skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
flagged. please don't post things like this here. leave this stuff to reddit
And if you like a dark theme, but none of those do it for you, there's always Zenburn: http://www.brockman.se/software/zenburn/
Official Google Blog: Net neutrality and the benefits of caching
Sounds like this is the approach the funeral director with $250MM in IBM stock took.
Twitter Humiliates MySpace
There are quite a few meetups/conferences in Delhi - Proto.in, barcampdelhi.com , tienewdelhi.org etc
This looks interesting as a code generator, but I fail to understand how it can be useful to lisp programmers. After the code is generated, there is no easy way to call the C-compiled function, other than manually running a C compiler, then using whatever foreign method call method is available in your lisp version. That is: it sucks almost as badly as writing the C code manually. Am I missing something crucial here?
A zoo is a great way to make a small fortune. How do you do it?

Start with a Very, Very Large Fortune.
Actually, Apple does buy ideas (when it's forced to).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitouch#Fingerworks
IPod Photo Skin Case Cobalt Blue by Speck 
The SkinTight iPod Skin stretches over your iPod from the bottom opening in the skin or the scroll wheel cutout. The included screen cover is held tight in place by the elastic case. To dock you iPod while in its case, lift the flex-a-way flap off the bottom of the ipod and then dock.
I don't think either the OP or the author of the linked article claimed that the details are unimportant or that creating a 'proper modern compiler' is simple. Rather, they're claiming that many people find compilers _conceptually_ intimidating, and that this is unwarranted.
I would agree with the post if IPhone was on a better network like Verizon, but given that AT&T's network coverage just isn't that great in the US (I'm currently a subscriber), not to mention that we don't have great nationwide wifi yet; I just feel that most IPhone apps still need to written in obj c.

(ironically, this is pointed out in the post)
I support resubmission and clobbering if the improvement in submission title is as noticeable as in this case.
Become an angel investor. Help startups grow. Share knowledge. Provide relief from those who don't know or understand how to really make a startup work. And, ideally, make more money.
From Arrington's reporting, it looks like minority shareholders were squeezed out (not bought out) and cap table was heavily modified. It doesn't matter how careful you are and how right you think you are, when you make a decision to wipe out holdings, a lawsuit or a threat of lawsuit will eventually come and minority will have a strong case against the board. No wonder none of the board members talked to Mike and no one gave statements for the record... they know they'd be exposing themselves to liability.
The Reinvention of the Self
Probably because women can't live without their Hacker News.
I'd be like the paypal guys and fund a lot of crazy/awesome/futuristic projects (The Seasteading Institute, Space X, Tesla Motors).

Then I'd fly to the moon in a craft that costs less than $100 million and paint a big fat logo up there.
I'd hate to sound like a Reddit comment, but thank you very much.
The Google Non-Story On Network Neutrality
thanks for sharing - good read. #5 was really inspiring.
i really wish we had less techcrunch on the front page.
this is totally valid as it is related to youtube/new-media having a larger than "selling crap and getting laid" affect on the world.
Don't know about Sergey and Larry, but Jobs has a thing for vehicles that he considers a great combo of engineering and aesthetic design.

According to Guy Kawasaki, he bought a BMW motorcycle during the development of the original Mac, which he kept parked near near the lobby of the building where Mac development took place. According to Kawasaki, Jobs referred to it as living art.

Supposedly he later kept a BMW motorcycle, (not clear if it was the same one) in the living room of Jackling house, his mansion in Woodside.
As you say, yes, if you really sit down and think about it, it's a tricky concept.

My conclusion: It's all about the energy, and to a lesser extent, atoms. With sufficient energy and the right atoms, we can make anything we may wish to consume. With sufficient energy and technology we may even be able to fiddle with atoms to some extent.

Therefore, "sustainable" technology is when we can survive on less energy than we can bring in for the given time period, and on fewer atoms than we can bring in for the given time.

We are taking both out of the Earth at a fantastic rate, which isn't as bad as it sounds because the Earth (not to mention the universe) is freakin' huge and awash in both energy and atoms in the general sense. (The Universe is young.) What we run short on is two things: cheap atoms and energy, and complicated atomic configurations, particularly "food". In the case of some particular atoms, we can run out of those relatively soon (like palladium), but those are generally substitutable to some acceptable extent with other atoms and energy.

Our current issues with inefficient and dangerous atom extraction and extraction of cheap energy from the Earth is an aberration, albeit a multi-century one that is still going strong. Long-term, there are only two solutions: To live with the meager resources that nature will provide us, which is to say, to live like savages, or to develop a nanotechnology so powerful that with the input of relatively small amounts of energy, a life form can be sustained. There's a low solution and is almost certainly a high solution; the middle solution (modern technology) is, as you intimate, not long-term sustainable no matter what we do. It does not matter how much we recycle or conserve or reuse, it doesn't matter if we drive Priuses or Hummers, this can't last.

It can, however, extend the time frame we have to develop high technology, and given the various outcomes which I won't take the time to enumerate, it is almost certainly a good idea, as long as it doesn't hurt research into high technology. So even though what we currently call "sustainability" isn't, it does directly contribute to eventual sustainability by extending the time frame we have to develop it.

Personally, I think the only limit for nanotechnology is ultimate physical limits, I see no great impediment remaining but time and effort. But I don't think anything less than a technology that can sustain a high-tech civilization truly indefinitely with only an energy input is truly "sustainable".

I observe that if you look at the problem like this, a lot of things promoted in the name of sustainability actually harm our prospects of such technology.
Ever visited the Dusit zoo in Bangkok? I don't like most zoos, but thought this one was done really well.
I am blatantly not a lawyer but from my understanding you can not patent rules to a game. So the clever thing to do would be implementing a "word game engine" which allows users to upload their rules to it and share those rules, if they happen to be scrabble-esque..? Are you responsible for all user content in that situation? (serious question)
It's probably true that Gmail has this on their roadmap. I would recommend those who aren't already building a product to create something on Yahoo and see which ones are "hits" and be ready to port to Gmail asap. Good luck, this is a great opportunity.
> They weren’t generating much revenue from toolbar and device installations - just $5 million or so annually.

There is no God.
Once wrote a compiler in Lisp. It makes you smarter the first time. Therefore you won't try a second time.
This article is the most interesting I have seen on techcrunch in a while. It really is an extraordinary event, and Arrington has actually done a great job reporting on it.
Ask HN: Do RoR Developers Fall Within the 95/5% Rule?
In doing lots of research for potential Rails developers I seem to be hitting either:

5%: Individual developers with great online reputations, lots of blog entires, contributors to several gems/plugins as well as books; but are "not available for hire" either because they are too busy, or are somehow able to hold down a full-time job at a firm in addition to all their valuable community work.

95%: Individual developers or small development shops with nicely laid out web sites but "portfolios" that are extremely thin and/or seem to be on the very low end of the complexity scale.

Have others had the same experience? Any outliers?
Let's hope this never happens again... Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children.
Pygame ported to pyS60 for nokia phones
Downturn may turn techies to crime, say reports
Or how about we stop trying to develop our own beautiful UIs? One of the main attractions of the platform is that the UI is really good and consistent. The verbiage used between all apps is consistent, informative, and the imagery for icons and whatnot are also equally carried through.

So why are we mucking with it? I see more and more iPhone apps trying to completely overhaul Apple's own UI elements, to appear "unique", when all they're doing is adding to user confusion and inconsistency.

There are legitimate places where the UI must be extended - I say extend, not replace - because Apple's existing toolkit items are simply not up to the task, but IMHO one of the major failings in the iPhone dev community is failure to uphold the basics of UI standards.
My speculation: because there are no drawbacks to yawning
too much, we've evolved to yawn with even the slightest triggers.

Unless, of course, you're talking to your wife/husband/whatever and a case of the yawns kicks in.
A lot of "busy" people read email on their blackberries, so if the possible actions are difficult (not forwarding or terse responses) they forget about it (since the blackberry marks the item read and then it falls to the bottom of their inbox, never to be seen again.)

Naturally, I'm sending this from a blackberry...
Gaming Effects Versus Hollywood
KPSS TERCiH Tarihleri
Yahoo Mail’s New App Platform
First of all, I don't have a 'cause' or agenda. I found some tips in this article useful and hence submitted it. That's all. Content quality is subjective, some hate it and some like it. I have no control over this and neither do I have a problem with negative comments ON the article itself. What I dislike are personal attacks like this.

I don't even know who you are so I'm not sure why you are targeting me. Had a bad day?

Are you suggesting that top ten lists are inherently flawed? Should all list posts NOT ever be submitted to Hacker News? Or are you suggesting that I shouldn't be allowed to participate in this community because everything I share is more or less rubbish?

I joined this community 602 days ago. That's 1 year and eight months ago. I'm not a fly-by-night spammer. Everyone can see the stories I submit to verify this.

Your obvious condescension is quite unnecessary. And frankly, I find it quite insulting. I don't have a devious plan to destroy Hacker News so maybe you should chill out a bit.
"Molecular Programming" [Video]
"Sorry honey, I was thinking very intently about the deep thought you just shared, and my brain just needed some additional cooling."

Get out of jail free...
> We even had some employees who volunteered to be "rif'ed." Two I know had already received offers from outside the company that were still open, but they were declined, so the company could axe those that H.R. chose instead.

Why should the company "take volunteers" for RIFs? Now I don't argue for a purely chance-based system for doing layoffs, preferring instead that a viable company make thoughtful choices about whom should be let go, I will observe that a random lottery will likely produce better results for the on-going company operations than allowing for a voluntary round of layoffs (presumably, with severance). In a voluntary round, your most employable are disproportionately likely to volunteer, meaning you're worse off than if you left it to chance.

(From the less-than-median employable employee's point of view, naturally allowing for a voluntary round is preferable, but it's the company's choice of how to do it, not the worst employee's choice.)
I was in that class, too, I think. (StatsXYX X=2 Y=5?) The professor was a great guy to me, so I'm sorry you had that experience.
http://www.jython.org/Project/jythonc.html
Yeah, that comes out to ~$77k per employee (before the layoffs)... no way a company can survive on that.
> Cohen, who has recently had highly publicized financial troubles, may have simply been bought off.

[citation needed]
Yahoo is working hard to open their platform. But, why no developer actually appreciates them?
They had 65 employees and $50 million in funding. They were obviously planning on making a little bit more than $5 million a year.
Startup founder going for the unreachable
The "we're in the business of selling news not paper" is a trope from a guy named Rob Curley, the "hyperlocal hero" of the newspaper industry, currently working away at the Las Vegas Sun.

http://elapsedtime.blogspot.com/2007/03/rob-curleys-google-v...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
If you want to make a point, you better come up with arguments better than "because I say so". I have given you fairly detailed technical advantages of native software and offered an explanation why we have (temporarily, I hope) moved back to the stone age, only to hear nothing but heard-it-before Web 2.0 marketing pitch devoid of any factual support.

BTW it's 2008, nobody installs shit from a CD. Ever heard of a package manager? Also look at iPhone apps: here we have a computer which is online 100% of time by definition, yet all that neat software for it is strictly "traditional". That's because "traditional" kicks ass, users like it, plus Apple solved the distribution problem. Solve that problem on a generic PC and you don't need the browser anymore.
Anyone going to lead a health care community discussion?
I'minlikewithyou makes jigsaw puzzles fun again, working on revenue
Would you have preferred that it be submitted with a different title? Title is subjective.
I will continue working on it for the acquirer until the acquirer can actually work it out without me.
Private companies like AT&T/Bell Labs and IBM used to do LOTS of research.

Most tech companies used to do more research during the Cold War, because The Customer was paying well. Should I add more?
Why you don't want to pay money for private company common stock, example N.
It's important because, as a user, I want some of the sites I use to be aware of each other and work together.
Both JRuby and Jython compile dynamic languages into the JVM; the instruction set of the VM makes it fairly difficult to deal with dynamic types and to deal with reloading methods on the fly (I believe that in Java the only real way to unload a class is to throw away the whole classloader associated with it). If you're really curious about how it's done, check out Charles Nutter's blog (http://blog.headius.com/2008/09/first-taste-of-invokedynamic... is pretty interesting) or download the JRuby source and check it out.

That said, it's certainly not trivial, so it still might not qualify as "sane."
Financial Times? The Economist? New Yorker? There's a lot of decent, event better, magazines and newspapers.
Orwellian Apple ad celebrates 25th birthday
Tip #2 is nice in theory, but styling button spacing in a cross-browser manner is nearly impossible.

Tip #7 is awful. By the time the images load, the user could already be typing in another input box. If you must set focus, do it right after the <input>.

Tip #8 is pretty bad too. Users expect input boxes to look like input boxes. See Wufoo, which does this properly by highlighting the background.

Some of the ideas aren't bad, but a few "useful techniques" won't lead to a usable interface.
Writing a compiler is like anything else, it's a lot easier when you've done it. If you want to try out compiler writing, use (or invent) a simple toy language and write a compiler for it, in your favourite implementation language. Once you've done that, it'll all seem a lot simpler.
Indeed . . . as someone who works with an in-house language, I can affirm that the ratio of time we've spent on the initial parse/compile steps to the time spent on things like error reporting and optimization is probably approaching 1:100 at this point.
This article was quite good, yes. SmashingMag makes Top 10 lists that are genuinely interesting: not always, but often.
Yes, I know. But I still cherish that I can do math and math only. (OK, we have to do something like a minor, but I chose math-heavy theoretical computer science to complement.)
Purple People Collective
[insert comment about how Hacker News is becoming Reddit]
Ask HN: Sales Courses
We are putting some new sales people with domain specific knowledge into the US, but they have little sales experience.
Does anyone have any recommendations for sales courses we could put people through when they get to the US?
Facebook's new value: $1.3 billion?
Doesn't gmail already have this? I'm using TwitterGadget from within gmail already.

http://www.twittergadget.com/
bloomberg mostly. I get financial data from Fidelity.
BitTorrent's Bram Cohen isn't limited by Asperger's
If you're writing a real honest-to-God compiler (source language to hardware execution, not a Java/Ruby/Python VM targeted language) these years, and you don't start with LLVM (http://llvm.org) as a basis for code generation, you're really missing the boat.

As an old compiler hacker (from the early 70s), what I've seen of LLVM is that it's a world-class foundation.
You can store the HTML/CSS/JavaScript locally within the app, as well as use the built in SQLite database, which solves this problem. Of course, you lose the ability to update the app whenever you wish.
Also, Titanium, an open source AIR competitor: http://titaniumapp.com/
It's probably also bad to be modest when you are that awesome. I mean, think about it; who tells people to be modest? Priests, parents and bosses? People in a position of power? Kind of self-serving, no?
The WSJ was once a great paper, when it stuck to business and financial reporting and before Bartley, Noonan, and the current scum took over the editorial page. One could read the WSJ, NY Times, New Yorker, The Nation, and The National review to get a good healthy mix and diversity of strong opinion. I shudder to think what will happen if Murdoch gets his hands on the Times. Just my two cents, YMMV :)
If this follows the pattern of the Snow/Wind storm that hit Seattle over the winter of 2006-2007, about one month after the power comes back on people will be selling their generators for half price on Craigslist.

I would expect gouging to exacerbate this -- people will want to recover some of the money they spent too much of.
I don't think it is necessary to know C to have an idea how an operating system works. C is just a programming language, it is not so special - it is just by accident that many OS are written in C. I am not even sure if the majority of desktop software is written in C anymore. And I indeed have no interest in understanding the "closed source" software on my desktop. Why should I, I can't change it anyway.

In any case it would be sufficient to learn C when the problem arises, but to say one should learn C no matter what seems wrong to me. I haven't used C since university days, and I don't think that makes me a worse programmer than people who know C.

Actually, I would say knowing LISP (or Scheme) would be much more useful for of becoming a good programmer than C. While I learned some Scheme at university, I only read SICP last year, and I feel that it opened my eyes to a lot of things.
This should be a lot of fun to play around with.
"And why didn't they study humans?"

"He and colleagues Michael Miller and Anne Clark analyzed yawning in parakeets as representative vertebrates because the birds have relatively large brains, live wild in Australia, which is subject to frequent temperature swings, and, most importantly, do not engage in contagious yawning, as humans and some other animals do."
I'd like to think that I fall in the top 10% if not the top 5. Check out my page on working with rails and feel free to contact me if you're interested. http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/12559-brandon-pollet
"Then I'd fly to the moon ... and paint a big fat logo up there."

Or you could get Hancock to do it for you ... :)
[delete comment about inserting comments]
"... This article is the most interesting I have seen on techcrunch in a while. It really is an extraordinary event, and Arrington has actually done a great job reporting on it. ..."

I think you nailed it there. Having some legal training has paid off with a nice summary of the situation?

"... So why did Cohen agree to vote for the transaction? Speculation abounds, but one aspect of the transaction is suspicious ... That mostly means Cohen, who is reportedly getting the lion’s share of the 30% of the company put aside for current employees. Cohen, who has recently had highly publicized financial troubles, may have simply been bought off ..."

But ... here we have an allegation that might have a simpler explanation. I found this article in 'Business Week' article, "BitTorrent's Bram Cohen Isn't Limited by Asperger's" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=399039 reading through his blog.

Don't let the lack of facts or another possible explanation get in the way of a good story.
Bali Tours | Nakbali.com
Now that you have the money, maybe you should try some coffee.

http://sivers.org/about
> I have given you fairly detailed technical advantages of native software and offered an explanation why we have (temporarily, I hope) moved back to the stone age

I don't think you really understand why we moved back to the "stone age" at all, or exactly what kind of stone our age is. I also really don't think you're reading my comments, because fundamentally, we agree.

Just making something "native code" isn't a silver bullet that automatically makes it awesome, you know. If it's really native code, then it's only going to run on one OS and one architecture. You would have to make it something slightly higher-level, like a VM, or an interpreted language. Have it talk to a native API.

Then, of course, the API should be a least-common-denominator of a bunch of different platforms. So fancy Quartz effects that won't work on Windows, you'll need to either not provide them or mark them as platform-specific (thus making people not use them).

Think about what you want here. You have an application, your dream platform thing. It connects to a remote server, downloads some code written for it, and runs it locally. That code talks to an API provided by the dream platform that lets it draw GUI widgets and take input, in a manner standardized across a bunch of platforms. It then (in my ideal world) uses the server it got the code from for storage.

That is a browser. It's the same thing. All you want is a browser that uses Cocoa instead of HTML/CSS, and can store apps in a cache and run them offline. Which, don't get me wrong, is a great idea. It means throwing away backward compatibility with the web, but it's still a great idea.

Thing is, congratulations, you're the ten millionth person to have this idea. It's not a bad idea, but it's by no means new. And the problem it solves is the same one that's how we got into the "stone age": distribution.

Browsers suck? Great, make a better browser then. I'll download it. Probably even write apps for it. Just stop pretending it's a "return to desktop apps".

(As for the iPhone, I think it's a long way from having "solved the distribution problem". Very onerous terms of service and approval process mean that most of the apps suck, and probably always will.)