skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I asked about this on Quora a while back and the general consensus was that such an acquisition was a bad idea. (Though I think it could be a great opportunity for Amazon to expand into brick and mortar shops at a discounted price.)

http://www.quora.com/Would-it-make-sense-for-Amazon-to-buy-B...
Android activation rate trends indicates that this will likely reverse.
"Handmade" and you're using stock icons on your own landing page?

Apart from that, I think it's a great idea.

1. Focus even more. ONLY do landing pages.

2. Make sure there are at least 4 examples we can see.

3. Set a fixed price.
Excerpt from actual US policy:
"When warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country. All states possess an inherent right to self-defense, and we recognize that certain hostile acts conducted through cyberspace could compel actions under the commitments we have with our military treaty partners. We reserve the right to use all necessary means—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic—as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law, in order to defend our Nation, our allies, our partners, and our interests. In so doing, we will exhaust all options before military force whenever we can; will carefully weigh the costs and risks of action against the costs of inaction; and will act in a way that reflects our values and strengthens our legitimacy, seeking broad international support whenever possible." (pp.18)

Ars Headline:
"US warns: hack us, and we might bomb you"

Submission title:
"Hack us, and we'll bomb you"
The very best algorithm
Absolutely. Any page in the process served without SSL introduces a vulnerability. None of that is explicitly within the scope of PCI.
List of products/services that show that crusading anti-piracy media publishing companies are full of it: Netflix, Steam, Hulu, O'Reilly Media, that one anime streaming service that was covered previously by Ars Technica... who else?
There is a strong perception (whether accurate or not--and I honestly don't know the answer) that it's the same old story with Microsoft: if you go the .NET route, you've gotta buy into the entire Microsoft ecosystem. It's not just .NET that you're choosing; you're also choosing Windows servers, IIS, Visual Studio, etc.

If that perception is accurate, it's entirely reasonable to say, "Despite liking a lot of what .NET has to offer, we don't want to buy into one specific company's ecosystem that deeply."

If that perception is inaccurate, then there should be some serious marketing around changing that perception (and not just from MS--but more like this type of grass-roots post).
At least since Jobs has been back. There was some fairly ill-conceived if not exactly malevolently-designed stuff coming out of Cupertino during the interregnum.

A recent linked piece nailed Apple's strengths and weaknesses: If Steve uses it, it generally rocks. If it doesn't, it could very well blow e.g. Ping.
And now you're telling me we'll go to war if someone takes out the internet?

Interesting. I never thought about someone "taking out" the internet. An internet kill switch would be useful to a government wanting to start a war. Simply kill the internet, then blame it on the country of your choice.
iOS had a pretty big headstart. Read Scoble's recent post on some hot Android apps [1]. They're just now beginning to do high quality apps first on Android. Momentum has started to shift. It won't happen instantly, but it does appear to be happening.

[1]http://scobleizer.com/2011/05/09/what-i-learned-by-interview...

The money quote:

"But the most interesting set of companies is being built around smartphones and here, for the first time, Apple’s iOS doesn’t have the coolest apps. For instance, Innobell lets you add social apps to a phone call. Only on Android today. TekTrak gives you really great security. But mostly on Android today. And WalkBase lets you track your phone’s movement through wifi and assisted GPS patterns in the room. Again, only on Android because Apple and Microsoft don’t let WalkBase talk to the radios the way Android does."
> 10% growth every year for a quarter of a century? I regard that as very impressive.

They are catching up to status quo. Mostly because they squandered the previous decades scientifically hunting down sparrows and enemies of the state.
In fairness, taking out the internet may represent far greater damage than sinking a warship. A nationwide disruption could cause billions in economic damage, and more targeted attacks on specific infrastructure like dams, water treatment, etc. have the potential to kill as well.

Hell, shutting off Google for a few days would probably kill more than 46 people if medical residents aren't able to look stuff up as quickly as they can now.
My beautiful wife and I were walking past Regents Park (in central London) just before Christmas last year, admiring the houses and wondering aloud what an obscene amount of money it would cost to live or base your office out of any of them. Wonga had two.

It was the first we'd heard of them (having been in London only a month or so), but they got a lot of publicity on the Tube in the lead up to New Year's Eve (where they sponsored free public transport for the evening). But even discussions of that promotion were all tinged with 'how could Transport for London / the Mayor's office associate themselves with a company like this?'.

"Is there any positivity in that brand?"

None that I've seen. And when they're charging interest rates like they do to afford offices like they do, I doubt any will be forthcoming in the near future.
I'm using rails for my company but ruby is definitely not my preferred language. Blocks/Procs/Lambdas (why are there three almost identical constructs?) definitely don't compare to function application / currying. I'd much rather write in F# but I'm worried about all the nice to haves that come with the rails stack, like capistrano or the plugins to serve/upload your assets to S3. (e.g. ASP.NET has HAML but not sass)

I definitely foresee at some point switching to ASP.NET in a similar manner as twitter is moving over to the JVM / Scala, but rails still has a lot of legs in it for us.
Mono lets you run some .NET code on Linux/Mac OS X. Some of my favourite pieces of Microsoft technology are missing or too broken to use - for example WPF is an excellent tool for building desktop applications but it doesn't work on Mono, F# sort of works until you try doing recursion with abstract data types.
International Strategy for Cyberspace
A lot of cash rich multi-national companies have this foreign cash "problem." They earn it overseas and can't bring it back without paying U.S. tax on it, so they leave it there. On page 31 of Google's 10-Q it says that $17 billion of its $37 billion cash hoard at March 31, 2011 was held outside the U.S. and was unlikely to be repatriated to the U.S. for tax reasons. Of course that still leaves them with $20 billion in the U.S., plus whatever they've earned in the U.S. since March 31, 2011, but I guess borrowing an extra $3 billion at ultra-low US Treasury-like rates is an historically cheap way to top up the tank.
Submission title: "Hack us, and we'll bomb you"

There wasn't an intention to add editorial spin the headline, but it seems my sloppy transcription betrays my feelings on reading it.
plentyoffish.com the worlds largest dating site is based on M$ tech
Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup.

We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues seem to be associated with ASP.Net and claiming to be a web developer without understanding how the web actually works. Many of them are so into just using the tools that they never bother to learn Javascript and instead insist on doing Postbacks for everything.

I feel that we're starting to see a new side of Microsoft when it comes to the web and startups.

Things like ASP.Net MVC, Azure and BizSpark give me hope.
Two UTDallas Grads Seek to Cut Emergency Treatment Time
Yes, seriously. In what sense are JVMs "specialized for long-running applications"? If you mean they start slowly, that's hardly the case even if you start from scratch:

> time java HelloWorld
Hello, World!
java HelloWorld 0.28s user 0.06s system 135% cpu 0.248 total

In any case, the JVM is just an example (although I still argue it can serve this purpose well). My main point is that the "correct" model for the web is a bytecode-running VM inside every browser that lets you do everything javascript does through APIs.
I've always wished that, instead of a "browser language", browsers exposed a LOW LEVEL bytecode environment (which browsers are then free to interpret, JIT compile or on-the-fly AOT compile at page load time). It should be reasonably low level, in that it should provide an abstraction from the hardware, but still allow for very efficient execution of lower level code. Then high level languages and frameworks could be layered on top. This way, browser languages would be 1) more efficient if they need to be and 2) more diverse.

Its a pity that javascript is so in-grained in client-side web now, as its really a terrible bytecode... Hell, failing the above, I would have liked to see Lua as the default client-side language, rather than Javascript (for reasons I will mention shortly), but of course that will never happen now that Javascript has been the default for fifteen years.

The reasons I would like Lua as the default language, besides the fact that LuaJIT is very fast (certainly for number crunching code, especially if you use the FFI to operate on low level structs (I mean, without calling into C) - the FFI is also one of, if not the, simplest FFI I've seen in any language[1]), it is, at least under my impression, a much more consistent language, while being just as flexible, easy to learn and dynamic. The thing I dislike most about Javascript is that it has lots of little gotchas and inconsistencies. Having said that, though, perhaps Lua does too and I just haven't used it enough yet to get bitten by them. Then again, it didn't take long for this to happen in Javascript, so Lua does at least seem to be a little friendlier.

[1] Actually, I think Factor's FFI is similarly simple, if my memory serves me correctly
Just got an Android tablet at Google I/O, starting with development ASAP. Developing for Android 3.0 is impossible without hardware, the emulator is really really slow.

There will be more tablet apps when there's more hardware choice and availability.
I realize you are talking about Android phone apps, but maybe what Android tablet apps need is a few devs bragging about the money they are making to attract more tablet app developers. Having less than 100 apps (last figure I heard) doesn't help to sell more tablets.
Calculator implemented in DNS resolver
> (e.g. ASP.NET has HAML but not sass)

I fixed that this past weekend :)

http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2011/05/16/announcing-sa...
Mentioning a comment he made somewhere else to discredit him is clearly an ad hominem, even if your attack on Chomsky wasn't.

Chomsky is wrong on a lot of things. That in no way makes him wrong about everything.
Agreed. Distribution is the primary concern of most software vendors (big or small), so mobile developers are going to target Android, iPhone, and in some cases BlackBerry. Microsoft's mobile market share today resembles Apple's desktop market share back in the 1990s.
As a student at San Francisco's top design school, critiques has become a huge part of school. Every day involves at least one class critique, and it's not uncommon for student to solicit extra critiques from their peers and teachers. A big part of our grade is based on how we do during formal critiques, how we integrate feedback, and the quality of the feedback we give others.

After two years of this, I have become much more resilient when it comes to getting feedback. You can tell me anything, I won't take it personally. However, the feedback I give has become harsher, and outside of the school context (especially at work—I'm a developer at a startup) I sometimes fear I may be putting people off by being so honest. I do my best to be as constructive as possible, though.
I don't know if it will ultimately be a huge success story but I think 'Cordy' http://www.cordythegame.com/ is fantastic and is Android only. We bought the full version within a few minutes of playing the trial version.
It's not accurate, for what it's worth.

I'm working on a startup with .NET, and while I do use some parts of the MS Ecosystem (Visual Studio, C#, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, IIS) I use plenty of tools that aren't from Microsoft (NUnit, JQuery, Github, ReSharper, TeamCity, DotTrace, DotCover, Selenium).

Any good technologist mixes and matches the things that work best for their solution, right?
And for some reason, many high-profile, that is, thwarted or captured, terrorists are engineers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.h...
Does bizspark include a discount for Azure?
I agree, and the shop where I'm employed is the same--we do lots of .NET development, but other products are built on other technologies.

As far as bad devs go, don't they exist for most platforms? I mean, is every Ruby programmer a genius?
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http://www.almstba.com/vb/showthread.php?t=20355
http://www.almstba.com/vb/showthread.php?t=20355
> It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM.

What makes you feel that .NET is so superior to the JVM? The JVM itself seems like a solid, performant VM platform, and there is a broad selection of languages in Scala, Groovy, Clojure, JRuby, Jython and friends.

Disclaimer: I'm platform agnostic and don't currently develop on the JVM or the .NET CLR, so I have no horse in this race. I'm genuinely curious.
Agreed. And for those who pull the Java applet as the perfect counter-example, they need to ask themselves: does it take this long to start an Android app?
Of course not! Because you can use the JVM in many different ways to eliminate the load time.
In a way, one could imagine Android has a better example of how to mix OS/Web/Multi-Architecture(CPU)
Great guide, thanks.

One issue I've run into trying to push from my windows 7 machine to my instance is a "Permission denied(publickey)" error, which I assume is due to a missing SSH key in git for my ec2 instance? Does anyone know how to tell the ec2 alias to use my instance private key when connecting?
For what it's worth, I was recently involved as a judge [1] for a competition the Telegraph ran searching for "Britain's Fittest Director" [2]

At no point did I or any of my team get any indication of pressure, preference or favour from the Telegraph. I was a few steps removed from them, but the impression I got was that they had involved a group of expert judges and were planning to back their judgement, and that that's what they did.

Perhaps this competition wasn't as high profile, or the finalists [3] not as controversial. I obviously can't speak about the Startup100 awards or the Telegraph in general, only share that my experience was different.

[1] My judging was limited to one of the intermediate rounds. They used a pool of similarly trained business experts from Shirlaws to meet with and assess the business fitness of the top contenders. I ran several interviews, and gave my score and some general feedback to the judging coordinator.

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/8308565/Comp...

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/8459412/Brit...
Free 1,500 hours of the Small Instance
Our 7 year old likes reading Roald Dahl, Dr. Doolittle, The Great Brain, and Encyclopedia Brown (for fiction), and Macaulay books (The Way Things Work, Built to Last), Usborne History books (The World Wars, The Ancient Greeks), and The Magic School Bus/Ms. Frizzle's Adventures (nonfiction).
Choosing what criticism to ignore, too, is also a huge skill. Every time someone suggests something, I will take it into consideration. I figure out why they said what they did, and try to get to the core reason. Then I can make an assessment as to whether to implement their suggestion, or whether another solution addresses the core problem.
> You check the ones that you expect.

You expect buffer overflows? Out-of-bounds arguments? These are the things the GP is referring to, I figure.
It will be a closed zone for decades.

I believe you have misinterpreted the data. The highest measured readings were 91 uSv/hr. That is equivalent to 9.1 mRem/hr (1 mRem = 10 uSv). The lowest dose in the 'red' zone is 19 uSv/hr or 1.9mRem. Public safety is considered to be 'at risk' if you are exposed to > 1000 mRem over 4 days. You can't reach that level in places where they read 91 uSV/hr (best you can do is 9.1244 or 873.6 mRem/4 days. And where its only 1.9mRem you only get 182 mRem/4 days.

The bottom line is that it is safe to go anywhere in the current 80km radius circle, if you are the government and want to minimize radiological hazard you will go through the area that shows the highest activity and identify and clean up any hot spots.

That information btw is in the DoE's contribution to this report.

The second part you missed is that Cs-134 will be down to noise in less than a decade due to decay which will reduce overall dosage. (I've noticed that no one has published the ratio)

So is there contamination from the plant in Japan? Yes.

Does is pose a public health risk? For the most part no.

Will any part of the area be 'off limits' this time next year? Probably not.

Will monitoring continue and specific areas be targeted for decontamination? Almost certainly.
I don't know that this actually makes any sense.

Are we still doing os checks and serving different pages based on the client (I'm not).

With modern browsers on smartphones, I think this is mostly not-necessary for the average top 200 site which likely still targest the lowest common-denominator browsers. Mobile browsers are over-powered and very capable to display these sites.

It's the smaller early adopter sites that are pushing the envelope and may need to do some sniffing.
You rock! You've tempted me to start using F# / ASP.NET MVC again.
Why is it that whenever I play with a temporary Linux install, I always end up typing "rm -rf /"?
Mathematics proves things about an infinite class of objects all the time, like, say, the input/output behavior of your program. One technique to do this is induction.
My startup uses .Net which I chose for the basic reason that I know it very well and I didn't have time to go learn something else while I was trying to get work done. Any server I add is in response to more paying customers so the cost doesn't matter at all. It cuts into the margin a little but I only add new servers when we add a lot of new business. The initial cost of VS.Net was annoying but it wasn't bad and I was able to run off of SQL Server 2008 Express for a very long time.
The desktop has several limitations. First, you have to code separately for each platform because there's not even a common runtime, let alone API. Second, installation and updates are not seamless. Third, it is less secure since native code can have many long-lasting side effects, even without security exploits.

Web apps more or less solve all these problems (code can't be completely browser-agnostic, but it's close). Why not add also the benefits of desktop apps?
Funding events are usually announced publicly, while revenue isn't. Revenue is also hard to compare between product, service, and advertising-supported companies.
Google Fiber Expands to Kansas City, MO
No one is saying we'll go to war if a hack happens. The policy makes clear to potential adversaries that these types of attacks would be considered an act of war by the US and make clear that there could be a military response.

Its a bit like in the Cold War when the US said it would respond to a nuclear attack in kind. Making clear how you intend to respond can be a deterrent.
Show HN: App to inspire App Ideas
Depends if the torpedo strikes a yacht containing any of the following: the RIAA, MPAA or Disney.

Oh, you thought that "states" meant government bodies?
Funny: Facebook refused my ad campaign for my app "The Wall Machine". guess why?
Typed array specification for JS
The problem is Microsoft. .Net would be a perfect thing if it wasn't fully owned my MS, in which case it probably won't be far as perfect.

However, you have to use MS OS, MS development tools, MS deployment - and it's pretty painful especially because you can't use shiny macbooks any longer :)
If you try to replace any element of that chain, you're on your own entirely.

On other hand, MS ecosystem is smaller than non-MS. For example, what does it have for non-relational storages?
Stack Overflow started from pure-MS infrastructure and it's 50/50% already - redis, linux frontend proxies.
Given the recent trend of founders partially cashing out during larger rounds, there's a chance that the funding event alone could guarantee a million dollars (or something relatively close).
I have a lot of experience using mono on mobile platforms, including webos, ios, and android. We also port to mac/windows and a number of other ARM-based linux platforms.

If you go with mono, the most striking thing you will notice is increased startup time. On iOS with full AOT this effect is less pronounced, but on webos/android even tiny mono apps have 1-3 seconds of black screen at startup since there's a lot of JIT/metadata work to be done.

On darwin platforms, we've found that mono's garbage collector pauses unmanaged threads at inconvenient times and were forced to move audio playback into a separate process to prevent glitches. This only mattered with large numbers of live objects (>500k), but it did come into play. The new SGen collector may fix this, but it still (as of 2.10.2) crashes too often to be used.

Memory usage is noticeably higher than for comparable objective-c apps, but is not the end of the world.

Once your app is up and running, the mono runtime is plenty fast enough for most things. We even do some light DSP in C# on these platforms. It's better than you would think.

On a related note, just because you're using C#/.net doesn't mean that you can code like you're in the desktop/server world. You still need to focus on doing as little work possible per screen displayed to get the snappiest possible user experience.
Not an old Russian proverb, Voltaire:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

More typically quoted as "perfect is the enemy of good"

One of my favorite sayings... also see Lagom for a similar philosophy in Sweden.
>Essentially, the cost differences have become moot.

What? Have you seen these prices?
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx

That's just SQL Server for god's sake.
That biz sparks program is like a drug dealer giving free samples... yeh u get a free copy of visual studio, but then you got to pay if you exceed any of these requirements...

http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

Privately held?
Less than three years old?
Making less than US $1M annually?
As do people who want to "abolish patents".

While the system might need some revisions, it's certainly not as broken as a lot of abolitionists are depicting. Some things are working fine, and innovation is happening at a very fast pace in the US.

Software patents can be abused but they can also be a force that encourages people to actually innovate instead of just copying what's already out there (which is pretty much all we are seeing from countries that don't have software patent laws).