skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love The Noun Project. They have the simplest, most easily recognizable set. Just wish they had all the social media ones as well: http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset:nounproject
apparently they're ahead of their seafaring counterparts. Commercial ships are still required to carry paper charts.
Cell phones are treated the same way as landlines in the US (in terms of charging).
Why iPhone 5 needs to be lighter
I know some people thought otherwise but short of Apple open sourcing iOS, this was the only realistic outcome. There are quite a lot of phone makers out there who would need years to develop there own iOS, meanwhile phones have been improving year on year for as far as I remember. Therefore, the 'smartphone' would become ubiquitous, basically just the next step up for feature phones (fist they got smaller, then they got screens, then they got mp3 players, then they got WAP, then they got touch screens and proper internet etc.). Android was the clear option for all these companies to start producing smart phones. I think a better measure of what's going on would be consider how iPhone's share of the total mobile phone market has grown.
I've found the Android version gives significantly worse directions then Maps on a PC, or even my TomTom. I'll have to give it a try again and see if this helps.

As an example, if I use my phone to navigate from my apartment to work, it takes me down a road where there's a redlight every quarter mile, as well as heavy traffic during 75% of the day. If I use my TomTom or Google maps on my PC, they take me down the highway, which is about 2x as fast as the route my phone tries to take me. I've had several people tell me similar things about the Android navigation.
webkit2 is also a private framework in Lion, a la iOS...
What are your interests in terms of CS and startups?

Domain specific search is one area that fits nicely into both categories, there are lots of things for which search algorithms are pretty poor at the moment, for example clothes or sofas.

Fraud detection is another interesting area, although getting the data to analyze might be tricky.

Some other specific ideas:

If you're interested in board games you could build an online competitor to Zillions of Games (a windows games engine that allows non-programmer to create games using S-Expressions).

There's probably some interesting things you can do with Google's english language dataset, for example build a tool that can estimate the age of a work based upon the words used.

Apply cryptography to a modern privacy issue, for example see if you can use cryptographic hashes of DNA for identification purposes as opposed to the DNA itself.

Develop a dynamic pricing/yield-management algorithm for an industry that doesn't normally use them.
Whenever an article (like this) presents a false dichotomy--either that Facebook IS the cure or it isn't--I just roll my eyes.

Take a look:

> But the reality is that when it comes to improving blog comments, anonymity really isn’t the issue — the biggest single factor that determines the quality of comments is whether the authors of a blog take part in them.

Attempts to boil down complex problems into a simple "this is the cause" statement will be wrong.
patio11's blog:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

Read all of the stuff on SEO (and everything else, too!).
Has Heroku killed the shared hosting company?
You might want to consider partnering with cable or radio stations in your area. Give them a cut of the profit for constant advertising. I'm pretty sure that is what one of the local job boards does near me.
Yeah maybe. Depends on the person I think. I actually find it easier to assemble a SQL string myself. If you're new to rails / AR and you're not familiar with SQL then you'll look up and figure out how to assemble the SQL via the ORM methods. If you're new to rails but an old hand at SQL, just building the string is super easy and takes you 2 seconds without looking up any documentation. Of course assembling the string AND sanitizing it requires a heck of a lot more effort.

Regardless, it's not a knock on rails. Just saying it's not necessarily a magic bullet to secure apps (and I don't believe rails nor PHP needs to be).
Take a break from your startup, work on mine: need appengine(java) developer
Hello HN
I tried looking at the regular freelancing websites (elance, odesk...) then I thought communities like Hacke news, reddit and stackoverflow maybe better places to look for good developers for relatively new technology.
I need a developer for a google app engine (java) project.
Maybe I can hire someone who has been working on their own startup and would like to take some time off for a month or two.
I am giving all the details below, appreciate your suggestions or responses.

skills required
- good knowledge of google app engine (java), its limitations, tricks, pitfalls and best practices (esp with the datastore)
- good java skills (speed) and knowledge of oop
- basic html/css and javascript skills

- work schedule
- The website is to be completed in March so it will start right away
- In most of March there will be daily communication and almost daily deliveries, so your calendar needs to be free

- about the website
- it is a website based on sports, at the start it will focus only on one sport
- basically fans can follow tournaments, interact with each other and play some simple sport related games (not flash)

- payment
- prefer billing by number of hours
- will pay with my credit card using the option with least overhead
- willing to make payments weekly/daily...

- strategy
- The site will be coded one feature at a time with a very plain html ui. Expect something like this:
- first chunk of work: a User class, a user registration page, login page (session), user's profile editing page, an admin page to view new users
- second chunk: classes: Tournament, Match (Tournaments consist of matches), a Tournament page, a match page, an admin type page to enter and delete data
- third chunk: user can add Tournament or match to his list, this list can be seen on his profile page
- the nifty features (usually done with javascript) will be implemented with simple basic html elements and minimal javascript
- once all the features are implemented in the backend I will get a designer to make a photoshop design
- photoshop design will be converted to html/css (by me or you or another front end designer)
- site will be operational before april and fixes will be made as required
- after May the site will be expanded by adding more sports and features

- current status of project
- I have a very well definded minimal set of features
- complete organization of the website (content of each type of page, whats in the menu's where, which page links to what etc)
- basic layout/wireframe(on paper) of each type of page
- I have a very well defined deadline too :)

</code></pre>
If you are interested please reply with your work sample, working hours, hourly rates etc (my email id: sunflight.explore@gmail.com)
Again, I appreciate any suggestions you might have for me.
What kind of data do you record (number of documents, average size of document) ? We have to use couchdb at my current job, and I have encoutered all those issues for even moderate size (replication failing more often than @ ~30-40 Gb). I wonder if that's an environment issue.
pen.io doesn't yet support markdown, but I'm planning on adding support for it.
Great, idea! It is now available on radiotime.com!
This made me think that App Engine suddenly got support for a really old mac assembly language tool.http://www.lightsoft.co.uk/Fantasm/fant.html

I must be getting old.
If you use Ledger, check out my command-line version of Mint for Ledger called Reckon.

http://blog.andrewcantino.com/post/1503439483/command-line-a...
Netflix spooks Hollywood more than ever
Pick up Thomas Schelling's Micro Motives and Macro Behavior; he originated many of these models (the most mind-blowing to me was that a small segregation preference among individuals balloons into way more segregation than was desired just because of physical constraints inherent in the geometry of neighborhoods).
Interesting how asymmetric the ratios are for almost all YC companies: they're happy to have people follow them, but not in general interested in following back.
It isn't too likely to catch on, I think. Unlike the modal alert()s, changing the address bar doesn't prevent one from just closing the tab that has the page in it. Sure, you lose whatever history got you to that site, but I find my history is rarely more than 5-10 links deep, since I tend to spawn new tabs rather than using the current one.
"At university things were just starting to get really fun. I'm mid thirties now and looking forward to the fun that's around the corner. Not only is the glass half full, but it's champagne and the cute waitress is coming round with refills."

As a college student I often worry that my life will become more boring after I graduate. What's your secret?
Canvas circle packing
Show HN: Finally out - Calendar for the Mac App Store
Fossilized alien bacteria inside a meteorite
I think this is what my local job board is doing as well.

I know someone who tried to compete with them and offered a weekly print product along with the website, but they didn't last too long.
I did a pretty well-received ant harvesting simulation in second life a while ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehEzRUu4_RM
> They are not required to post their updates to LLVM+clang, but they do

You open-source the projects you don't consider strategic assets and/or projects that would cost too much or take too long to develop internally. Open-sourcing is a tool - a development model. That's also why NeXT based its OS on Mach and BSD (and licensed Display PostScipt) - because that shortened their time to market and allowed them to build a computer will a full operating system with enough competitive differentiation to survive for some time (and be resurrected later in the form of OSX)

NeXT was very reluctant in sharing their GCC front-end but was eventually forced to comply with the GPL. Apple has no such obligations with LLVM-clang.
Then it is a field that we must take advantage of. We are barely using the full capacity of our senses; we're too lazy with our eyes. It's something we should consider in the future, try to develop the human senses.... I'm sure there's a little budget for that in the 3 trillion they spend on military ventures!
News Corp Leads $77 Million Round Into Music Startup "Beyond Oblivion"
I'm really waiting for the WebOS Tablets. The launch looked promising and the product looked well designed. What tips it for me in favor of Web OS vs. Android is the better execution of UI and support for DRM aps like Netflix.
Having just moved back to India, and having researched SMS rates/recharge behaviour for an app I'm building, you're getting a bad deal. The bad deal is the default in India, but knowledge of how to fix that is so widespread, and fixing it is so easy that effective SMS prices are closer to Rs0.02-0.05.
Tips for Great Essay Papers
Executing great essay papers is not something many students are skilled at. Most students find this a very difficult task. These students need to be guided in the right path which ensures that they submit excellent essay papers. This page will provide them the ability to do so.
So far reminds of Erlang / OTP.
Nice, glad to see it. When's native SVN support coming, and Perforce?

[Ed: I'm not poking fun, I actually think for a .NET platform those make sense]
Dear non-US writers: This article is specifically about US smartphones.

"Google Android Captures #1 Position in U.S. Smartphone Market"
I had originally submitted this app last week, all excited to see the sales, but then something horrible occurred: the app crashed on startup.

We stayed up until 5 AM and figured out the problem: the app was checking for our company's signature, but Apple re-signed it with its own certificate before releasing on the app store. Needless to say, it was pretty painful:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283064

The app was racking up 1 star reviews, so we pulled the app's availability on the store. I submitted the fix the very next day and emailed appreview @ apple with an URGENT subject line, asking them to please push this through quickly because the version that was up there was not helping anyone.

The fixed version just came out. So we're back at the same point we were last week. Except, are we? Back then, this app was at the top of the Productivity section within an hour. Now it's been a week. We'll see what happens.

So I guess this can be an example of how our startup handled a major setback... I'll keep you posted!
Couldn't you use this to mask AJAX fragment URLs for the forces of good?
Nice. I wish heroku would get on this. :)
Jason
hi
MacRuby is under the Ruby License. I am not sure it prohibits distributions of binaries without source. If, however, Apple decided to include the latest and greatest version of, say, bash, they would be required to give you redistribution rights along with the source. You could, then, redistribute it (thus giving informations about the next OSX) without violating the NDA.

If Apple forbids you to get the source of their GPL'ed parts and passing this source on to others, they are in violation of the GPL and their own right to distribute it is voided.
From a quick glance (sorry, I don't register for facebook apps) it seems to me you just need people using it in the same location.

The most sensible marketing idea to me is using it in your town. Get your friends to test it out, make plans on it, demo it anywhere you can. Find all the local people/groups in your area (meetup.com, facebook groups, craigslist, online dating sites, whatever else comes to mind?)

You need a critical mass in a given location for it to work (I hope you live somewhere crowded... not on a rural farm!). I say pick your own city because you may have an easier time connecting with people locally rather than cold emails/calls. Now is that time to spend any and all goodwill getting people to try it out.
The bottom of the screen (where it partially blocks the dock with the most-used apps) is the worst place to place a notification bar. I think Apple is more likely to make a notifications app which will get permanently pinned to the home screen.
Pingar Annouces Semantic API
I know someone from a background like that. I don't think he's really smarter,more skilled, or even more confident in 99% of situations. But in those few it's like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - he can step out over the pit fully sure he'll be ok.

You can't learn that kind of confidence. You have to truly believe you will be just fine.
Hmm. I think these functions escape output, not sanitize input.
Why would he need another hacker? Seriously, I think it's annoying to assume in every situation that they should screw the 'business guy' and go for another hacker!

He doesn't know how to market it, thus that's his problem, getting the word out. It would be counter intuitive to spend all his time learning to market (that in itself is silly, it would take a long time, and he may not even be able to do it.)
Shared hosting companies are doing quite fine. I think you'll find the users on shared hosting are wildly different from those on EC2/Heroku. Maybe someday when they are equally easy to use, but right now, as a small business owner or kid making a website, I don't want to think about hourly billing for my website.
My comment has no relation to escaping. It's in fact, centered on the idea that any attempt to do so will introduce potential vulnerabilities and the only sane way out of this mess is not having a language in the first place.

Anyway, the idea of blindingly assuming that just because something doesn't use SQL it's invulnerable to any kind of code injection is a very optimistic position.
Al Jazeera launches Twitter dashboard to track uprisings in the Middle East
You don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the other guy. (and the other guy is a billion-strong bureaucracy.)
Not only do they pay per SMS message to send, quite a few people pay per message received.

Which has always seemed insane to me. That's like being billed every time someone called your phone, whether you picked up or not.
Ahh, gotcha. Yeah, that kind of thing is hard to do reliably, though those should show up when one removes the accuracy filter (not necessarily in the right place).

And thanks! I really do like hearing criticisms, though, since it helps me figure out where to focus next.
It should be fairly difficult to abuse, since you need to link to the suicidal post in the contact form. I assume a human at Facebook will look at it before sending in the SWAT team.
I agree that worrying whether people are smarter or more naturally gifted than you might be is fruitless.

There's something quite magical involved in making things - pure aptitude isn't a good measure for success.

But I do think it's worth worrying about covering bases and thinking ahead. Have a plan - make sure that you'll be progressing faster than your competitor, that you'll be working harder than your competitor.

If you have the initial idea - you also potentially have the spark that makes it magical. A copycat won't.
I didn't really understand what it was from the homepage. Is it for me to organise things with my friends, or is it like Meetup.com? I think you should also make it more clear it's USA only (The zip codes).
Looking for a junior Software Engineer - Java in Singapore.
(Sorry, must be located in Singapore)

The team at Plunify is seeking a talented and enthusiastic Java developer to help build a cloud computing platform. Work with the latest Web technologies to bridge the gap between the desktop and the cloud. Most importantly, be passionate about creating great software, be able to learn quickly and be a team player.

Your role is to develop, maintain and support Java applications that work with our proprietary platform. Refine and enhance security of existing Java applications. You will also be required to learn and understand how to integrate your applications with various hardware and software systems.

Required:
- BS/MS CS or related majors. (New graduates welcome)
- Strong programming skills in Java
- Willingness to learn
- Fluency in written and spoken English. Any other languages are a bonus!
- Deep interest in cloud computing
- Any experience in database/SQL and web scripting technologies, e.g. PHP, Javascript is a plus

Get in touch via recruit at plunify dot com!
What happens to the notification when I'm typing something on the keyboard? Does the whole keyboard shift up or does it block the keyboard. Either way, it sounds like a usability nightmare to put notifications at the bottom of the screen...
Inside Ideo: How a leading design firm innovates
Tackle something boring.

Most non-profits tend to be operationally very poor due to lack of management, operations and organizational skills. Sit down with some local non-profits and see how they work on a day-to-day basis. Most have no metrics to measure performance, don't use a CRM system to track donors, volunteer and task management tends to be done on an ad-hoc basis, etc.

Non-profits have exactly the same problems as for-profit companies have, why not build them the tools that help solve these problems for them?
The end of the article makes a good point about the browser being the long term solution. However, does Apple have any incentive at this point to push browser-based games forward on the iPhone?
they should require papers maps on the plane at least, what happens if you drop the ipad and it breaks ?
Hear hear.

Suppose the following. Fortunately, you're in a remote bit of Australia. Unfortunately, you've broken a leg. Fortunately, you have a rescue chopper on the phone. Unfortunately, you dropped your GPS in a river. Fortunately, you know where you are, and you have a standard topographic map, so you read them a grid reference.

They won't be able to find you.

I realise that they're from the government, and they're here to help. Even so ...
Riak, by default, uses a replication value of three. Your single test machine has to do ~three times the work, so you should expect slower performance here. (I'm oversimplifying somewhat.)

You'll see significantly improved performance on a linear test (in my informal testing, 3-4x speedups) by adding an extra two nodes. Parallelized tests pretty much scale linearly with nodes.

In practice, I've found Riak to be slightly slower than MySQL. Direct reads/writes tend to be fast, but JSON parsing can bite you and denormalization requires more writes. The major advantage is that the Riak system can scale linearly with nodes, and that it can fail in predictable and resolvable ways.

As an example, the feed system I'm currently building on Riak will survive a total network partition and allow full reads and writes from every node with no data lost. Everything is automatically merged when the partition ends. The vclock-tagged multi-value functionality of Riak is exceptionally powerful when you want to design these types of systems, and is, in my mind, worth the performance hit and additional design complexity for certain classes of problems.

This was last year so maybe Riak's performance has increased since then. I'd be interested if TokyoCabinet was added as a backend.

There are also InnoDB and multiple in-memory backends, which may provide performance characteristics more in line with what you are looking for.
I can see that, but the lockstep price doubling in the last few years is pretty clearly collusion.

If you want a real ripoff, look at tethering "plans" where they charge you for literally nothing except not deliberately blocking certain data traffic.
On writing your own programming language
Three reasons:

1. Electronics are vulnerable to salt water.

2. Ships are at sea for longer than planes are in the air, so their power supplies are less reliable, and they are generally dirtier and more chaotic.

2. Ships tend to have proportionally smaller budgets for fancy electronics. More of them are run by random people from poor countries.

None of these is a fundamental limit. There are tens of thousands of ships designed and run such that none of these points matters. But I think that, generally, they tend to damp down enthusiasm about relying on electronics at sea.
I was surprised when I learned that adolescence was first described in the early 20th century. That was around the same time children stopped regularly working with their parents in the family business/farm. As a society, parents have abdicated the "final transision" to adulthood to the school systems, but that isn't working, so kids have no clear path to "adulthood" and, instead, wander aimlessly.

Personally, I think (and have read others who agree, sorry, no references available) that the fairly ubiquitous "coming of age" ceremony is very important. My oldest is 17 and we will be doing something this summer with my father (backpacking or the like) to celebrate his manhood. And, yes, we will even have a formal ceremony.

I'm always looking for good reading on this subject (truly guiding your kids to adulthood), so if you have any good pointers, send them on!
Ok. How are you going to execute better? Have you talked to any of your competitor's customers? Do they have any gripes about the website/pricing?
It is probably too late, but he did have a lot to do with our placing such a high regard on our inner, immediate emotional life. You are right, he said nothing (that I know of) about authenticity directly, though I think he was very much in the "express your feelings" (whatever that means) line of western thought.
See this comment by johnswamps from last year http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535673 for a bookmarklet that does location-bar-marquee.
I wonder how much of the gain in app usage can be attributed to the new version of the Android market, which I think shipped during this time period. We'd have to see app usage by platform stats for that though I guess.