skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nah, I'm not opposed to that, really. Ideally they'd have enough reviewers to handle that, though. A somewhat-non-profit like Mozilla handles it for Firefox extensions.

For us, the annoyance is just that we have to wait on them for multiple steps in the process when there's no guarantee they'll even post a produced app to the store.

We'll hedge our bets, though, and make a slightly useful app to see how annoying the process is, and wait for our larger app afterwards.

So far, we've been waiting over a week just to get into the program far enough to be able to legitimately put the app on our test iPhones. The app we're working on is worthless in the simulator, so to even debug it we need to get it on the phone itself. Waiting a few weeks to even debug your app is a bit demotivating. I whine here partly as a word of caution to anyone on a tight schedule.
I am a charismatic figure, often seen leaping tall buildings in a single bound or moving faster than a speeding bullet. I have been known to build houses for the homeless in the slums of Harlem on my lunch breaks. I walk old ladies across the street, I write motivational speeches, and I double down on twenty and win - all in half an hour. I sleep in a Yoga position on a bed of nails while drinking water. Occasionally, I run the New York Marathon and win. I take women’s breaths away with my divine artwork.

I move so quickly I make Jet Li look like a chump and my deft-defying footwork leaves Michael Jordan in awe. I am wanted in 2,359 countries as a political outlaw and am worshipped by a small Pigmy tribe in Africa. Using a pair of chopsticks and soy sauce I once saved a small Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn from the Asian Mafia. I build mainframe telecommunication networks for fun and single handedly defeated twenty 5 yr. olds in a game of Dodge Ball. I’ve been banned from playing the lottery because I win so much. In a Hyundai Excel I ran the quarter mile in the high 9’s. My incredible good looks are such that I make lesbians go straight.

Scientists have preserved my DNA for the cloning of a future biogenetically engineered army to take over the world. I coined the phrase “Bootie Call” and your sister once had a crush on me not so long ago. I write articles for GQ, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times just to amuse myself. I scored a 1600 on the SAT.
DMOZ > Altavista > Google
Classrooms of the Heart - John Gatto (1991)
Personally, I think it's more obnoxious than awkward. I can't see anyone's political views being positively influenced by a WiFi network named "Obama2008".
Apparently within the last the last year or so there have been many videos posted on YouTube relating to John Taylor Gatto, and a bunch of them are actually pretty good.
We generally have the rule that as authors we write the blog for ourselves first - then we either keep it internal or publish it externally.

It's actually a great documentation tool and really helps record and solidify thinking that you might never get down on paper - particularly when we're dealing with topics that would not usually be documented via the usual processes (e.g. non-technical).
Dell Mini 9 Netbook Unboxing
Reminds me of Apple's early days, when they didn't have an easy way for third parties to license their apps, their OS ended up without quality applications, and then Windows 3.1 ate their lunch... Anyone remember AmiPro?
Myspace, on the other hand, is harder to get through than mobile carriers. I've basically given up.
As a financially challenged high school senior I would need one for my three math classes (Calc, Adv Functs, and Data Mgmt.) and physics in the same semester. Suffice it to say, it will help immensely. With university admissions coming up soon I will definitely use it for my future CS degree, so I can guarantee it a good and productive home.

Thanks.
I don't understand the tagline. I'd guess it's somehow a dig at Squeak, but I don't get it.
The book that this is taken from is one of my all-time favorites, a quirky classic that deserves to be better known. Underneath its irreverence are quite a few profound insights. (I'd quote a couple but I leant out my copy.)

More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182937

Edit: oh yeah, the book is http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/dp...
Could There Be More To Google, Android, Chrome, & Gears Than Meets The Eye?
Check out Paul Heckbert's ray tracing business card at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/ (you'll need to load the page, then search for "business card"). The files themselves are chunks of PostScript code -- they can be viewed with GhostScript or Illustrator.
Silverlight is more of a Flash competitor than an AIR competitor. Chrome + Gears is kind of AIR-like, but it's a different approach to the same goal. More like Mozilla Prism.

I think offline/desktop access (whichever way you get it done) is an important step for the adoption of rich Internet apps.
2d Collision Detection as Done in the game "N"
You guys are just being paranoid. Salesforce runs fine within the corporate environment. Besides, they copied the Salesforce IP restriction configuration for extra security. I'm betting that the corporations will embrace it.
Well, their corporate sign-up for SAAS is one of the best mechanisms I've seen for grassroots growth in an organization. It has a lot of potential in lots of different areas.

Again and again and again in history, new technology first comes in the front door of the business before it comes anywhere near the loading dock. (I.e. employees adopt before IT/management recognizes the usefulness.) Their signup model really takes advantage of that fact. I'm super-excited to try it out for some of our upcoming releases, and it's even given me hope that some other unlikely business ideas might just work with the same sort of approach.
We already are being flooded with absolute crap! The store is full of mostly toys and 'concept' apps. And to think you have to pay for some of those (remember the several incarnations of 'iPhone Flash Light' both paid and unpaid?). I hope Apple fail to dominate this area of the market as they treat both their end users and developers with the utmost disdain.
You practically said everything on my mind. Yammer is a better version of Twitter. Built-in tags, threaded view. It's just really well-done.
This is not a new article by any means, but it's a good overview of the kinds of approaches one might take in collision.

One of the directors at my workplace has the motto "Collision is gameplay" because of the high importance of getting these dynamics right -- whether you allow things to interpenetrate or not, how general the allowed shapes are, etc. The algorithms can get complex very quickly if you let them, and sometimes an accurate and realistic physical simulation turns out to be the wrong thing.
Developers don't want to have to develop for multiple platforms. There are two ways to solve that: Either develop for a platform which has a monopoly share, or develop cross-platform.

Web Applications' ability to work on every platform, combined with an increasing feature-set (thanks to Gears), makes it a very viable platform.

The web is Google's domain: The better the web stack works in all platforms (including mobile), the better chance they'll have to beat out Microsoft, Apple, and all the rest.
That's kinda like complaining that there is no standard in the desktop software industry, because you know.. UNIX developers and Windows developers don't have the same API. That's rather silly.

Quite simply, there are two tiers in the mobile industry now: smartphones and feature phones. On the feature phone tier, having to jump through bullshit hoops was and still is standard - getting certificates from the carrier, worrying about SMS, etc. On the smartphone, there are far, far fewer limitations - companies like Palm and RIM don't shutdown apps, and the carrier's control does not extend beyond perhaps discriminating types of data traffic (ie, email vs 3rd party data).

Apple's SDK policies make the iPhone far closer to the restrictions feature phones have than to smartphones the iPhone is actually sold against (ie BB Bold).

oh, and: http://myhowto.org/java/j2me/22-sending-and-receiving-gsm-sm...

Pretty simple, no?
Why not jailbreak? It's trivial, pretty much risk-free (you can always fully restore) and you are doing it only for testing this app -- and only until Apple approves you. You can at least make sure you get your app all debugged by the time other things fall in place!
Has anyone here played with an OpenMoko ? I have examined one, but have so far avoided putting out the cash to buy one.

I have always disliked the cultist and elitist aspects of Job's company. I see Apple as no better, and possibly worse, than Gate's company.

I think, that if you are trying to make money to live the next 3 years comfortably, writing iPhone apps may be the way to go; but if you want there to be a world where your great-grand kids live comfortably writing apps for an open tri-corder from their apartments in a Stanford torus at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, then you write apps for the OpenMoko and feed yourself with a day job.
Personally I dont care about apps! There are a flood of them now and it seems reminiscent of all the Facebook apps that flooded that network - not for the better.

I just want an Internet mobile device that provides the full net experience in the palm of my hands; FLASH & VoiP access!
You seem to be suggesting that there's a lot of overlap between LinkedIn, Facebook, and your address book (in Outlook or otherwise). That's true, and certainly it suggests a certain blurring between work and personal life.

My incredulity stems from the inherent contradiction in the linked article, where the author not only slams Microsoft for lacking a social component in its email, but also for not making its software simpler. An email client is very simple: it allows me to have asynchronous conversations with other people in plain text, and keeps records of what's been said. Adding a "social" element doesn't make it better, it just distracts from the simple act of communication.

I completely agree that Facebook is an invaluable way to keep in touch with people, in both personal and professional contexts. But staying in touch is a different sort of interaction than having a precise, nuanced conversation. Communication isn't homogeneous, and just because Facebook is good at one kind doesn't mean it's the perfect medium for all communication. Anyone who says differently has drunk too much kool-aid.
I'm majoring in Math and Computer Science at the University of Toronto. The only reason why I can go here is because I busted my ass off to get a scholarship. And a new TI-89 would really help. :)
Thanks for your encouragement :-)
Cool card. The code not so much... e.g. anybody notice the comments?

nc = new NetConnection(); // New Connection
mic = Microphone.get(); // Configure Microphone

Oh dear.
Dave Winer has been bitching about apple for years and years and years... it is his favorite hobby.
What I don't like about steam is the norton-antivirus level of slowdown it causes to computers & games. When steam is removed from half life 2, it speeds up significantly
I'm thinking more like cpan than mozilla...
My guess is that Google sees an offline technology like Gears as being so fundamental to the future of Web applications, that it can't not be built into the browser.

Unless that offline technology is based on the HTML 5 client-side storage recommendation and isn't named Gears. In that case it should be ripped out and replaced with Gears.
List of eponymous laws — very cool Wikipedia page
I don't need it, but I think you should send it to me all the same, just to send a message to all the kids that they really don't need a calculator to do any mathematical stuff. When I worked through my university, I could not afford a calculator, and I dreamed about owning an 89, because all my friends had one. Well, I didn't get one.

And as a result, I can do pretty complex math in my head, and I know how to triple check my calculations to make sure that they not only are correct, but also make sense.

I never owned any calculator, and I came out just fine. The young ones should learn the lesson. And I should finally get the calculator now that I don't need it anymore.

Because that's how life is.
Integrated circuit is 50 years old today
... and switch to something like "Facebook for Enterprise 2.0", not Outlook.

update: I bet every popular web service eventually will have enterprise-oriented version, like Yammer is to Twitter.
The advertising equivalence principle?
Android is like OpenMoko but with a chance that anyone will ever own a compatible handset.
I've been trying to get Percival's Law of Data Compression -- "Birds of a feather compress better together" -- more widely used, but so far it has only been picked up by one other author.

Does anyone else here have similar "laws" that they think ought to be better known?
FitBit and swype struck me as about a thousand times cooler, but who knows...
People most often buy things they want ahead of what they need, unless it's food and shelter. And even then, they usually want a type of food or shelter that they don't really need, and will buy it even when they can't afford it.
You guys are giving me a hard time.
I'm just tired of trying to convince my friends to start a business.
I wanted to outline my "forces" in this post; just hint about what I'm capable of.
As for Craigslist: it's too local, not technical enough to find anyone.
I just want to meet someone who share the same interests and values. Obviously some of you don't, and I'd suggest just stop whining about it.
BTW, your assumptions are sometime telling a little bit too much about you...
Somehow, the article fails to mention Margin of Safety, an investment book less than twenty years old, which sells for about $1000:

http://www.amazon.com/Margin-Safety-Risk-Averse-Strategies-T...

Here's a piece on why it's so pricey:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_32/b3996085....

And here's a recent update on Klarman, who is still doing very well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/business/yourmoney/13klar....

In case $1000 is out of your price range, there's a Rapidshare of a scanned .pdf:

http://rapidshare.com/files/126088249/Margin.of.Safety.by.Se...
One of the unique things about Smalltalk is that the GUI for defining, accessing and modifying classes is an integral part of the language. You write code to implement your methods, but the structure of your application is defined more or less with pointing and clicking (and you can use the same UI for inspecting the implementation of the language itself, or at least parts of it). As far as I understand GNU Smalltalk replaced this with some ad hoc syntax for defining classes by editing text files.
Apple is evil and in severe need of competition in this space. May Android provide it.
Thanks man, that really means a lot to me. Its selfless things like this that make me really happy to be alive sometimes :]
Donkey Kong source code found, original developer comments
"The hard bit of having a "good idea" is not the invention of it, nor the selling of it to the end-user, but managing the myriad of politics and egos of the people who are supposedly on the same team as yourself."

Does this statement disturb you all like it frightens me?
The Seinfeld/Ballmer Windows Ads We Didn't Get to See
I am collecting calculators. I own HP-28S, HP-48G, TI-74 and TI-92.
In the past I owned an Atari ST and I still remember some M68000 assembly.
With me your calculator will never be forgotten - I use all of them periodically and keep fresh batteries in them.
Interesting; Many of my calculus classes -- university especially, but also high school -- didn't (don't) allow using a calculator at all on the tests. My university specifically mandates one model of calculator for all students. This model can't do symbolic manipulation/graphing and is not programmable at all. My high school had any sort of graphing calculator banned on tests.

I'm surprised that high schools are allowing students to use this sort of calculator (or for that matter, setting tests where it makes a difference what calculator you have.)
In an era of crowdsourcing, you'd think we could have 100% open platforms that automatically self-correct.

Bad apps should be rated lower. Great apps should be rated higher. Like Yelp, perhaps there should be a class of "super raters" that are selected by the owners of the community -- and perhaps they get moderation privileges -- kill spam, kill viruses, kill bad apps.
One time only: Java-Javascript smackdown
As a counterpoint, I love ido, and it makes using the commandline so frustrating.

99% of the time it somehow seems to have read my mind, so I can tab my way to happiness.
Out of curiosity, what are the annoyances you have with it?
You cannot compare developing for desktop with developing for mobile.

Saying it is simple shows me that you do not have much experience creating mobile applications.

If you develop for windows I assume it will work in every country, for every machine that runs windows, regardless of the machine manufacturer and the insternet service provider. Write once deploy nearly everywhere. Try that with mobile apps.

If you develop for Symbian phones, although one app may work on T-mobile UK networks, it may not work for T-mobile in the US.

It is anything and everything but simple.

EDIT: I am saying this after tools we had built using Twitter SMS API, NMS SMS API, Kannel, 41411 SMS API,as well as working on Mobile IM for Symbian, Call Interceptor for Brew, CallBack for all platforms including an Iphone web app, Backup application, Mobile Device Management Servers for Symbian and Brew, Infinite number of mobile games etc....All products being deployed in every continent save Australia. In every single case clients find it to be a pain. I wish writing and deploying mobile apps were as easy as it is for desktop apps.
Why I am a Bad Correspondent
Only if there is only on of the service. There is only one Amazon cloud storage, but there are thousands of other online storage places so switching is easy.

On the other hand there is only one IPhone, and because it uses coca switching is difficult.
Sorry, can someone explain the point of his argument? It seems misdirected.
A platform is called a platform because you build stuff on top of it. It might not be an open platform, but it's still a platform. (It's all semantics anyway, but the assertion doesn't make sense.)
Today I was trying to smash open a walnut and had nothing hard to do it with. I would appreciate it if you would send me your calculator, as I think it might easily be able to accomplish this.
What happened with Palm, then?
GATES: Our restricting IBM's ability to compete with us in licensing MS-DOS to other computer makers was the key point of the negotiation. We wanted to make sure only we could license it. We did the deal with them at a fairly low price, hoping that would help popularize it. Then we could make our move because we insisted that all other business stay with us. We knew that good IBM products are usually cloned, so it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that eventually we could license DOS to others. We knew that if we were ever going to make a lot of money on DOS it was going to come from the compatible guys, not from IBM. They paid us a fixed fee for DOS. We didn't get a royalty, even though we did make some money on the deal. Other people paid a royalty. So it was always advantageous to us, the market grew and other hardware guys were able to sell units.
Java is still far too complex, and Java developers far too expensive, for client-side web development.

Stark idiocy. Java (read: Applets) failed client-side because the JVM locks up the computer during its 30-second load times, and because Sun micro understands graphics and presentation like dogs understand high tea.
In my high school, a TI-83 was the only graphic calculator allowed on tests, though it was never an issue because very few people had TI-89s.

The AP calculus test is split into a calculator section and a no calculator section, and it definitely helps to have a TI-89.

In college calculus we were only allowed to use a scientific calculator.
"The programmer in question was adamant at the start that using FORTH was superior in terms of speed of delivery, space occupied by the code, and quality. In other words, much better than programming in assembler. He'd deliver DK Jr in record time. Management believed him.

So he got Atari to spring for this $800 FORTH package that came with a thick binder of documentation printed on funny-colored paper (to prevent photocopying) and wouldn't let anyone near his code. Nobody else got a copy of this package. He mucked around in FORTH getting stuff prototyped and "ready to write code" for months. And after like five months he had one or two screens working, and no sound, and the thing sucked. And all the time he was bragging about how FORTH was going to let him whip through the rest of the game like snot through a greased pig (or something like that), but it was already late, it was clear he was at sea and wasn't going to come through."

..

"Later, I heard from a Coin-op veteran something along the lines of, 'Yeah, every couple of years someone discovers this FORTH thing and thinks they can do games in it, and it never works out.'"
Inferences of Competence from Snap Judgments of Faces Predict Election Outcomes
The problem is they are denying apps that aren't crap and accepting ones that are. On top of that the App Store is the only way to sell your app, so if they deny your app you have no chance at success. If the app store were more like the music store and was a non-exclusive sales channel it wouldn't be that big of a deal.
This is pretty nice. Having a tool named after you seems to me better than your name on some pile of stone. After all, things come and go, but Andre Ampere's name will always be current.
I wish more people would do this math before launching a startup than plans to monetize via advertising. It's just a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, but I'm surprised at the number of startups that naively think they'll get rich with Google AdSense.

One small thing this calculation ignores is that the CPM, CPC, and CPA models shown aren't exactly equivalent. It depends on how much risk the advertiser is willing to take. With the CPA model, there is no risk - you only pay when the action happens. With CPM and CPC, you may get better or worse leads, so there is some variability.

On the whole, this post makes an argument that needs to be made more often: Have a monetization plan other than advertising.
you realize by doing this, hacker news will be doing yearly checkups on your grades to make sure their investment is performing well. We won't accept anything less than a top 10 school from US news reports on CS and Business. On the upside, now there's thousands of people who can help you get there.
First of all, it's a self-selected group of people-- not a very good sample. Secondly, and more interestingly, these are people who are self-selected precisely along a very specific axis, one regarding a non-normative notion of utility-- the very thing you are asking them about.
From MAIN.PRN:

; Prizes
; These are shoved into players; left-bottom justified in 8x8
; There's some confusion as to what to call the damn things....so I'm
; gonna do what I like, here...
...
; The "Birthday Cake" [I think...]
...
; The Purse ["...omigosh...that's not a /Birthday Cake/???"]
only 3 reasons? There gotta be more
Pedantic mode activate: it's actually the developer of the atari home-console clone of Nintendo's arcade Donkey Kong. I suspect the original developer comments might be in Japanese.

Maybe I'm imagining things, but I just don't like it that US developers are often seeming to get the credit for a Japanese success. Why don't we hear stories about the original coders of Donkey Kong? Miyamoto designed it, but didn't code it, so maybe it's because it's not code romantic (?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_(video_game)#Development

note HN doesn't linkerize the parentheses in that URL correctly