skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Apple's strength is more that 'they do it all' then 'they do it better'. We used to think that trying to do everything was harmful, and that you should stick to what you're good at and partner for the rest.

I think what we are seeing is that Apple's ability to develop hardware and software in lock-step gives them the ability to release earlier than anybody else.

Think about something like Windows 8. Microsoft develops it, shows it to manufacturers as it gets closer and closer to being completed, gets feedback and makes adjustments while manufacturers start designing for the new platform, then they finally get a 'release candidate' and finish of the hardware. Then who is responsible for marketing?

Of course, RIM is also an end-to-end provider, but they haven't had the vision to lead.

Lets not forget that all the manufacturers were showing tablets before Apple launched the iPad, but it took another year for non-Apple tablets to hit the market en-masse.
Guys, i know most people will be aware of this, but since its forcing the same username as HN, please choose a DIFFERENT password.
Design by Contract is Most Requested Feature?
Samsung looks like they are just trying to be the first and grab market share with the first Honeycomb tablet. Looking at this and the iPad, my question still is: what do I use this for? On the go my smartphone handles all my computing tasks and at home I have several boxes for at home computation. Where is this supposed to fit in?
I get what you mean about learning from other people, but I don't think it's as black and white.
I think working on FOSS projects with the community can be just as rewarding and educational as working with someone in a similar scenario in a business environment, particularly when it is taken seriously and you leverage the community to better educate yourself in areas you aren't familiar with.

I just think it's disingenuous to imply that the only programmers who are better than you (or I) do it as a 9-5 job. Some do it just for fun.
Where did he say he anyone was rehired as a W-2 contractor? 1099 could be possible (except for the whole work-for-hire IP issue).
Could be a college student effect, like there used to be on Usenet. It could be that a not-insignificant percentage of Facebook activity is during class on laptops.
It's never the right time, except when it is.
1. Agreed. I was going to switch to them when the Torch came out (love my physical keyboard), but what a failure that was.

5. So much of this, but I doubt they have enough power to do this anymore. Case in point: BESX (the free enterprise server). When BESX came out everyone was happy until Verizon were assholes and still required some nonsense fees that BESX was supposed to make free.

I don't know how much things have changed since then -- it's been about a year now -- but I doubt its any different now.
Either way, it should have no bearing on an interview.

It shouldn't automatically disqualify you, but if you've created something fantastic as a side project, should that really not factor into the decision at all?
I ask because following that incident I will no longer be presenting dissenting views here, irrespective of perceived value.

Presenting a dissenting opinion is an art form. It takes practice. I do a lot of it. I never really fit in anywhere I go. An awful lot of my views do not fit into whatever the 'typical' assumptions are on a topic and this means that no matter what I say, both sides often wind up kicking the crap out of me.

Some tips, should you decide you would like to try again:

Don't be argumentative about it. Present your views as a standing-on-your-own-two-feet position, not a shooting-down-the-opposition thing.

Show some respect -- agree to disagree, make no attempt to "win people over", much less "win".

Stick to the issues. When you dissent, inevitably there will be enormous social pressure swirling around your lack of going along to get along. Anyone who speaks to you will likely try to put all kinds of crap on you about what they think you are saying. Politely clarify, as many times as it takes.

Judge the timing and context carefully. There is a time and place to offer an alternate point of view. There are other times and places where it's so not worth it.

Word your dissent very carefully. If your goal is to get people to really think and not just punch buttons, like it or not, the burden is on the minority voice to make an effort to communicate effectively. If you are going along with the majority opinion, you can express yourself sloppily and people won't care. But when stating a minority opinion, you must be extra careful to work at communicating effectively and intentionally avoid punching people's buttons so as to have some hope of actually being heard.
Yes, please. It would be much more useful that way.
spam is a solved problem.

I think that with regard to gmail, the spam problem has shifted back to overly aggressive filtering, rather than being solved. And with Priority Inbox, it seems like it shouldn't have to be that way.

When Priority Inbox was added, the idea of putting all of the adverts I signed up for in one view, and the rest right in front of me was a huge improvement.

The problem is that more and more, I'm finding the things that I actually signed up for end up in my spam folder rather than in this "middle tier" where I can assign them high priority if I care enough about them. Notifications of a new statement from a few banks of mine, not always, but often, end up flagged as spam. Many companies that I do business with and have specifically signed up for their adverts end up flagged as spam. I can whitelist them, sure, but I was so used to accepting that the spammers have won that I hadn't started looking in the spam folder until very recently (and when viewing my inbox, it takes one click to even see that I have new mail being sent to Spam).

Alice.com, Onlive, Godiva, Subway, local mall, local car dealership, credit card "points" account, beautician (if you haven't guessed, I share this account with my bride), all flagged as spam. Of the 71 items, 2 are traditional spam (one for prescriptions I don't need yet, and one with random letters and numbers from a woman I don't know).

Edit: bad grammar on my prt.
If you had x disk space before, now you have 1.25x. That means your current usage is x / 1.25x = 0.8.
Best Practices from Mobile Marketing Association
The copy on that is horribly difficult to read and comprehend. I think you're trying to be too cool.

Don't tell me you have an awesome interface, show me something. Show me artists that are using your service. Get me interested in their page.

Though I suspect you actually are just using this to see if there is a market there or not. If that is the question, yes there are lots of people already providing this service to musicians, to many to mention, and nobody really stands out.
Hey (Saikat from Stripe) -- not cheeky at all, but certainly flattering.

Sorry we've been kind of quiet (we do read Hacker News, though). We're just working hard to implement the feedback we've been getting from our existing users, and we want to make sure our product scales well and gets better as new people use it.

Here's a question: any chance you would be interested in having us watch you integrate Stripe? We've been doing this lately to try to make sure our first-run experience is really good. Send me an e-mail (saikat@stripe.com) either way.
Does anyone have experience running the languages coming out of Microsoft Research on Mono? I have no experience with C# or Mono, but I am interested in having a go with F* and would appreciate any guidance someone more familiar with the tech stack might have.
Interesting list, I'd be interested to see what other "stacks" companies are running on.
I'm with you. The only thing I'd imagine is the ASUS Transformer if it had a full copy of Chrome. Then it would just be a nice netbook with all of Android and an even more compact form factor for when it might make sense.
Facebook's Creepy Facial Recognition Software and How to Disable It
Ask HN: Why all the secrecy around the job postings?
Just curious... I see job postings all the time here (which is really cool), but why don't they ever list what the company actually does?

I'm not applying to any of these, so I'm not in the target market; maybe I just don't "get it"?
Artur Bergman (Wikia) on SSDs at O'Reilly Velocity - Fuck NoSQL, Sharding, ...
3 Non-Shitty Ways to do Dinner+Movie Dates
That's pretty much complete BS. IE is no more dependent on Windows than Chrome is, but yes, various bits of the Windows UI are dependent on the Trident engine in IE. Either way, IE is no more inherently insecure than any other browser, despite its many vulnerabilities in the past. In addition, security improvements in the OS itself affect not only IE, but any browser running on top of it, making your claims even more silly.

I know you like to hate on MS (how many times have we been over this in the past few months?), but really, your claims here are completely unfounded. IE has a completely shit track record, but they have done a whole, whole lot in recent years to improve its security. Look at the many, many vulnerabilities in other browsers/layout engines compared to IE in recent years -- it's pretty startling. There are many reasons to hate on IE, but the effort put into securing it -- and the way they've gone about securing it -- is definitely not on of them.
Quoting the directories would also stop this, eg.

rm -rf /usr /lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorg # KABOOM!
rm -rf "/usr /lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorg" # Harmless.
Zed, thanks for replying - I had heard of your book and actually quite like the style. Much better than the academic papers I usually devour, I just didn't really think that last chapter was very good.

By the way, I enjoyed track 2 of week 2 of your "random improv".
Why not both? Or just pick the one ypu're better with?

I don't get why fanboys of each platform wants the other to die... The worst thing that could happen is a smartphone platform monopoly... Hello stagnation... Hello nineties...
Microsoft Research does some interesting stuff, though I have to take issue with their choice of naming. One wonders if they're trying to poke at search engines.

The "#" in C# made it painful, in the beginning, to craft a good query. Now they're using a symbol commonly interpreted as a wildcard.

I'm not insinuating any evil intentions with the name (that's a little ridiculous since it's an experimental language to begin with), but it's a little odd that they'd choose something that will likely be search engine unfriendly... again.
Ask HN: Can you take a quick survey to help gather information for my startup?
I'm gathering some initial information to learn more about booking habits and booking for occasions. If you could take the survey below (shouldn't take more than 1 minute) it would help a bunch! Thanks.

https://www.survs.com/survey/HARIXFR938
Speaking as someone doing security research on WebGL but no real dog in this fight (aside from developing on WebGL on the side, making me potentially biased in its favor), nothing MS has said is Windows-specific or remotely exaggerated. In fact, they explicitly didn't talk about many potential attack vectors against WebGL, which makes me think they really don't care much about this either way.
Clickable link: https://www.survs.com/survey/HARIXFR938
Tablets are good for restaurants, stock taking and other specialised uses. Though they will soon fight the connected TV in the lounge room, right now they are a good option to have about the house if you just want to read or browse and remain mobile. Depending upon how their price and applications develop (very much in flux right now, it seems) against other platforms (PC, mobile, connected TV) I expect we'll see a leveling out in tablet growth. One thing's apparently for sure: they've killed the underpowered 'netbook' concept (finally).
I asked Paul Irish, Chome Developer relations:
@paul_irish re http://bit.ly/kOZ7Lp - MSFT wrong? Security risk in Chrome/FF with WebGL?

http://twitter.com/#!/paul_irish/status/81492337108328448
@AlexGraul i think chrome's record in pwn2own is a good indicator of our commitment to security while delivering great features. :)
Very nice UI! Simple and easy to use, well done.
IMO the top use of the iPad is for little kids (think 10 and younger). It's the modern Gameboy.

The other big reason is as an eReader.

I just don't find the web, virtual keyboard, and other apps to be interesting enough to grab me if there is a desktop/laptop alternative. And their too large for me to take everywhere I take my phone.

With that said, I have little doubt that touch-based computers will come to dominate, although I think convertibles will actually turn out to be quite popular. Unlike cellphones, an actual keyboard on a tablet is HUGE win.
Is there a way to outsource breaking into the building?
Though there is some wisdom in what Zed says here, I am getting quite tired of the 'actually, programming itself (especially as a job) is boring' meme, as if saying that marks you out as some sort of world-weary but insightful practitioner of the arts who has somehow risen above the mere trivial and seen it for the dull plod it really is.

Please stop telling me what I think + feel about my craft - you feel that way, you want to do it down, fine, but don't act as if it is some sort of immutable truth, especially when you are talking to people new to the craft which I think is quite unethical, frankly. Why assume your own experience/opinion is somehow necessarily correct and ought to be dictated as hard-won truths, when your entire schtick is 'dissecting others' logic'?

No matter how many times I read these sorts of things, nothing changes the fact that I find programming a joy, the whole thing of being able to render machines of such incredible power + complexity to do stuff at all a miracle and know it is something I want to spend as much time doing as I can for the rest of my life - no jaded naysayer, not even an 'internet famous' one can change my personal experience of the thing, and I am absolutely nowhere, a nobody in a CRUD job, and not even that good of a programmer, but my passion and love for it remains.

A funny thing about this is that no matter what pursuit you can think of, there are always those in it who say 'actually the reality of this is horrible', people who take that attitude exist everywhere in every field, no matter how wonderful and joyous it seems and often actually is. I think that's something to contemplate - if it were all true then nothing would be worth pursuing.

There is a lot of bullshit spoken about programming, lots of crap aspects to the reality of it, lots of crap aspects of dealing with other people in trying to get things done, but people seriously - this thing is amazing, let's be grateful and celebrate it for once, please.
Ideas are a dime a dozen; stealing the execution is another thing altogether.
There are thousands of 12 year olds who can really program.

But: that's still incredibly rare.

And: a top-.5% twelve year old being able to do something hardly means it's usual or unimpressive for an adult.
Awesome tool to create CSS sprites
To be clear, I completely agree with you. I was just pointing out that this Chevy v Bentley analogy wasn't this slam dunk where everyone just says, "Of course a Bentley, Chevy sucks".
Ummm... I would prefer to not break a felony on a date. But maybe just me?
Building Great Software Companies | Fog Creek Software
Is the Brazilian detail relevant? Or maybe it is is more difficult to sue Vostu over there.
Hooray for marginalization! Who wants to help me found refuge.es for people who need a home on the internet when theirs is shut down or flooded with crap.
In my limited experince my iPhone 4 lasts up to twice as long as some phones of my friends. And iOS 5 sounds like it has many features you may want (notifications, wifi sync, Sync with iCloud). But speaking of todays sync: It is in the summary Tab when the iPhone is connected. No learning how to disable it, it is just there where you would guess it is.
Why was this downvoted? Although I don't think that PG has any need to monetize HN, he's said that 'job listings are the ads here'. I assumed that meant they brought in revenue that helped cover the cost of running HN.
New Boxee Box giveaway contest kicks off
Augment lets you visualize in a real environment 3D models
The mark of whether you "know" a programming language isn't whether you've gone through a tutorial; it's whether you can write useful programs in that language.
British student faces extradition to us over copyright infringement
Veneers Los Angeles
Our dentist in Los Angeles offers several kinds of treatments, such as dental implants, to all the patients. Our cosmetic dentist in Los Angeles offers Invisalign, eth whitening, lumineer veneers and more. Your kids can also benefit from pediatric dentistry treatments offered at out office in Los Angeles.
The bit about nuclear power plants is such nonsense I doubt the creditability of the rest of the article. The highest figure anywhere seems to be about 15 years, from Storm van Leeuwen http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20071013/partC.pdf
Addendum to your moral: get a job in finance and don't waste your time making CRUD apps and being Super IT/DBA Guy at some uni's bio research lab. Much better pay, and if you're lucky you can train on in maths and the like to move up from day trading to being a full on quant. Then you can have the midlife crisis after you've amassed some capital and connections to start your special startup in SoCal.
What about the end of life of solar panels ? Did they manage to build recyclable ones ?
android was also acquired...
Microsoft has some minimal degree of support for F# on Mono. It is not the core focus for the F# team, but they do get to spend some time on it currently. Give it a shot.
http://www.allfacebook.com/zynga-farmville-2009-06

"If you’ve played Farm Town at any point in the past few months then you won’t need any education about how to use Zynga’s version of the game as it’s almost an exact duplicate."
Hm, do you go out of your way to make sure that you click the "Not Spam" button? I get it every once in a while... and there was a while when I consolidated into my gmail address that I had some false positives, but it was retrained very quickly. I still go through it once a month, but I haven't missed anything recently.

Of course, the one email I missed... got stuck in a Spam folder in an account that is pulled into my main Gmail account so it never even made it to the right spam folder. Oh well, that's Microsoft's fault for having my email address stored separately in a thousand different places and having, I'm not sure, inbred children running their recruiting division.

I don't see why we couldn't return to the old days, where the spam filter gave it a rating. Let Google do that and display random highly-unsure-spam-status emails in a special area or in the place of an ad to get your attention? Color-coding? I'm not sure how to best fix false positives once they reach your inbox or spam folder.
True enough, but it was slashed in a Congressional budget that the Whitehouse agreed to.

Sunlight Foundation has extensive coverage & ways you can help: http://sunlightfoundation.com/savethedata/
I can understand why they might want to keep that a secret. I can imagine some group, perhaps Lulzsec themselves, attacking someone who tried to help the victims.
I found the book that contains this chapter quite impressive. It represents the only attempt I've seen to document the procedure many self-taught programmers followed to learn programming by exploring. At first, reading the instructions about carefully typing in the exercises, it took me some time to realize the point (and I don't think someone would get much value out of only typing in the exercises); however, once I read some of the "Extra Credit" exercises it made perfect sense as an introduction to learning by exploration. If typing in the exercises and running them doesn't give you an irresistible urge to tweak them and see what happens, you probably won't find programming fun.
No, but you still use LINQ style lambda expressions to do more advanced queries involving the EF objects. It's actually a really, really nice blend. If you're doing .NET dev though, take a look at NHibernate. It's been around longer, it's been stable much longer, it has more features... and it actually has a community which is probably EF's weakest point IMO.
now someone needs to make something to use the APIs of all these sites to be able to control users across all of them from a single location.

bringing on new employees or terminating existing ones and having to do it across half a dozen different sites sounds kind of tedious and error-prone.
Ask HN: Graduate in Dec. and find a job, or go to Hong Kong for an exchange?
Hey guys!

I was wondering if I could get a bit of advice. I actually wasn't sure if this would be the best subreddit, if there is one I will gladly ask my question there.

I applied for an exchange to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in January, but I could actually finish all my schooling and find a job asap. I want to go to Hong Kong to do some traveling, and take a few interesting CS courses like web search and data mining. I won't actually need those courses - I will have enough credits to graduate, but I figure doing this exchange could be a great experience. Plus I would like to learn some Cantonese as well (background is half Iranian and half Italian/full Canadian). They also have a great CS/Engineering program. I figure it would look great on the resume as well.

The problem is, if I was to do my last semester in Hong Kong, usually in your last semester is when you are looking for jobs... And of course, there is the opportunity cost. How much could I be making instead of travelling? But at the same time, when will I ever get a chance to live in a different city again? Maybe for work, but doing it for school would be a bit more carefree. Also, I have not ruled out the possibility of doing my own startup, it is a dream of mine, but I may need another year or two of experience before I do that, I haven't figured that out yet. When my friend and I are ready, that is the plan.

ALSO, one last thing - I have already done an exchange to the Czech Republic, but it was more for fun, I did not do Comp Sci over there, just some arts courses.

I appreciate any advice you can give me :)

tl;dr - Get a job and make money, or delay graduating and do one more semester of school in Hong Kong?
more recent speculation has Schmidt being named Commerce Secretary.
Peak Facebook for Turkey, maybe. The US-only link at http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=u... still seems like it's growing.

Actually, looking at the top five countries in the geo breakdown, Facebook is dropping in a lot of places in the world. Not sure what's going on there.
Of course you don't think about Apple's share of profit when you're buying the iPhone, but when you're discussing the iPhone's long term future, the fact it makes an immense amount of profit is very much relevant.
You described the reasons I stuck with my own psuedo ActiveRecord on top of NHibernate's basic Transaction and Session support. It's called "unit of work" and it makes much more sense to me. We're very specific (for simplicity and sanity) that all HTTP operations to our webapp are autonomous (from the user perspective) and stateless. No multipaged forms, etc.

So every request is given a session and whatever needs to happen as a result of that request is encapsulated in that session. If something goes wrong, that transaction in that session can be reverted. If NHibernate determines that it needs data modified early in the session for something later in the transaction, it handles it behind the scenes. Then an ActiveRecord pattern can be thrown on top of that and you still get CRUD within a "unit of work" context.

I like it. :)