skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The governments in many other countries actually have laws that prohibit the practice of locked phones by telcos. Anyone can enlighten why the US government is not taking such approach as it is definitely pro consumers. Is such laws perceived by US as bad for the free market, entrepreneurship and competitiveness?
This looks like a really cool idea and I can't wait to try it. Is there any chance an android version will be coming out soon?
i prefer the way he said it.. same as bxr, i'd like to know early on what i'm about to waste time on.. i finished reading the whole thing..
Facebook Aiming For $100 Billion IPO in Early 2012: Report
The "other" reason to avoid a self signed cert is that a self signed cert still leaves your users open to a MITM attack. If your goal is to avoid a MITM, a self signed cert gives you nothing but more configuration lines in your webserver config.
i think you overestimate the difficulty of producing working software. cs50 requires all their students to produce working software from scratch as a final project. there are always a few very impressive ones from total novices, a ton of good ones, and surprisingly very few horrible projects. these projects are not temperature conversion projects; they are indeed games, websites, iphone apps, etc.
i believe that the statistics are somewhat inaccurate and therefore misleading. technically there are multiple things that could skew the results, none of which necessarily have to do with users not liking facebook or seeking alternatives, though it makes a catchy title.

1. a user could register for as many fb accounts as he/she has emails. i personally have 2 facebook accounts, the reason is because i forgot that i registered an account, not necessarily because of my alter ego, he's quite passive and doesn't like fb.

2. users that pass away

3. users that move beyond a certain age range

4. pages that don't represent individuals, like brands or groups, those could dissolve.

i don't think this data really says much of anything about the facebook phenomenon other than the fact that there are some adjustments in the total number of accounts, perhaps for the better as the dirty are purged into oblivion.

a more interesting statistic would be how much freaking revenue they're making.
You just bought it and you aren't even going to play it?

But why?
I also use an iPhone on T-mobile. As jrmg said, you'll only get Edge since the 3G frequencies are different, but the speed is fine for most use. I also highly recommend T-mobile overall. Let's just hope something stops AT&T's buyout.
As has already been mentioned in the comments on the post earlier today, emailing a direct login link or merely a password reset link actually do have different security implications: when an attacker gains access to the account by resetting your password, you will know about this as soon as you try to login yourself. With a direct login link you won't.

Furthermore, when offering direct login links you are training your users to not remember their passwords. A bad side-effect, unless you have only users who will never login except when notified.
5 lessons learned from a serial entrepreneur
"She got into YCombinator. She must be good." vs "She got into 500 Startups. She must be good. Or they must have tried to recruit her because of that pronoun I keep using."

This is also why affirmative action hurts the careers of people who ostensibly benefit from it, if they don't get into Harvard: at Harvard, the black/white SAT gap is fairly small. Everywhere else, it's huge, so there's a big adverse selection problem, and of course employers know about it.
> Right, but the problem is that there doesn't seem to be a 'right' way, That's the problem.

The problem is that the state of the art changes. The reason Rails is still relevant is because the core team is committed to improvement, even at the expense of API stability and legacy support. That's definitely a valid concern for someone supporting apps on a shoestring, but on the other hand it makes Rails more suitable for someone who wants to stay on the cutting edge. You simply can't have it both ways...

> We were all prototype a few years ago, now it jquery ...

You mean __7__ years ago when they chose it as the default? Rails was the first framework with Ajax support built-in, and it was done poorly because nobody understood how it should really work at the time.

> we (well I) hadn't heard of coffeescript till a few months ago and now its a default option in rails

It's easy to argue that CoffeeScript shouldn't be a default, but then it's even easier to just turn it off. Shouldn't be a point of major contention, but I can see how people don't like it.

> The way we were constructing ActiveRecord finders had been set all through Rails 2, now we've changed it

Yes, they replaced a hodge-podge of ad-hoc query construction with a relational algebra library that enables dramatically more flexible query construction and lazy loading. Who knows how many broken edge cases were fixed merely by the switch to a proper mathematical basis.

> the way we dealt with gems was set all through rails 2 now its changed completely in Rails 3.

Bundler solves dozens of thorny issues that were intractable in the Rails system. Now Rails is simpler because it doesn't have to have any gem activation code, it's handled by a separate library that can solve your gem management problems for your non-Rails projects as well. You may not have run into any of these issues, but I assure you there were real and Bundler is a big step in the right direction.

> the way we dealt with gems was set all through rails 2 now its changed completely in Rails 3.

Yeah but what are the implications of that? You want Microsoft-style legacy support from Apple? They ain't gonna give it to you, because that lack of legacy support is what enables them to move forward at the pace they do. This has definitely impacted the type of projects I feel comfortable delivering in Rails (ie. no low-budget small client sites), but for an actively developed app it makes Rails a more attractive place to be.
He said "I'm a former ASP.NET MVP", if a person is an MVP, then in that context it's "Most valuable professional"
This was my experience as well. I invested in following Hartl's tutorial and by the end I was capable of creating webapps that did cool things.
CSS Animations coming to Firefox 5
Paradosso, great and well-though out perspective. As someone who is about to start a two-year MBA focused in entrepreneurship, I'm curious: In the end, do you think it was worth it for you?
AI Memos
Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth
New RStudio Beta Available
Build a findable website (Structure defined by SEO)
Also try http://browserling.com. You can click the screen icon in the sidebar to change the resolutions.
Wasn't trying to be antagonistic. Was addressing something that comes up very often. You can't blame me for thinking so at the sight of stating NDA. That said, NDA between companies and employees are more in reference to what the company does. I can't imagine it would restrict you from leaving to pursue your own idea with a fellow employee. But then again, I don't work for Google so I don't know what they would require you to sign.
Making quantum cryptography truly secure
Meet Ian Milham, Art Director at Visceral Games
I was on the fence about it for awhile before reading the review, but this morning I decided to pick it up due to a tight schedule during the day(had to get there just as the store opened before work) and fear of the game being sold out if I wanted to play it. It's not the most sound logic, I will admit :)
works normally on wo years old MBP / latest chrome
Miracle-Gro targets Medical Marijuana industry
Instead of eating lunch out every day, buy 4 iPads
If your phone is not locked then you paid retail for the phone. In the US there has been a long history of the carriers subsidizing phones (e.g. loaning you money to pay for the phone) and keeping the phone locked to that carrier for the duration of the initial contract. This kept phone prices lower and was previously not a major issue for most users since there were really only a couple of options available to them that were all approximately the same price (e.g. choose between GSM or CDMA and then choose one of two major players in each group.)

Laws preventing carrier locks are not perceived as bad, but Americans liked their phones to appear inexpensive and since we had far fewer real options when it came to the carrier it was not a major inconvenience.
> In most cases — for mere humans, anyway — there really is a right way to do things. Ruby is an Object Oriented programming language. There are literally decades of prior research in the field of OO software design, and they’ve resulted in a lot of really well-documented and well-tested design patterns for building software.

... coming from the people who are known for relying heavily on monkey patching existing classes.

Or did that change recently?
As someone who has used the iPhone on both, not having certain features enabled as a result were annoying as well. Such as visual voicemail (as one example). Sure you can live with it but its still an annoyance.
Apple In Trouble If MS Buys Nokia?
I've made it a point to enjoy my life. I like my living arrangements, my meals, my free time, and especially my work. I like the company I work for, and the people I work with.

I have refused jobs solely on the basis that I didn't like what the company stood for, even though I knew I could get a substantial pay raise by going there.

Anyone who can't say "I'm having fun" right now (barring the rare emergency) is doing life wrong.
Study: Kids Are the Road to Tech Innovation
This post grapples with some interesting issues, especially conceptual confusion about terminology, and how to classify specific situations.

New market or pre-existing category: I agree an mp3 player was a pre-existing category - but what about iTunes? It is more like Edison creating a power-station and network along with the light-bulb; or Birdseye establishing freezers in the supermarket, along with actually freezing food.

The iPhone is interesting: sure, it's a phone, and sure, smart-phones were a pre-existing category. But the iPhone (a) included new technology (touch-screen) that revolutionized user interaction with phones (does that make it a new category?); (b) it wasn't really a phone, nor really a smart-phone, but a platform for apps - like a PC; (c) the innovation of the appstore, to facilitate that platform.

And let us remember that, historically, Apple invented the PC.

---

Is a new sub-category (of a pre-existing category) a new market or a pre-existing category? And, more importantly, what difference does it make - i.e. for what tasks is this distinction relevant? (how is it used)

Target an existing need (Christensen says customers 'hire' products to do jobs they want to get done): I agree this is a good way to go - but it is much broader than "pre-existing category". Let's be clear though: there's needs that exist that people are aware of (enough to search on), and needs that exist that people aren't consciously aware of. And that's where we truly get into "new": not just a new category, but new need.

I agree that new markets are much harder to target, but also much more fun. Andrew, I'd be interested to hear you elaborate on " 'blank-slate' ideas" being superficially innovative, riskier and “first mover advantage” being wildly overrated. Can you give examples? (I don't quite understand what you mean).

---

Re: "marketplace" abstract terms:
Reminds me of annual report terms like caffeinated beverages and baked confectionery - a cool, elevated god-like view that no-one can relate to.

A horseless carriage is a carriage that doesn't go - unless you already know about cars.

---

PS: despite all my complaints, I find it a very interesting submission - and I've been playing with the https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer and it's a very revealing and powerful tool.
Advice for a 19 year old CS guy
Hello. Am Arjun, doing my bachelors in CS in India. Unlike my classmates who have always preferred grades over experience, i have always wanted to learn something new and build something with what i have learnt. At the end of my Bachelors , i would hate having nothing but grades in my CV. I have done a couple of Freelancing projects and would have earned around 1000 $. I am comfortable with HTML,CSS, PHP, Visual Basic, C, C++, MySQL, Objective-C. What do i learn from here on. There are so many things and i really don't know what to choose over. Kindly help me
The ML / probabilistic AI people think they're the latest and greatest, so they don't talk to anyone else, certainly not the GOFAI people, and especially not the statistics department.
I think "ladybugga" is a goldmine right now. +1 for the story although I think the real pivot point was "Screw it, let's do it!" instead of writing business plans.
yes, wmeredith hit it right on the nose; it's all relative, so compared to friendster and myspace of the time, fb was a breath of fresh air.

regarding the technology, some of the amazing things that happen unfortunately can't always be seen via a browser. for example, the fact that they're able to store (and retrieve) millions of photos a day is quite an engineering feat. the number of user posts per hour must also be quite astonishing and probably a multiple higher than photos. the scale with which fb is able to launch datacenters and manage thousands upon thousands of servers also makes for quality engineering.
I don't think this is necessarily 100% accurate as to why it's locked. After all, you were still tied to a contract with a cancellation fee.
This happens with all languages and frameworks too. There are ASP.NET 1.1 apps at the last place I worked because when we did a test upgrade to 2.0 things started failing.... and there were no automated tests (yet a requirement of bugless releases :) so henceforth nobody wanted to invest in upgrading.

Its the nature of the software beast that upgrading a large and complex application to a new version of the language or framework is difficult and maybe prohibitively difficult. Once something is written and it works it often times stays as is... sometimes for decades.
You get data, but at EDGE (2G) speeds. Which is just fine for almost everything you'd want your phone to do. I am using my iPhone 3G on the T-Mobile network and it is not an issue at all =)
Does this mean you can now buy an officially unlocked iPhone, take it to AT&T, and activate it WITHOUT a data plan?

(Better yet, can I do the same with a secondhand iPhone purchased from Craigslist that's already filled its 2-year quota?)
They don't have to switch to anything - they just have to revert to plain-old email / IM and their reliable phone contacts list. Most normal people I know would rather talk about stuff and send important links or announcements through IM, even though they also have Facebook accounts.

The only instance where I thought that Facebook was useful was for getting together for a 10 year high-school reunion, but even then, only half of my old colleagues were on Facebook. What worked was plain word-of-mouth, since somebody always knows someone that is missing from the conversation and can get in contact.

Basically what has the potential to kill Facebook are the old means of communication, channels that are still reliable and still widespread. That's why Facebook does provide IM and even email, as they want to move your Inbox on their servers; but IMHO, that remains to be seen how well it plays out, as people are pretty conservative about their current email and IM accounts (it's like your phone number, you don't want to change it so often).

And I can see why they are afraid of Google - Google has users that rely heavily on their email service, which is state of the art IMHO, it has user profiles that will appear in search results, it has productivity apps that allow for collaboration, it works on social search features as an alternative to Facebook's Like, and if Buzz wouldn't suck so much, they would have been a serious threat by now.

Unfortunately for Google, they can't seem to pull their shit together. Also, judging in this light, Microsoft's acquisition of Skype may not have been so stupid after all.
- Turing-completeness of templates (or does one need inheritance to get Turing-completeness?)

- Exception-safety

- Writing portable code (no, 'int' does not wrap around; chars are not ASCII, signed int is neither equal to in int nor to unsigned int, etc)
J.C. Penney Names Apple’s retail guru as CEO
FWIW FB has denied any decline in the US

http://www.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/view...
clickable - http://masswerks.com
Gotta say, awesome work so far! Encryption aside, this is a great concept.
It's in the works: http://goo.gl/XAiBr and http://goo.gl/7HvQ4 (see quote in #3)
Actually, I think one of the new features addresses the file refreshing issue. I don't know for sure yet (in the process of upgrading right now), but its mentioned in one of the New and Notable articles.
>>"I don't know what they would require you to sign"

Our lives away, basically.
>Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors? How about an "Intro to Medicine" where we do fun stuff like play Operation and dress up in scrubs?

Maybe more people would remember their high school biology classes if this were slightly the case. Instead, the gen-ed level courses are more like weeding-out courses, and many simply flat-out forget everything because it was such a horrible experience.
Steve Blank and Ben Horowitz Debate the Tech Bubble
Apple and Google are interesting comparisons. Some significant part of Apple's success lies in becoming identified with "cool": its products are stylish and fashionable in addition to being useful. Google's success, on the other hand, rests very little on that; it started out as pure utility (search), something people used not because they had lots of friends using it or because it was "cool" to use it, but because they tried it and it got them the results they wanted. And even if Google has become known recently as something of a "cool" company, I don't think that its individual products are identified as "cool" in the same way Apple's are.

So it may be worth asking: is Facebook more like Google, or more like Apple? Or in other words: would Facebook survive a demotion from "cool, trendy place to be" to "utility?" Is such a "demotion" happening as we speak?
That's true but with reset password links you can force the user to do extra work, like enter a CAPTCHA or answer a secret question. That should prevent bots from scraping and compromising accounts on a large scale.
There were not nearly enough teachers in my high school to even teach all the intro level courses I could have taken in college.
"Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors?"

You wrote it tongue-in-cheek but I would honestly be interested in such a course. Many (most?) students enter college without a clear course of study in mind, and while the sciences and math require more work and discipline than, say, the much maligned English degree, that doesn't mean that the introductory coursework must be so dry and tedious as to scare away all but the most ardent students. If we want to encourage more people to get technical degrees, some "fun" courses could be a good tool.
A new version (v0.94) of the RStudio (R IDE)
this I'm pretty sure was mentioned here before:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173420
How Working Out Makes Us Better Entrepreneurs
Solving the Expression Problem
They don't even have to know the amount of the transactions. The "campaign donation bureau" can only releases monthly balances.
i agree, we need something better, more specific. an example being google, a general web search engine and stackoverflow, a general development search engine. both can be used together to complement each other.
This is great. While learning Scala I tried to implement a custom collection but had trouble knowing what to inherit, override, etc...
Calacanis is a stupid person, so he shouldn't write.
No, you can make a receiving address without ever connecting to the network. Current clients won't do so (that I'm aware of), but it's entirely possible.

The main reason though is that new addresses aren't broadcast. The only time you know their location is when they send, and only if you were watching their traffic / the traffic of all nodes they sent to.
For a film geared towards the general public, its technical accuracy was laudable—not perfect, but better than I originally expected.
Also, I think it's unfair to generalize that young developers ask more questions. Perhaps the young developers have worked on something else for five years, thus they may be "old" in that domain, but new elsewhere. If you bring in someone who has coded for thirty years into a new domain they will ask questions, period.
No, actually the web developer extension allows either the entire window or the portal (page display) dimensions to be specified.
In some cases, yes depending on the state. If you buy an item in state Y and pay y% sales tax on it, then when you return to state X, sometimes you are required to pay the difference x%-y% in tax.

I am not a tax expert, but here are some examples I know of:
A buddy of mine recently purchased a car while living in Texas, then moved to California a few months later and was required to pay the difference in sales tax on it before registering it.

New Hampshire doesn't have sales tax. The state of Massachusetts assumes people who reside in border towns will be purchasing goods there and automatically bills a yearly flat rate.
Anonymous hackers target Malaysia next
It's only free for one year. It's a bait.
Crashed hard on Chrome in my Ubuntu VM running on a MacBook Pro w/ 8GB of RAM (the VM has 6GB)
Hell, you could expire them as soon as they are clicked, and then have the fallback.
thanks so much guys
The problem with this analogy is that it is generally pretty easy to look at the beach and gather the information that there are huge waves and a rocky, dangerous shore (and sometimes even the sharks) and then you are informed. If the only people who can inform you are the ones that are trying to draw money from you, though, it falls under something more similar to consumer protection than it does under closing beaches.
GIT is not a threat to Subversion
>it can make life difficult once you start straying from "their way" even if you know exactly what you're doing for even simple things like mapping to a legacy DB with schema intact (not gonna happen)

Yikes, unfortunately this knocks rails off of my to-try list. I've got a non-web application with an unusual, but by no means bad, schema. I've found it makes a good measuring stick for frameworks/tools. I have nothing against doing things in the way of a particular framework, but I have existing code to bring to the party too, if something isn't going to play nice I ignore it. I can't live with building something that exists in isolation. Its either not going to work with what I have, or hold me back when I want to build on top of it with something else.
Have you played it?
What you described is not how banks or money work.

Below is an entertaining, albeit slightly alarmist, educational video on how the money system works today. This should be required viewing for anyone considering using money:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8
I think it's probably better to allow the option for single sign-on instead (i.e. Facebook or Twitter). It's just as easy for the user, essentially the same difficulty level for the developer, and seemingly much more secure than sending tokens through email.

Of course, it does have a couple of disadvantages (not all users have Facebook/Twitter accounts or would feel comfortable with you having access to them, plus you're partially dependent on an external service), but I think for most applications SSO would be preferable to authentication tokens.
Unlimited MySQL scaling, at $1 million per TB-year (!)