skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you install a package via the package managers on debian, ubuntu, fedora, and other major distros you can be reasonably sure that the packages aren't malicious because they've been security reviewed before they made it into APT/YUM/etc. Downloading some shell script off the internet and running it without even reading it first is a really bad idea by comparison.
That first claim, that it's as expressive as Ruby, just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. (I've never used Ruby much, but I know my Python, and I'm going to assume they're approximately equally expressive). In no sane Python codebase would you see copy-paste that looks like:

https://github.com/foursquare/rogue/blob/master/src/main/sca...

or

the function/tuple/product classes found here: https://github.com/scala/scala/tree/master/src/library/scala
Yes the bit of paper has to come from The Right Sort of Place. KA probably doesn't count. And that's why The Right Sort of Places aren't worried.
Razor Dune Buggy - Hot Toy or Waste of Money?
Love this kids dune buggy! I want one for me...
No way. It will be a year at best to hook people to it. It will be their "blade" to the tablet "razor".
There are countless times over the past several thousand years when you could have said that, but our tools for production have managed to get a bit better since 2000 BC.
I simply mean it in the sense of the dictionary definition:

interesting |ˈint(ə)ristiNG, ˈintəˌrestiNG|
adjective

arousing curiosity or interest; holding or catching the
attention: an interesting debate | it will be very
interesting to see what they come up with.

The man writes on a variety of topics, and whether one agrees with his opinions or thinks they are weird (or both!), one should find them to arouse curiosity, and catch and hold ones attention--and hence they are "interesting".
Production isn't limited to what you can and can't do with a desktop PC... I think what OP is suggesting is that we should be using computers to help people actively build more stuff, as using them to aid in passive consumption of things others have made.
That's part of my point. The R&D is going into optimizing consumption instead of enabling production. I think there's still room for making it easier for people to produce expressive content. I don't think I'm necessarily imaginative enough to think of many, or the best, but I've started to try.[0] I think some people, particularly those working on Web stuff, are also trying. But I think web software is only one vector. Other vectors include: hardware, operating systems, native applications.

[0]: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9325300749/a-different-kind-o...
Why I Felt I Had To Turn My Back On Wikileaks
How does it stop following up? After being triggered once?
California is also the most populous state in the US. Looking at one figure without the other is rather silly.

Per capita, California does not bring in the highest amount of revenue of any state. In 2008 (the latest year I could quickly find data for), its #8 (#9 if you include DC). As a portion of personal income, CA is #11 or #12 (with DC).

Sources:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
Good point.
That guy Marco from instapaper talked about this issue some time ago but didn't mention that apple makes it hard to specify a minimum os version in any kind of informed way.
So I decided to grit my teeth and carry on. Dismay mounted, however, with the arrival of Israel Shamir, a self-styled Russian "peace campaigner" with a long history of antisemitic writing. Shamir was introduced to the team under the pseudonym Adam, and it was only several weeks after he had left – with a huge cache of unredacted cables – that most of us started to find out who he was.

Press enquiries started to trickle in. A little research revealed his unsavoury history, but I was told Julian would be unwilling for WikiLeaks to publish anything critical of Shamir. Instead, shamefully, we put out a statement simply distancing WikiLeaks from him.

There followed even more damning allegations. Shamir had been seen leaving the interior ministry of Belarus, an eastern European dictatorship.

The next day, the country's dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, boasted he would start a Belarusian WikiLeaks showing the US was funding his political rivals.

Scores of arrests of opposition activists followed the country's elections – but Shamir wrote a piece painting an idyllic picture of free, fair, elections in a happy country.

Human rights groups demanded answers, amid fears that Belarus may have received material from the cables. No answers were supplied. Julian would not look into the matter.
Yes, I do that stuff. I have always done it. I now do it on a more appropriate device. It’s consumption and it’s fun. Not something to scoff at. (Mine was more a response to the central authority bullshit which is obvious nonsense.)

It doesn’t matter what I did or did not produce with the iPad. Computers are cheap, software is cheap, creation was never as easy as it is today. We are living in a golden age of content creation but content creation is not for everyone. So what.
I use Desktop frequently. It's often the only way I can find things on my computer.

"Desktop: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing"

OK, but I'm pretty sure most files are still stored locally on most computers. I've barely ever used Windows own search feature. I hope it's up to scratch.
Ask HN: Is a designer 'technical'?
Always been asking myself that.
Well, it is Android in the sense that it shares the same API and thus runs Android apps from the Amazon Appstore.
The ability to downvote gets unlocked when you get enough karma. There are other abilities (e.g. creating a poll, flagging posts). I don't know whether there's a definitive list with thresholds anywhere (possibly in the Arc source code to HN).
I'm surprised Google Desktop is shutting down. A lot of my coworkers use this and rely on this quite heavily. I used it a lot myself.

There certainly is a need to index and search the vast amount of data that's now in our ever growing HDs. Is the search feature in the latest Windows versions capable of tackling this?
If you look behind the numbers they aren't as impressive as they sound.

GE, for instance, has 287.000 employees, and it only takes one to tick them off in the stat they present here. A product that has some traction, as 37signals does, will almost certainly include a few people in large companies.

They are very good at marketing though...
Nokia & Microsoft let a patent troll fight for them
Doing a queue system where the workers wait in a busy-loop is pretty insane.

I'm saying that as the author of Delayed::Job so i'm pretty much responsible for those shenanigans.
We're going back to something more like the broadcast television model, where a more or less centralized authority produces the content for passive users to consume.

That’s the sentence I was responding to. Central authority bullshit and all.
He was still involved in the company, and for example, launched Lion in June. I find it hard to believe that Steve Jobs didn't know about another phone being lost. That's not the type of thing the acting CEO keeps from the CEO for fear of bothering him.
Wow, $50M for Aardvark & shut down in a year. Sometimes I really don't get things like this.
On Win7, the jump is due to WinSxS. Every DLL several times and several versions. DLL hell solved.
Ask HN: Tool that lets you identify changes an app makes to the disk?
Similar to using the time command ($ time <app>) in a shell to see duration of execution, I wondered if there's something that will be similarly executed and give you a read-out of the changes an app makes to disk.
I think this is a symptom of lack of imagination and not of some kind of conceptual wall. We're still dragging along a lot of old baggage and assumptions.
The most interesting part to me was that they are designers who considered the programming to be the most important part. As a programmer, I find the design to be the most important part.

Maybe the perspectives change because if you're not good at something, but it's important, you need to make it priority #1 otherwise your project will fail. The thing you're already good at may still be important but since you could do it in your sleep, it's not priority #1.
There is Simplenote (http://simplenoteapp.com), which is a pretty no-frills web app that also integrates with a number of native apps (including Notational Velocity if you're on OS X).
I'm curious: does the term "bootstrapped" apply only to how you begin the business, or to the entire history? I tend to read it that way, but I can see where others might disagree.
Show HN: teamloopapp.com - team communication and management tool
Please check out our first product launch, teamloop. We built teamloop to help in the space of managing sports teams and help improve the communication of those teams. We used it internally for our kids teams this last baseball season and are now looking to open it up to others and build on the core functionality that's there. We are hoping to expand to support full leagues over the next few months.

While we are aimed at Sports teams it certainly can work for other types of teams (or groups). We currently use it to communicate and stay on top of the development of teamloop itself.

Please check it out and let us know what you think!

http://teamloopapp.com
Thanks for the in-depth answer. This actually reminds me of Chebyshev polynomials, which I was obsessed with in a very simple way last spring. But I'm not advanced enough in maths to draw any concrete connection.
Because people fuck up when nervous and scared? How many people do you think have said they would challenge an airplane hijacker? They would rescue someone from a burning building? They would donate to charity? Then how many actually did?
E-ink made the Kindle. Tablets are exciting, but reading a novel on a backlit screen is no fun, and if it were, we'd read on our cell phones, because they're easier to carry around.

This is disappointing. The Kindle 2 (the model I had) did one thing, and one thing phenomenally well. I don't want my kindle to be a Swiss army knife.
It seems like Amazon is gambling here that most users don't really care about apps that much, which jibes with my own intuitions about the android market. If you have a good web browser and email client the rest is unnecessary gravy, at least to a lot of people.
I think you kind of misunderstand what flagging is and it leads to you fear it unnecessarily. Flagging tends to be used as kind of a downvote, since HN lacks proper downvotes on articles. It reduces a post's ranking and, if flags accumulate much faster than upvotes, will cause the post to be killed. AFAIK, it doesn't ban you, your site or anything else, and certainly doesn't cause a magic hellban out of nowhere.
It actually says "$100 million in all time sales." Which means that they had sold $100 million worth of software since the time the company was founded. Still impressive, but very different than $100 million in revenue per year.
can you imagine getting sued by the babysitter? "HEY MAN I WANT MY 2 HOUR BREAK AND I WANT BENEFITS. ALL OF THEM. PWNED."
Netflix shares fall after stumble with starz
* Google’s Android Market is nowhere to be found. In fact,no Google app is anywhere to be found. This is Android fully forked. My understanding is that the Kindle OS was built on top of some version of Android prior to 2.2.*

MG goes on to say it is smooth and responsive. And I think many Apps are going to be incompatible with anything less than Android 2.2. Given this I would think Amazon will want to have at least 2.2 on there.

Would be kinda sad if they ran 1.6 on it in 2011!

[Edit] May be it is 2.1 - AWS SDK for Android Requires Android 2.1 (API Level 7) or higher. Oh well may be they will keep it up to date!
Why being dirt poor is fantastic
If you want to try lots of things failure has to be cheap, and part of cheap failure is failing fast. I think 20% time almost guarantees that they keep trying new things, though.
The IE7/IE8 compatibility modes are notoriously unreliable, e.g.:

Most importantly, why does my page not work in IE7, even though it works in IE7 mode in IE9?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5993222/why-does-my-page-...

IE9’s emulation of older IE document modes makes this easier but those emulations are not exact.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-multip...
So they built a service called "App Engine" and it turns out that the "engines" that run my "app" are exactly the parts that Google doesn't have enough of, and so they are going to charge me uncompetitive amounts of money per day?

Lets suppose that google doesn't have enough machines. Do they:

a) Massively increase the price to reduce customers?
b) Massively increase the number of machines?

You're saying "a".
It's fair to say validation and feedback from peers is a valid reason too, not just ego.
All this talk about robotic cars carrying people long distances reminds me of Robert Heinlein's short story "The Roads Must Roll". Huge, underground moving sidewalks running at 100 mph replace highways and railways as the dominant transportation method in the United States.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Roads_Mus...
So, you mean like everything on OSX and Windows, where you don't have such package management systems with (long-standing, trustable) benevolent hosts? Yeah, downloading some application off the internet and running them is a really bad idea - how is this worse?

edit: how about iOS? There have been news entries about them sending data where they shouldn't - that's a curated host. iOS is a lot more sandboxed, but that doesn't make the danger nonexistent.
Wha? If I want to create I can. It’s never been as easy as today. You are creating a false dichotomy.

The content I was consuming on my iPad – and that was my point – did not come from a central authority (no more than before when I consumed on my Laptop) and it’s enabled by the cheap tools available for content creation today.

I was listening to one awesome podcast by a guy who made podcasting his job and survives (extremely successfully) from donations alone.

I was browsing awesome webcomics from people who would never had a chance to make their comics accessible to as many people as they can today.

I was reading awesome Harry Potter fan fiction and tales from a lawyer doing his job.

All not possible only a decade (maybe two in some cases) ago. We are living in a golden ago of content creation. To be worried about tablets in that context is – sorry – crazy.
Yes. Having used Windows 7 at work and Leopard at home, Windows 7's start menu search functionality is just as good as Spotlight. It has, like Spotlight, let me treat my hard drive like a shapeless pile and still find everything I need quickly. It's also fast enough to use as an application launcher.
Oh geez. The "few bad apples" defense. The iPhone 5 is such a white-hot priority at Apple, I'd be surprised if this investigation somehow did not shoot up like lightning through the chain of command.
You made the most important comment in this thread.

I really would like to see TC clear this up. Do they really mean fork or, as I suspect and as you state, is this just Android without the google apps baked in?

Market is a bigger question. Without considering manually side loading the apps, I'm assuming that users will be able to install google apps on the device as they are, for the most part, all available via Android Market right now.

Given that Amazon doesn't provide mail, maps or any of the other useful google apps, I'm assuming that users will be able to download them from Android Market, somehow.
I was so puzzled when I got flagged that, for only the second time in many years, I emailed pg. Asked him what happened. Hell I thought it was a system bug. It had five votes in something like 20 minutes, then it was flagged. It went from being like 17th place to not appearing anywhere that I could find in the first 500 headlines. It wasn't just punished -- site volume was so high it was effectively gone.

That means any one person veto power over whatever you create, simply because they can, because they've been around. With a huge number of folks on-site, the system just can't work like that.
Not according to this PR on Jan 17, 2011:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/01/17Apple-Media-Adviso...

"At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company."
FactoryGirl 2.1.0 Brings the Heat
> If you install a package via the package managers on debian, ubuntu, fedora, and other major distros you can be reasonably sure that the packages aren't malicious because they've been security reviewed before they made it into APT/YUM/etc

When people are delivering software that isn't in the official repository, downloading a script and running it is no less secure than the alternatives.
Ridiculously Transparent
I disclaim I'm a Ruby nut, but all four apply to both. They both have qualities that can be seen as pros or cons by their respective fans. You'd need to be more specific with your requirements.

It is no big deal to learn enough of each to make a reasonable comparison in several hours.
Ron paul fema
That's exactly what I thought too. Was about to say, that would be the most epic 'Blog posts', if that's how 37Signals announces they were indeed in the Fortune 500. That would have been awesome.
Your point is well taken, but doesn't Celery want RabbitMQ? That's an awful lot of machinery for what is (in many apps) a very small problem.

We get to look at lots of people's Rails apps, and it appears that Resque is emerging as the de facto answer to this problem. A nice attribute of Resque is that for all the machinery Redis provides, it also solves the "memcache" problem and is probably a better utility player than $X-MQ.

If you have an app that already wants $X-MQ, Celery sounds very sensible. And having apps that want $X-MQ is a good thing, too.

And, not reinventing this wheel also makes sense.
> Bad trend in the open-source community. Please don't ask your users to install stuff this way. Not that you can't be trusted, it leads to people dropping their guard.

And what will be the right way to do it? The way people don't drop their guard? `./configure && make && sudo make install`? Or `sudo apt-get install`? How are any of these or many other options seemingly better than this?
This code is a complete abomination, why would you stick your neck out and defend it? What igorgue is saying is, even if somebody gave me this code, I wouldn't take it, and I concur.
How we built eightbitbeats.com in 48 hours
MongoDB uses capped collection internally for the oplog, which is very similar to my use-case. I have built an API to make this easier, i.e., there are no wheels being re-invented here.

In my use-case I am simply passing a message to a worker to indicate that it it must terminate. There are no adverse consequences if the 'job' fails.

I am most certainly not advocating that Karait solves all the world's queueing problems. It solves a specific problem I have, and I am confident in this assertion.

BTW, do you get some sort of fiduciary kick-back from the makers Celery ;)
DTrace?
Personal experience: no. It damages the entire team. I've seen how team morale improves when such a person departs.

Talked to a friend today who is way, way good at polo (the horse type). The head guy at his stable picks players (in South America) as follows: (1) he asks around for "nice" people. (2) he goes and watches them play. (3) he extends offers. Screening for potential members of the team happens in that order.
The fact that Colon deleted his LinkedIn profile very recently is a huge red flag.
I was going to ask about Resque as well. There's also a port of it (I don't know how well maintained it is, but it exists) that uses mongo as the backend instead of redis if you want to avoid adding another platform to your app.
What about well funded but pre-IPOd companies? Like Groupons, Zyngas, etc.
What kind of range do people get at newer, recently funded startups?
The 2% was from an NPR Marketplace story I heard on the radio last night.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/09/01/pm...

"The state estimates sales tax would bring in around $83 million from Amazon alone -- $317 million from all Internet retailers. Income tax from Amazon's promised 7,000 jobs might add up to 2.5 percent of that."

What we're comparing here is how much sales tax California would pull in from online retailers vs how much income tax those 7,000 new workers would pay to CA. You can't compare the gross payroll amount to the sales tax.
Oh, I agree 100%. That's not how I advocate using this (it's just an example I whipped together of the API). I use it in a distributed environment where the queue is checked periodically by subprocesses (mainly for shutdown events).
I think the Kindle-branded tablet will be successful and manage to compete with the iPad.

However, it's not going to win in the way people expect it to; I think it'll bring a lot of people into the post-PC tablet world and introduce a cheap tablet to a lot of people, but it's not going to revolutionize anything major and won't be able to do anything the iPad and/or TouchPad can't do.
Sure, if any of this is true it's very likely that Jobs was kept aware of the situation or even advised on how to proceed. At the end of the day this happened under Cook because Cook was the acting CEO.

edit: I don't know of a better way to describe Cooks role during this period as he was responsible for daily operations while Jobs retained the title of CEO. Acting CEO may not be the correct description.
The article does say that:

>Amazon has been working on a multi-touch screen/e-ink hybrid tablet device.

Presumably it's just much, much easier to develop the backlit tablet than one using e-ink. The technology will be there eventually, but it might take a while... :(
Devices and timezones
The part of Xcode 4 that tires me out
I feel backbone.js is a great base to build a custom mvc framework on top of it. However, for simple projects, I find it to be to heavyweight. I.e. it's really hard to have nested collections (You have to rebind all events). Views could give you a better hand for 90% of scenarios.. These are only 2 examples, but this is why I say it's more of a meta-framework. (I use backbone and patch it with lots of function, event binding, etc. and only then I can use it in my code).

So, I think there's still a place for a smaller, more 90%/10% mvc framework.. and have backbone.js to fallback on in the 10%. In fact, this framework could be build on top of backbone :)
> "she" is neuter for inanimate objects.

I had never considered that English has genders for objects. Airplanes, ships, and cars can be feminine objects (by convention of calling them "she"), but I can't think of other (common) examples inanimate objects referred to by "she". My telephone is an "it", not a "she". Perhaps "she" only applies to anthropomorphic inanimate objects?
I wrote Noogle Goatbook (http://www.nooglegoatbook.com/) 2 years ago when they first announced Google Notebook was being discontinued. It's still a little rough but I might continue working on it and/or stick it on github if people are interested.
I'm still leaning on SQS for most things. If it comes time to tear this piece of infrastructure out completely, I will likely go with Resque, or RabbitMQ.

Karait is a simple abstraction layer on top of MongoDB capped collections, good for a certain class of problems, certainly not a capital 'M' message queue.

An aside: I've worked with RabbitMQ in a large production environment. It is far from trivial to keep on its feet. It would be hard to get me excited about adding an extra layer of abstraction on top of it like Celery (I'd probably lean towards just using an AMQP library).
New Sony Reader WiFi Is Android Underneath
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