skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we're just seeing the start.

There are still lines for the iPhone at my local Apple Store in the Woodlands mall, and I am one of the few people at my company that has an iPhone, and we are an IT consultancy.

The iPhone has not yet taken off.

Things are going to get a lot hotter.
Words and chords: The semantic shifts of the Beatles' chords
Ask HN: Which programming languages for mobile apps?
Which programming languages should I learn if I want to do mobile apps?

Which can you use for each platform?

* iPhone: Objective C(only?)
* Symbian-phones(Ericsson, Nokia etc): Java and C, Python on some Nokia? Correct?
* Android: Java? Or any language since it is open source? Or it only has to compile to the Dalvik VM? According to:

http://www.scala-lang.org/downloads/targets/android.html Scala can be used. What about Clojure?

Other platforms?
Why don’t hotels use Roombas?
Review: Collapse and how societies destroy themselves.
Understanding Zoho, the Quiet Company Taking on Google and Microsoft
Do you know why it changed? Did they get some kind of cease and desist from Cuil?
OpenSSL is a lot of code, but it also has a lot of users who have uncovered subtle-yet-horrible security problems in the past. So it is somewhat trustworthy.

OpenSSL has a lot of users. But many eyes only makes bugs shallow if the eyes are open -- and 99.999% of people who use OpenSSL have never looked at the code.

One of the dirty secrets of open source is that there are a lot of projects which almost everybody uses by very few people actually develop.

Your app has only been seen by you and perhaps a small team. My money says that if someone breaks your system, it's going to be through that vector, not the SSL stack.

Even if you believe that OpenSSL has had lots of people looking at the code, which is more likely to have bugs -- 20k LOC or 200k LOC?
the most disturbing thing on starbuck's playlist last year was the Carol King live album. I wanted to kill myself when they started playing it every hour.

The alternatives, if you still have Tmobile wireless, are

- Fedex Kinko's, harsh lighting coupled with excessive air conditioning, and who knows what kind of fumes you're inhaling?

- Borders bookstores are more like it, if you need ot look up K&R, gang of 4, whatever, there it is. BUt the wireless routers have limited range.
Or perhaps, an attempt at humor?
Instead of using time-tested crypto, invent your own! That never goes wrong!

The only cryptography I'm talking about using here is "if the file I download has the right SHA256 hash, it's the right file" -- and that's far more "time-tested" than SSL is.

(And in any case, the rule against inventing ones' own cryptosystems is usually stated as "until you've shown that you can break other peoples' cryptography" -- so it doesn't apply to me.)
i haven't tried either of these, i'm just digging thru my notes/bkmarks

http://balsamiq.com/

http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/Home.html
Yahoo blocks 20,000 subscribers from one of the net's oldest email newsletters
Posted here because it has implications for anyone doing large amounts of email. Even if you play by the rules, you can still hit some serious snags if your users don't understand what those rules are.
HTTP server plus CGI was designed to be a gateway to anything. HTML browser with Javascript, plugins and capability to perform HTTP GET, POST methods was designed to be easy to be programmed.

So the hard part are

1. The right UI that makes the task easy.

2. The accumulation of data and/or consturction of the system behind the HTTP server that does the task. And in case you have millions simultaneous users, you will have a lot of fun to find efficient ways to perform the task. (Efficiency in both computing resources consumptions and economical cost)

3. Building the system described in 1 and 2 fast enough to have feedback from users frequently and iterate it fast so they will always expecting something good/useful/cool shows up every now and then.

4. Good quality of service. Whether there is only one user or billions of users in the world use the system. The system shouldn't make them frustrated in complete the task. The system shouldn't waste their time in life by waiting a broken page.
Business opportunity?
If you are going to use the quote, get it right:

"Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"

(note the words "essential" and "temporary" in there, the interesting discussion is about what qualifies as essential liberty in this debate and whether or not the safety provided would be temporary or have a more lasting effect.)
The only thing I find is that I need to manage the volume of Caffeine flowing throuh my veins - the initial rush can last 30 minutes, during which time I start getting seriously distracted until I calm back down again.
Slow and steady rules the day where the coffee intake is concerned.
What makes these "traps" so bad? I think smart people getting into medicine is a good thing. I think academics make valuable contributions to the world. I think that one of the two US presidential candidates is materially better than the other, and the world will be much better if he is elected.

Seriously, is the only worthwhile thing for an intelligent person to start a company that somehow involves blogging, RSS, and AJAX?
I think it would help if they had a better name. That is no more a conspiracy than the Dirac equations making cells making me is a conspiracy.
The smarter you are the more of a tragedy it is.
But it's just as true for all the "mainstream" topics he points to as easy traffic magnets. There are a zillion people trying to make money writing about celebrity gossip, too.
Don’t Want to Talk? New Service Sells Missed Calls
Night Life Reprogrammed
In Online Musical, the Mad Doctor Is In
You can't really google a bird to figure out that it's a magpie (yet), but one does wonder what the point of being able to identify it is. I'd hope that they're learning more concepts in science than rote memorization which is a debunked educational method.
The really interesting discussion is how a quote became an axiom.
I'm just guessing, but 4hoursearch.com is probably much more available and/or cheaper than yuil.com, as well as being easier to remember than sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/. Just guessin'.
Kwabena Boahen: Making a computer that works like the brain
It's impressively stupid. BBC personality (who does TV Nature shows) comments on stupid poll published by BBC Wildlife Magazine in order to shame parents into making their kids watch those same TV nature shows, since the vast majority of them probably don't have too much access to nature. It's basically a large and deceiving ad.

I wonder if "Sarah Cassidy, Education Correspondent" feels unclean.
E-commerce
Zeuscart is a complete E-Commerce solution that provides all you need to build, operate and maintain an professional-looking on-line store as quickly and efficiently as possible. One of the most feature rich Zeuscart solutions of today, Zeuscart offers configuration flexibility and the industry’s leading environment for customization. Zeuscart is not merely a shopping cart. It is a powerful Zeuscart system featuring Desktop -based administration, a completely customizable front-end, a product catalog, inventory tracking, a shopping cart, shipping and taxes calculation, search engine optimization, Gift category and much more.
Truly. It's often surprising that the features that seem so simple in theory can be really complex when brought into reality. Making something that is really good can feel like death by a thousand cuts sometimes.

It's easy to fool yourself into thinking something will be a lot easier than it will be too. This site is a good example. I'm sure I could make a basic functional clone in a few hours, but there'd be dozens of (important) details I'd miss. And that's just copying something. Creating something new means you have to figure out all those details and there's really no shortcut. The best you can do is to keep things as absolutely minimal as possible.
I have some guesses about how this works. JAR is basically ZIP, which puts the directory at the end of the file. I guess that GIF (or at least most GIF decoders) has a header at the beginning of the file and will ignore any garbage at the end of a file. Sites can filter this out without recompressing by canonicalizing images; i.e. removing any data that is not necessary for properly decoding the image.

(The OS X spell checker suggests "cannibalizing" instead of "canonicalizing". I guess you could do that, too.)
David Hornik: Y Combinator Rocks
I don't understand that. What about browsers is inherently insecure?
FAIL. GPUs can encode/decode H.264, so there's no reason for a separate chip.
This is neat idea to market, First create a CUIL clone in terms of appearance.Second bring it down, so people who missed it (including me) want to see it and Then relaunch it again with a new name :-) ....
The more you drink, the more you'll need to drink. It's an endless cycle, until you are dropping more on Starbuckses than on your rent, your teeth are brown, and your kidneys are shot. It may also turn you gay. And gay people can't program - all the gay programmers I know (and I know a few) love programming, but are terrible at it.
Gay programmers
It's a very politically incorrect topic, but I wanted to know what others' opinion was. Many people agreed on proggit and here that there is such a thing as "programming like a girl" (pestering others with questions instead of doing what you are supposed to do). What was your experience with gay programmers? Mine wasn't very positive (let's not bring Von Neumann into this). Thanks.
Ditto, then wondered if this is a strange marketing campaign...
Do you guys think this app will last till the end of the year?

If it doesn't, I wonder if Apple will make it disappear from "our" iPhones?
Most of it was kind of silly, but this part felt close to home:

For hippie programmers, the problem is solved when they've figured out how to solve it rather than later, when the work is finished and the problem no longer exists.

Not sure how that makes me a hippy, though...
Patching has some serious flaws. The main problem is that the vast majority of people don't apply their patches, even when applications auto-check for updates. When a patch is released, that patch directs the bad guys to exactly where the security flaw is.
http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/

Crazy amount of tech blogs at the top. There might be fewer people who care about startups than Paris Hilton, but the startup lovers are online 14 hours a day, while the Paris Hilton obsessives can't even spell DSL, let alone subscribe to it.

What the internet thinks is interesting has little relation to what the overall population thinks is.
Ironic how the criticize "critical thinking" (at least, what they think it means -- they abuse the term) for not providing solutions, only problems. Yet at the same time, they don't suggest any solutions to these traps, they only list them.

Fall into your own trap much?
Researcher Vivek Wadhwa on Globalization, Immigrant Entrepreneurship, etc.
Band Leaks Track to BitTorrent, Blames Pirates.
This includes some really neat examples of unorthodox chord changes in deceptively simple songs. But then the author goes off the deep end, alleging to have found overall patterns in these chords and coming out with a grand theory of how they relate to the songs' lyrics and emotions. This is typical of the poppycock that critics and academics invent. The piece is its own reductio ad absurdum.

Despite this, it contains interesting concrete observations, like that the Beatles blended their vocal harmonies with their more dissonant chords to make them sound right. That's pretty cool. But musicians do this by feel, and the way critics think doesn't (in my opinion) match the way art really works.

Anyway, thanks for one of the more unusual posts here in a long time. I'd never have run across it otherwise.
Excellent: a combination of C's syntax and extensibility with Common Lisp's speed. That's what I've been waiting for!
The change seems to correlate with the time the Beatles came out of the closes. I'm not surprised.
Gay people can't program. News at 11.
I never considered any of those traps, but then I'm just a dumb ass who went to make it in the commercial world.
Privacy Watchdog gets back at Google by invading their Privacy.
It makes sense, actually. If you do programming full-time, your brain is too tired to think about how to best market your product, etc. When I program too much for too long, I feel like I turn into a machine myself, finding it hard to interact with humans.
The author lost me around the time I noticed there was no reference to Dominic Pedler's work on the subject in the bibliography.
Google Health team's experience with GWT
Not really a fan of the name, 4 hour search makes me think it'll take 4 hours to get search results. I would have kept yuil in the actual name, i.e. of the top of my head I looked and

YUILSEEK.COM is available!

USEYUIL.COM is available!

YOURYUIL.COM is available!

CUILYUIL.COM is available!

SEARCHYUIL.COM is available!
I think that one of the two US presidential candidates...

Two?

http://www.votesmart.org/election_president.php
Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
Al Gore uses the energy of 20 households (and it increased by 10% this year)
Social engineering at its best or "How to Get Into Any Club"
Most likely, your sample is not statistically significant. How would someone's sexual orientation affect their coding?
I'm calling troll, but you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Turing.
yes they did.
just updated profile - It's matt @ thazhmon . com
Why Don't 99%+ of Americans use Roombas?
Well obviously it's not a real death threat; I've been using the Interwebs a long time and I've never seen a single legit threat of any sort.

Perhaps I misinterpreted the entire comment, but if so it's only because it seems to be common now to threaten or recommend death upon anyone who does anything one doesn't approve of. I've seen enough of that in the real world and I've grown tired of seeing it on the Internet, where most people have no understanding of what they're saying and nobody seems to get that killing the opposing viewpoint is not the solution since their viewpoint is what creates the contrast necessary for you to have one in the first place.

So, to conclude, I apologize to noonespecial for the flame; my patience with an increasingly intelligence-diluted Web wanes.
Because vacuuming is <5% of what cleaning people do. You'd need an auto-emptying robot too, which is much harder to make. And you'd need to make it much more reliable - drastically increasing the life of the product. That's very hard.
Of course you can still create an iPhone app that becomes a success. But I imagine on the first they, people were kind of hungry to try the new app store and their new iPhones. They would have bought just about anything (wasn't "Flashlight" in the top 10?). Once they have bought two or three games, how many more will they buy? So coming out with a cool game a couple of months later is a huge disadvantage.
Yes, but the talk here was about a crosswords application, not a strike of genius.
The ability to sling code by itself is not good criteria for building a company. Just like being a good cook doesn't make you well equipped to own a restaurant. If your friend is happy with his current situation, makes a decent living doing it, why would he change it?
Ezra Zygmuntowicz Interviewed on The Web 2.0 Show
I read the news today, oh boy.

It was not hacker news.

ED: For all you beatle noobs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZez_k4vAzU
I'm not sure about "wouldn't be here", but Allman and McKusick can certainly be added to a list of people without whom the Internet would be a far worse place.
Hmmm nothing wrong with smart people getting into medicine. I would not have it any other way.

The point is one should not get into the "Professions" because they think they have the smarts to do it but for something more, something like "satisfying the soul" or for pure joy...
Because people would steal them the way they steal towels and other things in hotel rooms?

It'd be a crackhead's paradise -- find the nearest hotel, break two room windows in, and score a cool $600 worth of electronics in a few minutes. Score!
Fully agreed, from another full-time Seattle cafe denizen.
Why don't they do that now for the TVs or the fine art?
Certainly, hackers have nothing to do with music, and aren't much interested in anything outside their techie little sphere.

Edit: it hardly matters, but I didn't downmod you, I just disagree.
"fine art"?
Good point. I'll try to explore how trolling can be converted into cash flow more closely. Thanks.
The people who work there aren't very good programmers though. Fame is almost random, much like the tornadoes caused by butterflies.
Vacuuming a hotel is a fundamentally different engineering problem than vacuuming a house in a similar way that a dish washer for a restaurant is different than for a home. The washer from where I worked was a large industrial box that worked hard and fast. A home unit would have to conserve energy and water where as the industrial unit doesn't necessarily. Customers need clean dishes NOW more than the business needs to save some single-digit percentage in energy and water costs.

Speed, capacity and throughput come into play.

I only need to clean 1 living quarters where as a maid service in a hotel has to do dozens, every day. The roomba would have to be at least as fast as the human and it is not. That's OK for home use since I'm at work so it can take all day if it wanted to. That wouldn't work out so well at a hotel where throughput matters more.

This sounds like an interesting problem for someone in operations research to tackle. I can conceive that a roomba might be useful in a hotel (for example, when the cleaning staff is going at the bathroom, let the robot loose in the room) ... but it would require some time and money to study it.

Perhaps a system where the floor has embedded RFID tags with unique serial numbers to help make the robot's job easier and more efficient, and a larger capacity bin and battery.

I'm sure iRobot is thinking about this.
I have to disagree. The Web doesn't handle interrupts or do memory allocation, schedule process and so forth. To call it that means you have to shed all meaning of the word operating system.
simply cool
I still don't see the usefulness of :(tipjoy, let alone Twitter integration.
I can answer the Symbian part since i've been there before.

You can use JavaME on it with some specific extensions, you can also use Python(at least on S60), and you can use C++(not C, if i remember correctly).

But note that the languages on this platform do not all have equal capabilities with respect to access to the underlying platform. There are some things that are just not possible...Except for the C++ part, which is the native language and thus has almost complete access to the system.
Cross Browser compatibility
The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.

From experience, the last 1% takes around 50% of the time.
It all depends. If you want to get your programs on carrier decks you are either going to have to learn J2ME (Java) or Brew. Java powered phones are by far the most popular, including all Nokias, S-E, and RIM Blackberry models.

However, I think the iPhone platform is the future. You have a distribution model that bypasses the carrier decks with iTunes. Which is huge because it's a pain in the ass to get on carrier decks, seeing how most NA phones are locked from installing software unless you download it directly from the carrier's portal. Then you have the fact that Apple users tend to open their wallets more for software.
My sample is 3-4 : bad. 0.8 (suspected gay) : good. That's not counting Von Neumann. This isn't statistically significant. That's why I'm asking about others' opinions. Why is everyone so quick to say girls tend to be bad programmers, but gay programmers are a touchy subject?

This is not a troll. I'm just stimulating a discussion that AFAIK has never taken place before.

Thanks
Wow, that is a stupid idea.

http://mattmaroon.com/?p=416
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Possibly but you should really try to concentrate on business opportunities that are a close match to your skill-set and temperament which I guess the coffee industry isn't for most of the visitors here.
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It wouldn't have to be as fast as a human because it doesn't need to be watched and a maid could carry multiple of them. (In fact given their battery life, she'd have to.) She could clean room 1, release roomba 1 in it after she was done, move on to clean room 2 while roomba 1 worked, release roomba 2 after the end, etc.

There might be a little lag at the end of the shift though, depending on the amount of time the Roomba took to vacuum and the amount of time she took to do everything else, so she'd probably just vacuum the last room or two by hand depending.

Nonetheless, the idea is dumb for many other reasons.
Agreed. Most people use Roombas for entertainment purposes. It definitely takes more time to look after them than it would to do a better job with a vacuum.

I bought one for my wife. I kind of think of it as a pet.
Rather than breaking in, they'd just take the thing home after staying there, and then when they got billed, call the credit card company and say "I never saw any Roomba". Credit Card companies almost never deny a customer a charge back, and they certainly wouldn't over an item that actually could just run away on its own.
Unlike the Roomba, a customer couldn't plausibly assert that a TV or a painting actually escaped from a room by itself.
Because they are expensive and inefficient. They're largely novelty.

My primary reason is that they get stuck on cords easily, and I have too many of those to be worth the hassle of concealing.
Like Stephen Colbert says - Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you stuff which makes you happy. ;)
Its called "Wisdom of the Crowds".
Especially given that it needs to remain small in order to get under beds. You can't just slap a giant battery on it.
You're right about Turing. He was the gay one, not von Neumann. I can't help but wonder however, how come you know so much about homosexuality amongst coders? Is it perhaps because of your own deviances? (I'm just curious. If the question is too personal, you don't have to answer)
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Turing FTW! And lots of others. I think they have about the same incidence of intelligence/effectiveness as straight ones.
Gay people are better at marketing than at programming. News at 11.
30 people whose company got bought out is amazing - kudos to YC, and to each of them. Each one is an extraordinary achievement

Just reminding myself I've also done something cool: I think one has a right to that statement after the first sale of one's product. "I made something people want". And for me, that was an amazing experience. Thanks for reminding me of it. :-)