skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trumpet Winsock fundraising effort raises $20k, leads to general amnesty
Hello HN.

You may recall that a few months ago I launched a donation drive[1] for Peter Tattam, whose Trumpet Winsock software helped to launch the internet age.

Peter just emailed me to advise that 800 donors have contributed a total of approximately $20k USD.

Peter has decided to issue a total amnesty for all unpaid copies, whether personal or corporate, up to January 2011 as a thank you to everyone who chipped in[2]. Previously he issued an amnesty for individuals only[3].

One of the most generous donors has been OpenSRS[4] nee Tucows.

You can still donate via Peter's site below or by visiting http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/

Thanks, HN. I couldn't have done it without you. And thanks even more, Peter.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875
[2] http://www.trumpet.com.au/
[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303337
[4] http://www.opensrs.com/blog/2011/05/tooting-the-horn-of-an-internet-legend-peter-tattam/
iOS is a mobile operating system.
This sounds like it's right up my alley. Thanks!
native vs web is a false choice: it's not like one wins and the other loses. they're both better in different ways. do native for some things where it's a net win, and do web for others where web is a net win. And in terms of capabilities, the line is blurring further, esp from the web side.
Tasteful Routes for Ruby on Rails
If you are an iOS developer, the docs are up.
I don't think this follows either. Google provides many native apps on Android. The real difference is that cloud-based computing is natural for Google but a fundamental shift for Apple.
The various platforms you mention really serve different purposes and users use them with very different intentions.
One small note:

Debt for an individual is a choice. However our monetary system mandates that some people or entities must always be in debt. If there were no debt there would be almost no money in circulation.

So while you say that debt is a choice, it is impossible for everyone to be debt-free. If everyone stopped borrowing (consumers, industry and government) in this country, we would have a complete economic breakdown.

This is like saying smoking is a choice: from the perspective of the single potential smoker, it is. From the perspective of the marketer this is unimportant as they don't need you to smoke, they just need some people to smoke.
Exactly. A lot of Apple's big announcements today were about features that create lock-in. Your music is tied to a $25 iTunes subscriptions; your reading list, email, calendar, to do list, and office documents are tied to iCloud; they even want your text messaging tied to your iOS devices. Then there's all those apps you bought on the Mac and iOS App Stores that you'll never be able to transfer to another system.

If you start using enough of these new features, switching away to Android, WebOS or Windows will be a nightmare.
And if Apple or this service is de-legitimized through Apple going out of business and shutting it down in a decade or two (hey, it could happen) - or due to licensing disputes down the line with the record companies. Well.. Hope you backed up the original files. That's a good question, actually:

If you keep the old files around, and five years from now cancel the subscription.. ultimately it's likely you've paid much, much more than the original collection was worth. Are the old ripped files still legitimate, or do they cease to be?
It's interesting, I wanted to teach myself iOS development and the best way for me was to come up with a project and see it to the end. My project was location aware reminders. I wasn't going to get rich or anything, just was solving a problem I had and learning a new framework/environment.

Seeing Apple's new Reminders app has really de-motivated me to finish it. Also before you point out TaskAve or any others, I only learnt about them today, in this thread. I purposely didn't go looking for location aware reminder apps as I knew it would de-motivate me to finish mine, and hence not learn what I wanted.

Although I can't miss reading what is coming in iOS 5 :)

Oh well, I'll have to think of something else to keep me interested.
Is this like when that band you liked suddenly got popular so you didn't like them anymore?

Or is it more like when Roman from Party Down met that girl who was "really into Sci Fi" and she started talking about Lord of the Rings and then he berated her with the difference between Fantasy and Sci Fi?
Zsh-lovers:  Tips, tricks and examples for the Z shell
> What Apple is doing is effectively what MS got in trouble for.

Microsoft got in trouble for telling manufacturers not to ship Netscape.
Pranksters slap Windows logo on Apple's Hamburg store
They are already verifiable. You provide the seller with an absentee ballot, he or she fills it out, and then you exchange the completed ballot for the beer/cash/delicious pie.
There are significant risks for taking on non-accredited investors assuming there is an exchange for equity, especially that many. Chances are attorneys will advise against it.
I'm not hating, I just think it's weird that everyone you know have iPhones, when Android devices are outselling iPhones 2:1 and have now a bigger market share than iOS. Yet it's still possible. I'm just impressed.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I think they are trying to grab a ton of money while the getting is good, knowing that their business model is not sustainable. They spend enormous sums of money on sales-staff (to get the deals from vendors) and many vendors say they are unhappy after the groupon goes live. Apparently most groupon-buyers are cheap one-time-visitors and the local vendor doesn't recoup their expenses.
GECCO 2011 Industrial Challenge: Optimizing FX trading strategies
"You can have an online music store without waging a format war and trying to control how people use their music."

You can do this today only because Apple went to bat with the labels, won a bunch of freedoms, had a crapton of success and the labels (fearing Apple's leverage) gave even more freedoms to Amazon et al.
It's probably important to note that if you're really banking on your app going viral via Twitter, it's only prudent to gracefully degrade to the current XAuth method for tweeting since it will be quite some time before most iOS devices have native Twitter.

That said, this could really be a big help in encouraging users to share content from your apps.
https://github.com/languages/Lua #16
https://github.com/languages/Haskell #15
Console Cards Accessories Multifunction Case for 3DS
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Except none of these services are cross platform. Thus, many users will not be interested. The IM apps will do fine because groups of friends very often have several types of phones. Same goes for dropbox.

This is why competition is good and investing all your eggs into a single walled garden is dangerous.
Or JavaScript is the kind of language that requires a lot of question-asking to accomplish anything significant (poor language design/documentation).
Medical Marijuana Daily Deals - Groupon Style
Apple has made themselves yet another little walled garden? How very quaint!
This is a striking point. Up until now, switching costs off of the iPhone were basically a matter of dealing with AT&T. Once the iCloud tentacles are in deep enough it will be nearly impossible to say goodbye to all the licensed content that I only can access through Apple devices.
It's about risk. Visa/MC/AMEX deals with people worldwide, which includes some crooks and thieves that are trying to scam them (and will continue to do so, under multiple identities). The coffee shop only deals with customers it sees personally, so it can keep people from scamming them multiple times, or for large amounts.

Any business that tries to disrupt Visa/MC/AMEX is going to have to be able to handle and reject large-scale fraud.
"fixed date" in this case means "We have the following list of features we want in the product, to be launched as our big update. How many months will it take? (and we'll hold you to that exact date)"

The further ahead you must forecast, the less accurate your estimate will be. In many organizations, the hapless architect is asked to give a solid date for a laundry list of features, many of which he can't research very well up front. Many technologies exist to solve a number of the problems, but the experienced architect KNOWS that each and every one of those technologies will fail to work, be poorly documented, be poorly supported, contain subtle bugs that affect nobody else but him, be incompatible with existing infrastructure, etc.
There will be a great number of dead ends, which can only be discovered once the team has spent a good amount of time learning the technologies via documentation, web searches, object code disassembly, threatening vendors' families and pets, and so on.

And fixing these emerging problems will involve other technologies, each with their own problems, resulting in a factorial solution set.

This is why the traditional method of estimation has been to estimate how long you expect it to take with a lot of things going wrong, and then triple it (you triple it so that you can be "talked down" to double, even though that increases the risk of going over).

In short, long term project completion forecasts are a fairy tale, and so anyone who expects you to adhere to them makes agility near impossible.
The index is basically defined as Google for "<language> programming" then massage the numbers via hand waving and "false positive detection." It's a silly way to measure programming language popularity given all the possible alternatives.

My guess is that their "false positive detection" is penalizing Javascript more than anything. I can understand Lua being #10, but Javascript being #11 is preposterous.
I think that the point was that Google's revenue stream doesn't seem to be easily commodotizable, while Apple's (at least theoretically) is.

update: Downvotes? In my HN? I was just clarifying what I thought the original author was getting at, which wasn't what the parent post to mine was arguing against. If you have a disagreement with what I say, then argue against it, rather than just down-voting. Then maybe we can both learn something, instead of "I disagree with you, and I want to let people know that, but I don't want to expose my ideas to possible ridicule so I'll lurk in the background."
You do what the developers have been doing, going into the install app and copy the dmg to a dvd or usb stick so you can install it on other systems.

Unless they are removing the disk image from the production release (unlikely).

http://holgr.com/blog/2011/02/creating-a-bootable-os-x-10-7-...
It's far easier to migrate to Singapore than Hong Kong. At best you'll be able to get residency after 7 years, but that's only if you can manage to get a work visa, which is not easy unless you work for a big company.

I lived in HK for 10 years and will go there every other month. I love HK. But it's not for everyone. People there say you work in HK you don't live there. And that's all you do, work, work, work and then take a break to do some other work.

After 10 years of 18 hour days 7 days a week, I moved to Thailand and for the last 12 years. I live 50km from the Laos border in the city of Udon Thani. I see trees and the occasional elephant from my room.

I live here and then run my business from other countries like Hong Kong and Singapore.

I like Singapore. Unlike Hong Kong they actually welcome people to migrate there. I will move all my operations there over the next year or so and get residency and then split my time between Singapore, Thailand and Laos.

BTW, Cantonese is a far more more interesting language than Mandarin. Mandarin is a second language for a large percentage of mainland Chinese. But it's good to learn for business. And in my humble opinion, simplified Chinese is an ugly hack from a committee that has stripped most of the beauty and meaning from the language. If you learn traditional first, simplified is easy to pick up and you'll understand the context and meaning behind the characters. Compare the simplified and complex characters 'country'. The traditional character tells a story, a country is a place with a border, which is defended with weapons and words. The simplified charger is literally, jade in a box. Yuck.
I'm not sure that I would frame it that way, but I think that is more or less correct. Lua is such a small language that you generally don't need to ask questions before you do stuff.
Show HN: MootiroForm, an online opensource form creator made in Python/Pyramid
Link to sign up and use: http://form.mootiro.org

MootiroForm is yet another online form creator, but with a focus on Nonprofits' needs.

Mootiro is an effort made by an Brazilian nonprofit called IT3S, to create softwares suited to all Nonprofits' needs.

Our next effort will be a voting site where Nonprofit organizations can discuss and prioritize their software needs.

All softwares created by IT3S are opensource. You can learn more about us on http://mootiro.org and http://it3s.org.

We're still in beta and are making a lot of changes and have a lot of work to do but wanted to get some feedback.

Thanks
"That’s what we’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now."

Classic Gruber. I really hope that no one that I know ever mentions a WWDC presentation from a decade before.
Completely agree. Ideally they'd also update their Gracenote matching to match tracks to CDs that people hadn't ripped yet. If not, I guess the race will now be on to build a ripper that can encode as fast as possible at the minimum quality level required for a match.
Though it depends on Apple's licensing terms, Apps that work on multiple platforms have an incentive to allow you to export the data that it syncs with iCloud. They want to keep you as a customer if you jump ship to Android.
Great to know, thx, but that shows exactly what one issue is: there are at least 5 json modules... How are people supposed to know which one to pick?
I also haven't heard anything about this.
It almost sounds like your conjecture is that, in the long run, Apple is destined to lose this.
I'd read that again. Everyone I text has iPhones. With a possible exception every couple months. I don't live in IPhone Bubble but I certainly communicate inside of one. That doesn't strike me as terribly unusual.

And even if it were only half, I'm still saving money since I don't have to change my habits. Pretty good deal. If you're not a carrier.
The availability of devices aren't the problem, it's the WiFi-only problem. The times I'd like to "FaceTime" with people the most are times I'm not on WiFi.
This is a very narrow understanding about what businesses do. They don't think of things that lock in users. They think of features that people will want to use. Solutions to peoples problems, even ones they didn't know they had.

So if you're good enough at that, people have trouble giving up your platform or service. Calling it lock in is just good features and service in a negative light.

"Oh, Apple does great to replace things when they break, but it's just lock in. It's not actually good service."
Funny enough, TechCrunch already ran an article claiming it to be 'Heroku of mobile': http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/27/stackmob/
I know some UK ISPs have their own Steam servers.

Some also cache YouTube videos for this purpose, for example.
PGP WDE vs. Lion Disk Encryption
You're confusing Microsoft's illegal anticompetitive actions with their defense.

They tried to destroy Netscape through a number of illegal means. Their defense was to argue that IE was nothing more than a component of Windows, which was and is correct. If they had merely shipped IE with Windows they wouldn't have broken any laws, but that was never really the issue; it was only the issue MS wanted people to focus on.
This is a great point. I have had problems with Spotlight aggressively indexing my hard drive in the middle of a SC2 match. I've also had Time Machine pick terrible times to slow down my system.

What's incredibly annoying about these services is they don't do the obvious thing and wait until the computer has been idle for a while.
Sometimes I wonder how much Apple is paying this Gruber guy.
Jeff Robbins:

http://www.lullabot.com/about/team/jeff-robbins

I know that lots of other musicians program as well, of course, but not necessarily ostentatiously.
Ask HN: What do you use for your online stores and what could make it better?
I've been working on an easy to use ecommerce system to help people make professional online stores without knowing how to program or design.

I'm looking feedback on the current big names BigCartel, Shopify, Storenvy etc and what could make them better. Any ideas? Any complaints?

If you're interested in my project you can get early beta access here: http://launching.leesfer.com

Thanks HN!
I don't use the social and editorial stuff either, but I use two Instapaper features Apple's thing is not likely to have: (1) I use the bookmarklet (and also, ocasionally, read an article from the website) from my Windows and Linux boxes, and (2) in addition to reading on my iPod touch, I download my saved articles as an ePub file to read on my Sony PRS-505 eBook Reader.
And lets not forget linux mirrors which iinet also provide unmetered. I'm not sure if they will be able to mirror an update to Lion though, that would require some talks with Apple.
Clickable: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2BXM9PYaXY0
That was one aspect. Here's some notes from the Real antitrust lawsuit, note that a big part of this is "universal distribution" and "pricing" (since WMP is free).

But here's a question for you -- do you think Verizon, Walmart, or AT&T can disable any Apple provided functionality and have Instapaper run on first use? If one of them found a way to do it Jobs would shut it down so fast that they didn't know what hit them.

"Real's 64-page complaint accuses Microsoft of "tying" its Windows Media Player to its Windows operating system, shutting out competitors such as Real and instantly achieving

"virtually universal distribution." From October 2001 to March 2003, for example, Microsoft's "tying" ensured that Windows Media Player was preinstalled on about 95 percent of PCs shipped, the suit reads. By contrast, it continues, RealNetworks' digital media player was preinstalled on less than 2 percent of the estimated 207 million new PCs shipped.

RealNetworks said Microsoft has failed to share important information about the Windows code, thus hurting the performance of its RealPlayer product. For example, Microsoft refused to disclose details about certain security features, preventing Real from using them directly, according to the lawsuit.

Other charges allege that Microsoft used contractual restrictions and financial incentives to "force PC makers to accept Windows PC operating systems with the bundled Windows Media Player and to restrict the ability of PC makers to preinstall or promote competing digital media players."

According to the suit, PC makers told Real that their contracts with Microsoft kept them from removing or changing the status of a Windows Media Player; promoting RealOne subscription services during the first run of a new PC; and providing a desktop icon for Real Networks. "Microsoft's agreements with PC makers are exclusionary and anticompetitive," the suit concludes.

The suit also says Microsoft's pricing practices stifle competition. It alleges that Microsoft effectively forced competitors to provide free versions of their software to compete with Windows Media Player--a practice that has resulted in significant losses for RealNetworks. "Microsoft's below cost pricing, separately or together with Microsoft's other exclusionary conduct, poses a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly in the digital media markets," RealNetworks said in the filing. "
Ask HN: Preparing for "design a scalable system" interview questions
I'm currently in the process of interviewing with some big web companies. From my experience, and talking with others, it seems like asking questions about designing a scalable system is popular.

What is the best way to prepare for these sorts of interviews? I've been following the steps Steve Yegge recommends: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html and have been reviewing my college notes on data structures, algorithms, and theory. I've also worked my way through "The Algorithm Design Manual" which I recommend.

I'm not sure this preparation has been helpful for these sorts of questions. For example I recently had an interview about designing a scalable system and my solution involved thread pools, sharding, producer/consumer queues, and non-blocking I/O. I have some general understanding of those topics, but no deep knowledge. I was thinking of reviewing my notes from my distributed systems class, but it mainly covered topics like distributed mutual exclusion, and the byzantine generals problem.

Any ideas on how to better prepare?

In case you are wondering, I graduated with a Bachelors in CS a few years ago.

Thanks!
My impression is the gap between a prototype and a shippable hardware product this complex is very big and easily underestimated.

At the very least maybe you can convince AnyBots to stick an iPad2 on the head of their bot.
Not correct. See my other response. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627487
A tasteful variation on the RESTful Rails routes
An equally easy but free way to install is to sync browser bookmarks with iTunes.
well, several business have popped up around things that I would consider non-core: recurring payments, business analytics, etc. Generally, If I can't find some other business that will solve a problem that isn't core to my business, that problem is a good target for outsourcing.
Jordan Rudess (keyboardist of Dream Theater) has apparently released a couple of iPhone synthesizer apps, though I dunno whether he actually wrote them himself or collaborated with an experienced iPhone developer to produce them.

Also, Tom Scholz (frontman of Boston) was a kick-ass MIT-trained mechanical engineer who's done a lot of hardware hacking, including a line of devices that give you smooth tube amp tone at non-eardrum-popping volume levels.
I doubt it - but they may have first refusal on any ponzi bitcoins

(the real answer is, no, that is ridiculous)
True, but a crucial difference is that the cryptvoting allows verification after the fact, while absentee ballots must be verified in the window between the ballots being sent out and polling day.
I would argue that as soon as we understand how to put "logic" into a virus or delivery mechanism, we will be able to target cancer, and a host of other problems. I would also argue that this will happen.
Thanks. I think it'll take some time for people to get used to the robots, but Cisco makes billions on video conferencing in business environment.
Since a large portion (if not the majority) of iPhone, iPad, and iTunes users are on PC, don't they get some of these cloud features as well?
Should we send all of America’s economists away for a few years?
If Google wins, hardware will be secondary, and Apple--that thrives on selling hardware--will decline. And it's possible that that will happen...it's also possible that it won't. Apple isn't destined to lose anything. It's just that they have the potential to lose much more than Google does--even if everyone uses Apple hardware, Google can still serve ads to a certain extent.
The fact that someone paid for something shouldn't hold any legal water. Just because you suckered someone into paying you money that they didn't need to, shouldn't be able to influence how a court interprets the law. Especially the way that huge corporate interests like that will pay large sums of money to err on the side of caution and avoid a legal battle.
Early complaints and troubles with Apple’s Lion and iOS 5