skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Market.apk bundles aren't device specific, so the one you installed was probably just ripped from some different phone/tablet/whatever... no conspiracy theory needed here.

The only hack needed for a decent experience is to either modify your system build.prop to make it look like a device that has real market support, or hack the Market.apk itself to make google's servers think your tablet is some device that it isn't.

If all you did was install the APK by itself, some Archos fan developer must have pre-hacked the market.apk in that way, but doing that is relatively easy and common and doesn't mean Archos had anything to do with it.
Arduino + Coffeescript + Google Calendar == Remote-controlled Thermostat
Tracker blocking courtesy of Abine's targeted advertising cookie opt-out (TACO): http://www.abine.com/preview/taco.php
python doesn't scale well with multiple threads/cores[1]. the high level motivation is to fix that. since the GIL is the main source of the problems, that has to go.

[1] the best current solution is to use the multiprocessing package which runs a completely separate python instance on each core, but obviously that doesn't support simple shared memory access (you can do it, but it's not "natural").
Most Android apps (developed with the Android SDK) are Dalvik byte code, not native ARM code, so they should run just fine.

Apps that use native code (the developed with the NDK) probably won't work. A lot of games use at least some native code in order to leverage existing non-java libraries or code bases(the Box2d physics library for example).
Some good points, some odd ones (why would you really need a hierarchy of groups inside of other groups?), but the interface part is mostly wrong/exists already.

I just looked at it and I can't find an interface to re-organize my current list of friends in Lists.

Account->Edit Friends, each friend has "Edit Lists" next to them on hover

I also can't find a way to filter the messages only from people in a certain list

Click the arrow beside Most Recent on the News Feed, then you can filter by any list

Lists also have the same problem as groups, they are categories for people, meaning that one person can only belong in one List

One person can belong in as many lists as you want them to

And when posting a message on your wall, is there even an option for posting only to a certain list, as I can't see it.

Click the lock beside the share button -> Custom edit -> Specific People -> Type whatever lists you want
Are you trying to say that unregulated monopolies like US Steel, Standard Oil, the railroads, AT&T, American Tobacco didnt have the best interests of the public in mind? After all Carnegie gave us lots of libraries and without Rockefeller we would not have had the Rockettes.
First, you assume without proof that Sarbanes-Oxley will actually prevent the next Enron. Goals aren't results. I do not accept this as unarguably obvious. The rule of thumb is that it is easier to undetectably game complex systems than simple ones.

Second, you've not mentioned the fact that Sarbanes-Oxley has real costs, not just in terms of direct compliance but also the business that they've simply shut out in advance because the businesses knew they couldn't afford compliance.

Finally, the really relevant metric is not merely "How can we as a society purchase assurance against another Enron at any cost?", but "How can we as a society purchase assurance against Enron in the most cost-effective manner?" I am deeply skeptical that SOX is the correct answer to this question, or even within spitting distance.

You've also implicitly bought into the political duality and assumed that if I'm not for it I must be in the "conservative half", even after I just said I'm libertarian quite nearby. I don't particularly care about whether it's "liberal" or "conservative" solutions, I care about working in the most cost-effective manner. SOX is almost certainly not it.

People are bad about accounting for disasters, people are really really bad at accounting for regulations. The twin specters of mistaking goals for results and counting only benefits without the costs loom over pretty much every discussion.
FYI : I'm a UK national that's been running a UK-majority owned LLC in NYC for the last ~12 years (check out the E-2 visa). If you'd like to discuss doing something productive software-wise in NYC, let me know.
Properly speaking, the concept "monopoly" properly pertains only to situations where the government enforces the monopoly. This is the original meaning of the word (before it was altered in the 19th and 20th centuries).

There is no proper political right for a "consumer" to have a choice between multiple brands of a product. If there were such a right, it would be violated the moment they walked into a remote store that didn't happen to carry every single product currently sold on the market. Remember, rights are contextually absolute. Their purpose is to subjugate society to moral law. And the purpose of moral law is to make individual flourishing possible.
Is he opposed to moving?

He might find more luck on the other side of the country in Waterloo, Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal. Each of these cities have large tech communities and are within about 6-7 hour drive from each other.

He might have some luck in Calgary or Edmonton a little bit closer to Vancouver.
Well I fucking hope so.
When Black was named Telecommunications Adjudicator in 2004, he fought on two fronts to break the BT logjam. First, he used his own experience as a former employee of the telecom giant to push for change from the inside. When that wasn't enough, he used the bully pulpit provided by his government post to embarrass BT in public. He publicized the company's failure to meet goals. Reporters loved the story of the government regulator holding the giant firm's feet to the fire.

I wonder if there are similar tales in the U.S. of the brave little bureaucrat against the hulking titan of industry. Seems rather countercultural.
That doesn't really explain the difference though. The one Dutch telephone company used to be state owned. Now we have multiple competing telephone/tv/internet companies.
In discussions about electric cars there always seem to be two arguments that end up head-to-head:

1. That average or mode of distance traveled per day is less than X miles. (60 or something, a distance many electric car designs have no problem achieving)
2. That people won't accept a car that can't do long-distance trips.

The Volt/serial hybrid (which Volt actually isn't) design responds to both of these arguments. If we transitioned all cars on the road to this, the average drive wouldn't consume any gasoline at all but people could still take their infrequent longer road trips.

That's the premise I've seen at least.
There are two differences (though I don't think they're very important):

* In Europe, it was generally an artificial monopoly through a state company, Ma Bell was a natural monopoly sanctioned by the federal government.

* Where Ma Bell was broken up following an antitrust case, most european monopolies were simply privatized along with new regulations (or deregulations depending on the market) forcing them to open up their market (instead of turtling)
Ahh, I see. The thing is, I can't think of a single way to make {} be treated as false in the boolean context, so 1) I don't think you'd ever need anything more than "option = option || {}", 2) I think the example would have been better off using an integer or string where you actually might have to use the ugly long format.

EDIT: Unless of course you get some non object value passed in and you want to be sure to keep it regardless of whether or not it is falsy. Not sure why you'd want to do that -- I am sure I would NOT like to see someone do that if I had to deal with their code.
I think a lot of tribal meat eaters ate pretty sustainably because their population numbers held pretty steady, didn't explode. So just hunting wasn't enough to require the wild herds to also grow exponentially for survival. Let's face it, the issue is not meat, it's growth of the human population. But nobody wants to advocate eliminating humans (and definitely I don't), so we have to make the hard choices sometimes. I'd say the bigger issue isn't carbon footprint, it's water supply.

http://www.businessinsider.com/water-use-of-foods-2011-4?op=...
http://paulstamatiou.com/atlanta-to-san-francisco-moving-cro...
Show HN: Bitcoin mining monitoring and stats
Ach, when will people learn that windows bashing no longer makes you cool.

The reason they are the primary attack vectors is because of their market penetration, not some crap programming by a windows dev. There's not an OS out there in wide usage without a lot of 0-day exploits.

If Linux was dominating, we'd only ever hear about linux problems.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=firefox+exploit
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=osx+exploit
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=linux+exploit
No. Had billg gotten 4 years under his belt, he'd have worked for apple. Had Mark Z. done that, he'd probably have been a Google employee.

In both cases the result would have been okay, but nowhere near as good as becoming a world-changing billionaire.
Another lawyer here who feels the same way. Cheers.
If you can reliably get $2 per $1 you spend, why bother with a loan or investment? You've already won the game.
Why not just promote the new Friendster as a place to play games and soft pedal the whole social networking past?

Would the site be more successful if they'd chosen a different domain name?
That was a smart move. Their product is different and does not compete with Facebook

Sadly implemented dumbly; why on earth would I give them offline access to my Facebook account? Or, rather, I understand why, but don't understand why they won't let users try the service first, and then show them what they're missing out on by not granting offline access. Bizarre.
It really isn't that hard, especially given the relative anonymity of the internet. I've done it before, and while I'm not going to say it's a good feeling actually doing it, I feel so much better afterward knowing that my overall stress level is going to be lower. Some people are just poison when it comes to providing support, and they're not worth the time, money, and stress.
>to make a paragraph you have to hold down shift when you hit enter

I didn't know you could do that. Thanks!
> population density is much higher in Europe.

If this is really the case, then:

* Why do FIOS rollouts happen in the suburbs rather than in the densely packed cities? Wouldn't it be cheaper to roll out in the city since the suburbs are less dense than the cities that they cling to?

* Why don't we have excellent broadband on the US East coast where the population density is comparable to Europe?

> far more customers in high-population areas than it
> will in rural Wyoming

That's really the point. There are areas of high population density in the US, but the broadband options, even in those areas are sometimes lacking (especially when the ISPs oversell their bandwidth in high-population areas rather than upgrading to deal with the additional load).
That clearly isn't the answer, as the article spends many paragraphs explaining.

The answer is "do things that encourage competition and investment". The US government fails at this, but it is neither a limitation of government per se or easily achieved by private enterprise alone.
It will be insanely foolish if ALL the first invites don't also get about 30 invites themselves, and for those we invite, allow us to send them whatever "share" of our invites we want them to have.

So, I can invite a popular friend and give him 10 invites, and I can invite my other friend and give him 1 invite.
You mean the governments that constrain through force the market so that only a few monopolistic entities are present?
If they had chosen a new domain name they'd have nothing to separate them for the failing Hi5.com, which went from attempting to be a social network to doing the exact same thing this new Friendster is doing (logging in by Facebook and playing games).
> This is the original meaning of the word (before it was altered in the 19th and 20th centuries).

Considering the origins of the word (monopōlion, from monos "single" and pōlein "sell."), that does not feel correct.

While there were a number of de-jure monopolies (English and Dutch East India companies in the 17th century for instance) the origin of the word comes from a natural monopoly (of olive presses).
A Review of Sparrow Mail: Compelling yet Frustrating
Will people pay for privacy?
For me, the main reason for buying locally is economic; circulating money through locally owned businesses helps your neighbors. I would prefer to have the wealth created from my labor change hands a few times before going directly to Walmart HQ and/or some international tax haven.
Is everyone anonymous or pseudo-anonymous (My messages are attributed to anonymous35 or something)? If so, as people leave and email/anonymous names disappear you can identify people.
From a few months ago... Braintree: Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud
"I think VC-funded companies are more inclined to throw money and people at opportunities and problems"
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2800-bootstrapped-profitable-...

Congrats to them - this is another great win for Chicago.

Based on the article it seems they did $4.5 mil in rev in 2010... curious to see how that led to such a high valuation, even given the growth numbers.

In terms of future growth, we've had Braintree customers switch to other processors using FeeFighters and were blown away by how much money they saved. Customers love their service but get angry when they realize how much they have overpaid on their merchant account. I wonder if it's sustainable from that perspective.

EDIT: In case it was not clear from what I said above, I work for FeeFighters.

Also - Bryan has posted a response about why they raised on Braintree's blog. Valid points.
http://www.braintreepayments.com/inside-braintree/braintrees...
TDL Super botnet is 4.5 million strong
I think sooner or later most freelancers learn to adjust their prices based upon expectations. Not all clients are created equal, and you have to know how to judge a client for the amount of headache he will eventually cause you. Sad, but true, and it certainly separates the wheat from the chaff.
Without wishing to trash their efforts, Linux power management is a mess. Nothing works out of the box and you have to play around with powertop to optimise your kernel configuration to get even reasonable battery life. Add to that, the ACPI implementation is buggy as anything.

This, at least in my case when testing on an Acer 4820T, manifests itself as Windows 7 lasting 6-7 hours on battery (!) with heavy Visual Studio 2010 usage, whereas Ubuntu IDLING lasts about 2.5 hours out of the box and 3.5 after tuning it to bits.

It's ok optimising Linux like this but the whole EXPERIENCE is still horrid.
We're already paying for it with our personal data and no one seems to realize. See, e.g., all the trackers on big sites like Buzzfeed (http://i.imgur.com/bGepZ.png) and imgur (http://imgur.com/a9On0)
Layer 2 Attacks Using Yersinia
It also requires access to share on your Facebook wall without notifying you, which it seems to do after each game you try out on the website. Removing specific permissions from an application on Facebook is a much harder task than it seems to be. Also, if it requests so much information from Facebook, why does it still require me to type in my birthday and upload a picture of myself?
This may seem pedantic, but ranting is not the same as trolling. Even loudly complaining isn't really trolling.
Privacy is a right. You should not have to pay for it.
I don't buy that. One reason is that the article fails to account for the taxes that are put on phone bills that subsidize rural telecommunications. Another is that the regulations that force American telcos to support low-density projects have direct effects (someone subsidizes folks in Wyoming, and that invariably ends up being people living elsewhere) as well as indirect ones (regulating a business changes its culture for the worse. Risk takers get pushed out.)
Does anyone here have any useful advice as to how to deal with (and get people to avoid) these types of things? I usually avoid tech support, but sometimes (parents, gf, close friends, etc.) it's unavoidable, and I've been seeing a lot of stuff like this lately.

Obviously the usual advice applies (let those damn system updates run, update AV, NoScript+Adblock+non-IE browser, when strange looking .exe files try to run don't let them, etc.), but I'm seeing this stuff come up on systems where people are doing these things right, and actually seem to know what they're doing. I don't use Windows a lot myself, so I don't know if these things are really tough to avoid, it's always possible that people have done some stupid things, I'm not sure...

It seems that more and more often, too, I'm ending up having to resort to digging through HijackThis logs and cleaning things up by hand, which is not something an average end-user can really be expected to do.

Am I missing some better advice to give people (better AV software, maybe? Some of the big ones are missing infections that I know are several weeks or months old, which I would think is enough time to get the signatures in there...), or is this really just something that the average PC user will be doomed to turn to their nerd friends and paid support people for help for the foreseeable future?
Reactive Extensions (Rx) now officiailly released
I, too, do not understand why anybody would use Node.js... when you have Erlang :)

And since you speak of Java, I also do not understand why anybody would use that either. If you have a thing for the JVM, at least do yourself a favor and use a decent language, like Scala.
Myspace to Be Sold to Specific Media for $35 Million
This thread: http://➡.ws/ㅅ퍥

Meta: http://➡.ws/testing12
That's a good reason too. :-)
My impression is that mining is almost over; is anyone still making substantial profits?
I disagree. SSL is always nice, but end-to-end encryption isn't magic. SSL protects you from targeted man in the middle attacks by governments, isps, and users on the same network. Your friends are neither.
I didn't understand this UI at first. URL shorteners are very common and they always have the same UI: Enter long URL, get short URL. This UI has an extra step that is small and somewhat hidden, so I kept missing it and wondering why nothing was happening.

Once I get past that, how am I supposed to find a unique URL? All obvious combinations have already been taken. It seems like it would be better to generate a short URL based on words in the destination page's title or something. That way the server can take responsibility for generating something unique, short, and memorable.

Finally, it seems disingenuous to market this as "shortest URLs on earth". Only until all the short ones that are easy to guess get taken. If you want to guarantee that users get the shortest URLs possible, it would be better to generate them - that way you can use all possible strings.

Other (mostly terrible) ideas for guaranteeing "shortest URLs on Earth":

* Buy lots of short domains, so that you can use the short combinations on all of them.

* Expire the short URLs. Charge extra for permanent ones. The expired ones can be reused.

* Make the short URLs language-specific and vary depending on the request language.
The problem is caused by bad government, but the solution is good government, as exemplified by the BT story. A completely free market would lead to a monopoly in broadband anyways. The irony here is that the government is not doing anything to solve the problem.
I'd be interested in hearing some thoughts on backing up. Would rsync to S3 happening regularly be an adequate solution? Figure if it is on a cron and it fires every other minute, the deltas would be pretty small, and not much would be lost if a datacenter or cluster goes down.
What's funny is that they made a huge deal about Firebird being a clone of Rybka...when it was likely just based off of Fruit.

http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/chess-engine-controversy/
Build Your Own Google Voice Using Twilio with no Code
List of animal species with 46 chromosomes
Humans have 46 chromosomes. But what about other animal species ?
... as far as I know below is the only list of animal species with 46 chromosomes :
The point is that not all CS students (and later graduates) write code for the web.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2709401
Amazing new wireless tech: Breaking Shannon's Law
Features don't make the social network; customs do. FaceBook copied Twitter with its status messages in Twitter's infancy, and yet they didn't manage to kill Twitter.

I still dunno if Google+ will be a success, but if it is, I suspect it will be more due to the actions of early adopters than to Google.
Its even slow to run it on a phone. I specifically made sure to use a game framework that has both desktop/phone support to do most of my development on the pc and port it later on. Saves so much time getting around running apps on the phone when unnecessary to the development cycle.
"All of PyPy, CPython and IronPython have a GIL"

IronPython actually does NOT have a GIL: http://wiki.python.org/moin/IronPython
> is the speed hit (factor 2-5) really that bad? do haskell programmers have experience that confirms that?

The penalty was pretty bad in the earliest STMs, but the Simons have done so much work on multi-core stuff and the STM libraries that it's hard to say.

(I will note that lack of purity might be, as the comments point out, a real problem. That was what sunk the .Net/C# folks trying to add STM.)
Why government regulation? To prevent price gouging, favoritism to particular customers, killing off rivals. Prior to the Carterphone Decision you could not attach any third party equipment to the phone lines, including phones and modems. There was a huge battle for MCI to attach their long distance phone lines to the AT&T system. Common carrier status was invented to allow people to use their phones as they wish. When I was a child coast to coast phone calss were several dollars a minute. Now unlimited long distance is the price of a single call of the past.

(I realize that I answered the question "Why is regulation necessary?", but it goes along with the sanction.)
I'd love to see a similar DHH takedown of Groupon's valuation. And then Jason Fried, Groupon advisor and former corporate director, could refute it!
Microsoft v. i4i Revisited
I recently commented that the Microsoft v. i4i case did not change the law. After all, the Supreme Court simply confirmed that the statutory presumption of validity afforded patents under 35 U.S.C. 282 could only be overcome with "clear and convincing evidence" of invalidity -- nothing new. However, upon a more careful reading (prompted by a Facebook post by Fordham Prof. Jeanne Fromer), I now realize I was mistaken.

In the following passage, the Supreme Court explains that a patent provides the user with a "right to use" the patented invention, and not merely the right to exclude others from using the patented invention.

That changes everything, and will make patents ever so much more valuable. By the stroke of a pen, the wealth of America's inventors has been vastly increased. I sure hope they don't try to "fix" this.
Haha, you never know what kind of response you'll get by putting something on the internet!

Asking me about computer programming is going to be pretty silly. But if you're thinking about learning to code and want to understand what it's like to learn a new skill, I can probably share some insights.
Personally, I think I might care more about service when choosing a flight if I had some idea what the service would be like before hand. Right now I need to manually go look up reviews for the airline. It's also made worse because some airlines are really multiple different airline's put in one (usually via acquisition).
The joy of making a computer from scratch.
Skimming
Is skimming becoming more popular?