skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mac presence on web up nearly 5 percent in September
Is spanish on the way?
Elevator Pitches avec Bullets
I suspect if your Mac was going to kill you your car already would have. Gasoline (in the USA) can be up to 5% benzene by volume.

I don't have numbers, but I suspect that one hot-day fill of your car exposes you to more benzene than anything that an entirely dry piece of personal electronics could outgas, ever.
I do this too.
Fiction Rule of Thumb (comic)
Do you think they made a lot of money by having an NDA in place?

I'd say they just tried to keep control of as much as possible, as any company would, then relented when the whining from developers became too much to take.
Just called them. GREAT customer service. I dont know if the business numbers can make it profitable when scaling out. If it is everything it seems, they will do well.
HP Picks Up LeftHand Networks For $360 Million to Boost Storage And Virtualization
As does hydrogen cyanide. I think it's a good generalization to assume that anything which smells like almonds is toxic unless you're really sure it's actually almonds.
My thoughts exactly.
Although both are functional in their own way. MySpace is about me. Facebook seems to want to position itself about my network.
Evernote Hits a Homerun With API, Data Portability
EDIT: That's 10,000 simulations/day.
Definitely. It's interesting to skim the material safety data sheets for commonly consumed chemicals, BTW:

Sugar: http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s7394.htm ("Extremely large oral dosages may produce gastrointestinal disturbances.")

Capsaicin (in hot peppers): http://www.sciencelab.com/xMSDS-Capsaicin_Natural-9923296 ("Taste: Burning.")

Alcohol (ethanol): http://www.nafaa.org/ethanol.pdf ("May cause central nervous system depression, characterized by excitement, followed by headache, dizziness,
drowsiness, and nausea.")

Caffeine: http://www.sciencelab.com/xMSDS-Caffeine-9927475

Table salt: http://www.sciencelab.com/xMSDS-Sodium_chloride-9927593
Things change; I wonder how much has changed since "very early on" -- Oracle 11g's RDF support is extremely scalable, for example. Of course Oracle is evil so YMMV, but there's nothing timeless or essential in Joshua's claims here.
I think they encourages people to develop USEFUL profile widgets. The biggest and best applications get to put their widgets in the sidebar of the profile on every page.

And, of course, now you can make a full TAB for your app, so if you have a big idea you can give it a lot of space.
Cigarette smoke is a more direct source of benzene.

(Ergo, do not smoke while using a Mac Pro and covered in gasoline.)
How would having an NDA make Apple money? I wholly agree with you.
Pretty cool for Windows-stack developers. I wonder what the pricing will be compared to Linux instances.
An inspiring article - so are the comments from darkshikari!
Good News, Startups: You're Not Screwed
What areas are ripe for this sort of consulting? (Ignoring the fact that if you go into an area to make money rather than because you're rabidly interested in it, it's probably a bad idea.)

It seems there are two characteristics that would make an area ripe for this -- companies needing it badly, and some (real or perceived) barrier to entry that keeps legions of geeks from learning it.

Any other likely candidates?
that's what i was going to say, too. Probably negligible in comparison.
A Look at the ‘Clickjacking’ Web Attack and Why You Should Worry
Acquisition Fever in Instant Messaging Field: Nokia buys OZ Communications
Concepts like integer overflow are definitely lost on some developers, which is why I cringe when I see relatively new programmers toying with a language like C++. They are probably better off using experimental side projects to hone their C++, while doing production code in the relative safety of scripting languages.

Sure, you could argue something like hitting INT_MAX isn't likely with many data sets, but it's also a very difficult bug to find, so it shouldn't be there in the first place.

I love scripting language bindings. They let you put programming wizards and new programmers on the same team, where only some parts require extreme care (e.g. a C++ core). The majority of the code, if bound to something like Python, becomes relatively safe, so things that "sound simple" actually can be simple.
Let me quote one of Gruber's correspondents, who had the take that made the most sense to me: It's a lawyer thing, which we m wouldn't understand.

At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids “publishing” the software and any inventions contained therein. We know Apple’s been building up a patent strategy around multi-touch; maybe their lawyers believe there are patentable inventions described in the iPhone SDK and they are telling Apple to keep everything under NDA until they know provisional patents can be filed within a reasonable amount of time (you get a year after publishing in the US, but in the EU, I think you forfeit any patent claims once your invention is “published”).

It’s like, it doesn’t matter at all how broad/leaky the NDA process is, in the eyes of the USPTO, every invention in the iPhone SDK is a non-published invention and will continue to be so until the NDA is lifted.

http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/iphone_nda_patents

This take makes sense, because I agree that the NDA thing was otherwise completely self-defeating. It didn't actually protect any secrets and it certainly handicapped the developer community.

Someone should check Apple's patent filings and see if the NDA is disappearing today because the lawyers finally finished up their provisional-patent work last week.
Apparently it's pretty well-stated in the docs they give you.
ok. even if it's 10%, that's 1M new smartphone users a month in india, which is massive growth. i don't agree with this article at all. even though matt is a gambling man, i'm guessing he's not shorting companies banking on mobile growth - he's just trying to get traffic to his blog.
"Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, " I don't care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
NetDater - Date people in your area with similar movie tastes or movies in que.
Major League Baseball Final Week Review
Downvoted because...?

What does it cost? links to http://www.timesvr.com/signup.html

"
Will unused tasks get carried on to the next month?

No, the basic tasks expire at the end of the month. This is to help us price our service affordably by optimizing the Aide's time. You are however welcome to use all your tasks each month, and purchase more at a reasonable rate."

This does not seem relevant to an unlimited service.
PlanetVC, an aggregation of Venture Capitalist Blogs
"In the case of preservatives, it may benefit the company that uses them since their food won't spoil on the shelf -- but it doesn't benefit me in any way."

That's a really good point.
I think the problem people have when the CRA is brought up is that there's no way the stated purpose of the CRA would have "pressured" banks to lending to unqualified applicants. The purpose of the CRA was to get banks to lend to equally qualified applicants within their lending range. It's point is to break down institutional racism and discrimination.

I don't know enough about the details to know what Miron was talking about, though. He didn't say in the article.
Upvoted. I didn't see the FAQ page, I just used the service. I agree with you, it's not relevant so they should correct that - (or clarify why it's relevant. My hunch is you were downvoted because people have a knee jerk reaction to downvoting tangent negative comments =)
Cool! Glad to see this hit HN
That's true, but irrelevant. If I may borrow Mr. Jaynes' words:

For example, to tell us that a sugar substitute is dangerous in doses
a thousand times greater than would ever be encountered in practice,
is hardly an argument against using the substitute; indeed, the fact
that it is necessary to go to kilodoses in order to detect any ill
effects at all, is rather conclusive evidence, not of the danger,
but of the safety, of a tested substance. A similar overdose of sugar
would be far more dangerous, leading not to barely detectable harmful
effects, but to sure, immediate death by diabetic coma; yet nobody has
proposed to ban the use of sugar in food."

( source: http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html )

The key fact to remember is that it is the amount of Benzene that matters, not just that it is present.
Yeah, but bad decisions are human. Being able to say you were wrong and correcting the problem is praiseworthy in my book.
Domestic Satellite-Surveillance Program to Begin Despite Privacy Concerns
Thanks, that explanation makes the most sense of any I've heard or been able to come up with.

It's a disappointing, though; the world really doesn't need more UI/software patents.
I valued open source contributions highly when I was interviewing candidates: it demonstrates that you're someone who is passionate about programming and enjoys building things in your free time. That's exactly the sort of candidate that I think a lot of startups ought to be looking to hire.

But I think the question of open source contribution is completely different from "show us some code." The latter is intended to get a look at some of the actual work you've produced; the former is just another part of your work experience, formal or informal.
Why are people against the bailout - revenge?
NeighborMovieSwap - Speed up Netflix sharing by seeing what your neighbors/friends/dormmates have at their houses currently and just sneakernet swap the movies before they're returned. (webapp, but maybe not a viable business)
someone please make an iphone application where I can search and add to my instant queue
QueueTorrentSearch - Search your queue for movies you can download right now instead of waiting for Netflix.

(shady and not really something I'd ever want/use, but hey-- these things are popular and I'm trying to respond to your challenge)
Using evolution of neural nets to get artificial intelligence [video]
Yes, it gives them more patent protection--if something's under NDA then it's considered a trade secret and thus can't trigger the "publicly-available" patent problem.
How much are you willing to pay?
Unless you believe, as I do (and I think Steve Jobs does), that Flash is a business trojan horse, and is ultimately anti-open-standards and flies in the face of internet searchability, accessbility, etc.
If your too sensitive to criticism then a startup will be hell. Hard to generalise about entrepreneurs, but confidence and resultant tough skins are integral. If your more a creative type, then get a pitbull co-founder to take off the heat.
Like allowing you to buy in bulk?
How Wikipedia Works
Latest Version of the "Bail Out" Bill
Uber stays open after a lifeline from Sharenow
Trolls, SEO "morons" prompt smaller media sites to rethink comments
The Usability Problems of useit.com
NetflixNewsNotifier - analyzes your queue and usage and provides you celebrity/director gossip from the movies you actually watch. Provides you alerts when your favorite directors/actors/etc are added to Netflix. Can automatically queue those movies for you.
I'll add it to my list of apps to make. Can I put Netflix in the name or would that violate trademarks?
Linux is a kernel, so I think you mean the X11 window managers that exist...like GNOME or KDE.
Facebook app to show what movies you have at home. Twitter app to twitter what movies you have at home? Twitter app to tweet when you update your queue in near real time.

None are viable businesses or even that fun ... oh well
Ah, then I see the problem. Seems like it's no longer a problem though, saw some headline about the nda being dropped.
Who has time to read this kind of stuff? Its 400 some pages and the congressman can vote it through the next day? Do they actually have time to read it?
App to continually check Netflix to let you know when movies and tv series you want become available on Netflix, and automatically add them to your queue. (I guess you can add not released movies to your queue now? Maybe not for TV series though? Will it let you save say Kyle XY season 3?)
No. The bailout protects a broken system and pushes the problem downstream. You need to bail water out of the boat, sure, but ya gotta patch the hole up too, or you aren't going to get anyplace.
Maybe the developers need to refocus on the new design so they need time to release...
Why not a warp drive?
Being able to easily access all your notes from an iPhone, OS X, Windows, or the web without having to worry about syncing is a huge reason to use them.
Pressflip - We Read Digg And Reddit So You Don't Have To
I have just started using evernote and I must say I am also a huge fan. I ued to keep track of all my notes with outlook TASKS and that was just a huge mess.

I now have evernote on all my computers, even at work.
They corrected the problem, but they didn't actually say they made a mistake.
Actually, my research shows that EVERY person who has ever visited an Apple store, will DIE.
I love how every idea is a CamelCased name ...

MovieMeetup–when a movie in your queue is delivered, your FB friends are notified and invited to come over (if they bring popcorn).

TweetFlix–when your movie is delivered, "Joe is gonna watch The Godfather soon" is posted to your Twitter. (totally useless, I know)
> People are willing to trade a heck of a lot of functionality in order to not be chained to a desk.

I'm not sure that's really true. People in the west spend time at home and at work. Millions of people are probably not yearning to surf the web in strange places outside of their daily routine.
Not "any company" certainly. Microsoft doesn't require an NDA for their mobile platform's SDK. Symbian doesn't require an NDA for their mobile platform's SDK. Palm doesn't require an NDA for their mobile platform's SDK. Nokia doesn't require an NDA for their mobile platforms' SDK. And, finally and most importantly, Google doesn't require an NDA for access to their mobile platform's SDK.

So basically, Apple was out alone here. No one else is remotely as "evil" in this aspect. It's OK that you like the platform, there's lots to recommend it. But don't sugarcoat things. Apple were being repressive and obnoxious, and only relented because they were forced to by a competing platform.
Digital Marketing Blogger
Covers a lot of topics, but writes about 2.0 mostly, media companies and new marketing strategies.
Cellphone GPS-based Personal Environmental Impact Report by UCLA's CENS lab
This is a good point, but food can last a long time without preservatives. I have never had any dry food spoil on me, and I don't go through food particularly quickly. I think I have had some unopened flour around for about 3 years :)
You are being too bullish here. India is a country with a per capita of $1000. 71.6% of the people earn less than $2 a day. As i have seen the mobile growth in India, i know it has grown by leaps and bounds, but it is not the population from which you can make money of.

Almost every one has a mobile here, even some of the poorest people. The reason for that is the dirt cheap handsets combined with lifetime connections, you can get a handset for $28 plus a life-time connection for $12 and you are connected for life. I really don't see this people buying $300 smart phones and start using Google or buying stuff from internet. It is not going to happen and when i see this huge companies talking about how they will make tons of money from China and India, it only makes me laugh.
Again just have to wait and watch.
RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later
Reading uneducated users opinions about signal meters ("phone A is better because it has one more bar than phone B")

Come on! Who wouldn't want a phone that goes to eleven?
Oliver Steele: Practical Functional Javascript
I've been using the nightly for a while and so far the Web Inspector has been fantastic. Good enough where I've almost completely rid myself the dependence of Firebug on FF. However the one gripe I have is that when checking the color in CSS its displayed as RGB values instead of hex. The issue is on file in their bug tracker but not sure when it'll get resolved. Not a show stopper but just annoying.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation
I was expecting this site to be about the Dojo javascript toolkit and was really excited that someone had finally written Dojo documentation that didn't suck...
In my experience, there is not a real use case for RDF or the other Semantic Web standards. You always have to write domain specific code to actually drive an application with RDF - so why not ditch RDF and write a domain specific data store too? How does RDF contribute, if it neither automatically drives any part of your application, or facilitates linking or relating of mulltiple datasets?

This guy expresses the problem well: http://inamidst.com/whits/2008/ditching
How many twitter followers does it take make an impact?
When a phone comes with an internet connection and a fully capable browser, it's not really a 'phone' anymore. It's just a small computer.

Looking at it another way, if a phone has a capable browser, then you really don't have to do any extra work to support it - just build a web app as you normally would. Every site on the internet becomes a "mobile site".

There's no reason the leading internet sites won't also dominate these new pocket computers as well. The only reason that wouldn't be the case is if they had to build some a new product in order to capture the market - which by definition is not the case.
Google: Saving electricity one data center at a time
You still need Flash to make it work in the 80% of browsers that don't support that stuff.
Of course people prefer to type stuff in a big screen instead of a small screen. In that respect, big screens will continue to dominate, but what we will see is that the screen of phones will become big. You dock your iphone, it becomes your laptop. Apple is working on this, I heard.
Ditching the Semantic Web
The problem is worse than this article describes. You can no longer find an application you visit unless you "bookmark" it.

If you visit a new application, you must specifically click a bookmark button at the bottom of the screen AKA "taskbar", otherwise you will have to click "Applications", "Edit", then navigate through about 5 tabs, find your application and bookmark it.

Keeping Facebook clean is important but this has had, at least the short term effect of hiding (presumably desired) applications from users.
Mobile Users Should be Concerned | TechJaws
Microsoft to Release 'Windows Cloud'
I think "Web 2.0" is just a meaningless buzzword like "enterprise". It might actually mean something, but people have misused the word for so long that it doesn't actually mean anything in practice.
New York Balks at Verizon FiOS | TechJaws
Wanted: Intelligent Aliens, for a Research Project - Studying Us
10th hit:

> iPhone

> The revolutionary iPhone is a fully integrated telephone and Internet device with a built-in touch screen to bring the world of the Internet into your home ...

> http://www.uioa.com/productcatalog/ - View old version on the Internet Archive

Wait, what??
Exactly right, the way I see it, they have given the power to users to decide how and where to display their apps and widgets.
Paper that Self-Erases After 24 Hours invented by PARC scientists
The title is not TFA.
>They jack them up in the summer and then come fall the small decreases seem like a screaming deal.

Who is they? There is a supply and demand issue with summer gasoline that tends to force prices up.

I don't think Apple can claim the same thing.
Weapons of Mass Destruction, Iraq: http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=Weapons+of+Mass+De...

I have to say, for what it's worth, this data looked pretty worrisome...
> irrelevant

It's not known if it's relevant or not. It might be, it might not. Without having further information, it's simply impossible to say.
To be fair, that traffic graph is pretty misleading. It looks like it's dropping many orders of magnitude, but really the drop is from around 850 to 400. It looks more extreme than it really is because the limits of the Y axis are from 990 to 320.

Fiddling with the range of a graph when people will assume it's 0 to something is pretty dodgy. Not to mention there's no key on it to say what the numbers stand for.
Luxury hotels in Thailand luxury resorts Thailand luxury hotels and resorts
Is someone outselling the iPhone I'm not aware of?
Are you from some weird other dimension?

When you lead a market, you get to set the rules somewhat.
The point in this article about Expression vs. Sharing is a key point that I've always thought to be true. Facebook, in my opinion, works to shut out people's expressions. In a way, Facebook, and their management, have a conformist position.

Social Networking, in my opinion anyways, is supposed to be about..ehhh...socializing. That should include me being able to be exposed to new ideas, new people, new opinions, and likewise being able to express my ideas and my opinions. I think one of the big problems that we've seen with the new Facebook, and resulting decline in Widgets, is they took away a large portion of what allowed people to be different on Facebook. I will admit I use Facebook for only 2 purposes... I use it to play Mobwars (a random and pointless game) and to chat with my friends (not via messages but that IM program in that handy little bar at the bottom of the page). I don't ever visit anyone's profiles... I've had a hell of a time trying to find groups and such that are interesting to join, as with pages. I also am blessed to be able to see everything my friends are doing... hello Stalkerbook.

Facebook it seems, is becoming a mere screw around (time sink) and basic communications system. Even the communication aspect I don't think will last as more people get SmartPhones and are able to use features that are becoming increasingly cheap to send text messages. We're left then with a time sink... At least at Myspace we can be expressive...and find new music, new groups...
The Roots of the Crisis: How did Wall Street get into this mess?
Nothing of really important: nothing to be happier or more in peace...
Somehow this doesn't make me feel any less like Apple is a controlling monopolistic beast. Their release about it seems somewhat condescending.
Completely agree with you on this one.
IBM’s Cell Chip Gets Another Home: TV
Venture backed IPO drought continues.
Carnegie 2.0: Chastise people in private, praise them in public
Only few scientists are sincere to themselves -- most are following some ideology, and so they are highly biased...
Rackspace was most recent - anyone know the other 5?
Google Blog: Clean energy 2030
A lot of people talk about branding, and genericide is an interesting take on it.
SoundCloud Streamlines Music Sharing For Industry Professionals
Very, very cool. I'd love to get into this field (I'm tryin!).
Instead of asking what you could do, you ought to have been asking what needs to be done.

Effort and sacrifice is a big part of it, and there's also acknowledging the role that the unknown plays... luck... fortune, which favours the brave... that the universe is bigger than you can see... and if you act in faith, then opportunities will appear that you have not and could not have foreseen.

Because there are a great many more things in the world that you don't know than that you do, this is actually a pretty good way to bet...