skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good PR, yes, but it may also be a good strategic move for HP, particularly if this is a sign of things to come. HP is fighting hard to remain relevant, and a vibrant competitor to iOS and Android would push them back into relevancy. Everything tech seems to be heading toward mobile, and if HP can establish a firm foothold there, they'll be a stronger company for it.

Now, I'm not saying this will happen, but at least it's possible now. webOS wasn't going to do anything for anyone sitting in a corner. Personally, I think a lot of its success depends on if/how they manage to set up a competitive webOS app store, facilitate at least one device that can run it, and letting webOS run as openly as possible on that device. Open source advocates would flock to buy and develop for a device running on a truly open OS with an open development model.

I'm also curious about a compatibility layer for Android. Dalvik has already been ported to maemo/meego, although it's closed-source. I'm relatively sure someone will now port Dalvik to webOS. I think a webOS with a vibrant, open-source community, able to run Android apps, could pose a significant challenge to portions of the Android market (to iOS to a lesser extent).
May be this is related:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/09/19/paleo-diet-s...
Google gets Google Search on devices. And HP will get ... oops. A piece is missing here.
I take your point, but I'm not sure you're really taking his. As another data point, I just did a find/xargs-grep across my "~/codebase/3p" tree, which has ~5500 .h files for projects ranging from MongoDB to Ruby and Python to OpenSSL to valgrind. Virtually all of them have nested includes. Many of them are components of mission-critical software.

He's right; nested includes are a modern C idiom.
You are very cute and innocent, like a child.
Why wouldn't Google embrace WebOS? Their business is advertising and this will be as good a platform as any.
There is a reduction in the incidence of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease in smokers.
Maybe there aren't any problems - but your partner may believe things are as they should be. Because you have not expressed your concerns. The first thing is to talk about, you can always pull Zuckenberg on him later. But without this step you will never know if you were right or wrong.
Only if Oracle donated Java or MySQL to Apache, maybe with a change of license like they did for OpenOffice - now that would be something.
Ok, I just invented a new methodology, I dub thee: "Agilefall"

First we meet and discuss the goals for the sprint. Then I design (usually some class diagrams on a sheet of paper or board), then I code and test it (unit tests of course) and finally check it in. Each 4 to 6 week sprint is internally structured as a waterfall. :)
Awesome for Java. It would be hard to live without lambda expressions in .NET. I love them.
hp is selling well because they are selling $500 hardware at $100, which a lot of people are putting android on.
Ah yeah, I guessed that's why they only had a chroot until now, but what if you modified the system to load X11/Gnome at the end of boot instead of going into their own proprietary desktop environment?
Why does the tech community hate Enterprise IT?
Sensationalist title, inaccurate and begging for extra clicks.

I'm not surprised to see this from a journalist, nor am I surprised to see this from Nokia. Nokia's offerings have been near non-existent since they moved from Symbian to WP7 development. If anything, this is a plus for Microsoft, who I'm sure would've been happy to fund this (if they did not).
I own a Touchpad ($150 sale) and have dabbled in Android development. What I find amazing about WebOS is that the native development platform (not the Enyo javascript/html side) is SDL&OpenGL. This makes porting/developing on any desktop OS very simple and the learning friction very low.
My problem is that I want a comparison of syntax so I can see exactly how Coffeescript is an improvement over the equivalent Javascript.

When I visit the site and I see a table with CoffeeScript on one side and Javascript on the other, my brain sees just enough to verify that the expected elements are all there before it says, "Yep - there is the comparison you wanted".

So while it does clearly state that the JavaScript is the output of the tool, my brain has already decided that it is exactly what I was expecting, and it takes me a second to re-adjust my thoughts.

Ironically, if the output looked less "normal" I probably wouldn't have the same problem, but it is formatted nicely and is good enough that subconsciously my brain tells me "equivalent syntax" and not "compiler output".
That's true. And I mostly follow this.

When the other person consistently ignores logic and invents their own facts and reality, I occasionally adopt the Linus strategy; but I still take care to address the argument itself.

Point well taken. HN is a better place thanks to people like yourself.
If they had done this before Nokia bought in to Windows Phone 7 then we might actually have seen a great user interface on Nokia's excellent hardware.

Maybe RIM could adopt it instead? They could really use a better UI, plus a platform that actually scales well to tablets. Plus they have a large enough install base that once they get rid of their disastrous programming environment developers might actually start writing good apps for their phones.
I just love how much sound advice we discard because of our feelings towards someone/something.

Ever read Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality?
Best blogging sites for beginners
... not so much. A big part of the point of having a minimal function literal, `->` instead of `function(){}`, is that using anonymous functions is a bit more pleasant in any context -- including chaining.

list.map((num) ->
num * 2
).map((doubled) ->
doubled + 5
)

... instead of:

list.map(function(num) {
return num * 2;
}).map(function(doubled) {
return doubled + 5;
});

It's not a huge difference. But, by the same token, it's certainly not a reason to avoid the use of anonymous functions.
The incidence of breast and uterine cancer is lower the more children you have.

I think the link is tentative, but pregnancy and breast feeding reduces your lifetime exposure to estrogen which can be a promoter of certain types of cancers.
As a former HP intern and someone who laments the company's demise, I too have something to smile about today.
Ask: Anyone else annoyed with digital software downloads?
As someone who formats their laptop 1-2 times per year I am completely frustrated with digital software downloads. I want the actual disk so I can reload the software without worrying that I will not be able to reinstall the purchased software without a hassle. Have you seen the price of photoshop? ouch! With digital software downloads, do activation keys have a life span? Three times? Anyone else want to bring back the physical disk?
OK, I'm confused.

So you are seeing that anyone who wants to see win32 support should stop moaning send a patch.

But then, any such patch would add extra code and an abstraction layer, so therefore must be rejected.

So, sending a patch isn't actually useful at all then.
You are, of course, correct. I've been a bit cowardly so far, but that needs to change; I'll talk to him and see if we can't work things out. At the very least, I should make him aware I'm feeling like this.
The devices exist already, except they're all running Android. It shouldn't take more than a few tweaks to get WebOS running instead. Any HW manufacturer could try it to test the waters, and if they're first it would be good PR.
Nice pic and landing page, but ...

I don't see how this app would benefit me (at least). What does it do exactly that anyone would be willing to pay money for? Or are you planning to make money through advertising and affiliate programs?

"Automatic shopping reminders" - There's tons of apps and todo apps like this.

"Local deals to help you save" - Again, tons of apps and websites and cupon websites providing this service (not to mention the daily safeway/shoppers/local grocery store cupons i get in the mail.

"Track your spending" - how exactly and why would I need this? Discovercard and other credit card companies alredy have very useful interfaces for sorting 'groceries' purchases (not to mention Mint.com and similar sites)

Other questions come to mind (if you're also thinking of implementing some kind of inventory tracking/mangement of 'fridge' items:
- You scan a receipt, get the items, but then how do you know which ones aren't there anymore?
- Who has time/patience to keep track of their fridge items in a website?

Overall, other than the 'potential' for the visual coolness factor of scanning my receipt and displaying that stuff in the fridge image online I don't see anything I would use here, much less pay money for, and even then, why wouldn't i just open my own fridge and look at it?

Just my two cents'...
>I'm confused as to the meaning there. What is it about phone calls that follow an exponential distribution?

Sorry for the confusion. Lemme clarify a bit. Say you work at an office. 9am to 5pm. 8 hours a day.

scala> 60x60x8

res45: Int = 28800

So a phone call can arrive in any one of those 28,800 seconds. Putting it another way, the probability p of getting a phone call at any particular second is very remote, but the number of seconds aka trials is n=28800 ie. very large. Anytime you have very small p and very large n, that's a nice candidate for a particular member of the exponential family of distributions. In this case, the arrival times of phone calls to your office will be Poisson.

Say you hire an office assistant to count the number of phone calls every day, and she tells you after a month that your office averages say 24 calls a day. That 24 is your mu, the mean of the Poison distribution.At that point you know everything you need to know about the distribution, because Poisson is a discrete distribution whose probability p is specified entirely by the mean mu!

So you can go off and compute the probability p like so:

scala> import scala.math.{exp,pow}

scala> def fact(n:Int):Int = { if( n>1) nfact(n-1) else 1}

scala> def p(mu:Int,n:Int) = {pow(mu,n)exp(-mu)/fact(n)}

The chances of your office getting 4 or fewer phone calls by noon is then easy to figure out. Since you average 24 calls in 8 hours, you should average 9 calls by noon. So the probability of getting 4 or fewer calls would be

scala> (0 to 4).map(p(9,_)).sum

res46: Double = 0.05496364149510491

So you have a 5% chance of getting 4 or fewer calls by noon. If someone offers to bet a million dollars that your office will get 4 or fewer calls by noon, the odds of winning that bet are 1 in 19.

edit:formatted for better readability.
I had a P800 and I think the difference between the P800 and iPhone is much greater than the difference between the iPhone and the Galaxy. Replacing a raised plastic bezel with a single flat piece of glass is innovative IMO. The feel of using a modern phone is also completely different from the P800.
Business Headshots
You can only sell if you can find a buyer.
The condescending UI
Your preferences aren't that unpredictable - just answer five questions
>Apple was taught that this is how you play the game.

This implies that Apple was some naive child entering the Big Bad World of Business. I doubt they were unaware of how to play the game.
Standardizing on Windows as a deployment platform has known costs and benefits. One of the costs is in largely losing out on the traditional UNIX software ecosystem.

There are some OSS projects that maintain first-class Windows support, but nobody should be surprised that when they find out that Windows is poorly supported by an OSS ecosystem that is predominately focused on producing software for UNIX descendent systems.
I really hope they manage to do that, and avoid the fragmentation that Android experienced, especially with multiple app stores and no centralised over-the-air update mechanism.
It's probably very selfish of me, but I hope for others to also want webOS on one of Samsung's tablets and that a method will be devised to replace Android on a 7 Plus, 7.7, or 8.9 (or all three!). I really like Samsung's hardware and webOS would be killer on it.
why is everyone so excited by some asian female's fake science
This sprung out of DavisWiki (http://daviswiki.org/). Poking around that site you find that the citizens have a sense of humor. Does your town have a Zombie Attack Response Guide?

http://daviswiki.org/Zombie_Attack_Response_Guide
But they have their own platform which they exercise more control over. They would have to work with individual vendors to get full Google Apps support natively on WebOS devices. Why would they embrace that and do extra work when they can continue to push their own effort?
So people with kids buy a car, and rent it out when they're not planning to use it for a few hours.
And Royce was ultimately advocating an iterative method (rather than a strict waterfall), not unlike most agile methods today, although his cycles were much larger.

If one is interested in software development methodology, I strongly recommend taking 15 minutes to read the actual "waterfall" paper[1].

Poor guy, Winston Royce is one of the most misunderstood folks in the industry.

(By the way, curiously enough, Royce's son William was a major contributor to the Rational Unified Process.)

[1] http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/wate...
Adding a package manager to the vanilla distribution is, in my opinion, the biggest change in this release. This is going to make finding and installing great elisp packages so much easier, especially for new users.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA
Ask HN: What SaaS are you currently paying for?
What subscription software services are good enough to fork over your hard earned money each month?
Anybody have a guide on how one might make custom phone using webos? I asked just a while ago on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8450744/resources-on-how-...

(I just know my karma is going to get trashed for cross posting)
With the announcement of WebOS open source, it should theoretically become possible. Luna is just a desktop environment overtop a fairly normal Linux system. There might need to be a few extra packages installed to get Gnome 3 or Unity running, but as long as they can grab access to the video processor, it should be do-able. One more thing to look forward to.
I'm probably a bot.
I love DataTables.

Don't bother breaking compatibility with old versions.

You want to know something that is 100x better? This exact comment on your FAQ page. More people will read it, understand you made that decision, and move on.

If someone cares enough they will fork it and change the variable names. But in reality it doesn't matter.
Actually, Apple certainly doesn't follow the do no evil thing much like Google does. If you have any instances of Google doing such malicious things like Apple is doing, I'd love to be informed (also will help remove my misgivings):

http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/12/09/apple-w3c
First one who does will get my money when I'm looking for an upgrade on my Pre3 and Touchpad next year, and I'm not alone ;-)
my tactic: if you are burned out on coding, stop and do something else positive:

* go for a run
* do an errand that has to be done anyway
* balance your checkbook

This gets your mind on something else which is probably the problem - we aren't meant to stare at a screen doing exactly the same things over and over for 8 hours.

And remember, you are not alone in this. No depression allowed - you are not weak, you are human.
Story of Average Indian 'Techie'
Although I agree with this for the most part, it goes both ways. A huge use case for this app (for me at least) is to be able to quickly look up product reviews by other consumers. If I'm already in the store, I might well buy the product there if it was given good reviews on amazon. In this case, amazon has spent the money to develop the app but the store gets my money.
Please support a cool Kickstarter idea to help you learn music theory on an iPad
I was thinking they were using Leftronic for their dashboard, but looks like they say it's Geckoboard. Interesting how there's a convergence around how dashboards look - I imagine it's like michaelbuckbee said, that Panic's design is a huge inspiration for others.
It doesn't matter why they are selling well, what matters is that there are about a quarter million TouchPads in users' hands right now.

That's a healthy install base, and makes working on an open source OS for the device a worthwhile proposition.

From there, it will hopefully be a virtuous cycle, as people buy devices that can run WebOS because of a healthy developer community.
Just start. Usually the problem is that you unnecessarily look up to your tasks. You think it's boring, difficult, or you don't know where to start. Just start. Once you start, you get into a positive flow and become motivated to finish it.
His video (http://grumomedia.com/new-grumo-what-is-hipmunk/) truly brought upon a smile in it's quest to convey simplicty.

The spanish accent is very comforting in a way, like the time you visit a mexican resort and the person in the hotel's tour guide booth tells you very clearly and in very simple english what you can expect. None of this 'empower yourself' and 'be all you can be' by using our product bs, just tell me what the thing does. If your product is any good at solving my problem I won't need further convincing.
Interesting. Then according to this result, http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsseldona.htm , one rational response to patent trolls (established and loved, or merely trollish) is to not pay, to fight.
Reading that was pretty eery since I just ate a banana, got a glass of water from the kitchen, have Chrome open with 20 tabs (including, obviously, Hacker News) and have a Pomodoro Android app within reach. The only thing that snapped me out of it was that my app was free.
I think the first thing journalists need to realize is that people like Gates, Jobs, and Page don't care about short-term effects on stock price. The only reason you'd care about that is if you were in a pump-and-dump.

Microsoft may not be "cool" anymore, but it's the biggest and most profitable enterprise software company and it's a business that will last. What more would Gates want?
How is that more uncertain than anything in business? How many will my product sell? How fast? What's going to happen to materials prices? What are my competitors going to do?

By that logic the market couldn't work for 98% of products.

Legal action I'd suggest is certainly no harder to predict than that and probably easier.
"Mistakenly"?
Not quite correct so. A court granted an injunction which would allow Motorola to ban 3G Apple products in Germany [¹]. However Motorola must deposit 100m € if they want to make good on that right as a guarantee in case a subsequent court ruling lifts that injunction.

[¹] http://www.heise.de/mac-and-i/meldung/Schwere-Schlappe-fuer-...
Actually, simply saying "WordPress is insecure" without reason or explanation isn't very productive at all.

WordPress Core has so many eyeballs looking through the code, and some great full-time engineers working on it, that's it's actually very secure.

WordPress insecurities mainly occur when you add in badly written plugins - but that's not the fault of WordPress.

While I don't want to verge off-topic, that's actually the root cause of most WordPress-related vectors, and so it's sad that the original post didn't really reflect on that more (other than "keep the plugin up to date")
Heh. It wouldn't be perfect. But if the system of N people has C < N people who will make or approve corrupt decisions, and each person had to have 1 randomly chosen person sign off on each possibly corrupt decision, you go from C/N chance of a randomly chosen decision being a corrupt one to a (C/N)^2 chance. If the system has a relatively low percentage of corrupt people, that could be a big win.

If C is too large, you could improve the scheme by adding another sign-off to increase it to (C/N)^3, as well as by punishing the original requester and anybody who approves along the way when a corrupt decision is caught.
Look, the author explains that the patch is incomplete, which I highlighted above and that it doesn't provide enough to the current functionality available already on Win32, but instead replaces a crucial component that has proven itself to work.

The patch will not make Redis behave well on Win32, Redis will still remain unusable for production environments and Redis already works well enough on Windows for development purposes.

Really, dismissing this patch is a no-brainer - and even though the author said that he prefers to keep it POSIX-only anyway, I'm sure they'll reconsider if they receive a proper patch that fixes the problem, but for the moment there is no such patch.

If there would be a patch that fixed the problem, this whole discussion would be a non-issue, even if the patch wouldn't get integrated in the main branch - somebody (if there indeed is interest) will create another branch specific for Win32 and everybody will be happy. But we can't even have a discussion of branching or not, because there is no such patch available.

So I don't see what's with all this arguing.
No, PDFs don't have to be generated from PS at all. PDF has it's own well-defined spec. Valid PDF files can be generated in many ways besides from PS files. It's even possible to write a valid PDF file by hand if you're feeling masochistic.
If these companies are "desperate for an alternative" why didn't they embrace webOS before? Or why aren't they pushing Windows Mobile?

Or, if they want open, why not just fork Android like Amazon and Barnes and Noble? Are you seriously suggesting Barnes and Noble has more technical resources than HTC and Samsung?
And support two different software stacks?

I don't think many will.
Besides that, I would be surprised if he didn't enjoy philanthropy substantially more than running a software company.
I have this exact same problem and I just have to get started. I don't start because I know a task is going to be a lot of work but that work will go away if I just get started. It's difficult and I think all coders deal with it.
RIM has already settled on QNX for its next-generation OS (their tablet runs on it), and I think they just don't have the software/UI chops to handle it either way.

I can see WebOS being concurrence/counterbalance to Android and W7P (mostly Android) for other phonemakers than Samsung (who already has bada)
pinch-to-zoom is obvious once you have a display capable of multitouch input. The whole reason it works so well is that it is mimicking a real world interaction that is fully intuitive (read: obvious!). Should specific implementations of multitouch input technology be patent-able? Yes. Should pinch-to-zoom and other obvious gestures be patent-able on top of that? Obviously not.

What drives patent applications for things like pinch-to-zoom isn't novelty, but companies with vast legal teams who throw patents against the wall to see what sticks. My name appears on some patent applications. Not because those patents describe things that are novel (because they don't) but because the company I was working for at the time went into a "patent everything" phase. I regret allowing them to even use my name on those applications.

All of this is ultimately the USPTO's fault for basically rubber stamping whatever comes through the door and letting the courts figure it out. Filing clearly stupid patents should come with a penalty akin to frivolous lawsuits, but at this point I doubt the system will ever change, at least until the USA completes its long but accelerating slide into economic irrelevance.
Lead Generation software
They do mention it in their press release: "HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space."

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111209xa.html?m...