skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I read the headline I imagined that Cloudant was going to be pretty upset to see this on the front page of HN - but it looks like it was submitted by Cloudant themselves and links to their own press release!

If it must be done, this is the type of deal that you sweep under the rug and never talk about again, much less publicize on a site like HN.
Freemium: Earn More with Free-to-Play
Show HN: A better knowledge management solution: makandracards.com
The future of knowledge management.
Turn your iPad into a 3D controller
Currently Windows only with support for Google SketchUp and Rhino. Mac support coming in the next week.

Here's some promo codes for the App Store:

96K9347XTTFK
9TFJM7Y6EWK3
ATYRLFRLXRFW
M7WFMKYR6743
XJWAKAK6YJA3
Yes to this and the other comment mentioning joins being slow. If your $DYNAMIC-LANGUAGE is too slow - something that is kind of hard to achieve on today's servers - you just add another one (your frontend is running something like nginx anyway, right?).

Development speed is much more important. Some people are fast in Java, I am not.
I was surprised he didn't mention more agile Java web frameworks like Play! (fairly much awesome) and GWT and/or SmartGWT (I use them a lot for customer work, but prefer Play! for my own projects).

I am also surprised he didn't talk about alternative JVM languages like Clojure and JRuby, which are great languages for the JVM for some types of applications.
Great, let's just stop educational progress and innovation to save a few jobs. Because the economies of the world will stop innovating too to save a few jobs for us.
They would never just leave us behind.
I'm definitely not an expert in languages but from a developer point of view, this Dart thing is really not step in a right direction.
Here is why:

* Introducing a new language: like the existing ones cannot be improved.

* Not following what actually majority of web developers want: an easy to use framework which is extensible and modular

* Not thinking about maintainability and scalability of the code (a while ago the C++ compilers where actually creating C code and then compiling that... worked in theory but not in practice - at least not on HP-UX)

* It seems like a half baken think (and people assume this will be in preview/beta forever and then just closed as project)

* Not ability to use the exiting tools and libraries with it.

I wish (just my personal preference) that Google will get behind javascript / ruby / java and make them interoperate more. The jruby is awesome approach: just mix java and ruby.
Hey Mizza - I'm one of the engineers that worked on Android support. Until today, our entire push and device registration system was iOS specific. Today it becomes device agnostic. The blog post that janaboruta added goes into detail on what's changed.

To answer your other questions, I can only answer with my opinion. Obviously I've used some mobile backend platforms and I believe that they offer features beyond the trivial store and retrieval case. The obvious and biggest feature that comes to mind is supporting push notifications out of the box.

But there are a few more that at least StackMob provides, such as the ability to version your API out of the box, run multiple versions concurrently, have a sandbox environment in which to develop, have the option to extend the platform with your own code, and have good analytics for your app. We're always adding new features too.

As an Android & iOS developer before I worked at StackMob, I generally had to do some work to implement all of those things. We're aiming to build these things well so that any mobile engineer can use them and focus on building a great app instead of a great backend.

Hope that helps.
How To Jailbreak iOS 5 Final Using Redsn0w for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
so far it looks like iOS 5 is running ok on a 3GS.
Yah, his arguments are silly.

Sure, Java is faster, but people left for/use Ruby (mostly Rails) because making a web app in Java became horribly inefficient. I know, I did this for years and left for that exact reason. Spring, Hibernate, jars that all used different logging that leaked memory in different ways, deploying, verbose syntax - it all became too much for me.

I'm sure Scala will address some of these things, but if anything, I think what will materialize is the opposite of his argument. If anything, faster 'disks' and databases will just allow people to use Ruby or Python even more. I'm not sure Ruby will ever be as fast as Java, but again, that's never the reason why I left the Java world for Ruby/Rails. Productivity was.
Are Workers Too Productive?
So is it legal to hold the phone to your ear and talk to Siri while driving?
An object-document mapper to connect Python and MongoDB
Google never actually claims they're a startup, they just say they want to be like a startup.

There're varying degrees of success at this, ranging from "if I squint really hard, I could almost see it" to "Yeah...I don't think so." But I give 'em props for trying, as most companies with 30k employees don't even make the effort.

BTW, I could go all the way up to the VP level within the Search bigwigs and they'd be able to answer this.
At some point, people are going to have to admit the web is not as interactive without javascript, and will need to stop complaining when they choose to disable it. Those people are welcome to revive gopher if that is what they are after.
Yeah, I'll get right on that Mars mirror.

Seriously, I didn't say he was wrong in theory, but focusing so much attention on the highly unlikely to the detriment of the exceedingly common is a drastic distortion of the issue, and a cost/benefit analysis skewed in either direction can have costly repercussions.
This type health news confuse people; everything we think will make us healthy is later claimed as an unhealthy exercise in some other research, should we distrust health news in mainstream media totally?
Since we've already descended into anecdotal territory, lemme drop an anecdote. I had a dot-product function which turned out to be a hotspot in some numerical code. The original function looked something like:

def dot(v1, v2):
return sum(i * j for i, j in zip(v1, v2))

Very functional, very pretty, very straightforward. But it was slow, both in CPython and PyPy. A bit of bytecode analysis and profiling later, we realized that unrolling would be faster by several orders of magnitude. So I checked this in:

def dot2(u, v):
return u[0] * v[0] + u[1] * v[1]
def dot3(u, v):
return u[0] * v[0] + u[1] * v[1] + u[2] * v[2]

And the bottleneck went away. From the Zen of Python: "Practicality beats purity."
I'm kinda hurt to see this on here, to be honest. Might advise getting out before you plant the self-terminating PR seed.
Dramatically illuminating movies you can watch to learn about why everyone on YC thinks this is an absurd move: FUEL, Food Inc.
I get the feeling he is making the common mistake of comparing Java with JVM. Java, as a language, is fine but many other languages (Ruby, Python) run on top of the JVM and have very good execution times (plus multi-core support).

...languages like Ruby. These are slow as molasses (though now our CPUs are much faster) but easy to program for a broader, younger, and maybe less experienced crowd of developers.

Something about this rubs me the wrong way, and smacks of elitism. I've seen some amazing code from the Ruby community yet I feel he is confusing a language's learning curve with the experience of its development community.

Under Ruby, we put C++. On top of Ruby we put the Rails web framework. It’s not very common to actually code anything in Ruby.

Wow. I completely disagree with this. I stopped reading after that.
This article is so against the hacker ethos its not even funny.

In what way? This is a summarization of scientific research.
I once considered suicide too. It was for a different reason. My boyfriend of 2 years told me he got engaged to a woman his parents picked. I had just graduated from college, had no job, was still living with my parents and had no plans for the future. I just got more and more depressed..stopped eating and pretty much cried all the time. My best friend told me to "stop being a loser". My mom kept saying "why are you doing this to us?". Well, I felt like a loser and a burden to society...really, I would be doing a favor to everyone if I just disappeared.

Then one day I did try to commit suicide by slitting my wrists. It didn't quite work out. It wasn't as easy as they show in the movies :). Then I had a realization. I was looking for some external factor to make me feel better...my mom, my friends, etc. and I was very self-pitiful. I realized that if I wanted to get out of my situation, only I can do something about it.

I let go of the past and started over. I got a paid internship..moved out of my parents house and concentrated on just being self-sustaining. I made new friends and tried to be as social as possible...being around happy people rubs of on you :)

I feel like you are still in the phase where you are going over your past and keep thinking that you should have done something different. You have to stop thinking about the past. Hopefully, saying it out loud here helped you a little with that. I would suggest you to concentrate on the present. Take small steps. Do one thing each day to improve your situation.

A few more tips that helped me deal with my depression:
- Write out your feelings like you did now
- Try your best not be alone. Either go to the library or a coffee shop to do job applications or other work.
- Don't take your friends and your dad too seriously. Most people do not know how to deal with a depressed person. They usually say the exact wrong thing :)

Best of luck!
Yeah! Or maybe, once you get the initial tweaks here worked out, tech jobs in general — with either categories or tags to filter to what's relevant for an individual user. Would be absolutely thrilled to see this expand into general jobs eventually..
The fact that he didn't mean to post this is proof enough that G+ sucks. And he's spot on about everything he said. Google doesn't get platforms at all. Look what happened to Blogger, arguably their most successful platform (which they didn't even build).
Python as a statistics workbench
I wonder whether Apple lost interest in iAds a little when they realised the potential of Siri to replace search: suddenly they had a better way to disrupt Google.
Agreed, but I didn't feel like writing out a novel on why Monsanto is quite possibly the most evil organization in existence. Creating sterile, engineered food, while suing local farmers who didn't want Monsanto's seed on their farms anyways. Not to mention the patents they have an all sorts of food products in order to control the food supply. Remember, Monsanto's main mission is to control the entire world's food supply... aka, all seed would be purchased from them... If that isn't evil, I don't know what is.
Does anybody know how the entropy is calculated?
Are those people supposed to turn their eyesight back on, through some magical switch, as well?
Sam, did you enjoy the film?
Yes, Siri, very much
How many stars out of five would you give it?
Four.
Thank you, Sam. I will try to recommend similar films in the future.

I Could totally see this happenning in a Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB app. if Apple ever allow third party apps access to Siri APIs.
What about job listings that allow telecommuting?
This article is indeed cringe-worthy. Not because he's defending Java, but because of all the strong opinions clearly based on a weak understanding of what he's talking about.
That is not the sort of library he is talking about, I, unfortunately, may not give details, but rest assured that is not what is being referred to, at all.
They put a bunch of effort into this cpu but in several cases it's actually slower than their older 6-core.

They have a whole new approach coming but that will take at least a year to appear.

Lately all AMD seems to be doing is helping keep Intel prices lower (I got this 4ghz i3 with motherboard for $100 after rebate, which is incredible compared to Intel pricing in the past).
In fairness to the author, I don't think this was intended as an "Apple is evil" post, though using the term "trojan horse" makes for great linkbait.

I don't see that this is that far-fetched. Considering how many other mobile phones have adopted features that debuted on the iPhone, it isn't much of a stretch to imagine a startup designed to allow you opt in to location-based discounts that are cued in part by your voice memos or location check-ins. Apple might not be the one to do it, but it is definitely a tempting revenue stream... if the database knows that 250 people who have "wife's shoes" on their reminder list are currently within walking/driving distance of the local mall, why not? Google already reads your email to serve up ads.

This kind of thing is why I don't have have a facebook page, a gmail account, or a smarter phone than a Blackberry. I love technology and software, always want to have the latest and greatest, but my data has to stay mine, and I can remember who to buy shoes for well enough on my own. But I also realize that makes me a minority and an oddity. Most people don't care if their phone knows everything about them, and they would probably be happy to have it remind them to buy flowers for 25% off on the way back from the bar.
Manage All Your Facebook And Flickr Images With Photobounce
How do you log into your email then?
There is one thing that Google has done well that no other company (Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) seems to understand. Hire experts. They call this hire Ph.D.'s, but that's slightly inaccurate because having a Ph.D. does not make you an expert. They understand that building systems at large scale requires people who have a deep understanding of distributed systems that goes much beyond "My code is on SourceForge" mentality, or "Git is better than SVN because it is a distributed repository".

To this day, I am still shocked as to how many devs have no clue on what I'm talking about, yet they are in charge of Internet-scale systems. Here's a list of symptoms, I've heard over the years:

- I'll put something quick together.

- I implemented Paxos last night.

- I found an optimization in the two-phase commit protocol.

In my opinion, being expert means becoming humble and doubtful about your code when implementing large-scale systems. If your code runs on thousands of machines and serves 100K+ people and you think you rock as a developer/architect then you're doing something wrong.

Facebook doesn't get this. Look at their systems. They barely work. Good thing it doesn't matter. Yet. But it will eventually.

Amazon gets a little of this. Bringing Werner showed signs that they started to get it. They are still in this mix where a small group of people gets it and continues to bring in experts and push amazing things out. We'll see how long this will last.

Microsoft clearly doesn't get it. But that's ok, because they have no Internet-scale systems anyway. They built MSR which is capable of building such systems, but they make sure MSR remains isolated from their code. MSR seems happy to have no role in the company and to continue to publish amazing research.
How To Forgive and Let Go of The Past
Goldman, Morgan Stanley May Shed 'Bank' Status
Why three different blogs? Can't all these be posted to a single blog and split based on categories?
The equivalent price Intel chip gives more bang for the buck and improved lower power usage. See the performance section of the article.
+1! If you want to learn more about this watch Food Inc. available on NetFlix streaming. If you have high blood pressure you may want to skip the part where an Indiana man explains how he was sued by Monsanto for inducing farmers to violate patents by seed cleaning - a practice utilized by farmers for thousands of years.
We launch today. To thank HN we buried easter eggs (discounts) around the site.
Thanks for reposting. It's a testament to Google's flat-seeming corporate culture that team members are encouraged to speak their mind so frankly.

The key paragraph for me is this one: Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it's hard for them to get funding for it because it's not part of our culture. Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they'll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resource love. I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unloved to me.

This is my perennial Google grumble in a more elegantly stated nutshell: Google is a magical playground of wonderful things, few of which are finished. It's magical because the parts that work do so at great speed and with almost spookily good results. It's maddening because some things are automagically interoperable and others are head-deskingly separate or incomplete. The main thing I use Google Docs for is word processing, and though it's great to have stuff in the cloud it's just absurd - absurd - that when I move to an Android device the UI is unavailable, or that the full UI lacks support for things like user-defined text styles.

Thing is, Docs owuld be fine if I was just using it for a personal journal or some glorified notepad. But now that I'm a student again, I'm writing letters and model legal briefs and things like that, and it's just a pain in the ass for that, so every day I flirt with reinstalling MS Office...2003. The stuff I need to do was all in Office >10 years ago, and I would even put up with Clippy again just to have things like outlining, styles and templates.

Steve Yegge should get a seat on the board, pronto.
Something I noticed this week: if you use the Apple Store app and are within a few hundred metres of an actual Apple Store, the app pops up a window with upcoming One2One sessions and genius bar openings.
"The only case that was actually litigated..."
Certainly -- because most give in vs. the threat of a lawsuit that'll put them in financial ruins.

There's no EFF or ACLU for farmers, though I'm now thinking there should be.
Everything you see is a remix
This article is nonsense. It deserves nothing but ridicule.

The popularity of dynamic scripting languages had nothing to do with databases, and everything to do with prevailing fashion, compiler technology, and industry priorities. We've had fast databases for decades now, and good freely available databases for about half as long.

Even if you take this point as a charity, the timelines don't match up. There just isn't a link between Java and all this. Technology has advanced a lot since the early 90's and we're dealing with a lot of new languages, VMs, and language design.

There simply aren't causal links anywhere in this chain of argument.

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them..." -- It doesn't matter who said it, it is correct.
The writer's argument pretty much boils down to the claim that java will be faster than ruby on rails even more than now. For technical reasons why he claims this, read the article. I don't know enough to know if his technical claim is true or not, but here is why I won't be switching from rails to java anytime soon.

I previously worked with c# and asp.net which may be comparable to java in many regards. I currently work with rails. In my experience, the ability to build rapid prototypes with rails simply trumps marginal gain you might get out of performance improvement with .net or java frameworks. I think the writer also agrees with this statement. Pretty much anything you build with java, you can build faster with ruby on rails. So I'll probably stick with rails for a while.

Things might certainly be different for larger firms that have exhaustive developer resources to close the gap of developing time between java and ruby.
Ask HN: critique my blog?
http://alecbenzer.com/

Been tweaking the design of my blog a bit lately. Anyone have any comments/suggestions? I'm principally a coder, so I'm a bit out of my element when it comes to design.

I'm looking for comments on the design, not the content, but feel free to comment on the latter as well, if you'd like.
Reading this will clear out how damper control is done
It looks like Bulldozer is a "speed racer" design that was intended to run at 4-5 GHz. It's hard to tell the cause from the outside, but either due to 32 nm fab problems or design problems they're shipping it at 3.6 GHz. Given the fates of NetBurst and POWER6, I cannot imagine why AMD chose such a design.

Another way to look at it is that the market will bear ~$1,000 pricing for Intel's flagship processors but <$300 for AMD's. That's sad. (I remember paying $700 for the first Athlon FX.)
Nginx Taking Funding: A Deal with the Devil?
The 90% Prep Work
> Essentially, what this says is that doing more stuff online shouldn't be an excuse to fire teachers. That seems very sensible

No, it isn't sensible at all.

This is an attempt by an entrenched interest to stave off and destroy innovation for their own benefit. The more teachers that work, the more dues they collect. They couldn't care less about the quality of the education rendered.

Imagine a kid from a poor neighborhood sitting in on a lecture from a top tier university. That's what we're talking about. That kind of educational opportunity. And the unions are trying to destroy that.

It's heartbreaking.
The feature of reminding you to do X when you are near Y is part of the Reminders app, not Siri. Siri only has the logic to take a verbal request and add a reminder to that app.
The Diaspora* Project Requests Donations to Keep Going
I cant seem to figure out but there is some problem with the forms.. i have all the 'required' fields filled and it still says.. 'One or more required team registration fields were incomplete.' very broad message, could be anything. also in some cases '100 words left' works and in others it doesn't. maybe that's the reason.. but now i can't save my form.
how important are letters of recommendations in the process? there's an blank field there.
Wall Street Journal caught faking circulation figures
I'm a Rubyist and I actually buy his basic argument, but the technical details are out of date/wrong and it reduces his credibility. I don't know if Cringely is a developer but it doesn't read as if he is and his point would have been better made from a higher level rather than playing the trendy dynamic language-bashing card.
Apple's Find My Friends iOS App Now Live
Get it while it's hot
> where exactly is the line

Not that I have an aswer to that, but I have the impression Coffeescript was designed specifically to compile 1:1 to matching js.

A lot of the distinction seems to depend on the local culture of the language. I've seen a lot of lispers talking about their new "language", where they add some minor feature to scheme.
AMD has lost their edge. They used to compete with low priced processors that were pretty much matched, within a few percent, with Intel's offerings. With their newest flagship Bulldozer processors retailing at 279.00 you can save yourself $60.00 and go with the a Intel i5-2500k and have nearly the same performance. The AMDs may do well in highly multithreaded scenarios, but their single core performance isn't stellar.
* Bulldozer's single-threaded performance is worse than that of its predecessor Thuban (2008).

* It is barely competitive with the Intel 2500k, a chip about 2/3rd its size, less than half its transistor count and 100W more efficient (system-level) at load.

I may be missing a thing or two, but the fact that this is all AMD has to show after 4 years of research and a 32nm process is just astounding.