skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have done the same on an iPhone (staying in the country on a GPRS connection with a hangover) - but it's much much better on an iPad.
In Tarsnap I use a pair of 64-bit values, one for dollars and one for attodollars. I figure I don't mind losing a few attodollars to rounding, and I'm unlikely to ever have revenue exceeding 2^64 dollars.
To tell the truth, the best way to learn to develop something is to go and do it, mess up, read some article, and do everything possible before asking for help. If you can figure out how to solve the problem yourself, then you not only learn how to develop, but also learn how to tackle a problem in the future. If someone is "coaching" or "mentoring" you, you wont ever learn, and both of you will be frustrated. I recommend start small and grow your dev chops. Make the development of your idea the way to learn to do it and keep the motivation for learning.
If full price is £9.99 and you've got it on offer at £5.00, that's less than 50% off. If you want to say you're offering it at 50% off, you need to price it at £4.99.

In banking, I believe the convention is to round to the nearest penny, and round half-pennies to the nearest even penny.
> They are supposed to mean...

Url?
Pepsi Refresh: Social Media’s Pearl Harbor or Waterloo?
"Existential angst mostly just consists of having one or more problems you don't know how to identify ("My life lacks obvious progress indicators" having not even occurred to you as a hypothesis for describing what's wrong)"

This has nothing to do with existentialism, much less existential angst. Don't know where you got this definition.
Just my personal opinion, but I would suggest having something like: "Don't want to sign in with facebook? We understand, here's why we're requiring it while we build: {...}, enter your e-mail here [email input box] and we'll notify you as soon as other login options become available". This would serve to explain why you are requiring it (which might be enough to persuade some folks) and would allow those who are interested but not enough to link their FB to have a way to keep in the loop.

As far as how long you can get away without having your own login system, it really would depend who your target market is - and what kind of community you are trying to build. I would recommend keeping track of # of sign-ups per week / month, and adjust the priority of the "create login system" task based on how that number changes.
Just Making Money - A Compilation of DHH at Startup School 2008
Does anyone at The Atlantic understand statistics?
This seems like a double-edged sword for RIM in that, it's a disincentive to actually develop for the Playbook when they can just create an Android app and market it to both. It seems like a very short-sighted move.
"Why should we labor this unpleasant point? Because the Book of Mormon labors it, for our special benefit. Wealth is a jealous master who will not be served halfheartedly and will suffer no rival--not even God: "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." (Matthew 6:24) In return for unquestioning obedience wealth promises security, power, position, and honors, in fact anything in this world. Above all, the Nephites like the Romans saw in it a mark of superiority and would do anything to get hold of it, for to them "money answereth all things." (Ecclesiastes 10:19) "Ye do always remember your riches," cried Samuel the Lamanite, ". . .unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities." (Helaman 13:22) Along with this, of course, everyone dresses in the height of fashion, the main point being always that the proper clothes are expensive--the expression "costly apparel" occurs 14 times in the Book of Mormon. The more important wealth is, the less important it is how one gets it." - Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley

“The worst fear I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and His people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty, and all manner of persecution and be true. But my greatest fear is that they cannot stand wealth” - Brigham Young

"Men of wealth among us, as elsewhere, who command their tens and hundreds of thousands, who have their every want supplied, have more anxiety, care and perplexity than many of you, who have to struggle for a comfortable living. And if you were placed in their position you would be a great deal more uneasy than you are now." - John Taylor.

Money is much more dangerous and troublesome than most people realize. These three quotes testify to that, as well as most of the production generated by rich people. Wealth destroys many who finally get it.
For a presentation I needed an additional voice to convince the audience that building a sustainable business was preferable over striving for a massive exit. A short compilation of David Heinemeier Hansson talk at 2008 Startup School did the trick. With all the increased bubble talk it is worth watching again. You can find the full talk at http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/b/259414909
i agree that use case for graphs around interests are possibly a better use. If you look at Yobongo (YC), I think is exactly what you're talking about in showing you people near you that want to chat or go out within your city.
I caused/discovered a bug :)
http://captainobvio.us/details/buy-twitter-handles
For those of us doing Android dev, this actually sounds like more of a headache than anything. It can be challenging enough making an app that works on all the different possible Android versions (OEM skins, old revs.) without having to deal with a totally incompatible OS.
This is a pretty long presentation and he seems to be giving a lot of top view information about the various NoSQL solutions. His point about Polyglot solutions seems to ring true at my current company.
I look forward to the infinite recursion of follow-up posts.
You probably got downvoted for being off-topic - it'd be better to ask that kind of question on Stack Overflow. Leave out the subjective "is it because I'm a noob?" parts, and stick with the more objective "is there a better way to do this?", and you'll probably be able to figure out from that where any holes in your knowledge/experience might be.
My notes and complete solutions to "Discrete Mathematics using a Computer"
When I read http://crackberry.com/press-release-rim-expands-application-... makes lot of sense now.
I believe that the interest from these investors does not lie in the consumer facing functionality of sharing photos but the ability to target locations and inject relevant advertisements into this stream of photographs. The large amount of user centric information which this app is collecting is very attractive to market research groups which pay a lot of money. These are two revenue streams heavily utilized by google and facebook.
15 Unconventional Ways to Increase Your Profit
I mentioned Taubes' earlier bona fides because it was presumably his track record with articles and books on cold fusion and particle physics research that convinced the editors of _Science_ to give him the go-ahead on his 2001 journal article that preceded the 2002 NY Times article and the 2007 book. I think his track record demonstrates his concern for both good science and good journalism.

I do know that he is distinctly at odds with the majority of scientists who work in the dietary field.

Oh dear. Even if you had data to back that up, are you really going to embrace science as a popularity contest?

I'm talking about real scientists, with real science degrees. Doing real controlled scientific studies. Most of them consider Atkins a disaster for public health.

I'm not as interested in scientists' opinions as I am in the underlying science. I'm unaware of any studies that show the Atkins diet is really a disaster, but feel free to cite away. But to repeat myself, don't conflate warnings on the dangers of carb consumption with being a proponent of the Atkins diet.

Taubes' focus for most of his career is about how good science is perverted for not-so-good human motives. So for example when some of your "real scientists" offer a "real controlled scientific study"[1] showing that people lost weight on both low-fat and low-carb diets, Taubes asks[2] the rather logical question, how is that a weight-loss study would restrict total calorie intake on only one (low-fat) of the two diets. I mean, if you're studying weight loss, shouldn't you be controlling total calorie intake for all groups?

the scientists he quoted have said repeatedly that the disaster is that we eat 20% more calories per day, in general, than we did before WW2, and that increased fat consumption also occurred during that time

Well if those scientists really said that, which I doubt, I'm pretty sure they're wrong on the facts. I haven't digested the whole NHANES data set from the CDC, but a quick Google check found this nutritionist's summary[3]:

"In 1964 Americans ate 39 percent of their calories from fat and only 13 percent were obese. Now, while most Americans get only about 33 percent of their calories from fat, two-thirds, more than 190 million Americans are overweight or obese."

In short: Fat is not your enemy, but keep your eyes on both calories and carbs.

Edit: added following links...

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20679559

[2] http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydra...

[3] http://www.redcedarwellness.com/2010/07/the-truth-about-fats...
YOU KILLED IT!!!!

:P

Probably an error with my controller that does writes to MongoDB - I'll check it out.
That's actually more than the Gross World Product...
No matter how I look at this, it doesn't strike me as anything new or special.

Sure, it's sort of a useful feature, but it's also a clear admission that Facebook couldn't figure out how to leverage their user base to get good answers. Polling your friends? Yawn

Crowdsourcing is still a very young technology and it isn't well understood how to make the most of it. Personally, I'm really glad that Facebook didn't see the same opportunity for Questions that I do, now if only they stay clueless for another year...
Since I never use spotlight on the iPhone, I make the 2nd page of apps my home, and use folders so I only have three pages total, so everything is within one swipe of home.

I also put my most-used apps (such as phone and e-mail) not on the dock but along the arc of my thumb, for easy one-hand operation.
Well it's clearly good for developers and users; whether it's good for RIM or not is an open question.
I have a similar inner struggle with a product I am working on. I personally cannot manage more logins for anymore sites. I am constantly resetting passwords. I wouldn't be against using a single login solution but faceboos kind of gives random people personal information about you (if you opt in) so it might be a little scary. I wonder what the general population thinks?
Thanks, wish it was online though (can't actually run those programs as I'm on OS X).
It is but BN should improve the specs little bit and market/sell it like a tablet.
Yeah, but your drama is way off.

They claim 500MM active users. Assume that's a total lie, and it's 50MM. Assume their valuation is 100 billion (twice the Goldman round).

Let's also assume that they hit a P/E ratio of, oh, 10. (Google's at 22, Apple 19, Yahoo 18, so 10 is really low.)

So to hit a 100b valuation, they'd need to earn 10b annually, or $200/user.

$200/user is on the high end, but reasonable, at least as far as U.S. users are concerned.

(For what it's worth: Twitter would have been a good example, I think.)
I wanted to put a more descriptive title but couldn't in the alloted 80 chars.

Basically, I've spent the last two weeks working through "Discrete Mathematics using a Computer" which teaches Discrete Mathematics using Haskell.

The book is very beginner friendly (for both math and haskell), and I recommend it to anyone wanting to get started with Discrete Maths (you'll also learn some haskell along the way :)).

The solutions are posted as github gists so you can fork and send me patches if you find bugs in the code or corrections to the proofs. Thanks.
17 Ways To Better Your Blog
Very small, very passive side project. http://goo.gl/tPPJz

Wrote it for my own use as a better "alternative" to browse for Kindle books after too much frustration with Amazon's site for browsing about.

Since it works via affiliate fees, between friends and family I easily made my first dollar in the first hour of going "live" with it.

A few dollars come in here and there. A passive, side, small project for sure. But I still add stuff during the weekend.
Never had any problems with Toshiba laptops.
First, I'm shameless. Second, I'm working on http://redwoodapp.com, a Spotlight-like OSX app that's similar to Greplin. Two key differences:

(1) Privacy - Redwood doesn't index your data: it conducts searches in parallel. When you open an item, it's cached locally for as-you-type search. Redwood doesn't intercept your traffic in anyway.

(2) No syncing complexity. Your Gigabytes of "Rent-A-Kitten" business plans on Google Docs are searchable immediately. Same with new messages in your 60k-message inbox.

We're using MacRuby, so you'll need OSX 10.6 or greater to try the beta.
After OAuth, it couldn't retrieve my twitter username/picture, displayed them as null.
The real story here is that the RIAA's claims finally got so ridiculous, the judge called bullshit and is suggesting a different way of calculating damages. Specifically, for the law that assigns a $ value per work infringed, he's suggesting interpreting that value as per distinct work infringed rather than per individual copy made.
This is the meaning of life: that everyone has a purpose
spends like this one make me think that we could be in a bubble.

why? when fred wilson talks about saving a few thousand dollars, these guys go out and blow a fraction of million! i mean think up something like instagram.

especially when something as memorable as fireblot.com is still available for $10
I assume PG uses this service himself, with his Gmail, Google Docs, and Dropbox. Right? No?
Most physical infrastructure is insanely costly to create in the first place. If a utility charges too much money for your liking and you don't have a couple billion to compete with them, tough shit.

The infrastructure of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter could be replicated by a small team of smart developers in a matter of months, probably costing only a few million dollars. The only thing they have going for them is network effects, which are less powerful than we think when there is a viable competitor (e.g. MySpace being overtaken by Facebook).
Assuming the damages Limewire will have to pay total an astronomical amount, who on earth pays for it? Do the founders take on the debt for the rest of their lives or what?
I don't know what's more disappointing, the fact that your original comment, which added absolutely nothing of value, was voted up or that this explanation has even more votes.

All it takes is a simple Google search to show that the author of the quote uses worship quite routinely in one of the word's many "widely accepted" meanings:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/worship

The only contentious thing he has done is draw parallels to atheism, the definition of which is not so sensitive to context. The merits of doing so I think would have been a good talking point, but instead all you contributed was "a stupid nonsense."
The article gives me the impression that Honeycomb source won't be ever be released; it sounds like they're only going to release Ice Cream source.
Reasons you deserve a raise
Oh, sorry. I would say that selecting the rounding policy is up to you. I'd agree with the poster that gives the fractional penny to the customer.
It's the bankers who sell you books, right?
Which Type Of Company Is Right For You? [Infographic]
Logging in using FF4.0 on Windows XP works fine for me.

That is, unless you're trying to make a list of users who just logged in (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976), so you can DoS the server, in which case I didn't just log out and log back in.
Don't encourage them :D

Can anybody provide the TL:DR version? Lots of odd looking graphs from some traffic reporting program I'm not familiar with and tiny little text.
Quiet 'socialbot' quickly gains a following
I thought this for a few seconds as well. Then it hit me... that's because I'm not a 21 year old who already has 7-8 years worth of history stored on multiple social networking platforms... where I will continue to build and accumulate "stuff" for the rest of my life.

This idea is brilliant, and this kid understood it because it makes so much sense from his perspective. Even with my more limited context, once I "got it", I couldn't wait to try it out and it rocks.

You select your platforms, type what you are looking for into a search box and Greplin finds it instantly... no scrolling or searching. Check it out.
It's not the same, though: with summers, spring break, and even college, you know that you're time-limited, and have to scope your projects appropriately. With creative work, you have as much time as you're willing to pay the opportunity cost for.
It would be funny if there was some glowing comment in agreement with the site, then a reply / comment button - but the only thing that happens when you press that button is it copies the original glowing comment and pastes it new.

Or especially after soemone types a bunch of crap - the submit replaces everything they types with the glowing comment :)
I had to delete the comments off of that thread - my post oauth-hook failed to retrieve your information. It could be an issue on my end (most likely) or an issue with Twitter @Anywhere. I'll investigate!
The CIA Factbook cites the 2010 estimate for GDP at $74.48 trillion:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Also of interest, another number close to this is the world's stock of broad money, at around $75.86 trillion. Because this is comprised of all money in circulation, plus the total quantity of money in money market funds, credit union deposits, and other liquid assets, the top end of what is being asked for is almost literally, all of the money in the world.
Try logging out and logging back in
Tracking the Nation's Weight Loss Goals
Ask HN: Need a Beta Testing Service for Android Development?
Over the course of the last year or so I created a beta tester infrastructure to help me test my new paid apps in the Android market.

I use it to give out an early free version my app to a list of beta testers. They give me feedback and whatnot and I'm reasonably confident that the free version can't be used by people not on the list.

The infrastructure allows me to provision a list of beta users for an app and provides beta test codes for them. They can log into the beta using an email address or the beta code.

I add a small jar to my project and a single line of code to launch the beta login activity.

I'm trying to decide whether it makes sense for me to expand things so that other developers can use it too.

Here's a Google doc form that I set up to see if others are interested and if it's worth spending some time on.
Missing: Newt Gingrich’s Tweets Before July 2010
I just moved to San Francisco not too long ago. Maybe I don't want to know about the best Mexican food in SF from someone from SF, maybe I want the opinion of my Texan pals, who share a similar taste in Mexican food....cuz damnit, I want that certain type of salsa (or something).

Of course, on the Internet, we are always in danger of ending up in an echo chamber.

And besides, there's still Yelp. And Foodspotting. And every other one of those apps out there to get outside my friends' opinions. I just think this makes it easier than ever to get friends' feedback.

Only thing I wonder is, will FB prioritize these entries? Because seeking friends' opinions on FB always seems to get answers from people you weren't looking for answers from.
Maybe not a foxhole but a child of ours who was very sick. Since then I just don't partake when there is an argument about the existence of something bigger than ourselves. Each to his own.
Velocity 2011 Registration Now Live
A New Platform for Subscription-based Selling
Paul Graham on Twitter: We're trying to figure out...
Another obvious use case is at a party/a night at the club. I'd love to take a few pics and go home and see every picture taken there at the time. Since people generally have the decency to not put party-pictures on facebook anymore, it'd be great to see them somewhere without having to tag your shenaningans for the whole world to see.
ok, I fixed the problem. It should work now.
What an interesting thing to take away from the quote, maybe I assume too much because I've read the whole speech but certainly I did not think he meant to say what you are implying.

What I took from it personally is that people tend to find meaning in life from something - a deity, a job, money, fame, looks, their own business - and that it doesn't really which of those you choose you're essentially taking a leap of faith that it will deliver happiness.
Iran Tracks Tor Users: This Week in Online Tyranny
In the middle 3rd millennium, aging will be gone and death will be rare

In several comments here, you use the word "will" a lot. It's possible, but it makes you sound like a crazy prophet. No-one knows for sure how the future will play out.
I've been using FB auth only for a year or so on one of my Android apps. It's centered specifically around social sharing and I'm focusing on US based users at first.

Given the maintenance tradeoffs around other login methods, I'm pretty happy with my choice. I'm sure that I lose groups of users that are only on Twitter, or Orkut or choose your SN du jour, but in the spirit of keeping things lean I'm happy with my choice.

One can always add other auth methods when growth looks like a hockey stick. 500MM+ FB users should be enough to get started.
Direct from 24: An Intel Center Worthy of its Name
blog of Google Maps mashups. Sometimes they don't need much programming
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

dedicated apps:
http://www.appbrain.com/app/beer-map/net.chrislehmann.beerma...
http://www.androidtapp.com/where/
http://www.yelp.com/yelpmobile

I second matomesc's point: learning Javascript will let you write your own mashup, which gives you more customization.
Except that it isn't.

You're suggesting that there's an absolute concept such as "wrong" speech, and that you're somehow capable of defining and legislating that.
That's what it does - it's a search engine that lets you search within your own stuff all in one place... that may be too simple but that's how I remember it.
What Color Needs to Win Us Over
It's good design, and good design is a recurring theme on Hacker News.
JSON to JSONP Bridge
The Biggest Mistake Made By LE Technology Vendors (Part I)
>Personally, I'm really glad that Facebook didn't see the same opportunity for Questions that I do, now if only they stay clueless for another year...

We might have different ideas, but I thought the same thing. But if we have the same idea, I'm only giving you til September :)
"Android developers have two app stores to think about at the moment."

We do?
I'm guessing that this isn't at all about competition from Apple or RIM. I'm guessing that Google is taking extra time to go over all of the source code to make sure when they release it they aren't inadvertently helping out Oracle's current lawsuit against them regarding Java.
Totally agree. I'm a huge fan and think I like it even more because I didn't get it right away.
"ignore the haters... we're all jealous... btw what does your app do I'm never using it again".

You just proved all the "haters" right and disproved your own statement.

(Not that I agree with all the "haters", I quite like the idea and can think of times I'll use it, but your post is contradictory)
Exotic Spheres Earn Mathematician John Milnor an Abel Prize