skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does this strike anyone else as little more than a shallow skin for Windows 7? HTML5 and javascript? How is this different than my browser? Apps in Windows 8 . . . kind of like apps in Chrome?
> Western culture, abstract thought and artistic development: nothing important has developed since 1919; we’re still reeling from the shock.

Information theory? Software? Modern quantum mechanics?

Yeah, I know there's been no important stuff except that important stuff.
Wondershare Video Converter für Mac – Mac Video Converter
Wondershare Video Converter für Mac ist ein professioneller Mac Video Converter, der Videos in alle gängigen Formate umwandelt. Jetzt hier downloaden!
Not sure about difference, they do have a similarity though - both are illegal & unethical.
Facebook to Android receiving a Major Upgrade
Facebook Android update bring several new features including, some of those released, the like for the comments, support pages, upload videos and bugs fix.
Nearly three dozen Android apps infected with malware
5 Technologies That Will Shape the Web
Based on what business model?

What demand for what service exists for bitcoin?

The "e-wallet" / PayPal model is based on transaction fees, which the bitcoin protocol seeks to eliminate. There is no need for a middle-man?
I really want to work on this. I bought some domains regarding it. I can work on something quick over a couple hours and have something going.
> After enough time I think you will be able to type on a touch screen without looking...I think a spit screen keyboard is a win, overall.

Thanks for the good laugh :)
inside sales. Google, facebook, groupon etc all have telesales organizations even though each transaction is small. growing an inside sales team is hard. You most likely will have to hire a manager and could blow your whole cash reserve on a dud. Alternately you could go with an outsourced sales company.
jason, I need the same thing at our company. I am going to spike a quick prototype tonight and I was wondering if I could bounce some things off of you so it would have value in your eyes?
They can't blame a sales team for this. It was their own responsibility to monitor sales team's activity.
The best part of the article: "The music industry has seen its domestic revenue plunge by more than half in 10 years, from $15 billion to $7 billion..."
We have been working on several JavaScript-related tools that build on top of RubyGems. The most recent versions of RubyGems issued what were, IMO, user hostile deprecation warnings, which confused and alarmed our end users. We were not aware of these changes ahead of time, and it didn't seem to be of much concern to the RubyGems maintainers.

For critical infrastructure like package management, these kind of changes can be difficult to deal with. We're switching all of our projects to SlimGems, and are going to be contributing code for improving its use as a library for other software to build on.
The canonical example, in fact. They've gone through something like 10 different APIs/frameworks in the last decade, IIRC.
My concern is did MS just Osborne itself? I was just thinking my wife's current laptop is 3 years old -- maybe time for a new one. Now I'm thinking I'm waiting until next year and getting a Win8 touch laptop (ideally a really slick convertible).
Is Google app engine a good solution for an ecommerce app?
Hi,

I have a prototype for a ecommerce application (inventory listing and order management features) that is designed using php/mysql/Apache stack and looking to offer it as a production worthy solution to business.

Would google app engine (python based) be a good solution? Any pitfalls I need to watch out for? Is there integration with payment solutions (Paypal etc.).

Context: I am a business analyst who has picked up programming skills on the fly and comfortable picking up a new languague..but looking to understand design implications of going with google app engine python stack.

Thanks in advance.
How recently? Google Docs has gotten faster at syncing in the last year or so.
Just like Cocoa is Mac OS X only. It's for developing native apps. The point is that MS is using open specifications as the centerpiece of their new platform.
JavaDoc can be good, there's nothing to stop you including short usage examples for a class. Not that it's that common...
It reminds me of Dashboard on Mac OS X, which is composed of HTML and CSS widgets.
Netflix uses Silverlight because it supports DRM.
I applaud PG for showing incredible constraint on this issue, on this board. It's like a father standing firm alongside his guilty son, while tomatoes are being thrown on them, while the cowardly son keeps mumbling lies 'It wasn't me, my friends did it. I just watched', while the father just stands there and takes it.
I think I'm a forward thinking fellow but I don't see developer tools moving away from traditional keyboard (and usually mouse) environment for a long time. This seems like a slimmed down Windows Media Center layer powered by HTML/JS just like Windows Sidebar gadgets. It'll be great for tablets and touchscreen PCs but I don't see it being too beneficial to business users.
I'm mildly annoyed when I see parts of a portmanteau capitalized. It's wormhole, not worm hole, so the CamelCase would be Wormhole, not WormHole.

A really neat idea, though!
:) I swear I went over the text twice to make sure it didn't have any embarrassing typo that disproved my point. Oh well. In my defense I make similar mistakes on a normal physical keyboard as well.
When I drag the red rectangle around in the left container, bits of it sometimes get "stuck" in the right container. I'm doing this in Chrome 11.0.696.71 on Ubuntu 10.04, if that helps.
I started watching the first video, and it said "Check out the remake". "Okay," I say, "if it's better, why isn't it on the main site? If it's not better...why is it so prominent?" And then it turned out that both videos were, in a word, awful. You lost me after the first 100 seconds or so of each one. I don't know if they ever advertised your website--I didn't get that far. PS: The one on the main site has misspellings in the lyrics.

I also looked at the main description:

>Let your candidates code in their own IDE where they
>feel comfortable and check the results in Google Docs.

"Ah," I think, "he's about to pull some kind of voodoo so that I can show my interviewer what I can do with Vim and SLIME." Then I actually investigated, and found out that by "their own IDE" you mean a "common IDE", and by "common IDE" you actually were referring to only two IDEs, neither of which I have used or want to use.

The web version is actually cool, and I'll probably use it with my friends (I actually just finished typing some code into Facebook to help a friend out--it would've been great to use this website instead). But I had my hopes built up about my "own IDE", so using the web interface turned out to be disappointing.

So my humble suggestions:

1) Trash both videos.

2) Change some wording to make it clear that most people will use a web interface that niftily allows real-time editing by two people.

3) Since your product is so cool, mention that if the customer uses Eclipse or IDEA, there's a plugin so he can use his own IDE!
Whiteboard ftw!
No, no, no.

The Metro UI is great. The tiles are smart, the apps are beautiful, the solution to multitasking is promising, but this whole new approach cannot coexist with a Windows desktop. I almost fell out of my seat when the demonstrator nonchalantly switched back to the Windows 7-style desktop, complete with start menu, taskbar, and maximized MS Office.

This the old curse of Windows backward-compatibility in a new form – not in system-level cruft this time, but in incompatible UIs from completely different worlds. You can't put a new tablet UI and a traditional desktop UI next to each other on the same device and expect users to use them together.

It's as if Microsoft is attempting its own "Back to the Mac," only they never actually left. Apple got it right, starting fresh with a new form factor and adapting appropriate elements of it to the desktop. Microsoft is also starting fresh with a new form factor, but then trying to shoehorn the whole thing onto the desktop.

Of course, this is just a preview. I'm sure things will change a lot between now and the next preview, let alone the final release. But this isn't starting off on the right foot.
The way the link between companies and spammers usually works is that the spammer is contracted at arms length as an 'affiliate' and is paid per lead. The company will try to be willfully ignorant of the tactics being used so they can claim that they just have an affiliate program and they don't know how the traffic is generated.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not saying that this is what Airbnb did. In fact the original post said the emails had clean urls without referral IDs. To me that suggests a sloppy internal campaign with no metrics.
One of the guides in a documentary on it said that if Everest was at sea level, you would take your kids to summit it. But the altitude makes it a completely different animal. I wonder what the statistics are on frostbite and amputated body parts (fingers, toes). All of the documentaries I've watched seem to include a pretty high rate of some kind of frostbite in many of the climbers.
For books i'd suggest Men of Mathematics that has inspired countless people to math careers or Terence Tao's Solving Mathematical Problems, which is excellent.

Now, if money's no object, i.e. you're willing to spend around $200, the gomboc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gömböc) is a wonderful object to buy, you can buy it at the gomboc-shop.com
Google vs. Facebook: Where would you rather go for lunch?
Is the paperwork involved laborious? I ask this because I think it would be interesting to streamline the process and create a marketplace where conceivably tens or hundreds or more people could 'own' a copyright and/or trademark, grant licenses and divvy the profits among themselves whenever the license is evoked
> (c) Copyright John M. Hope 2011. Released under the Don't be a Dick (DD) license.
It wasn't a symmetric situation though. The Germans generally held better ground because they were the ones who initially made the decision to entrench after First Marne. They chose the best defensive positions they could find, and the French and British had to make do (although I guess there would have been exceptions, such as the Verdun sector). Politically, the French and British couldn't just sit there and do nothing or sue for peace because they had a vast enemy army encamped on their territory -- what terms do you think the Germans would have imposed when they were clearly at the advantage? Under these circumstances they had to launch offensives, and given that they were at war and in stalemate, this was not a mad decision although it seems like it to us a hundred years on. The real madness was in letting the war happen in the first place, and the real tragedy was the criminally slow pace at which the general staff on both sides learned the errors of their pre-war doctrines.
For what it's worth, the Dominion online application form is really really bad.
Similarity and number are both explained by copy-pasting a pre-written message, which is not considered automation.
Yes, many plans to do charity work are half-baked. But I'm actually pretty pleased with this story since they're publishing their failures rather than sweeping it under the rug.

Market incentives aren't really there to reward charities for being really effective; most charities raise money by telling a good story. Few people dig deeper because digging deeper is hard.

As far as I know, http://givewell.org/ is the best thing out there when it comes to evaluating charities. Also, I highly recommend reading Poor Economics, a book that just came out that describes some more solid research using randomized trials.
It sounds like if the industry isn't enforcing itself and operating out in the open, no one really cares. Also once these companies get their hands on you they make you sign contracts so that you can only exclusively list through them. Its a screwed up industry full of commission based workers.
The main problem I have with this is the same problem I have with the horrible Xbox dashboard - The left to right sliding tiles hurt my eyes like crazy. It's like trying to look out a side car window as you are travelling along and your eyes don't know what to focus on. At least the old Xbox dashboard tiles lined up behind each other so your eyes were always in the middle of the screen, but with this, ugh my eyes hurt just watching the demo.
Definitely. When we win, we get to steal one of your engineers. Our choice.
The Ruby/Rails way: When the drama created by oversized egos inevitably comes to a head, fork/replace the project and badmouth the other guys.

Allow me to rewrite your statement to be ruby-drama-free:

We have been working on several JavaScript-related tools that build on top of RubyGems. As the most recent versions of RubyGems have begun deprecating standard APIs that we and many other projects rely on, we have decided to fork the project, with the intention of maintaining an alternative to RubyGems that maintains ongoing compatibility with the existing API.

<optional: insert rational for forking / discussion of how you would prefer to merge and not use the nuclear option of forking someone's project here>
yeah, any company caught doing something like this would likely respond pretty much just like this, intentional or not.

rogue contractors or unauthorized employees, they were acting without the knowledge/consent of higher ups, they've since been fired or contracts terminated, etc..
Your description presumes too much that the company intends the result. It is true that there are some willfully ignorant companies. However companies that try to have good affiliate programs often find those programs difficult to police.

Until you have specific evidence otherwise in any particular case, it is best not to be too fast to ascribe to malice. (Of course that benefit of the doubt is exactly what unethical companies are hoping to take advantage of.)
Technically, Apple showed off Lion last year and is going to release it this year.

Microsoft is showing off Windows 8 this year and is going to release it next year.

Nonetheless, this near-overlap happened around the time of Win 7 and Snow Leopard too (both released late summer 2009).
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timoth...)
Even if there were such a book, you'd have to deal with other people's code that used the "Bad Parts" of Scala. I dread deciphering clever Scala one-liners.
In Boston, it is absurd for Rails developers also.

It doesn't help call volume-wise that "Quantronix" seems to be outsourcing calls to india and calling about positions in Texas regardless of my stated Boston-only preference.
I'm all for projects like SlimGems. You can be a cowboy in your app, you can be a cowboy in your framework, you can even be a cowboy in your language, to some extent. But package management should be as absolutely rock-solid and considerate as possible. RubyGems has been anything but. Patch versions introducing breaking changes, outwardly hostile deprecation warnings, and some fairly hostile developers. There needs to be more attention paid to Semantic Versioning (http://semver.org) and less breaking.
Is there a good argument against Oracle releasing ZFS under the GPL (so that it could be integrated into the Linux kernel)?
New Rails PaaS coming. Rails Ready
I can't decide if I'm happy or not that non-coding skills can leave such an impression.

I'm still at my first job (I'm only a HS senior), and for the interview I was asked to bring in some code. I brought my laptop, whose splash screen proudly displayed "Crunchbang Linux". I believe this was the moment that gave the most "points" in their eyes. Then I opened up my code, did some basic-but-impressive-looking flying around with Vim (it's not like there was actual editing involved), popped over to a terminal to `cd' around and then run it, and left a very good impression.

And my PM has a habit of asking me for help with bash. I have a rudimentary-at-best knowledge of it, but he's happy when I kludge together something with pipes and grep and sometimes "after that command, vim will open. You should then press the following to find and replace the text as desired." I'll then include as a footnote, "There's a much better way to do this as a one-liner with sed and awk...I just don't know how."

So of {beautiful code, working product, knowledge of tools} they only value two...and I'm just surprised it's the last two, not the first two. I guess I can't complain though.
Ask HN: Any word on the status of current late YC applications?
The Diaspora Project – First Year In Graphs
Microsoft doesn't sell computers, they sell software. To them, whenever it comes out, it's gonna sell no matter what.
Pretty sure they're about to actually start the 3 month thingy.
Angry Birds walkthrough
Angry Birds: The best Angry Birds collection for Girls and Kids and more!
I've had much better luck with the 'Hiring Freelancers?' threads here than with any job board or recruiter service. For one thing it seems like people actually read posts rather than just looking for keywords.
One has a billion dollar valuation and was YC funded...
Seems like the guy has his mac back.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/police-nab-lapt...
Also, the title of this post should read "jQuery," not "JQuery."
It is inevitable. No government can hire thousands of employees who can evaluate high levels of novelty or cleverness. People who can do so make more money and have more fun in the private sector.
You have completely missed the point. Because the network can observe transactions, using a Bitcoin account as a ballot box, and Bitcoins as the votes, is a transparent, verified mechanism for determining the community's aggregate will.

This approach negates the incentive to create sham clients under a one-client-one-vote system; it has the same benefit over IP-based voting systems, or what have you. Voting with Bitcoins means that that every participant in the economy has a voting power equal to his account balance (if the Bitcoins are returned after voting) or the number of Bitcoins he both has and is willing to give up to affect the vote's outcome (if they are not returned). So those who are more invested in the Bitcoin economy would have more (or potentially more) power to determine the rules of the economy.
People have been predicting the demise of Windows for DECADES and it's still around 90% market share so excuse me if I don't hold my breath.
The irony is palpable.

Relax, seriously. Try to give people the benefit of the doubt instead of just projecting whatever you want onto them. When you read what someone has written on the Internet, sometimes you will misunderstand them...and you need to understand and appreciate that.

BTW, the job thing was a joke about how we're all asking for jobs on HN now. I would think the lol-cat would be an obvious clue that it was intended in jest.

For the record, I am more or less always available for work beause I'm a freelancer.
I think they intend to eat it while it is still breathing.
Hey, I'd be fine too if someone was badmouthing my company which just took $100 million in investment :-)

Comes with the territory, I assume.
I don't know if I'd say he switched back. It looked more like the win7 UI was contained in it's own tile, and only came about because he ran a non-win8 app (Excel). Pretty smart way to maintain backwards compatibility.

One thing that did jump out at me was that it seemed to be best suited for a tablet and NOT a desktop computer. Hopefully MS keeps building on it and the new desktop doesn't turn out to be Bob 2.0 :)
Not really. Ours is founded by an American who has lived here for 11 years and, having previously founded and sold companies in France and California. It's sort of an American company in Vietnam, more so than a Vietnamese startup :)
Startup ideas
Good catch. Also I just realized that I was wrong in calling wormhole a portmanteau. It's actually a compound word.
There is one part of this explanation that seems weird to me.

If you read through http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do... and look at the links delivered, they don't have any sort of affiliate IDs. Which means that Airbnb had no way to tie this traffic to that advertising campaign, and had no tracking.

It is possible that they legitimately were willing to pay a third party contractor something based on all of their traffic, no questions asked (I've seen that kind of deal with SEO companies before), but it seems odd.
exactly. if you want to outperform the mean you're chasing alpha.
Yeah, I think I read somewhere here that the first dinner was this week or something...
In which case it's even worse. HTML5+JS is great, but aggravating enough that I'd still spring for a native API if I had the choice.
Just a small distinction: semantic versioning does nothing to prevent you from breaking, it just take the high road by calling it a different version number.

My big issue with semantic versioning, which I endorse on the whole, is that it says it's okay to change public interfaces between major versions. That's fine if your environment allows you to activate two different versions of a library, but most don't. In this case, it means even if RubyGems was called 2.0, you'd have the same technical problems if you have libs with dependencies on RubyGems 1.x and other libs with dependencies on RubyGems 2.x. Modules really should be used to namespace interfaces across major versions.
What demand is there for financial services in general? A whole new financial sector can (and will) be created, whether regulated or not. It's the wild west.
Holy SHIT. It blows me away that this came out of MS.
Well, these threads could've suffered mysterious deaths by now, but instead the other one has like 580 points :)
RubyGems 1.8.5 actually breaks Rails 2.3.11. Just to be really clear there: the package manager breaks the 4 month old release of the most important framework for that language, on a branch that until rather recently was still the preferred production stack (and is still used by a bazillion websites).

I was flabbergasted. Really? Nobody thought to check to make sure the package manager release doesn't break Rails 2 completely? I'm glad to see Loren and crew step up.
I'm curious in what way you find it irritating?

I realize a lot of people have taken this as an attempt to tear down Loren or something, but that's just not the case.

I took time out of my day to go through this guy's site and offer some helpful advice. I didn't just run his page through ySlow or something, I actually went through to see what he was doing and how he could improve it.

I did it in a respectful way, and made a point of complimenting him because I think he did a nice job, and I wanted to make clear I wasn't tearing that down.

If you knew me, you'd know I spend a lot of time in the web development community in IRC and various message boards helping people improve what they are doing, and getting help myself occasionally when I'm stuck on a contract.

It didn't occur to me that so many people would just assume bad faith, personally I try to give people the befit of the doubt...and I never assume that I know exactly what they are saying because text is such a difficult medium to convey these things. In retrospect I could have really hammered in that point, but hindsight is 20/20, and I suspect there still would have been a bunch of people bristling.

This tendency to project things on to other people and then get all offended about what you think they are saying is my biggest issue with some geeks.
AMD announces Z series chips, APUs targeted at Windows Tablets