skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the ipod there were only really 3 specs that mattered, storage , size and weight. As long as the CPU is fast enough to decode MP3 in real time then it is basically irrelevant.

The original iPhone was basically in a market of one when it was first released, however now with more android phones becoming available people are becoming more interested in the technical differences between them mainly because it helps answer other questions about what will be possible with the device.
LinkedIn’s New CardMunch iPhone App: Reinventing Business Cards
Why Warren Buffett is betting big on IBM (and not Google, Microsoft or HP)
10 Fresh Responsive WordPress Themes
You are right. What I should have said is: "the lack of sigils to indicate type of a variable". In perl this noise is everywhere, while in Ruby its is a lot less common.

Specially if you use accessor methods. In ruby, unlike smalltalk, this instance variable sigils are pretty much impossible to get rid off. This is because in Smalltalk local variables have to be declared, and if you don't, the Language will try to use the instance variables. In Ruby it would default to being a local variable, if already assigned, or invoking a method with no arguments.
I assume it's on the front page of YC because it's an good summary of an interesting topic, which is more than you can say about most stories. I don't use Bitcoin or care whether it succeeds but I upvoted the submission because it got me to spend ten minutes thinking about this interesting problem with the protocol.
Show HN: my first Chrome extension (PenaltyBlox)
Whether it is a designer ultra-tweeting about some conference she is at or a venture capitalist intensely describing his pursuit of the always-elusive "inbox zero", sometimes you just want to mute someone you follow on Twitter.

This extensions allows you to do just that. You can easily put accounts that you follow in the penalty box, where they will be silenced and feel shame. When you have deemed their sins absolved, you can let them out, free to fill your Twitter stream again.

Download:
http://bit.ly/u1giXH

Read About:
http://bit.ly/tdqX6y

Source:
http://bit.ly/tmxvf1
How To Run Almost Any Android App On the Kindle Fire
That's just not true. If even one California resident signs up for their service to transmit funds--and I am a California resident who has signed up for their service--California law applies.
I would definitely be interested in an internship at a growing start-up. I would classify myself as a Non-Technical business person, though I do have a strong passion and general knowledge of technology. Feel free to send me an e-mail @ Lyandve_brya@bentley.edu
If any of you are in Seattle, and want to become registered marrow donors and potentially help save a life, there is a swabbing party tonight at the Rob Roy in Belltown.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=174595119298897
It worked out for Apple/iTunes just fine. I don't like this approach (and do not buy i-devices for that reason), but it is quite viable if executed right.
That's what I was looking for. I could only find last year's thread.
I don't agree. Consumers will be mostly web browsing, checking email, and consuming media, with web browsing having the most noticeable lag between intent and rendered result. Consumers hope the CPU spec correlates to that use, because e spec tables don't usually show amusing else.

Consumers are really dumb about spec lists. How else would the computer industry get away with marketing laptops or monitors by inches instead of megapixels?
Keep in mind -- $20k over 10 months is a pretty low return on the investment involved in an application.

Perhaps the revenue will trend upwards ... but if we put our team on an application like this and only saw $20k in revenue in 10 months, we'd be out of business.
This is exactly the problem. If you want to get involved in promoting computing at school (rather than ICT) have a look at

http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/
> The recipient just has to enter their bank's ABA number and account number.

Sounds like ACH. I don't think it's possible for individuals to use on their own, though.

I can just log into my bank in Germany and transfer money to any account in Europe (even in the UK) with zero fees. As mentioned, it's a very common method of payment because it costs nothing to set up or use. Only downside is that transfers usually take a couple days to clear.
Needs a lot more characters to handle height progressions and angles better, but that's awesome.
I wonder if it might, someday, be more profitable for some firms (e.g. software companies) to focus on products in countries with limited copyright and patent law. That would be very exciting.

With the cost of patents increasing, it seems to me that this is possible (although perhaps not plausible).
Booleans have 2 states - true and false. A 3 state equivalent is a Trivalent (Someone correct me if i'm wrong here).

Unless you plan on making use of the third state to indicate something in particular, just set it to 0 and call it a day. Space is cheap, and unless you want to constantly write NULL checks to handle it without the need for a 3rd case, in which case you'd most likely assume NULL is 0, you're only causing problems for yourself down the road

Just my opinion, I'm sure others may disagree

Edit: Potential Caveat

Say it's a table to hold answers from a questionnaire, you may see some value for adding it as a NULLable so you can say "Oh, this guy skipped that question", if such a thing were possible in the application.

So for that situation, i'd say the choice is more of a case by case thing
I'm a Grails advocate, and can be pretty productive in it. This is coming from someone with 15 years of PHP experience (sprinkled with some other tech), and I'm pretty productive in that as well. There are some aspects of projects I'm actually more productive in Grails in, which is a byproduct of the groovy/java language syntax than anything else. GORM is a dream to work with for 90% of the projects I do, as opposed to any PHP-based ORM, for example, and even Rails' ActiveRecord. Obviously just "imo"

Probably a bit off topic, but PHP/Ruby/Python/Perl scale up much easier than Java scales down. And there's fewer large scale problems/apps than there are smaller scale stuff, so we see far more usage of PHP/etc in most day to day work.
> Call me cynical, to me this sounds like a story so outrageous that it becomes rather implausible.

Not at all. I'm in India. I regularly score terrible marks because my teachers don't understand my projects, not even when I limit my projects to things that most college students across the world are assigned as homework.

A week ago I tried to explain to my teacher how I'm going to build a Scheme interpreter for my final year project. Now, this teacher spends about fifteen minutes talking to most students about their projects, most of which are basic CRUD apps/websites done in Java or C#. She spent all of 3 minutes with me, and then sent me on my way. All this time, she thought I was building a "steam interpreter". I'd tried really hard to explain to her what Scheme was, and I'd even shown her some example code in the Racket REPL. At the end of my explanation, she was blank.

At the end of the year, every guy with a partially-working, hacked-together ASP.NET CRUD app that he grabbed off of CodeProject is going to walk away with an 85 or a 90, and I'll score a 75 or something. This happens every semester we have a project.

Oh, and this isn't even the first time I'm getting screwed. Moreover, I'm not the only Indian kid who regularly gets screwed. The blogosphere is replete with nightmarish tales of Indian teachers screwing over students.

I don't know about the UK, but 99% of the teachers here in India are absolute shitheads who don't deserve their jobs.

And here's a little bonus for those who read this far: tomorrow, I have to explain some of the concepts behind ZFS to my teacher. Whee.
Amazon's cloud is the world's 42nd fastest supercomputer
A more powerful social effect maybe, but that teacher won't keep his job. It sounds like this kid already knows what course he'll pick for uni, if he's going, and the teacher doesn't know the area at all, so can't help in any way.
Sometimes it takes a while to click. I abhorred `map` for the longest time, but nowadays i use it everywhere; since i read the SICP and suddenly grokked them.
Sounds interesting. Can it be done by entrepreneurs, though?

One idea: find some way to turn the economy into an MMMORPG. Ie 3d printing where the designs are created by Warcraftesque guilds and the profits are shared.

Google "john robb open source ventures".
Consumers arn't getting rid of their credit cards any time soon. Why would they? They get 1) credit, 2) get to dispute anything they want off the bill, 3) don't pay any type of fee.

And the merchants don't drive payment options ... they simply accept what consumers provide.

Also, IMO, the moment fraudsters target Dwolla, is the moment Dwolla realizes that a 2-7% transaction fee is necessary to stay in business.
Occupy: The Tech at the Heart of the Movement
yes, but the point is if the utility provided by these "dists" would be mostly useless for other languages, then it's hardly honest to use said feature to promote CPAN (and therefore perl) against other languages.

the review system is a questionable advantage too, as I don't want to go digging through 16 SMTP packages to find the best one, and especially as I suspect most people install CPAN modules through the command prompt (or via their distro's package manager), rather than digging through a website.

I also note that Python tends to adopt the best packages into the standard library...
I also wonder with #spacepunk tech brewing if it's possible to actually overpower a satellites signal. There is someone on kickstarter working on low earth orbit satellites that would stay in orbit for 2 weeks.
Thank you, Nathan. I'm glad to see an application for pediatric patients. Hopefully, the price will go down in a future. You could try to advertise it among neurologists:

http://www.neurology.org/
Thanks for answers. I have some more questions.

- In a month I am going to incorporate my company in U.S. Is California the best State for my company? Is Delaware corporation right choice or I should look at LLC?

- I don't need a visa if I am visiting USA. But I have to leave the country every 3 months. In the future I will need a work visa. Does anyone have experience with work visas for Europeans?
Larry Wall didn't care much about making a pretty language.

This suggests that Larry Wall was happy to create a kludgey language for the sake of just getting things done.

I don't have any references around to back this up, but given Wall's background in linguistics, and his demonstrated interest in language features, I have to believe he was interested in creating a coherent, thoughtful, as well as practical, language.

Perhaps you nor I find the results pretty per se, but the language does have its own aesthetic which apparently many find to have a kind of beauty.
Bonfire, Twitter chat done right
This seems to have been missed. Should be up voted and discussed. Sounds like a fantastic framework and I'm really looking forward to hearing what other HNers have to say about it.

How far off from production ready do you think it is?
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. -- Marshall_McLuhan

It's not that Perl makes it natural for people to express their thoughts. It's simply that your mind was trained to think in Perl.
Offer HN: Hacker needed for Part time/Internship 
My startup Grosper.com is looking for a part time hacker to come in and work with our team. The work will mostly involve making changes and doing QA for the existing code. As we are a small team, you will get the opportunity to ship the code that you have written and see how people interact with it. The position is location agnostic as long as you have a good internet connection, work well within a team and can effectively communicate.

You should have some previous work that we can look at and assess. You must also let us know the kind of work from around the web that you admire. You must know PHP, CSS and HTML. The position does not pay a lot, but we hope you will have a great experience and we are honestly paying as much as we can afford and not looking to take advantage of interns by making them work for free. Contact me at mohammed.hingora@grosper.com if you're interested.
This just goes to show that 1st and 1st really is the center of the universe
> I don't know off the top of my head my account number or routing info. Looking it up is a pain and typing it in can be done incorrectly. This isn't something I want to do regularly.

But how is that any different from a credit card number? I have all my bank info in my pocket, right on my Maestro card. No expiration date, no CVV code. Just an account number and a publicly-known bank number. If I'm authorizing a direct debit, that's all I have to enter.
Craigslist was profitable from the start. Dwolla is nowhere close. Being disruptive doesn't matter if you can't stay in business.
Yes, I'd Love This $60,000 Flight Simulator, Thanks
My parents put $2000 in a Dwolla account, did nothing with it, and two months later decided to withdraw it. Dwolla put a hold on it for over a week without any notification, and my father finally decided to call. On the phone they said 'well you know, $2000 is a lot of money'. My parents had to send over scanned photo identification just to get their money out.

Anyways, what I learned is that Dwolla's customer service is terrible. I don't recommend it to anybody.
I want to see you super-succeed, and in a lot of ways you already have succeeded.

The most important part is not that you made $19,000 while teaching yourself how to code, but that you are actually making the world a better place. I would angel fund this idea (if I had the money) the minute I would read gives a voice to anyone who cannot speak. I would venture fund your product that minute I would read replaces a $7,000+ medical device that is bulky and difficult to use.
The problem with this strategy is what Buckaroo Banzai said: "No matter where you go, there you are."

In other words, a lot of the time the things that are making you unhappy are internal: lack of confidence, self-esteem, self respect, or non-functional brain chemistry. Sure, if there's something weighing you down (a bad relationship or job) then change it. But if you're unhappy with everything in your life then what you need to change is yourself.
I follow Bitcoins, in the matter that some people might follow Nascar crashes, and it is not credible to me that Dwolla is primarily getting those volumes on Bitcoin transactions. First, the Bitcoin community is, on the observable evidence, not large enough to support them. Second, my understanding is Dwolla belatedly discovered the value of chargebacks, which bit the Bitcoiners because of all the obvious reasons.
Prosecutions are conducted under the guise of due process, but are anything but. Certainly many who are prosecuted are guilty, but chances are there was at least one innocent person under the steamroller that this guy was helping drive.

For one, he gets the scorn because all the people who groomed him into thinking he was "building a better world" aren't in the spotlight. If he's truly repetant, he can reflect upon how they misled him and adjust his personal opinion accordingly.

But really, he's pointing out one law lacking due process like it's the exception. It's not. The whole system has cargo-culted the idea of justice, going through the motions so outsiders think there's intelligence and justice behind it.
Uxbekistan and—in the South Pacific—R'Iyeh, fictional city in Lovecraft where Cthulhu is held prisoner.
I considered doing that, but I thought Ave AAA might just confuse people, especially people who don't know NYC. And I kind of like that I'm squashing all the nuances with this simple cruel grid :P
Wouldn't the phone equivalent be them calling his office number and leaving a message? It seems like they looked up his name and when they found a hit, they found his office and his office address. Surely there would also have been a similar process looking up his last known phone number if they determined he no longer used whatever number he gave them?
Popular business books turned into comics
Is parsing a page template on the server and including a 'recent posts' snippet really so challenging that it justifies every client doing another HTTP request for that very same snippet?
As someone who used to be a production director, program director, and DJ on a low-power FM radio station, this looks absolutely awesome!

The way we handled playlists and show airtimes was pretty arcane compared to this. We basically used some custom software I had written for our station which included basic scheduling and whatnot, along with Winamp and good old pen-and-paper (this was from 2003-2008, so pretty recent); this looks better by about 1000x. I'm considering getting back in touch with those guys and suggesting they give it a try (I think it'd be worth installing Ubuntu on their computers just to give this a go).
> "why are wire transfers so expensive in the US?"

Regulatory capture. There's a ton of financial incentive for the banks and processing networks to push credit. Instead of a simple processing fee that gets pushed to near-zero, they can get a percentage transaction fee from their monopoly network, possibly participation fees from the merchants, lock-in/network effect, they get to push credit debt to increase revenue from the purchaser, they can run 'promotions' and 'rewards' programs to stimulate use, etc.

Even before the overdraft racket had a light shined on it, banks and networks were pressuring merchants (through 'incentives') to shift transactions back to credit. They were raising debit processing and card fees in direct response to the revenue effects of consumers switching to debit. Lowering potential debit revenue by cleaning up overdraft nonsense just put the final nail in establishment incentives to support debit.
> The great downfall of Perl is that it's slow:

What about Perl6 and LLVM?

My personal experience with Perl5:

- It has incomparable expressiveness. Only APL is more expressive. But more expressiveness makes source code less readable.

- Perl's regexp engine is the best - no doubt about it.

- I would never use Perl for big projects. Its odd syntax ($, sometimes %,... before variable names etc.) is terrible for long term maintainability.
Cool. I've been noticing more of these apps (that virtualize an expensive custom device) lately.

Here's another example, an app that replaces whatever gadget piano tuners used to carry:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tunelab-piano-tuner/id3355683...
Do you have a source for your claim that users are transacting over $500,000 per day on Dwolla for Bitcoins?

Dwolla's entire purpose is not to use the traditional POS systems. However, they could certainly create their own inexpensive POS device with no interchange fees or use a cell phone.

Glad to see you sue over unjust laws but no need to bash Dwolla. The service is unbeatable compared to any other way to transfer large amounts of money.
I've noted that those who experience drugs as a depressant tend to have normal dopamine activity whereas those who experience drugs as a stimulant appear to have low dopamine activity

I think in general you are going to find depressants will act like depressants, and stimulants will act as stimulants. In your theory, focus on the inflection point where (e.g. alcohol) a depressant acts as a stimulant. It is a stimulant for all people when consumed in the right amount, though it also depends on other factors. Some days alcohol will make me stay up all night, some days it will put me to sleep in 15 minutes.
hahahaha he means serious business.
I was responding directly to the "loved" part, but now I realize that was not clear. For the record, I think everything but CPAN applies to Ruby and Python. And your personal irritations are not really relevant to people who use it, just as my personal irritations with Perl are relevant to people who use (and maybe love) it.
Actually, it's the right one. What you want to reduce is the incidence of infected people in the donor pool.

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/incidence.htm
CDC estimates MSM represent approximately 2% of the US
population, but accounted for more than 50% of all new
HIV infections annually from 2006 to 2009.

If you can drop your incidence of HIV by 50% while reducing the pool size by only 2%, you've improved the infection incidence in the pool substantially!
Gave it a try, works like a charm!
Paypal had similar limitations in the early days.
Nathan,

Great story and way to find a niche that was unserved. There are so many out there (niches that is) with archaic products/services that are begging for right person to come along and improve them.

Good luck with the dedicated venture!
Except that dealing with the Dwolla people is far worse than Visa/Mastercard.
Totally get it. I'm very happy for him, and I'm fully aware of why I only made $190 :) As the parent of an autistic child, I'm really happy that app authors like this can disrupt entrenched and overpriced industries and make tech like this available to a lot more people. Someone will eventually compete with him too (App Stores totally grease the wheels for competition) and then consumers will benefit even more.
But even then, how long will it take for the funds to clear? Credit and debit cards work so well online because clearing happens almost instantaneously.
That's a different statistic, isn't it.
Though I think the point still applies. If the best computer scientists of the world had built this app, it still would have unlikely achieved greater success.
What medication gave you the same benefits as weed, if you don't mind me asking?

My experiences very closely match yours, fwiw.
I tried Ritalin but wasn't satisfied at all, and am 'back on' weed.
Red Hat automates Java dev in OpenShift PaaS — GigaOm
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I'd much rather see a large organized event by individual web sites than unilateral action by Google.

Not least among my reasons being that I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Google to act.
Consumers pay the fees. Just not directly.
Oh, definitely. I'm just saying that that statistic is irrelevant to that particular point.