skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not downvote it. However, I imagine that some people think that this app does hurt people, albeit indirectly, and that this is so obvious that someone overlooking it is either a troll or oblivious.

(I am not taking that position, or any other position about the app or photophotoplasm’s comment, in this comment. I’m staying strictly on the meta level here. Void where prohibited by law. Contents may settle during shipping.)
Firefox 4 doubles IE9 24-hour download tally
At the risk of making the same mistake again, sorry :)
You didn't read my question properly; I'm asking about web apps, not desktop apps.
> As I recall, years ago some folks wrote up all these "version control best practices" for some conference, and this was one of the "rules". But it's common sense too - autotools is deep enough magic that most people won't know to run bootstrap.sh, or autoreconf -i, or whatever.

I disagree. At this point in the game, autotooled systems are pretty common, and to assert that they are deep magic like saying "CMake is deep enough magic that most people won't know to run mkdir build && cd build && cmake .., or whatever".

Developers are not like most people. A release tarball (created with `make distcheck`, say) will absolutely contain configure and other generated files. That's one of the points of the autotools - to have minimal dependencies at build time.

Developers, on the other hand, will need to look up a project's dependencies, install other special tools (parser generators, for instance). This should be documented somewhere, along with the bootstrap instructions.
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I have a small WP7 application I submitted around launch, I'd done Silverlight development before so it was pretty easy to jump in. I built it over about six weeks of occasional evenings and started selling pretty much immediately. I've released my downloads and sales figures for the first three months.

The App: http://compiledexperience.com/windows-phone-7/to-do

The Numbers: http://compiledexperience.com/blog/posts/a-windows-phone-7-a...
Ask HN: did anybody volunteer to help in Fukushima?
I just read an article about workers being pressured into working at Fukushima, some of them unlearned amateurs. I know it is a bit OT, but since the pro-nuclear power sentiments seem to be so strong here on HN, I can't help wondering if any of the people who are so vocal about the supposedly overblown dangers of radiation have volunteered to help?
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More-or-less. I test drove Chrome for about a month but I cannot live without NoScript support. Besides that I find the browsers to be about equal for what I use them for.

This was about 6 months ago.

note: I did try NotScripts for Chrome, but it was too limited.
Fair enough. I'm not really expecting any respect for the platform from a post on HN. I prefer that to come from people who actually use it and like it.

My angle is to

1. Show that there are people in Chennai who actually do things like this. There are very few startups here, and the kind of programmers who'd be willing to work in one are a very small minority.

2. Attract other people in the region to me. Right now I'm doing this alone and it's not easy. I want to work with someone, and looking around and meeting people isn't working out. People who read HN self select themselves into being the kind of people I want to work with.

I understand that you think this was a publicity stunt, and yes, I did want people to see it. But I think that stating it that way misses the point.
Show HN: Web app to find available iPad 2 stock at Target
A quick Sinatra app I made using HTML5, CSS3, Aristo, Heroku and based on a post by Garrett Murray.
http://log.maniacalrage.net/post/4030658171/tip-how-to-get-an-ipad-2-at-target-today-i
These days (in my experience, which I believe is typical), no-one even uses release tarballs, everyone just uses the repositories.

Maybe you can require your developers to install esoteric tools, but that's no way to solicit contributions. For a compiler I worked on, we had a dependency on libphp5, which was enough to discourage anybody. But we also had dependencies on a particular version of flex, gengetopt, bison, autoconf, automake and _maketea_. The final one was a tool we wrote and had spun out into a separate project, which was written in Haskell, and required exactly ghc 6.10. Do you think we were going to get contributions from people who needed to install all of those just to fix a minor issue?
The example user might like to use some word processing software, some native email client with big storage, some graphic editing and maybe even some Twitter app. Some people prefer native, installed applications to doing everything in a browser. What do you know, she might even want to do some programming!
including the front side cam, we've already been(being?) through the same trends on desktops and laptops too. :)
Succinct Data Structures: Cramming 80,000 words into a Javascript file.
Link me, I would like to become a customer.
I disagree with you that autoconf is bad. Its design came from a lot of locally-optimal choices that don't look so good in 2011, and there's a lot of legacy code being copied around in people's configure.ac files.

To me, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Then again, I'm known to my friends as "that guy who knows automake" :-).
A quick Sinatra app I made using HTML5, CSS3, Aristo, Heroku and based on a post by Garrett Murray.
http://log.maniacalrage.net/post/4030658171/tip-how-to-get-a...
I'm sure they would get removed. Those sound just as offensive.
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They forgot to use the social collaborative tune!

SocialText (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKezmcIEhZQ) and Chatter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsK2nXp-fWs) both do, lol.
> I have to respectfully disagree. I'm glad they got rid of this stupid app. It's simply hate sugar-coated with psuedo-science.

If it was hateful, I agree. But I don't think the article even says what the app does, so how do we know that it was "hate sugar-coated with psuedo-science"?

I assumed this app was supposed to help "ex-gays" (or whatever they call themselves now) somehow. If that's the case, it's probably only being downloaded by people already involved in this stuff anyway.

So if they're downloading it out of their own free will, and it doesn't incite hate or violence, I don't see why it needs to be censored.
Looks like Apple has cured the the 'Gay Cure' app.
Well, Android's IP footing is worrysome considering the lawsuits and all. :)
> if [...] it doesn't incite hate or violence, I don't see why it needs to be censored.

It incites intolerance by implying that homosexuality is a disease.
Proof that Einstein is a LYING IDIOT 15 years AFTER his first relativity paper.
Hey thanks, that looks great! Hope it's working out well for you.
I hope that I can see a rational discussion about it and this includes both pro and con Android information.

And I'd rather see incorrect information debunked than only seeing pro-Android topics and messages as it usually happens.
Nothing will ever bring back hours of IE6 workaround time, or change my mind about using a Windows computer.

Cumulatively, developers and clients paid millions in billable hours for their neglect in monopoly.

They couldn't warm up to me even if they swapped their board of directors with Sesame Street characters.
"he never got he never got a high school degree"

This sentence tripped me up. I vividly remember some of the more boring classes where you end up staring at the clock, for some subjects I actually tried to put in the least effort possible to achieve 80%. I wish I had those years back to do follow something I really enjoyed doing.
Yes, but you know what's worse than removing "offensive" apps? Being selective about it.

Or rather, if you make it your missing to ban "offensive" apps and a "gay cure app" gets approved, then you look like an ass.
See.. Back in 2006 they couldn't even produce a dotted border on a cake, let alone in the browser.

edit: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ie6+dotted+border
Finger Wars: broke your Android display... for free
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There's another situation I've seen happen where there's clearly a problem with a third party's component, and customers are looking to you to fix it, but the third party is genuinely not to blame for the problem and it would be unfair to expose them to the negative PR which would result. In my case this was with a component on a car which caused what looked to the customer to be a worrying defect (so the negative PR would have been significant), but was in fact completely harmless, and it only ever manifested in a fairly narrow range of meteorological conditions.

All you can really do then is hunker down and work together to fix the problem. There's nothing to be gained by alienating the only people who can fix something which is, at the end of the day, making you look bad.
http://kennethfinnegan.blogspot.com/

Text ads, top banner and bottom of right bar. $300 a year; as a college student, yeah, that's worth it.
So you sold the original site on Flippa and then also sold essentially the same code again to other people? Wasn't that against the terms of sale to the Flippa buyer?
Curious, it's written in C++ .

IMHO I think straight C would have been easier for World + Dog to link against.
I agree! I work at a finance startup (sadly no equity) and went from learning accounts from scratch, to financial models to handling Biz Dev, sales, hiring, corp communication, and on and on. Its great fun!

S/W startups definitely don't have a monopoly on it, plus other types of startups make you face very different sets of problems than the ones generally/commonly discussed on HN.
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They sent a cake while FF3 release too !
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/256292
I think it's a hoax. If it was the real IE team parts of the cake wouldn't be on the pan. I'm also pretty sure the E would be hanging off the right side.
Old graphics drivers usually have severe stability issues, so Mozilla blacklists them. You need to update to more recent ones -- anything after around June 2010 should do. Check out about:support for more information. (Note that if you're on Linux Mozilla only whitelists the proprietary nvidia driver IIRC, since all the open source drivers have issues.)

I don't think chrome has blacklisted anything yet, but from what I hear Google's looking at doing it.

In general, the problem is with your computer, and not with your browser or the demos.
You can't design against a 7m tsunami wave following a 9.0 earthquake. What exactly does low elevation mean when the wave is 7m high?
A tsunami wave that reaches 5km from the shore has so much water and pressure that designing against it is nearly impossible.

Your tower would have been nearly as high as the reactor itself http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-66018.html nobody sane would have proposed something like this before this event.

Looking at past events and errors it's always easy to say that it was a stupid to do it like it was done. Anticipating future events and their inherent risks and designing against them is nearly impossible. That's the danger of nuclear power, it's able to multiply the risks of every natural desaster. You design for a 5m wave - there comes the 7m wave - you design for a 20m wave - the wave was 23m high in some areas.

"Must be managed properly" is not an sentence we should have in anything we design that can have these catastrophic effect, because there's human error, and it will always be there, even in the best planned facilities on the globe.
Natural language processing introduction
It is impossible to have monopoly on money.

Simply put, money is whatever market participants agree on.
No, the buyer didn't mind. He was buying the site more for the revenue/traction rather than te technology. It's actually very common to create a script and sell both developed sites based on it as well as the script itself.
Yeah I'm curious too. I see references to it and copies of it everywhere but the original is down.

I'm guessing it could easily fall under libel/slander/defamation.
>it doesn't incite hate or violence

This is the limit of freedom of speech under the US Constitution. This is not the limit for morally acceptable behavior, and has nothing at all to do with a private company's control over their historically tightly and arbitrarily controlled ecosystem.

edit: not even this. Incitements of violence is the limit of constitutional free speech, not mere hatred. But to believe that propaganda claiming some people can and should be "cured" of their sexuality isn't hatred is idiotic at best.
I wish I could, but that side of my brain shuts down after more than one drink.
pretty easy, if you try to build safe - the costs are actually higher than most alternatives - comparing with china might not be very clever
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348619
Position is everything :-P
i have a lyrics site that earns 100usd every year thru adsense. it runs on zendframework(tried others but zf wins by a huge margin in caching on shared hosting). the income has paid for my blog, domain names, my brothers site, and a couple of beers.
That's great. Good work on finding an opportunity and acting fast on it.
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Honestly speaking, if he played around on an Apple II, this happened almost 30 years ago when the computer industry was still brand-new. Not to denigrate him, his achievements, or MIT, but the world is different now.

It's an awesome anecdote, and I am a big fan of MIT, but consider this my preemptive counter-argument to the inevitable, "Here, see, more proof of why you should drop out of high school!"

(though, after all's said and done, I do hope MIT is not too different from the MIT that accepted him back then)
Yes, understandable, but IMO, it has got a bit too distracting, at least for me.

A possible collaboration of some sort, what do you think?

http://getLocalNe.ws

(This is actually one of our recent by-products.)
I have no issue with a smaller government. I just don't see how smaller or bigger government are worthy goals IN and OF themselves. It just needs to be working government.

The debate about big vs small govt. is one of many, pointless hand-wavy, ideas used to harm your debate.

Is it wrong to point out that something is being used to obfuscate discussion, polarize opinion, and detract from getting a solution?
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How is the app "not hurting anyone"? The implication of the app in question is that if you are gay you are some kind of diseased freak that can be "cured". Churches have been trying these kinds of "pray away the gay treatments" for homosexual members, sometimes with tragic results like self-loathing, suicide, etc. I am certainly for free speech, but things like this, hate speech, or the Westboro Baptist church protesting funerals of fallen US servicemen (see God Hates Fags[1]) are really pushing the limits of what is acceptable IMHO.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church
RapiDefs looks really good.
"you can't cure gayness"

"of course you can, otherwise Apple wouldn't have approved an app that does it"

'Apple' is a name that carries authority and that can be used to lend credence to misinformation. That definitely does hurt people. Read the above as the last thing a father said to his gay son. If banning this app prevents even one tragedy, then good riddance. There are no disadvantages to applauding Apple for removing this app.
I get the feeling Firefox gets more cakes from Microsoft than they send in return, if its entirely based on release cycles.
Booking.com first, Ryanair last in UK website usability study
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ridiculous? Could you elaborate? It would be an interesting piece of info.
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Philip Greenspun also entered MIT after dropping out of high school.
The other thing that needs to be considered is the total effort for the refactoring including necessary testing.

As a development manager the thing that scares me isn't the small fix, it's that it takes place on a critical much used library that has potentially far reaching consequences.
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Come anticipato nel post precedente cominciano ad emergere i primi dettagli su quanto è accaduto ad RSA in merito al furto di informazioni riservate sul sistema di autenticazione RSA SecurID.

RSA, nella giornata di ieri, ha inviato ai propri clienti un lettera con alcune informazioni più dettagliate e...
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A part of me does support totally free speech, but the other part of me is what made me one of the demonstrators against the Oxford Union when they had invited David Irving and Nick Griffin, and also that made me be one of the many people who emailed Apple (or, more specifically, Jobs) to complain about this app.
It's not so unusual, I was accepted into my Computer Science MSc (at Oxford) without a CS background - I did have a first class BA, but it was a joint honours in IT and Philosophy from a more-or-less unknown university (Lampeter).

Anyone who knows CS will know that IT is nothing like CS. I didn't have any A-Levels either. Masters degrees are a lot more forgiving, and I had some experience in software engineering.

(edit: this was year of 2009, and yes, I passed ;0) )
None. I'm not a pointy type, I much prefer navigating with the keyboard.
I'm developing a penny auction website for local market http://www.lelanggokil.com/. The auctions are not even started yet and I'm already getting money (albeit small). But I'm still at loss since the marketing cost (FB Ad and AdWords) outweigh the profit (I spent about $40/day for the last 2 weeks).

The website actually acts as a proof of concept as I plan to white-label it (that's why the stuff being auctioned are not expensive). But if the PoC works, I will focus on it.

My problems so far:
- Credit card and PayPal are very rare, I must rely on manual work (user banks in, I check my bank account balance, I approve/reject)
- Negative sentiment against penny auction
- Customer support (manual work)

To be honest, this is my first non-consulting real personal project (that is, a product, spends money, gets money). So even if this project fails, I still learn from it and reuse a lot of its software parts.
This should be an eye opener for all those bookish/only SAT score people.
and I heard there's a team that doesn't add that icon you deleted back to your desktop every time an update is released.
Aw... i just wish they didnt swap "new tab" and "new window" in the right-click on link menu. I understand the decision, but im so used to the previous setup that I get owned every time :/

Apart from that, im really happy with this new version!
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Most of us feel the same way, but surely free speech is so much more important than these other issues.
This has been true since 3.6 unless you're on mac.
While this is fascinating let's not forget that other people are NOT like Tom. Education is important and we shouldn't dismiss it if we have an opportunity to take it.
This is quite well made. I enjoyed playing a few rounds. I did get the feeling that some of the word descriptions were written by non-native English speakers. There were some very small grammatical mistakes or strange combinations of words.

Regardless, quite a fun product. The hard part is going to be to stick in people's minds. Turning it into a Facebook game is one good way to achieve that, but you should probably keep thinking of more such things.
So I've been tracking my karma on this post, its gone something like

1 -> 2 -> 0 -> 5 -> 2 -> 4 -> 0

Appears to be a submartingale(maybe)
Ok I stuffed up the experiment by posting this, the sequence after the 5th observations are no longer independent and invalidated.
Money is a mean of exchange that happens to be a store of value. A thing that punishes the exchange is not an effective money.

In an economy with a finite amount of money, even potentially, the exchange is not rational given that the money's value grows over time.

That's why the focus is on generating BitCoins.
Why was this down-voted? a request was made for people with successful/profitable passive income sources to chime in. I believe the author responded to that.
Snickers :-)
This blog post makes it sound like he didn't fill out an application. However, I'm guessing he did and also sent in code as supplemental material (which is quite common).

College admissions is a game. I currently go to MIT and it's definitely more meritocratic than many other institutions of similar "prestige" but it's not an exception.

High school students today optimize their grades and SATs
and after school activities. They speak French and
Chinese, play piano and paint abstract art. They dance
around and play hockey and act like they help homeless
people.

It's ultra-competitive. That said, the number of kids who do this sort of thing is waning. I think people realize that being extremely good or having insane dedication to one thing or "theme" is key.

On the other hand this stereotype arose from an era where admissions committees were trying to create a class of well-rounded students. It still occurs to some degree. However, things are trending towards creating a well-rounded class instead (lots of highly specialized students).
> When you have dependencies which rely on specialist tools, it is a good idea [...] to commit your generated files too.

The problem I encounter regularly is that people have slightly different versions of autotools (e.g., autoconf 2.62 and autoconf 2.63).

When they commit with svn (and are not super careful), several commits have small diffs in the generated files (added newline, '\n' vs. real newline, etc.), making merges painful.
Yes, I wanted to do it, just to demonstrate that BitCoin is just as susceptible to problems of money supply as any other currency.

The basic idea is to allow people to deposit BitCoins, but then issue a BitCoin derivative subject to fractional banking rules and charge interest. This should in theory give rise to the same problems current banks have, where the debt is never fully repayable (unless you create more money to pay the interest), and requires a banking system to continually generate debt.
Someone I know well was recruited on full scholarship to Cornell as a math student in 2007, even though he was a high school dropout.
i wrote an iOS card game that makes me about 300 bucks a month. i do almost no maintenance on it anymore. it would probably do a whole lot better if it had any kind of marketing behind it, but it's not really in my nature.
To all the comments here - I don't think Chris is making a point against schooling. He's sort of implicitly making a point against resume padding.

Resume padding is not a healthy thing and such examples could enlighten a lot of high school students.
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> It's simply hate sugar-coated with psuedo-science. Apple made the right decision.

Shouldn't Apple remove all astrology apps then?
I used to have a site that was set up for pancake day, stuff to do on pancake day, about a couple of hundred different pancake recipes and so on. Every year I'd make about £200 in advertising revenue, which would pay for the hosting for other projects, some general shenanigans and (of course) my pancake day. My plan was to do something similar for other temporally-targeted holidays but valentines day was extremely competitive and easter was too big. In the end I swapped the site for a friend's laptop.