skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh Noes -- teh Angry Birds GPL'd! Google's Alleged GPL Violations in Android
Call me naive...and quotes aside...This may be due to Amazon possibly wanting to provide a similar service themselves? Possibly working in some sort of fee/etc?
I wonder if Google App Engine (appspot.com) will be taken into account; they also have web store for apps in Chrome.
Truth in Labeling
Chuck, thanks for the comments. At the time I was enthralled by the possibilities of the iPad and wanted to hack together something that was both useful for me and others. I intended it as a side project (instead of a full blown startup).

I don't regret doing it and I'm happy that I spent that month exploring (and brushing up on my Delphi skills!). I'm thinking about open sourcing the project but would need to clean it up some. It's all spaghetti right now.

Oh, and would love to get your feedback on my next project :-)

(And yea, that spam thing at the bottom is kinda lame)
Are We Thinking Too Little, or Too Much?
First of all, below (a) is the list of mobile providers in the US. Note that, even if T-Mobile were removed, there would be more than one (1) GSM provider. So your "mono" comment is both unnecessarily snarky and wrong.

But, if you really, wanted to push it, you could probably find a way to claim that T-Mobile/AT&T had a monopoly. You could also claim that any company had a monopoly on their product, simply because the product that this company sells is going to be somewhat different than those of its competitors. Yeah, true, so what?

(a)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless_...
Indeed - plus the fact that kids can scratch a DVD to the point of unusable within seconds.
I think 'thrown under the bus' is a bit extreme.

He was simply telling it as he saw it.

They hired people that turned out to be not as good as he would have liked, and that was a major issue that cascaded.

I don't see anything wrong with that.
Ask HN: How do you feel about affirmative action and reverse discrimination?
Affirmative action is prominent in many areas of society, everywhere from applying to universities or applying to a job. However, the act of making decisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, background or something else will alway create a bias, even when it attempts to counteract it. This is known as reverse discrimination. Most people would agree that the issue is not as big as the discrimination minorities face themselves, but the people in the majority still have a fairly good reason to display discern.

What do you all think?
You pay a little more for hardware, but Apple usually outdoes itself in support.

At the 3 year mark I decided to replace the optical drive on my macbook with a big hard drive and use an SSD to boot. Three weeks later the computer is dead. I reverse the process. Still dead. Both hard drives worked, but I couldn't test the other parts.

I took it to the Apple store and the genius said they couldn't look at it since it had been modified. I was bummed but knew it was a long shot. The store sends a follow up email survey and I say I had at least hoped I could find out if the machine was salvageable - I'd get a new logic board if that would fix it - or consider a new laptop.

The store manager calls the next day and has me explain exactly when I did and what happened in the store and says they can send it to an Apple warehouse and for ~$200 they'll fix anything that is broken and return it in a week. I took him up on that.

The next day I get a call that my computer is ready. No warehouse. No charge. They fixed it in the store, replacing the internals. I admitted I was probably the reason the machine died. All I wanted was to see if they could just test the logic board so I knew how bad the problem was. And Apple repaired it, well out of warranty, for free.

I probably would have bought a new computer from them had they said it was toast. I didn't hesitate to buy another mac a year later.
I prefer the experience within Stanza to either iBooks or Kindle -- ability to resize, page turning, etc.

That said, there is a big difference between the "apps" and they Kindle device itself.
"What's more, most of the black programmers i've worked with at startups were born in Africa or the Caribbean."
There's a good reason for that.From the African perspective what I can say, is that Africans has very strong will and motivation. The level of excellence that is expected by African parents from there children is abnormally high. In my country, Uganda, it's very common for a parent to punish his/her child for being the Second in class regardless of the good grades earned.

At present because of the technology boom in Africa, one's ability to skillfully work with different technologies is revered by others. Consequently, more Africans are tackling various fields in technology, especially computer science, with the same motivation and determination that was dedicated to traditional fields such as tropical medicine and electrical engineering.
I can't really disagree with your points there, because they are not irrelevant yet, certainly not to consumers. If you are a producer of third party software, they are rapidly becoming irrelevant despite the huge install base. Perhaps they can continue to succeed once they've lost all third party support (other than the shovelware), but that's not a bet I would make as an investor. If it weren't for their success in the handheld market, they probably would have folded in the early 00s, and now they have very fierce competition in the handheld market.
I'm pretty tech savvy. I write code. I have a half-decent living room setup, with an HDTV and surround sound. I have an Xbox 360. I get the latest gear when it tickles my fancy. New technology does not scare me.

And I have absolutely zero urge to buy a Blu-Ray player. None at all. And I don't expect that to change any time soon. DVDs are good enough on the rare I occasion I need them. Netflix Watch Instantly is awesome. I'm at the point where if I want to watch something I can't stream from Netflix I say fuck it and watch something else.

Marco's right to be skeptical of the next generation of physical media distribution. That game is going to be over inside of five years.
AT&T  T-Mobile Deal - M&A Arbitrage 
Just had a call with my friend in DC who advises on M&A Arbitrate. He wanted my perspective on the deal. I tend to do my own independent research, and hate reading populate news outlets before forming my own view.

Why? It's like doing a Physics problem and peaking at the solution half-way through... if you peak at the solution, you can only see the answer that way...which is bad because the whole point of the problem was to develop your own way to tackle the problem...

What do you think?

*spoiler: i argue that the deal will go through focusing on social-economics principles
its also my understanding that submissions that are controversial (a lower upvote to comment ratio) weighted lower.
I don't have a dating site, it just seems like they are cropping up left and right and it vexed me as to how their database is initially populated.
Hmm... I see that it's implemented differently, but aren't they accomplishing the same user task? Fundamentally, they're both solutions to the "this file is too large to email" problem. Or am I missing something?
I'm not sure that a "lingua franca" is even possible. Even if one language was so far ahead of the others that discussions like this thread were pointless, there would always be resistance from other developers. People just seem to get too attached to the idea of "There's one language to write everything in, and I pick this one."
I can't speak for the majority of broadband users. I can only say I'd rather not use Netflix than install Silverlight.

I have lived just fine without it anyway and chances are my TV can do it on its own without Silverlight.
Not really. Any political consultant worth his salt could easily paint Rand Paul as a racist, given his comments on the Civil Rights Act. (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-now/2010/05/rand_paul...)

Just to be clear, I'm not saying I think Rand Paul is a racist. I'm just saying I don't think he has a chance in a national election.
FTA:

"By applying a little more category theory we can show how a single abstraction, monads and monad comprehensions, can be used as a unified query language for both SQL and coSQL."

So just added to my reading list:
Grust, T. 2003. Monad comprehensions: a versatile representation for queries. In The Functional Approach to Data Management, eds. P. Gray, L. Kerschberg, P. King, and A. Poulovassilis, 288-311. Springer Verlag.
On box art and such it is rendered that way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)#...
Touring the US - the Seedcamp way
Internet streaming/renting is great for the US market. But where I live (Portugal) there's no TV Shows tab in iTunes or Amazon Instant or even Netflix. We are tied to DVDs or Blu Rays. They are much more expansive for sure and that's why people don't buy as much, see as much or consume as much media (movies or Tv Shows). Anyway, when they do, it's in DVD or Blu Ray (or piracy...).

We need physical discs here... but we wish we didn't...
> some kind meta-joke about blank pages.

<html>
<head><title>about:blank</title></head>
<body>This page is intentionally left blank.</body>
</html>

:)
Josh is awesome! He has almost 3000 vouchers from across the US and loves that our map function maps it all out for him, categorizes it and sorts by expiration. ~Cheryl Yeoh (Founder of CityPockets)
Wow this is super efficient and was much needed.
That's an interestingly familiar situation. Since my freshman year, there were more the 4 black students in my computer science classes. In fact at some point, the African Americans ende up dropping the major whereas the African students kept going. It's not like we had much of a choice really, our parents would have "killed us" for wasting their hard earned money :)
The flip side of course being that libertarians generally oppose the kind of government regulation that could stop this heinous merger from further destroying an already non-classical market.
interesting, but a week seems too long for me. is there a service that sends me daily summary email with links?
Sounds like the OP is just chasing after a lottery-ticket style product that is an instant success AND cheap to maintain AND manages to hold his interest for longer than a week.

Starting lots of different projects is just one tactic for possible, eventual success. Putting time, effort and a little patience into one project that you really believe in is another. Nothing is guaranteed.
"The dirty hippies tend to get angry about stuff like the fact that Exxon apparently pays little to no corporate taxes (citation needed), and whatever else they have going on they certainly haven't posted a loss recently."

Exxon Mobile paid $21 billion in corporate taxes on operating income of $53 billion in the fiscal year ended December 31, 2010 for an effective corporate tax rate of 40%. Do leftists not know where to look this stuff up? They are allowed to take finance and accounting classes, no?
I can only say just use the parts you like and ignore the rest. I lived through EJB 1.0. Spring and Hibernate are massive improvements compared to that and the community and software parts will continue to evolve.

BTW, I would like to point out that design patterns are just syntactical/mental constructs for programmers to do something in a less expressive programming language. For example, the Visitor pattern makes very little sense if you have functions as first-class values, i.e. closures. Same for the pub-sub pattern if you have used a programming language which support dataflow variables.
Here's a point for doing most of it in Delphi. :-)
You hire new teachers slower than old teachers retire.
phew I thought I was going to get flamed for using Delphi!
Assume that I want to send a large file to multiple recipients. Does your P2P technology mean that it works like torrent, each node will contribute some of its bandwidth to uploading or that the file will be sent directly from my computer to each of my recipients ?

Edit: How does it compare to http://www.bittorrent.com/dna ?
As long as they've not been SO successful, that consumers now consider "App Store" to be "The thing you get stuff for your phone from" where phone could be WinMo or Android or Symbian.
First words ever spoken on Twitter, Telephone, SMS, YouTube, Telegram
Me too, it was seriously weird. I scrolled around the page for quite a while trying to figure out the joke before the text finally appeared.
I think daily would be perfect. Only when you have something pending, of course, or it'll look too spammy when you come back from a vacation.
In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. -- John von Neumann
Would you use it if you could configure your own delay period?

I've tried to come up with a way to change it for each page you submit, but I haven't come up with anything that doesn't require pop-ups or page refreshes. I really would like to keep the UI as simple as possible. Is it too much work for the user to add the delay to the end of the url, ie example.com#DaysToSend=1, hit refresh, then hit the bookmarklet?

is there a service that sends me daily summary email with links?

That sounds alot like Read it Later: http://readitlaterlist.com/.
I chase high-impact projects. They don't need to be lottery-style, but they do need to have degrees of widespread use. In this case, the market was premature. No matter how much "time, effort, and little patience" wasn't going to change the world overnight to use smart TV's! (Otherwise I would have stuck with it :)
How much is your app worth?
>the act of making decisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, background or something else

(this reply is US-centric, from what I've heard, apparently AA is implemented differently in other countries)

In terms of employment, the above quote is incorrect. It is illegal to hire someone based on race. AA policies are designed to make sure that an employer is not discriminating against a protected class, but hiring decisions are supposed to based on merit.

In terms of college admissions things are different. Admissions typically are not based solely on academic merit (with the exception of Cal Tech I suppose), but based on a bunch of other factors that align with the college's mission. In this context the USSC has said that race can be one of these factors, and frankly I don't have a problem with it (then again, I am black so take that for what you will).

>This is known as reverse discrimination.

Even when the AA policy is designed to attract white males (nursing programs, HBCU admissions)?
it really is difficult for builder/hackers to handle the paradox, to be tenacious yet realistic, because we love _all_ our children
Ask HN: Can you recommend a mobile app developer/studio?
Hi there,

I'm a product manager at Simply Hired and a happy reader of Hacker News! I need to find a mobile app developer or small studio to build a couple mobile apps for us. I thought I'd reach out to see if any fellow readers are looking for a short gig or could recommend a firm.

I have wireframes, but it would be great to work with somebody who has some experience with mobile search apps/utilities and would have some ideas to contribute .. i.e. more of a discussion type relationship then just throwing a dense bunch of drawings over the fence.

If you have any recommendations then please respond or email me at swapna (at) simplyhired dot com

Thanks guys.
I think those jokes are acceptable. I think racist jokes are funny, and that includes jokes that make fun of my own race. We laugh at absurdity, and one thing that's pretty absurd is racism.
Google paid 2.4% last year

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...

"Google’s practices are very similar to those at countless other global companies operating across a wide range of industries," said Jane Penner, a spokeswoman for the Mountain View, California-based company.
So it's Everlater for HN? Seems like it wouldn't be all that useful outside of that context, since you've made timing the differentiating feature.
What about age?
"Why is it misleading to look at total cost or total government cost rather than simply federal government cost? What makes the federal government special?"

It makes sense to say we as a nation spend $XXX billion on defense because there's a central organization deciding how it's allocated.

It makes less sense to look at the total for education because each district largely gets paid out of its own property taxes - influenced by demographics, by the regulations of different states, and by the disparity in real-estate prices.
"enough copy protection to kill almost all casual piracy (including such innocent cases as ripping movies you own so you can play them on vacation on your iPad)"

Actually, I think every blu-ray I've purchased recently came with a download code and/or disc containing another copy of the movie specifically for copying to iGadgets. If I cared to put my movies on an iPad, this is even more convenient because it's already pre-ripped.
OK. It was cool the first three times you pointed out crate here and on the TC article but now it's getting to be a bit much.

EDIT: I'll take the karma hit.
Ask HN: Review my collaborative World War Two project
Ah yes, because Northeastern Alaska Sanskrit 2400-baud Modem Wireless has sooooo many subscribers. Yeah, that argument will hold up.

There are no other GSM providers of note which offer modern, up-to-date services (and handsets) and are a serious option now, besides ATT. I was snarky because I suspected obtuseness; I think that obtuseness has now been confirmed.
Without patents, companies that wanted to maintain a research lead would not publish. Information would be scarce, researchers would end up re-inventing a lot. With patents, a lot of information is public, but if you want to use it directly, you have to pay.
BTW, Qo, I note your account was created 5 hrs ago, seemingly for the purpose of posting your comment above. Karma is currently 1. Do you work for ATT, by chance?
That's only sometimes true. There are plenty of intelligent developers learning the newest and coolest languages who'd I'd never hire.

Why? Because learning cool tech and Getting Stuff Done are two very different things.

While it is true that most developers suck at writing code, knowing Scala doesn't tell me whether you:

1. Have enough discipline to do the boring, tedious parts of your job
2. Know how to prioritize tasks
3. Can write easily maintainable code
4. Can work well with others.

Technical ability is only one part of an employee.
:). I guess your father can right click the files and folder get the link.
An Internal Brain Drain?
We have a Panasonic BluRay player at home that gets used quite a lot. Almost every evening it gets used by someone to watch streaming videos from Netflix or Amazon Prime using the built in network interface. Once or twice a week, it also gets used to play standard DVD's from Netflix, and a couple times since getting it we've even found something we want to watch on actual BluRay.

(Translation: BluRay disks aren't going to take over, but the additional features of the devices are a bulkhead for streaming media in the living room.)
The day after that the iPad comes back with a note on it: "Wife is a Linux kernel hacker and fully paid up member of the FSF."
This is what drop.io should have been all along!
This is, at least obliquely, the subject of an honours thesis I am working on. I'd like to say more but this margin is too narrow to contain the complete proof.
Changed to git clone.
He is right and it is a darned shame, because with the big screens of today the quality of blu ray is sorely needed. I do own a blu ray player, and i am a huge arthouse movie buff and it does make a difference for the very few good movies that make it on bluray.

The Netflix online service is not nearly as good.

But having to watch 15 minutes of mandatory nonscippable adds before you get to watch a movie you actually paid for is really really f-ing annoying.

It is a shame the industry could not come up with a standard that actually works. Next time, the manufacturers should just make the most technically advanced and open standard they can come up with and completely ignore the content makers.
I think using on DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE is a much better idea than replace into. The REPLACE does an insert possibly followed by a delete. I'd steer clear of that in newer version of MySQL. I wouldn't want to have people deleting rows in my tables unless they really needed to.

We have people write scripts that populate data in our database keep a set of IDs around that they want to delete and if they have new data to insert somewhere along the way we have them update the rows they were going to delete with the new data they were going to insert. We insert and delete data only as we need to. Doing this to 3-4 tables that have high contention cut my slow query log size by half and all the queries that I don't see in that log anymore impact customers so it was a great change.
I completely agree. I see this sort of 'shotgun hiring' all the time. It is very difficult to hire a lot of very good developers in a short amount of time. Sorry to say it, but there are an ever increasing amount of awful coders out there. I really do mean awful. Kevin is just telling it like he saw it. I am sure the good devs over at Digg would say the same thing.
Are you talking about this: http://www.everlater.com/? Can you explain the similarity please?

The purpose of Reminder Bear is to go back to sites that will see some update in a week's time. It's not just for HN, you can use it on any web page that you want to be updated on. Most discussion on the web ends after a week, and if it's still going strong you can resubmit it to check next week.

Here are the things I've used it for so far:

Forums that I'm not subscribed to

Sites with comments that don't notify me of replies

News stories

Reddit threads
Dropbox down? ...And now up!
There's no upside for a minority to answer this question. Simply makes them a bigger target. Not complicated to not discriminate if one chooses. Gotta choose though.
Alternatives have begun in bid to hear from NASA's Spirit Mars rover
Careful with marketing numbers. I believe they're a common way of essentially hiding profits. Hollywood studios do this sort of thing all the time. Before you can say they spent that much on marketing you need to know exactly how much money went to whom and for what.
I put the beginning of the march at the end of the NES era, when third party developers that were disgusted with Nintendo's greedy, hamfisted approach to licensing fled in droves to Genesis/Megadrive and PC-Engine. Sales held up reasonably well with the competition through the SNES era, but plummeted dramatically once Sony got in the game (due to Nintendo's greedy, hamfisted approach to partnerships). Handheld sales kept them alive during the dismal N64 and GameCube years, and they did quite well with the Wii (although software sales have plummeted). Once again though, Nintendo's greedy, ham fisted approach to working with developers is probably going to hurt them.

If you look at the big picture, you will find that Nintendo has been in decline for a long time, and that their questionable business practices will hurt them in the long run. Let's all come back in ten more years and see if I'm right.
I don't recall Microsoft using anything open source.