skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Parse sounds like it will be another Urban Airship, not Heroku, unless:

- They enormously extend their offering to support development of arbitrary server-side code.

- They figure out how to do this in a way that doesn't introduce inescapable lock-in for application developers.

- They figure out how to differentiate this offering from what similar server-side deployment/platform services already provide (Heroku, EC2, AppEngine, whatever).

That's not to say UA or Parse won't ever see a big exit (in this market, who knows). Rather, I seriously doubt -- in either case -- that the economics are there for more than a profitable "lifestyle business".

(no negativity implied -- I favor lifestyle businesses, but VCs don't).
Cool Github project: create a gallery of all the photos in your inbox
I'm an engineer at heart. One of the hardest things that I have to do on a daily basis is to ask myself where what I think is cool conflicts with what the user needs. Or indeed if my cool idea will harm the user. As engineers we tend to focus on the cool bit. I too have fallen into that trap and I expect to do it many times in the future. But I try to be aware that this can and will happen.

I think asking language nuts (which isn't limited to those who write compilers, but also extends to practitioners with deep knowlede) to be aware of this is particularly important in that people look to them for enlightenment and advice -- and when they do harmful things it has a huge multiplier effect.
local business ads - extremely well targeted and higher cpm than Google ads. Also maybe you can get government funding of some kind.
I wonder how well it absorbs radar.
From the ones that I know of, they are at least $1 million USD and up.
"The question then becomes, how can it be put to use on Earth, and what benefits could we see on the surface of the planet rather than above it?"

I'm sure there are many applications as an interior coating in optics, such as photography, cinematography, telescopy and microscopy, leading to sharper images. E-Ink displays could use it on the dark side of their "pixels" for higher contrast. Car body paint shops could offer it for the darkest matte black on the block. I could finally have the ultimate set of curtains to ensure cave-like darkness on the brightest day. Ninjas will appreciate it for moving undetected through the shadows (and slightly more commonly with special forces and swat teams, who might also appreciate the coating on their gear). I could get an ultra-black turtleneck to make it look like my disembodied head and hands are animating themselves. My cell phone could be blacker than anyone else's. And finally, this could make for really high-contrast black-light posters.
One thing I forgot to mention, now that the scheduler code has been changed the famous "you are not expected to understand this" comment is gone.
That's awesome! What kind of system you use to sense different grips, i.e. what kind of sensors there are inside the "ball".
Wednesday Transcription Tip- Indirect and Direct Object
Me too. Most programmers don't understand the "brain" of a select statement. People gtalk me all the time when they are stuck and the answer is often times to remove 90% of the query and replace it with a GROUP BY and a HAVING. Most people don't think of the steps the interpreter goes through because it is a declarative language.
This reminds of of a story. I once worked at a place that would transfer solicitors and similar callers to our fake employee Helen Wait's voicemail (pronounced hell 'n wait). "Can I speak to somebody about where you buy your paper products?" "Sure, let me transfer you to Helen Wait."
Mark Cuban talked about this. When he first started he would say "yes" to everything a client needed and then worked around the clock to make sure he delivered it to them and learned along the way. This probably includes many unbilled hours but it forces you to learn.
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3010687
Flash has had chronic performance and reliability issues even on Windows.

And you forgot to mention one of the main issues with Flash: security (or the lack of thereof), it has had so many holes it is starting to make Active X look good (hyperbole, I know, but not by much).
Snark aside, I'd say that Siri doesn't seem to work at least 50% of the time.

First, it tends not to be able to connect to the network. Whether with full 3G or even over wifi a large percentage of the time you'll end up with "I'm having trouble connecting to the network" after asking your question. There shouldn't be any excuses here - paid for the phone which the service was a feature, one should be able to use it whenever they need.

Second, the speech to text is severely lacking. Sure it does a fairly good job of sentence translation but anything outside of phonetic names is just garbage. You'll get 'Red Robin' but not 'QDoba'. You'll get the last name of 'Anderson' or 'Jones' but any ethnic name (I'm of German descent - no match, I can't imagine being Indian, Korean, Hispanic, etc.) isn't going to match unless you say it phonetically.

Third, it just tends to be a glorified search widget. Other than reminders or asking about the weather you'll most likely just be prompted to search for what you are asking. And at that point you are back to the phonetic requirements to get what you are searching for.

I'm not saying Siri is bad, it has it's place, but this isn't the revolution it's hyped up to be.
Earn money on Twitter
The min threshhold I think is now 500 karma. It's a way to ensure that only people who have been around for a while and understand the community have the ability to downvote, and the rule is only downvote contentless posts (like memes, "+1"'s, etc).
> I'd think most of the Chinese buying houses for their kids are essentially legit businessmen.

Not the instances that I know of. They are corrupt Chinese gov officials using embezzled money on homes that typically cost 1-4 million USD (mostly in the 2's from what I've seen).
It's not a "no true Scotsman" fallacy — I'm saying that you're using entirely too high a bar. BCC's design is excellent compared to most sites for small businesses run by non-designers. It is not a work of art, but it is professionally designed, reasonably attractive and does not look obviously hacky. (By contrast, the old design actually was pretty crap.) Patrick's audience is not known to have discriminating design taste, so IMO it is fine. Take a look at, say, the website for a local bike shop to see what what bad design looks like.
S. Korean Grocery Chain Brings the Store to the People
I also find the Oracle outer join operator (+) easier to use.

I just searched the full (Oracle) sql codebase of the project I'm working on, and it seems that there is no clear winner in the "outer join" vs "(+)" battle (outer = 46%, (+) = 54%). There is no code style requirement for joins.
I did this after giving up on ever having a career in I.T. and being fed up with my 8 year job at Wal-Mart. I already had some knowledge of PHP, JavaScript, ..etc and I got most of my work from oDesk.com. I took a couple of weeks to go over some training at Lynda.com before I started taking on work since I was mostly self-taught. I found that not already being an expert in Web Design/Development meant that it took me longer to do the jobs that people wanted done and I ended up spending more time on projects than it should have taken. I obviously couldn't bill the client more for my lack of knowledge so I ended up working 12 to 14 hour days and made about the same as what I made when I left Wal-Mart.

I'm definitely not discouraging you, but if you've already got a job I'd test the waters with some freelance work before quitting. In my case, quitting my job at Wal-Mart and doing freelance web design/development actually landed me a career in the I.T. field and 3 years later I'm on the verge of making a 6-figure salary doing what I love to do.
Couldn't it also be used in solar technology? It absorbs the light and I assume it stores it as heat, seems like the next logical step...
AVOS acquires Trunk.ly
A Tech Recruiters’ Guide to Driving Hiring Managers Insane
> just throw a few $1000 at a fundraising dinner to get the guy offering the biggest tax breaks elected.

I'm confused. Are we talking about China or Taiwan?
I think this is one of the best marketing uses of QR codes and a mobile app that I've seen. It actually solves a real problem and brings in revenue.
Thanks for your reply. Is there some ad network specially targetting local ads?
and goodbye battery life.
Even the simplest HTML5 game find a way to use 90% of my CPU.
Reminder: No Matter Which Dark Souls Character You Play, You Will Die a Lot
CrunchFund, Angels Back Flowdock, A Group Chat Application For Teams
You don't like any of the three branches and compare the executive to a totalitarian Big Brother.

What do you suggest as an alternative?
No Nonsense Muscle Building
One quarter of China’s top 1000 richest people obtained their wealth from property, compared to less than 10% among the world’s 1000 richest, the report says.

Are they comparing the top-1000 richest people in China to the top-1000 richest people in the world? That's not a very good comparison. It's like comparing the top-1000 students from a single college, to the top-1000 students from every college in the entire world.

I'm not sure if the actual report makes this comparison too as I cannot read Chinese.
That's interesting -- I'm surprised that Yelp would encourage this.

The result seems to be reviews that value the restaurant relative to the effect that visiting and reviewing the restaurant has on the writer's ego.

This seems to result in a dearth of objective reviews about the food (or service), and means that I largely can't identify with any of the restaurant reviewers on Yelp.
Prison or Princeton: Which is More Expensive?
isn't heroku "heroku for mobile"?
It's all those clicks that do it, even when you can't see or feel it the sound of a buckling-spring keyboard just comforts you.
Sort of. That is, traditionally XAML has been used primarily for Silverlight & WPF applications, but it's actually just a declarative language used for laying out (usually) Silverlight & WPF controls.

It's sort of a combo HTML&CSS. So your statement in that vein would be like "Isn't HTML&CSS just another name for Gecko and/or WebKit?"

That said, even though it looks like XAML may be used for new WinRT-based apps in the Windows Metro stuff, I'd be surprised if it survives the deaths of Silverlight & WPF.
I can't seem to find a link to this in action. I just find two blog posts about it.
Inviting hacker news readers to reserve names early at http://mynam.es
Ask HN: Looking for a 'how to hire' type-ish thread from a githubber
I read a post discussing good hiring techniques on Monday (11/7) between 5:30 and 9:00 by a githubber and have been looking for it too long now -- hoping somebody can remember some better clues about it then I can .. please dont waste time digging for it.. thats what i will be doing. just post if you can remember it off the top of your head.. thank you
unfortunately, I must agree with you. 9 times out of 10 candidates cannot answer the question you've posed. One time I even had a candidate with 17 years of experience (!!!) who didn't even know what a join was (masked in a question form). I let it slide, pretended like it was an "advanced" question, and came back to it later (figured he was nervous). The second time around I phrased the question "so, imagine I want to join data from these two tables so that the output would be first name, and location" (2 different tables). Even then, the candidate did not get the hint.... Instead, he offered to change the schema of the fake database and have all the information in one table....
I completely agree that /blog was better than blog subdomain in the past, but this article has me convinced that google now treats them the same.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganiz...

Am I wrong?
RIP Mobile Flash
Adobe kills mobile Flash in favor of HTML5... giving Steve Jobs the last laugh
I agree, but on the HTML5 side, we have not one but several moving targets, and IE is hardly open.
Ah, a page out of the Citibank playbook. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870354560457540...)
My personal record:

PropertyWithADifferentDefaultValueAlreadyExists

And I've missed to add `Exception` to its end, because that's what it is.
Watch Me Make Mistakes
I'm Guillaume. I regularly tell people to just call me "William" :)
Nice! RSS feeds with the view of the day / gallery images would be great
most do but you don't get a premium - i would call 10-20 businesses in your town.
although, i do think that buttons on the steering wheel, which you learn to use without looking are a big big enhancement to anything on the console.
It's not a threat unless people stop buying iPads. How you do you get from "interest in the Fire" to "lack of interest in the iPad"?

They don't compete on price. They're not really even the same class of device. This is just another pointless and content-free "ZOMG <foo> KILLER IS ON THE WAY!!1" article.
The Popcorn library syncs events to a video's timeline. For example, I can show the profile, photo, and recent Tweets of each presenter/speaker in a video. And the plugins work with YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5 videos. This was always possible in JavaScript, but Popcorn makes it simpler, putting interactive video into the hands of beginner programmers and small projects.
After signing up for the beta it's clearly targeted to mobile apps developers who don't want to create their back-end.

It provides a good bunch of interesting features and skeleton of apps for Android and iOS.
Clash of the E-Book Titans: Rakuten vs. Amazon
Adobe shifts mobile device support from Flash Player to AIR and HTML5
This is Venus Robot , The Insect Eaters
The XAML/C# stack is called many different things within windows. Silverlight and WPF are just two names for it. Keep in mind though that even things that are branded silverlight (desktop/web apps and wp7 apps) aren't even the same thing. The WP7 API differs heavily from the desktop API. The XAML/C# stack for metro apps is also just a very small subset of the silverlight stack.

Silverlight may very well be going away, but XAML/C# isn't. The only thing that's most likely disappearing is the push for it to be on the web and the name "silverlight" itself.
What an awful namespace collision this introduces.
Something about "outsource server-side back-end" doesn't, um, parse for me.
Maybe for one generation, but I have two great friends who are the children of these types, and they are as American as anyone.
If you didn't bother to ask for help, how do you know they wouldn't have helped?

I bought a book from No Starch Press, and I hated it. (Possibly due to my own fault.) I wrote to them to complain, and they refunded my money and told me to throw away the book.
Windows UDP vulnerability allows remote code execution
Take This Lollipop Fastest Growing App on Facebook
It's got to be from a point-and-click Query-O-Matic tool.
No sources for any of the figures given, so not so interesting
Natural Remedies for Colic
Does your app have a "report a bug" option? I sure hope so, otherwise this complaining blog post would look awfully hypocritical.
That's because many mobile browsers aren't optimised yet - I think that will be solved with time.
They’re addressing other users, asking “Is anyone else having this problem?”
What’s that about? How is finding other with the same problem going to help you?

Sounds like the user hasn't ruled out a configuration error or buggy device and is simply looking for a solution. This is due diligence before reporting a bug (along with reading the documentation, of course).
This is a significant breakthrough. Scala is once again showing the way forward. Instead of having ad hoc macros (which everyone knows are bad), Scala macros don't change the syntax of the language. Thus they are no more difficult to come to terms with than an API for a well-written library. In this sense ordinary API's are going to start looking like crippled Scala.

The other nice thing about these is that you don't need to lose type safety to use macros. That's really where the innovation is here.

I don't yet fully understand how this all works at the type-theoretic level. I'm imagining that expressions (as opposed to the values they represent) are thought of as belonging to higher kinded types. The macros then reject expression which aren't of the right kind.

I have to say, I am absolutely flawed by the comments so far about this. I think this is going to have an absolutely pivotal effect on future programming languages. This is how macros should always have been. I don't know of any other language which does this. It's a totally new area in language theory to explore.
I, on a few occasions, have went the nice route by firing off an email (or phone call) about problem and have it deleted or a form letter sent back. In essence, my problem was ignored.

In that case, I went on Google and linked my name to a nasty complaint. Lo and behold, they called or emailed back and solved it if I removed the negative feedback.

Time and time again, if I complain publicly and become a cost sinkhole I get results. If I am a sheep, I get nothing.
The position of the paper on the table seems like an entirely visual variable. What information about the documents or the content within them did the latter group ascertain through tactile senses?

I'd assume that the amount of information about the content that was acquired tactilely was none. Feeling the paper can only give you information about the paper medium itself, not the ideas encoded in written language on it - conceptual content is non-tangible, by definition.

So the mistake the computer group made was to try to model the human-paper interaction with software, when software isn't made out of paper. They should have attempted to figure out what human-content interaction was being proxied via re-positioning the paper, and modeled that in the software.
Cool stuff. Reminds me a bit of how http://soundcloud.com does a similar thing with music. Check it out if you haven't, yet. It's a really well done solution IMHO.
But I thought the future was now ;-)
I'm fine if the government mandates that they install their GPS tracker on my car in order for me to be legally allowed to drive it. The reason is because it's my decision to make; if I don't like the rules, I could just not drive. (And I don't like the rules for having a driver's license in Illinois, like "implied consent", so guess what, I don't drive or have a driver's license.)

I don't like being singled out for special treatment without some judicial oversight. That's the problem with the GPS trackers; the sneakiness of it. If it were done out in the open, then I wouldn't mind.
Google sure is good at guiding the conversation on these APIs. It used to be that everyone complained about Chrome's piss-poor audio implementation, but now people are complaining that Microsoft and Mozilla are 'slow to support' the Web Audio API 'standard' even though it looks like Google documenting their NIH mixer library after the fact instead of an actual market-driven standards effort.
There is a big gap between a two way medium like Twitter and something like the frustratingly one way App Store reviews.

I think HN is mostly familiar (and admiring of) Zappos and their awesome customer service. Twitter is bar none the easiest, cheapest way to get positive public customer support stories.

Most twitter users have a handful (less than a 100) people they regularly interact with and are kind of amazed that a company would take the time to message them directly about an issue they were having.

From there it is usually easy to get a dialog going and when their issue is fixed they aren't just satisfied but ecstatic about your company and product (typically they go back on Twitter and talk you up to their friends).
The sources are all at the bottom of the infographic. Larger version of the infographic is here: http://blog.sourceninja.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/sourc...
The Social Graph is Both
I don't think this is anything like Heroku
Hey, Siri, send Jenn $5
Yes, the patriot act was being kicked around in some form since at least 1995.

"When I was chairman in '94 I introduced a major antiterrorism bill--back then,...I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up [the PATRIOT act] was my bill." - Joe Biden

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/rhetorical-question
What services does Google sell? To me, it looks like they sell user eyeballs to advertisers.
PV technology, as far as I know, works less efficiently at higher temperatures, so the heat storage might not be desirable. On the other hand, there's also concentrated solar power, which uses giant arrays of mirrors to heat up water for use in a traditional steam turbine, for which this might be useful.
Flash Lite was a hack-n-slashed fork off the venerable (and briefly open-source!) Flash Player 4. The portability and modularization of the Flash code has improved since 1999.
Many developers already moved on, no need to wait for Adobe's permission to do so.
Congrats mutru and the team!
I didn't upvote this article, because Unlimited is truly Unlimited -- as long as you're using wifi.

That's the point: you have a cell network available, seamlessly. The old incumbent carriers with their caps and rates and bag of tricks.

But if you can find a wifi connection, you're home free.
Madison's temporary lose is San Francisco's gain.

Don't get used to it!
Same, it seems they lost the link to the actual demo and just keep linking back to this blog post: http://mozillapopcorn.org/popcorn-in-the-planetarium-demo/ :(
Estimate how many slaves work for you based on your possessions and lifestyle.
You could also say that this is a situation Cisco and Juniper have created. In the past, they have not been great at delivering good quality software. Some still say that Cisco's version 1 is really a beta.
This has created a culture of caution at ISPs where they have had to create their own long acceptance testing procedures, causing long periods between updates.
Http://youtu.be/poZatSfEjbE
The USA
Coders and Prospectors
on PostgreSQL it's part of pgAdmin you don't need a separate tool
In regards to your first bullet, one of Parse's competitors, CloudMine, allows developers to write their own server-side JavaScript code that executes within a sandboxed environment: https://cloudmine.me/developer_zone#code/overview
Your choice of words was unfortunate, then - "stalemate" implies a tie with no possible move for any player.

In 2003, there was Ajax rich (you could do some nontrivial client side processing -- like hide and show elements), and there was Flash rich (antialiased polygons, sound). I was talking about the latter, and so do most people that consider HTML5 a worthy flash replacement (even though e.g. you still have to use Flash for proper sound support).