apple's builtin version.
A Great Hacker News Contest
David Friedman wrote a very short post 5 years ago on accounting:

"I have been teaching a new course that includes two weeks explaining accounting to law students. To do so, I first had to understand it myself. I think I now do, and in the hope that the information might be useful to others ... ."

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-acc...
If you have a formal systems bent, as I do, you might enjoy "Algebraic Models for Accounting Systems" (http://www.amazon.com/Algebraic-Accounting-Systems-Salvador-...).

"This book describes the construction of algebraic models which represent the operations of the double entry accounting system. It gives a novel, comprehensive, proof based treatment of the topic, using such concepts from abstract algebra as automata, digraphs, monoids and quotient structures."

Think of it as a primer for building yourself an exceedingly awesome and utterly-unnecessary Haskell-based QuickBooks.
There are things that a small group can't accomplish (building an oil pipeline for example). However, a little expertise and the right scope could attack the industry obliquely. Rather than try to build the whole system perhaps you have a small part of it that you make. You can't build the pipeline, but maybe you can build a better O-ring seal.
Can anyone recommend a SIP phone for OS X?

As a semi-aside, I'm really tired of paying for skype since the service is so awful and would happily redirect my money elsewhere.
Clickable link: http://grapevine-project.info