skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's unfortunate you're downvoted, as there's truth amid the cynicism. It's true that consultants get paid more for hard-to-use software, and I get the impression even some open-source projects play this card... But, usually there's some progress in successive technologies - from your position, can you see any? I'm interested in understanding the real problems here.

For example (AFAIK) XML webservices tend to be less tightly coupled than CORBA's IDLs (though you can tight-couple in any language):

- XML using its own format specification language (DTD; XML Schema) helps keep the external data format independent from the application's internal data structures (until some bright spark realizes they can avoid duplication! by deriving one from the other... thus re-coupling them. Because of this, SOAP is CORBA all over again).

CORBA's IDL produced an interface for every object. This is fine for methods of the top-level object (that represents the main actions of the application/service), but when applied to objects that form the internal data structures (the nested object tree/graph that is received/sent as an argument/return value), it forces the external format to have the same structure as the internal data structure, thus tightly-coupling them.
[And, CORBA tried to do "distributed objects", which just didn't work very well - though it sounds like a good idea.]

REST seems to be making a big difference. It explicitly uses "representational state", meaning that the external format is independent of the sender and receiver's internal representation. By defining the format independently of an end-point, it seems you escape tight-coupling. In practice, devs will often derive internal object definitions from the external format - but then they do the loose-coupling themselves, internally, and so tight-coupling is still avoid. [It's seeming to me that
deriving internal-->external is bad; but external-->internal is OK.]

In a way, I think this progression can be seen as realizing the concept of information hiding in greater and greater depth as time goes on.

Does that seem right? What do you think? Can you point me to any references that address these issues (esp about tight-coupling between internal/external representations)? Many thanks for any help!
After much consumer push back against locked bootloaders in new devices, HTC has (apparently) decided to discontinue the policy. This arrives just after Motorola makes some unsubstantiated comment about reconsidering the policy.

For some history, the Droid 1 was very open and easy to flash with custom ROMs. It's European brother, the Milestone, featured on-chip security that verified the signature of the bootloader which in turn verified the signature of various boot files including the linux kernel at the heart of Android. Subsequent Motorola devices in the US featured similar security and thus do not have official CM7 builds.

HTC recently adopted a similar strategy with respect to some of their more recent phones. The Thunderbolt had a buggy implementation though, and was still hacked quite quickly. The Evo 3d (And another? maybe?) featured a fixed version that more closely represented the impenetrable Motorola style bootloader.

Anyway, it appears now, that they maybe embracing the community more, which makes me happy. My mom won't stop talking about how fast her Droid OG is. I put CM7 on it which includes Gingerbread... a treat her phone would have never otherwise seen. Meaning it also includes a fix for an awful race condition that can make it impossible to answer phone calls. Good stuff all around.

Also, for context, this is the statement Motorola made a month ago: http://ausdroid.net/2011/04/27/confirmation-motorola-to-unlo... They make very specific caveats for "where carriers allow it".
Except PayPal is not a bank (in the US), and your account with them is not a merchant account. Consequently the 180-day hold rule does not apply.

I don't agree with proexploit's assertion that we'd be better off without PayPal, but I also wouldn't carry signs and chant slogans in the streets if the US government forced them to be better stewards of their customers' hard-earned money.
I accidentally sounded tough on crime. Who would have thought!

I want good conditions and adequate payment, no jobs that keep prisoners where they are. Well, scratch that, I want what works. I care about reducing the crime rate and keeping prisons quite empty, not punishment. I don’t know what role forced prison labor plays there and would be willing to accept it, should it be beneficial. I just don’t know.

There isn’t such a big difference between forcing someone to work and taking away someone’s freedom, it’s really hard to justify why one can’t, for example, exchange one with the other. It’s both about taking away human rights.
Stop being obtuse.

Here is a picture of a Musa Basjoo banana plant growing in Sochi: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Musa_basjooSochi1.JPG

The Musa Basjoo banana plant is growing in Sochi. Sochi is in Russia. Therefore, bananas can grow in Russia.
I'm a very satisfied customer of Warby Parker.

A couple of things about their service / office that really stand out.

1. Completely paperless: Basically the place is rows and rows of people working on mac pros.

2. Fantastic customer service: If you don't like what they mail you, they send you up to 5 other models to try each one. You send back what you don't like.

3. Convenient sales process: They took a photo of my Rx with a mac and OCRed it on the spot.

4. A well manufactured product. I abuse my glasses heavily and have found Warby Parker's to survive drops, scratches, falling asleep with them on, etc.

5. Crazy price point: I'm not familiar with their supply chain, but for the quality I was shocked by the low price. I saw people going in and buying multiple pairs on the spot.

They may not be a software shop, but they're leveraging every inch of technology they can get to create a great product and pass the rather significant savings on to the consumer.
Am I missing something? Why can't they just produce a Micro-SD card that can run in card emulation mode? Wouldn't that allow a lot of people to use this without new phones?
How old are you? I'm tempted to chalk this up to cointegration between you losing friends (like many others) while growing older and Facebook's popularity increasing.

Its harder to make friends as you grow older, and you grow apart from friends over the years, so your net # of friends declines with time. Meanwhile, we're growing up while Facebook becomes more popular. Thus, it's easy to blame FB for a traditional phenomenon related to the passage of time in one's life.
There's nothing ambiguous about that case. Accepting pre-orders and "donations" is an enormous risk for a payment processor. The merchant isn't sending anything out in exchange for the payments. They could fail to complete or send the product. The risk continues to increase the more pre-orders come in. The merchant can't substantiate that they can fulfill the orders since they have no history of shipping that product in the past. If they were taking payments through a real merchant account (why aren't they? well, they'd have a real tough time getting underwriting to allow it), the bank's risk department probably would've frozen them or required establishment of a risk reserve account too.
Ask HN: What have been your experiences with .NET?
A bit of background: I'm taking part in a Canadian incubator program. My co-founders and I have been given the option of using half of our money to pay for development from the program's development partners at a good rate, or to take the money in cash and source our own development.

The development partners only have a background in .NET programming. We're worried about this because we may not still have access to this team after August, and the two members of our founding team with development experience don't know .NET. How common are strong .NET developers who thrive in small startup environments?

That said, there are some benefits: the developers we have access to have a ton of experience, we won't have to spend time sourcing external development, and they're charging us roughly at cost for their hours.

Our timeline is pretty strict: we need to have our product ready by August. But we also don't want to compromise our potential for future growth.

Any advice or experiences you can share would be incredibly helpful, as we need to make our decision in the next week.
Have you heard of https://getpantheon.com/ ?
Ask HN: business models - pro account to avoid (useful) ads?
Take the typical freemium business model:

- Free version supported by ads, with limited (but sufficient) perks

- Paid version for ~$5/month, no ads + various other perks specific to the site

This obviously works for a number of sites, like Pandora. But let's say that your site is similar to Google - your ads are based on searches and (presumably) would be useful. Do you still make the pro account ad-free, or does that signal that the ads aren't so useful after all? Maybe just make the ability to hide ads an option?
RSS feeds. Most journals now have one. Examples:

JMLR: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/jmlr.xml

IEEE TPAMI: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/rss/TOC34.XML

IEEE TASLP: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/rss/TOC10376.XML
If you are worried about that even with their privacy policy, you can have them just forward the mail to you physically without scanning. ECM doesn't scan the contents of your mail by default, only the outside of the envelope/package to OCR and let you identify who it is from. The level of privacy/trust you get is on par with the post office and your mail carrier's.
I timed 24 minutes of commercials in Boston.
There's a freaking graph. Are we really being this pedantic that we can't understand what he's saying?
Ruby FFI FTW
Huh? LinkedIn has absolutely no restrictions on who can be a member or who can be connected. They only data they curate is the global search index, but that can be replaced by anything else on the Internet, like email or XMPP.
The leadership at MS needs serious re-work if they want to maintain their position in the enterprise. Their cash cow is Windows OS and based on what we've seen with their push for HTML5 at conferences like MIX over proprietary hooks into their OS like WPF and Silverlight will just eventually decimate their hold on the money making enterprise world.

Apple's enterprise hold last quarter grew 66%. This should scare Microsoft.

Our company has now pretty much set their sights on developing in HTML5 for internal line of business apps which used to be heavily desktop Windows based applications. This will eventually lead to less reliance on Windows and Microsoft, which is a good thing for the company but a terrible blow for Microsoft.

Apple seems to get it as to how to grow their business and keep the competitor from cannibalizing it. Apple has been downplaying HTML5 support in Safari/Webkit and almost purposefuly leaving things broken. This is a smart move on Apple's part in my opinion.

I've been mostly a loyal MS supporter but with the way things are going I'm strongly considering moving over from Windows to coding Apple apps and learning Objective C despite how nice C# coding is.

There's still time and hope to see if they change things around and announce something good at PDC in September, otherwise say goodbye to stagnant Microsoft.
To be fair, PayPal does offer real merchant accounts underwritten by real banks. PayPal Website Payments Pro accounts are underwritten by one of these banks: JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, Wells Fargo and National Westminster Bank.

The point of my comment was that proexploit makes it sound like the 180 day hold follows from PayPal not being a regulated bank, where the reality is that regulated banks have the same 180 day hold.

I fear I may sound fishy standing up for PayPal considering its unpopularity (despite so many on HN using it without problems), but I don't like to see the perpetuation of untruths. The people that write these complaints must have never read a merchant account agreement. The list of banks that underwrite the Payments Pro accounts are on the PayPal website under the Legal Agreements link. I do read every contract I agree to.
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I'm thinking the figure probably errs more on the pessimistic side, though the author considers it optimistic. It doesn't take into account increased technology, the benefits of assisted suicide, or the availability of cheaper labor and materials in third-world areas.

But in any case, this is a handy number to start thinking about how realistic the goal of a post-death society really is. If everyone could have it, would everyone want it? And if so, what is the maximum we would collectively be willing to pay?
The Means of Production
That article is about Python 2's super, which is a different beast. Lessons were learnt in the design of Python 3's version.
I have ECM for the package pickups from street addresses specifically, as I cannot rely on anybody to make a delivery on time and without leaving it on the sidewalk (which makes the forwarding moot). Fantastic stuff, on top of their other services.

I would like to add though that you can pay extra for searchable PDFs and check deposits and more, which practically seals the deal for me. Much easier to pay a small fee than to deal with all that stuff, and their check deposit service seems to handle a lot more than most banks offer for their scan at home deposit service.
There was a piece posted here some months ago that made the claim that 3D movies would never work, because the human eye (or brain) has to work harder than normal to process the false perception of near and far objects which the eye has to focus on at one fixed distance (the screen surface).
If there are multiple start-ups being accepted at once into the incubator, and if the terms are identical then maybe you can pool resources to talk to a lawyer and amortize the cost.
What is the state of the art in digital asset preservation?
Websites, apps, networks, languages come and go...sometimes in months and years. How are these being preserved? What assets will survive for a century or millennium? We have the Rosetta Stone, but will the API directory survive?
Looking at the heatmap, "Pricing" and "Features" are your most clickable menu items. For some reason you completely ignored it and put "Pricing" all the way to the right, where 10% of the visitors can't even see it.

You don't need a "home" link in the menu, that's what the logo is for.

Your menu should look like this:

Pricing | Features | Plugins | Support | other crap nobody ever sees

Then your most important money-making link-button "Try FogBugs" is below the fold for at least 30% of your visitors.

I think you really need to look at this and understand what it means:

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

You might even want to display pricing right there on the main page.
Major Australian Banks cancel cards over potential security breach
the evil

What, exactly, does that refer to?
Popular CAPTCHA broken
15 Most Famous Ghost Pictures and history
Yes, it's standard in most phones sold in Japan. Charged to your monthly phone bill.
As a specialist, I have to say: This makes me very glad I'm not a primary care provider. The doctors of the future will be evaluated on bedside manner and interpersonal skills - not on diagnostic ability or knowledge, because they'll all have access to Watson. Which is scary because smooth talking idiots can get into medical school, but get rapidly weeded out in the real world. It scares me that stupidity can hide behind this computing beast. And there will be situations where Watson cannot help (emergencies) where a doctor and his smarts are all he has to go by.

If Watson makes a wrong diagnoses and a patient dies, who will be responsible? The doctor? IBM? All it would take is one or two incorrect diagnoses leading to large malpractice suits to really put the medical profession on edge about this. Granted, many incompetent practitioners exist out there making all kinds of dangerous decisions, but this would really stick out in the public eye.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_haven#North_America and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_La...
Your civics is weak... he would also need to buy the Judiciary and the Executive branches

In practice, owning the legislature would probably suffice. There are provisions for a Congressionally-declared state of martial law.

Confederate States of America

This last one is a good guide to what will happen if a state were to "revoke its consent to be governed."
Supernova Sonata - Music of the (Exploding) Spheres
That's a very helpful idea, I didn't think to discuss it with the others.
Why you should consider becoming an electrician
More reasons HTC is my favorite phone manufacturer right now. After a bike accident left my Nexus One screen broken, $100 and a 4-day turnaround got me back on my feet. Thrilled. Maybe they'll drop the Sense UI from the stock phones. One can dream.
Because PayPal is seeking to also sue people whose names they do not yet know:

6. eBay and PayPal (collectively “Plaintiffs”) are ignorant of the true names and capacities, whether individual, corporate or otherwise, of defendants named herein as Does 1 through 50 and Plaintiffs sue said defendants by their fictitious names. Plaintiffs will seek leave to amend this complaint to assert allegations against the Doe defendants when their true involvement in these matters and capacities are ascertained.

In other words, PayPal employees that PayPal alleges that the former employees recruited to Google.
nice post, what is the state of ocr these days? the last time i used it was back in 2000, and that experience kept me away from it for nearly 11 years! the accuracy was quite low, in the 80% range.

incredible that such a thing involves so many processes and different pieces of software. imagine a single solution that does all of this, money maker...
I wonder if it helps to submit when a large number of people are active at HN as opposed to say on a weekend. It seems to me that the sort-order algorithm is based on up-votes and time elapsed since submission. So if a submission is made during off hours, it does not get enough attention or votes, yet the time elapses the same way...
It's more of a meta incubator. You can buy my e-book: Lean Incubator - Get Incubators to Market Faster to Get Startups to Get Products to Market Faster - Local Mobile Social Cloud Edition
I could definitely see it not as a replacement for a physician, but as sort of a safeguard to check if the physician's decision regarding treatment for a particular set of symptoms matches up watson's previously learned data. Watson wouldn't preempt the physician, but rather raise an alarm if something looks out of the ordinary.
I like the old adage that say something to the effect of "the harder I work the luckier I am."
The first thing I thought is "what rhythm!". Steve, thanks so much for making the whole deal opensource - this is exactly the sort of design I've been gravitating towards. I especially love the main blog page and lack of pagination on anything - it feels like the first blog I've seen that actually gets it.
In the end, the power is going to be with the payors, who are plenty savvy themselves, not the pharma companies.

Drugs are a relatively small part (10-15%) of the overall cost of healthcare.
I grew up in Maricopa County (Peoria). I think Joe Arpaio had the right idea.
The USSR nationalized plenty of formerly-private land and natural resources, but it built its industrial capacity almost entirely from scratch. (At enormous human cost - which is the only way to uplift an agrarian backwater to modernity in decades instead of centuries.)

The factories which were sold as scrap metal to the West for pennies on the dollar were fully public property.
If these communications occurred from within Paypal's coporate network or using Paypal equipment they could have been gathered using employee spying systems that they might have in place.
PlayStation 4 is in development
JSON has a nice way of reinventing that wheel on their website. http://json.org/
The only API's I've used, that are being shut down, are the Translation and Image Search. I had a little app that looked up the original word and translated word then displayed images; that way I had a better reference to what that word meant(Rosetta Stone). It was just a toy, but I'm sad to see it go!
I was with you until "but to a first or even second approximation, you are not dealing with one of those problems, so ...". Perhaps there is a typo there and it should have been something like "but when to a first or even...."
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. From what I understand "index" is just a copy of the database of sites. There is little to no value in simply having that index. The index is near useless.

Yeah, the more I read your post, the more I don't think you understand the point of the idea. The idea would be that many people could contribute to indexing the web, faster, and sharing that in a decentralized fashion. With open access to that index, anyone is able to innovate on that data and build their own search engine.

Having fewer crawlers would be a good thing and would indeed decrease the number of hits to your website. More importantly, the work of those crawlers could be distributed and thus page updates could happen even faster.

Even if you're right, that some how the indices themselves can be tuned and can be search-engine specific, who cares? That doesn't preclude or prevent an open index from existing.

BTW, I didn't really downvote anyone, nor did I have a problem with your comment. I just didn't understand it, and it was hot on the tails of another indecipherable comment. I think I understand your point now, but I feel we're either talking about two different things or thinking about them in vastly different manners.
This is cool. When I was at IBM in Austin last week, one of the IBM-ers mentioned that one of the first areas they hoped to use Watson was primary care. Amazing. I think I'd rather go to Watson than most GP's.
Cool, great to see you're making use of EDB. Would love to hear more about how you're using, how the transition was, etc. mm@backtype.com.
Transfer your orkut photo albums to Facebook (html5 app)
"Even perfect speech recognition would only get you part of the way there, and we aren't likely to get that any time soon."

We're working on it, though.

http://www.mmodal.com

Most of the time, there is still a transcriptionist in the loop. Or the doctor has to make his own edits.
Until 7-11s pop up all over town and become known for being notoriously easy to walk in and back out of with their money.
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Laid Off or Lonely, You May Be Lucky
Does your bookshelf teach concepts or just tools?
"And until true Strong AI"

Watson seems like a significant step in that direction.
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http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A relative of mine was recently telling me that her company is considering going to a completely paperless office.

I told her that'd make going to the bathroom pretty nasty.
More details: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/industry/library/ind-watso...