skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went ahead and upvoted the link anyway. I'm hoping that someone who knows what it is will see it on HN and inform the rest of us poor souls.
ssshhhh. This is a technological revolution, don't tell them that the war is already over.
With the fragmentation of mobile operating systems, this move will take quite a while. As long as Apple, Google and RIM do not allow cross-platform messaging outside of SMS, SMS will still stay strong. I will always have friends who are using Android & other platforms and SMS is still the only way to communicate with them all.
Nice tutorial summarizing this useful action. The ASIHTTPRequest lib is also good to note here as the ASINetworkQueue NSOperationQueue subclass allows for tracking progress of the entire queue in addition to a few other useful delegate methods

http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/How-to-use#about_ASINe...
Apple and Google have competing visions. In Google's vision, the operating system itself matters less and less, as functionality is pushed into the web browser and web pages. This is in contrast to Apple, which is pushing specialized native applications which do not rely on a web browser to access remote data.

Google is trying to remove the OS from the equation. Apple is trying to remove the web browser from the equation. I think those visions are clearly in competition.
News of the World Apologizes for Hacking Sienna Miller’s Phone
I'd be extremely surprised if that didn't happen.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried playing with this yet, or read the docs, so this is pure speculation:

It may not need to do any kind of complicated proving or cross-unit analysis, and instead opt to simply rely on the fact that every good Objective-C citizen follows the same social naming conventions. Things coming back from methods with "alloc", "copy", or "new" in the name are owned by the current method and need to be disposed of properly (release it at the end of the method, or if it escapes this method, add it to the autorelease pool). Everything else can be assumed to be taken care of and we need only bump the retain count if it's getting assigned to something with a scope larger than the current method.

It wouldn't catch everything, but it could be made predictable in behavior and eliminate a large percentage of the boilerplate.
"I also would recommend scraping fake posts from forums rather than coming up with your own. Put fake usernames"

Not this.

I agree with the first two paragraphs. But scraping content and removing attribution is unethical.

Over the years I have heard many anecdotes of successful startups doing shady things in their early days. [1] It makes me think this is an industry norm. Do what it takes to succeed. The ends justify the means. (As long as it's just a white collar crime.)

Am I in the minority for noticing this? Or for caring to the point of construing an action such as content scraping without attribution as going down an ethical slippery slope? Do other entrepreneurs consider this viewpoint as being weak and uncompetitive?

More than any of my other comments, I'm hoping to get replies here rather than silent views or votes.

[1] Facebook and the Social Network has been the most sensationalized. But for my argument, let's remove instances of intra-company squabbles. They are often he said, she said; a company's interactions with the public should be easier to interpret.
Awesome training, thanks Mr. Moeck!
this team at Caltech is doing interesting research along these lines: http://www.rnl.caltech.edu/research/index.html
What you're talking about is the 80-20 rule: 80% of people only need 20% of the featureset.

It's an incidence of the Pareto Principle, and dates back to 1906.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Do you like photography?
Wow just wow. Maybe that's why they started paying Foxconn employees a few cents extra per iDevice so that they won't violate their employee agreement to not commit suicide? At least they have a job unlike non-employees, right?

There are a lot of examples of Apple's moneymindedness like margins on hardawre, upgrades cost, 30% of app cost etc. but the the most egregious is the 30% tithe on all in-app purchases and subscription content. The fact that they rejected Readability's app for the iPhone and iPad AFTER taking their FOSS code to implement the readability feature is Safari is one of the biggest examples of how Apple is squeezing the last bit of money. http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

How altruistic is that?
You have to look at it from the other person's perspective. You have to help me help you. I need to be confident in my introductions. I know a lot of people so you need to help me narrow it down. And I would prefer to have a story.
Try and imagine using XCode on a tablet under iOS all day. Doesn't sound very appealing does it?

No one needs to supplant the workstation form-factor. What we're in the process of is realizing that there are tons of other opportunities in mobile form factors. Try to think of all the workplace activities that involve taking down data on pieces of paper and taking them over to a computer where they get entered. Try to think of all the times when people read off information from a specialized instrument and enter it into a computer. All of these are opportunities for mobile computing.
Others already recommended great books, but I think it might be helpful to clarify one thing. I'm extremely pleased with the breadth and depth of my undergrad education; I'd never encountered ropes, bloom lists, or skip lists. These are all concepts for very specific subsets of problems, so if you were just worried that you hadn't heard of them, don't be. If on the other hand you looked up their implementations and still didn't understand how they worked and couldn't compare them with more mundane structures then most definitely pursue the resources listed in this topic.
I've found the easiest solution to this is to pay about $150 and let the folks at psd2html -- or similar -- handle all of that for me.
2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors
Happy to help.

Grid is an Oauth API that allows third party access to our payment network, Dwolla.

In case you're not familiar with Dwolla, we're a cash-based network that is devoid of credit cards (this is how we operate so cheaply). We allow our users to send money through their social networks, buy goods at local stores based on their location (called spots: http://www.dwolla.org/blog/dwolla-spots-the-future-of-paymen...), all for a flat fee of 25 cents.

Grid provides developers access to all of this to build new technologies we haven't even thought of.

Does this help, at all?
Tabs vs spaces for indentation
That's the whole point, this series of articles isn't an unbiased documentary about acquisitions. 37Signals likes to "prove" that they are right with articles about their way of doing things. It wouldn't shock me at all if one day they sold their company and then wrote a post about the way they sold and who they sold it to was completely different then all these other cases, etc...
I work for a payment processor and so I'm interested in the space, but I'm not quite following. I see a lot of conclusions rather than any explanation behind it. Disappointing since I'd like to see something new and cool here.
I just hope they don't make data plans even more expensive than they are now.

Thankfully I'm still grandfathered into the unlimited plan, but I have a feeling they are going to make it harder and harder to stay on this plan as time goes on.
I'm a designer and I understand what you mean. There are two different things going on here...

1. Design also has its own "architecture astronauts", people who theorize a lot but don't get things done. They are usually in academia, since there are not many companies willing to pay for design astronauting.

2. Design, despite being more closely related to engineering, is usually expressed from the perspective of art. That's why I think most programmers have problems getting a grasp of it. The reasons are mainly historical, but fortunately people are paying more attention to more rational approaches to design (Tufte, Krug).

To me it seems the author is trying to overreach the scope of UX (when it's already huge) with vague ideas of where it should head.
Thanks so much for that link - I owe you!
Hmm, I don't quite follow. I'm new to Cocoa programming and just followed the advice from the book Cocoa up and running.
This is a very fascinating set of comments. We have people that believe that the news is irrelevant, mere entertainment, a form of brainwashing (!), and something that only encompasses quick hit reporting. Then we have those that argue for more specialization since it works just fine for Pandora and Netflix. It seems to be a minority position that a diverse set of news creates a better informed citizenry and this is something desirable. I'm not sure if this is just among techies or if this is a broader belief. I'd be interested in your thoughts.
I very much see what the author is getting at, but I think he mis-diagnoses the problem. To the extent that the news is homogeneous then, all things being equal, we're going to get stuff that panders to the lowest common denominator, not in depth or challenging reporting. I mean, have you watched cable news recently?

I think that more than just have everybody have the same source of news the writer would really prefer that that news was more in depth and critical than most of what you find on television, or in other words that other people should embrace his preferences in news watching. I probably agree with him! But in practice I think talking about or trying to achieve the first when you really want the second is going to be counterproductive.
Ask on http://superuser.com.
And the last line that things were condensed and edited. Condensed, ok, edited? wtf. It doesn't feel intellectually honest as a blog post.
I think your site needs some work, both the design and the chicken and egg participation problem. However obviously there is some value in having scrapers for every state legislature. Maybe you should pivot and become an api provider for this info?
I think it plays a scene of Bambi watching his Mom develop emphysema...=)
First reaction: that's it?? Second reaction: wait, this was big enough to engulf the Earth. Cool!
I very frequently write and receive standard correspondence that benefit massively from employing appropriate use of bold, italics and bullet points.

I'm against over-using formatting, but just because some websites are ugly it doesn't mean that the web in general doesn't benefit from being marked up for presentation.

This plain-text only crusade is a sad remnant from a time when the individual bandwidth consumed by each message actually mattered and/or there was a real risk that some people for valid reasons had an e-mail client incapable of displaying HTML emails. Neither is valid any more, and what's more, there's a rich selection of quality e-mail clients available that will happily only show you the plain text version of the e-mail you're looking at: Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send.
>"That doesn't mean they won't get their electricity elsewhere when it's economically infeasible to use oil for that."

Again, possibility vs. feasibility. You talk about capital costs... what do you imagine it will cost to convert a significant share of Saudi Arabia's generating capacity to nuclear, for example. How likely is that to happen politically? And if the day comes that oil is so expensive that an Arab nation is actually considering going nuclear, how financially feasible will a nuclear program be? Remember, big construction projects drink a lot of diesel.

>"Shelf drilling is a capital expense, it's not recurring costs."

It's more accurate to say that platform drilling incurs massive up-front capital investment, as well as intense ongoing maintenance. Remember, we're not just talking about running the platform; we're talking about operating pipelines, refineries, etc. The large capital cost is part of the problem -- see my earlier comment about large integrated projects. But really, for EROEI purposes it doesn't matter when the money is spent; over its lifetime, an oil extraction project will consume a given amount of energy. That energy input comes overwhelmingly from oil and nat gas, and will continue to do so until the day we start seeing solar/nuclear/coal-powered rigs appear.
There's a particular hybrid car out there that actually does have that if you drive outside of "environmentally sound" parameters... i.e. too hard of accelerations or high speeds. The idea is to encourage driving in such a way that maximizes your mileage, thus making the trees happy.
This probably won't be settled in an HN thread but for what it's worth, I like spaces (Python). The other religious war that seems unresolvable is where to put braces in languages like PHP. What drove me nuts was the more common Allman style with braces on new lines. Thank goodness I'm on Python now. The tighter code is so much more pleasant to look at and work with.
Quick plug: I'm working on a startup called Lean Designs to help developers who struggle with web design create beautiful sites. In a nutshell, it's an HTML5-based WYSIWYG editor that exports to professional HTML/CSS. I invite you all to check it out:

http://www.leandesigns.com
Personally, I blocked the ability to tag me in any photos. I don't have to remove myself because no one but me can tag me in the first place.
Zen and the Art of Spambot Comments
When Spambots warm your heart with kind messages…
I think the "1000 photos + 30 days" limit can turn out to be too low for some. For example, one could go on a five week holiday (not ridiculously long for Europeans), taking about 40 photos a day and syncing to the cloud. Then, depending on how Apple handles the deletions, the first week of photos could be lost.

If they silently delete photos, I bet we will see some cases pop up ("pair lost the photos of the first week of their honeymoon")
>If for example they pay out dividends for 100% of their earnings to stockholders, the value of google would stay the same, while this people would own a larger share of the company.

Google doesn't pay dividends:

http://investor.google.com/corporate/faq.html#dividend

If it did you are right that the earnings would not add to the total value.

>If you rule out that payments are coming from marketing, it's basically like "if I buy stocks of my employer company one day I will own them". Unlikely, but not impossible.

What does marketing have to do with it? If you buy stock in your employer with your salary you wouldn't always be able to eventually own it. Your contribution to the company is 100 and hopefully you are a net positive contributor and are only paid 50 for that work. The company thus increases in value by 50 through your work. So to eventually own the company you have to invest more than 50 to win the race, otherwise for every bit you buy the company increases in value by more than that. In this mock example 50 is the total of your salary so it's not possible.
Ha, fair enough.

The Members Group is a financial services company (serving roughly 2 million members) and is one of our main investors and security partners. Working together with them, we've been able to provide Grid's distribution for free.

But you do bring up a good point to clarify. While the Grid is free, using our rails is not. In our online and mobile platforms, we charge a flat fee of 25 cents, no matter the size of the transaction. So, when a third party does build on top of our network, we still hold onto that quarter. This is our only fee.

Sorry for misleading you. I'll change the verbiage.
Totally agreed, one of the biggest industrial users of tablets is in hospitals, which is exactly what you're talking about.

Lots of people do seem to think that workstations will be supplanted though. So much hype about the "death of the PC," the "post-PC era," although I accept that "post" doesnt necessarily imply a world where that thing is totally gone.
Great, just what we needed, even more overpriced data plans.
Every one of your posts in this thread -- every single reply -- seems entirely shortsighted.

It's very obvious you've never used an opt-in email list to build and grow a commercial business.

You think Groupon (and the ilk), or Newegg, etc, would see the huge returns from email they do if they were sending out plaintext?

The only thing that really bothers me about your posts, though, is that you try to say things with such a tone of authority. But you just don't know what you're talking about.
Hot New York City Startups
Forgive my ignorant question, but what if that eruption was aimed at us? Was that a mass ejection of something? If so, could that something have ruined the electronics in orbiting satellites or stripped our atmosphere?

Maybe I'm over-reacting but that appears to be an absolutely massive explosion.
> If people want what Bitcoin provides.

That's the key point. There is a huge demand for alcohol, for drugs, and for cheap/free content. In the first two cases, this means that there is real profit to be had in selling it, and the illegality means that prices can be hugely inflated due to risk. For free content - "car downloaders" is a really nice way to describe it - I haven't yet figured out the economic motives, but it seems to be a mixture of selling ads (for the people running the sites), sharing/giving back to the community (especially on private, invitation-only trackers), and just because of how easy it is.

Is it possible to make money or karma off of bitcoins in a similar way? Well, you can sell them. If you have bitcoins, you can make a profit of them that way - you can sell them for above value, or charge for the service as well as the coins. You can also buy them, hoping that the price increases, which ends up as selling them.

So, answer this: if bitcoins were made illegal, what monetary incentive would there be to use them? Their price certainly wouldn't go up - it would plummet as all the legitimate traders tried to get out.
> If I had any choice in the matter, I wouldn't

I live in Peru, most people still use IE out of ignorance here, not because they can't. Browser evangelism is sure useless to an HN reader but it's very needed for common users and I encourage it very much.
Hands-on with the Wii U: it's here, and it's amazing
Thank you for downloading Perfect Keylogger 1.68.2
Consider the source. Jason Fried is very proud of 37 signals, and is very vocal about bootstrapping and not "building to sell." And rightly so. He's built 37 signals into an incredible company, in my opinion.
Is this sped up?
Oregon's Self-Employment Assistance Program: States Supporting Entrepreneurship
Because they use the web everyday.

At my old company, we taught designers contraints about web elements and what could typically be styled and executed. This relationship between front-end dev and web designer was pretty key. I never coded but because of my usage of the web, I knew the constraints.

Those designers ended up designing some of the most used sites in the United States.

When working at an agency, one rarely ever touches code because the client either has a team to deal with it OR there are full-time front-end devs.

But hey, if those designers who multiplied revenue for ecommerce sites and increased viewership for content sites are bad web designers, then I'll take those scrubs anyday.
Tag Printing - Matches to Your Demands
Idsketch.com is the best place to get tag printing in unique styles having unique ideas to make people laugh. We offer our services all over the world. We know how to serve you better.
"Some will say this is unlikely because of Microsoft’s grip on enterprise sales, but consumers have been leading the IT market for the last decade and the mobile transition will only accelerate this trend."

The mobile transition is a fallacy in my opinion. There is no transition; it is more a compliment to real computing solutions. Do you think large business are going to sacrifice control of their data to a "cloud" rather than their own datacenters and be held hostage to a recurring fee? Or how would you like your employees to be doing spreadsheets and documents on a tablet's virtual keyboard?

While I do believe many consumer needs can be met by mobile tech, the PC will continue to exist for a lot longer than three years simply because of the utility of conventional design. No matter how hard you try, three years from now Windows will still be alive and ingrained into the government and business world for at least three more years after that.
I guess we can all start using it now. Heh.
The blog post with more explanation: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/th...
hey jslampe, thanks for answering - if Dwolla is cash based, how do I put money in my account? Do I mail you a check? Sorry if my question sounds silly but it's genuine confusion on my part. If the service is cash based, how is money transferred? how can cash in an account be taken out?

also, is it only for the US?
It's hilarious to me that you think Americans should be banned from the internet, after the existence of the network (ARPAnet) as well as a huge percentage of the growth of the internet as a consumer tool (Silicon Valley) can be directly attributed to work done by Americans.
There's a decent mix of dev/design talent on Forrst
to last billions of years. You yourself think that projecting the tens of millions place 64 years in the future is an absurd number of significant digits. How many significant digits do you think is appropriate in a time frame 100M years longer? Even the UN itself only purports to project population trends until 2300, which is far short of a billion years, as hubristic as it is.

Also, the UN projections have some unjustified assumptions. From page 7, under section C:

>Over the long run,
total fertility is projected to settle at 1.85 children
per woman in each country—in between the current rate for Northern America (which is just below replacement level) and the rate for Europe (which is currently well below). This figure is somewhat arbitrary

In the longer run they expect the growth rate of all countries to stabilize at 0:

>The eventually similar growth between more
developed and less developed regions is produced
by similar long-range assumptions, especially the
assumptions that fertility will fall in all countries
below replacement (in the medium scenario) and
rebound to replacement after a period largely
similar across countries of a century or so. Starting their fertility declines later, less developed
regions will reach low fertility levels after more
developed regions but also stay at these levels
until a later date.

Of course population stabilizes at a rate not too much higher than the present rate if you assume fertility rates converge around the replacement level. Garbage in, garbage out.
Touch Interfaces and Disregarding Creation - ac
Isn't WWDC where most SDKs get announced?
Yes. I couldn't see it at first, because of the advertising overlay, but there is a time readout in the lower-left of the video.

It looks like it's sped up about 60x.
webOS devices are unlikely to approach the popularity of iOS and Android devices among consumers, but HP can sell webOS "solutions" to their existing enterprise customers and become the next RIM BlackBerry. HP doesn't need to beat iOS to "win" (for various definitions of "win").
Cringely is in the business of trying to look prophetic so he makes wild predictions like this to get attention.

Yeah, but in the long run, he may be right. Has peak Windows occurred? It's not quite clear, but it may have, with the total PC business going at -1% yoy. And when Windows/Office sales start showing big year over year declines, Microsoft will be hurting very badly, if they haven't developed some other revenue source.
Damn, I read "One of the coolest eruptions from Sun you'll ever see. This happened today."

I was like finally, closures in java!
I just updated the license to the MIT license (should have just used that from the start).