skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true and happened with 1.5 and with the Nexus One: new version dev in private, then a big open sourcing effort (by specific team members) after the version is released. I guess the difference here is that for 3.0 they indicated that they made a lot of tablet-specific changes which won't translate well to phones. So the source isn't in a state where they want to release it for phones, and get the opposite of last year's fiasco (when OEMs put 2.x onto tablets).
A thoughtful legal analysis of copyright and the Google Books decision
Interesting, I wanted to comment along the line of

Hate is Love
War is Peace
etc ...

Brave new world (in combination with Newspeak) just about captures it.
Great feedback. I've edited the post "Even small and silly as this one, open-source contributions are very valuable. I know how excited Sebastian was that his first open-source project had a pull request. I know how users will love to see a cool icon in their favorites when they use Heroku-Bartender. It’s an open-source win. Go contribute something small to any open-source project – even if it’s a favicon!"
I've got to say that from a developers perspective its worth trying whenever possible to not put CAPTCHA in a form if at all possible for the benefit of your customers. No one enjoys filling out a CAPTCHA. I'd say trying honeypot fields and timestamps, hashed value matching, etc that are all invisible to the end user.

I think not being a lazy developer in order to allow your customers to not make as much effort is a good thing. Only at a point where other methods dont work should you then employ CAPTCHA.
My guess is that the people who frequent Hacker News are mostly not attached to one extreme ideology or the other. They like the creative freedom and empowerment that a capitalist society brings, but also the knowledge that if they fall on hard times then there is a safety net that keeps them off the streets. Remember, we can't all be winners all of the time, sometimes bad stuff happens to good people. Smart people know this.

Life isn't black and white and ideologies don't need to be either.
Bullet-proof Node.js coding
If it's so hard to tell the true humans from the machines (CAPTCHA) shouldn't it be a lot easier to tell true machines from humans and human/machine combinations? (Human/machine combination, like a person in a debugger with some reverse engineering tools.)

Couldn't this be used to increase the security of computer systems? What if one could extend this to be able to tell particular machines from humans, human/machine combos, and counterfeit machines. I suspect one can do this. I have been working on this problem for the past 3 months, and I'm about to implement it and publish it on the App Store.
IPad 2 - Less is More
Yes, he's equivocating "open" with "more freedom to explore without fear", which is understandable for an enthusiastic 14-year-old. ;-)

But he's making the same point that others have made, that freedom from worry about virii/spam/etc is a real advantage over the absolute openness of the web or desktop worlds, at least for non-geek population.
...Google has made the decision to keep the Honeycomb source code under wraps because it doesn't want hardware vendors to adapt it to run on other form factors where it might not function properly.

This is completely bullshit. If code is really open, it allows everybody to use the code as they see fit, however unfit other users might think it is.

The Apache webserver is really open: I can modify it and use it without any restriction from the Apache Foundation just because they might think my modifications "don't function properly".
Ok, but where is the evidence that anyone in the unions (mainly referring to their leadership here) accepted money (bribes)?
you can write macros that handle that. in lisp everything can be code (or data). that is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness at the same time.
Ask HN: Demo or Video?
I know dropbox had a lot of success by putting together a video of their idea. I created a demo page, do you think this is as effective? http://oim.ae/chatdemo
You do realize that Android's browser is built on webkit, yes?
Compare: "security labels in clothing are a way of announcing to the world that you've got a theft problem, that you don't know how to deal with it, and that you've decided to offload the frustration of the problem onto your user-base. Security labels suck, because you can't properly try some pieces of clothing on with those labels in them, which means sales go down."

Such complaining doesn't accomplish a thing, unless you tell them about an effective alternative. If you don't change anything about the trade-off they have knowingly made, nothing will change. To have any chance of convincing anyone, you at least need to explain the alternatives. Everyone that reads this post just shrugs their shoulders and ignores you, because their captchas effectively solve a problem they and their clients would suffer from without those captchas.

In this case, if you open with

Using a CAPTCHA is a way of announcing to the world that
you’ve got a spam problem, that you don’t know how to deal
with it, and that you’ve decided to offload the
frustration of the problem onto your user-base.

then I think it is very dissatisfying[1] to follow up later with

They replaced the CAPTCHA with honeypot fields and
timestamp analysis, which has apparently proven to be very
effective at preventing spam while being completely
invisible to the end user.

which indicates that you have no idea about alternatives for fighting spam, apart from some measures that have 'apparently' helped in one particular case. It's not better than someone in a bar complaining about stupid government rules, without any idea or suggestion for how to improve things.

[1] it said 'hypocritical' here. That is not the correct word for it.
there have been a few studies by Oracle that use some questionable to put it mildly methodologies. This one uses standardized and accepted methodology.
Slowing down in this crazy tech startup mania
If the attack is specifically against your site these won't help.
None of the DRM-related revelations in the article should be overly shocking to the HN crowd. For me, the most interesting nugget of info was that e-books now account for a quarter of O'Reilly's revenue. (top of the second page)
Anyone able to expand on the timestamp/honeypot techniques mentioned?
A better way to say this would be: knotted cords are definitely attested in classical Chinese texts, they just tend to be the kind of texts that aren't trustworthy as actual history. The standard mythical history of Chinese says that knotted cords predated written language, and that a mythical figure invented the Chinese writing system after observing the tracks of birds.

Given widespread evidence of cord-tying used to keep tallies, it sounds like this doesn't prove any connection to anything.
Hmm. I guess the "I don't have time to contribute to open source projects" excuse no longer holds any water!
I upvoted because I dig the psychological aspect of the article -- The teenage market is where I like to turn for a prediction of where the general market will be in a few years. Because while teens aren’t nerdy, they tend to be early adopters because it’s cool

But the argument about openness is greatly flawed.
Whats "weak?"

Where'd you go to school and do you have links to some stuff you've done? Were you a CS Major? Do you do design?

I'm an amateur too but I've gotten far enough to hack something together. Could use some help (specifically with JS and AJAX on this mobile webapp im working on. If that sounds up your alley, comment with your twitter handle, we're funded (angel) and would love to have another hand on deck.

Cant pay a ton of course while we're trying to keep burn low but if you've got hustle and are willing to learn, I'd love to chat w/ you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
They made some pretty bad decisions early on by not having a good international network. The pre plus and pre2 are available locked and unlocked on different GSM carriers so I don't see why it wouldn't be available in Australia or Japan.
Poll: Where does your karma mostly come from?
Submitting my own blog / website post
Submitting questions / polls
Submitting someone else's content
"While we’re excited to offer these new features to Android tablets, we have more work to do before we can deliver them to other device types including phones. Until then, we’ve decided not to release Honeycomb to open source."

The until then part strikes me as pretty important. It sounds like Google is just delaying the release of the source until they reach a certain milestone. This is a very reasonable position to take. I think the author of the piece is jumping to conclusions.
http://source.android.com/ states that

Android is an open-source software stack for mobile devices, and a corresponding open-source project led by Google. We created Android in response to our own experiences launching mobile apps. We wanted to make sure that there was no central point of failure, so that no industry player can restrict or control the innovations of any other. That's why we created Android, and made its source code open.

It doesn't say

Android is a closed-source software stack for mobile devices, and a corresponding closed-source project led by Google. We created Android in response to our own experiences launching mobile apps. We wanted to make sure that there was a central point of control, so that we can protect our brand assets. That's why we created Android, and kept its source code secret.

If to get your open platform to become popular you have to sacrifice any idea of openness, then what was the point?
Simple syntax isn't about elitism. It's not like some evil Lisper, decades ago, figured ``I know! let's make simple syntax so almost nobody can understand or write it!''

The simple syntax of Lisp has only one purpose: easy programmatic manipulation (reading, writing, transformation). I.e., less boilerplate. Let me spell that out for you: EASIER MANIPULATION, LESS BOILERPLATE. Elitist much?

There isn't Yet Another Parser Toolkit Of The Week in the Lisp world, there isn't Yet Another Lexer Utility Of The Month in the Lisp world.

Seriously, writing a bunch of parentheses isn't much harder than writing intricate, complex C-like (C++, Java etc.) syntax structures. How the heck did simplicity became synonym of elitism in the subject of Lisp syntax?
GAME STUDIO EXTRA EDITION – system for 3D and 2D computer games.
Game studio extra edition is a programming software. The game studio extra edition is the leading authoring system for 3D and 2D computer games.
Layers of Accountability and Losing Weight
I'd be interested in knowing whether the application itself is designed to be immune to autofilled accounts. Assuming people use it to create slideshows they can then share with their family/friends and not socially/crowdsourced a la flickr, a bunch of bots with garbage accounts no one has to look at wouldn't actually harm anyone else's experience of the site.
Can Customized Education Be Scaled Up?
The author is 14yo. I am truly stunned at his ability to articulate his experience and opinions to the world. He should be commended for that if nothing else.

Now to the topic at hand: I own Apple products and they serve me well. However, I have to agree with dazzla that JP describes accessibility rather than openness.
Now, I am a fairly young person myself, but the author is in 8th grade. I'm not sure he's qualified to talk about changes in the market over a few years.
My parents gave me a copy of typing tutor and said "For one hour of video games you need to do 10 minutes of typing." I was a comfortable touch-typest in weeks.

I didn't learn to really hammer out the words until I started dialing into the local collage modem pool to play muds.
Ask HN: Which host should I use for a PHP site?
I have a relatively simple PHP (Codeigniter) website that I am currently running on a shared host while it has been in development. Needless to say, I haven't been impressed with the performance of the site and would like to move it to a speedy host before we launch.

Right now we don't have much traffic but I'm hoping to get around 1000 visitors/day come launch time (hey a boy can dream right?). Could I kindly ask on your suggestions on start-up friendly hosting options?

Thanks in advance.
Bots tend to fill in every input field they encounter. So you could add an empty hidden input field to your form and check if the field has been populated.
Another way is to look how long it took to open the page which contains the form and the form got submitted by injecting a timestamp. Bots are way faster than humans.
I see these prices as a clear sign that the current DNS system needs to be replaced. It's ridiculous. They are driven up by "scarcity," but there isn't any real deficit. Names are just letters and numbers, and there is infinite number of combinations, there is virrually infinite number of relatively short combinations.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that there are only a few TLDs, none of them are very meaningful, so it all effectively converges into a single namespace.

If there were TLDs like .games, .mag (magazine), .press, .news, .comp and so on, no single domain would hold so much "value".

For companies, you could have a reserved .corp TLD where every entry has to be verified (so only a registered business with matching name can own it). For products, you could have .prod.
If timestamp analysis is effective now, it won't be forever. It would be trivially easy to program an autofiller to leave pseudo-random pauses between filling individual fields. If this becomes a much more common technique, the spammers will adapt.
And you know that I don't because ... ?
Very much agree about the openness argument. Though, speaking to the quote about teens and prediction, I present this:

This is what Motorola and Google and Samsung and BlackBerry and everyone else, with the sole exception of Apple, do not get about “open” computing. It’s powerful, but for ordinary people, it’s too powerful

Notice a prominent name missing from that list? If what the author feels is true (and being a teenager himself), this speaks volumes to just how far they are behind the curve.
I don't think you can reach the conclusion that the iPad is more open than any other platform because one person, who doesn't even own an iPad yet, thinks it does more.

Although, it would be interesting to know why the author's friend has that impression. I wouldn't think it's common, at least it isn't in my (admittedly tech savvy) circles.
Roughly how would timestamp analysis work? (I'm guessing a honeypot field would be an empty text field in a hidden div or something along those lines)
The article states that "Google's evangelists touted it as an open ecosystem" and seems to be taking the position that Google have not lived up to this claim.

All Rubin's tweet indicates is that Android is open source.
Of course, they put your name & other info on every page of the PDF generated for you. That probably works as a general "shaming" mechanism, such that most folks won't share indiscriminately.
Anonymity comes with a price though. You don't have any sort of reputation to build on when making claims about other people. If you want people to have more of a reason to believe what you say, putting your name on it should carry more weight. That should be the balance here.
I suspect one technique would be to add extra fields to the HTML form that are hidden when the page is viewed in an actual browser. Any submissions with values specified for these fields would likely come from a bot, since a normal user would not have been able to enter anything.
Sorry but I have to disagree with you - you use an awfully narrow definition of "game".

The game he makes is very unlikely to ever compete with the studios who makes AAA games, this much more of a casual game something that you may play on the subway or the bus during your commute; it's main target is not teens and he doesn't have the expenses usually associated with a game that size.

Minecraft proved that you can make money with non-casual games without competing on the graphics.

But if you restrict your definition of games to games targeted at teens and competes on graphics, then yes you will be left behind.
actually, the article says exactly the same thing...
I forgot to gave you some of my marketing ideas. I am executing these for my iPhone app but you can apply the same for your Android app too. Review the list part 1 and 2. Let me know what you think

App marketing part 2: http://tukulogics.com/blog/?p=63
App marketing part 1: http://tukulogics.com/blog/?p=50
I'd check out the searchyc.com engine for answers, but off the top of my head:

* SliceHost/Rackspace Cloud
* Linode
* EC2 (carefully)
* Web Faction
Search is Google's castle, everything else is a moat.
...everyone wants to sit back and let prior work bring in income today

This isn't rent seeking. This is simply enjoying rents from value creation. Rent seeking is when actively seek out rents by engaging in unproductive/harmful activities in order to continue receiving rents.

For example, getting a patent to prevent others from building similar works is rent seeking [1]. Or forming a union to prevent others from undercutting you is rent seeking. Similarly, creating regulatory requirements that crush small players (e.g., Walmart's attempts to raise the minimum wage, Phillip Morris attempts to increase tobacco regulation) is also rent seeking.

[1] Of course, patents might still be beneficial if the rents extracted are smaller than the value created which would not otherwise be created in the absence of patents.
How cheap apps & free software updates are creating a huge "consumer surplus"
Maybe, but everyone loves that sign. Just looking at it made me consider moving back and trying to start my biz idea.
Kinect & Pufferfish Eye of Sauron
You're playing on two different meanings of the term "open". Because Android might not qualify as OSS, they create the implication that it's just as tightly controlled as Apple's walled garden. But that's not even close to true.

The point of the OP's argument seems to be something like "Apple isn't open, and now this proves that Android isn't open either; hence, Apple and Android are the same in this respect". This argument is fallacious.
Meh. So basically you're asking for "not Lisp"? There are plenty of languages which fill that role already.

See: many modern languages which have a functional influence but more syntax (Scala, Ruby, Groovy, etc., etc.)
I don't understand all the justifications for Google's behavior being posted. I chose to purchase an Android phone because I believed that Google was committed to a truly open source mobile operating system. To me, that means that when I buy a hardware device that runs the OS, I can also download the source code the device uses, modify it, make use of my customized version, and share my changes with others. I feel that Google is trying to have their cake, and eat it too. At this point in time, I regard the Motorola Xoom and other Honeycomb devices as proprietary platforms that should be avoided by those who care about their software freedom.
That's what they told Gates and Jobs. :-)
One other data point for you. Groupon.com was purchased in May 2009 for $250,000. Source: http://mixergy.com/domain-business-tip/
JavaScript-style object literals in PHP
If your performance is bad on shared hosting while in development, your problem is probably not your host. Look at your code a second time.
The article is undoubtedly correct in explaining why Google chooses to keep Honeycomb closed at this time. However, this defeats the entire point of making Android "open."

Of course there will be droves of handset makers releasing crappy handsets with Honeycomb that is not ready. But perhaps one company out there might do something innovative and useful, and that's what you get when you open thing up.

Open always means tons of dreck, but it sometimes means something unexpected and good, that's the whole point. If Google doesn't want tons of dreck, it can stop pretending to be open.
I wish I could downvote you twice.

That he offered up the word "apparently", even with strong evidence of proof shows that he's being an objective reporter and a good scientist. I'm disheartened that this would earn somebody ridicule here.
It's the innate understanding of the market viewed from a teenage perspective--they already count Microsoft out.
Not going to say I agree with his point of view, but this is absolutely incredible writing for an 8th grader.
People keep saying that but i don't get it. Can you give me an example of the cruft you are talking about? Its one of those other myths i keep hearing about our cult.

p.s. Arc is more pleasing to use to you, I would certainly not choose it over common lisp or clojure, but maybe over scheme.
I have been using pseudo-timestamps and honeypot fields for a while now and it has worked pretty well for me. I get a bit of spam every now and then but it is usually someone manually copy-pasting. I could safely block those too but it is infrequent enough that I don't need to bother.

Here's my algorithm:

/form-show

fieldhash = hash(ymd(today))
valuehash = hash(remoteip + ymd(today))

<input type=hidden name=fieldhash value=valuehash>
<input type=text name=email value="" style=display:none>

/form-validate

field0 = hash(ymd(yesterday))
value0 = hash(remoteip + ymd(yesterday))
field1 = hash(ymd(today))
value1 = hash(reomteip + ymd(today))

if(post[email] != "")
// reject form

if(post[field0] == value0 || post[field1] == value1)
// accept form
ATENDIMENTO AS PORTADORAS DE ENDOMETRIOSE E DOR CRÔNICA
irrelevant aside, skip if desired

At first, I was annoyed because I knew this was going to be the same foolish logic of "It is more free because I am free from worry with it! See, I can use the word free too!" logic that makes me repost that lovely quote from George Orwell's Politics and the English Language about words having contradicting meanings and people arguing over them pointlessly. Then I RTFA and found out it was written by an 8th Grader. Whew, I feel better now. If other people making this argument would realize they were using 8th grade logic as well, I'd feel a lot better about this. Every time I see an adult making an argument stemming from poor understanding of the fact that words have multiple meanings, I want to bonk them over the head with a dictionary while shouting "see definiton (2)!" It is..a pet peeve of mine.

irrelevant aside over

This is still a terrible argument, because it ignores what the people complaining about the iPad being not open is all about. It has nothing to do with it being open meaning accessible, free meaning with a lack of worry, or any similar semantic strawmen. It has to do with the fact that you cannot put any application you want on an iOS device without Apple's permission. Jailbreaking is not an excuse, and neither is the "you just have to pay $100 a year and join a developer program". Users should be able to install what they want, when they want, without asking anyone's permission. You should own the hardware you purchase. Apple disagrees, and thus iOS devices are not free and open in the sense of being able to do with them as you please.