skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like webkit2png is the best bet, but its OS X only which is no good if you want to run it on a webserver.

The alternative is khtml2png, which will run on a linux webserver, but it looks like its going require a lot of messing about with virtual X-Servers to get it going http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=faq

Now the question is whether I can get my creaky old Fedora 4 box to get this all working without rebuilding the whole thing!

Edit: looks like a good tutorial at http://corpocrat.com/2008/08/26/capturing-a-screenshot-of-a-...
It's never failed me. Check out the source for how I use it:
http://bit.ly/4g6ihb
I still can't believe you have to have a mac to develop for iPhones. Why would apple want to shut out so many potential developers, and app revenue for that matter?
Motorola RAZR2 V9 Graphite Grey Unlocked
The Motorola RAZR2 V9 defines the next trend in 3G. Its stainless steel frame make this svelte handset durable and resilient – helping to ensure an ultra-thin shape with a strong structure. Its composing materials include vacuum metal finishes and two-tone soft touch housing that will inspire unending envy.
I think he recognises that - the article quotes him as saying "I really believe in markets, and I believe in the power we all have to build great companies that change things.".
It depends. I don't think anyone sees OCW as a substitute for going to school at MIT.

That's the whole point. If it were successful, it would be (a substitute). What you are saying is that it isn't a problem, because it's' not too successful.

I'd also argue that universities serve other roles beyond education.

Education is what pins it all together. Imagine a future where degrees are not University centred, courses are available online & testing/evaluation is gets solved separately from the institutions. For one thing, filtering is not necessary. There's infinite room in every degree so if any filtering is done, it needs to be done as part of the testing/evaluation. Universities are a shell in this world. Parents are not likely to cough up the $$ they do currently, for students to make friends.
Quantum Catalytics-Ze-gen Patent Lawsuit
For as long as it works, this is actually a rather nice hack of the Apple ad-hoc developers distribution model.

I guess we'll see soon enough if that Apple remote kill feature is real or not.
Agreed. All this nonsense is entirely outside daily flow. I found while developing a rather deep app over the past 4-5 months (in review now) that the whole workflow was actually quite good, with little to slow one down.

You can test things out quickly on the simulator for most functionality (including OpenGL, which is at the heart of our app), and only go to the phone when you need to test real performance or accelerometer-based input, etc.
I'm an Actionscript developer by profession, and having recently moved into Flex work I can strongly recommend both the Flex framework and Flex Builder -- at least, if you choose to create content for the Flash Player at all. The programming model is worlds ahead of what Flash developers have been putting up with for the past decade; they made clear and effective efforts to make it work like the languages, frameworks, and systems professional developers are already familiar with.

Since Actionscript 3 has optional static typing, and contains little-documented but very real implementations of closures and functional programming, it can be written as a Java-like OO language, as a Javascript-like dynamic language, or as a clunky but at least workable functional language; and the XML-based GUI-layout component, MXML, is surprisingly powerful and consistent.

Even though Flash is where my paycheck comes from, I am not at all convinced that it is the ideal format for most web content, so I won't argue with anyone who hates it. But anyone who has avoided Flash because of its programming model should definitely give Flex a second look.

(As for Flex Builder, I use it for its debugger and compiler, while doing heavy-duty text editing in jEdit. I mean, it doesn't even have parenthesis balancing, for chrissake.)
5 Countries Stand Between Google and World Domination
There's a fourth reason: tradition. Here in Czech Republic people are used to use seznam.cz as their search engine and most don't even know there's something other. Seznam has a strong position on the market, but it is getting weaker every minute. I think that in a two year's time, Google will dominate event the czech market.
There's also haxe (http://www.haxe.org), which we're using to good effect at justin.tv.
Because they don't think it's worth it to port their whole Xcode development environment to Windows? It's a heavy user of Cocoa and much Mac OS-specific technology.

Because they want to (as a side effect, which can only help computer hardware sales) expose developers to a much more pleasant OS environment?

Because the cost of a Mac ($2K for a very capable 24" iMac) is nothing compared to the earning potential of a serious iPhone app?

I could go on...
By far the best summary of the recent financial crisis that I've read yet.

interesting quote:

"... if the government had rescued Lehman, it would have repudiated the claim that the Bear rescue was extraordinary; it would have also conceded that in the six months since Bear failed, neither the new facility that it set up nor the other steps to make markets more robust were reliable. Essentially, the Fed and the Treasury would have been admitting that they had lied or were incompetent in stabilizing the financial system — or both."
I've worked in some environments with pretty massive databases... Every one has known how many servers they have (and the overall capacity). Most have some pretty serious capacity measurement, monitoring and planning methods.

So yeah, I still find it a bit odd. Each to their own I guess.
Umm, someone I know who frequents 4chan just IM'd me, there might be something brewing.

Apparently someone just uploaded "full emails on rapidshare" with 3 passwords on it, first 2 passwords work but last one is currently unknown.

Will be interesting to see if it's real or fake.
note on the iphone contracts

Not sure how things are (& were) in the states, but down here I think Apple did something interesting. The iphone plans must come with 'data plans.' These have been available but something that consumers just didn't want (to pay for) previously. They always took the 'pay as you go' options, & just avoided using it. So the majority of people that bought phones in the past couple of years had internet enable devices that they never used. Apple broke that.

I think it comes back to Apple's measures of success. They don't just measure sales, they measure use. Do you check mail? Do you listen to music? Do you use the browser?

The contracts (while highly priced) are there to optimise for those latter metrics. It's a much more forward minded strategy then most of what we've seen up to now. Given the whole segment a kick up the arse.
I am proud of not knowing what "throwing sheep" meant because it is Facebook related afterall.
Some may consider Lisp a failure of a language, but I sure am glad my startup is written in Lisp! The issue of syntax baffles me, because in recently learning Javascript, the essential area of bugs for me were almost all syntax related. I never have to worry about syntax in lisp as its either ( or ). There are no ; or } or { or , etc to worry about what goes where when.

The logical structure reveals itself so clearly in the form of indentation so that the parenthesis become transparent for me. Having emacs slime automate the indenting is of course essential in enabling a clear focus on the function of the code instead of spending time thinking about the syntax.
In grade school, they taught us to use 22/7 for pi. Unfortunately, that led some people to believe that PI == 22/7.

It's even more fun when state legislators try to define pi.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/805/did-a-state-leg...
There's a fourth reason: tradition. Here in Czech Republic people are used to use seznam.cz as their search engine and most don't even know there's something other. Seznam has a strong position on the market, but it is getting weaker every minute. I think that in a two year's time, Google will dominate event the czech market.
Startups, or only frivolous (sheep-throwing) startups?
Ha, is this guy a joke?

AS elegant? I think it's the ugliest language next to java.

AS has deep roots in Scheme!??

Also, I know you can use javascript for Flex, but can you create a swf using javascript?
http://img.4chan.org/b/res/86012008.html
I must add that the S60 (Mostly Nokia's Symbian devices) are using webkit as well
Do you also enjoy telling people that you don't watch television?
longer thread including files + first 2 passwords is here apparently.

http://img.4chan.org/b/res/86000654.html
You have an interesting point here that is not often discussed.

I am pretty new to programming, which means that I'm not stuck in conventions about how code syntax is supposed to be. On this background I find lisp pretty easy exactly because the syntax is so simple.

To me lisp is like chess: It's easy to grasp the basic rules, but hard to become a master.
Sergey Brin starts blog, discloses he has genetic predisposition to Parkinson's disease
Buffett's Berkshire Accelerates Pace of Acquisitions
I'm one of a small handful of C++ defenders on this site, and I don't think you're going to find a serious answer to your question here (assuming that you were asking a serious question, and weren't just lighting a flamewar.)

Now, not to hold a match to the tinder or anything, but I think that part of the reason that there's such a vocal backlash against C++ is that a few generations of programmers have never been exposed to the language in school or work. Today, most college kids are being trained on some combination of Java and scripting languages, and (in an era of web apps and cheap hardware) have never had any real reason to use C++.

That said, my opinion is that deep C++ (and C) knowledge is a litmus test for a good developer. If your only development experience is in perl/python/ruby/java, you're quite likely to be missing some important skills. On the flip side, a good C++ developer will be able to quickly pick up any dynamic language or programming paradigm you give her.
Please tell me that all those crazy redundant type declarations I see in AS3 code is optional too? IMHO AS1 started as a broken but usable language then AS2 and AS3 came along and added layers of Java-style bureaucracy for no good reason. AS should've been more like Javacsript with simple duck-typing and first order functions, etc. Flash developers are web developers who know and understand Javascript. Why on earth AS3 has to become so different then Javascript is beyond me.
for me the #1 benefit is first-class functions. once you have that, you have the best that functional programming has to offer

more generally, the composability of functions allows for more tacit programming. for example:

array = [ 1, 2, 3 ]

sort( array )

print( array )

here sort is a function that takes an array and sorts it in-place. the sort function itself doesn't return anything. but if we have it return the array, we can write the above this way:

print( sort( [ 1, 2, 3 ] ) )

not only does it read easier, you also no longer have to think about the state of the array

from there you can enforce immutability, and then you have to worry even less about the state... because there isn't any

but to me that's extreme. the ideal of FP is nice, but taking something fundamentally dynamic like an algorithm or a working software system, and then trying to process it with something that can in its nicest terms be called anally rigid, is IMO fundamentally misguided. the only language in which i've seen this work is XSLT (a strict functional language,) because in its case you're dealing with rigid things to begin with (declarative XML documents) and on top of that it maps perfectly to its domain (XML documents are structured/"composed")

of course, strict FP has lots of benefits for the computer regarding optimization. but from a language design POV i'd rather give full power to the programmer and do my best to optimize later (eg via JIT)

so, IMO, use first-class functions all over the place and take advantage of the conceptual alleviation that composabilility offers, but consider the type-anal, FP-anal, OO-anal, and pretty much anything-anal languages to have been designed by crazy kooks who can't see the very wide line between theory and practice
Felix's Book --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283983
It appears to be the real deal: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10045958-93.html
I find mine exceptionally easy to use, though my back lawn in SF is about the size of a large living room rug, so a power mower would be, well, nuts.
EFF to sue Bush, Cheney, NSA and others over telecom spying
Sergey Brin Launches A Personal Blog, Talks About His Risk Of Parkinson’s
What it costs to sack a worker
If the iBeer thing is what I think it is, it's an application that will find you the nearest store to purchase beer when you tap the glass with your finger.

I don't see how that's some scathing critique of the devolution of society, moreso than the phone itself at least.

People can ignore what's going on in the world and contribute to the "downfall of society" or choose to live in a perpetual state of guilt about the success that the "first world" lives in at the moment, neither has a moral high ground. Your attitude doesn't matter -- but your contribution does.

The fact that the US is losing its edge in technology has as much to do with the rest of the world catching up or exceeding where we are. That's not cause for tears and somber attitudes, that's the third world gaining prosperity and health, and the second world joining the first world party. The luddites and idiots have been a problem as long as there has been humanity; that they've been in a leadership role in the US is a minor anomoly at best, and a self solving problem at worst.

I'm almost the perfect pessimist, but even I'm seeing the glass as half full at this point in history. Web 2.0's pretty overrated on the whole though -- maybe he could reclaim the conference time for something more useful.
This guy has been spamming YC for months with his site; I'm amazed that so few of his submissions have gotten [dead]ed.
I enjoy the exercise I get from push mowing. When one's actual work doesn't involve manual labour, doing physical work can be a real enjoyment.
I'm not sure how to avoid sounding insensitive, but it seems like an ad for his wife's company...
Don't forget the tabs, zoom, text entry, scrolling etc that makes Safari on the iphone so easy.
As long as android has all that, it could be good :)
I liked Microsoft better when they were assholes
Television rots the brain. Only watch anime on your computer monitor.
I think a good rule of thumb at this point is to be extremely skeptical of anything advertising supported. If people won't pay you, are you really creating enough value to society to justify awarding yourself any warm fuzzies?

I suppose exceptions could be made for services like Google, which people would pay $1000/year for if that's what all the providers charged, but which happen to be advertising-supported.

"Make something people want enough to pay for." Now there's a terrifying heuristic.
Britain's FSA bans short-selling financial stocks
Even if you give them monopoly, it was a shift in government policy (deregulation) that took it away.
The Ad-hoc model requires considerable effort for the purchaser and especially the developer. The dev has to enter in the device UID for every single person who wants to use the app. This doesn't scale to anywhere near the millions of users Tap Tap has.
To the average user, if MacOS was a 10, then Windows was an 8. I won't argue that they were playing catchup, but it wasn't that far behind after 3.1.
Such as?

I dunno about you, but I would call penicillin a pretty significant hack.
Agreed. And upgrades will be a pain, too.
Is there something similar that is bluetooth?
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 55 - Ear Rest
Yeah, I kind of figured, but I've spent the last three years growing a decidedly unsexy web-app from 1 webserver and two database machines to the small fleet of machines it is today; and if there were an extant distribution that took some of the pain away I would be on top of it. But as you say it's somewhat hard to get people to spend money on server operating systems.

The real problem is that there is too much variation for widely usable solution to come to the fore. Basic webhosting has things like webmin or (yech!) Ensim, that package up the standard tasks in nifty web frontend. But managing a heterogeneous network of webservers and databases is still more difficult than it ought to be.

Thanks for the considered answer. I don't think anyone was thinking that this was a viable business; more just people wishing there were a solution to the problems they are dealing with.
which is under investigation from the the CA Dept of Health, cant find the link but read it a few months ago.
No I think he's talking about the app that uses the accelerometer to simulate chugging a beer. That's it.
Just to nitpick, you can actually go on all you want, and most, if not all, of your reasons, remain speculative. A windows-based dev environment would seem like, at least at face value, a shrewd strategy (of course I am disregarding all maintenance costs for spreading apple's competency across multiple platforms).

But when they switched to intel, everyone knew it was a good decision. If they didn't switch, Apple would still be alive today, and you can give another list of reasons for not switching. Can't tell for sure without a time machine.

The fantasy is tantalizing though, and very much so. That alone is disappointing.
Mobile robot packs web-cam, runs eCos
And I have to admit to not always following my own advice. Apologies to any I've offended.
You can use continued fractions to get as close as you want to pi with a fraction (and it gets closer much faster than the decimal approximation, too!) Continued fractions are worth taking a look at if you've never seen them, they're pretty cool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fractions
This is all well and good, but I've never owned a PC that didn't get errors when coming back from sleep or hibernate. A clean install usually works ok, but this doesn't last long.

To be fair it's probably not Microsoft's fault entirely. Generally seems to be a driver that causes the hassle (often a USB device).

This is one aspect that Apple has right (or at least a lot, lot better).
The popularity of native apps on the iPhone itself is a pretty strong argument as to why. Phones have all sorts of features that can't be accessed by browsers. GPS, Camera, Bluetooth, who knows what else in 5 years.

Lots of stuff benefits from integration with the OS.
Grafly looks awesome. Is the "interesting part" in-house?
Ask YC: How do you get important information around overzealous spam filters?
I run a forum ( http://forum.starmen.net/ ) that has a traditional signup, and more importantly, password recovery, that requires your email address. The problem is that a lot of ISPs, including AOL and BellSouth, just plain do NOT accept our emails. For example, this is from a direct TELNET connection to AOL: http://pastie.org/275370 . Our emails are just plain not allowed in, and it's frustrating having to do automatic password recoveries without email addresses.

I'm not doing anything illegal, just sending a "Welcome to our Forums!" email and password recovery upon request. Our email ( http://pastie.org/275373 ) contains both a real address and an opt-out page, which is what most filters look for. Gmail and Yahoo work fine, some ISPs work fine as well as SpamAssassin based stuff, it's mostly AOL and small ISPs.

How do you get important information around overzealous spam filters?
Wikipedia deletes entry on PBWiki, the biggest hosted competitor with 550,000 wikis
..and they're down :(
>I now have the opportunity to adjust my life to reduce those odds (e.g. there is evidence that exercise may be protective against Parkinson's).

You don't need a genetic test to know that excercise is incredibly healthy.
Right. But they do seem to be trying to move in that direction somewhat. I'd consider them Android's greatest rival.
According to a TechCrunch article:

"California’s Department of Public Health has issued cease and desist letters to 13 genetic testing startups - most notably 23andMe, which Michael [Arrington] tried out earlier this year. The C&D’s are mandating that the labs demonstrate that they have been certified by both the state and federal government, and, perhaps more importantly, that all genetic tests were ordered by a patient’s doctor, which is required by state law."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/17/cease-and-desist-califo...
All they need for that is a solid ratings system in the store. Or possibly some independent third party certification system. Both are easily possible.
justin.tv - nice :-)

-- Just another haXe fan over here
Had too.blogspot.com been unclaimed for that long?
Do you always get a 421 response code, or only on the first attempt to send an email with that source/destination address pair? SMTP 421 is a transient error code, meaning that the sending server should retry again later; and it is widely used for "graylisting".
Why the hell are you sending mail via telnet? That seems like one of the best ways I can think of to get your mail shit canned.

Setup a for-real MTA, with proper forward and reverse DNS (and likely SPF) records. Then, send your emails through that MTA. If you're still getting rejected, try some variants of your message and text-content to URL ratio, etc. until you find what works reliably.
If it were successful, it would be (a substitute).

I disagree with that definition of success. OCW is very successful -- its goal is fundamentally different from the degree-granting part of MIT.

Success for OCW means that everyone who wants to access university-level content can do it for free. If MIT wants to charge tuition for the "premium" version where you live on campus, can ask questions of the professors, get to know your classmates, get a degree, etc, then they certainly have the right to. That is a scarce resource, and can command a price like many other scarce resources people pay for.
He probably wants his site to be a news and discussion site, not a bug tracker.
As opposed to the private business they discuss in the open, over unsecured cell phones, over unsecured 2-way pagers (this one is less common today with the decline in 2-way pager popularity), over unsecured wifi, etc?

I doubt she was this smart, but one way to keep your email from getting read by an "insider" would be to use Yahoo Mail over a secure connection.

My guess is that she used Yahoo mail because more proper channels for email were either not available, or imposed restrictions that made their usage unrealistic. IT department can get so over zealous with security that it causes the users to route around their policies, leaving the whole thing LESS secure.
Surely you could automate the process. Have the user pay, enter their UID in a web form, and automatically build the app and send it to them?

Hell, you could probably build your own AppStore that 3rd party devs could sell their own apps through, though I'm sure Apple would squash that very quickly...
# sysctl hw.setperf=0
FriendFeed Dials Down the Noise With Duplicate Detection
Yahoo’s Home Page Reborn as a ‘Dashboard’ for the Web
S60 is a platform, Symbian is an OS

And you're right about the development, its hell!!!!

I just want to add, the J60 isn't as good as the Android's Java environment (not even close), and it carries the penalty of the J2ME slogan write once test everywhere (to the point where different open S60 devices will behave differently)

Symbian week point is its development environment, I imagine they will have to respond in that front in the next versions.
New FriendFeed design launched... with an exciting new feature
EFF sues NSA, President & VP: Stop illegal surveillance