skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In US geography, "The South" means something very different to the southern half of the country. Likewise, "The Midwest" is concentrated entirely in the eastern half of the country. "The South" is really the south-east corner of the country.

Is it just confederate states? Well, eleven states seceded, and 22 senators implies eleven states, so probably. Not sure where Kentucky fits in.
Google TV Returns Outnumber Sales
Even when a big story breaks, there's rarely more than 3 or 4 links that pop to the front page throughout the day. They're from different sources, sometimes they provide different insights. Other times they don't, and they just go away.

If 4/30 links on the frontpage are about the same story, it's really not that big of a deal.
"As the post states, it's certainly not needed for REPL interaction with a browser"

Ok, it is not needed per se, but how can it be done without also writing your own parser and evalulator? I didn't see mention of the how in the article.

Also it's not

Runtime eval: "Oh, wait, here's more program!"

It's: "Oh, you forgot this part of the program, that I already gave you an exact description of".

I'm not advocating any sort of complicated change, just evaluating simple independent expressions that generate the input to evals. I hypothosize that in most cases this is possible. Maybe eval is more often used in ways that does depend on input (REPL is such a case).
I vote we convert the repetition to recursion, which should be more acceptable to the Y combinator crowd.
Manufacturers and carriers want to differentiate their products rather than becoming yet another peddler of generic Android phones. I think Google's strategy from the beginning was to commoditize mobile devices to weaken the carriers stranglehold on internet data (blocking Google's services from their walled gardens).
Many sites have (c) XXXX-YYYY at the bottom. Same thing.
How do giant stacks of uninvested cash in corporate coffers improve the economy? I wish someone could explain this.
I think here the relevant definition of 'obvious' is 'readily inventable independently by competent parties.'

I.e. ideally, you want the defensive patent to be obvious enough that your likely attackers will have come up with and used it in vital processes.

Yes, usefulness is an important correlation, but obviousness is too, insofar as obviousness is inversely proprortional to how widespread a method is.
Actually, that does bring up a question, is there a plugin available now that allows you to completely substitute your js for their js? Ignoring the Free software issue, this would be quite useful to have in general...

(If there is, RMS should probably be made aware of it, because that addresses half of his concern).
House Committee Approves Bill Mandating That Companies Spy on Their Users
I had multiple years or coding experience in other languages. Learning RoR hasn't been pretty. But I'm pretty impressed by the language and framework so far.

1) I'd highly recommend taking the Rails for Zombies course. it is free from code school.
2) In terms of online resources, RailsGuide and RailsTutorial have both been quite useful.
3) In terms of books, I like the Agile book. I like the reference in the second half of the book more than the tutorial coverage (which I also got from the sources listed in #2 above)

Some tips:

a) While scaffolding seems cool when you first see it, I suggest not using it for your first project. It hides too much stuff that you should probably understand.

b) I'd suggest going with Rails 3.0 for now. That's the advice I got.

c) I'm using MacOS and heroku. Fantastic experience so far!

d) Don't start with mastering the ruby language first. I did a quick primer and got started with rails.
Yes, you started writing Blub before I was born. Good for you. It's very unfortunate that you haven't progressed past that point.

That you have openly admitted that you do not understand the productivity and code quality benefits of closures, etc. is so very much not my problem. Massive switch statements and needless object subclassing to get around Java's inefficiencies--be my guest. Enjoy your spaghetti.

I have demonstrated, to my own satisfaction and really that's all I give a damn about, that I am considerably more productive using Scala (you do know what Scala is, right?) on the JVM, consuming Java libraries, than I am Java. The language is a roadblock, regardless of how your 90's sensibilities feel about the issue.

(Seriously, whoever decided a function object pattern was a suitable alternative to a delegate or closure should be barred from programming, ever again.)
To be fair, just about everyone reading this will probably have more cash than the USA in another week or two.
"Write once, deploy everywhere" seems to have worked awfully well for Google and a host of other companies. Granted, Google docs is not as feature complete as MS Word, but it's good enough for a lot of people.

There's a time and a place for native applications, no matter what the platform. But for a large percentage of apps in the different mobile market places writing them in HTML5 + JS wouldn't hurt them quality wise.

If you need to support an app on multiple platforms I think it makes easier to turn out a higher quality app as your attention isn't split between three different releases.

Granted, I work on private enterprise applications that the public will never get to see, but I think in a lot of cases a technology like phone gap makes a great deal of sense.
Not to put words in Paul's mouth, but I believe his statement was:

1. It's relatively rare to get an angry mob

2. It's even more rare for that angry mob to target YC companies because YC companies are a small % of total companies

3. Therefore this situation is not common enough to optimize for
Distributing profits via bonuses and dividends in the US without US taxes being collected on that money is bad, yes. It's not like corporations pay a very high tax rate, even on the rare occasions that they do actually pay their full tax obligation, after all.

And the other point, of course, is that money that goes directly into the savings accounts of the already-rich does not tend to stimulate the economy very well. This is a rather well-demonstrated fact: if the money doesn't get spent, there's no economic impact there.
I was referring to the hypthesis that shady areas are often dark, and thus we could turn unlit/unshaded areas into shaded AND lit areas, and perhaps reduce crime at the same time.
> I get that Android and iOS have different UI paradigms, but what's going on behind the scenes is exactly the same in a lot of cases.

Sure, it's the same, if you call being turing complete the same.
The traditional way of doing that has been to write a low-level C library with the core functionality, and write a native app for each platform that leverages the library. This is how the best cross-platform apps are made.

I can see a bright future tho in JavaScript-based game engines, so long as they're wrapped in a native app (written by a developer, not generated by an SDK).
Here's an algorithm you can use to predict that for all submissions. If the link here has the post's original title, we won't. If it doesn't, we'll replace it with the original title.

I know of a counterexample from this week. The original submitter (I) posted an article I learned about from a local scientist with the original title

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270

and then during the subsequent discussion the HN title of the thread was changed to something that I don't think is a fair summary of the submitted article. (I don't know which curator did that, or which users flagged the thread, but I saw it happen after it was too late to edit the original submission.)

The original article is here and you can see its title:

http://independentsciencenews.org/news/23andme-disproves-its...

After edit: In view of the blanket policy statement to which I am responding, I'm especially curious about the recent exception I linked to.
"Tethers in space, break" for a long number of reasons. NASA has actually tried to use tethers in space several times and found a lot of surprisingly tough issues. One of the least obvious induced current, but read up on it as there is some really interesting engendering involved. So, from the perspective of someone who you want to ride in a tin can at the end of one of these you are really going to need to say, if these break the occupants survive due the ability for each half to reinter the atmosphere, be rescued or whatever.

Now run the numbers for a version of that a reasonable person would actually be willing to live in for a full year and perhaps he would be willing to discuss it. However, a moon base is probably both cheaper and safer.
Easy peasy. Use a good algorithm that is correct most of the time and present the results to the user in a way that's correctable.
Not really. There are plenty of cases of applications that don't look native, but are successful for various reasons (quality, niche, speed).
I like the auditor's take on this:

"I see no data protection issues for these requests, data protection only applies to consumers not businesses so there should be no issues with this information."

The Data Protection Act applies to individuals within the EEA trusted circle nations, full stop. Whether or not the information being requested requires individual consent under the DPA is a different point altogether.
Tweet Roulette feature helps Twitter users with common interests break the ice
We posted FriendFury on HN a few days ago and there seemed to be interest in the project, but we noticed users weren't interacting much. The original version only let users choose a few topics they care about and then we showed other FriendFury users who share the same interests. Last night we added a Tweet Roulette feature to help encourage exploration and to help people break the ice and initiate relevant conversations through Twitter.

After joining in (using the Twitter API), you'll now see that we've already selected a person to message and let you know which topic you both share. Just send a tweet asking their favorite musician or show them your new project to break the ice. We think it's a really novel use of the "roulette" style feature, and I'd love to hear HN's thoughts!

URL: http://friendfury.com
It doesn't produce an emotional response from me, and it doesn't give me any idea of what you are / what you're offering.

My best guess based on the slogan would be that you're some kind of prototyping site or crafting site. I'm not seeing any connection to events.
Is Internet Explorer For The Dumb? A New Study Suggests Exactly That.
And then some non-lazy guy types in Albuquerque New Mexico and you find that Mexico is not a US State.

I know, this isn't a particularly difficult thing to work around, but I was amused that you replaced one bad assumption with another.
Sorry, I should have been more specific--I use Eclim to bring gvim inside the Eclipse environment, or I use Netbeans with a set of macros that parallel my vim ones. I find the built-in "boilerplate simplification" nonsense to be a patch over the fact that Java itself is no better than mediocre, and should not be considered a valid defense of Java as a tool.

And the reason? Because even with all these tools that have grown up around Java to address its shortcomings, it completely sucks. Absolutely sucks. Miserable to write and--more importantly--miserable to read. Meanwhile, I can comfortably write idiomatic Scala in Netbeans (the Eclipse plugin is shaky) with the editor's only help being Intellisense, idiomatic Scala that another programmer can read easily without trouble, because the language is geared toward actually being descriptive rather than covered in boilerplate.

And Scala is not a dynamically typed language, but shows that a static language can actually act very similarly to one. And you still get all those features that you miss. It's sort of what you're talking about re: AS3, but it's here now and works.

.

I wasn't joking earlier when I said that the best Java "tool" is a Scala compiler. It's not perfect (hello, long compile times), but I can do anything that I do in Java faster and with more readable and therefore reliable code in Scala. The reverse is not true, because to get around Java's inherent lack of expressivity you are forced to create new points of failure for yourself.

That's not good. It's not necessary. But it's defended to the death by people who--not you, but some of the other posters on this thread--really do truly think in Blub and don't understand why these things are bad.
clickable link: http://friendfury.com
MailChimp API Sees Some Serious Growth
Interesting. I read her post as responses to AirBnB's word twisting in the TC press release -- most of what you call being "disingenuous" is her refuting impressions people might have gotten from the press release and telling her side (instead of just telling her side).

Breakdown/example follows:

re: suspect in custody.

AirBnB was quoted saying "a suspect is now in custody, and our information will now become important evidence"

She starts by refuting an impression you might have gotten (the bad guy will go to jail for what he did to her): "no charges or arrest warrant has been issued for my case" (which means AirBnB's information can't be evidence for anything she knows about - she also notes that they might have information that she doesn't)

She then describes her case to the best of her knowledge for those interested.

re: contact with AirBnB.

AirBnB was quoted saying "We have been in close contact with her ever since [5 weeks ago]"

She starts by refuting an impression you might have gotten (she has been in contact with AirBnB team members [other than the founder], or had any AirBnB labor tasked full time with helping her) "Since June 30, this co-founder has been the only person at Airbnb from whom I have received occasional contact regarding my situation, his messages directed primarily at my blog post and its activity on Twitter."

She then describes her contact with AirBnB in rich, concrete detail for those interested.

tl;dr - EJ wasn't being disingenuous/equivocating, she was doing two things with one post (responding to press release and sharing concrete details)
What I've learned from a natural expert in customer crisis management
I'm not sure if we share the same notion of supercompilation. The whole point of supercompilation is to speculatively evaluate terms to supply branch-level constraints that propagate through the call graph, enabling program transformations such as inlining, dead code elimination, partial evaluation and deforestation. Whole-program transformations such as these are done during compilation (i.e. in the dev environment and not in production.) How would you retro-actively undo an existing transformed piece of code when a new form is observed by eval? How would you maintain a list of already-applied transformations to allow new code to be specialized? Supercompilation is not an incremental procedure.
If this "Android Compatability Test Suite" is anything like how the video game manufacturers test and approve video games, let's just say a lot of things can get graded on a curve, with the right motivation.

Clearly this phone is one example, if the battery is discharging itself so quickly (and generating so much heat) in an hour.
There's an important distinction between "we don't negotiate with terrorists" and "we will never implement a worthwhile feature if it was requested in a disrespectful manner".

Take the Zed Shaw + dongml story [1]. Zed's behavior was silly, but the loophole needed to be closed regardless and so it was.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601342
I'd be interested in what this guy can do with a $100 price point.
Airbnb Competitor Checks IDs: 'We Don't Want to Trade Security for Volume'
Try http://vicoapp.com/ - TextMate bundles, a real, Lispy scripting language (Nu), and vim style modal editing. Still has a ways to go in terms of vim command parity, but I've been using it as my main editor for the past month and really enjoying it.
Most of my work in Clojure these days involves implementing logic programming and state-of-art predicate dispatch. Both have numerous practical real world use cases (I want them right now) and both would be near impossible to implement with acceptable syntax / performance in plain JavaScript.

Even more importantly this functionality can be provided to end users as libraries not as an alternate version of ClojureScript. For example, while I have a deep respect for CoffeeScript, these types of innovations are "ghettoized" in CoffeeScript because they require users to fork the compiler.
depriving the government of the tax revenue that money transfer should have brought in.

I'm not sure about the "should have" part here. That money was earned in another country. It has already had tax paid on it, in another country.

It's silly for the US to try to double-tax companies, it just puts US-based companies at a competitive disadvantage against local companies when competing for foreign business. For instance, suppose US Sprocket International sells a million sprockets at a $10 profit each, in Germany. Meanwhile, Deutsche Sprocket Gmbh is also selling a million sprockets at $10 profit each in Germany. Both US Sprocket and Deutsche Sprocket have to pay, say, $3 million in taxes to the German government for doing business in their country, and that's fine. But while Deutsche Sprocket is done with their tax obligations, US Sprocket then goes and finds that the US Government also wants a cut out of their profit. This makes doing business in Germany significantly less worthwhile for US-based companies.

Besides, let's not forget that company profits are already double taxed anyway. Tax is paid when the company makes a profit, and then again when by the shareholders when they receive their dividends. So we're really talking triple taxation here.
I've really been enjoying developing an app with Phonegap and Sencha Touch. Sencha Touch has a pretty steep learning curve, but once you get it, its pretty nice and you can put together a cross platform app REALLY quickly.

I plan on using Phonegap + Sencha touch to release first iterations of apps. If the app looks like it is picking up steam in either the iOS or Android markets, then I can decide to invest the time in making a native version.
Many years ago, I took a look at the Apple iPod website, and looked at the models. The breakdown was simple. iPod shuffle, iPod Mini, iPod. You could see one page with all prices for all sizes (two sizes for each model), and then you just had to pick a colour and you were good.

I then went to look at Creative's website, and looked through their list of products. They had 16 separate models, many of which were very subtle variations (e.g. the 316 vs. the 316z). There was no breakdown page that would show you the differences or help you decide. Some of them had LCD screens, some of them played WMA, some of them had more space, some came in multiple colours, but you didn't know which had what or what it cost until you clicked on the page. Making a completely informed decision would take hours of clicking links, making notes, hitting the back button, and then clicking the next link.

I marvelled that not only was Creative competing against Apple, they were competing against themselves. They produced 16 different models, which requires 16 different manufacturing processes, 16 different packagings, 16 different manuals (each in a variety of languages), 16 different QA processes.

The same thing is happening here. Manufacturers are largely unwilling to challenge Apple in the high-end of the market (where the Galaxy S, Nexus S, iPhone 4, etc. all live), so they work in the smaller end. The lower prices mean lower margins and lesser quality parts. This also leads to less testing and QA, meaning a lower quality finished product.

As a result of these lower margins, they need to sell more phones, which means producing more models of phones and shortening the lifetimes of the phones in order to encourage people to turn them over faster. It's becoming a race to the bottom.

People compare Android and iOS to Windows and Mac, but it feels like the better comparison is Mac vs. PC hardware, not software. Apple makes very few models of computer (Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, iMac, Mac Pro), which they refresh lately. There are lots of variations, but you have four base models which are simple to understand. In comparison, if you go to Dell's website, there are a dozen models you can buy, each with subtle variations, and even with different prices depending on which business unit you buy from. Other PC manufacturers all do the same thing, and because they don't control the software they ship (other than crapware), they can only really differentiate on price.

It's become a race to the bottom, trying to slash costs and increase volumes at the same time, and PC manufacturers have realized that they're fighting over a huge chunk of the market and leaving Apple to actually make the profits. Android certainly has the potential to surpass Apple in market share, but they're going to be fighting over a much smaller chunk of profits, fragmenting their efforts over multiple products and competing against other manufacturers' multiple products.

It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
> do you really think they are so dumb that they don't realize it's not worth the bad PR to save money

Well it was AirBnB that admitted that they (or contractor scapegoats) farmed Craigslist to grow its business without thought how that appears to the general public and what that does to their integrity and PR. So yes - it's quite conceivable that they could be 'dumb' enough.
"And finally, it is unclear if the services of Mint or Wesabe were actually making a difference for personal finance"

Amen to that. As well as Mint did, it's still not enough to change Americans' bad fundamental financial habits (speaking from personal and professional experience working on pf apps). There's still plenty of room for PF apps and I'm encouraged to see new solutions that focus on saving or debt reduction.
BDSM: Yes, Bash is a Real Programming Language
Maybe not forever, but long enough to cause pain in your life? Sure. Perhaps the company was bought or created by someone with too much money and not much domain expertise and then they gave their incompetent relative a position without much oversight. Wouldn't be the first or last time that happened.
In my high school stats class the example that was used was 2 airlines, one of which had better on-time arrival rates at every airport, yet in sum had a worse on-time arrival rate due to where more flights emanated from.
I'm rolling a b2b startup. Let me know what you think:
keep distinct news items, but merge into a parent item that links both, much like the way this polling story work.

The parent item gets the combined vote total of child items, and any summary screen that shows the parent item would then remove all children of that parent item, showing the parent instead.
If you distribute a million dollars across the entire US economy, that's roughly 30 cents per person, and it's likely to be spent on some chewing gum or a very small amount of food. It dissipates before it has a chance to grow. If concentrated, the million dollars can be applied to things that are only possible when money is concentrated, like doing research and development, investing in large construction projects, etc. Instead of spending the money directly on basic resource acquisition, when concentrated, it can amplify resource production, which lowers prices and provides a greater benefit to the average Joe than having another 30 cents in his wallet.
Don't repeat the same mistakes as OQL[1]?

[1] http://www.odbms.org/ODMG/OG/
‪The Flower Pot Fridge
An official mechanism to link related/duplicate submissions would be great. They could be displayed at the top. Listing submission dates there would also be helpful.

I do not like the idea of a merge because often comments are VERY article-specific, NOT simply topic-specific!