skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does "porting Dalvik to Chrome" even mean?

Assuming that means "be able to run Dalvik bytecode in the browser", that doesn't help with all the Android APIs and such, so it's hard to see how it would be useful.
Yep, which makes the address book a hack for (high-latency, obviously) cross-app communication. E.g., last I knew, TextExpander added an entry to your address book with your abbreviations, so that other apps e.g. Simplenote can use those abbreviations as you type. Very well intentioned hack, which shouldn’t be necessary, but is, using an API that really just shouldn’t be open…
Unfortunately, the quality has really gone down. Five years ago, I used to read Salon every day. They used to have very interesting well researched and well thought out articles.

Nowadays Salon is progressively obtaining the qualities associated with a bad blog. A lot of half thought out articles, a lot of lazy opinion pieces, a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist, practically no attempt to obtain first hand information, just regurgitating popular culture and what appeared on Gawker two hours prior, movie reviews that sheepishly praise the latest idiotic big budget movies. Oh and I read a book review where a reviewer panned a book she had not read.

So yeah, pretty depressing.
this is a bad analogy, apple does not backport features to old versions of their OS, they put their new OS on old handsets. google puts their new OS onto old devices as much as they can too, the problem is that the carriers and other handset manufacturers don't. i'm sure google would love if everything would start running ICS, but it's not their responsibility.
I understand wanting this from a usability perspective, but is there some way to opt-out if our data is already on their servers? I, for example, in just browsing around the app out of curiosity ended up on the "find my friends" screen and without warning Path now has all of my contact data.

I have yet to open the app again.
It's called VIM Golf. http://www.vimgolf.com

You might also be interested in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2588481/are-there-any-kat...
There is always a good time for some shameless auto-promotion, so I'll mention Triggr, a package which allows one to convert R process into a fast, event-based XML-, JSON- or even more freestyle RPC server: https://github.com/mbq/Triggr
I've known about the GNU since it's inception. Do you honestly think I don't know about this?

The GNU isn't "gratis" or "libre". This is my point.
You can prepend a count to that too, to increment/decrement by a fixed amount.

This gets scary useful when you use tpope's speeddating plugin.
I actually think that Dave's response was pretty lame. That was a typical PR/B2C response, neglecting that he is talking to techies here.

Everybody knows "why" Path is doing this and the response should have been more of "why this way".
Breaking Routine
But that isn't what happened. They were owned, multiple times, and have admitted that this was stolen during a hacking incident that they didn't investigate previously.
Since Google changed their algorithms to deal better with web spam and useless articles, even blackhatters and web spammers know that you have to serve useful content to get search engine traffic.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-sea...

Also, how much of this traffic increase has to do with the election, since Salon is a site that runs a lot of political stories? It is good they are seeing more traffic with fewer, better articles, but 2 months of record traffic in an election year would be expected of a political site. What will be their explanation in a year after the election is over and their traffic falls?

He specifically mentioned there were no outlier events that drove traffic, but is that really true? The Republican debates and early primaries have been dominating most news outlets for a few months now. It certainly drives the stories on Salon today.

Understanding what drives traffic, whether it be events, advertising, trends, etc., is essential to craft a content strategy that works in the long run.

I do believe longer, engaging, original stories are good for the user, whether they are scanning or reading the entire article. They are good for SEO too. It will be interesting to see what happens with Salon's traffic and their new-found commitment to better content.
Worth mentioning:

Open source sentiment analysis library based on NLTK: http://github.com/tawlk/synt

(Trains on as much twitter data as you want to learn internet slang)

Simple gist to do basic sentiment analysis:

https://gist.github.com/1266556
By "definitions" I was referring to common definitions you can find in a dictionary, not definitions you just unilaterally invent.

Please, Hacker News is not the place for tired old flamewars. Go back to late 90s /. if you want to argue about whether GPL or BSD is more free.
I agree the article was too strident, but if you watch his videos I think they do a good job of illustrating his philosophy.
While this article doesn't help at all to classify programmers, it's interesting in that it gives a good insight into the author's approach to computer programming.

It's a very book-oriented, "teach yourself how to program computers, then program them" way of looking at the sport. It's what I'd expect to see from a CS major who'd never programmed until he hit university, or possibly a history-major-turned -programmer who learned his trade through those big red Wrox Press books with 24 authors on the cover. My personal path never intersected this curve at all.

I (and I suspect a lot of other folks) came up the Tinker route, being given an Apple II or C64 as a kid with no games on it and needing to find the shortest route to get games written so that you could play them. Every exposure to a new technology (with a new thing that needs accomplishing) gets met with a new batch of playing around with it until it all makes sense, then on to the next thing. Windows programming, web development, database stuff, OOP, functional programming, and everything in between, but never with a plan or anything resembling any of the "stages" the author describes.

Even now, 35 years in, I can't find a place on that scale where I fit. I bet there are a lot of programmers out there in the same position.
Given the stature of the Judges involved I wonder if the event would be seen as a good thing. There seems to be a shift in tech to the degree that a celebrity backing may be what's required for the rise of the next great startup. Starting to see a lot of this, just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on the whole 'celeb involvement'?
Thirdly, they're doing a good enough job at it themselves.
Google to Strip Chrome of SSL Revocation Checking
Mine too, but it runs very hot and gets significantly less battery on Linux than Windows. (How you know something's wrong.)

I tried a fix or two as suggested, but they didn't help; I hope the kernel upgrade does it!
I've been using those more and more recently and have noticed a couple interesting things to be aware of. First, Vim interprets a dash character immediately preceding the number as a negative sign. (In playing around a bit I suspect this behavior is slightly influenced by the syntax rules for the particular filetype you're working with.) The effect of this is to flip the behavior of CTRL-A and CTRL-X. Secondly, if the first digit of the number is '0', Vim will behave as if the number is octal, so incrementing "07" once will result in "010". Similarly, a prefix of "0x" or "0X" will cause a number to be treated as hex.
It's a double edged sword. Many users like it that they don't have to create a user name, remember a password, confirm an account (usually), etc and that all of their other friends 'automagically' appear on the app who've installed it. Whatsapp has something like %90 of smartphone users in sweden.

Phone numbers cost money, and multiple emails are usually a chore still.
> a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist

Just thought I'd point out the humor in you using a gendered word to describe their tendency to talk about sexism.
L, M, and H are also very useful for vertical movement. My general procedure for navigating (when I don't have anything particular to find), from general to specific, is: Ctrl-f/Ctrl-b, L/M/H, j/k).
Thanks! That's definitely getting there. It would be even better if I could do it in the browser, with simpler challenges to start out. Maybe a few intro tutorials or the like.
The client could do 'signed' hashes using the local phone number and the friend number (sending the server both the local:friend pair and the friend:local pair).

That wouldn't really stop anybody from reversing the hashes, but it would make a global rainbow table useless.
Eh, I don't think you're quite right here. @private means "Only accessible by this class and its instances, not parent, sibling or child classes." What Apple means by "private" in that case, though, is "Only for use by Apple, not outside vendors." If NSActionCell has private subclasses that need the variable, marking it @private would be flat-out wrong.
That is really awesome.

I wonder if the file size gains of switching to WebP is worth the hit of including the WebP.js file. Of course you'd now require clients to support JS but in this day and age that's reasonable anyways.
Video tutorial: Android Application Design
Chromium for Android is going to be open source, and the only difference between desktop Chrome and Chromium is branding and nonfree codec support.
Furthermore, they've officially deprecated the UDID as of iOS 5 which means it'll be going away sometime after that.
Woops, I pasted the wrong thing there:

"Much of the code for Chrome for Android is already shared with Chromium and over the coming weeks, the Chromium team will be upstreaming many new components developed for Chrome for Android to Chromium, WebKit and other projects."
I think it will be a matter of time until the iOS platform (3-5 years) is more akin to that of the Mac platform, where there is a walled garden app store, and an outside ecosystem as well. Buying from the walled garden will have many advantages, so it will thrive, but having the ability to buy apps from other locations will enable the platform to also stay competitive.
Looking for love? Online dating algorithms won't help you | The Verge
Get your advice from the second best, not the best
Where is this setting? This is the second time I've heard someone say you could do that but I cannot find any options like that. Settings just has Refresh interval and options to configure notifications.
This, unfortunately, is not just the Apple fanboy problem, though they are persistently at the forefront of the internet slander. As a woman in a tchnology sector, where a lot of communication happens online and over the internet (as is the learned behavour - monkey see, money do), I feel like we are about to embark on a mission that is equivalent to getting the right to vote.

I have played in male dominating world since I left high school (I graduated from metallurgical engineering and worked in heavy manufacturing before joining the tech sector). I am quite disappointed in the way some people carry themselves online. But I suppose there will always be people who will be idiots and jerks. Internet allows them to do with a doze of anonimity and so they do not have quams about saying the first think that pops into their heads.

The bigger problem, in my opinion, is the quiet ones. The people that stand by on the sidelines and eat popcorn. Just like lying by omition is still lying, not saying anything when people like this go on their rampage make them complicit.

It is a problem, but I am uncertain that it can be clearly attributed to Apple fanboys, or software developers or any other specific group. What we need is a model where behaviour like this is not tolerated and people like this are not deified. Peers that disagree with them need to speak out and say something.

How severe were the threats? Were they severe enough to report to authorities? I understand that you may not want to breach that barrier, but I believe that we at least need to appear serious about using all that is available to us, so that people who are currently abstaining from involvement can actually step in and sway the trends in the other direction.

I realize that this is slightly offtopic from the post, but I think you are illustrating the bigger problem and using Apple as an example. Yes, what happened is awful but there are Shawn Kings and John Grobers all over the tech sector. Including my and your office.
I couldn't be happier to see a start up like Dwolla thriving in my home town. Congrats Dwolla!
Of all the "Vim tricks" article I came across, this one is my favorite so far.

I have been a vim power user for a little over 2 years now. I never bothered installing plugins and spent all my time instead learning ... the exact same commands described in the article. Now I type fast, I mean real fast.

A couple more tips I find useful:

- 'gg' and 'G' in command mode will send you to the beginning and the ending of the file.

- 'Ctrl-N' and 'Ctrl-P' in insert mode will auto-complete (suggestions only come from existing words in opened buffers, for more you'd probably need plugins).

All the other tips are _spot on_! I especially like the first one about moving vertically one line at a time. It takes some time getting used to, but the fact that you can repeat the 'jump' or jump back to your previous position. Believe me, you'll fly :)

My new set of advice for blazing fast typing:

1. Learn to touch type. The rest is meaningless without this.

2. Repeat 'vimtutor' religiously for 10-15 days.

3. Read this post and apply every tip until it's hard-written in your fingers' muscle memory.

4. ... voila!
Our app was recently rejected specifically for this reason, though we had a "skip" button, contacts weren't just automatically 'farmed'. So we had to add a popup with explicit allow/deny buttons and then the app passed subsequent reviews.
This is NOT controversial. You give them permission to do this. If you don't want Path to import your address book, then don't ask Path to import your address book.
> That's why I started my post with "Let me contrive a hypothetical".

Not here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3561964 This is the post I originally responded to, so this is the post I was assuming we were talking about.

> A ruthless corporation that doesn't care about the open source community (which I think describes most corporations, FWIW) is very different than "a company that's adamant against open-sourcing". The former will contribute open source code when it is in their economic best interest, but they won't go out of their way to play nice with the open source folks. The latter will sacrifice their economic interests just to stick to their ideology.

That's fair.
That is so funny. I saw BTJunkie shut down yesterday and I said to myself, "Time to fire up the old BBS"
That's not the moral of the story; techies are great early-adopters and end users for that reason.

The moral is to treat customers privacy with utmost respect.
>we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

"Proactively?" How do you get into the Social Networking business and not see this issue coming before the first line of code is written?

[re: hashing]
>This is a good alternative solution which we'll look into. Thanks for the idea.

Again, no. That no competent system design talent/time was dedicated to this process is a damning critique of your organization's ability to be trusted to safeguard user data.
As an engineer at a different social network -- not Facebook, but not small, about 30 million users -- he's right. That fuNctionality is important. But we do it in way that preserves privacy. IMO this is just sloppy...
This appears to be a sound response to a sensitive issue. Certainly handled far better than some others have handled their PR (debacles) recently.
KA member here.

Today at 3:30 I'll be at our Los Altos district teacher feedback session for hours.

As a dev, I meet with our pilot teachers regularly.

Our implementations team does it literally every day.

I have multiple email threads in my inbox of long back-and-forth conversations between our developers and our fearless teachers.

Ok, back to work!
Does this mean that the standard HTTPS stack on the iPhone is insecure? Shouldn't certificate verification fail when it attempts to send data via the mitmproxy?
>what's with all the hate for href="#"?
Um, there was a section of my post explaining everything wrong with it, which was also further discussed in the G+ comments.

Of course I understand why keyboard accessibility (a benefit of href="#") is a good thing, that was a main point in the post: There's no solution for adding "buttons" (in the functionality sense) that look like standard links without major drawbacks, like a lack of keyboard control.
Here's a link to a socket.io client library in Obj-C:

https://github.com/pkyeck/socket.IO-objc
The reason Unitt didn't work for us is that it isn't updated to work with the latest WebSocket protocol. This is an issue, especially since there's finally a standard (RFC 6455)

tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455

Tornado is nice since it implements some of the legacy versions of WebSockets, but there are many servers that will probably deprecate them sooner rather than later.
One thing I've found over and over is that the "earlies" have a kind of technology intuition that lets them feel how a product could or should work and the courage to just try things to see if the product might work like that.
What this means is that a product not only needs to be far less polished for the "earlies" to make use of it, it doesn't even really have to be finished.

On the other end of the spectrum, the "normies" will have trouble figuring out that the "file->save" option will save their work to disk, even though its exactly like the one in Word. You'll have to tell them this explicitly somehow, and even then, they'll be so afraid of breaking something that they'll need someone else to demonstrate it to them before they'll try it on their own.
Payment processing has been ripe for disruption for a long time - so glad they are getting around the barriers to entry.

Interesting Marc Echo is an investor - http://blog.dwolla.com/

I first met Marc at Big Omaha during his amazing talk on disruption and innovation. Marc’s advice has ranged from telling me to be more confident to telling me that our logo sucks. It’s always been incredibly unfiltered and at times… harsh. But that’s actually what we really need, and when we need the truth I know I can always look to Marc for a totally good opinion on all things in life.
I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone like Marc, and his partners at Artists & Instigators just get it.
I know many folks like ggplot2 much more than anything available for Python. What are the advantages of using R over Python?
Law Would Put Homeland Security in Charge of Business IT Security
How are they scammy? The affiliates want to make money, the networks want to make money.. sure some of the affiliates try shady techniques, but the affiliate network themselves are not scams - they do give prizes and reward top performers. Do you just view their products (health/beauty products) as scammy?
Reading the comments, theres a lot of disagreement (for some valid reasons) but this list is getting more hate than it deserves. If you consider that the MAJORITY of programmers are essentially corporate code monkeys this is actually a very accurate list.

If I read this list and then apply its rules to the average programmer at fortune 500 companies it is almost perfectly accurate at measuring the least to most talented programmers I've worked alongside.

In the corporate world, the bulk of developers fall into one of the following groups: guys who can barely modify a custom report, guys who can write a report, guys who can create a basic CRUD class for reuse across reports, guys who can contribute to a complex application, guys who can design a complex application, and then the guys who are hired to create the tools/languages that are leveraged when creating complex applications.

There are obviously many areas of programming that do not fall under these definitions but the AVERAGE programming (i.e. average corporate developer) probably fits very neatly into one of these definitions.
$150,000 in sales not profit, big difference.
"Swipe from the edge to switch tab" is beautiful :)
Software may be global, but patent licenses for things like codecs aren't.
At that point it's also useless for matching.
It's fascinating that despite all the to-do apps, people still resort to home-grown, highly manual solutions. Do people think there will eventually be an app that works for the masses, or will planning continue to be a personal, isolated experience?
Chrome for Android beta launches: place shifting, faster rendering, card view
Nothing to do with work. I've been "in technology" for my entire life and professionally for the last 18 years. I have learned that whilst homebrew is satisfying an itch, sometimes there are people who do things better. I've had companies go bankrupt on me and that's why I have contingency plans in place to remedy things, but I sometimes like the fact I can pay someone to do a specific thing for me better than I could do it myself (or at least as well). I'm past the point in my life where it seems useful to spend my time doing something because I can, I'd much rather spend that time on something else (other work, family, friends, hobbies) if there's a viable way that makes good business sense.

p.s. Flattered you care ;)
MobileWorks(S11) is hiring full-time employees and interns
Google App Engine community support is moving to Stack Overflow
Facebook has something MySpace never had: an ecosystem. With Facebook Connect, a place to receive invites, a central place for contacts, albums, etc, a developer program, brand/fan pages, etc. it's hard to see them going away for a long long time.

That said, I am not in Facebook. I would consider joining a social network if it had meaningful/interesting conversations I would want to participate in. Sort of like Hacker News, but more geared towards any general meaningful topic, not just tech. Quora is as close as it gets, but even that is too much Q&A.. I just want general chat, like Reddit except a bit more serious.
I like CTRL-U/CTRL-D for scroll up/down by half a screen, as opposed to a full screen.
Great alternative?

"Pricing like it should be! 2.9%..." I stopped right there.

It does not cost more to process larger numbers. There is no rational justification whatsoever for any money-handling service to charge a percentage. Period.

No amount of 'but the other guys are bigger assholes than me!' will cover up the fact that the banking environment right now is set up to make it as difficult as possible for anyone but extremely large businesses to do a large volume of transactions without making it outright illegal.

I want to see a payment processor that charges a low, flat rate for processing transactions, with their charges based upon the actual cost incurred by their processing plus a bit of profit. They are providing a useful service, I'm not against making money. But taking a percentage when the size of the transaction does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to your costs of processing is like taking your dick out in public and asking children to pet it.
Perhaps, however when calls like this are noted additional scrutiny of the application could be applied to ensure they are not abused (such as using a proxy in the way described by the parent).

There are other actions allowed by the SDK that seem to have little non-nefarious use, such as the ability to hide the fact that an application is transmitting and receiving data (the network "spinner" can be disabled by the application); as others have mentioned it's interesting which API calls require authorization from the user while others do not.