skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is cool and all, but I'd really like Amazon to make a DX with an extra inch of space, so it's the size of a real book, and I can read PDFs on it without squinting.
Hogwarts Castle created in Minecraft
Watch,Shark Night 3D,online,megavideo
watch,Shark Night 3D,online,megavideo
But as presented in a small boat friends college to discover the lake was filled with hundreds of large meat-eating sharks,
>> they are designers who considered the programming

I got the impression that they are bankers from the post, where do they say they are designers?
I think this comment from Wesley Chun on the GAE team is key:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/obfGjbIkOTI...

"your app can be slashdotted or tweeted by demi moore -- http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/10/mobile-app-creat... -- or perhaps you may need to build/host something on the scale of both the royal wedding blog and event livestream with traffic numbers that are mindblowing -- http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/royal-wedding-be... ... these are the reasons for using App Engine. it was not meant as free/cheap generic app-hosting but to provide a premium service that's difficult to get elsewhere in the market. if you're just after the former, there are plenty of options for you."

My take-away is that GAE is hard to justify unless your usage pattern is unpredictable and spike-y. I'm taking the long weekend to give dotcloud a serious test-drive.
Fast flip provided absolutely brilliant way of news browsing and skimming, I will miss it a lot as well.
I started using Everything (http://www.voidtools.com/) to help mitigate XP's slow searching and still use it today, even with Win7's much improved search functionality.

Everything Search only indexes file names, so you can't search via date modified or anything like that, but it is super-fast and supports regular expressions. Need to find a word doc that begins with 'ca'? Just type '^ca.*\.docx?', instant results.
All of the below products launched, at the time, with poorer spec sheet features/price than their competitors, and then proceeded to annihilate said competitors:

- MacBook/Pro

- iPhone

- BlackBerry

- iPod

- Android

- Wii

When are we as the geek community going to stop worshipping the spec sheet and realize that mainstream consumers can't give two shits about it?
Thanks crenshaw. In the near future, we plan to do a little more behind the scenes as well as a few more in depth technical write ups that focus on specific aspects of the project. Sounds crazy, but there was a lot to talk about for a short 48 hour period and we had to cut it down for this post.
Google Acquires Zave Networks To Bulk Up Commerce
SQL support is in progress:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/l0D...
I don't buy the idea that tablets are getting more optimised for consumption. Just take a look at the app store to see the huge amount of music production software available, some of it replacing music $500+ hardware for $30. And even with its approval process, I find the app store a bad example of the cathedral model considering how all app makers are treated equally. Sure, you have to buy an external keyboard to write longer content on the new tablets, but if the post-PC era happens, I find it hard to believe that content creators will be stopped by that. Time will tell, of course.
Here's my complaint:

I, and many others, spent a lot of time figuring out how to write apps that do it the "app engine way":

* Fast completes (30 second timeout)
* Offloading to task queues when you cant
* Channels
* Blobstore two-phase upload urls
* Mail eccentricities

We did so, because we believe Google when they told us If you write your apps in this really weird way then we will be able to give you scale and cost benefits that you wont be able to get elsewhere

We believed them, because it seemed reasonable. We laughed at those who complained that django would hit the 30-second limit: "Its not a general hosting! Figure out the App Engine way!" And we educated on how to do it right, and many were happy.

Well, it turns out that it is general purpose hosting, with all of the costs, and yet also with all of the (once rational, now bullshit) idiosyncrasies.

---

But that's not the biggest complaint. The biggest complaint is that when my friends and peers objected to App Engine, its strange requirements and its potential lock in, they were right and I am a fucking naive idiot. And I really don't like to be proven a naive idiot. I put my faith in Google's engineers and they have utterly destroyed my credibility. THIS more than anything is the cost to me.
VimClojure, http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2501

slimv, http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531
Ask HN: New Laptop, No OS, Where To Buy?
Is there an online retailer you would buy from if you needed a new laptop as your development machine?

Has to be under $500 and no OS. Will just do a fresh Ubuntu install.

Thanks for the guidance -
Aardvark has never been totally awesome to the point where I would use it to ask questions myself, but it has done a really good job sending me IM's asking me questions that are really relevant to things I'm reasonably well read on.

I think it was a really neat idea, kinda sad to see it go, even though it's kind of been a wasteland since the acquisition. Which I guess is what the Google acquisitions mostly have been lately, "talent acquisitions" rather than "we want to get into this business" acquisitions.
One (interesting?) thing to note is the Chrome comic was drawn by Scott McCloud, professional comic book artist extroidinare.

The Correlate comic was drawn by Manu Cornet, who's a Googler: https://plus.google.com/106154493978299996445/posts
I am optimistic that we will see those higher-end tools in tablet form sooner, rather than later. All it would really take is a step up in multi-touch precision. Steve Jobs has famously ripped on the stylus, but to have fine pen precision (like Wacom already offers) in additional to simple finger manipulation could end all doubt about a tablet's ability to replace a PC. It could switch from writing/drawing/manipulating with a gigantic crayon, to a fine mechanical pencil.
What do you call the black rods of steel in your prison cell window in Apple Police Headquarters?

Genius bars.
Have you played with viper-mode?
Gorgeous iNecklace is Adafruit Industries New Open Source Geek Couture Accessory
Ask HN: is Google search down?
That's not the point. Amazon IS including their android app store with the tablet and if the tablet only supports old android api's then developers will need to write seperate code for regular android and kindle android.
Smart TV Just Got Smarter - With Mind Control
Google Correlate as well as Trends are awesome. Why is google providing these data mining services for free to everyone? How are they making money from it?
I like the new design. How do you know they didn't AB test it?
Higgs Boson -the song
At least for me and my friends in Sedona AZ, Google search has been down for quite a while but other Google services like G+ seem to be fine.
By far the most interesting quote from Siegler's article:

Overall, the UI of this Kindle felt very responsive. You can flick through the carousel seamlessly. This is something Amazon has apparently been working on quite a bit, I’m told. And they continue to.

If Amazon gets this right, they're a long way towards recreating the iPad UX. In fact, this entire article suggests that the Kindle tablet will be the first widely adopted non-iPad tablet. In addition to the above:

1. The interface sounds great. I am a humongous fan of the Kindle Cloud Reader and iOS interfaces, and I believe they're designed very well. Users can expect a well-designed tablet from Amazon.

2. Users can draw from a central source for their content. Amazon will provide all the movies, music, and books you need--something every other Android tablet has lacked so far. Mainstream users will appreciate the centralized content provision, especially from a company as respected as Amazon.

3. Cutting the Android Market solves a lot of potential issues: no spyware, no OS incompatibilities, no apps with large hardware requirements. Everything in the Amazon Appstore will work on this Kindle (I expect it to be a requirement for admission).

This tablet sounds very...Apple-like. A very closed ecosystem with access to interesting content and a curated app store. I would buy it if I was shopping for a tablet.
No need to be a jerk and jump to conclusions...I thought I added something with that comment (apparently not!)
Reverse Demo Day: Angels Pitch Entrepreneurs
This needs a language filter option users can toggle on or off. Would love to have my niece play but there's some questionable content there.
Supposedly, perl was originally pearl. Practical Extraction and Report Language. The 'a' got dropped because Larry wanted the name to be a four-letter word.
The 25 Best Tech Companies To Work For In 2011
The iPad has also had an explosion of content. Why is that not all the evidence you need?
This whole trope about creation vs consumption is pointing fingers in the wrong direction: why blame the iPad, when a lot of the creativity is going into tweets and likes? You mention 3 older social networks as being some kind of revolution, well, what about FB, twitter, G+, etc? We are all consuming each others creations, so the whole centralized authority bit is overblown.
That's not to rip on social tools, or the iPad. Just pointing out that your global conversation has evolved, not died.
Batshit Crazy -the Michele Bachmann Song
I never said it wasn't tested. I said it hasn't had the years of AB test the previous standard design had.
pygame seems the best choice for starters, in the about/rules page they mention this http://www.pygame.org/wiki/CookBook ,seems really handy
I really hope they don't hope to make this a replacement for their eink non-backlit devices. That would be a disaster :(
I always thought the official name was "Practical Extraction and Report Language", or perl for short.

I think that's a backronym (albeit from L. Wall).

http://wordsmith.org/words/backronym.html
This applies to countless run-of-the-mill, crappy, casual and free games. As an example, the "energy" system makes me cringe. Instead of offering a game to pick up and play, it limits you and beckons you to come back for more later, unless you pay $5.99 now! or something.

I think the energy system in this sense is usually typical of a poor game, from what I've experienced. It would be hard to get it to work unless it was auxiliary to the game in some well-implemented sense.
HDFC Bank Hacked and discovered SQL Injection Vulnerability
But even if I have everything in Dropbox, I still need to search for documents locally.
I'm seeing a 50x (5000%) $ increase and I wrote my app from scratch "by the GAE book". It almost seems as if those of us who put the effort in to do it the GAE way are worse off than those who just uploaded django.
I had a co-worker once that used Emacs and would always enable viper mode for me when I came to help him on his computer. Every time I used it, I always managed to break it or expose some way it didn't work! It left me with a bad impression, but I guess I could give it a try again.
I've heard of 3 out of 10 of these highly successful startups. I think we call ourselves successes prematurely to try to accelerate the arrival of true success. Again today a very good friend who runs a startup with great potential trumpeted the fact that he is profitable. Looking deeper, turns out he's no longer pouring cash into the company, but unable to pay himself a salary.

Lets cut the bullshit guys. You're "highly successful" when you're able to pay yourself and your employees above market rate salaries and retain profit for growth.

Edit: ...as well as being able to start making a dent in the debt you may have accumulated during the cash burning phase of your startup. If you want a really fucking scary exercise, plot your cashflows to date and do a NPV or IRR calculation on the flows. You'll have quite the come-to-jesus moment and will realize how deep the hole is you need to climb out of before you can call yourself successful.
I don't know, I don't even like how the startup industry currently works.

It mostly looks like a wealth transfer from the wealthy to the children of yuppies to me.

I don't see much business value actually being created.
I'd support this more if they weren't using https - since the user's going to run it anyway, there's no real advantage over any other means of getting this file onto their system. Well-known http:// urls are worse since they allow interesting spoofing attacks if they become popular.
Don't forget that Heroku's "PORT" is a string while app.listen will expect an int. Easy fix, just parseInt(process.env.PORT).
Pearls are formed in response to constant irritation over a long period of time.
And I'm sure the people in charge of the F500 IT systems and PCI compliance are super frustrated at these basecamp/campfire implementors. "Just works" can often mean, "ignores some really important organizational rules," or "creates a bunch of new work for someone else." These rules are sometimes in place for a reason. Not all system constraints are waste.
Music to code by. Enjoy.
Free Drawing Software
It's not that hard to make predictions like this and have them be eventually confirmed true. In fact, the weakest predictions often seem the most prescient since they are achieved the farthest into the future.

I'll just go on the record here with flying cars, 300 year lifespans, portable holograms, human-embedded electronics that give superhuman sensory abilities, etc...
I can't speak for the aardvark team but I would feel devastated having in so many years of hard work only to see my baby being terminated, not because it's a bad product but simply because it doesn't fit the broader vision of the company that acquired you. Not sure I could stay at a place like that.
Or, It's a nightmare for Amazon's competitors making Honeycomb tablets, the sales of which are so mediocre that if the Kindle Tablet gains any traction at ALL developers will wonder why bother with any other Android tablet?
If you don't mind would you elaborate on what type of content you meant when you said: "centralized authority produces the content for passive users to consume". When I think of content the first thing that comes to mind is stuff like image editing (Photoshop, LR3,Aperture etc) and video editing because those are two realms I spend my free time in. I didn't get what you meant by your statement so that's why I asked.

And just to be clear I do believe that tablets are aimed at content consumption and not so much content creation, and I believe that to be a good thing. Why? Well people don't need a $2000 laptop to surf the web and check email.
AT&T looks to make a deal with DOJ on T-Mobile (will only buy 75% of T-Mobile)
A single flag on the new page pretty much kills an article.

Typically the way that a story gets upvoted is that if it receives enough votes in the first 30 minutes of being posted (typically <10) it gets to the front page, once it gets to the front page far more people see it and vote for it so it gets to stay there.

Essentially it comes down to luck whether a link gets enough votes in that first 30 minutes to hit the front page. If someone flags an article in that first 30 minutes before it hits the front page then it almost certainly never will. Very few articles get enough votes on the new page to overcome the flag penalty.

It means it's trivial for anyone to kill an article they don't want to appear on the front-page (i.e a negative article about their startup or a positive one about a competitor).
1) I don't know much about being on a sports team as an adult or parent, but the site feels snappy so I like it :)

2) It definitely sounds like you're solving a problem a bit more general than just sports teams, so you may be selling yourself short. It sounds like something that could be used for any kind of 'meetup' style organization (where there are some scheduling issues plus some financial issues). I remember needing something like this many times in college when everybody was a part of a million different student organizations. So... you could make the main pitch more general but than have a sports team as your primary case-study.

2) In my humble opinion, you aren't likely to do anything with photo sharing that hasn't been done before, and it doesn't look like you're very focused on it anyway. If it was me, I wouldn't bother with that aspect.
As Wesley Chung noted in his reply on the GAE mailing list, GAE is designed for companies who get very unpredictable traffic. If you get a very predictable traffic, it's significantly cheaper hosting on AWS. Some of my apps previously cost $40 a month, now cost almost $300 per month. I can definitely run these apps on Linode for a fraction of the cost.

I picked GAE mainly because it was fast to setup, but I could have equally chosen Heroku over app engine when I first built it. In hindsight, I wish I had.
Yes, and it's brilliantly easy. Cedar stack is a pleasure to work with.

The best part about using Heroku for NodeJS apps is that I can focus more on writing my app code and less on sysadmin-related tasks. I don't have to worry very much about provisioning or scaling ("heroku scale web=2" tadaaa).

The downsides include cost (this depends on a variety of factors of course, e.g. what 3rd party plugins you're using) and lack of "control" (if you care about that sort of thing). Also, they don't support WebSockets (yet).

<self-promotion-warning>
My Node Knockout app is running nodejs/mongo/redis/socket.io (resorting to long-polling since Heroku doesn't support Websockets, but it's quick enough): http://restalytics.com (sorry, the home page is kinda busted, but scroll down to the bottom and log in with nkodemo@restalytics.com/nkodemo if you'd like to see a working demo. Modern browsers only).
</self-promotion-warning>

Edit: I'm linking to my app to show you an example of a working NodeJS app on Heroku, but I've wrapped it in a self-promotion-warning regardless to preemptively fend off any downvotes that I might get as a result of people misunderstanding my intentions.

Edit2: Full disclosure, I happen to work at Salesforce.com.
Facebook is forking Android in a similar fashion.
> "For an organisation supposedly devoted to human rights, the apparent lack of concern when faced with such a grave charge was overwhelming."

I've had this sense about Wikileaks for quite a while, now. They present themselves as an intelligence agency for the people, devoted to human rights. But they don't conduct themselves like an intelligence agency; they're sloppy and careless, with few safeguards in place. They also don't focus well on human rights; they drum up more publicity for US diplomatic cables than, for example, Chinese dissidents. They talk about the importance of openness, going so far as to expose the names of informants in foreign countries, but try to keep their own internal information secret.

I love the idea of Wikileaks, but the implementation sucks.
If you want to reach a wide audience on Android, you already need to be prepared to support older Android releases, because most phones don't get upgraded after purchase.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that if this did happen it was probably a case of an individual/team going too far and not some shift in Apple writ large. If you saw a night manager at Wendy's punch someone in the face you wouldn't assume it was corporate policy.
I think the disconnect here is you're simply seeing the ipad as a pc replacement when the reality is the ipad is a new category that while partially replacing PCs also can partially replaces many other things: books, magazines, newspapers, the radio on your desk, the bedside clock, photo albums, etc.

Someone like Ugh or myself sees you call all of this awesome a "step back" and laughs.

I think you've sold the iPad short too early. Intent or not it will be a huge device for content creation the same way the iphone is a huge device for content creation -- the best camera you have is the one you have with you and as Flickr attests, iPhone 4 is used by millions every day for creation.

Similarly the iPad will be huge and Apple has already recognized this with signature first party apps like GarageBand, iMovie, Pages, Numbers. I have a feeling in years to come a lot of musicians will say that the best keyboard, drum set, guitar, etc that you have is the one you have with you.

Do you like to write sometimes? There's an app for that. When you're not at your desk will the best typewriter be the one you have with you? Probably.

Do you like to draw and doodle sometimes? There's an app for that. When you're not at your desk will the best drawing and painting studio be the one you have with you? Probably.
Spray-on clothing - YouTube
Not quite right. There is some support for ARC for iOS 4 (that is bundled with the compiled app). Some more at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6308425/ios-5-best-practi... .
Getting JSON out of Google Spreadsheets
Mark Bittman on the politics of the plate (video)
> No, wait. Yes I am. I taught a course at my university on the topic.

Teaching a course seems to be an excellent way to learn the basics. It does not make you an expert, though - that needs a couple years of practice.
That is the most awesome product name ever. And it looks quite good too.

It's a shame it's hosted on Google App Engine though. Given their new pricing changes, you might have to move it. Maybe you should launch Noogle Gap Engine...
Damn it. It appears the only solution is limiting the amount of instances in the application settings. I manage a free sync service with approximately 20,000 active users on App Engine. I just checked the billing history for our application and saw similar results, the cost will increase 10 fold.
The orders didn't necessarily come from the top. Could have been this ex-cop guy taking matters into his own hands.
Regarding the GPU (BCM2763?):

Can you share any more details on the user space situation? Will there be Xorg/Mesa/Gallium support? Will you be relying on Broadcom's driver team for updates, if any, or do you guys have driver source under NDA with which you can support the GPU in future?

This seems to be the biggest concern for many who are looking at the platform. Just trying to gauge what kind of useful lifespan this board will have with regards to keeping an up to date Linux distro running on it. There's going to be a lot of flux and ABI changes ahead in the Linux graphics stack. Some more GPU details on your Wiki would be great if you have them available.
For $81/month, you can get a 4 processor 2GB Linode box, which is enough to run a few dozen fun projects on there.
The "Google Experience" has always been an optional part of Android that required additional licensing, but all the major Android manufacturers have licensed it. The lack of it means that this diverges from the typical Android device much more than Samsung, HTC, or Motorola devices. When you throw in the fact that the main shell is considerably different (a content browser rather than a widget environment), I'd say that the use of the term "fork" is understandable, even if not quite right.
Though considering who it was, it would be more like the head of security for Wendy's corporate punching someone while investigating a theft.
Off line access to Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs