skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So far I have only read the tutorials to some extent. I don't like that there is no garbage collection on the iPhone, and that I have to write header files. The pointer stuff looks suspicious, too, but I have not read far enough to know how awful it will be.

I seem to remember that Joel On Software wrote once that garbage collection gave one of the biggest productivity boosts modern languages provide.

Oh, another thing I don't like is the stupid hungarian notation of the API.

Also, it seems kind of pseudo-dynamic: if it is dynamic, what is the point of header files and interfaces? It doesn't make sense to me.
Wow What could cause a person to stoop so low
True, but when does one reach a size (user base) at which stuff like that becomes critical?
Yeah, if anything, those answers pique my curiosity.
Thanks for sharing the insight. A few months of work in exchange for some valuable lessons learned - well done.
At least the payment was not from hell, from the sounds of it.
I'm not sure, but this title seems a little distasteful
Is Amazon DRM free? Doesn't it encode the name of the buyer in the MP3? (I honestly don't know, it just seems likely they do that).
Will Work for Bandwidth
Yang on Stepping down
I've had a lot of luck with Adsense in the left column, with similar font and color to the primary content. Click-throughs were twice what they were with the same ad in the right column.
> I've had people tell me that setting up the SVN, moderating discussions in a mailing list, twittering project updates, and orchestrating the cultural/public facing side of the organization are the most productive early tasks.

If there's no code, what "project updates" are you twittering?

Note that all of those things are fairly low cost, so doing them isn't much of a contribution. They may add more value than the same amount of time spent implementing, but there will be far more implementation time.
So what about an adapting morphing keyboard that presents options applicable to what you're doing?

For example, you could start up an editor, be writing javascript, and the keyboard would know what is and isn't valid, and give you the options...

Does anyone remember the ZX Spectrum keyboard? "For" was on the F key, "Next" was on the N key - made for pretty fast typing once you got used to it.

I agree, formatted text seems the best method for programming, and keyboards are the best we have at the moment, but I'd expect there to be some surprises in our lifetime. I don't expect to be writing code using a keyboard in 50 years time.
Well you are not allowed to code for the iPhone unless you have a license from Apple.

I wonder when they will do the same to their desktop computers. It is not as if companies haven't tried that scheme (see Microsoft "certified software" and stuff like that).
i love the way you speak, baby
Thousands of people playing your 404 Flash game (and using server resources) isn't what you want when you can barely keep your core service alive. Also, it would provide yet another thing for Twitter users to complain about.
best opinion i've heard all morning regarding this. thanks for the thought.
"API documentation, design proposals, e-mails, IMs, etc"

None of those are programming. They are communication and admin. Which are completely different.
Agreed, there is no reason to be flippant about this.
is he disputing that he knew about the pending event that would cause the stock to drop?

here's the way i look at it: Mr. Cuban wanted to save .0003% of his total net worth by dumping stock on an anonymous unsuspecting buyer who lost 10% of their investment amount in a 24 hour period because s/he did not have the inside information that Mark had and that buyer would most certainly not have bought the stock if s/he did.

it's lousy no matter how you slice it or dice it.
Encoding the name of the buyer in the MP3 is not DRM. It doesn't restrict your usage of the media in any way. If they do that, I fully support it.
Does "estimating your opponent's hands" have any value? If you could do that with any certainty you probably don't need a calculator.

EDIT: I realize that estimating your opponent's hands is important. Basic poker there. I'm talking about "estimating your opponent's hands" which is featured in one of the calculator's screens. That seems like an iffy thing to feed into a computer. It's a garbage-in-garbage-out situation.
We are talking about a cloud service and the same company's CDN system. They already would have said certificates running possibly in multiple hosts. How do you get to "bordering on fraud" from there?

FAIL (Because of your reply tone, please try to be more civilized next time, shame on your up-voters too.)
Boxee Raises $4 Million For Socially-Networked Media Center
Agreed.

Everyone else commenting seems to be pointing out the technical hurdles / problems with a flash installation, but they are ignoring the huge business problem with NOT implementing it: customers want it.

Eventually, phones are going to come along that allow free apps, your own music, flash, similar browsing experience, and a real keyboard... and smart people will start to switch back.

In other words, the technical hurdles here are less important than the business ones. This is Jobs trying to have his iron grip, but in the long run, I dont see it working out.
Understanding How to Use the Microsoft's Exploitability Index
Developer strikes it rich with iPhone game: Makes $250K profit in two months.
The Best TV show you've (probably) never watched
I don't think you had a failed poker software business. You wrote, released, and announced some software. That's simply step one, and the very minimum. Next, you need to iterate, which may include adding features found in other software, creating a web version, and more. I see very few lessons here, and they are on how to fail.
Also consider AB testing different placements, types of ads, etc. Will give you hard data on what works better.
It sounds as if you didn't try any advertising at all, except for a small announcement in a poker group? I think you should have put a lot more thought into how to get users to find your product. Like, sometimes (often, maybe), people don't even know they could use something and that something they could use exists. You have to educate them.
Wasn't this really old news?
I am pretty ok with sqlalchemy on my pylons/TG projects.
Header files are a blessing. They move many bugs from runtime to compile time. The point of the header file is to make a contract. Sometimes that isn't appropriate and there you can "go dynamic" if you need to, but you are moving your errors to the runtime.

The retain/release model of object lifetime management in Objective C becomes nearly automatic for the programmer. That being a dangerous "nearly", you can still screw up.

Garbage collection is much nicer, but given the limited memory I can understand why they didn't enable it on the phone.

Remember: You can screw up badly with garbage collected systems too, it just doesn't result in a core dump on a desktop machine. You can accidentally leave references to objects you will never access again (cache structures are notorious) preventing it from being reclaimed. On a desktop that leads to a bit of memory bloat and maybe some swapping if the app runs long enough. On an iPhone you run out your RAM and get terminated.
The same size one should start using any CDN - as soon as you start caring about page load speed.
This is vaksel's second submission this week about Mark Cuban and insider trading. The last one was Mark Cuban's one line response to the insider trading allegations and also pointed to his blog.

Just what, exactly, does Mark Cuban have to do with hackers or HN? Why is this stuff getting voted up? Not to mention, even just from a news standpoint these articles have very little substance to them. Can we give this a rest, please?

Those of us who are interested in Mark Cuban and insider trading can go to his blog on our own without having these off topic posts plastered all over the front page.
Er, That's a typo on my part. I simply meant "an application I can use online" .. :)

Bah can't edit my previous post, owell!
Why not use a wiki? My fave is Wikka: http://wikkawiki.org/HomePage
Which codecs? That's a key question.
The market for programming language implementors is not a big one, I think. Not to say they won't find jobs, being smart guys, but they may not find jobs doing something so "abstract".
I've seen the British version of the show, I didn't know Canada had it's own version.

I don't know how beneficial it is to entrepreneurs, it is interesting to watch, I completely agree with that, but the British version doesn't offer much education except for allowing you to see elevator pitches and see who's a moron and who comes prepared.
"For" was on the F key, "Next" was on the N key - made for pretty fast typing once you got used to it.

Okay, I've been trying to control my inner lecturer but now I'm just going to come out and say it: You need to learn emacs. The features you're describing have been built into my text editor for years, and they could be yours today!

(Cue the dancing girls and the fabulous music!)

The emacs term for a feature that turns a key sequence like "f <TAB>" into "for" is snippets. Check out this screencast demo of the YASnippets package:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOj7btx3ATg

I don't really use snippets myself (although the screencast might inspire me to try again). I find that autocompleting "for" is not very interesting, because I can type it really fast. What I do use all the time is hippie-expand:

http://badbyteblues.blogspot.com/2007/12/hippie-expand-and-a...

I have that bound to a special key of my own, so that I can continue to use TAB for other purposes like intelligent code indenting. With hippie-expand I rarely type the same symbol name twice. The first time it's "drupal_set_message", but after that it's just "dru" followed by one to five keypresses to scroll through the options.

The other thing I'm just bursting to say is: you need to learn to type. Touch typists do not care about key caps that change their labels. We don't look at the keys. I can't type 80 WPM while looking at the keys. I've met typists who type Dvorak on QWERTY keyboards, for whom looking at the keys would break their typing. My own keyboard has an "End" key that's actually Escape, an Escape key that's actually Caps Lock, a Page Down key that functions as Page Up if you hold down shift, Page Up and Home keys that are actually Option... (Hint: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage_pro.htm).
Perhaps because Cuban is a fairly prominent angel investor within the community?

Just because it's not relevant to you, doesn't mean it isn't interesting and relevant to the rest of us. If no one found it interesting, then it wouldn't get voted up.
some of my own experiments - http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2008/11/some-work-in-process-pr...
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google (millions of photos from the LIFE archive, 1750s to today)
After I implemented the world's best photo-sharing site using Scheme I discovered it was also a decent blogging platform. See my blogs here: http://friendfeed.com/brlewis?service=blog
Some work in proc(gr)essing...
Motorola launches widget contest for mobile Linux platform they're throwing out next year
'Desktop Tower Defense' Maker Raises $1 Million For More Addictive Timewasters
Pong in 30 Lines
[O'Reilly] Voice in Google Mobile App: A Tipping Point for the Web?
Corporate Culture Is Most Important Factor In Driving Innovation
annoyingly addictive. tower defense = untold hours of my life that i will never get back...

A++++++ would waste that time again if given the option (and would also be annoyed that i did)
SGN CEO Demos How to Turn iPhone into Wii-mote
Check out johnchow.com He's got a ton of ideas and practical examples, plus he makes a ton of cash rambling about making a ton of cash.
Sulking for 5 months isn't much of a life. Life is short.

Exactly my thoughts. The author's tolerance for ignorance and blatant hostility is far greater than mine. I would have booked a flight back home as soon as I heard "We don't take the lord's name in vain." Life is too short to deal with such a low caliber of human being on a daily basis, especially for such a long time.
Twitter's New FAIL logo
Amazon artist pages: It's not about the social
Being able to figure out what kind of hand your opponent has is the difference between winning and losing poker. You usually make a guess based on previous behavior, how much aggression your opponent has shown so far, the position your opponent is in (acting first is a huge disadvantage) and so on.

If you make no estimate what kind of hand your opponent has you can only reason in three ways:

a) you assume he always has the best hand. So you throw away your hand.

b) you assume he always has the worst hand. So you put your chips in.

c) you bet big if you have good cards, and you throw your cards away when your cards are lousy.

Clearly (a) and (b) are bad strategies.

The last strategy is not as bad as the other two, but still terrible. More often than not your cards are bad. So your opponent will figure out you're not willing to make large bets with lousy cards, so every time you don't bet, he will, and every time you bet, he won't. You're going to lose your chips that way. Basic game theory.

So you need to figure out what cards he could have been dealt so that his actions make sense. Then, from that range of plausible cards, figure out how often he has a better hand than you do. If you like your odds, you put your chips in. Otherwise, you throw your cards away.

It's a lot more complex than this, of course. But the point is that "estimating your opponent's hands", as difficult as it may be, is absolutely crucial if you want to win.
Open any LCD monitor. The ribbon cable which connects the VGA/DVI/HDMI decoder board to the LCD panel itself (a separate product, of which there are only a few manufacturers) carries an entirely unencrypted and fairly well-documented signal. With an <$100 FPGA, any HDMI monitor can be turned into a decryptor.
Good point. I added a bit of clarification to the article since it did read like the one post was the only thing I did.

After it launched I decided that the best way to demonstrate its utility was to search poker forums for problems and then post the ALL IN Expert results. I wound up adding a feature to the software that let people export the results in a forum-friendly format which also linked back to the site. This helped bring some people to the site and if I had continued it for some time it may have brought in a few more registrations. In hindsight maybe I should have done this more. It's hard to say... No matter how much you prod a dead duck it's not gonna move much.
JavaFX RIA technology almost ready
The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later
The End - a set on Flickr
Were you aware of the existing (and immensely popular) free tools when you started programming?

If so, what was going to be your edge?
Yep, you're right. As I mentioned in the post, I use the word "business" liberally for lack of a better term. If there had been a future for the product I would have iterated, created a web app, etc, but I decided it wasn't worth the effort. As far as the lessons, figuring out how something fails is strongly tied to figuring out why it succeeds.
This is a victory for proper capitalization.
Startups who take advantage of our FreeTrademarksForStartups.com offer are free to leave at any time. We hope to demonstrate to them why many startups have chosen us. We work hard to get our trademark applications right the first time to avoid any problems. Problems can occur no matter who files your trademark. And we've chosen to cap this offer at $1500 (which includes the USPTO filing fee for one class). Twitter me @ErikJHeels if you have questions. Thanks.
hehe even after advocating "macro"/"tab completion" etc type programming, personally I'm not sure I could do it. I remember doing it fine on the ZX Spectrum, but those were "learning to program" days. Now I want full power, and that means the computer listening to exactly what I type - If I type "f, tab" I want it to show "f, tab"... auto completion would completely get in my way and irritate the hell out of me.

I don't look at the keyboard either. I was meaning more that instead of a qwerty keyboard, the keyboard would change shape/configuration to show macros, which you could configure and remember when they appear etc - you would still not look at the keyboard, but it'd just make things a bit more obvious rather than have special emacs key sequences etc.
Apostrophe-S is not a plural!

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_apost.html
Not saying that it would have been successful, hard to say.

But reading "Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable” seems a bit harsh. In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I heard from some online dating services that they really boil down to the hard calculation of "how expensive is it to convert a user we bought with advertising". Like if they raise their conversion rates, they can afford more advertising, and so on. Sure, maybe sometimes there will be a "hit dating service" that spreads through word of mouth, but the others seem to do OK, too.

Especially in Poker it seems advertising is huge?
I've always wondered if it really matters much if you get "sued" in some other country like this. Really, what can a foreign court do to you? Block your site to its citizens? I doubt that would go over well in France...
There's nothing lamer than getting a generic 404 page. At the very least, there should be a link to a site map or the home page. This is nicely thought-out. Well done.
Sure, I'll bite.

- "Oregon Woman Loses 400k to scam"
-- Although it's a story about a woman, I suspect that the vast majority of the 552 current comments are from men, making rude, arrogant, or demeaning comments. Men braying like jackasses and cracking puerile jokes about how dumb someone (a woman) is? What's not to love?

- "First Look at Johnny Depp"
-- Skews female

- "New honeycomb tire is 'bulletproof'"
-- A story about car/bike technology and guns/bullets. Not to feed any stereotypes here, fellas, but that positively reeks of testosterone.

- "If TV Shows Had Truthful Titles"
-- Sophomoric snark on the Internet can amuse both sexes, but tends to skew male. Perhaps because sophomoric snark in general skews male. No offense intended.

- "Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners"
-- Obsessing over political minutiae/sophomoric snark again, combined with a bit of political trivia? See above. Or do you think that the relentless Ron Paul stories were also being constantly up-voted by an enraptured female audience glued to whatever new tidbit was coming from his camp?

- "Phil Gramm Has No Remorse Over Destroying the US Economy"
-- See above. This is a story that could be appealing to both men and women, but the puerile slant to it makes it slightly less interesting to women, or so I've tended to notice. Just like in Real Life, your hilarious political jokes just AREN'T THAT FUNNY to most girls, y'know?

- "Chinese pirates crack Blu-ray DRM, sell pirated HD discs"
-- DRM nerd porn. There's no reason why this wouldn't appeal to women, but by and large, the tone and thrust of the article greatly narrows its (male) audience.

- "30 Rare & Expensive Gamecube Games"
-- Skews both older and to a more rarefied hardcore/distinguishing gamer audience. Which is largely male. If it said 'best Wii games' for instance, it wouldn't be so male-centric.

- "New MythTV Interface Preview"
-- Nerd porn. See above.

- "Mark Cuban charged with insider trading."
-- Nerd-slash-financial-slash-sports porn.

Cue the inevitable comments how you're a woman and those stories totally appeal to you. :-)
Thanks, these look great.

Any chance you can post the source to these?
I assume you're talking about PokerStove, no? I happily used it for a long time, but felt it could use some improvement. For example, you can't weigh the hands in your opponent's range (that is, saying KK is half as likely as AA). Also, PokerStove is great for calculating equity, but not so much for calculating EV. To calculate your EV when you call is pretty easy (EV = equity * new_pot - to_call), but to calculate your shove EV takes a bit of work. My aim with ALL IN expert was to make those things trivially easy to do. Eventually I had planned on doing postflop calculations as well (the first iteration only had preflop), but as I mentioned elsewhere I just didn't see it being worth the investment in time for a project that didn't have much of a future.
Webby has a blog mode, though I've not used it, but I'm guessing it wasn't quite what you needed.

When I see people sort-of reinvent a wheel or two I wonder what the reason was.

Out of curiosity, did you consider forking Webby, or offering to add in the parts you wanted back to the Webby project? Is it easier to grab the ideas you like and start fresh on your own than to try to hack on someone else's existing code?

For myself, when I find myself writing something similar to an existing project, it tends to be because a) I wasn't quite aware of what the other project offered, b) (more often) the 80/80 rule kicks in: The existing code gives me 80% of what I want, but I'll be spending 80% of my development time trying to get the rest of what I need, and writing my own version looks to be more efficient in the long run. This is more so if I expect to be reusing that code for many projects, so I can readily see the motivation in creating your own blogging software if you plan on using the hell out of it, regardless of what existing tools do.
The affiliate program I use has several travel programs - ranging from travel newsletter signups to airline pay per sale. I would really recommend trying one of those and messing around with placement to increase your conversion rate.

With my referral id, the site is: https://secure.neverblue.com/signup?ref=aff_66639

Email me any questions.
This has to be one of the most inane and trivialising posts I've seen on the subject of the SiPort shootings.
Point taken.

Great... I've got the hacker equivalent of Britney Spears-type celebrity news to look forward to for the next few months.
Is it just me, or do a lot of these layoffs have an "oh, yeah, us too, we should do layoffs, yeah!" feeling to them? Why suddenly now?
Reddit had a spin-off called lipstick.com, which has now become http://www.weheartgossip.com/

There's the 'OMG' reddit alien, replete with blond hair and lipstick: http://thumbs.reddit.com/t5_2qh3n_29.png?v=4v4n810ku3an8yqud...

Sadly, it falls into the category of 'what advertisers/editors think women want in a social networking site.' Based on my own at-work experience with somewhat/fairly geeky girls (not coders), tmz.com and perezhilton.com already accomplish what lipstick/weheartgossip seek to do.
You can take the source code for hacker news, change the css around, and buy a fitting domain name.
How about just flash video?
I think part of the problem you're perceiving is that the examples that come to mind for"web community"--reddit, digg, slashdot, something awful, kuro5hin, sensibleerection, .+chan, etc.--carry inherent bias and groupthink: in learning to overcome bias, they best serve as sources of what to avoid.

This site does, perhaps, better than any other non-dictatorial group at keeping discussion rational: even groups of open-source developers working toward a common goal often devolve into chaos if there's not a single, strong personality in charge.

I'm not sure what the optimal solutions are, but if the hypothesized OB community doesn't reach at least the very high bar set here, I wouldn't have much interest.
Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, "Outliers", and the 10,000 hour rule
NOKIA 6300I GREY UNLOCKED
Nokia 6300i is one of the upcoming presentations of Nokia, which will capture the whole world with its unique technology of integrated VOIP in order to be connected with your loved ones round-the-clock.
I tried signing up for the service, the website said it would send me an email, and I never got it.