skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/w...

Seems sort of silly at this point. But with enough demand for more unskilled labour online, it might become something more substantial.

From the paper:
" The rather wobbly-legged best guesses for 2008 are that 400,000 gold farmers earning an average US$145 per month produced a global market worth US$500m; but we could easily more than double the latter to over US$1bn. There are probably 5-10m consumers of gold farming services. "
Anything with a full touch screen is a good start.

Found the iPhone 3G was disappointing (more like a toy) compared to my Blackberry.

However, the HTC I've been using for about a year (http://www.coolsmartphone.com/article727.html) is excellent and definitely the best of the lot.
We're using Symfony as well, and it's been quite wonderful. Fitting into the framework took some time, but its abstraction allowed us to move from mysql to posgresql for testing, and then back to mysql without much thought at all. Also, optimizing queries for a specific database is fairly simple.

Propel has been a bit of a kludge at times, but it does a decent job. We're experimenting with 1.3 and Doctrine to evaluate our migration path however.

Anything that's hit you as particularly inefficient?
Intriguing. Can I find a tethering app to access my phone's internet via my laptop using Windows Mobile on this HTC?
I was interested in the HTC Touch, but the reviews killed it for me. This one looks fascinating.
I think the reason this is a bad idea is that in order to turn a blocking operation into an async one, you're adding a totally new transport layer (HTTP) and data representation (JSON), as well as middleware. That means a significant performance hit, and a lot of needless complexity (and potential for failure).

It would be much simpler to either make the database driver itself non-blocking (Postgres' client library supports async queries, for instance), or use a dedicated pool of threads to perform blocking DB operations. It might be that Ruby's threading is too broken for the latter to be feasible, but it still makes using DBSlayer just to get async DB operations needless overkill.
phishing site?

edit: apparently not: http://staff.tumblr.com/post/45588160/tumblr-4-beta
I'd totally agree with that, I think I was more pointing out that Nokia do have a way to bill Apps to the consumer over the phone.
$20 for an encryption key which allows you to digitally sign your app and get to the more interesting parts of the API - system event listeners, background processes, auto-startups, system modules etc. For the iPhone you need a $99 key to do anything, and I don't know what the situation is with WinMO.

BB's have been tetherable for years, though I don't know about unauthorized ways to do this. The browser is decent, and every model has a GPS variant.

As for the platform, its fairly open. Its much more capable than the iPhone and regular cell phones, but not as open as Android (which is obviously about as open as you can get).
And perhaps you're correct. But I wouldn't be surprised if the government spends money estimating the amount of non-picked up change.
Ideas, Excecution and the Rare Auteur
The advantages described by the author here are the same ones you always hear in discussions about the benefits of unit testing (bugs are caught sooner, you feel better about your code, etc.)

The real benefit to unit testing (at least from my experience) is that it encourages you to write better code up front. By thinking in terms of the smallest possible units, you don't bite off more than you can chew. As a results, your code tends to be more decoupled, more modular, and more logical (unit testing helps you organize responsibilities in your code).

For this reason, even if I had to delete every test I wrote after I made it pass, I'd still write a failing test before writing any implementation code. Of course I'd much rather prefer to keep my test suite, since it does provide the benefits discussed by the author. While no amount of unit tests will reveal every bug in your code, the quality of code I've written after writing a failing test first is vastly superior to code I've written sans-test.

Your mileage may vary, but if you haven't tried it yet, I suggest you give it a whirl.
Android effectively doesn't exist yet and is as good as vaporware to me until I see some phones on sale.

Hm. So far I'm leaning towards a jailbroken iphone, but!
What particular blackberry model would you recommend?
LivePlace To Launch Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered In The Cloud
a) Safari's unstable, and it's an Apple app

b) Any OS that lets user-mode apps break it has major flaws and needs to be fixed (and AFAICT no third party apps install drivers).

c) Virtualization is not a fix for b).
Help me understand: How would this improve the content of the post?
Compare it with a Nokia N95, which I had before I got my 2G iPhone, and now wish I hadn't given away.

The N95 has a 3G antenna, and a battery that last for days, even with heavy use of it's Webkit based browser.

Apple releasing a 3G iPhone that has worse battery life than the currently terrible battery life of a 2G is fucking ridiculous.
Agreed. Be sure to hit it if you didn't read the whole thing:

http://www.thesheepmarket.com/
The other dead giveaway is when you are working at an unusual hour. You hear a phone ring down the hall, no answer. Then a phone closer to you. Then one right next door, then your phone rings. The whole sequence is like something out of a cheap horror flick.

You eye it with disgust, but pick it up, and sure enough it's a recruiter sequentially dialling through the extensions. And they have the nerve to pretend they are calling just for you!
I have two piece of advice about what technical recruiters should not do, based on my own experience:

1. Announce that someone is applying for a job without first asking them if they're interested. (Yes, this happened to me: I was invited to go somewhere and speak about my research; I agreed; and when I turned up, I was introduced as "Colin Percival, who wants to work for us". To this day I still don't know exactly what job I was "applying" for -- I talked about my research and got out of there as quickly as I could.)

2. Announce that someone is applying for a job other than the one they told you they were applying for. (In fact, there were three different positions involved, and in the end I was offered the position I originally applied for -- but not before having a list of on-site interviewers selected on the basis of a different position and then partially reworked on the spot.)
Cost-Cutting in New York and London = A Boom in India
Http://sportsity.com - requesting feedback
Hello HN community. I'd like to thank you in advance for any feedback you can provide on my website, http://sportsity.com

The purpose of the site is to find places to play sports or otherwise be active. I won't say more than that, because I'm interested in how intuitive/usable people find the interface.

Thanks again for your constructive comments.
RIM had to be huge before NTP bothered to shake them down form money. All of those examples above share the characteristics that they were huge successful companies when they were shaken down. The results were also fairly random.

I think it fits the model that once you are large and successful, the trolls will come out of the wood-work. The compliment is that you are big and successful enough to be worth a shakedown. Once you are the $250k to actually defend (its really more like $1 mil/year for up to 7 years) is chump-change to you at that point. The big problem is the more or less random outcomes of such trials.

Until you are making big money, you are not worth the time because a victory would be costly to the victor and you'd have nothing to actually turn over. If they won debt, you'd just close up shop, as there'd be no point in working to pay a troll.

When I say that "there's no such thing as infringement" I'm not talking in the made-up world of legal types. They could rule you infringing for tying your shoe if they had the right lawyers, I'm speaking from the realistic standpoint that no two software systems are ever really alike unless you outright steal a copy of the source. I've used the example before that 2 computers that factor large prime numbers look form the outside like a pair of beige boxes that do exactly the same thing, but inside they are likely worlds different. This confuses the lawyers, patent officers and uneducated outsiders and leads to the problems that the patent system now faces when it comes to software.

When you patent a machine, you have to show its inner workings and they have to be novel. When you patent software, you can pretend that the general purpose computer is the inner workings, and not the actual software. This lets you cheat and patent a concept directly, without proof that the inner workings are novel or even possible.
"looking bigger" is good for smartphones.
Misuse Of Social Tools-Guilty As Charged
Increase Your Depth as a Programmer by Spelunking
http://whois.domaintools.com/tumblr-beta.com
agreed. It fits perfectly on the iPhone. Check it out if you're browsing from one.
I love it. Great visualization. Nice work.
That would kind of cut out the campus bookstore, wouldn't it?
You've obviously never used an E Ink display before. The iPhone cannot seriously compete in this space.
Seems silly to say this as a blanket statement, given that it's provably worked before. It's probably suboptimal in most cases, but sometimes a startup can pump out an initial product quickly and cheaply that way.
Thomas Finchum Gay ?
I'm not sure there is a good one. Generally, other people's photographs are their property, so scraping them would raise a whole bunch of problems if you have another person's photograph that they don't want you to have. Sounds silly, since you'd be in the photographs, but the site would get a lot of takedown requests. Not that YouTube doesn't, but you get the idea. I'm sure someone's done it though, I just don't know who.
they've definitely made some optimizations for the iphone, and i think we might begin to see the introduction of some 'pro' features with this release...i'm not sure exactly what they have in store, but i'm excited to see how they plan to monetize tumblr
Good reply. Thanks for replying. I personally think it ultimatily boils down to content that the search engine has. That is the index in this case for Google. I think the semantics and the semantic web will make a huge difference. How I look at it is that because Google's result for "c# string replace" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=c%23+string+replace is much better than Mahalo's http://www.mahalo.com/C#_string_replace, Google is good. I was thinking about how the search will be in the next 2-3 years. The main problem I see with is the discovery of new content in search engine, and I think Google basically brute forced the whole thing by trying to index everything and hope that the results are there and which works alright for the query above. It basically boils down to 100 thousand crawlers and huge index. If social search engine cannot discover this page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fk49wtc1.aspx for this query "c# string replace" for instance, it is game over. Google is alive because of these kinds of results. My main concern is how to discover new content and without the burden of updating the index and bruce forcing the whole thing by indexing every word on a webpage. I know Google indexes pieces of webpages but still it is ton of words to index. I just see huge problem with creating huge index like Google and maintaining that index which is also a lot of work. Also I don't have the resources (money) to create a huge index, which is another main reason.

Good discussion by the way.
Users talk the talk, but don't walk the walk on privacy
Apple are in uncharted territory. Providing an SDK to the iPhone is equivalent as allowing different sets of hardware running OSX. It would be interesting to see how long will it take Apple to bring the goods (if ever...)
Virtual Community Stardoll hits 20 milllion members.
Genetic Glitch May Prevent Kids from Learning from Their Mistakes
Should Microsoft Fund Startups, Y Combinator-Style?
From their "about" paper... a lot of these are pretty incredible. I don't know what kind of a team they have but many games companies would have hard time claiming even half of these innovations.

OTOY 1.0 features:

* super fast software rendering (surpassing many DX7 and DX8 cards at 640x480) with 100% support across all types of systems (see http://www.otoy.com/city/)

* simple to use scripting language - very easy migration from Flash, Director or C++

* average 6-8 week development time line for games

* scene graph and collision system optimized for very large worlds - ranging from infinite terrain to indoor scenes

* proprietary compression for Audio (2x better than MP3), lossy image (5x better than JPG, 1.5x better than JPEG200), lossless image (2x better than PNG) and lossless data and text (25% better than ZIP)

* voxel space rendering for cinematic scenes

* imaging support in software (hand optimized ASM code for x86 on Intel Macs and PCs): includes all Photoshop
and Director blend modes, real time full screen dilation, glows, blur, toon shading, convolutions, flood fills, color keying, CMYK/HSV/RGB conversion, vector drawing, noise effects, flare generation.

* Real time switching between full screen, windowed, and embedded
You could potentially get around the copyright policy by putting a disclaimer that the user most 'own' or have permission to grab the images. It's no different than someone downloading a copyrighted picture and uploading them to another service.

The other big issue I can foresee is that most of the sharing websites don't have api's for you to programatically get at photos. They in fact do their best to prevent you from ripping photos. You would have to play a pretty nasty cat and mouse game there.
This reminds me of an old routine about cat hide production.

You probably all remember the "the cats will eat the rats and the rats will eat the cats" thing.

Total B.S. but kind of entertaining.
Founders fear giving their investors too much control and stake in a company with investors, until Microsoft jumped in the game. Shit just got real.
The video that is being shown is a rip off of a movie that is actually fairly famous in 3D graphics circles. It has been around for years, at least 3 by my count. This demo was made almost certainly without the author's permission. Further, it demos only video editing skills, as the actual rendering was done years ago. It is interesting that they are leading the viewer of the video to believe that this is a world in the cloud that is being rendered real time. It seems a little less than honest to me.

By the way, the video can be found at:

http://3dblasphemy.com/personal/CITY.html

For those who are interested, the 'tell' is that the camera angles are exactly the same as those in the 3D Blasphemy video. Additionally, the apartment that is rendered a few minutes into the video is rasterized and not raytraced, like the city is.

I am curious, now, to see OTOY in action. I know I am starting to smell a paper tiger, or perhaps vapor ware.
I wonder how reponsive this really is. A fair number of people get nauseous when there is a ~250ms lag between their command to move (i.e. moving the mouse to look up) and their view actually moving. A lot more would find it irritating, at the very least.

That being said, I can't wait to try it out myself.
It's actually more than a few $ a day to be made, English speakers can get around $4 an hour once they get good at the system. These English speakers aren't doing it to support themselves, they spend their money as Amazon credit on DVDs and surround sound systems and LCD TVs.
I spend pretty much every weekend hiking, snowshoeing, and/or cross country skiing in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

I'm also an engineer. So I've been dealing with this conundrum for pretty much my entire adult life.
I'm going to guess that if they even have most of these features, they've probably just stolen existing technology and called it their own. Much like most "high performance proprietary video compression methods" these days are just ripoffs of H.264 (see SVQ3 and RV30/RV40), I would not at all be surprised if even their non-vaporware tech is copied.

1.5x better image compression than JPEG-2000 is rather easy; H.264 can pull that off handily with intra compression. 2x better than MP3? They're probably using HE-AACv2. 2x better than PNG isn't difficult either; lossless wavelet or just something FFV1-style should be sufficient. 25% better than zip? LZMA.

Of course, eventually people will realize that almost all this stuff is patented up the wazoo...

Another thing I found rather amusing was "5x better than JPEG, 1.5x better than JPEG-2000"; implying that somehow JPEG-2000 was over three times better than JPEG...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/JPEG_JFIF...
I've got a friend with an HTC touch, and it is awesome. Definitely recommend taking a look at the HTC lineup.
Birds-nest BSOD during Olympic cermonies
Beyond Nash: Computer Science and Game Theory
"... Apparently these recruiters just call random numbers and hope to be directed to some hiring manager. ..."

Poor phone screening technique.

All calls should be routed through one person where they can shield internal people from "unknown" callers. This simple hack works surprisingly well in large companies and is a 101 social engineering technique. Kevin Mitnick now makes a living writing books on this subject ~ http://www.amazon.com/Art-Deception-Controlling-Element-Secu...
sometimes a startup can pump out an initial product quickly and cheaply that way.

Worked okay for ConnectBeam :
http://connectbeam.com/

Outsourced their prototype to India on angel and debt, used the prototype as a proof of concept to get their Series A, then put together an in-house team to do it the right way (Struts/Hibernation/LDAP/etc).

Even hired a contractor (this guy) to do some high-gear grinding on the kludged UI just in time for their first beta shipments.

Even though the initial product was mostly trashed, it got their business from concept to sales. Quick.
IEEE Spectrum: First Solar: Quest for the $1 Watt
Remarkable Surveillance Systems
Provides cctv systems, security camera, remote video surveillance equipments, security monitors, cables, connectors and wireless equipment for all applications.
Uncharted territory? I am not so sure it is uncharted for them - and it certainly isn't uncharted in the industry.
Ask HN: why do we have less science related posts now that in the past?
This is something that I don't really understand well. Why do we have less science (or music, arts, whatever not directly programming & startups related) content here? If I remember it well, we used to have about 50% programming & startups, and 50% content that was interesting to hackers even if it was outside of those subjects. I even think the name change to Hacker News was to avoid focusing too much in startup & programming content (the previous name was Startup News)... why did the community almost entirely drop it?

I think the problem isn't that we don't like it when it appears, but that for some reason people isn't posting it so often. I haven't had problems posting maths, science, etc content into the first page, so maybe if everyone is interested in this we could try to post such content more often?

What do you think?

(Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker.)
And how do you deal with it? What do you feel?

I think that while engineering has a limit for how beautiful it can get, maths is much more nature-like in this regard.
Speculating Sucks
"... His isn't an online outliner though is it? ..."

No.

My main app only runs on Windows
and Mac. Can't do it with Linux.
Shame, I know. [1]

there was a comment on why Winer recently purchased a Eee100 with MS Windows and the answer was because his tools are Win/Mac. The point I was making is Outliners have a long history, Winer was there early. The specification is more important than the tool ~ http://docs.opml.org/

[1] http://friendfeed.com/e/fff3a72d-e91d-eae5-5a82-d5a8fc0c8996
Fantastic Contraption
I hope they bring Kindle to Canada soon. I was ready to buy one a while back and disappointed to find that it was USA only.
Is this Hacker News? what have we become...
demonstrably

Not gonna happen. There are too many variables to control, and it's impossible to run the same project twice, let alone repeatedly. People with opposing beliefs will never be convinced by such a "demonstration"; they will simply find some detail or other to justify what they already believe.

The empirical literature on software projects is downright feeble. Meanwhile the programming culture is very rich in anecdotes and folklore. I find that suggestive.
Researchers Halt Spread Of HIV With RNAi In Animal Model
Users run circles around NBC's Great Olympics Firewall
And, Starling is not the reason for Twitter's scaling problems. It's actually a very very simple and very useful and it works as advertised.
I had a Nokia N70 before I got my N95, and the N95 is definitely must faster (less "laggy") but still not perfect. The quality is fine, and I can't think of many features it doesn't have. If you want a good, solid, reliable phone, the N95 is the best thing I've ever seen from Nokia, and I place Nokia at the top of the list for mobiles.

As for something you can hack -- I don't know. I gather there are options for the Nokias, but I've never got around to trying them. I'd avoid MS and Apple on principle (the totalitarianism, as you say, is a deal breaker) and Palm is a bit overpriced and underpowered; they're really stuck in the 1990s, the poor dears. What does that leave? Not much.
I rather use a 9" netbook

More powerful, more versatile.
Well, it might.
Where I went, the campus bookstore was a co-op anyway. I think not for profit. I'd imagine for many campuses they just cost money to keep alive.
But You'd probably still need them to an extent.
Applying this information to parenting is the killer app for genetic profiles, much more compelling than employer screening. A sheet of paper that tells you what's unique about your kids and how to raise them? It would be very hard to say no.
Wow 40% of jobs could be offshored? That surprises me. What is the 60% of jobs that requires a physical presence in wall street?
"which means Microsoft had more revenue and nearly twice the net profit of Apple and Google combined"

Wow, I thought Google was having more profit than Microsoft already. Why is everyone pointing Microsoft as dead and Google as the leader then? At least it's not the case yet.
Agreed. I'm not proposing virtualization as a fix for stability specifically. I'm thinking mainly about security with stability as a pleasant side effect. The OLPC folks gave the XO laptop this capability to ensure 3rd party app security in what they thought could be the "largest software monoculture in the world." Turns out the iPhone is further along on that than the XO. (Blackberry is even farther along, but they seem to have avoided catastrophes. I wonder if the Black hats just haven't learned that it pays to be subtle?)
The blackberry bold is coming out soon, maybe you should hold off until then.

Symbian is being open-sourced, and Nokia is known for being developer friendly as far as I know.

iPhones are cool, but don't seem to be particularly developer friendly. Also, FYI, I think you need a mac to develop for them.
nobody is saying microsoft is dead. but their peak is almost certainly behind them. they've already lost their leadership role, and their actions as of late have convinced most of us that they have nowhere to go but down.

they are well on their way to duplicating ibm's progression into a profitable but not terribly newsworthy tech company.