skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ew! They use the timestamp parameter for that? That's both sick and wrong. Requiring people who access your webservice to have an accurate clock is the most braindead thing I've heard this month, at least. Oh boy, network congestion and clock skew could combine to produce some wonderful heisenbugs for developers. And for what? The want of nonce? Some ridiculous design principle of making your API totally state free. sigh
Hyperinflation was a recurring problem in China from 1100 to 1450 when the government used paper currency - http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/china_paper_money_chinese_p... I don't think that the Chinese case fits either of your two categories. The Chinese situation is actually quite analogous to the U.S. The government began to rely on fiat currency and inflation to fund its operations, and the temptation to keep printing money was too great.
State-free protocols are useful when the server side is distributed and potentially disconnected. :-)

As for "wonderful heisenbugs" -- the AWS services return a clear "hey, your clock is broken" error, so it wouldn't be very hard to developers to figure out what was going on.
The article was chiefly about writing. It's fairly apolitical really. It just happens to be about a guy who writes for the President.
FWIW, I laughed out loud at that one.
Refuse democracy. Particularly electoral democracy. Some kind of Republic that makes more use of lotteries may be a bit more workable - http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect... But probably the best idea is some form of Formalism - http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formali...
On the iPhone there are two main problems. First is lack of garbage collection. Not everyone can keep track of their allocations easily and the result if unstable programs for the end users. While there is some notion of allocatin pool it has problems - for once it's scoped to call stack, thus making it little more than extension of on-stack variables. Further, some standard methods that create e.g. strings add-ref strings for you, but some don't. Ther eis no consistency. It shouldn't have been that way.

The second problem is that cocoa touch is very async. By contrast windows forms is very synchronized - when you create a form and pass control to it, control does not return until that form closes, and then result is returned. Even a cavement can understand that. In cocoa/touch you pass control to a form, and then it returns and then you have to return it as well before the form is drawn. If you do something like closing a form in the event where you are supposed to re-draw the form the system blows up on you. If you set background from one callback it goes into infinite requirsion. There is no way to tell upfront - you have to try. It's very unintuitive that way and hard to wrap your head around it.

I'm sure a bunch of c00l haxors will tell you that they have no problem using it and therefore nobody else should have problems, but hey - some people can ride unicile, doesn't make it a good transporation choice.
Exxon Gas Credit Card
An informative and detailed analysis of the Exxon Gas Credit Card
I played with it some about 10 years ago, but at that time it was really in the wilderness and didn't have much practical application, so I let it be. It seems nice in some ways, but I don't really see it making the jump out of MacOS X territory. Who knows, though.
For C# and Java, I can recommend Peter Sestofts Precisely books. They're short and to the point:
http://www.itu.dk/~sestoft/javaprecisely/
http://www.itu.dk/~sestoft/csharpprecisely/
(Author is my thesis advisor, so beware)
Linus confused about evolution and engineering
that's not striking that just arbitrary, Bill Clinton was younger than Obama

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_President...
From Square Mile to Kashiwazaki-Kariwa
Who is going to get developers to write 3 versions of their app -- one for the iPhone, one for the iPhone Mega, and one for normal OS X? It won't be hard, but a lot of testing will be required. Will developers be willing to do it?
I don't really see why people care that much about techcrunch. Granted I'm just a regular hacker, not doing startup, not having any plans to do so, and generally care very little about startup news.

I just want interesting technews. Give me links to some new awesome tech, with demos or videos showcasing why I should be awed. Give me links to new awesome tech which makes my life simpler. Give me links to fancy programming tricks which while technically awesome or impressive, would never survive a code-review. Give me stuff that feeds the hacker in me.

In that respect techcrunch has generally been of very little interest to me, and lately I haven't even bothered reading stories from techcrunch at all.

Is the focus on techcrunch around here (because I see noone else on the web caring) because it has historically been PR friendly to startups?
Well, I think the real issue is that C++, C, and Objective C are all bad.

If you want OOP, slapping it on top of assembly language isn't a great idea. Use CL or Smalltalk instead; or any of the dynamic languages. Those are much closer to being good than anything in the C family.
you probably meant "not statically-typed"
Well, a commercial soundtrack on a catchy flash animation is also copyright infringement unless royalties were paid, but there have been a couple of times when this has lead me to investigate a particular artist.
Interesting... this seems kind of weird:

> If you use a template Operating Agreement that we provide {link to come}, you can establish a company that is based solely (or primarily) on the pooling of time, attention and effort (as opposed to investment of capital in exchange for shares).

I wonder what the practical issues are regarding these, like can you get a bank account 'entirely online'? You pretty much need that part too, to have a real company.
If you can’t make assumptions, then don’t bother with JavaScript
Here is a list of the Nobel Laureates per university straight from the source (based on affiliation at the time of the Nobel Prize announcement):

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/universities.html

Wikipedia has another list based on what universities claim themselves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Laureates_by_univ...

So while Caltech is doing very well indeed, there are 15 universities with more affiliated awardees.
3 Mapping APIs Combined to Create 3D Virtual Driving Simulator
That He Not Busy Being Born Is Busy Dying
Brown economists: Ancestral history explains roots of income inequality
When I write code as cleverly as possible it's easier to debug, 'cos I've played knifey-spoony before!
You make zero sense.
A long time I ago I used to make multi-agent artificial life simulations in a system called Swarm, which was in Objective C:

http://www.swarm.org/wiki/Main_Page

I don't remember much, just that it was a nice language, well fitting for the problem domain. It seems meanwhile they also added Java and C++ support.
Objective-C is a dynamic language.

Check out MacRuby, which is Ruby implemented on top of the Objective-C runtime: http://www.macruby.org/

The key difference between this and other "bridges" is Ruby classes are implemented as Objective-C classes. This couldn't have been done if Objective-C weren't as dynamic as it is. Objective-C is basically Ruby in C's clothing (which leads to a very different "feel", but in terms of "dynamicism" they're approximately the same).

And "slapping it on top of assembly language"? I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. C compilers are usually written in C. V8 (Chrome's JavaScript engine) generates machine code. What exactly is your argument?
How to price software/Saas?
Wait. That's not quite fair. First, I found out that she's a transexual quite easily and so that can hardly be called "outing" someone. Second, I did think about whether I should write that comment, and I thought by pointing it out I was helping, by saying "Look, this person is amazing and she's also a transexual." It's a push against the stigma.

To go to your Nazi example, I felt I was saying, "Jessie Owens just kicked your ass, and look -- he's black."
Eric Sink wrote an excellent primer on software pricing and you can read it at http://www.ericsink.com/bos/Product_Pricing.html
I really dig the simplicity of this approach, yet I think it's disaster waiting to happen.

Essentially, you're moving a part of your functionality (the part that determines which URLs exist, and which parameters are defined in those URLs) from a programming language environment to a common language environment (the comments). That common language environment is not as capable when it comes to defining, specifying or altering functionality - but it's what a programming language excels in.

So what do you do if you want to generate URLs? Or if you want to define URLs based on some content in the database? Those are hard things to accomplish with your current approach. I assume that there's a proper API that might address such issues, but the article doesn't mention such a thing. Good luck though.
Project quick cask launch
Project Quick Cash is a collection of 5 underground money-making techniques that have made Alok and his customers a ton of money. These techniques are quick/easy to implement, require zero/very low investment and can be used to make easy Affiliate and/or Adsense income.
1. Build a great product

2. Give it away for free

3. ???

4. Profit!

Are you sure you can't merge 2 and 3 into something more... sensible?
Las vegas web design
Flying Cow Design offers custom web design and development services in Las Vegas, Nevada at great prices
Sock and awe
There would be zero story there without Obama.
Guide to Building a Supercomputer from Playstation 3
AFAIR InstallShield is rather expensive, so it may be tempting to consider some free alternatives such as

Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page)
Windows Installer XML toolset (http://wix.sourceforge.net/)
But, doesn't he know that Saccharine in large quantities causes cancer?

Seriously, though, nothing that Obama's said during the campaign has been remotely memorable to me, though I did stop listening to all his speeches as their numbers accumulated. Were any as memorable as, say, Reagan's "A Time to Choose"? Were any quotable? I'm sure they're on youtube, and I would be willing to turn off the old analytical mind for a moment to listen to a nice piece of performance art from the man, if any exists.

And not the "new day in America/ a time for change/ things haven't been going well for a lot of folks/ problems on main street" kind of pablum that I remember from the campaign.
Do We have a Moral Duty to Improve the Human Race?
Didn't Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address himself? Legend has it he wrote it on the train ride to the Battlefield, though I'm not sure if that's true.
Twitter Strategies for Business
AI is going to be developed, but only when we are able to recognize the simplicity inherent in intelligence.
That doesn't make it political.
I was sure it was about database schema...
My assumption is that the Amazon people felt that by using HMAC-SHA1 they were secure because that's a well known way of hashing and signing something. The pitfall was in their implementation. They have such a simple system, yet they managed to make a mistake.

This sort of problem is one of the reasons that I made the crypto in tumbler (http://tumbler.sf.net/) as simple as possible because I was sure that if I did anything but total simplicity I would screw it up.
Perhaps it's just late and my mind is tired, but it took me a minute to understand what was going on. Maybe a simpler example would be helpful.

Since the delimiters are removed before computing the signature (so each is just "ABCDEFGHIJLM"), the signatures for the following two query strings are the same:

?A=B&C=D&E=FHIJKLM

?A=B&C=D&E=F&H=I&J=K&L=M

So if the value of of the E parameter is controlled by the user, they can construct a value ("HIJKLM") such that the resulting signatures is the same as the signature for a query with a bunch of additional parameters they choose ("H=I&J=K&L=M").

Clever.
Here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/09/marissa-m...

Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%.
Just noticed your reply. I have personal experience with this actually. I had a niche market shareware product, and it got rave reviews. It was awesome, dominated its niche, and users loved it. All seven of them.

In the meantime, my friend had made a mass market shareware program. He got thousands of registrations, and made a lot of money.

But your experience may be different. I'd love to read more if you have any good links or even some google terms (names, companies, products) to suggest I look at. Thanks.
A friend and I work on our own separate startups and we searched for ways to increase our productivity. We started a weekly challenge. Every week we meet in a coffee shop and set goals that we must achieve by the next meeting. If goals are not met, we commit to buying coffee and deserts for everyone else in the meeting. It worked wonders and we both got so much more done faster.
This in my opinion is why Java Me on mobile phones is a terrible platform to develop for... It's incredibly annoying to try and produce an application for several different handsets.
"The other issue is side effects. The aid tourists tell people about it, continue to contribute, influence politicians a certain way, educates his children, etc."

Good point for the feedaneed.org project as well. I anticipate that at least for some volunteers there will be meaningful side-effects (they donate $, continue to volunteer their service, tell others about non-profit x, etc.) I think that for most people, there's a stronger connection when you spend time on a project, than when you just donate $.
Product Pricing Primer
Indeed. Now just watch as the army of Apple fanboys mod you down for stating what is obvious as sunlight.
It would still be an interesting project. Especially if it were a generic MapReduce type thing.

It's crazy to think how much power a major site like Google could harness if they actually did this. If I were them I'd do it, but make it opt-in, of course.

If it weren't for the same origin policy they could make a distributed web crawler that loads web pages, parses them, and returns a nice clean list of words and links for the real heavy duty processing. They would need some assurances that clients didn't tamper with the data. Perhaps several clients could process the same pages, and they could ensure they match before accepting the data.
Maybe this explains why I hate using OpenOffice and other copy-cat software?
Agreed that it would be ideal to let people select the projects that are most interesting to them or for which they are best fit. Once there is a list of needed projects from non-profits, what would you propose is the best way to make this match?
* More updates = more traffic = more sales, because each update gets you near the top of the download sites

If this is true for the iPhone AppStore as well, this would explain the endless annoyance of millions of Apps doing fourth-digit updates two times a week. I actually find myself prompted with updating some applications more often than I use them.

Automatic updates are cool, but with all software everywhere interrupting your flow, begging about updates, it's getting quite annoying.
That video creeped me out a bit. :o
Flickr occupies a weird space between photo.net (which is almost all photographers) and Facebook (people who take photos of each other). It may be great for photo-hosting, but no-one wants that in a vaccuum.
was also reported on TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/futuretap-taps-taptapta...
Static Methods are Death to Testability
> But it hasn’t yet made it easy for a group of individuals, located around the globe, to create a persistent legal entity that has the ability to own property, open a bank account and enter into contracts with third parties

Does this mean that a group of individuals who are not US citizens can form a virtual company under Vermont law?
Nokia 1200 1208 Contact Service
1200, 1200 contact service, 1200 flashing, 1208, 1208 contact serivce, 1208 flashing, download 1200 pm. download 1208 pm, Nokia
You can learn Objective-C in about 5 hours, true (probably less, if you know C and C++). The point being that Obj-C without NSObject (and cocoa framework) is not a big deal. The "good things" come from cocoa and Interface Builder. And you will need more than a few hour for cocoa.
Obj-C by itself is C with a very thin OOP layer (and an associated frankly strange syntax for calling methods). Cocoa is a very interesting programming framework with wonderful programming tools.
The Mhz==Performance state of affairs really ended(+) around the time Intel first hit 3Ghz with the classic P4.

(+)Not that it was ever really true, but it was an accurate enough measure for most normal people talking about x86 processors for a few years. With the glaring exception of the Celeron - same speed, yet cheaper and less performant.
A “road” to peace
You probably worked with one of the big outsourcing body shops. The average developer anywhere in the world has a poor CS education, and this is the reason why Mr. Papadimoulis' site exists. I know folks who work for the Googles, Microsofts, Yahoos and the like in India and I find it hard to believe that the guys who write the JScript.NET compiler, or Windows Live Messenger don't have a CS degree. Clearly, you need to get over your bias.

Your $40 number seems grounded in reality though. I've never worked in the outsourcing business, but Ravi claims about $40 is what you need to pay for a good coder. [http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/05/faq-from-my-mail-box-1...].
And the comments show why I wouldn't base a decision purely on this chart.

Not covered on the chart, but apparently also variable: audio in, power management/fans, OS update success, two finger scrolling...
Our First 14 Days: What to expect when you're expecting... to launch
Great, he's allowing the schedule to slip and blaming humanity. Just because we ran version 0.9 "neandertal" for a few ten's of thousands of years before upgrading to version 1.0 "cro magnon" about 30-50K years ago... Guess the 3.0 kernel's going to be delivered about the time of ST:TNG?
As opposed to any other speechwriter?
I'm gonna ask you a simple question and I want you to listen to me: who's the big winner here tonight at the election? Huh? Obama, that's who. Obama's the big winner. Obama wins.
KPSS KURSU - 2009 KPSS - KPSS 2008 - KPSS 2008 SINAV TARİHLERİ - KPSS KURSU ,KPSS KURSLARI
I tend to agree. But I also think that people who are cunning enough to beat the system are then usually good enough to perform at a job as well provided the right kind of carrot is being shown.
A very similar stinking system exists in India where a future of a kid is sort of nailed right after high school. But invariably the guys who crack the engineering entrance were cracking the civil service exam at the end of their graduation. Funny thing is that now a management course is values better than civil services, so again best of our engineers (in terms of resume) are sweeping the top MBA seats. So probably though it is some cram exam or something similar but it seems to get you some intelligent people who are capable of chasing anything. But that's true only for the top layer. Average ivy league student is mobbed big time in the industry by smart kids from unknown colleges. At least half the programmers I admire come from useless colleges.
OpenStep and GNUStep developers.
The best and the brightest
"Could not find "where did it go?" after downloading (not joking)"

I know you are not joking. The company that can solve this problem will have my heart, and probably my wallet if I ever develop desktop software again.
I didn't mean to imply they were the only two under-50 presidents; simply that they were part of a small set, most of which share certain traits, creative ability being one. To wit, Obama's speeches, Grant's Memoirs, and Clinton's musical talent.
Joost Just Gives Up On P2P Altogether
Expedia Coupons
How to find the Best Expedia Coupons
And also http://etoileos.com/ which is based on GNUstep. Very interesting project.
Free Ringtones
The real music ringtones, as well known as, music tones, voice tones, and MP3 ringtones were introduced at December 2002, as well as have got revolutionized download free ringtones industry and in contrast to others, the real music
ringtones are real MP3's downloaded to mobile phone as mobile ringtones and thus they will deliver true music knowledge with ringtones and lyrics. The ringtones for mobile phones are huge business. Majority of mobile phone owners have got numerous ringtones that they may select from that come provided with their mobile phone. This allows everybody to modify sounds that their mobile phone will emit when they get phone call and text message on their cell phone. But, loads of people don’t like, and get bored fast with these mobile ringtones and search for something little more attractive.
> Do you look to the market to price (external input) or do you primarily look internally (we think it's worth xyz and adds $x value therefore..)?

Whatever you do, don't look internally. Your estimate of what it's worth is always awful. Why? Because prices aren't measured on a linear scale. Just to take an example from every day life: books. A lot of people make impulse purchases of books in the $10-$20 dollar range. Let's call one of those people Bob. It doesn't matter much if Bob is short on cash, a $10 book is easily bought. Often, Bob won't read the book, or won't finish it because it may not turn out to be very good. And curiously, Bob will not save to buy a $30 book, that he's sure he's going to like, because it's simply priced outside of the arbitrary range. In our minds, good books are not allowed to cost more than bad books. If we see two John Grisham titles laying next to each other in the bookstore, and if they're priced differently, what do we assume?

a) one book is much better/enjoyable/exciting than the other book

b) one book is newer/more popular/hardcover/etc

Think about this. It makes no sense that (b) is the right answer. And yet it is.

Mostly, I think, you have to find the right price point by experimentation. Don't be afraid to raise the price when you release a new version, and don't be afraid to lower the price with holiday certificates. Then measure and refine. A lot of people are afraid of raising prices because they might lose customers that way, but compare that to all the money lost by giving away your product too cheaply.
Karma? Guānxi?
Vacation rentals by owner
We offer a lot of vacation rentals in most popular cities throughout the world which are well furnished with all ultra modern facilities. A lot of adventurous activities like swimming, fishing, hiking, boating are available near these vacation rentals. Then take your vacation rental at http://www.vacationrentalsavings.com
though I somewhat agree with Seth, he also has to consider that with less bright people in the world of finance, getting these new initiatives that everybody will be building will be a serious new challenge. There has to be a balance between the people who manage money, and the people who create actual things.
Thanks! Didn't know the BoS site had a forum as well.
That would break their business model.
Ask HN: Advertising based business
Is it possible (in current economic conditions) to build a sustainable business which derives most of it revenues from advertising?

Also, at what scale/user base, assuming minimal cost structures (no marketing/distribution/engineering costs)
Noobindex beta launches/redesign
Your workout on Twitter? For total noobs
PaceFit.com has launched a Beta preview and we are in the process of developing a workout program on Twitter in addition to our site. What would hackers like to see or not see as part of the workout?
To learn a language you must first have something to say.