skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although these boats are to be used for research it would be fascinating to make a similar ocean robot which specializes in herding ocean trash and collecting it for recycling.

Another article from the same site (http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678872/methods-plastic-madness-o...) is about the ocean trash problem and a startup whose goal is to process low quality, sun brittled plastics such as those in the Pacific Ocean trash patch.

But the article makes the very valid point that gathering plastics from the ocean is a labor intensive effort. It would be cool to see a combination of autonomous robots such as these that could herd floating plastic trash and take it back to base stations for collection and recycling.
I suppose when Coca-cola makes it compelling for consumers to buy their car (ie, making the beverage better while driving "compatible" car), they can advertise it.

However, even WinPhone7 with deep FB integration didn't seem to really catch on with users (or at least, that wasn't a standout feature that brought users in).

Perhaps FB will stop updating their iOS/Android apps just to make Buffy look better?
It's probably done like that because iDevices don't support fixed positioning. Some browser detection and different CSS/JS profiles based on browser type would probably be warranted.
Windows 8 can't arrive soon enough. It will ship with IE10 and it will not run anything older than that. That's the first Windows OS that guarantees a modern browser.
"too long"? Are you joking?

Anyone when educated about the proper use that says that is just spouting BS.

Do it right or don't do it all.
> The miniature ships built by Liquid Robotics ...

In case anyone wasn't aware of it, this is the company that James Gosling now works for.
(I have no idea whether he is involved in this project or not.)
The Apple Store down the street from me has cash registers. I think they only do the iPhone checkout thing when you do a large purchase.

My experience standing in line at an Apple Store has been very bad. Perhaps worse than any retail store I can recall. By not having a clear line the customer is left confused. What am I supposed to do if I want to buy a mouse? If the store's not busy you're set. If it is busy you have to try and grab an employee, who's undoubtedly busy helping another customer already. Then they tell you to stand in the line. Except that the front cash register area is both a cash register and a work station. So you might be standing in line and the two people in front of you are getting repairs. So you wait 15 minutes to buy a mouse.

A busy Apple Store feels like a DMV to me. There are numerous customers standing around waiting to be helped, but there is no clear way to get a ticket, as there at least is at a DMV.
Consider for a moment the cultural environment you're trying to make this argument in. I truly believe that many many programmers have cognitive dissonance around intellectual property, perceived value of invention/innovation, and what their compensation and rights should be around that value.

In the hacker news crowd, I think it is significantly more present.

I don't recall your opinions on these topics, but prepare to be faced with some pretty intense logical fallacies today.
Could you please present your "am[p]le scientific evidence [...] that sexual orientation can't be changed".

I'll present an anecdote which, amongst several I've seen/heard, suggests to me that you're wrong in your assertion.

"On Freddie Mercury's Sexuality

'I think it was an undiscussed thing for a long time. The truth of the matter is nobody should care. Why should anyone care what sexual persuasion people have? It's about the music, and Freddie would have been the first to say that. He never hid the fact that he was turned on by men instead of by women, but strange enough, I don't think it was always the case. Because in the early days, we used to share rooms. So in the early days, I know who Freddie slept with, and they weren't men, but I think it gradually changed. And I have no idea how these things work, but it wasn't really anybody's business but his, and we never talked about it as if it were important. Why should it be important? We just made music together.'"

quoted from http://m.npr.org/news/front/128935865?singlePage=true
I took the plunge and switched over to pypy with version 1.6. Besides the occasional minor headache, most things work as expected and the huge speed-up makes it more than worth it.
> What does google have, fundamentally, to offer to the phone industry that nobody else can offer? Better search? A better maps app?

How about Google Voice? I sure hope that in 10 years the phone network has been subsumed by the Internet, and that the days of stupid roaming and SMS charges is behind us.

What did Apple do when Google tried to launch a Google Voice app for the iPhone? Rejected it from the App Store. That was the moment when I realized that Android was totally necessary for Google to not be at the mercy of its competitors.
I've had a similarly surreal experience. I took a photo of a cup of coffee in Zeitgeist Cafe in Seattle early in 2005. I was new to Wikipedia so I uploaded it and put it on the page for Coffee, where it has stayed since.

I see it everywhere. The most surreal experience was when I was waiting for my luggage at SeaTac last year, and on the TV in front of me was an ad for a national hotel chain -- and they used my photo (violating the CC license by the way) when touting their continental breakfast. You can see the way this photo "virus" has spread on the new Google Image search as well: http://images.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=cup...
It is absolutely critical. The 30-40% productivity gain per monitor is absolutely true.

My setups have included:

Three 19" screens at 1280x1024. This was uber productive. Reference/communication on the left screen, code in the middle screen, test on the right screen.

Now I'm running a 23" Samsung and a 27" Asus. I use the 27" to code and the 23" to read/test on. The 27" has a 1920x1080 resolution but larger type causes less strain on my eyes.

Where do I think I'm going to end up? Buying a 27" iMac and using it as a Target Display Mode for my next Macbook Air. I think I could do it all on one 27".
YES.

1: Any time I go through a border I have the expectation that an immigration officer (from any country) has access to my online activity. This could be a quick google search, but more likely I've been run through an automatic system to detect any red flags prior to arrival. A future government may see your actions now as 'unpatriotic'.

2: When we are not in our native countries (and even then) our rights are essentially 100% in the hands of the immigration officers whilst at a border. Read those immigration cards sometime.

3: In any country a Law Enforcement Officer can google you and can also use a 3rd party summary service to find out about you. So you you get arrested then anything you have online is available to be used as evidence against you.

4: When the rule of law applies, and decent people are enforcing the law, then none of this matters if you behave in a legal manner, even if you are fully exercising your right to free speech. However LEOs like the rest of us are human and have bias. So expect the worst at times. As we have seen recently a few bad actors can bring an entire force, state or even country into disrepute.

5: We should have the expectation that anything put into a computer, certainly written online or even said in a call can and probably is being captured. It's one of trillions of data points and ignored, but if you ever become famous, infamous or under suspicion then the data is there.
Why Everyone But The Artist And The Music Fan Is Doomed
Can someone explain the redundancies to me? If you can't text rot13("shpx") then why do they need to block rot13("shpx") + " you"? Or does that imply that rot13("shpx") + " u" would be accepted (it's not on the list)? Or did someone just not understand how longer strings match faster?
Since IMDB started, it was originally a volunteer contributed project.
Interesting. I wonder: is it common for people to associate the word robot with a humanoid form, or had your wife recently watched iRobot?
Should be back in business if you'd like to try again.
Thanks Dewey.
Acme Labs has much the same problem. Jef's (2005) article about handling his mail is still a good read (though a bit dated now) http://acme.com/mail_filtering/
I guess you would call such a trash-collecting robot WALL-C?
Sure, I get that. The irony I see is that in the same breath he ties "new laws" to an increase in liberalism. Which is either a gross misestimation of the nature of most new laws or a gross perversion of the very idea of a "liberal" society. More so if we take the more classic meaning of the term (in the Locke, not Clinton sense).
PyPy performance is good, but the project is still not very mature. It's not quite yet ready as a drop-in replacement.

In particular, the build process is really painful (3+ hours on a high-end Xeon workstation) and quite immature.

I was particularly annoyed to discover that the build process isn't incremental -- if it fails for any reason, you get to start all over again.

The CPython extension support is also still very experimental (that is, if you have any Python extension modules written in C, be prepared for a lot of fun getting them to work).

PyPy also doesn't support anywhere near the number of OS platforms that Python does natively. It's very much a Linux, Mac, or Windows thing only. And it's heavily focused on x86 if you want to use the JIT version.
One of the major reasons that people oppose software patents specifically, rather than all patents: software already has copyright, while physical objects don't.

Also, even if a company like 3M did start making the stuff (and patents or no patents, they easily could by finding a different variation), do you really think that would put Sugru out of business, given the kind of community they've managed to build?
It's too bad that on the iPhone you need to:

a. Know what a QR code is, how to use it, and

b. Have an app installed specifically for reading QR codes!

It's too bad because I think your idea probably would leave an impression on somebody.
Just file a patent application for them, as you don't care about actually patenting them you won't need to shell out for patent lawyers, so you just need to pay a relatively small filing fee.

Plus it makes it much more likely that your patent will turn up in prior art searches.
Files've been there before acquisition
That's actually exactly Google's solution: they give you a set of reports and an indication of when the malware or malicious link was last detected on the site.

But I don't think that's the issue here. That facebook warning does not, as far as I know, get generated from a positive malware/spam/badness metric. It's just thrown up as a default action when someone links to an unblessed site on the web. That's what the poster doesn't like: it goes against the whole idea of hyperlinking.
Disappointing. "We can beg other powers to intervene" is not "we can fix it".
Once I started using multiple monitors for software development, I never looked back.
C'est la vie. It's not the startup scene - it's a basic principle of society, unfortunately. Who you know is just as important as what you know or can do. The best thing to do is find people to know by showing them what you can do.
Isn't the real danger from the ocean garbage patches that the rubbish breaks down to the point where you can't easily collect it up?.
Interesting, would you really pay for it? Quite a few of the folks we've interviewed & surveyed say they'd use it, only if free. What kind of demographic do you think would be happy to pay for this kind of service.
Nice!

Bug report: Submitting a new post with just a title, and without the text gave me a 500 error. When I clicked back to fill in the text, the submit button was still disabled showing the "Submitting" text. So I had to reload the page.
Adobe Flash sites rapidly converted to HTML5 for iOS users
Google Voice has a competitive advantage over carriers in they aren't regulated. They block calls to rural phone companies that charge high connection fees, phone companies can't legally do that.

I was once a big advocate of Google Voice but I realized you're not really gaining independence by moving your number to Google. You're just transferring dependency from a phone company you pay money to, to an advertising company you don't.
Oh, I've done interviews about pages like this.

Politicians use them to collect email addresses. I don't think they have to operate under the same anti-spam rules as the rest of us. So they use big issues like this to harvest emails.
This is kind of overengineered. Why not just stuff the guts of an old USB keyboard into the enclosure and wire the switch to the Enter key?
New ebook forum
My own experience suggests you are truly burnt out when you are no longer capable of doing work in the face of dire consequences like missing mortgage repayments and feeding your children.

Of course, this feeds back on itself, with further stress causing even more difficulty in fulfilling one's obligations.
Android Market has generated about 7% of the gross revenue of Apple's App Store
Tim Pool And Henry Ferry: The Men Behind Occupy Wall Street's Live Stream
I think this is part of the "fetish".

Turing is supposedly openly homosexual according to his friend and biographer and yet his fiancee still agrees to get engaged and appears to be surprised by his admission to her that he was attracted to men - they worked together and spent a lot of time outside of work together, you'd think she'd be the first to know if he was openly homosexual. This incident in his life certainly suggest bisexuality.

Moreover it seems that Turing considered his homosexual activity to be a perversion; his acceptance of the hormone therapy moves in that direction. Turing as an exceptional chemist himself would be more than aware of the possible consequences of continuing the treatment. Surely he'd choose prison otherwise?

I've a pet theory about his apparent ephebophilia and that he fell for a "honey" trap leading to his arrest but that's pushing us OT quite a bit I think.
My usual address for this kind of thing is john@doe.com.
I've always wondered who would get those emails...
I think younger people are more prone to mental illness, autism, ADHD these days. From the moment of inception, an environment of mental, physical, familial, emotional, societal and spiritual toxicity has occurred, in my view. So you can't expect superhumans to come knocking down your door, expect retards and scammers who are watching out for numero uno (and it's not you.)
Along a similar line, there are two reserved IP prefixes for use in documentation and examples;

IPv4: 192.0.2.0/24 - as described in RFC3330, http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3330.html

IPv6: 2001:db8::/32 - as described in RFC3849, http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3849.html
It is the top voted comment because it is a thoughtful analysis of why the top web companies perhaps should not have entered the mobile space, with some depth. This provides a lot more insight into the industry than the simplistic alternative of simply claiming that every corporation is motivated primarily by money, which is just restatement of an atomic truth.

Ad hominem doesn't really belong on HN. If you have a legitimate counter argument, you should put some thought into writing something that can stand on its own.
I guess I could have tried that, but this seems like more fun to me.
In my mind, it's not so much the knowledge or tools that separates the two groups as it is the process. Do you have a thorough assessment/validation system? Do you consciously know what the risks and possible failure modes in your systems are? What are the fallback systems, and have you formally thought of what should and will happen when those fail? Is your code reviewed by someone other than its author? Is your code maintainable and understandable for others? What records from construction and production are you keeping and why?

You can do engineering in basic VBScript and you can do hacks in horrible but algorithmically amazing C++.

A lot of this effort doesn't make sense in a casual web environment. If you're building an app with ads aiming to flip in a couple of years - or even to run it as lifestyle - you might not be very troubled when one of your features has a glitch and you don't necessarily have to have planned for HE.net going down or looked for Django exploits. There isn't anything necessarily wrong with that, it's just not engineering.
Novocation
open source library for location tracking in android
Why would it be a boon to phishers? Existing solutions for phishing/malware blacklisting are mature and quite well supported. There's lost of competition in the market, and they work quite well overall. It's not like Facebook couldn't just buy one of these for decent coverage.

The point is that putting up what amounts to a false negative malware warning on basically every "minor" link on facebook (I know it's not really a false negative, but that's how it's perceived) is just terrible overkill for the problem, and a terrible experience for the users.

That it survives at all leads one to wonder seriously about facebook's intentions.
That fuckers getting a lot of emails!
I think the possibility that OP is worried about (making dissent illegal) is probably at least as radical as overturning the clause against ex post facto law (both would require Constitutional amendment AFAIK). So given the level of paranoia required to worry about the possibility that free speech will be gone in the US, the constitutional ban on ex post facto laws isn't really responsive.
I agree with most of the points in your blog post and would also not recommend to take the 'labs' approach. My team and me have dropped our 'labs' company just recently. We have built extremely innovative algorithms to tackle a huge problem but completely failed to define and follow an actual product vision and strategy. Our motivation went down over time and our individual visions became more and more misaligned.
A related topic that drives me nuts after years of operations is the fairly widespread use of '.int' to represent private DNS on an internal network. '.int' is a rarely used TLD for international organizations created by treaty. It is so rare that many browsers do not recognize it as such and will ship you off to a search for 'www.nato.int', for example. Nonetheless, it drives me batty whenever I see 'dns1.int'.
Correlation and R-Squared
No one said it'll work 100% of the time. But it most likely would have saved the OP a lot of pain. Just because something isn't a perfect solution, it doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
the problems you listed aren't pressing at all. alternative energy? we have truly ridiculous thorium reactor designs that could supply power (and run desalination off the back end for free) for the next thousand years. Space travel? Canned primates is a blind alley and we're ignoring more efficient designs because people are afraid of the word nuclear. Health? We actively prevent the falling in cost that would make health care more widely affordable, and that's granting that health care is related to health outcomes, which isn't at all clear.

No one wants to hear that all of our problems are self imposed. It's too terrifying given the current state of affairs.
Of course. Just about everything a corporation does is driven by the pursuit of profit. However, the rather verbose post you replied to had a point obfuscated in the jungle of words. Core competency (a company's ethos) is an important factor. You won't see McDonalds getting into the smartphone business simply because of money.
We own profista.com and use it for testing ourselves. Using it in the docs helps us see how many people are trying out the samples.

I wish all our users would read the docs as carefully as you do! :)
This might cause unintended consequences for the HN button:

http://hnapiwrapper.herokuapp.com/

For example, I'm using one for my app:

http://hnapiwrapper.herokuapp.com/button.html?width=120&...

I wander if it will cause the button to reset after 19 days if someone clicks it.
Facebook Not Building A Phone*
OK, thats not really clear from the layout. Your example is clearer, but if you have to put it in a script and pipe stuff to it, its not really a 1-liner.
Thanks for sharing Ilya.
Wait... how can hosing a development environment cause people to lose work? The entire point of the development environment is so that when (not if: when) you hose it, you don't experience much pain at all.
Esther Dyson vs Bill Campbell: 2002 − 2012
Which may be why Microsoft is getting into the retail biz.
5 month old data integrity bug on MySQL marked as non-critical
I guess I just haven't met these Facebook victims - vegetables chained to their computers, grinning and drooling as they click reflexively on adverts all day, unaware that they could be outside, surrounded by swarms of butterflies and running with wild horses in the warmth of the Summer sun.

Mostly it's just a website.
Worse yet, some internal networks use .local, despite its standard use for mDNS.
Google Chrome Advertising on "New Tab" Screen
I truly feel sorry for the poor guy that owns asdf@asdf.com. I must have registered for over a hundred different accounts on various Interweb forums using his email address...
I'm not sure how it works yet but the newest version of the App Store app on your phone allows you to actually check youself out - no blue shirt needed.

Not sure how they prevent theft yet though, I haven't yet used it.
How to Last Longer in Bed for Men
This is a narrow-minded analysis that fails to expose what is really important in the competition between these giants.

The battleground is not the phones (devices) but the services that power the experiences consumers will use and pay for (often indirectly) over time.

A better pivot would be around the assets that each of these 5 companies must have to be a leader in the consumer space in the next 3-5 years:

1) Control of (or unfettered access to) a global-scale social graph

2) An efficient, direct-to-consumer commerce system allowing taking/making payments in micro amounts

3) A world-wide, scalable cloud platform

4) A set of consumer valuable services

I've listed these in the order I think most important. If you agree the social graph is important you'll understand why Google will do whatever it takes to make G+ a real competitor to Facebook.

Microsoft will eventually get excellent at interfacing directly with consumers (or will partner with someone e.g. Amazon to do so).

Amazon is very well positioned across all four.

Apple struggles with the social graph and cloud platform. They are clearly investing in the cloud. Not clear what they think they will do about the lack of a social graph.

Google is in pretty good shape except the only "consumer valuable service" they really provide is search; they need more.
If anyone is looking for a movie database with a less strict terms of use, check http://www.themoviedb.org/

This is the service "used by many popular media centers like Moovida, XBMC, Plex, MythTV and MediaPortal."

They have a pretty nice API too. http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/
I'm desperate for us to hire someone else

But not desperate enough to explain this to your business partner? A working relationship is similar a romantic relationship. You can't just hope the other person will "pick up" on what's bothering you. You have to tell them.
But as lbrandy mentioned, this is in one rare case and appears to be the result of a bug. If this happened when most links were clicked leaving Facebook, you can rest assured that all publishers would be up in arms.
Google Just Snuck Most of Chrome OS Onto the iPad
I don't think Google is really interested in building hardware. They bought Motorola only for the patents. Didn't they even say that Motorola will continue to operate independently?

The new "Nexus Prime" (Google reference phone for their latest OS version) was not even made by Motorola.
could also play around with voice commands, then you wouldn't even need a physical interface