skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That sounds like a trend of two. I think it is more likely that both Stephenson and Doctorow were programmers earlier in their careers (implied in their Wikipedia articles -- Doctorow founded a software company and Stephenson switched to a physics major so that he could "spend more time on the university mainframe"). And once you know a text editor really well (any text editor, even Word), it is simply most efficient to keep using it; there are apparently still professional writers who won't use an editor that lacks WordStar keybindings.

However, it would not surprise me at all to learn that there is significant overlap between "people who learn to program" and "people who want to write sci-fi novels". I just don't think we'll hear about Toni Morrison picking up emacs anytime soon.
Calling Out The Excuse-Makers (prosecute the fraud)
Six-month long exposures made with a pinhole camera.
She could be the melodramatic manager of a nail salon, for all I care. The point is, she wrote a good article about the emotional toll of not being able to make payroll.

Her chosen profession, spending habits, personal life -- nothing else is relevant to the discussion.
I understand it's not easy to learn a new language and that the apple process can be tedious but it's definitely not that bad. I have publish a couple of apps for clients without any problems. Somehow people think because it's for a phone it's supposed to be simpler.
You can judge for yourself. Check out Crowdspring.com, you can see the quality of the logos from the crowdsourcing. I think it is often VERY good.

The designer that wrote the article needs to learn how to compete in the new marketplace.
I'm Spanish. Look at the Unemployment in my country: http://img.elblogsalmon.com/2009/01/paro_dic.JPG 11.3% now.

In 2005, 80% of ALL new Jobs in the E.U. were created in Spain due to the Real State Bubble (similar to Japan's-UK's-USA's one). Now we are facing two crisis at the same time: international credit crisis and post real state bubble crisis...
Perhaps, she didn't even want to meet him for coffee.
my philosophy is that arrow keys are only bad if you're using them while in insert mode. I find that this was added to appeal to novices, but in the long run, really interferes with learning to use the editor to its fullest.
I don't think you can patent this...my school gives these out at any outdoor event. My friends and I usually collect a bunch and I keep them around -- in my purse, in my car, etc.
Thanks, your comments help. Landing page as in homepage (maybe I'm using the wrong terminology). Only one of those.
The cameras are really easy to make (disposable) and require no chemistry to develop. You end up with a color-like negative using simple black and white photo paper. Here are a couple related howtos:

http://www.pinholephotography.org/Solargraph%20instructions....

http://www.solargraphy.com/index.php?option=com_content&...
I don't know if that qualifies as a hack, but I don't see what's admirable about it, nor is it particularly clever. Should we applaud when a businessman finds a loophole in the tax system? Or when he hires a lawyer to "hack" the justice system?
Question: did the trains in Norway also stop when Hamas was sending thousands of Quassam rockets at Israeli civilian areas over the past few years, or does this sort of protest only get triggered when Jews are using weapons?
Web startup to offer foreign news as papers cut
great presentation.
hi there,

concerning register based vm architectures you might find the following a good read: "virtual machine showdown: stack vs. registers" (https://www.usenix.org/events/vee05/full_papers/p153-yunhe.p...). aside from lua and parrot, google's dalvik also uses a register architecture (afaik).

i also had a look at the lua implementation a month or so ago, and i found some other details very interesting: it uses very few instructions (<40), and it uses a very neat trick to "unify" floating point and integer numbers: by using double as the default numerical type. (compare for example to the jvm, {i, f} x {add, mult, div, .etc.})
Yet another favicon for Google
Again, I must run and hide behind the great work Twitpic is doing.

http://blog.twitpic.com/2008/12/be-yourself/

Twitpic is self funded and ran by one guy from his apartment

He does it because he loves it, not because it pays the bills. Does everything HAVE to turn a profit?
I'm kinda curious to see how this all works with only html and js.
What? The economy is not completely dead? Potentially profitable ventures are getting funded? Blasphemy! We are in a HORRIBLE DEPRESSION which will end the age of American dominance, capitalism, and possibly humanity itself. Haven't they heard?
The eBay Architecture Over Time [pdf]
Worse Than the Early ’80s
if you want to target more than one set of keywords then you probably want more than one landing page, each targeting a specific user group or keywords. The home page is more general.
Look at it the other way: What if Amazon was planning a Web console all along? Should they give up because someone beat them to it? If a third party implements a feature (persistent storage, load balancing, HA, auto-scaling), should Amazon be blocked from building that feature?
Even though I appreciate the apology, I think the original post that he wrote did bring up some decent points, especially with regards to the features and community aspects of the two sites. Note, of course, that I prefer Git over Hg, grain of salt, etc:

I see the "GitHub vs. BitBucket" debate brought up most often in the context of users new to the DVCS concept, who have not yet investigated or chosen a favorite between the two. In this context, the fact that GitHub's community is far larger is a valid point and benefit, and a big draw for new users. The same goes for the better fork-related features.

I honestly think that because the two look and function quite similarly, the details are really what are important when trying to decide which tool you want to spend your time with. Setting aside the fanboy arguments relating to Git and Hg themselves, I think that GitHub makes for a very compelling reason to choose Git over Hg/BitBucket, simply because it has the "better" community and features.

Now, perhaps if schacon had made his argument in this fashion, rather than the screen-by-screen accusations, no apology would have been necessary? But I'm not very good at making arguments; I always did very poorly when trying to write argument essays in high school...
Humble origins of Microsoft's Tag iPhone app
We're very excited about this and some cool stuff we're doing that is launching very soon.
Summary: A logo designer insults inexpensive alternatives to his expensive service, with no justification.
Other investors are no doubt very happy that Porsche did this. They reaped the same benefits as the company did.
Wouldn't it be easier to use a different browser instead of creating multiple accounts?
I don't believe un-open source is a concept that can exist under past versions of the GPL. If you read the GPL, it has no time limit on the license. And the contract also has no termination conditions except for one (which the people downloading/modifying the program control).

Therefore, it appears an old version GPL license is a neverending license without a way for the original person to end it. So no, he cannot open-source any of it, even his own original work. He can stop distributing it, but since he gave a license to others to distribute it, they can just distribute the original. And unless they break the one term of the license, he cannot stop that.

Clearly, this is where you run into the concept of the GPL. It was meant to ensure that original works of software would always be available to use and modify. "Always available" are the key words. He is out of luck.

The new GPL (v.3) appears to grant a license for the term of copyright. Not sure what that means. But, it also gives a license to someone you distribute the work to from the orignal copyright holder. To me, this means if you try to distribute a project with someone else's modifications, the person receiving the project gets a GPL license on those modifications, not your expensive license. Since the original work can also be distributed, essentially this means the whole thing can't be un-open-sourced.

Basically, the only thing I think he can do it make his own modifications, and release those for a fee. He cannot stop anyone from releasing the original or the original with others modifications.
Do you think there aren't problems with the tax system or justice system? I know what you are trying to say though.
You're claiming "zero-data loss capability". That isn't possible. Let's say I insert something and before the server can even log that it happened the server dies. Well, that's data loss.

No, because the client should see that the transaction aborted and retry it.
Every multi-dimensional measure can be projected onto one dimension. The question is whether it still retains useful discriminating power at that point.

The whole argument in favor of a g factor in intelligence is that when you measure different kinds of intelligence (verbal, analytical etc.) the numbers you get seem to be a function of a single dominant factor. (That's the argument, I'm not saying whether or not I agree with it.)
"So, what can I help you with?"

"We're wondering how you've sized the market."

"I'm afraid that's confidential information. I can't really tell you that until we get to know you better."

"Umm, ok. How about your biggest name clients?"

"I obviously can't reveal that kind of information at this stage."

(etc)

Option 1) "Look, we really want to invest in you, that's why I'm doing this research. How can I make you more comfortable talking to me?"

Option 2) "Ok... thanks. I need to go now, do you mind if I call you back later?"
Rescue-Time for Intranets (stand alone would do too).

Ideally it would be able to track not only what applications you are using or URL are looking at, but also which files you are working with. Then you can tag entire directories in order to keep track of projects.

Pretty reports is a must

Bonus points if you provide programmatic hooks to automate filling of damned time tracking, ticket trackig and TPS tracking 3rd party solutions.
So would normal profits from products though. They're in the automotive industry after all.
So long as we are sharing .screenrcs, this is the way I like my hardstatus string:

hardstatus string '%{gb}[%{W}%H%{g}] [%= %?%-w%?%{Y}(%{W}%n %t%?(%u)%?%{Y})%{g}%?%+w%= ] [%{W}%D %M %d %c%{g}]'
Site that let's teenagers list what kinds of odd jobs they would do for money, like lawn mowing, leaf raking, garage cleaning. Then people in their neighborhood can look for kids to do this work.

You would set a means of money exchange and the kids could publish what they are earning money for to draw the adults into picking them.
The Mac's market share is growing simply because market share doesn't matter anymore. Thanks to the Internet, people are buying the computers they want, not the one they feel constrained to buy.
It already exists. Try http://www.gskinner.com/gmodeler/app/run.html
Richard East-Co-Founder of OMS3
This is purely good business sense for any Internet marketer, says Richard East, co-founder of OMS3. “The fact is that Internet Marketing is a game and it requires creative thinking and ideas outside the box.
gnucash and lilypond are the two that immediately spring to mind-- but three does indeed stump me. snd uses Guile, but snd isn't itself GNU.
"And if webOS is basically web-based, that means that all of Palm's apps will be available on the iPhone, but none of the iPhone's apps will be available on the Palm Pre"

You are counting on webOS being nothing more than a WebKit browser. I am sure that's not the case.

I am also sure the iPhone is not the primary target the Pre is aimed at. There is a host of Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian slightlycleverphones (it takes more than a qwerty keyboard to be a smartphone) that are pretty much in Palm's crosshairs.

And, sorry to say, you sound like an Apple fanboy ;-) I know. I sound like one very frequently.
Agreed. It is noteworthy that we have an analogous situation here on HN. Karma is really a one-dimensional projection of a two-dimensional (at least) characteristic. People upmod because they agree, or because they think the post is interesting. This blends two quite different characteristics into one number. We could still argue that the value of a person's karma has a rough correlation with total value or contribution to the community, albeit two people may have the same karma values but have arrived at them through different means (say, one being agreeable, and the other being interesting).
Ask HN: Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN
Semi interesting background - part of the team behind Sproost met each other here on HN.

We always respect the HN community feedback. Thanks in advance for your comments on what we've built so far...

http://www.sproost.com
Apple is swimming in money. You really can't count them off. On the bright side (for Palm), Microsoft is swimming in money too and they accomplished little more than licensing a sub-par Windows CE thing to just about every maker of quasismartphones and crushing Palm in the process.

Never forget Palm owned the PDA market after crushing Apple out of it and created the smartphone market with the first Treos. They did a lot of things wrong, but with adequate funding and adequate brains, they can do a lot.
This got my curiosity, the mobile space is going to buzz in next coming months!
Was hoping to get more suggestions.
Stop the presses: Google gets another new favicon
Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the Earth
It may be possible to treat brain diseases with ultrasound
Defining the computer science boondoggle (are you caught up in one?)
Ask HN: How-to Implement Machine Learning?
Ok, here's the deal. I'm taking a machine learning class using primarily Bishop's text. Awesome book. Awesome class.

How do you all suggest I implement the material though? In class we use MATLAB, but I'm slightly hesitant because I want to create some cool web applications.

O'Reilly's book Collective Intelligence uses Python, which I don't know, but I would learn it if it would be worth it.

Would I also have to learn Django?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
I agree, it's not indecent of them or anything (unless maybe they outright lied to someone about it; it's very hard to speculate about these things from the outside anyhow).
You don't know anything (about a subject) until you know what you don't know.
You know, the big G was recognizable and everyone knew it was Google. Then the small g came along and Google had this big lengthy explanation on how they spent month after month trying to come up with what their favicon should be. And now they just change it again? Because they wanted something less recognizable?

Everyone knew the big G. Everyone associated it with Google. When you're Google, it doesn't really matter what your logo is - people use you because you're good, they just need a mark that they associate with that quality. Only when you're bad at what you do (yet still need people to think you're good at what you do) does this sillyness have a lot of meaning.
Putting math in historical perspective helps a lot. Like most students I was taught the Calculus with the rigorous epsilon delta definition of a limit which was then used to define derivatives. It never really clicked until I read the historical context for Newton. He didn't use limits, but used infinitesimals, which are less rigorous but make a lot more sense to me at least.
All Scoble said was it had a better user experience. You can split hairs about whether app selection should be figured into UX - I think maybe it should - but that clearly isn't what Scoble means.

Being based on HTML and JS does not mean that Pre apps will be served up over HTTP. My bet is they get compiled like any app for iPhone or Android.

Bottom line: the article didn't say the Pre will "dethrone" the iPhone. Palm doesn't need it to; they just have to have a viable business. As of today, they do - I for one wouldn't have said that two days ago.
Mathematica-like iPhone app
I don't quite understand this. So someone in, say, Australia, sending email to someone else in Australia, has that mail routed via Canada?

If so, why?
Simplifed SCUBA closed circuit rebreather developed
More on The Two Flaws Of Libertarian Economics (Zed's Response to Comments)
Pandora/last.fm for Articles/News/RSS. Stations, skipping, shared traits, etc. More topic centered than FriendFeed.
TechCrunch Poll: What Would Make You Switch Search Engines?
IANAL, but even if you eliminated all of the GPL'd code from your codebase, there's a possibility that some of your code could be a derivative work of the eliminated code, setting you up for copyright issues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design might be useful.
If it's a business with shareholders and investors it does.
"You are counting on webOS being nothing more than a WebKit browser. I am sure that's not the case."

Even if it's not, the fact remains that apps written in HTML+CSS+javascript (what's more, HTML+CSS+JS tweaked to run on WebKit) will be trivial to port to the iPhone -- not just because the iPhone has a fantastic webkit browser, but because the apps themselves will be trivial.

The Pre, at best, will be a phone of widgets (I like your "slightly clever phone" moniker). I've made my share of widgets, and I know they can be both fun and useful. But after three months of game development on the iPhone, I would hang myself if I didn't have Cocoa. The Pre is going to see twenty versions of Lights Out, but you'll never see a Cro Mag or a Crayon Physics.

When people go on about the iPhone being a "computer in your pocket" they're talking about Cocoa its OS X underpinnings. Mojo and WebOS, at best, put safari in your pocket, and the iPhone already does that for cheaper.

Maybe you're right, and the Palm doesn't have the iPhone in its crosshairs. But I'm not sure how that helps them.
Try yahoo finance. Cash on hand as of end of fiscal year:

* AAPL 24.49B (on 27-Sep)

* GOOG 14.41B (on 31-Dec)

* MSFT 19.71B (on 30-Sep)
Not Bad.

I wasn't sure what it was all about until I actually completed the quiz and started looking at "rooms". You may want to fix that somehow.

Also, I found some issues with the way the room objects were displayed (after you have a style)... seemed a little mish-mashed.

Looks like a good thing to present to Architecture digest or House and Home or one of those magazines... timing might not be the best with the recession though.

Good luck to you!
Cocoa + OS X = developer playground in your pocket.

Mojo + WebOS = web browser in your pocket.
23 million users. Story of an online paper doll site.
I checked, and I was a bit off on the numbers.

My basic assumption is that there's a minimal amount of smarts you'd need to have to be capable of being an effective teacher.

I then looked @ people I know who I think have at least that minimal amount of smarts, took their job titles, than was going off of the local salaries for those kinds of jobs.

My mistake was comparing local salaries for those kinds of jobs to the nationwide median for k-12 teachers; since "local" for me means "expensive eastern seaboard city", I'm comparing expensive apples to median oranges, and thus I'm a bit off.

For reference:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary...

That said, I do think people's expectations are off for how much teachers "ought" to be getting paid.

We can probably agree that there's some N for which "you probably have to have been in -- or have been capable of being in -- the top N% of your high school class to be capable of being a good teacher".

We might not agree on that N -- 5%? 15%? 25%? -- but let's look at what each N means if do a naive mapping to individual income levels:

top 5% -> 100k+
top 10% -> ~75k+
top 15% -> ~62.5k+ (I'm ballparking this from the table)

etc., via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

So pick your top N% and pick a salary range and you've got a ballpark range for what it'd take to staff a school with teachers culled from the top N% of achievers (and note that I'm actually lowballing it: the $ for each N is the minimum amount to put you into the top-N%, not the average or median income of the top N% of earners).

I'll happily admit that the above is a horribly inaccurate ballpark, but it's a place to start from instead of handwaving as to why teachers are/are not paid that much.

As a side note: one of the things that isn't mentioned when looking @ how much school costs in, say, South Korea is that relative salaries are usually higher for teachers than their domestic counterparts, and on top of that due to cultural reasons they're more "respected" by their fellow adults than they are in the USA, which makes it cheaper to attract quality people to be teachers.
It's a fascinating story: the original founder of StarDoll.com is a 50+ year old woman.
Ask HN: Review our startup: Mugasha - A better way to listen to electronic dance music
Windows 7 Beta Real Time Reviews
What Defines the Ruby Community?
If you liked this one, try the one about career women and oral sex:http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/06/high-income-women-g...
That's a cool idea! do you think a news site with two types of upvotes would work?

A user could sort their view of the front page based on either props (agree votes) or recommendations (interest votes) or some weighted combination. Maybe too complicated?
But those all led to the post; they're not on their own island.

Also, it's not like she's writing about mobile technology and people are posting her spending habits out of nowhere.
In my mind, Facebook's value is 0 until it can demonstrate profitability.

This whole idea of it not being big enough yet is asinine.
"Palm’s bet on social networking integration is a game changer ... That is huge and not many people will get it."

Umm, how can a social anything be huge if not many people get it? The Zune wasn't just social, it was The Social -- and no one got it.
I say this as an iPhone lover, but I think you might be jumping to conclusions prematurely.

Granted, the fact that that iPhone already has an awesome product in the market (version 2.0 at that) puts them light years ahead of the product demo Palm has at the trade show.

But just because something is miles ahead of current competition doesn't mean your safe forever. The iPhone has some serious weaknesses, including but not limited to:

* No background processing for third party apps
* No cut/copy/paste
* Restrictive application distribution

Okay, true, I could only think of three weaknesses (cause seriously, my iPhone is f'ing sweet), but if Palm could match them on the UI, best them on their weaknesses, and make a strong play for the corporate market, they could be on to something.

At a minimum it would be nice for Apple to sweat a bit so they finally get MOVING on the aforementioned weaknesses.
Fred Wilson on display advertising
Why did you choose a lightbox for sign-up/login?
Unless you have hooks for deeper functionality inside the JavaScript interpreter used to run the application logic. And I somewhat doubt Palm will refrain to release a full SDK for the native OS.
Seriously..

In a previous life I had a product on PalmOS. Not only were the APIs pretty good, but they'd give you the source to PalmOS APIs. You didn't get the kernel (AFAIK it wasn't theirs to give), but you knew how the APIs you called interpreted their arguments.

It was a good community, and in between that, Palm, and Metrowerks, you had lots of support. Oh, and CodeWarrior... those were the days...

And finally, you never worried about Palm screwing you as an app vendor, which is a concern from Apple (I'm a mac fan, and have written on MacOS, but I'm also realistic cough Watson cough). They're not playing the walled garden game, they just did their side of the system well and encouraged app developers to do the same with good tools, docs, & support.
People who use the Ruby programming language. That was easy, next.