skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use a chroot on my Touchpad to run Ubuntu with LXDE. It's... workable, but no where near "desktop" quality. The lack of a mouse kills it, and LXDE isn't really touch optimized. It's really nice to have around when there are apps you need to use that are run better (or easier) from a GUI, and the dual core 1.5Ghz processor with 1GB of RAM is sufficient to keep it running without hiccup (until I load Eclipse).

With some low-end (or ARM) optimization, Ubuntu would rock the mobile productivity world.
LFE is a Lisp 2. It has ':' which is the equivalent of funcall.
So instead of my company phone and company locked down desktop PC, I get one device which I can then plug into any dock in the building. IT Support only have to worry about one device instead of two.
The whole point of the announcement is that it isn't 2 OS's: Android and Ubuntu are running on the same kernel.
The difference between something merely existing and something remarkable existing. If you find that someone has already done your idea, and they've executed well, consider abandoning your idea. If they haven't solved the problem well enough then it doesn't matter that they exist.

One of the greatest sources of motivation in solving a problem is the anticipation to use the solution. If a good solution already exists then you're not going to have that.

Think of the Zune team. Those guys were trying to solve a problem that the iPod had already solved so well. Where's the excitement? They had to make up artificial problems for the Zune to solve (WiFi song sharing) just to get excited about it. The problem is that the market doesn't care about artificial problems.
نتيجة الانتخابات الرئاسية باليمن 2012
If I didn't want to do cloud sync, I'd be more excited about a local sync. One doesn't tend to generate gigabytes of data on a phone so even a Bluetooth sync would be sufficient for most people.
Why Startups Need to Blog (and what to talk about)
The gesture is not enabled there anyway, it's just for the ipad.
It depends on what you mean by not as well developed. If by that you mean maturity. Probably, its much newer and has just had its very first early alpha release.
Direct link to Canonical's announcement: http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3617238
Perhaps you should start off your pitch with "Why no one actually uses X."

Yes and no. I'd maybe try to rephrase that to something along the lines of "I've looked through their site and I haven't seen any evidence of them attracting users". Dismissing a rival with "meh, no-one uses it!" makes it sound like you haven't really considered the competition.
An example could be taken from Mint.com, which started a blog before having a product and that blog became a reference in personal finance and a traction for the service they launched later on.
I will do that (its a great idea by the way)

Yes it does have scheme like names.
No you do not have to sharpquote. Its a lisp 1 not a lisp 2
that doesn't seem ideal if the phonecall is about what you're doing on the desktop.
Its not really a refactoring of the Ki framework. It is a completely different underlaying architecture (much simpler). That allows for better async handling and a smaller footprint.
Weekend Project: Craigslist & Foursquare Mashup
> Well, I haven't used iOS since version 3, but I see screenshots with notifications for weather, stocks

Weathers and stocks are "widgets" (except only those 2 are available and they can only be displayed in the notification center).

Aside from that, I'm not sure how it works on Android but on iOS an application must explicitly register for notifications the first time it's opened and this launches a dialog asking the user what kind of notification it allows.

So it's quite easy to tell applications to buzz off and not notify anything.
This is actually a good answer, in that it suggests that norms might be important in answering the question. However, this [1] paper by some of the authorities on P3P suggests that the answer might be less clear than you are suggesting.

Specifically, these are the headline stats:

1. 34% of websites have errors in their P3P compact header in that they contain invalid, missing, or conflicting tokens.

2. 79% of websites with P3P compact headers are missing full policy files, which is required to be compliant.

3. Among the top 100 websites, only 48 have P3P compact policies, and of those, 41 have no full policy file, and 21 have errors making the header invalid.

4. 97% of invalid compact policies bypass Internet Explorer's default filters.

5. Vast numbers (thousands) of the valid compact policies are duplicates. In fact, a little under 5000 of the approximately 20,000 compact policies that are valid are the same policy (NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM) which coincidentally is listed all over the web as a bug fix for IE's cookie handling.

Reading between the lines, the norm here seems to be to either (a) not include P3P (52% of top websites) or (b) include it as a bug fix in an invalid, non-compliant way (21--41% of top websites). Is an invalid P3P header likely to be legally binding if the overwhelming majority of websites of all sizes implement it incorrectly, both intentionally and unintentionally? Is it worth the time, expense, and potential legal risk for a small startup to try to use it correctly?

[1] http://repository.cmu.edu/cylab/73/
Data Killed the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) Star
"... I wish all technical books did this. ..."

Why limit this to technical articles? Why not any written document? The key point, non-tech editors and writers are not going to use the clumsy tools github provides. They might use an editor that hides the mechanics of github.
It actually took more time to write it plain-text than it would have to unpack a bitstring into a struct. With or without optimization it cost you more human resources (in terms of time and money) to do it their way. As you add more hardware (in cluster nodes), your CPU time on each proxy node needed to perform this operation every second will increase.

My original point was not to encourage over-optimization, but to design better. But deploy whatever you want, I don't care.
To me, that seems like a lot of trouble to share a relatively trivial amount of hardware. Hardware which is optimised for different, fairly specific circumstances, incidently.
"Desktop PCs will always outperform portable devices"

That doesn't mean portable devices won't replace them. Laptops began to replace desktops a few years ago, the same way PCs replaced mainframes.
Ask HN: Women hackers moving to (or living in) the Valley 
Are you an awesome female hacker looking to move out to the Valley in June or are already living in the area? Are you looking to live with really smart, like-minded chicks? I'd like to either start a female hacker apartment among ourselves, or add to one. Is anyone else interested?

As for myself, if you're curious, I'm a Python/Haskell/C strawberry blonde hacker who knows a lot about linguistics as well :) I'm coming out the area in the middle of June to start work and want to join / create an inspired, supportive female living space.
BrailleTouch: Mobile Texting for the Visually Impaired
If you think your data "in the cloud" (which is just a way of saying "on other people's physical systems") is safe from theft, breakage or some foreign government agency pulling the plug, you haven't been paying much attention to reality lately.

And by "lately" I mean the past decade.

Don't get me wrong, I like the convenience of "the cloud". It's especially helpful in synchronizing all the data that I have on cheap and abundant storage on various devices.

We can have both. Why advocate giving up the one option that makes you independent from third party interference (or simply a lack of connectivity)?
Finally an OS company has seen and grasped this big business opportunity. This could mean a big boom in Ubuntu users. A win for linux.
That's what I'm hoping, because the tablet space seems begging for competition. It's clearly the future of much of main-stream computer use. I don't even care if it gets all that much adoption. As long as the market isn't locked in by one vendor focused on native apps, it makes a strong argument for focusing on the HTML/JS open web experience a top priority.

On the flip side of the native app argument, he fact that native WebOS apps are HTML/JS also makes it a much more attractive target than it would be if it required learning another language. Even a modest percentage of that market would make that effort worthwhile for a web-based product.
The key word is want.

Those wealthy enough to be in real estate in my country have in many cases made more money sitting on their arses for a couple of years than I expect to make in my whole lifetime. You can literally sit on a piece of unwanted real estate if you have sufficient capital and wait to see if it accrues added "value". Sure you may have to pay some legal fees occasionally but all you really need do is be wealthy in the first place. You're buying a scarce resource that, provided you can take a long view and aren't forced to sell at a particular time, will almost certainly not decrease in value.

Now, domaining is the same. But here the scarcity is dubious as the registries can alter that whenever they want to print some more money for themselves. Buy-in is a lot less costly but predicting the upside appears to be concomitantly more difficult.

Most people domaining don't have sufficient capital to do it right or are to late to the market. But I don't see how this changes the underlying similarity. The same is true in real estate.
Play Framework 2 with Scala, Anorm, JSON, CoffeeScript, jQuery & Heroku
"Built for speed, Hurricane can send and receive as many as the network can handle. Hurricane is so fast that it can do an entire process-to-process round-trip in 60 microseconds." -WOW! Quite impressive.
Why Do Alumni Donate to Their Alma Mater?
Agreed. I love the idea of implementing it in browser. So simple and elegant, and obvious in hindsight. Why didn't I think of it!?
Distant 'waterworld' is confirmed
Or in other words, a thicker client.
Comcast launching Xfinity Streampix to compete with Netflix
Dear Jim Gaffigan, Louis CK paid $35k for his website. We'll do yours for $0.
> I don't know anyone now who hasn't bailed on then and gone with mint, Debian or centos.

Are these people paying customers, purchasers of support? Canonical has to become profitable soonish in order to secure long term future. Future looks like mobile/embedded devices with some corporate desktop use/ Linux Thin Client stuff.
Android's back button is its single best feature. Without it, I might not still be using Android. What it should do: go back to the screen you were previously on. Android apps are generally full-screen apps; there's little mystery there (IMO).

Unfortunately, Google is mandating that it acquire "up button" semantics rather than back button semantics - for many apps, it's supposed to go to the "top" level before it exits out. That I'm not a fan of, and I'm afraid it's going to encourage its "mystery meat" nature, because it'll no longer act like a browser back button.
Double-Click app switching helps with this problem.
> What benefits do we stand to gain from still having things run or be stored on a local machine?

Security.
> I log in to my cloud desktop using whatever dumb machine is available, and off I go.

Unfortunately there is no way to verify that that machine is actually "dumb". Fundamentally this is because modern computation and storage are microscopic phenomena. Even today we take it as an act of faith that our freshly produced electronics only do what the manufacturers say - and this is an ongoing problem for US defense contractors that outsource component manufacture to China.

This problem is also experienced by travelers who expect a "dumb browser" at the internet cafe, when in fact they are being key logged.

> What benefits do we stand to gain from still having things run or be stored on a local machine?

There are a few, such as statefulness that is maintained even without network connectivity. But the big one is that, presumably, "your" device is more trustworthy than a dumb terminal because, at the very least, you haven't acted to subvert your own security (although even this is often not the case).
The fate of all those strange and magical personalities hangs in limbo whether you stop reading close to the end or at the actual end. The last scene reveals one piece of the puzzle but it doesn't really conclude the story.
That sounds so much like American corpspeak that if I didn't know better I'd accuse these guys of being what you guys call "yank-offs".

Granted, you'd still be branded a corporate douche for actually talking like that straight-facedly here in the US; but "actionable" is live jargon and actually used by even savvy manager-types.
Most people associate Facebook with hanging out with friends and general screwing around, and while there are is a certain amount of that, it happens distinctly in the context of doing work (used loosely), which is the main use case.

Yes, but for geeks, and especially geeks using GitHub, programming work is the equivalent of Facebook "fun".
Soooo, the solution to stagnating email... is to make it look like Facebook.

Not what I'd call "fair dinkum", but...
Just be careful with thermal output. If you make your phone work this hard, you'll get your leg burned.
That's right: once a certain threshhold of compute performance is reached, the excess is only useful for specialists and gamers.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/canonical-endin...

Looks like consolidation around mobile/embedded/consumer devices to me.
Compression tames Big Data on Hadoop
Too Much Noise. Need Signal
Worf (Star Trek TNG) Would Have Made A Great Entrepreneur
iOS "back" button is generally an "up" button, not a "back" button. For that reason, it's not nearly as useful as Android's.
Mattias Duarte, who was the lead UX designer on WebOS, is now head of UX development for Android. ICS has lifted a lot of ideas from WebOS as a result.

That said, WebOS multitasking is still much better than even ICS. The thumbnail menu in ICS is an improvement over the old Android task switcher, but it doesn't even come close to the fluidity of swiping up to bring up the card view and then flicking between running apps (which aren't thumbnails; they update in realtime as you're looking at them).

>App intercommunication (intents). Shared account info.

These are definitely areas where Android is still ahead. The account integration in WebOS is okay, but works far better in Android. And intent are the killer feature of Android, IMO.
>nobody can afford to buy thousands of storefronts //

For sure. But plenty of people (hidden behind corporations) have bought up 10s of store-fronts.

If domain names cost $500 per year to keep from the registry then this would find an equivalence in a piece of real-estate being taxed at around 40x the annual rent per year.
I'd be interested to know what the YouTube ToS says about this. It's likely that they can take away your ad revenue for no reason at all. Instead of complaining that someone stole your ad revenue, you should be thanking the all mighty Google every time they are gracious enough to give you a single cent of their ad revenue.
Apple Extends Deadline for Sandboxing of Mac App Store Apps to June 1
We're turning off Clickpass March 15. How to keep your HN account.
We're going to stop supporting Clickpass on March 15. If you use
Clickpass to log in to Hacker News, please

(1) put your email address
in your profile (no one can see it except you and us), then

(2)
change your password by going to http://news.ycombinator.com/changepw.
GLNF : passe d'armes Seiler-Servel sur le "faux nez de Foellner"
Does anyone know who coined the "inside of every X there is a Y trying to come out"?
In Hiring Programmers, Style Trumps Language
I saw David Rubenstien, the founder of the Carlyle group speak about founding that company. He said he read the average age of successful entrepreneurs is 29 to 37ish. At 37ish he thought to himself I better get it done now.

He founded the Carlyle group, one of the most prestigious private equity firms out there. He made it sound like it was his previous experience which helped him succeed.

At 29 I feel very young and have learned that I still have a ridiculous amount to learn. It doesn't hurt having a little self control, getting some experience then going for it.

For ever Facebook there are tons of companies that never went anywhere.
I call linkbait on the title.
The Bro’s Guide To Pinterest
New breed of steamy alien planet found
> As one of our first customers

I'm sure there is the altruistic bent in all of us, willing to help out our fellow man and whatnot, but Jim Gaffigan isn't poor by any stretch and you need customers who pay. Giving away your work for free helps no one. A customer is a customer and a customer pays.
It takes 8 years to get where I am.

130,000 LOC

Mine is exclusively x86, absolutely set on x86--I said "I will do just x86 and be simpler than Linux." I did a compiler that's half my value.

Win 8 comes out next year -- end of road.

The window was from 2005(first 64bit machines) - 2013(Win8) for 64-bit x86. I had mine viable for the last 3 years, but FBI/CIA had me locked up.

VMWare is like putting a Harley in the back of a pickup and sitting on it. There is no glory in VMWare -- that's retarded.

----

http://www.losethos.com/LTHtml/Compiler/BackEnd.html
Every 1 second, this module generates a single multicast UDP packet, containing the number of busy and idle workers. The packet is a simple ASCII format, similiar to GET query parameters in HTTP.
An Example Packet

v=1&ready=75&busy=0

Consumers should handle new variables besides busy and ready, separated by '&', being added in the future.

I think that last line is why they avoid a binary format. Everyone who's consuming this packet already has a function available which can parse url query parameters with arbitrary name/value pairs, and that's the format being used here. I'm also not sure that the user needs to turn this into a binary format before using it; a string comparison against "75" and "0" is just as capable and nearly as fast as a numeric comparison, especially if you're using a scripting language for your heartbeat monitor rather than C.
Which Animated Photo App Will Be the Next Instagram?
Anti-Pattern ‘Validation by Execute ‘n’ Rollback’
Thank you.

There are couple of analytical services out there, as SaaS, that can connect to various third-party sites, databases or other data sources. However, what is missing is some nice, reusable, simple UI set of elements for pivoting and drilling down. The idea is that apps can use Cubes as module for providing aggregation and drill-down capability. Then you have a front-end module, either within the app or any external, that can connect to the Cubes OLAP API and you can do reporting as you like.

I'm not too much front-end guy, so any help would be appreciated. As mentioned in one of my other comments here, I've started https://github.com/Stiivi/cubes.js . Just proof-of-concept.
They have a small IT department that has developed some pretty interesting tools, most of which are open-source. They had a very progressive CIO who had APIs created to access legislative data, etc.

Really useful stuff if you need to know what the legislature is up to.

http://www.nysenate.gov/open
How your business could get sued for using Pinterest
While we're on this topic, can you add a note to the profile page that says that email isn't publicly visible? This seems to be a common source of confusion.
Are there any plans for BrowserID auth, perhaps?
So this isn't something I can actually buy if I understand this correctly, right?
A handy tool for sharing resources in a team
What I'm trying to get at is that doctors need some sort of tools to help explain the situation to their patients and their patient's families. It doesn't have to be my suggestion, but some way of making the twin points that: a) prolonging life at any cost is not compassionate to the patient, and b) prolonging life at any cost is not compassionate to people who actually can be healed to go live a happy remainder of their life.
I can see this working really well for younger users, non-power-users, and non-techies who want to carry around their desktop environment and whose needs are met by web apps like Google Docs.

I can also see its potential in developing countries where many people have a phone and a TV but not a PC.

The medium-term goal is sort of obvious: Ubuntu running on the phone with the ability to display Unity on its own tiny screen or on larger external displays and allowing the user to interact with it via touch or via external input devices like keyboards, mice, etc.
Thank you.

How long? I was working for around 5 years in (later with) a data warehouse in a mobile telco company, now I am doing "data brewing" as a freelancer. My favourite book is Star Schema The Complete Reference by Christopher Adamson. Very very brief introduction to OLAP and Cubes you can see in my slide deck: http://www.slideshare.net/Stiivi/cubes-7781602

Thanks, fixed the link.
Shut up and take my money. This is what I've been dreaming of since I got my smartphone. Why should I even have a netbook for general purpose computing? I want to go anywhere with my MID (mobile internet device).
It's not sharing the device's hardware that matters, but the device's data. All your data is either on the phone (pictures, etc), or available through the phone which is always on and always authenticated to the "cloud" (Android Gmail contacts, emails, etc).

The future of computing is either that (using your cellphone as a computer), or putting 100% of your data on the cloud (so you can access it from any device). But the former has the advantage that data can be cached on the device (pictures, contacts), therefore it does not require permanent Internet access so you can work even when offline.
Phil Haack is one of the people who recently joined Github from MS developer tools division, with the aim to make the github experience better for those same devs.

He blogs, maybe you'll find more info on the subject there: http://haacked.com/archive/2011/12/07/hello-github.aspx

I wonder who the other person who joined Github from Microsoft was?
I just turned 28 and I was about to post the same thing as the parent comment. It does make you question your life choices a little bit, though I do feel much better prepared now than I would have been at 25. And I don't think I could have run a company at 20.
Why does the library itself not use OTP? You seem to have re-implemented a lot of what OTP already gives you (such as gen_server and the supervisor tree).
Ask HN: Who's hiring interns this Summer 2012?
I've had a tough time consolidating information on the most interesting startups who are hiring interns this summer. Let us know who you are and what position you're looking to fill!
There's already a bright yellow box that informs you about that, but it only shows when the e-mail field is empty.
It's not a problem. I was 30 when we started Viaweb.

Empirically the worst danger of being older may be that it's harder to recruit your friends as cofounders.
How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy
Your evidence that "no one uses X" is point number two. It is support for your first claim, which should be upfront. And the fact that you have a list of damned good reasons why no one uses X should help them get on board with your point - that is, after you've made that point, they should be thinking "Yeah, I can see why no one would use X." Then you present the evidence that no one uses X.

And if you don't have a list of damned good reasons why no one uses X, then they shouldn't give you any money.
i think there's a note there already that the email address will not be publicized.
Hmm, okay. It still seems that people are often confused by this, though.