skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just released an android app to the market last week which I believe will be extremely helpful to those trying to deal with the high gas prices. There have been quite a few studies about how the average driver can save on gas. A study by Edmunds summarizes the results best in an easy-to-read article. Basically, by altering your driving habits to reduce breaking, hard accelerating and speeding, you can see some serious fuel use improvements (one study saw 45% improvement, although Edmunds finds 35%). This is like Weight Watchers for your car, turning that 25 MPG beast to 34 MPG dieter.

The application, known as Open Road: Fuel Economy Assistant will track those behaviors for you so that you can actually measure your results. All you need to do is select your car from the database (or build you custom car) and press Start before you leave on your trip. As you drive, you will see live and trip averaged fuel economy. There is also a display for how much that individual trip cost you.

Check it out and give me some feedback!

PS. The iOS version will be released in a week or so. Like the facebook page to get news about its release.
I am definetly finding things that otherwise i would miss. i am just facinated by how much "Fan art" is out there. fans are spending time and showing off their creativity through Fan art which is such a pleasure to see.

I am part of the Fancite team. I would love to hear any feedback you guys have on the design/product etc.
Wow, the vehicle theft rate is almost 5 times higher in SF than NY:

http://newyork.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=san+fran...

Of course this was burglary or theft, not vehicle theft. But I wonder what makes for such an extreme difference.
Selenium Conf '12 Speakers
some of these “antipatterns” are just stupidities. and a little number of “good practices” in this list actually have a lot of downsides, rendering them antipatterns.

and the sidebar is really annoying.
"Big News:" is in the title of the linked article.
This pricing model sounds to me like "the user is always punished."

You bought XGB this month. You didn't use it all? Ooops, you overpaid. Punished.

You used more? Ooops, you pay a higher rate for the overage. Punished.

How about we treat this like any other commodity and I get exactly what I pay for?
Why do programmers prefer Python over Ruby?
I'm a Ruby programmer. Recently there was a poll about everyone's favorite programming language and Python came out ahead over Ruby. To me, Python seems to lack some of the niceties that Ruby has like blocks and it also seems to have some superfluous stuff like having to pass self into each method. I'm not trying to ignite a flamewar but rather I am genuinely interested in why a programmer might prefer Python. Thanks.
Well, the biggest limitation is that it has granularity of 0 to 256 for message data.

That means if you want an analog like continuous change from 0 to max for some audio property, you get stepping instead.

It's also not very fast for todays work with tons of channels.

I doesn't know about audio at all, etc.

OSC is a better replacement, but not widespread enough.
There is but you can't do anything useful with it like login or submit reviews.
Like IPv4, Bitcoin was a research project that got out of control. Mistakes were made.
Bypass the craptastic new Blogger template:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
Sure, I guess we aren't in a post-PC era. Yet.

I don't even own a tablet of any kind, but the reasons the author gives for dismissing them are extremely short-sighted.

The reason people still use PCs for email, office applications, and graphics applications has absolutely nothing to do with how suited tablets are to those domains, and everything to do with market inertia. It takes time to convert to a new system of doing anything. As more and more people move to tablets, you can expect all of the author's points to change overnight.

There are plenty of office applications for iOS and Android. Off the top of my head, I know that much of the iWork suite and Google Docs both have native apps for their respective OSes, and I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to find Microsoft Office on WP7. As people start to use these more at home, they'll slowly start to creep into offices as well. I don't know if Photoshop (or anything like it) exists on a mobile OS, but the Photoshop interface seems like it would translate almost perfectly to a touchscreen. Again, as more people start to use it, more offices will start to use it.

Games like World of Warcraft and Skyrim are targeted towards the PCs because that's where the hardcore gamers are. But games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope are on tablets because that's where everyone else is. But as hardcore gamers move to tablets, game studios will start building their games for mobile OSes. John Carmack has already moved Id in this direction, releasing their latest game on iOS, and it's only a matter of time before others follow suit.

Ergonomics are almost a non-issue. Almost every tablet owner I've ever seen has a stand of some sort or another, and many who do serious work also have a keyboard.

Which brings us to his last point that a tablet with a keyboard is "basically a desktop". This is about as useful as saying that a mobile phone with a bluetooth headset is just a phone. That hasn't stopped bluetooth headsets or mobile phones from selling like crazy, and the same can be said for tablets and keyboards.

I doubt the computer is going to leave wholesale, but I think it's crazy to believe that tablets won't start taking huge chunks out of their market share within just a few short years.
Post PC = Post Industrial. PCs, just like heavy industries, aren't going anywhere, but tablets, smartphones and (finally, yes!) wearable glasses, just like the service industry, are going to be the next thing to grow exponentially...
Are average developers really getting paid 150K in the valley these days? (figure mentioned in the article)
Youtube is a popular site to view unreliable, low-quality streaming versions of unlawfully shared videos. Nobody thinks Youtube is a substitute for (say) a Hulu+ or Amazon Prime subscription.

Maybe not, but for many people it is a replacement for MP3 downloading services like iTunes. Sure, it doesn't offer all the same features (neither did MU), but it offers enough.

People also shared legitimate content on Napster. Once in a blue moon, someone will use BitTorrent to transfer a Linux kernel. But we all know why those services were or are popular.

In my (anecdotal, yes) experience of watching people use it, that's exactly why Youtube is popular too. User created content is an exception.
I'm a little wary. Forrst caters to both designers and developers, so hopefully this acquisition doesn't effect the core product. Feedback is very easy to get on Forrst right now, which is one of it's biggest draws for me personally.

An aside: this article is terribly written.
If you'd read the article you discover that sudo's capabilities are far more limited than RBAC's.

For example, RBAC can prevent a process from performing any network operations. Read the blog entry for more information.
Building a GSM network with Open Source
where is the fun in that? :D

This was basically a fun app to hack on for the weekend, throwing it out there.
It's very interesting to see hard data that confirms a general feeling I get when comparing walking down the streets of SF and of NY.

That feeling is one of the few things that makes me still prefer New York to San Francisco... I hope that gets fixed soon!
Yelp has a Windows phone app. Even if it didn't, you can do that from a web browser too.
Exactly. The function is perhaps the most powerful and useful abstraction in all of computer science.

I always found it absurd that some languages force you to write "Math.cos(...)".
Off topic, but what about that site makes scrolling with arrow keys so slow? It's really slow in Safari, and quicker but still laggy in Chrome.
Congrats to Kyle, being acquired is no easy feat.

Now for some speculation:

My guess is that Forrst wasn't growing as much as it used to or stopped growing all-together and people started getting nervous. (I noticed fewer activity by its users).

Looking at the alexa numbers, its popularity peaked in the middle of 2011. Pageviews took a huge dive since then, which is extremely alarming. Obviously Alexa isn't 100% accurate, but it gives a decent estimation on where the site is trending.
Link to the extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jbnnmgaglnnbbdfall...
Hmm, I wonder how much does it cost for cars to have security camera with batteries and wireless capability to upload video. That's probably a costly and ineffective solution considering the scale of it.

It's better to have parking lot cameras anyway?

Or how about a vibration sensor that trigger a picture capture? Smart thieves would probably get around it but it probably will capture some of the dumb ones, providing deterrence.
Tracking a small surface area is indeed easier but this is actually a larger area (the funnel effect will undo quite a bit of the effect of the reduced cross section), and it will nicely capture the wind because of its shape. On top of that you'll have to deal with force in more than one direction compared to panels mounted flush with a roof.

Mounting solar panels using aluminum stand-offs is very easy and tried-and-true tech, setting up a tower like this up on your roof is not going to be nearly as easy as you think because there will be a lot of force trying to pull the whole assembly off the roof whereas conventional installations have to deal mostly with compressive forces (which is a whole lot easier).

And that's with the wind directly on the panels. The arm of force from such an assembly will be proportional to the height of the total stack and will be quite impressive. You'll need - at a minimum - braces and guys behind the stack if you don't want it to take off in the first storm.

Those sixty penetrations have a nice side effect of spreading the load evenly over the roof so that you don't need to design a structure behind it to deal with the force of the whole array.
This article is not "on the Oracle website" it is on the Oracle *employee blog website". This is an engineer at Oracle expressing his personal opinion about technology.

Note the disclaimer at the bottom:

The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.
I wrote a light hearted post questioning the nature of the naming. I wasn't trying to be juvenile, just to highlight the sad state of product names.
We have to name javascript functions twice?

We should be using eval to get the global object?

If you are going to go through that hassle to get the global object why not do the same for everything else you will ever use? Every single external variable could have it's own privately named identifier. Won't that be fun.
I supposed that depends on what you mean by "knew to be infringers." I don't think having received a (or several, or...what is the number?) DMCA takedown concerning one's account earns someone the label, but in this context it appears to be what you're saying.
jschema and jschema-rpc both look much nicer:

http://jschema.org/

http://jschema.org/rpc.html
Got your experimental programming language:

> Vitess - a new project released by YouTube, written in Go, it’s a frontend to MySQL. It does a lot of optimization on the fly, it rewrites queries and acts as a proxy. Currently it serves every YouTube database request. It’s RPC based.
"if we're going to cause the (almost-)elimination of the job of newspaper editor, I'd hope we'd do it with something capable of doing at least as good a job."

That's a fair request. Though, google didn't design search or autocomplete to do that right? Are they held responsible because some people figured it was good enough to do that job? I completely understand that it is detrimental to some people. At the same time, if it is changed, doesn't that take away its core functionality, which is actually useful to everybody?

Search and autocomplete serve a specific purpose: to search the internet for topics relevant to a query, and to aid in searching for common topics, respectively. People give them more functionality then that. Is that google's fault? Would they be fair in saying, "You're using it wrong"?
The major problem with usage based billing is that I'd need to evaluate the value of every bit I'm transferring. Was that cat picture really worth X cents? What about this blog post? And do I trust this app not to make a huge bill? Oh, I can't afford to download these updates now, surely nobody will try to exploit remote code execution holes on my box. My home web server got just slashdotted (hn'd?), how much will that cost?
An iPhone is a better smartphone than my Android-based one is. I can, however, develop software for my phone without a Mac and deploy it to actual hardware without paying Apple for the privilege of deploying my software to my own phone.
Youtube started off as a dating website?

This has to go down in history as one of the best pivot decisions ever made.
While we're on the topic of scalability, what did you learn (if anything) from the Guild Wars 2 beta signup incident? For those of you who are unaware, which is probably nearly all of you, ArenaNet opened up registration for the beta of Guild Wars 2, and internally we were using Ducksboard to track the signups in realtime, but when we got close to 1 million registrations we decided to make a public Ducksboard page, which apparently took down some servers until the Ducksboard people were able to presumably scale things up.
Having tried my hand at building computing systems in Minecraft myself, I must say this is very impressive work.
all important points. Especially "Be Nice".
I like this, but it's the third time the link has been submitted.
Linux doesn't already have RBAC. RBAC can do things Linux can't like two-man authentication for system administration (e.g. two people together can open a safe with their own keys, but not just one).

https://blogs.oracle.com/gbrunett/entry/enforcing_a_two_man_rule
Surgery on Diabetics May Be Better Than Standard Treatment
I think this would be one of the few cases to list video games on a college/job application. I'll be honest that I didn't watch all 10 minutes, but it seems like he's using some complex methods, especially for a 16 year old. Props to him, one hell of a hacker!
How about doing just that, to automate entering a password in Outlook so that emails can be collected from Exchange (which would require the mail user's password to be entered if Exchange was restarted) with Outlook running in a Windows VM on a Linux box, and a custom app processing the emails and POSTing them to an API on the Linux host, where they were processed to extract structured data out of attachments?

That wasn't a fragile system AT ALL.
Ask HN: StumbleUpon wants me to remove my app from Webstore. What should I do?
There does seem to be an opportunity here. The free tools I've used for doing this all hit the web server and are either command-line based (wget, etc.) and/or ancient: "Xenu's Link Sleuth" for Windows. ( http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html )

I'd love to hear more about what other people are using, particularly if tools can find broken JavaScript/AJAX links.
A Large Collection of Useful jQuery Utils
Relevant Studies:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200225?query=fea...

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200111?query=fea...
If you have specific feedback about areas that need improvement, I'm certain the blog author would love to hear them. Ranting without justification isn't likely to solve anything.
I didn't say sudo can do everything RBAC can. I said "sudo" would allow Linus to do everything he wanted to do without giving (or even having) a root password.
My biggest fear with any of these hard straws is people chipping their incisors.

These questions need to be answered:

[]How does this stainless-steel straw impact the environment compared to a 3-5 year supply of single use straws(on average per user)

[]How is this any better than the other hard straws available?

[*]Why is stainless-steel the best material?
I would say that spam is inherently wrong (unethical), search/autocomplete isn't.
There's still a huge untapped market for apps and hardware for the elderly.

Last year I did a marketing project, and got some fairly nice insights. For example, most people between 60 and 75 in developed countries don't consider themselves "old" and are mostly self-reliant

“Seniors do not think about their age in general. Unless extremely tired or depressed, older people do not think of themselves as old. Advertising that talks to the silver citizen’s active lifestyle rather than to or about his age are preferred” (www.brandchannel.com).

People in that age range now desire several of the same products as younger people, like iPads or iPhones and Kindles.

Our specific product failed in the customer validation stage, but there's a huge untapped market out there. Heck, I've almost talked myself into trying again :)
Well, for me, it's readability and maintainability. I find Ruby unreadable, and if I want to hire a programmer, it's easier to take a Perl, PHP, or even C# developer and teach them Python than it is to teach them Ruby, at least from my experence.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Ruby as a language, and until it was added to most languages, the scaffolding held me in awe...

I just prefer Python's readability.
Paul Allen-backed Xiant Mobile brings ‘smarter’ email to Kindle Fire
Parse is hiring
Seems worth it to me. Not only are you getting a 3 letter domain name but you get to hold on to your current brand.
As a scientific programmer, I like python because I'm used to it, because there are a wealth of useful libraries and packages that suit my needs, and that it can be "fast" (if you know how to take advantage of the underlying c code and use numpy whenever possible; and the obvious fast-prototyping advantage over compiled languages). I don't have much experience with Ruby so this is by no means a diss of the language. Its just why I have stuck with it for so long
I've done some programming in Python and am currently learning Ruby.

One of the differences I see is Python's philosophy of having one, correct way to do things, while Ruby supports having multiple ways. This difference in philosophy seems to be clear in the language design. Python usually has one or two accepted ways to do basic tasks, while Ruby has more.

It's a little frustrating because in Ruby, I have to remember different syntax and constructs for doing the same basic thing. I'd much rather just have to remember one way, and expect other people's code to use that one way (ie, Python is more readable).

Python also seems to have a larger community and more well-developed/useful libraries and tools. I don't think NumPy and SciPy have equivalents in Ruby.

Also, even though Ruby says it advocates the principle of least surprise, I'm often surprised by Ruby, and much less so by Python.
You could just not pay the disputed bill until the matter has been resolved and switch providers in the interim.
Could Minecraft be that little thing that teaches kids about logic? Maybe Jeb and co. should consider adding even simpler logic based building blocks, more akin to Lego's Mindstorm as an alternative to relays and switches.

I find it fascinating to think in 10-20 years many will be looking back fondly on how they learned to hack with an unassuming little game: Minecraft.
Good point! Python is very nice to read
The comparison to condoms may be a little juvenile, but it is an effective way of making a valid point: many product names seem to be picked randomly with little thought these days. The practice is confusing and dilutes brands to meaningless words. What's a Motorola Droid Razr Maxx? Why does it have both the Droid and Razr brands, with Maxx tacked on at the end for good measure? How is it different than a Motorola Droid, a Motorola Razr, or the Motorola Droid Razr?
"Microsoft trained consultant" the first question I would ask is for him to explain Windows 8 and the metro interface? It seems that even Microsoft sees where things are headed and is making changes to stay relevant post "PC". Let's be clear, no one thinks that PCs (desktops, laptops) are going to die overnight however the market will not see the growth it had in the past. For the time being there will be a place for traditional desktops and laptops however the need for them in the average users home is quickly fading.

Posted from my iPad.
The problem with hacker news isn't the comments, it's the submissions.
I honestly love seeing stuff like this -- it's really cool.

But part of me always wonders, "I wonder what this kid could've built if he had a more meaningful project in mind?"

I understand that you need to have a certain amount of "fun" before you can do "serious" things, but I can't help but feel a little disappointed that he didn't "dream bigger."

It's not really a criticism. This kid is probably really smart, but I wish it was easy to create environments for such people to really flourish to their full potential.
You must not have read the article. The challenge was to pull up the weather in 2 different cities (later, the manager said 2 cities in different states)

The reps phone just "happened" to have LiveTiles setup so that the weather in 2 cities was the first thing on the home screen.

They knew the challenge, and setup their phone do win it as fast as possible. The "Specially customized their phones" comment is that they rigged the phone to be near-unbeatable ahead of time, since they made the challenge.
Infographic - Video surveillance in numbers / by "aspice" startup
Smoked by Windows Phone? Is anyone else reminded of the funeral procession Microsoft held for iPhone a few years ago?

http://www.intomobile.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-windows-phone...
Increase your Website earnings with Infolinks Tag Cloud and Related Tag
Given that websockets don't even work reliably yet, and are not even implemented in all popular browsers of the day, that's hardly a proposition. Not to mention that everybody implementing his own HTTP replacement from scratch with websockets instead of a common standard is a highway to hell.

As for what's wrong with it:

- better support for non-blocking requests
- better support for streaming media
- better support for caching
- better content negotiation (e.g for "retina" x2 assets)
- better authentication mechanisms
- better support for encryption

Also check:
http://static.usenix.org/event/usenix99/invited_talks/mogul....
Last time I looked at parse I think it used basic http auth over https to authenticate clients.

Having seen how easy it is to look at the plain traffic a mobile app sends with http://mitmproxy.org/ I would have concerns to use this.

Or is there some per user authentication?
I wonder how much speedup they could get from PyPy
The iPhone before the iPhone: Lessons from InfoGear's failed Internet phone
Europe lost the mobile race
I like the name at least.
Ah yes, but it's using a ~30 year old technology (RPC).
But yet we price water and gasoline per gallon, natural gas per cubic foot, and electricity per kilowatt hour.

* in the US, others feel free to convert to your local units.
Interestingly, New York saw its car theft rate declare years after years since the 90s. San Francisco's theft rate also declined, but it does so rather unevenly.

Wonder what's the story there?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=car+theft+statistic+san...
I honestly don't understand why they simply don't use out of sync data. You could have nodes periodically send aggregates of likes & views, and then add those in to the total ever N heartbeats. Why bother fudging the in-between.
This is very very impressive, though I hope the kid's next project is some creative and useful applications rather than another Minecraft undertaking.
With today's prices, you can rack up huge bills with legitimate usage; disputing such a bill is basically stealing. Pre-paid would prevent such problems.
Leaky (YC S11) Relaunches with Real-Time Price Updates