skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Minecraft developer makes "serious" offer to fund Psychonauts sequel
Wait, he has a startup that is basing product features on analytics on user data? How is he getting a statistically significant sample size for something that appears to be pre-launch?
Firefox for android unfortunately started out real slow...might be a good move for Google. Time to go to xda-developers and see if it'll be on your phone.
All I want to know is how long till it replaces the current implementation of WebView in the Android SDK.
Yes, having extensions in a mobile browser is the next step to quick personalization beyond native applications.

I bet that web augmentation on mobiles can be really huge.
"..product by security company would be secure"

By this logic, wouldn't you also expect the storage of the source code to be secured?

In my mind, security implies all forms; physical, logical, in-transit, at rest, etc
A Military Robot that Does It All
No, because it isn't the kind of war that can be won.

That was my point.
I think Apple's Mac roadmap is:

* Mac continues to evolve slowly, not have major innovations. Innovations that do occur will be on things that are aligned with iOS-like devices (like Launchpad, Mac App Store, Macbook Air's).

* Someday they will ditch Mac, when an iOS device can be used to (1) create new iOS apps, and (2) be a productivity machine (e.g. w/ keyboard / etc).

Those of us who like to poke under the hood will have to move back to Linux or something else.
Same problem happened to me. I'm locked out, so I guess I'll make a mailinator address and try again.
Decoupling the browser from the OS is one of the best things that could happen for android security going forward. While it won't help people who can't get upgrades to ICS, at least it will solve the future problems of people who get stuck on 4.x while their OS browser slowly becomes more and more exploitable. I have one phone that is still on 2.2 - it is trivially easy to own the phone with a little bit of javascript on any web page.
Unfortunately, I would also assert that overall product quality has been neglected as of late.

Because you had a Mac Pro with a faulty firmware for the latest OS?

Whole stacks of iBook G3s had to be returned (some of them again and again) because of faulty logic boards. The Cube had overheating problems. The batteries of a few Powerbook lines where problematic and had to be recalled. G5 Mac Pro's had leaking liquid cooling and fan problems. Powerbooks had problems with their DVD writers. Early MacBook Pros also had problems with their fans. You can find tons of similar events from 1999 to 2012. Lots of older Apple machines had problems that needed a firmware update to fix, from graphic glitches to what have you.

They don't imply that "overall product quality has been neglected as of late". Just that, in every company and in every product line, there are to be some problems in some models, some machines or even whole runs. Nothing is perfect, and nothing was perfect before. I cannot even enumerate how many times I had problems with faulty Wintel PCs.

What happened is you just had some Mac computer that didn't have a problem before whereas your new one has a non-yet-updated by Apple firmware. A very little empirical evidence for any claim regarding overall QA. Gee, Apple in 2011 made what's perhaps the world's best laptop, the MBA 13" (touted as so by many Mac and PC review sites and magazines).
GNU Project renews focus on free software in education
The conundrum is that you can't define a canonical inheritance relationship between square and rectangle or mammal and cat because the relationship depends entirely on how you are using these concepts in your program. Making them immutable may affect the relationship but does not make it canonical.
We've been user "Browser", I hope one advantage of using Chrome would be bookmark sync with my desktop browser. "Browser" doesn't even have folders for it's bookmarks.

Anyway, my phone only runs Android 2.3 so it seems I'll have to wait till my next upgrade to avoid using hacked up apps to sync my bookmarks.
Too bad 99% of Android devices can't run this, according to Google -- http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
> With all that said, it remains incredibly tough to set up business in the US. Even with the US funding behind us, and an American co-founder, options are surprisingly slim as the usual work visa – H1-B – is not suited for companies that are just starting out or for founders who have major stakes in the company. It doesn’t matter how many jobs you do or promise to create, the options are surprisingly limited.

One gloomy forecast, this.

Can anyone who's gone through the motions of starting a company in the US as a EU citizen share their experience?
https://airbrakeapp.com/account/new?dev=true

You missed the small link at the bottom of the pricing grid
Russian Anonymous publish mail archives of pro-Putin Internet trolls.
I had been wondering whether Google would port Chrome to Android, or they would port Dalvik to Chrome. I'm still not ruling out the latter option.
Is anyone else getting confused too? who did acquired who?

On http://contrast.ie/ is stated Exceptional is acquired by Airbrake.io (Hoptoad). And here is state the opposite... will Exceptional continue to exist or Airbrake? Or Both?
More discussion over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3562785
Weird... it was $5/mo when we signed up less than a year ago. Seems that our price hasn't changed. That said, we're moving away from it.

Why? Well, it's practically useless outside of Ruby. The UX assumes Rack/Rails-isms, so the experience is weird for Javascript errors. Beyond that, stack traces aren't good enough to debug many issues; you need logging integration. This is especially true for minified javascript.
I wrote this post. To summarize my argument in three lines:

There ARE different ways of defining mathematics, and some of them contradict each other.

Silicon Valley companies wrongly assume their platforms are agnostic on those definitions.

For better or worse, if you're trying to make money in math education, the Common Core State Standards are the definition that trumps your or my preference for recursion, computational algebra, etc, and those standards include a lot of practices for which, at this point in history, computers aren't just unhelpful, but also counterproductive.
sounds like Steve Jobs Jr. Don't know if that's a good or bad thing...
Not true. I have taken food several times through security. I am talking about US airports. Drinks, however, are not allowed.
Learning math from a human in a classroom works because it forms a local culture that cares about math. Students have a chance to be motivated by what the teacher cares about, and this is a very social phenomenon.

It is harder to express sqrt(3/4) on a computer in a meaningful way because there is no ubiquitous and intuitive interface for doing this -- the article has a good point here. But that doesn't mean it's a problem we can't address.

I like the idea of thinking of students in a classroom as young mathematicians, because it respects the students and inclines us to teach in alignment with real-world use cases -- it addresses the 'when will we ever use this' question. From that perspective, it would be a mistake to exclude technology based on its shortcomings. If it is genuinely useful for doing math, then it is worth learning.

I see a lot of concern about math education -- I think most of it misses the main problem, which is that there's zero motivation for people who are great at math to become teachers. If I have a PhD in math, and I become a math teacher, then (i) my math friends will think I will never publish a paper again, (ii) they'll think I am no longer good enough for serious math research, and (iii) I will take a huge pay cut vs typical math-PhD jobs. I might as well add (iv) I would suddenly be working with many people who don't respect or care about what I'm good at (students). I'm an optimist - I think all of these are addressable in the long run. Questions about the virtues of technology are secondary to the ecosystem and cultural perceptions around teachers.
Sounds like it might be time for me to roll a service like this. I used to use Exceptional, but their free plan went away, and I switched to just using exception_notifier to send emails straight to me instead. It's a useful service, but the price point just doesn't work for hobby/small projects.
"Browser" on Android 4 syncs with Chrome already (and has folder support).
If a personal backup solution requires manual steps, it will eventually stop happening.
Klout Acquires Blockboard to take Influence Local & Mobile
I don't really get this stuff. Building stuff that's considered to be hard are actually the things I learned when starting out with programming. Things like a driver, a boot loader, a compiler aren't things that are harder than any other piece of software. Of course everything gets hard when you go beyond the basic stuff, but I never got why people that program in C++ or Java (usually) tend to be so arrogant when it comes to these things. Assembly isn't hard and building an interpreter or compiler also is pretty simple. The thing that's really hard when programming is the "maintenance" stuff. Be it a web application, an operating system kernel, a compiler, video game or an IRC client. Implementing the feature itself usually isn't that hard. Fixing bug is, finding the right balance between performance and simplicity is too. Oh and progressing without breaking API or ABI compatibility.

It usually not important what paradigm you follow. I myself like languages like Perl, where I can choose what way I want to go. Also functional programming languages like Haskell are awesome for building interpreters, but really I consider Assembly to probably be the easiest language there is and everything should start with it, especially C or C++ programmers, because it will prevent you from making assumptions that are wrong and prevent stupid code.

Also looking at different languages is fun and everything that is considered hard is usually lots of fun. Haskell and Assembly are the best examples.

About research. If you don't do the same thing over and over it's always a way of researching things. Most people building awesome stuff are people connecting things that haven't been connected by now.

What I want to say in short is that I don't see how these "levels" can ever fit to anyone. Also I don't get what paradigms and well, everything thing listed fits the term "level". It's about what I thought when I had even less of an idea of what programming is about. I am still exploring stuff and am a complete beginner. I never had a serious project. I just hack (as in writing bad code) some scripts together.

Disclaimer: I know I am a bad programmer, if you can even call me one at all. I have a very idealistic view on things.
In theory this could make their product even more secure, assuming whatever exploits are found are reported back to them.

It would be interesting if Semantec would do something like start a bounty for reporting exploits. But of course that would be promoting use of their source code which I'm sure they would never do.
DDoS Attacks: Size doesn’t matter
Why Facebook May Not Be Enough For The Next Generation
Why Flexible Hours Inspire Performance
Yup. After living through this traumatic experience, I bet Dotcom's kids will hate the police for the rest of their lives.
To expand on the analogy, it's more like GPS receivers have a very wide funnel so that they catch every drop. This funnel extends into the range that lightsquared has. If it weren't GPS, the FCC would just say "fix your damn receivers, they are within the parameters of your license" but GPS is clearly Sui Generis because of the combination of the weakness of the signals and the importance to our infrastructure.
With Android 4.0 at 1% market share, it'll be a long time before most people can even try this.

http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
How Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow
Hi this is Ben. I run all things product. I take full responsibility for outages and our pricing change and I'd like to share what we're thinking--and I'm happy to have constructive feedback.

We have regular usage of 3000+ requests per second between our products. We have 12+ languages/frameworks that feed us exceptions. We also have integrations with PaaS providers like Heroku, EngineYard, AppFog and others. We also get hundreds of support requests each week. Part of our mission for embracing both of these products is to complete a vision that includes many powerful additions. But to get there we knew we needed to both retool the architecture for scale. We also wanted to keep under 24 hour turnaround time for our support.

When you look at our historical pricing there is no way we could meet our expectations of providing high reliability to our customers, a high quality of support and maintain all the bits that feed into the product--not to mention our vision for the future.

We tested our pricing changes with over a hundred of our users and they adamantly agreed--charge us more--make it rock solid--and let's see some of those features (e.g. search!).

And in general--our philosophy with pricing is this: we are developers. All of our customers are developers. But within this group there is a distinction--the side-project developer and the corporate developer. You are probably a corporate developer when you've advanced to having a company credit card. To you, our pricing is trivial for a production infrastructure service (see AWS or even Salesforce and friends). For the side-project developer--we are never going to be inexpensive enough. And we don't want to break your back to get great service from us! In fact, if anyone has been adversely affected by our plans, you should tell me! I take responsibility and want to hear from you.

I'm ben@airbrake.io or just give me a call at 415 500 5207. Although I'm in Berlin right now with some of our awesome users http://instagr.am/p/GtrfVDlnsy/, so if my speech is slurred or I'm slow to respond this evening, you know why. :-)
How Pinterest is Becoming the Next Big Thing in Social Media for Business
Twitter open sources its Effective Scala guide
This is just the one email that the article was referencing. Not the entire set.
Sony Security Breach
So far, I'm not a big fan of gnome3 (and Unity), but I'm going to give the gnome developers some credit and trust the direction they took. They spent countless hours thinking about what to do - I didn't.

They refactored most of gtk, simplifying many things, and in the long run, when people are done migrating everything, I believe it will turn out for the best.
Crossing the Lean Startup Chasm
Toggl.com is a great service. It was launched after being prototyped at a hackathon in Europe. Can no longer find the link.

According to this TechCrunch article (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/biz-stone-steps-back-from-t...), Twitter started as a side project at Odeo that came out of a hackathon. "Among the assets of Odeo was a little side project created during a hackathon, called Twitter."
Chrome for iOS please.
Testing in private beta with real users :)
I usually describe myself as a Full Stack Programmer, or Generalist.

I'm as comfortable doing embedded C as I am Ruby.
Notch says "Shut up and take my money" on creation of Psychonauts 2
Do you mean 4c/GB/month? The $50 cartridge fee would be non-recurring except for storage.
No mention in the article about people who overflow their seats. I personally don't care whether the person beside me is 6'7" and 220lbs. But I do care if they're 5'0', 220lbs and half of their body is on my lap. Prices should rise with average customer weight for everyone across the board to make up for fuel costs, but when someone takes up two seats, they should pay extra for it.

But of course, I think seat sizes should increase with average customer width too, but we're still flying in planes that were manufactured in the skinny 70s. Increasing seat size would ensure that only the most ginormous would have to pay for an extra seat, rather than the 60% of the population that is overweight.
> Still, the code is worthless for anyone if your product is secure. And I would imagine that product by security company would be secure.

Actually they had known vulnerabilities, but they didn't think it worth their time to fix them until their code was to be released.

http://www.symantec.com/theme.jsp?themeid=anonymous-code-cla...

> On Friday, January 27, 2012, Symantec released a patch that eliminates known vulnerabilities affecting customers using pcAnywhere 12.0 and pcAnywhere 12.1.
On some airlines, but the majority don't have them. I always try to get exit row, but even then the seat width is pretty small. If you're 5'2" I'm sure it's great! :)
Finally! And I thought intelligence services would never grab that opportunity to paint their activities on Anonymous. Got to give them kudos for coming up with that password thingy as the "convincer".
what makes you think they will ?
Too bad it's only available in "select countries", which certainly don't include the Netherlands... Probably just the US and Canada? Kind of old-fashioned.
Miguez de Icaza explains here why you're not getting laid (much):

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html
Programming ability == quality of mental model, IMHO. A mental model is essentially a map, and there are many types of maps.

More on this: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=316
The original post is here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/R-web-apps-77616.S.91223876
Does anyone know if this is Open Source?
The Welcome Email can be a formidable tool (for your startup)
Yes, that's exactly the kind of service I'd like to see. A small number of days to access the data is fine.
>You disclose what you have done, and in return, for X number of years, anyone who wants to use the method you have published pays you a fee.

Neither am I going to wait X years to use an idea, nor am I going to pay a fee. I want it right here and right now, and nobody should have a right to stop me. I want to build on it, so others in turn can use my discoveries to build even further.

>The alternative to patents is trade secrets.

No, the alternative is that people would realize already that is in no one's prolonged interested to keep discoveries secret, and that collaborative efforts using each others' ideas would lead to exponential growth of technology.

Patents are a detriment to humanity as a whole and its future technological progress, and we need to get rid of them as soon as possible, along with copyright, and erase the whole delusion of "intellectual property" from all books of law. It probably was the worst mistake in the history of mankind.
I'm guessing this shares code with Chromium, so will it be open source too?

EDIT: Looks potential: http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/deeper-look-at-chrome-for-a...

"With hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, strong HTML5 video support, and new capabilities such as Indexed DB, WebWorkers and Web Sockets, Chrome for Android is a solid platform for developing web content on mobile devices."
Meetup is a great pioneer in the space, but there is still a lot of room for innovation.
What am I to do with games that I purchase, but no longer enjoy?

Well, I now have _another_ reason to stick with my NES.
Ask HN: Got a steady flow of Subscribers. Now how do I keep the ball rolling? 
Hello, I recently prelaunched http://eFolio.me two days ago and after being featured on betali.st we now have a good influx of subscribers.

Now I know an inevitable slow down subscribers will happen if I don't act quickly. What are some things I can do to gain more exposure?

I've already started submitting our start-up to other sites and other measures. It'd be great to get some tips from seasoned hackers.
but something is clearly wrong when commerical interests start to be "enforced" by counter-terrorism forces.

I guess that was always the case. Where commercial interests = control of oil resources.
I'm rather confused that Google seems to be aiming to fragment the browser market for its own platform. I already wasn't looking forward to supporting/testing both Browser and Firefox on Android... Is Google just this disorganized internally?
You might be classifiable as a money transmitter in which case you would possibly be regulated in your state as such.
Damn, that's a lot of GETs if you're just doing backup. What's up with that?
I believe Exceptional was acquired by Jon Siegel, and then Exceptional, under its new ownership, acquired Airbrake. I haven't seen anything that indicates which brand will take precedence or if both will continue running.
I've been hearing that the browser in Android is kinda bad from a lot of web/js developers. I hope that this makes the situation more palatable. Even better is when they'll ship a version for Windows Phone and ios.
On the interface part, this one works quite well.

http://webdemo.visionobjects.com/equation.html
Does IT have too many ‘Chiefs’
Dwolla raises $5M to continue its work on “really freaky stuff”
> where we send armies after white collar criminals

They sent a POLICE unit after an armed suspect (put such pictures on the web) surrounded by (potentially) armed bodyguards - sounds reasonable to me.
Just bring an empty bottle and refill it at a tap behind security.
Yes. The casual misogyny women on the Internet is arguably one of the most underreported, widespread, systemic problems on the Internet. The grandparent here suggests that the Internet mob doesn't march solely on women. Uh, who said they do?

There is a drastic difference in the tenor of attacks on men and women when this happens, however. There's something substantially more ugly in the character of the mob's reaction, but fortunately we have a word for it: misogyny.

Actually, it's a fairly regular occurrence on the Internet even when it's not provoked by these controversies. I don't have one good source for information about this stuff, but here's something that looks fairly comprehensive, in that it collects the experiences from a variety of female bloggers: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/helen-lewis-hasteley/2011/....
According to MG Siegler, Chrome is in the bizdev-required proprietary 'with Google' part of Android, not the Open Source part.
http://parislemon.com/post/17215781807/chrome-for-android-th...
That means we're stuck with legacy browsers in existing Androids and in the non-Google-blessed world (Amazon Fire and the billion Chinese phones and tablets).
File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era
A report released today looks at file sharing in the post MegaUpload era. The main finding — file sharing did not go away. Did not even decrease much in North America. Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links.
She writes that a) some Apple fanboys (i.e. not "some bloggers") went on a nasty, unsupported rampage and b) that this kind of activity damages Apple's reputation (arguably true). Whether or not it's "Apple's problem" is up to Apple to decide.
Understanding Atomic Operations « 0xjfdube