skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
XKCD: "umwelt" in a window 3,000 px wide (Lion + Chrome)
The tweet appears to be real:

https://twitter.com/#!/tfadp/status/185901238477537281
that low-ish revenue you report is also there in the iphone platform as the overall aggregate iphone app sales masks that data point.

Now can we have a honest conversation instead of using the non-meaningful fragmentation word designed to start a non-conversation..

Its the same problem with code quality..code quality dramatically impacts sellability on both platforms..however we have a diss-connect as on android people want to blame Google Play market rather than the problem and on iphone peopel want to claim its something else because Apple never gets anything wrong..

ITS THE SAME EFFING problem FOLKS ON Both platforms!

Can we please remove our heads from our asses!?
The Data Protection Act gives the security services opt-outs on the basis of national security. This is to prevent you, for example, requesting all files that MI5 might have on you.
Please explain how the humor of spooning with one's coworkers represents "discrimination or marginalization in your life".
The "http response code" is amazing!!
Sounds like the CEO of omgpop is going to fit right in at Zynga.
AdBlock is introducing CatBlock
How can something that raises the costs of development be regarded as a feature?

It might not be a fatal problem, but it does raise the barrier to entry, and it does reduce profitability for apps that are more marginal.
UK to announce real-time phone, email, Web traffic monitoring
Thanks, I'd completely forgotten about Armed Bear as an option. Would you recommend it in preference to something like SBCL for deployment to Heroku or DotCloud?
Square-like payment devices in Asia
Canadians may be affected by U.S. credit card hack
If it was "effectively public", there wouldn't be any issue with people being compelled to show their pages to their employers.
let's say I find a flight for $400.
Would you pay without seeing details?

Sure. I mean, I would have to trust your system, but you're not emitting any scammy signals, so I basically do.

we are targeting people who we can help
the most. That is, people flying to remote
places, or on complex itineraries, or who
just want to absolve themselves of the stress.

Fair enough!
It is app-dependent too.
Node.js experiment: MMO Asteroids
Outing an in-browser lisp OS on April 1st is what I call timing.
The truth of the matter is all of us are far more risk from the people we know than the people we don't.

If you don't like this app and don't like the people behind it, stop making sure that every person who might be interested in it hears about it so they can add it to their phone. I wonder how much bank the devs are making from all this free press.

Maybe there are muggers and robbers and stalkers looking for me on this app, I'm not going to think about it for more than a half second. You should really fear getting cancer, or getting in a car accident, or even getting the flu, not being accosted by random people from the internet. Random people from the internet is not a statistically significant source of crime or harm to people, and this app isn't going to do anything to change that.
Its a EU thing that is pushed from the commission to the individual countries. Germany implemented this a while ago but it was ruled unconstitutional by our constitutional court, so the law was repealed and all collected data was deleted (at least thats what they say). Now the government is facing fines from the EU for not implementing the law.

Its awful that an institution of questionable democratic legitimation (EU commission) is forcing a democratic government to implement laws, that are against their constitution. The worst thing is, that the big political parties dont see anything wrong in this.
There has to be more to the story...
A friend is a network engineer who has worked on some big UK ISP projects and he says that all had a requirement to mirror traffic and make it available to an external undocumented point/body. It's just understood that it's the security services.
You have to type something before it pops up. Try to type some text in both the title and text fields.
You just described LJ's model. It didn't work well (outside of Russia).
NSF program at Stanford aims to tap into Silicon Valley know-how
Predis, a flexible and feature-complete PHP client library for Redis
I think the author makes a very very important point. The entire issue needs to be viewed from the perspective that a user is not equal to his data. Every facebook user shares his/her information with varying intents and motivation. People maintain a fairly public facebook profile say for potential employers, old friends etc.

We are NOT as privacy-illiterate as we are made out to be in recent articles about Girls around me. For instance, I recently applied to YC and enlisted my Facebook profile. And, I have been posting a lot of public content with that very intention in mind for months now.

I came across another instance of this when I was trying to "teach" my sister the importance of heightened privacy. She plainly refused as she often needs to plan open events and she needs to put up a lot of her information public.

We need to understand that just as you cannot ask women not to go out for fear of stalkers, you cannot ask people not to share information publicly. In fact, we need to keep up with the shift in social media to increase law-enforcement. Girls Around Me is a clear violation of the intention with which millions share their information publicly.

I think we need to standardize and associate User Intents as a first class attribute to a user's data. And find and penalize miscreants like Girls Around Me who violate the intention associated with people's information.
Sunny Leone talks about Narendra Modi . . .?
Enter hypertask mode...

http://i.imgur.com/UTvUH.png
> Because to me there are two perpetrators in situations like these. Those who committed the crime, obviously, but also those who make apps like Girls Around Me

I have no moral problem with considering the Girls Around Me devs to be at fault, but in practice it's like getting angry with individual spammers. It's futile. Pretty soon others will leap onto the publicity created by the furore and create something functionally equivalent. It seems to me the practical approaches to improving the situation are a) Embarrass Foursquare, Facebook et al into not sharing the info, b) Educate people into being more careful what they put online or c) Work on alternative social networking infrastructure that's more respectful of people's privacy. Whether or not we get upset at the Girls Around Me people is just a distraction.
I can see how map works. It could even be done in JavaScript: map(myFunction, items);

"myFunction(item) for item in array" looks like
"call myFunction on "item", which is not yet defined... oh now it is." It's backwards.
Sour grapes; makes you wonder if they intended all along to embrace and extend Connectrode.
there is a deep tug-of-war in this. The EU position is that European Law is higher level than any law of member states, including their constitutions. States, generally, say that EU law takes its very legitimation from the souce of national law and, consequently, cannot overrule it.
Search in a speed of light. Refreshed IndexTank API by IndexDen
I understand the app's Foursquare API access has been withdrawn, so presumably it won't work anymore. On the other hand this kind of app probably looks like a pretty appealing prospect for unscrupulous app developers right now.
This is not a 'problem' I'm trying to solve. I do this because I truly believe this IS the best value I can add to the company as a whole.
>How can something that raises the costs of development be regarded as a feature?

Because it serves the needs of customers better?
If I were trying to solve this problem for Primary/Secondary education, I wouldn't teach "computational thinking", I'd teach philosophy and give students programming tasks in an art class.

Why? Philosophy gives you a feeling for syllogistic reasoning of the type that occurs both in arguments and computer programs.

Programming in the art class because what really matters with implementation is that students feel that they are making something they want to see in the world, rather than rote-learning drudgery.

Programming in Mathematics classes, also.
Sweet idea, can you add this intent tort liability to the TOS of your startup? I doubt any lawyer would ever abuse such a provision to sue you into oblivion.
I agree - I know neither of these ppl or the company - but even from that distance I could see a chip on Dan's shoulder. He may need to get that looked at.
In the context of the article, it's an end-user feature. Just as having the ability to use anything from a 10" netbook screen to a 6-monitor array is a major feature of PCs that could not be equaled if there were only one or two PC models on the market. Though surely it would be cheaper and easier to develop PC apps if there were only one or two models.

Considering I'm typing this on my phone's physical keyboard, I'm a big fan of the fact that hardware diversity allows me to find a phone that fits the way I want to work.
It seems we are now in the midst of an all out assault on the concept of intellectual property. A lot of people see no reason why their right to consume should be limited or why creators should have some control over the use of their creations in an advanced civilisation.
I ended up spending most of the day on it and it's more like 20% with that combo.

Fortunately, I found a better way that does get me to 80% or so.
The article clearly states it is a feature for consumers, not developers, a feature that is largely responsible for the success of Android as a platform, since consumers have a choice to pick what kind of device they like.
It is relatively harder to develop for Android than for iOS, but it is nowhere near being as big of an issue as some are trying to portray it. Of course if you are, for example, a one man band developer, it will be very difficult to provide high quality native experiences on two different platforms, but that's a limitation of time and experience, not of inherent impossibility of any platform.
> in practice it's like getting angry with individual spammers. It's futile.

Completely agree. In fact, I think the author makes that point later in the article too. What is worth highlighting is the fact that "Educate people about privacy" cannot work. People share things publicly with a lot of different motivations. A potential employer may be interested in where we usually travel to but so would a stalker too.

Instead of trying to discourage people from sharing such info, I think we need to standardize the associated intent with a user's data. Most of us won't be bothered by targeted ads but anyone surely will be about Girls Around Me.
Read through this twice and still don't get the point he's trying to make.

Nothing I've read about the Girls Around Me coverage treats the women in a patronizing tone. If anything the question is more along the lines of "D'you think they know this can happen? Can it happen with my info?"

Sure, you can point the finger at the app developers but there's a certain amount of personal awareness and responsibility that people need to develop. Social-sharing is moving faster than most people are able to comprehend. Anything that encourages discussion is a good and useful thing in my view
A manifesto for teaching computer science in the 21st century
>> But when I hear people proclaim the importance of educating these presumably ignorant young women about the dangers of Facebook, it is just a little too close to comfort to those seeking to educate women about the dangers of hemlines that end above the knee.

People do need to be educated about the implications of using social services on the internet. It's our responsibility as consumers and citizens to know what we are getting ourselves into.

Mind you, this doesn't just apply to women - but the safety concerns are greater than for men. No amount of moralistic hand-wringing will change the fact that a woman faces a slew of security challenges that men rarely even contemplate.
Knowing more about the backstory still wouldn't justify these tweets.
Works in every browser that supports 3d transforms, namely the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari (+ Mobile)
Microsoft is transforming XBox into a PC controlled by expressions
Ask HN: How many of you have bought Connectrode since the OMGPOP news hit?
> As of march 2012, 92% of devices are running Android 2.2 (Froyo) and higher. The

> Froyo feature set is a really good base line for most of the applications. I challenge

> you to find a new feature in higher versions that you really need to have in a general purpose app.

So, for "general purpose apps", whatever that is, Android 2.2 (which was launched 2 years ago) is
great. 2 years is ages in computer land and this is a huge issue, even though the author likes to downplay
this because the 2 year old software works "just fine". Android is very fragmented and if you
have to develop for 2 year old software still today, that's a big proof.

> Developer tools

This whole section can be skipped when developing for iOS. Big deal, there are tools to
help you develop for the chaos that is the Android flora. Just because the tools exist doesn't mean
it's easy to support all these different devices.

> Developers can provide different graphics for different screen sizes

I don't have the exact number on the range of Android screen sizes, but there's much more
work to this than the author implies. Just because you can doesn't mean it's easy.

> There is an emulator and UI builder that can emulate any Android version, screen resolution

> and pixel density combo

The ARM emulator is really really slow. Maybe it's picked up speed with Android x86 but
when I was developing for Android the emulator was almost unusable and basically everybody's
advice was to go out and buy an Android device. This will get pretty expensive pretty fast if
you need to emulate the range of Android devices.

> It doesn’t matter if you prefer a large vs a small screen, a hardware keyboard vs software

> input, a 1Ghz+ quadcore vs a 600Mhz single core, a device from an A brand vs a Chinese

> copy or maybe you just want the best available phone for you specific budget.

> There will be a device available for your needs. This is only possible due to the so called

> “fragmentation”.

IMHO, sure, some people prefer larger screen or a hardware keyboard. But the rest of this
paragraph doesn't make sense. Who'd want a single core rather than quadcore? Who'd want a
chinese knock off instead of a brand? This is both just a question of budget. So in reality,
again IMHO, I think the "featureful" difference between Android devices is much less then is purported
in this post.

Just one more thing, I'm not knocking on Android as such - variety is good and Android has some
features over iOS and iOS has features over Android. But having developed a little bit
for both platforms, Android is definitely very fragmented and harder to develop for.
The app doesn't even work and people are still talking about it? That's insane.

Yeah, you could probably make one called Gold Digger that finds eligible bachelors. Maybe narrow it down to all the guys in your area with an LLB/MBA?
As is the thousand pixel footer
Feature your startup. Get insightful feedback.
Server Monitoring With Icinga On Ubuntu 11.10
I have no problem with this if it's just GCHQ and they need a warrant to do it. The police shouldn't be able to do it, though I don't have a problem if they can request GCHQ to do it for them! They don't think they have time to go beyond terrorism.
I think you're right about the patronizing tone. Most responses to this issue are plainly trying to raise the possible security implications of such misuse of publicly available user information.

Other than that, I think the author makes a strong case for people sharing their info publicly. Yes, they need to be aware about the implications but efforts MUST also be made to find and penalize apps that clearly misuse the data and violates people's intentions with which they shared the info in the first place.
Yes, I'm in Sweden and yes we have the FRA law. But there are huge differences between this and the FRA law. The FRA explicitly forbids FRA to intercept/process traffic that is meant to stay within the borders. Both laws are an insult to democracy but my take from this is that this is much worse and they have different intents.

Why is it better to have this thing legislated? The argument that it is better to have laws like this because otherwise they will just do it anyway (illegally) just blows my mind. There are many advantages to having stuff like this unlegislated, without support from the law they can't actively act on the data, something that is far better than having the FRA-law. Especially when the intent of the law isn't to act on it but rather to observe.

In other words that argument is of the lines that "since they already have the information (which they illegally intercepted), why wouldn't we want to give them the legal right to intercept that information so that they act on it as well?". How does that make any sense?

Even with a warrant the data collected by FRA wouldn't be legal to use in a court if both parties (sender and receiver of a message/whatever) was in Sweden (regardless of whether the traffic took a detour across the border or not (too/from gmails servers for instance)).
I remember seeing mindhunter presenting this the first time. The effect was cool. But seeing him jump up and down on stage because he managed to get it working. Way cooler!
[Edit]: Oups sorry, this was already linked in the original article.

Apparently the company's backlash against Shay Pierce had begun on Thursday: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fg%2Fa%2F2012%...
I did, and nothing happens. Maybe the unicorn doesn't like me.
Very very fun indeed. The examples are a really nice introduction too!
All social networks are based on our capacity to trust others. We trust social networks like facebook and foursquare not to abuse us with unwanted ads and we trust others to treat us and our information with respect. This "Girls around me" article is coming from a place of extreme fear.

The users of this app are most likely to be introverted young men rather than serial killers and rapists. It's impossible to hurt someone with an app so linking the existence of any app with the dangers of stalking, rape and murder seems to be fear mongering.
Apple gives in, two year warranty for Europe
Competition among young engineers
Your well reasoned and nuanced comment has no place on HN. :-)
Maybe the responsibility and the legal loopholes of such a possibility are too high. But that does not absolve social networks and the like to acknowledge the fact that people have an associated intent with what they share online. It is their responsibility to guard their users' intent and motivations at all times.

In fact, I'd be ready to accept your challenge. I can risk a lawsuit in order to protect my users. After all, when have patent trolls ever stopped passionate people from creating amazing products?
We've all been had
For what it's worth, versions newer than android 2.2 do have features that are worth using. My personal favorite is hardware accelerated graphics. That really does make the phone's UI feel as snappy as the one on iOS.
Then there's the support for multi-core apps (introduced in 3.0), resizable widgets (3.1), social API (4.0), calendar api (4.0), beam (4.0), low-level media streaming (4.0), media effects(4.0) .. and many many others. Android 4.0 is full of goodies.
Great. Looking forward to this.
Can't help but think this whole controversy must be (at least in part) motivated by that $30-million for "employee retention" mentioned in the article. I suspected as much when I first saw the uproar on Twitter, but didn't know if the Zyna/OMGPOP deal had any such incentive.

Does anyone know how those retention clauses usually work?
from what that article makes it look like, its simply Pierce's word against the company's. both have their share of things to "fight for". Pierce has his game and public image and OMGPOP has PR and it's recent sale to zynga.
I'm not one to wear a tinfoil hat but SOPA in the US, Bill C-30 in Canada, and the various laws in the EU can make one think there is some sort of conspiracy going on. It's simply intriguing how all these laws seem so similar.
Now I'm curious, do (or why do) Australians seem to like Australia better? Coming from a family of immigrants and being one myself I love to hear stories of what country works better for certain people and why.
Just like the feature in OSX Mail. It's nice to see how web UI is keeping par with native development.
I liked the helpful compiler error.
This is probably the most immature and mean thing I've seen for months. But can't we just ignore it?
It's not a limitation of experience. Regardless of how experienced you are, it will still cost you more.

Higher development costs for apps is a problem for consumers as well as developers.

When developers complain about fragmentation they aren't complaining about the diversity of form factors and device capabilities.

They are complaining that these aren't cleanly abstracted away by the operating system, and that the delivery of updates is a mess.

OS Support for diverse hardware is a feature. Fragmentation is not.

Apple sidesteps this problem by not supporting diverse hardware.

Android could potentially solve the problem with better abstraction and a better software update process, but hasn't yet, so the costs are passed on to developers and consumers.
To be fair she did post something that would get her fired if posted in a truly public setting

But it was not a public setting, so how is that relevant?
The subject misquotes the tweet. It did not say "Shay Pierce". It just said it was the one employee who turned down going to Zynga.

However, there was a second tweet that did explicitly mention Pierce. Here's a screenshot showing both: http://i.imgur.com/Dob8n.jpg

The text of the other tweet is "What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many...".

These tweets were on March 30, so they are not April fools jokes.
It got me - I thought Squid had dropped the ball (because cat pics were turning up in the most unusual places and context) and restarted it :)
this is the former president/founder of Teach for America...
Spain was actually forced by the US to pass a SOPA-like law, according to wikileaks
Sounds like he's well shot of them.

And this seems bizarre behaviour on OMGPOP's part - he was entirely complimentary to OMGPOP and he publicly disclaimed credit for Draw Something. Even if you did hate him and the press he stirred up, the best way to make it go away is to completely ignore it. Why on Earth would you make this the story?
> "Educate people about privacy" cannot work

I agree that it's unlikely to fix the problem in its entirety, but I'm a bit short of easy fixes and I still think it's an important thing to do. And, although it's a politically fraught area, I'm pretty adamant that we should not always conflate explaining the world's hazards with blaming people for shitty stuff that happens to them.
Gecko Technology

http://youtu.be/v1eFZZM_Suo
That would require setting down the pitchforks.
Mozilla opens up over Boot 2 Gecko | Mobile IT | ZDNet UK
Funding Circle, a Kickstarter for SMBs, Picks Up $16M
"In many ways it is better to have this thing legislated: at least then it's out in the open. It's naive to think that large ISPs in countries without active legislation aren't linking intelligence agencies into their networks."

How about the other option: we make it strictly illegal for ISPs to cooperate with intelligence agencies (or anyone else asking for data) unless there's a warrant involved (and even then only to the extent of the warrant).
Professor's 'Enemies' Plug-In for Facebook Goes Viral
Notch weighs in : https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/186359914657091585