skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it would be easier for Apple to succeed with a phone with a physical keyboard than it will be for BlackBerry to hit one out of the park with the touchscreen 9000. Apple would only require minor modifications to software. The BlackBerry will be starting from the ground.

Whether Apple will do this is another matter entirely.
dude, all you do is post yr own stuff. Ego casting at its worst.
Unlocked Black Motorola L6i
The L6i leaves a real impression. This is phone with ultra sleek sliver form with vivid glass color display. Phone is equipped with integrated 4x zoom VGA digital camera with auto-timer and multimedia photo album creation.
“Since framework teams at Microsoft can develop managed code software so much faster than they could using C++, their own efforts are dramatically accelerated. They no longer have the time to do coordination with other teams; such coordination would quickly become the bottleneck to getting their own efforts out the door. In a culture such as Microsoft, which values shipped software above all else, such a bottleneck will by necessity be bypassed,” Hollis said.

So Microsoft's productivity is too good? So good that the business process is slowing things down more than coding? Isn't that good? I see this as a problem for managers at Microsoft not necessarily the developers.

I agree there are issues with .NET but this doesn't seem to be one of them. I think the bigger problem will be what to do with enterprise code that was written for 1.1, 2.0, etc and will be around for 10-20 years. Microsoft will need backwards compatibility with all these releases for a long time (1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 3.5 SPx).
check out the ORM in phreeze: http://www.phreeze.com

its excellent, and the framework itself is pretty snappy.
Heaven forbid they release an unfinished, buggy product and we rant and rave about it to no end. (Oh wait, we'll save that for Microsoft products only - namely Vista).
Just how hard would it be for BlackBerry to duplicate the important parts of the AppStore? How about do that and lose the the obnoxious part, like setting up a standardized framework that's easy for developers to opt-in to, and not required?
[Ballmer's] mockery of Google’s search as “a white page with 10 blue links” indicates that he has no idea why Google has been so successful. I’d wager that if anyone is ever going to gain on Google in search, it will be by presenting even more focused results — less clutter, fewer distractions, more emphasis on making the results easily scanned.

Hmmm, reminds me of something Paul was saying the other day about ideas he'd like to fund...
So do it. Nobody is preventing you from putting your money where your mouth is and placing your ideas or technologies for energy efficiency on the market. I, for one, am sick of reading this noise of "we should X" or "if only we did Y" (I would posit that is the source of the general dislike for political threads on HN). If [any of] you really believe in what you are saying, do something about it. On the other hand, if you believe oil-less technologies will only work in conjunction with government intervention of the oil markets, maybe you should stop preaching about them until the market reaches a point where oil is more expensive than the alternatives.

Here's a [random] energy-saving idea. Internet businesses with a 12-hour business day. The downtime each day without drives, networks, CPUs, monitors, etc. running will save a bunch of power.
I've never had any problems with getting installers to install the proper version of Microsoft's .NET framework.

As for getting the right version of .NET on the customer's box their installer works (in VS2008) and InstallShield works with no problems. I've done product installs and enterprise installs with no problems from .NET framework versioning.

I had problems upgrading code from 1.0 to 1.1 and from 1.1 to 2.0 but no problems upgrading to new .NET frameworks since then. I've also had no problems with VS2008 targeting different .NET frameworks. I agree historically it was a problem but M$ has addressed it recently and things seem to work.

[EDIT: Reformatted and reworded things a bit]
No one ever seems to give any mention to Viewzi, a Dallas based visual search engine that is pretty awesome from both a design and technical standpoint. http://viewzi.com

Even though Viewzi is still in beta, the overall apathy toward them from the tech crowd seems to point to the conclusion that maybe people don't really want a design oriented search experience.

Regardless, good luck to Viewzi and others who feel called to create a new approach to search, but the bottom-line remains... Branding is key, and Google is one of the most well-known and trusted brands in the world.

In addition, even if you were to come up with some innovative new approach, Google or some random programmer with BOSS could easily implement similar features and render your hard work worthless. (see: Cuil)

Search doesn't need fixed where it isn't broken.

EDIT: I'm also tired of hearing people say that Google has no sense of design when it is one of the most well-designed sites on the web. There is an art to knowing what not to include, and Google does this better than anyone on the web.
So if you link your drop.io account with twitter it sends out a tweet when you make a "drop"?

Not to be cynical but this doesn't really sound like a big deal to me - am I missing something here?
Have you tried Doctrine? It's available as a plugin, I believe.
I used to do consulting like this for a Smalltalk vendor. It's spot-on in its description of the short-sightedness of many shops.
7 Miles of Car-Free Streets in NYC (vid)
Seems amazingly biased to me...
Citi: Yep, The Kindle's A Huge Hit. $1 Billion For Amazon In 2010
Free iPhones: Apple's New Model Will Blow Out Sales And Earnings
You can think of this as just changing the granularity of your tokens. The set of possible tokens becomes huge and the number of them per page decreases at the same time, so of course this is going to make looking for approximate matches much easier.
I have used the basic mysqli functions everyone uses in past projects but for my latest I started using mysqli prepared statements. I don't have benchmarks but they're supposed to be faster and more secure:

http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/686
"In the last day I've been called trollish, snarky, voted down without explanation, my commenting style has come under withering attack."

From past experiences with you, your "style" seems to be to mis-characterize the initial argument, hijack the thread with long, vague, tangential rants, and then to complain that people don't address the substance of your posts.

Perhaps your comments are being voted down for a related reason.
New social networks invent twists to stay in game
I use Kohana's ORM, which fully supports its Active Record query builder system.
I'm driving a fixed up old Mercedes 300 diesel and running it on biodiesel. (B-100 in warm weather, B-80 in the winter.) I'm also switching to an electric company that can sell me only electricity sourced from wind and hydroelectric. (Through the magic of fungibility, of couse.) So as far as being my own personal Denmark, I'm doing as much as I think I can be expected to at the moment.
ADODB also has the excellent feature of a shorthand, generalized SQL format that's incredibly useful for specifying cross-platform schema.

We use this in the Mantis project to define a list of sequential schema definitions, which then gets applied one-by-one to generate or upgrade an installation's database, and it works on MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, Oracle, and DB2.
Huh? I had to reboot my Windows Mobile phone (BlackJack) every day, else the mobile IE would refuse to display any web page. Mobile Safari has yet to crash on me. Statements like this "you made the iPhone less stable than Windows Mobile" are useless.
Critical thinking 101:

First, why not see how long other successful platforms took to get their first 'killer app'?

Apple II: First released, June, 1977. Killer app (visicalc) released: May 1979.

PC-DOS: released in Aug. '81, first killer app (lotus 123), Jan 1983.

Mac: released Jan '84, first killer app (Aldus Pagemaker), sometime in 1985.

Second, what do unit sales have to do with expectations for a killer app?

It's a little early for tc to complain about a killer app.
Photos of the LaunchBox08 companies at Demo Day
I use this to clean all my strings:

private function clean_string($string, $strip_tags = true) {

if (!strlen($string)) return NULL;

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) $string = stripslashes($string);

if($strip_tags)
$string = strip_tags($string);

if (!is_numeric($string)) {
$string = mysql_escape_string($string);
}

return $string;

}

Edit: You only need to use mysql_real_escape_string if you are inserting binary data or need to use database character sets. mysql_real_escape_string also requires a mysql connection and link identifier.
Probably not very hard, but if they had done it, they would have all the hype now wouldn't they? RIM has been in the business for years, so why didn't they start an App Store this well marketed a long time ago?

This is a simple case of a start-up (Apple) changing the way business is done and capturing a share of the market from older companies who were to entrenched in the old way of doing things. RIM can still catch up, and like you mentioned, maybe even surpass Apple by getting rid of obnoxious parts, they just need to get their act together.
So the lesson is: the fewer boxes you can get away with, the better?
amusingly safari crashed on me just as I finished reading the article on my iphone
Yes, I apparently those that can, do, and those that can not, talk trash.
LaunchBox Cultivates the Scene for Start-Ups
Yeah, that's what I meant. Given the information you had at the time...
Free Software is the Future
I think I have seen a lot less safari crashes. However, iphone apps seem to crash my phone a lot, and in particular, the app store crashes my phone about half the time I try to use it.
Google Analytics New Front Door… Is Now Broken
Songkick (YC s07) in the Financial Times - A little chat about finding backing
There is a dangerous kind of boolean thinking here :

"Either you believe that luck is dominant, in which case, why bother with effort?
or
You believe that luck is random, in which case it can be eliminated from your thinking and you can focus on all the stuff you can control."

Life is full of stochastic processes which all have a bit of randomness to them. Luck actually does not exist. There is just random chance that some event may happen which a certain subjective point of view interprets as favorable.

Take poker as a simple example. There is random "luck" in that at each point in the game, certain sequences of cards could fall that are more or less favorable to the cards in your hand. You win money at poker by considering how likely each random outcome is and making rational decisions based on this.

I think the likelihood of each random or apparently random is just another factor in the decision making process. Just like in poker, it's a volume game - make good bets on likely outcomes and if you get screwed a few times it'll all even out if you play enough. Repetition is how we can get randomness under control.
adhearsion is not a startup, it's an open source project.
Andrew Chen: How to start a professional blog - 10 tips for new bloggers
what's the use case for this? are you using it for aiderss?
Is any tech more overdue than solar-powered air conditioning?
Dude, you're arguing with Google employee #23. Unless you're last name is Page or Brin, I'd take his insight ;)
How did this get so many votes up?

Look at his page on Wikipedia.
And yet, we immediately recognize the style of the article is uncov. And we recognize the author's name.

It may be bad writing, but that doesn't matter. It's good enough.
Nbcolympics.com not enough (for me)
Wow, Viewzi is pretty cool, nice design. How did you hear of these guys?
The 2008 InfoWorld Geek IT IQ Test
ok hopping on you -- yoo? also I don't see any reason to use at all. Maybe think a bit more niche? (Think Met's news) I know I know waaay off base but this arena is already quite covered and tracked as has been pointed out.
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
"I make $1.45 a week and I love it"
The real coup with the the iPhone is Apple's handling of the user's experience in the iPhone App store.

BB certainly has the least retarded relationship with US carriers (especially now that they're so big), but their old-world mindset of small crappy web portals reflects more on their history with the carriers and their tendency to "eat their seed corn" and over-monetize channels (pay to get your app listed and pay to download it? no thanks)

Otherwise BB has the iPhone beat for indie developers -- the SDK is free to download and use, and you can transfer apps straight from your website to a telephone. BB doesn't force themselves into the center of your transactions, which means as a developer you're free to do things like charge per month or per message, or distribute your app for free and allow people to buy it inside the application itself.
Just pathetic.
Yep, We know, could they please use another color scheme. Currently there are 3 floating around the office and all of them look hideous with all the finger prints on them.
AirBed And Breakfast Takes Pad Crashing To A Whole New Level
Here’s the Deadliest Catch: Hiring an Agency to Build Your Startup
Is it just me or are dialplans not really that hard?

Also, AEL is pretty powerful too. All of the asterisk "pros" recommend using the dialplan extensively for performance and stability reasons.

Ragi has potential in my opinion, however.
Maybe that quote is just a window into Steve Jobs's psyche - inferring his business legacy is more important to him than all else.
Why are more people not discussing the importance in regionalized social networks? I mean that seems to be even what Google is now focusing on. More niche or more geotargeted which one comes first? Which one has more potential? social network for chicago or social network for firemen? Any thoughts?
i have a kindle and it's pretty awesome...

However it's so much like a book that i forget to turn the power off all the time -- and it has no auto-shutoff function.
> the problem is that supply is running out.

...eventually. In the 19th and early 20th century there was a lot of people scared that coal was going to run out and torpedo the early industrial economy. Quite a few prominent intellectuals were worried about Peak Coal. It didn't happen. It COULD theoretically happen, granted. But technology grew to use different inputs and the price system gave people incentive to explore new deposits. We still have tons of coal.
Battered by Russia, Georgia moves servers to Atlanta
I personally think RIM's success is going to be contingent on updating or modernizing the appearance of their UI/OS.

BB crushed all competitors to date by offering a smartphone that was acutely targeted at their market - business users. Now that they're seeing volume as a premium general purpose phone they'll need to track the desirable features in that segment. The BB Bold looks like a great start (the UI is sooo much nicer looking than 4.1-4.3), but Apple has really raised the bar, so it's not a gimmie like it was in years past.
This is a troll of epic proportions.

Well, not really epic. Mini-series proportion is probably more apt.
Doctors Allergic To Electronic Record-Keeping
I actually think that this may be an honest mistake. Perhaps the author meant 'c' rather than Lisp.

Still, the unending self-congratulatory tone annoyed me.
You could make more money picking up change, and nobody else would profit from your labor.
I used PDO a lot at my last job; it's one of the decisions I regret. Whenever I tried to do anything somewhat advanced, it had a tendency to segfault. Especially bothersome to track were segfaults due to leaving a statement open: at least through 5.1.6, PHP destroys objects at end-of-request in order by creation, and PDO doesn't like having the connection destroyed before its statements.

At my current place, I inherited a badly-designed wrapper class around OO-style mysqli (and stored procedures); the mysqli part seems to be pretty good.
But it's kind of hard to tell how well specific third-party apps are driving phone sales when the phones are selling approximately as fast as they can be made.

Well said. On a device that already plays music, is a phone, handles email and offers maps with a GPS, everything else is icing on the cake.

On this topic, the bloomberg app is great. I wish I could easily email links from it though.
That's mostly a myth. Yes, you have to worry about what you put on those stacks. But 2-3 pages per blocking call is noise even on low end servers these days. At my day job, we have an application (not a web app, but something similar architecturally) which routinely has 4-700 threads blocked on I/O on a 2G machine. The load average scares the IT guys, but the application works very smoothly and scales much better than anything using select() or poll() would (CPU overhead checking 700 file descriptors isn't trivial). And the code is cleaner to boot.

The "don't use threads for I/O" notion comes out of the early 90's, when OS schedulers were more primitive and memory was more scarce.
Lil Wayne Daughter Dies
Funny. Mine is as stable as my Macbook - eg very. But then I haven't installed any 3rd party apps, so maybe that's the difference.
It's just the new "twitter doesn't scale". They'll get bored and move onto something else.
I am not finding Viewzi to be very intuitive. This is not what I expect from a search results page:

http://www.viewzi.com/search/hurricane%20tracking

What am I supposed to do next?
screen uber alles
Those Kindle Estimates Keep Going Up.
No, it's not. It's sufficiently bad that I won't waste my time reading more articles by that author, and I will probably take a pass on articles by the Register, since their quality standards are low enough to let that drivel on.

(Actually, I've been avoiding The Register for a few years now, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt when this appeared on hacker news. It was a mistake.)
Heh - I'm working on a MapReduce blog post as we speak (see http://tinyurl.com/6oylnr). So I suppose I'm prone to his attack.

I actually think he makes one good point, that virtually no one actually needs to use MapReduce, let alone implement it, let alone write a blog tutorial on how to implement it. That said, virtually no one needs to write a compiler either, and yet understanding compilers (or even writing one) is not a waste.

Also, his comparison of a message queue (Starling) to MapReduce almost makes you wonder if he really understands MapReduce. Starling has nothing to do with MapReduce, and MapReduce is completely unrelated to Twitter's scaling problems.
Energy is still cheep even as oil is increasing in price. If we where to pay 100% of the cost of the US highway system though gas prices we would need to add ~3$/gallon to the price of gas. As a society we are already paying this even if you don't see 7$ at the pump. When you work out the real costs to drive a mile oil is still less than 40% on average and it's not going up all that fast.

PS: Offshore oil is going to make some companies a lot of money at some point but it's not going to change the price at the pump enough to notice. Which IMO makes it a straw man argument. For around 60$/barrel we can manufacture oil but you can pump it out of the ground for less than 10 so it's more a question of when to start manufacturing it than it is a question of when we need to start drilling.
Steve Jobs Shouldn't Be Happy with the AppStore...
Handling Human Error in the Datacenter
Don't forget at.
Virtual goods: Who will be the Amazon.com of virtual item sales?
Fantastic. Instead of facing up to the crippling inadequacies of Ruby's single threaded implementation, we get a mad scientist solution.

I swear Ruby attracts bad thinking like a magnet.
High-flying helpers can boost your chances of success
Nokia 5610 XpressMusic
Nokia 5610 XpressMusic comes ready to rock with an iconic Music Slider key making music easy to access with a flick of the thumb. Aluminum side panels accent the all-black high gloss finish and large 2.2-inch, 16 million color display of the Nokia 5610 XpressMusic.
Apparently, T-Mobile is planning on rolling out their own appstore, for all devices, talk about market size now.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/08/08/t_mobile_usa_s...

Obviously this might be as screwed up as T-Mobile's current website is, but its a step in the right direction.
I really do like them. This sort of timeline search view was the first I've been excited about for years:
http://www.viewzi.com/search/cronotron/ycombinator
What's a blocking database query? Readers don't block writers and writers don't block readers in any sane database in the last 20 years.

The situation you can see is unexpectedly long-running queries (say distributed transactions) causing the middle tier's connection pool to be exhausted, but that's not the same thing at all.
You'll remember this when someone is suddenly interested in your project and waving wads of cash at you, but it must run on SQL Server, today.
You choose a 'view' depending on where you want the results pulled from and how you want it to be displayed.

I agree, it isn't very intuitive, but only because it's different than Google, which is what we have been used to for so long.
I think there are two killer apps on the iPhone. Mobile safari with multi-touch and the gmaps app with multi-touch.

I don't use any other app on a daily (or even weekly) basis with the possible exception of the Yelp app and the WeatherBug app.
Zend Framework's Zend_Db is nice - usually something like

$select = $db->select();
$select->from( 'T_Shirt' );
$select->where( 'something = ?', $a );

And so on. You still have to write queries longhand if you're doing something more complex that a few joins, but Zend_Db is pretty handy.
Agreed. 2.0.1 fixed a lot of things that were bugging me. I'm still not entirely satisfied with some things - it's a bit slower than I'd like, particularly when loading up music - but at least Apple's given me reason to believe that things will get better.
That guy compares British rule in India around 1800 with Jewish rule in the US now. He dismisses the arguments of global warming, based on the claim that small differences can't cause big ones.
Sorry this is an older topic, but thought I'd add some more to this list that I've come across recently for the sake of completeness.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ - does exactly what it says, useful for playing around with word combos.

http://www.tdnam.com/ - expiring domain names and aftermarket, run by Godaddy - can find some good ones on here.
private function clean_string($string, $strip_tags = true,$empty_null = true) {
if (!strlen($string) and $empty_null) return NULL;
if($strip_tags)
$string = strip_tags($string);

return get_magic_quotes_gpc() ? mysql_escape_string(stripslashes($string)) : mysql_escape_string($string);
}

This is most likely faster because you're not changing the memory so frequently. In this is_numeric isn't needed because it'd just slow things down. It's really good practice to use mysql_real_escape_string, but I respect this way for simplicity's sake.
". . . lunch is $15 every day . . ."

Get some bread and make a sandwich, already!
Telecom plus
telecom plus-Anyone looking for a mobile phone, gas, electricity or low cost home and business landlines will find what they need at Telecom Plus. We are proud to have assembled one of the best portfolios of services and products that you will see anywhere.
Haha, half the apartments in Manhattan barely even have kitchens!
Their point is that it's a synchronous query. Just like a blocking read from a disk file, you have to wait until the answer is available before issuing another one. If you have a poorly threaded app server (which seems to be the use case here), that's a needless performance bottleneck.
For Techie Startups:  Don't Forget the Service
There's always room at the Service Inn