skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter and Google both have excellent APIs. Twitter's API is helped a great deal by every client built by Twitter is also built on the Twitter API.

Google's APIs, in my experience, have great documentation and an excellent learning curve. Want to do something simple? Well here's code that does that. Want to do a medium challenge? Use that code and this documentation to expand it - often projects can gain sophistication quickly with only tweaks here and there.

There's no doubt the Facebook API is terrible. You have to read several pages of text and answer a bunch of obtuse questions just to get your app registered. Then you have to deal with the oft mentioned documentation problems. The biggest problem I see is that its so hard to develop for, no one has built any decent third party libraries - as opposed to Twitter which has a ton of excellent libraries for interfacing with your favorite language.

I can't help but wonder if all of this is done on purpose. It seems to me that Facebook doesn't want anyone to be able to make as much money as them developing on their network, so they make it impossible. If there was a better API, there might be 10 Zyngas by now.
Sounds to me like the view-source running something from the page could possibly be used a domain-escaping bug. Just a gut feeling though.
"Perpetually" means "always, continually." US voters are very reliably responsive to political advertising; media campaigns seldom fail to swing opinion in the direction they want to.
How people use QR codes...
Hmm is this also happening with Learn Python The Hard Way?

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

Available for Kindle on Amazon but no mention on the official site?
For now it's free. When I add paid plans, my intention is to keep a free plan where you'd download the receipts instead of getting hard copies in the mail.
+1 is failing miserably, as opposed to author's sense of perspective?
You don't have to use it. I am really confused by the sentiment in this thread. If you want your web app to be cross platform then don't use nacl. You will be no worse off than you were yesterday before having read this article.
Your Rage is Pointless
Since I cannot control-F a book, I'll save a tree and stick with the PDF.
Don't worry, I filed an extensive bug report, like a true-hacker-style.
Thanks for taking notice Matt.

Let me start by giving some kudos. I had a chance to use a GUI tool that lets a developer test FB API calls. I'm not sure if this is officially released yet but it was a fantastic tool and a step in the right direction! (fyi: I got the link from a presenter at a hackathon ... forget the details).

Like some of the other folks here, I have burned many many hours trying to get the FB API to behave nicely. I think the core issue is documentation coupled with the velocity with which things change. I understand that the mantra for the company is "Move fast, break stuff" but I don't think it is right for you to cause developers pain. While you folks might have a lot of dev resources, not everyone does. A lot of times, I can see the API changes being done for good ... i.e. rename paramters or move'em around. The problem is that if you don't flag the change and/or documented this, you've pretty much guaranteed developer pain.

I understand when you move fast, you don't have time to document. People naturally turn to blog posts. This adds to the pain because half the stuff works while the other doesn't. My experience using the API at a recent hackathon was piece together fragments from different blogs and hope for the best.

So if there is one line of feedback you take from this .... if you change your API, think about it from the external developers standpoint.
When to pull the plug on old software
All valid points. This demographic is the exact demographic I wanted to look at though. Most of the world is not tech savvy.
Badrumsrenovering
Bathroom cleaning, renovateing
Indeed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798973
Real World Functional Programming - Book excerpts
LED images on an RC helicopter blade
Perhaps you could sell a 99 cents version on Amazon?
Could you elaborate a little more about your point please?
To save you the effort, the code says:

They don't - it's overly
complicated and stupid.

Well, that's one opinion. Personally, I use QR codes quite a lot. I scan them when I see them - it takes virtually no time - and it's given me information quickly and easily that would otherwise had to have been taken down by hand, either immediately, or later, from a photo.

But as a single example for how I use them, I have a QR code on my business card. Reactions fall broadly into three groups:

1. Those who know what a QR code is and use it to go straight to my on-line contact details. It connects to

1a. my blog,

1b. my other writings,

1c. my speaking details, and

1d. my contact details for further information.

2. Those who don't know what a QR code is, but are curious. It creates a talking point about technology, and how its appropriate use can make life a lot simpler. That is, after all, how I make money.

3. Those who don't notice or don't care. For them it's cost me nothing.

I see nothing but benefits.

What am I missing?
A Screenshot Tour of Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader for iPad
Totally agree with this.

It's true. My girlfriend is into arts too. She never understood my work but when I showed her paper.js and some other awesome scripts, she got to know the beauty of it :D
I like how they point out that they are rushing the ice cream sandwitch.

The fact is that android is on a 6 month release circle.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history, the latest phone version bump was on 6 December 2010, and for tablets the initial release was on 22 February 2011. If you ask me, it's not rushing, they're late.
I think in any of your 3 cases, if Microsoft pays 85 million then they are already ahead.

I'll be willing to bet that winning 1% of the search market cost much more than 85 million, and they'll get a much larger share of the market than 1%, even under your most pessimistic scenario.
I have to disagree. Yes, Kindle reader came out using Web SQL DB, but that spec is dead and for good reasons. I don't know how far along IE is at supporting IndexedDB, but it won't be long before Firefox, Chrome and IE all support IndexedDB and then it will make plenty of sense for Amazon to build Kindle Reader on top of that. From what I read, iOS 5 doesn't support IndexedDB, sadly. But it will in time.

I'm still surprised that no one has written an IndexedDB shim on top of Web SQL DB.
I just wanted to make sure none of those crooks in Congress got a free copy of my book, but I keep forgetting that other people live there too.

:-)

Seriously, sorry for the oversight. We'll fix this.
Want To Keep (And Motivate) Your Best Employees? It's Not About The Money
An Interesting New Vehicle for Tech Investors
Interesting post. I find work life balance to be very tightly coupled with the time horizon of the company.
Yes, it's a sign that I don't want to be disturbed. It's also a sign that people routinely fail to pick up on or just plain ignore in order to ask me mundane questions.
I personally can't concentrate in any kind of open-space office. When I need to focus, the very feeling of other people being present is a huge distraction to me. It was true since early childhood - I couldn't do homework or learn anything at home if I wasn't alone in a room with doors closed.

I don't really know how to explain it.
HN markup is pretty inefficient anyway.
Apologies to folks having difficulty. Book requests are still coming in, so the system is definitely operational. We'll be investigating the problems this morning. For now, my only guess is that it is related to the load, so I suggest you keep trying.
I tried doing a similar thing for a fairly short URL. I had to add some padding on the end ("?SourceID=QR") in order to make the QR big enough to fit my changes in.

Does the QR standard allow for arbitarily high levels of error correction? (More than the "H" level.)
Very cool, but it would so benefit from better camera work. It was fun, impressive and entertaining, but I had to give up after a while as it was hurting my eyes to have to follow it.

Image stabilization anyone?
It's available in the Cygwin/X11 version of KDE from Cygwin Ports
http://sourceware.org/cygwinports/

There has been talk of porting Konsole to native Windows, but thus far no action.
It reminds me about the importance of knowing geometry :-)
I could see this becoming very popular as a heart-rate etc. monitor at high-end gyms. Slap on a tattoo that will interface with whatever machines you use, then wash it off in the shower.
I really do not see #3 as being so unlikely. How many people actually change their default search engines? We are talking about Normals, not just tech-savvy people.
Pulling it with curl shows there are no scripts in the page. Even if I use a chrome UA header. Curious.

No funny response headers either.
What was so frustrating about RVM?
The fact that it's possible isn't news, but it's nice to see a tutorial on how to make one.
Algorithms to enhance or transform images
Romanian Startup - a game about guts, inspiration and skills
Do the people who come up with this syntax spend their whole lives trying to make it as unintuitive as possible?
Well the person who I replied to said he got no confirmation and the form just reloaded, so I told him that he should see a confirmation page and showed him what to expect. Did you not bother reading the comment I was replying to?
An interesting counter-point here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2800022

This was my reasoning not to do this when I put a QR code on my business card - too much risk of it becoming unreadable as the card got damaged/degraded over time.
U.K. Riots: Website Raises £25k to Help 89-Year-Old Barber
The QR Codes have built in levels of error correction, anywhere from 10% to 30%.
Could you elaborate on your read-only mode?

Is it only hiding functionality that would cause writes or is there more to it? Is it built into the application logic?
Mark Zuckerberg Video from 2005 -- Facebook Begins
Besides the whole `cd` override thing, I am curious why so many people are "confused" or have problems with RVM? (This is a genuine question. I've never had problems with RVM, but obviously others have, so I am curious)
Add OCR Functionality in Web, Windows Applications & Web Services
Aspose.OCR for .NET is a character recognition component built to allow developers to add OCR functionality in their ASP .NET web applications, web services and Windows applications. It provides a simple set of classes for controlling character recognition tasks. It helps developers to work with image (BMP, TIFF) files from within their own applications. It allows developers to extract text from images quickly & easily, saving time & effort involved in developing an OCR solution from scratch.
AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers
IT Skills Assessment: Are yours up to date?
There’s no question that it’s harder than ever to keep up with changes in the workplace, and all the more so in a field as defined by its rapidly changing technology as IT is. Think back to five years ago: the world was using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. If that doesn’t seem so strange, consider that there were no worries about your boss not liking what’s on your Facebook page, because only students were allowed to make accounts.
There's certainly a plus side to doing administrivia, if it can provide you with implicit feedback in how your doing.

With your logs, if you fully automated everything, you might not spot a problem with the server that you otherwise may not have noticed for weeks.

Let's say you have one task to complete upon each signup to your product - at least you get a real sense of the rate of signups.

(Although in discussing these thing I get the feeling of being pedantic, as I don't know how important they really are - a feeling I get a lot while reading HN.)
That comment is a bit harsh. You don't have to use the same QR image everywhere and can choose where it makes sense to have one with logo and where it does not.
LoseThos doesn't use Unicode, it uses PC Screen Codes. ALT-2-2-7 will place a pi character into source code with the editor. It will appear with the pi symbol. The compiler understands.
I currently use the Logitech MX518... I've had one for so long that the paint has started to wear off it. Still works perfectly though.
Which is exactly the feature he's abusing here: he's introducing error in the form of non-QRCode data in the middle of his QRCode, which eats away (significantly) at the error correction in order to look pretty.
Agreed, but recognizing that the context matters is important. The comment (which wasn't mine - btw) was a bit harsh, but it did put clearly into words one half of what I was thinking at the time.

As is so often the case, cool is not always the best option, and context matters more than we'd like, and more than some people realize.
I reside in India.
My request went through without a hitch (Opera11.50/Linux).

I think this is great idea for a version control book.
I work in a dual-vcs environment (Hg, git - Work, personal)
Ask HN: Does it matter to be a Computer Sc. student to enter the industry?
I am not a computer science student. But I am really passionate about coding. A lot of people keep telling me that my academic branch is different from what I like and it will not do me any good. Does it really matter if I am not a computer science student.
Malamud seeks to unlock Smithsonian archives
Aakasame Haddu (2011) Telugu Mp3 Songs Download - Tolly Mp3z
Aakasame Haddu (2011) Telugu Mp3 Songs Download - Tolly Mp3z
中国花生网
Ask HN: Where do you buy your SSL certificates?
Groupon IPO: The Silver Lining
Androids, blade runner and farmville
Venture capital mood cools in Silicon Valley
There is no "hacker style" to filing a good bug report. But I have a bee in my bonnet about bad ones - I often get the equivalent of dropping a car off at the garage for repair with just a note that "it makes a noise".
I agree. I've had better results listening to white noise.
Even with all the talk recently about how successive governments have failed the children of Britain, I still haven't heard any reasoned arguments about what can be done to change the situation.

The excessive drinking culture we have isn't fixed by controlling the price of alcohol or pub opening hours, and underage sex doesn't disappear with better sex education. These are all part of the culture that people are brought up in and can't be regulated away. Yet I've never heard anyone discuss how we can create a more positive culture.
Ground Rents For Sale
If you are selling freehold ground rents this property company can help. They sell all types of ground rent investments and cater for all investors.
The revolving door between Government regulatory jobs and positions in the very businesses regulated is pretty well-established at this point. I'd like to see some evidence to back up that assessment with regards to the US PTO, but it certainly doesn't strike me as unlikely.
8 grams of thorium could replace gasoline in cars
Do you need a social media sharing strategy?
Recent major change was the photo page redesign done this year no? (or was it last year?), and that redesign is good.

About the 1st point: totally agree. I use flickr to look for a good pictures and from time to time to post some of mine that are reasonably OK - for me it's not, and never has been, a site to post photos from last night's bash or socialize with people, that's what Facebook is for (and maybe G+ will be someday in the future (but it won't come easy for them)).
I also don't need the site to change every 6 months - if it works OK (and flickr works OK for me) then changing it is not really necessary (or at least, not that important).
> I don't think it's true (anymore) that people judge you by your ethnicity, social status, clothes, gender etc as I feel this article may imply without stating explicitly.

Perhaps less pertinent than before, but I suggest its still extremely important.

I can't think of a better link, but OKCupid shows how peoples (by default private) expressed beliefs in questions were significantly different from their actual actions (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-...)
Selling Sitting Tenants
simcop2387 is right in that the biology here gives them a leg-up on what would otherwise be an even more difficult problem. The whole class of lentiviruses (of which HIV is part) are useful for delivering genes to target cells. In this case, HIV is very good at finding T-cells which are exactly what whas needed here to trigger the immune response.

You are correct that they are using the HIV virus to reprogram the T-cells. They basically are making them express a very specific protein on their surface which allows them to seek out the tumor cells. When they find one, that protein is "wired up" to the cells' ordinary immune system genes that do their thing as they normally would.

Basically, the T-cell is like a hit man. It shows up, punches a bunch of holes in the target cell's membrane. Then it dumps a bunch of enzymes in there that go in and break important stuff. Once the chaos reaches a certain point, the target cell decides all is lost and it pushes the big, red "self destruct" button and goes through programmed cell death (apoptosis).

The actual work to make the viral vector and test it in mice was published in a study in 2009, so this new article is news because it's the follow-up where things were done in humans the first time (and they actually worked). From looking over the literature, apparently people have been trying this for some time but it has been failing for one reason or another.
China Points Fingers at U.S. Over Cyber Attacks
Name plates | name plate | nameplate - YouTube
I appreciate the thought, but I'm pretty strongly opposed to charging for tech books (http://openmymind.net/2011/3/31/Why-I%27d-Never-Charge-For-A...) and having to charge just so someone else can't isn't right.
See also MP Louise Mensch's twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/#!/LouiseMensch/status/10175449570018508...

"And really, stop w/ all the dramatics. Nobody is talking about "shutting down Twitter". It's about listening to police & a couple hours off." amongst other opinions.
One might have hoped that a leader in a democratic society would have thought carefully and fully before suggesting that a type of media be regulated or restricted. It is sad that Cameron instead chooses to indulge in irresponsible speculation about the value of such measures.

Indeed, it would seem that the spread of the rioting and looting can most easily be explained by people watching television and seeing others get away with such crimes.
What a great idea. Will future updates be available as well? Perhaps in a DVCS for easy access?

I'd be a happy man if ALL tech books lived in a DVCS. Users could fork it, push updates, fixes, etc. and the author could integrate changes as they see fit. No more searching for errata URLs, simply update your repository.

I'd even pay for this.

A great example of where this idea could be really useful is with Linux books like 'Linux Device Drivers', or 'Understanding the Linux Kernel'. These books are often out of date at the time they're published. I'd happily pay for access to them in a repository somewhere.

This is not unlike how the Pragmatic Bookshelf (http://pragprog.com/)works today with the exception that you have to wait for new book versions to become available, then regenerate them in your e-version format of choice. It'd be much more useful if the community of users could contribute back to the book source repository at their leisure.
This looks very interesting, but the it's a bit difficult to figure out what it actually is from the website. My impression is that it's like a more featureful take on Unison ("two-way rsync" iirc) with a central server to facilitate NAT traversal.

I suppose they probably haven't figured out their eventual pricing model, but I'd certainly pay a few bucks a month just for coordinating NAT traversal, papering over dynamic IPs and a web interface to set sync policy. For the most part, when my computers are sync'd peer-to-peer, I really don't need or want a copy of my data in the cloud -- my boxes _are_ the cloud. That means that their typical incremental cost per user would be practically zero.
While NaCl poses security concerns, they have invested a lot of effort to make the sandbox secure. Their first two papers deal with this quite a bit [1,2] and the new paper seems to expand on this more, but I haven't read it yet [3]. ActiveX doesn't even compare -- it's just running native code.

[1]http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarba...
[2]http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/NaCl_SFI.pd...
[3]http://naclports.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/experimental/v...

More about NaCl (http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/)

Portable NaCl (PNaCl) looked very promising (targeting LLVM (bytecode) and then re-targeting your native architecture) but I haven't heard anything about it lately.
Couldn't a website provide links to all those things? Without having to pull a camera out of your pocket?

I guess you could take time to snap a picture that means nothing to the human eye, I'd rather just tap it in or write it down. At least nothing requires them, like you said.
Honda plans nuclear mission for ASIMO robot
Understood. Now that you mentioned that, I can more clearly see what you were getting at with the article.
I can't seem to find the address of his shop. Is he on Tottenham High Street? I'm past due for a haircut.
Yahoo, which once held great promise, seems to have become the company that buys things and fails with them. Some examples off the top of my head:

Konfabulator (Yahoo Widgets), Geocites, Delicious, Flickr, Broadcast.com.

Heck, they don't even provide their own search results anymore. Can anyone think of something that Yahoo has bought that has flourished under them?
Beautiful homepage but there is an extra word in the paragraph "Unlimited Storage":
"AeroFS lets you can sync all the data"

Also I don't fully understand the product from just the first page. Who is your target audience?
No, black hat would be more comment backlink blasts and such, using tools like scrapebox.

I think it's called "white hat" more so than "black hat" because it's usually "safe" to do so. i.e., Google will not be able to automatically detect these links which are against their terms of service to penalize them.
Scanning the Universe in 3D. The Hottest Kinect Video Yet?
Slightly OT, but I've read that humans simplify ball catching by moving in such a way as to keep the ball in the same place in their field of view. There might be more details in the papers below, but paywalled so I don't know:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01679457939...

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1014...

"the eyes and/or the head move so that the image of the moving object is maintained at the same place on the fovea"
Smart Skin: Electronics That Stick and Stretch Like a Temporary Tattoo
My request went through (Philippines) :) I hope it comes. I'd like to show my workmates the beauty of version control and what they're missing.

There's a free online version (also PDF) http://www.ericsink.com/vcbe/index.html
Rumor Hints at September 7 iPod Event | Rumor | The Mac Observer
Acer Iconia Tab A100 on sale now 
Acer’s Iconia Tab A100 has finally gone on sale in the US, making it the first Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet with a 7-inch screen to hit shelves. Priced from $329.99, the A100 runs on NVIDIA’s dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor and has a 1024 x 600 16:10 touchscreen, 5-megapixel rear camera with autofocus and an LED flash, and a front-facing 2-megapixel camera for video calls. There’s also WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and MicroHDMI.
I've generally seen it been called white-hat. In my (limited) experience, black-hat is generally used to reference automatic link building, content spinning etc., while white-hat to reference link building through other means that Google will(or can) not automatically penalize.
It was 10AM for me :)