skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a free market of competing insurance companies who will take Bob's money. People who have a tv "installed or used" must buy a licence, and can only buy it from one company, whether they use that company's product or not. Indeed, they need to pay the fee even if they intend to only ever use the product of the BBC's competitors.

Non-payment of car insurance is handled by the police. Non-payment of tv licence is handled by a private company.

The TVL database is the largest civilian database in the UK, with details of 30million addresses. Cost of enforcement has been used as a reason to scrap the licence fee, by a previous BBC director general (Greg Dyke.)

While it's possible to kill people and cause a lot of damage on a push-bike it is considerably harder to do so than whilst driving a car. And the analogy breaks down further - I can listen to BBC radio all day; I can use the BBC website all day; I can even watch BBC tv programmes on the BBC video on demand service BBC iPlayer (so long as they are time-shifted and not live-streaming) without having to buy a licence. But as soon as I want to watch, for example, Sky, I need to pay the licence to BBC and pay a subscription to Sky.

For your analogy: As soon as Ann passes her driving test and buys a Ford she needs to pay money to Chrysler to allow her to drive.

(But all of my analogies suck!)
Amazon may be the 8000 pound gorilla, but up here in Canada people are still concerned about the patriot and other similar legalities in terms of storing our data in US companies or in the US. I hear this all the time, and not just public organizations, but also startups.

Or maybe group clouds, like Universities banding together to create IaaS.

So, to conclude, don't forget about private clouds. :)
I'm still amazed by how many students go to schools out of state to get the same quality of education that they can get in state for often a quarter of the cost or less.
The Setup: William Gibson
A dedicated server is probably your best bet, shared hosting solutions are always going to have contention.

But first, is there anyway you can measure where the time is spent in your application ? I know from profiling Java apps you often get great performance improvements from changing just a small amount of code.
> I know that's just an anecdote, maybe others can share theirs.

Okay. Most people I know who had a 3GS still have a 3GS; some are thinking of getting a 4S to replace it. Very few replaced it with a 4.

I went from a 3G to a 4 myself.
I run a small interactive agency, half my time is doing business and half coding. The single most difficult thing I have to deal with is the context switching. When I'm "taking care of business" its a crap load of little things which need to be done, as opposed to code which I need to do in a large multi-hour block. I can never intermingle the two or the coding just doesn't get done. My business partner (creative director/designer and runs our NY operation - I'm in SF.) can now tell on the phone if I'm in "coding" mode and has learned to leave me alone.
Marketplace reported on this Thursday:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/10/13/pm...
The way Kickstarter does it is using Amazon payments. Once the number of pledged donations reaches the threshold, then everyone is charged. I think the problem arises when you charge them upfront and sit on the money.
It took almost a year and multiple attempts to finally get rid of Perl 5.8, so glad it's done. :)
But thanks to Jesse and his ambitious plans for Perl, i think there is now a mentality change happening in the community that will make similar changes easier in the future.
A business contract typically tells a story about what two or more people hope to achieve by a mutual exchange of items of value in their deal. For most such contracts, a "meeting of the minds" lies at the heart of what the contract means and how it will be interpreted. If you don't have a formally executed document that itemizes the deal in total, it usually helps in documenting your intent if you have contemporaneous emails that set forth that intent.

Note a couple of points:

1. It is important that they be "contemporaneous" - after-the-fact emails that try to paint a self-serving picture do not help and can sometimes backfire.

2. It is important that they be clear. In emails, we sometimes ramble or make ill-conceived statements or simply incomplete ones, and all this can be twisted against you in any later dispute. Best advice here: be yourself and set forth the terms as you see them honestly, clearly, and in keeping with the nature of the relationship (no CYA stuff), preferably without legalese; don't document pointlessly but only as needed to add clarity to what you are hoping to achieve.

3. Watch out for "merger" clauses in any final documentation if your expressions of intent as set forth in emails are contradicted by what the final contract says. A merger clause says that the written contract sets forth the entire contract between the parties and that nothing that has previously been said or even tentatively agreed in prior exchanges between the parties is valid if it contradicts what is set forth in the final written contract. When you sign a contract that has such a clause, you will be hard put to push any contradictory interpretation that you might have previously documented in emails. The emails still matter if all they do is help interpret otherwise ambiguous expressions in the final contract but not if they contradict clear provisions of that contract. The lesson here: don't assume that, simply because you have documented something in an email, it will necessarily help you in the end.

4. Get good legal advice before signing any important contract and normally document it in a formal contract if it is at all important. If it is a smallish, then the ebb and flow and the informality of email documentation can work just fine but do be aware of the limitations of any such approach. A good lawyer will also help think through the issues and help eliminate problem areas concerning whether the contract expresses your true intent. Do not use a lawyer slavishly but use one when it matters. This is really the theme of my GP post where I essentially say be careful not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to using legal help on things that matter.
That's why I'm getting the N9. Better 'feel' and UX than iOS, more open than Android. Best navigation and integrated messaging with GTalk, Skype etc. Real-time event view to everything wins widgets hands-down. No need to jump loops to do simple things, no need to open apps to check updates etc. Personally I can live with fewer apps if everyday tasks are handled so well.
I have just found and entry on OEIS for the general formula for the first problem. http://oeis.org/A000055

G.f.: A(x) = 1 + T(x)-T^2(x)/2+T(x^2)/2, where T(x) = x + x^2 + 2*x^3 + … is g.f. for A000081

I havent checked it, I presume its wrong tho?
BlackBerry Outage Made Roads Safer
late comment that will probably never get read:

This is overly simplistic. In their heyday MS catered to developers first and their users second. You can make some snarky comment about this, but at the time it allowed them to become one of the largest and most powerful tech companies out there.

Google catered to it's own engineers first.

The point is there are different ways of building a business; don't blindly choose the Apple path just because they're currently at the top of the heap.
I'll believe you've seen people saying that kids learn languages faster, but I'm not :) There's a lot of research both ways, and second-language acquisition is very similar to first-, but there's definitely something different going on or we wouldn't have any idea how a baby can learn a language starting from knowing none.

There's also solid evidence that learning two or more languages as a child, while being slightly slower, sets you up better to learn more as an adult, as well as just making you a cooler person overall.

That aside, though, I share your skepticism. I was just relating my experience, and hoping maybe we could, you know, have a conversation about it :)
There's an easy way to do 3am US deployments: do them from Europe. I used to work at a consultancy in Ireland that did this, and it worked quite well. Deploy first thing in the morning, and you have up until some time in the afternoon to fix things if it goes pear-shaped.
You'll never be able to equate Rails development to dead-simple, single-page PHP scripts, because they're not even remotely similar.

You want dead-simple, single-page web development in Ruby? Check out CGI [1]. Once you get in to Rails, all examples are completely incongruent, because you're dealing with a large(ish) framework. When you compare Rails to a framework like Symphony or CodeIgniter, the learning curves and tool stacks begin to compare a little better. I don't know what version of PHP ships with OS X, but I know the web is full of HOWTO articles explaining how to get a more sensible stack of PHP version x.x.x on OS X. Many PHP devs are how using Nginx with PHP-FPM, which isn't there by default. Then there's the question of versions. Does a version manager for PHP even exist? What happens if you need to run an old PHP 4 application?

Those questions are rhetorical. I'm sure they all have answers, but that's not my point. My point is: you end up with the same problems on a different stack once you move past trivial examples or start dealing with other people's code.

IMO, Rails scales downward just fine. A new developer shouldn't jump right in to Rails development. MVC is too complicated for someone who can't handle basic tools If you're uncomfortable with tool chains like XCode, Terminal, RVM, and Bundler, then you have some learning to do. You don't get to be a doctor without understanding anatomy, and you don't get to be a programmer without understanding the fundamentals.

1 - http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.2/libdoc/cgi/rdoc/CGI.htm...
Crashlytics Looks to Win the Wild West of Mobile Bug Reporting
That's because all the manufacturing tooling for the 4S form factor has had 18 months to scale up since the launch of the 4. That's why Apple changed as little as possible in the physical form factor.
Ask HN: Missing buzz suggest an open source alternative to Google Buzz
It might sound stupid but some of my friends are going to miss google buzz a big time. In fact most of us met only on Google buzz, we dont know each other on facebook, FB is banned inside our organizations.

Our group grew very large eventually we held buzz group meets and a 25+ treks to western ghats in India. The common interest we share is an Indian language called "Marathi".

Now that google has closed Buzz we want an open source alternative which I will install on my private server and let everyone access. The closest thing was Jaiku (Ironical given it is another google product which got killed) but it's interface sucks a big time.
> But this sales boost will confirm to Apple that it's ok for them to just release the same phone for 2 years with some spec upgrades in the 2nd year.

You mean like the 3GS? Or, in Android-land, the Droid 2, Droid 3, Atrix 2, HTC Desire/Wildfire S etc.? It's hardly that strange a thing to do. Keep the design for a year, make the device enormously faster. This is par for the course in computers, and becoming increasingly common on the mobile market.
Then you agree with me that Apple didn't invent the UI or form factor, and merely aggregated/imitated/improved on the work of others. Which is exactly the same thing Google did with Android.

So... what are we arguing about?
Slow programming languages battle across time: http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering: http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html
The BBC is an enormous and success means for the UK to exert soft power globally via their native language affiliates around the world.

edit: It seems gaius is correct below - the World Service funding doesn't come from the BBC TV surcharge.
Terse Words: Ten Annoying Things About IT Contractors
I save a lot more than 20 articles every day. I also don't like the way Instapaper bundles the articles in identically named packages.

Readability makes them all separate items in my reading list, and does a better job (last time I checked) of keeping the author and publication info.
Wait... so your definition of whether something is "a ripoff" is based upon how commercially successful it is? So then android would by definition not be a ripoff. I must be misunderstanding your point.
Why is your ebook more expensive than the print version on Amazon? (Amazon is $10 cheaper)
I don't think you're being fair. If you've never had a boss who personified the saying "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," you've been very lucky in your career. I had one who would literally tell us to stop what we were doing, institute a whole spate of inefficient methods that we had to follow[1], shout down any objections because "I know a little bit about this stuff," and then leave so he didn't have to witness the fallout. It literally turned a one-hour task into a two-day project.

[1]: The details of the rules are kind of specific to the domain, which is not primarily software, but think along the lines of "All code must be written in Word, since I know it well, and no weird 'makefiles' or anything else that's hard to read. Oh, and since code-sharing is important, everything has to be printed out in triplicate." It's that kind of inefficiency.
Morbo never stops amazing when I build apps with other developers.
I'm faintly amused by this article. It's just an attempt to whip up some clicks with the ol' Hacker Kid On Your Network scenario. And this time, We Mean It, The Hacker Kid Can Do It With His Cell Phone.

It's not 100% clear to me, but it looks like you could do what this article is so scared of with existing Android apps, like Wigle Wardriving and Overlook Fing.
More than 10,000 Facebook account hacked by TeamSwaSTika
Exactly. A few years ago, project constraints had me working primarily on a mac for the first time. I loathed the dock for a good six months. Now I can't even remember what my objection to it was.

I believe our dislike is mostly predicated on unfamiliarity. I use various flavors of android, ios, windows, osx, and kde all on a weekly if not daily basis. I know the ins and outs and have preferences, but I'd never write a blog post like this, or even make a device recommendation on my preferences alone.
Humor meets the Economist...looking forward to it. It must be odd that I find the Economist entertaining (sometimes funny) to begin with. Anything that touts high quality and original content is worth a read.
My 3GS started acting up just days before the 4S launch, so I lined up at 4:30am to ensure I got a 4S.

I was amazed at the lack of 3GS phones in the line. So many people with 4s upgrading. Also many people buying 2 each, perhaps because in Canada you can buy them unlocked.

I wonder what were other locations were like?
>Google has a search engine, an e-mail service, a video sharing service, and a much more successful advertising model built around them.

You're forgetting Android. There are some other services I would include in with their top-tier ones (maps being a good example), but the omission of Android is fairly glaring.
The other problem with the ideas guy is that they usually can't see how difficult something is and want it asap. What ends up happening is that they either change their idea mid-stream or move onto something else. If they actually had any time (besides the idea) invested in it, this most likely wouldn't happen.

This is why you should partner up with someone with connections, money, or both if you are developer. Otherwise, they will not bring enough to the table.
I disagree with your assessment that "not one of [Google's] three positions is easily defensible in the face of determined competition, and I suspect it is more by luck (and inertia) than judgement that they have avoided this fate so far." There has been vigorous competition for search, including many billions spent by Microsoft on Bing. Microsoft literally tried to pay people to use their search. Microsoft continues to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter in their attempt to gain search share. I don't know how much more proof you need to see that Google's position in search is easily defensible.
> You don't see the other manufacturers keeping the same phone for 2 years.

See the Motorola Droid 2 and 3, and the HTC Wildfire S and Desire S. And Apple's own 3GS. Essentially the same physical design as their predecessors, but faster. Actually, Samsung is perhaps the only major phone manufacturer who _doesn't_ do this; most of their phones do change reasonably dramatically on every revision.
Indeed, let's put that into perspective http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/25/bbc-expenses-mar... and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/5639533/BBC-ex...
I think you're mistaking "native fluency" for just fluency, which is probably my fault. Of course adults can become fluent in new languages relatively easily with full immersion, but the simplest things for native speakers can be the hardest to acquire. For example, before a baby can talk, they will babble in the intonation of their native language-- it's the first thing they learn. It's also the last thing a non-native speaker picks up, happening well after they've acquired full fluency, or indeed never in many cases.

Now it may be that's more about our techniques for second-language acquisition than brain structure differences, but it's sure interesting, innit?
So we end up with.... what? Another tool?

I'm not saying the Ruby ecosystem is perfect, but a lot of the problems are engrained in Ruby culture. Losing the problems will likely mean losing some of benefits of that culture along the way.
That's the World Service, which is funded by the Foreign Office from general taxation.
http://status.net

It's open source: http://status.net/open-source
Politics does not belong on Hacker News. Please stop submitting these types of links.
What bad performance? IME, my Nexus One browser is slightly less smooth to scroll, but faster at redraw than the browsers on my (admittedly, slightly old at this point) iOS devices. It's a toss-up, really.

Question: do you have Flash installed? I had to uninstall it completely, because even the "on demand" option for browser plugins didn't disable it reliably.

(Biggest problem I have with my iOS devices (an iPod Touch and 1st gen iPad) is that they run out of charge on standby, from lack of use...)
Google returns 11600 results for "PHP sucks"
Show HN: A weekend project with my co-workers to track our moods: moodbe.at
FB. better lighting/interior design!
I tend to frequent http://www.mahdiyusuf.com The Dusty Programmer
Check out PayPal's new adaptive payments (or other similar services). I agree with byoung2 (though I don't have expertise in this area) -- you can receive a preapproval to charge funds once you have the amount needed to purchase through Amazon.

You'll probably need to charge a service fee, since the amount you'll get from your payment processor will be assessed their service fees.

With all the buzz around X.commerce, I'd definitely check them out -- all sorts of promise for easy group payments coming from them in the last few months.
You can't have both?
Go on a cruise. They have no WiFi and you get to go somewhere tropical with your friends and family.
The 6 Best Keyword Tools For Your WordPress Blog
I had the same reaction, but you have to keep in mind the company he's in. Cook's iPhone presentation struck me as fine but uninspiring, I've never seen Bezos give a presentation, and Larry's... not good in public. I still can't stand Zuck, but at least he hasn't had any more "hoody moments".
Streetart: 4001 post-its for Steve Jobs
> What if the attacker names their trojan "index.php"? Doesn't matter, only top-level index.php of the site can be executed.

As an alternative, you can simply gzip all uploads automatically. You will save hard drive space and prevent any funny business.
It's exciting to me, because I'm forced to use Blackboard and I hate it (for reasons eloquently described by others in thsi thread). I wanted to get excited about Moodle, and it's OK, but it's not all that. Face it, when you have such a derivative-sounding name, then your offering is likely to be shallow. Google and Pearson are among two of my favorite firms, and I know enough people connected with both to think their commitment to quality is more than skin deep.
I think there is a certain amount of strategy behind this policy. By giving away top class lectures for free you destroy the market for 99% of the universities that aren't MIT/Stanford/CM etc.

You still have more people that want come to you and pay your fees than you can accept - but in the future they might not have a cheaper tier university as an alternative.

It's like Oxford publishing the OED. Even if you didn't make money from the book - whats it worth to your selling other courses overseas?
Speculative Moldmaking
"Rails does run best on a Mac" is an inaccurate statement. Rails runs best in a Unix-like environment, as opposed to Windows. Rails development on Linux is just dandy, and IMO, a step better because you don't have to go out and pick a package manager for all your core libraries. You still face the issue with compiling your own Ruby though. There's some sort of deep seated issue between the Ruby community and distribution packagers that I've never figured out. The version of Ruby that you can install with your distro's package manager is rarely the one everyone uses for development. I think part of this has to do with the break-neck development pace of Ruby in general.
Please share your preferred newsletters -- I can't seem to find the good ones.
Mobile Attacks and Defense
NodeQt First implementation of qt for node.js
Agreed. While clearly not leaders in hardware, Microsoft's entrenched position in the enterprise means you can never count them out. They have a history of arriving very late to a game, getting it wrong a few times, but finally getting it right to gain the #1 position. I guess it's just hard to see now given some of the recent high profile failures like Zune and the meager gains in Bing market share after spending so many billions. But what about expanding upon their strong foothold in the living room with Xbox and Kinect?
I did what you are contemplating - got an unlocked 4S after having my 3GS for 2 1/2 years.

You won't be disappointed, the 4S is so much faster at everything. And Siri is amazing. The only downside is that I have started looking for the 'Siri button' on my iMac.
Star Trek's computer voice was Gene Roddenberry's wife. That doesn't sound like a demeaning sexist choice.

I'll give you the others though, especially Cortana from HALO https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cortana#Criti...
Suchmaschinen Marketing Experten: Essentials to create an Internet site
> TV, net, radio

That is as much of an understatement as if one said that Apple makes PCs, Media players and sells MP3s.

BBC stuff is really, really, epically, majestically good. BBC is primarily a production company, producing really thought provoking, quality, expensive (!) and often ahead of its time content.

In Slovenia we have the same scheme for financing our national media house. And we get a lot less bang for our buck.
No I have no degree but am in school for CS. I had met the hiring manager a few times at the local Python meetup and given a couple of small talks on Python tools like Fabric. He gave me a shot via internship based on that and the relative strength of my github repo.

That, and there's a serious shortage of programmers around here.
Although this is a somewhat sensationalist blog post, I agree that web development should be easier. Web IDEs like Cloud9, Akshell (www.akshell.com) etc. and platforms with built in dependency management features should make it possible in the not so distant future.