skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
God, this is depressing, lots of whiny fandroids who can't even f---ing read.

These morons have taken the article title as a literal synposis, it is being ironic (and yes, we know that Americans famously don't get irony).

The authors (one of whom is a former Apple exec) are arguing that what Apple did was invention and does indeed deserve protection from the legion of lazy wannabes who would just otherwise simply copy from the smartest kid in class.
Wondering what is the "conversion" rate? Around how many unique visitors do you get monthly? Your site looks good and something seems off if the coverage is good...
I have the latest Mac OS X version and no Java updates are available and this website says I have 1.6.0u33 which is exploitable. That means tens of millions of users are in danger, which I interestingly safely ignore. I will not download a JRE (especially Java 7) and install to my Mac other than Apple distributions. God knows what will break down with Java 7 on Mac. Maybe nothing, but I don't bother.
Did you omit the closing parenthesis on the ClosureScript mention on purpose? ;-)
fiestastic.com

It's a site that I thought would be very useful to find things to do based on the events your Facebook friends were attending. I still use it myself from time to time, but I've moved on to businesses I can outright charge to customers.
I'm actually testing a theory of the benefits of fake share counts on one of site's right now:

http://TimeForZen.com (look at the social widgets up top)

ALL of the share counts for the social widgets are fake. I made them up. I want to see if having high share counts will create a bandwagon effect and encourage more people to share, or if it will keep people on the site longer due to a higher perceived usefulness.

So far it's not doing anything for me due to low traffic, I'll have to run the experiment with some other sites.
Arrested Facebook 'troll' revealed to be UK policeman
Unfortunately the patent system doesn't account for how business works in the real world - companies copy each other, and that's how competition is born. If everyone had to do everything 100% different, they wouldn't be competitors in the same market anymore. They would just create tens of other markets, where they'd be the only company making that type of product, and most of them would probably fail, because competition can actually be good for the first mover, especially if the idea is too crazy. They can validate his idea, and more people will switch to that idea of a product.
Why 100 friends are worth more than 1000 acquaintances? | Māris Antons
Samsung Mobilers IFA 2012 – Agenda & Facts / Emails Sent to Bloggers
There's basically enough truth to it that you can't just refute-by-reality, but not enough to make statements like this acceptable by my standards. It's vague enough that it's not actually a useful statement for anyone taking it literally.

See: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-t...
App.net Gets First Dedicated iOS App, Passes 17,500 Users
Why Lean Startups Turn Into Innovative Firms
Nice app. It's like iWitness.
Security pros advise users to ditch Java
> []byte and string aren't the same.

Nor should it be. I've got plenty of issues with Go, but that most definitely isn't one. It's one of the few things Java got completely right (even though they fucked the String type itself): strings are not bytes.
BTW in go a string can be cast to []byte like this:

[]byte(aString)

it returns the utf-8 bytes, casting to []rune gives unicode codepoints.
Nowhere. Apple asked you to rename the app. They're not a court. There's no judge or jury. Even the trademark is irrelevant. Apple requires you to change the name and its their party. Sorry.
The problem with Linux is much simpler IMHO. No I don't mean the actual causes, but the root cause: Linus is a technical leader, so the kernel is a good product. He is not a "product leader" from the point of view of the final Desktop experience, so he took no responsibility for that (he actually blamed the UX of Linux many times in the past).

No one emerged as the "Linux Desktop Guru", taking full responsibility of a distribution completely targeted at fixing the UX, selecting a set of defaults to actually create a development platform. Fixing the problem of users supporting in a perfect way at least a subset of computer systems (targeting macs makes sense for instance).

So the Linux Desktop was the sum of a multitude of different tries, that alone sometimes were interesting, but not enough at all to define the whole OS experience from the point of view of the user.
>I would love to see a scientific method to measure developer productivity that isn't ridiculously flawed in completely obvious ways. So far I haven't seen one.

Well, just use the good old empirical method then. Of all the programs out there that people and businesses need to have, in what languages was the majority written? Do proponents of older, supposedly superior languages have an equal body of work to show for it?

>What I care about is primarily what makes me productive. I don't care if it makes anyone else productive but there is a good chance that it might.

I'm fine with that, what I tried to counter-argue was the statement "What we need isn't a new language, its a new platform which uses Lisp all the way down.".
I still think that the ability to generate self-contained, static binaries is potentially a huge advantage for Go vs the scripting languages. Instead of installing an interpreter and a bunch of libraries and fiddling with search paths you just copy a single file and go (as it were).

Think about what it takes to get something like a PHP photo gallery going vs what it would take with Go, for instance.
What about an airbnb for parking spaces?
As a student I built a website to manage rentals in GWT,
My goal was basically to make a leaving out of a product I built.
Cost: 300€
Gain: 20€ (not so great)
State:
open-sourced: https://github.com/simon-watiau/simplelocation

- Later I built a Storify client on iPhone. By that time I had no iOS
open-sourced project and I was trying to stay in the valley and get hired by Storify (failed).
State:
open-sourced: https://github.com/simon-watiau/Story-Browser
http://simon-watiau.github.com/2011/09/08/side-project-story...

Then I built a dating app based mostly for fun and to learn a bit of Android development.
I bet @adrienmagnus still remember this one :D
State:
open-sourced: https://github.com/simon-watiau/On-the-menu

My latest project was an iPad app to help me clean my Gmail Inbox:
state: free on the App-Store
http://simon-watiau.github.com/2012/08/21/side-project-inbox...
I never proposed that, I was pointing out a flaw and I hope that this issue will be fixed one day.
Ask HN: Using CrowdTilt and open sourcing our site
This post is regarding https://www.shicray.org/

_Site Overview_
It's a site that is a marketplace for service providers (programmers, hair stylists, cleaning people, gardeners, lawyers, etc... focusing of tech people for now).

We offer a set menu of services by city and all the prices are consistent across providers. E.g., so you want your lawn mowed? Large lawns: $50. Small lawns: $20... no matter the provider you choose.

Then based on feedback ratings we can increase the payout to good providers and pay poor providers less, incentivizing good service. Further, once we have sufficient traffic, we use supply/demand data to dictate market pricing.

We make money by charging a 15% fee to providers, about 3% of which goes to payment processing currently. We could reduce this, but I wanted to at least start high to give us room to do so.

_Bootstrapping_
I have two ideas to get us going.

1. We list our company on CrowdTilt ( https://www.crowdtilt.com/learn/faq ). Every donor who's a service provider, at least those above a certain donation amount, gets all future marketplace fees--minus payment processing--waived for life. Thus our donors should be more than happy to direct people to our site since we're providing payment processing, escrow, and ratings to boost their cred.

We'd set out to raise a sizeable sum of money, at least $500K. Since CrowdTilt only charges donors when the goal is reached, donors would be sure their donation is only going to a widely supported mission, decreasing the risk of a bad investment.

2. We open source the site's codebase for three reasons, (1) the community donated so they should have at least an AGPL license to it and (2) we're not relying on proprietary code since from seeing the site most developers could clone it, and (3) we might get outside dev support to help succeed.

_HN Feedback_
Can you offer me thoughts on this plan? Thanks in advance!
I'd love to see some of the code behind these maps. Are they rendered with mapnik? How practical would it be to make some of them live and interactive? Especially now we have vector graphics in the browser.
They ask themselves why Apple went for Samsung's head. It's pretty obvious... they don't want an Apple vs. Google. It's much easier to win vs Samsung (a foreign company, by the way) and thus establish some valuable jurisprudence. Google was recently said to be getting ready to sue Apple, it's only natural because Apple's target was always Google and it's now only a matter of time before we get to that. It's a bit like WW2 when Germany started invading eastern countries. It was in no small part a preemptive move, because eastern Europe being occupied by Germany or the USSR was only a matter of time. It would have been Russia if it hadn't been Germany. We might still see some preemptive moves by Google before Apple finally sues Google directly.
It's more than that, I think: I've worked with people of his caliber in other fields, and I can appreciate that they need to work at their own pace.

e.g., if he submitted QEMU as a patch for bochs, and it was rejected (for whatever reason), does anyone think his time was better spent fixing that patch?

He produces ingenious, high quality code, and does so at an unbelievable rate (note, none of his open source projects is related to his day job as far as I can tell - except perhaps the ASN 1 compiler).

I think he is arguably optimizing his contribution to society, and I hope he keeps doing that. Let people who can't produce the core do all the integration/politics/detail stuff.
Interesting. How many unique views a month does your site get now and what kind of conversion rates are you seeing? I am planning to launch a paid version of my app, http://www.pageblox.com and my potential customers are also developers/designers.
I made an app for reading Hacker News called HackerNode which makes about $300 a month.

http://www.hackerno.de

Do you guys have any ideas on how I can increase revenues?

Thinking of a subscription based model with a lot of killer features but don't know if there is a market for it.
Snel Afvallen in een Week 7 Unieke Tips
From: http://ogpl.gov.in/about_us

Open Government Platform (OGPL) is being developed by nodal agencies from both the countries (National Informatics Centre, Department of Electronics & IT, Government of India and Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies, General Services Administration, U.S. Government).
To know more about the participating organizations visit following links

National Informatics Centre (http://www.nic.in)

General Services Administration (http://data.gov)
Windows 7 Overtakes Windows XP As the Most Popular Desktop OS
it DOES work with cookies. At this moment I have a cookie from ycombinator called "user".
Who can use Ticketmaster bot?
In this article you will find different group of people who use or can use Ticketmaster bot in order to buy all the best tickets of their favorite shows and concerts, these people include...
A "me-too" product may be fine when starting and your goal is to gain experience. It may also be fine to enter an under-served niche, where the users are not happy with the currently available products.

But if you enter a popular, saturated niche, you will suffer - you'll spend 95% of your time just catching up with the competitors. You'll spend time building bridges between your product and the competition. You would have to make hard choices whether to innovate or copy from competitor (and thus not forcing user to re-learn what they already knew). If you implement a feature users are requesting and the competitor does not have, people will not switch to your product because you are missing other features or because you have no way of contacting the users or because they are simply loyal to the competitor. You may win in the end, but it will cost you a lot - make sure you have more resources at your disposal than the best competitor has before you start.
People complain about such software because we live in a world where there is no such thing as a Computer Driving Licence. Many users are perfectly fine to live in as much ignorance as possible, and are actually quite afraid of traditional computers. These users can easily be spotted at a glance on both Windows and Mac as they invariably use their desktop as a horrifically chaotic filesystem, never delving deeper, and the internet is essentially Facebook.
""over-kill"

What do you mean by that, and why is it bad?"

It's not. I'm just pointing out that there are alternatives to MySQL. And for small sites/apps that don't require something like Postgres; that can be SQLite.

Frankly I miss the days when an easy to install and use database was available to the masses. Remember Paradox, dBase and Foxpro? Sure all those database where powerful (xBase, for example) and used to develop complex applications. But they were also used for simple applications.

I would love to see something equivalent to those online. Oh wait, there is; SQLite.
I don't think it would be that nice. For good error reports back to the user, you'd have to have a fairly large amount of logic in the catch block. If you have a function that copies data from one file to the other and catch some sort of IOException, you'd end up trying to analyse what it is to report it properly. After all, it could be either one of the files, while opening, closing, reading, writing, ...
Creditfix Debt Help & Debt Advice Ireland for Mortgage Arrears Advice |
NASA faked the moon landing--Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax
Also, it is relevant to note that incentive for active development on Gov data-sets like these (believed to improve the existing establishment) is probably not as attractive an idea as it is to disrupt the legacy. That's how the relationship has been for centuries.

Actually, it is part of the GoI's "Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy" that was made law.
http://www.india.gov.in/allimpfrms/alldocs/16473.pdf

Looking at how much impact these platforms have induced even in developed nations there seems little advantage [some advantage definitely] of pursuing such an initiative in a country like India. Millions die of basic malnutrition there and perhaps the focus should be to make food available to consume, rather than data.

That is an extremely uninformed statement - one of the biggest challenges for efficiency in governance is accountability. Think of the govt. as a large legacy codebase, with the QA being done only by the parliamentarians/senators. Release of data allows QA by the ordinary citizens.
India has a judicial process called Public Interest Litigation [1]. Combined with public datasets, it makes for powerful governance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-interest_litigation_%28I...
Tumble weeds...
They've dropped ruby. But other then that, nothing really. I Love (and use) Netbeans. I was just emphasizing that they are still alive.

But really I think the only thing saving Netbeans' butt is Java.
I find it funny that any time facebook post some news there will be hundreds of idiots posting their facebook tech support questions as comments. As if they'll ever be answered.
"I will educate my friends and family that WEB BROWSER CHOICE MATTERS"

and

"Most importantly and above all, I will put the needs of the USER FIRST over my own needs as a developer."

So please do, put the needs of your USERS first. Your users do not NEED to be educated by you. It is not your business what browser they use.
The title of this submission is in fact totally wrong. Rakudo has quarterly releases. Perl 6 is not finished.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tapthat

It's a head to head NFC game. Proof of concept. Had some initial interest, but didn't take it to the next level.
That's the way it is with tech reporters, the other side of the story is always never revealed. Imagine, if this guy hadn't published this article? I, as an average reader would have thought Samsung is a scumbag company.

I don't support Samsung nor am I against them, just that we need to take anything that comes from a Tech Blogger/Journalist with a pinch of salt. Because, they know their audience is huge and they can manipulate anything to their advantage (For eg: Page views, popularity)

Actually, I lost faith in fair journalism after Techcrunch's posts a few months back. So I always wait for the other side of the story to be published.
>Going by popularity, C syntax is indeed king. In the 16th century, going by popularity, it was best not to shower or otherwise clean yourself.

Only I didn't go by popularity, I went by results: most of the must-have programs the world uses every day are written in C/C++, and almost none of them are written in Lisps (in the order of statistical noise).

Saying that that is just due to popularity ("C is more popular so offcourse more programs are written in it") is not really valid. Lisp has the headstart on C, it had a chance (AI, the Lisp Machine era), etc.

In the very least, you would expect the Lisp advocates to have a few killer-apps to show for all that superiority, the kind of stuff lone-worf team-of-one C/C++ programmers churn out (and a lot of them are mighty popular).

Can you point to any, preferably not Emacs?
Datavisualization.ch
Because it is more readable visually when its separated by whitespace rather than looking like a long string. Maybe I just have different preferences to anyone else in wanting the file manager of a desktop-aimed system to be simple and understandable rather than powerful (I have a terminal for that)...

The slashes aren't the main point really. Its the confusion of not knowing whats going to happen when I click somewhere and start typing that I really disagree with strongly.
It wasnt ubiquitous though as is 3G and WiFi which is why iOS works. If they didn't exist it would have had the same fate as the NewsPAD.
I collected a few stats here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvUEclt_oCPedHV...

The typical conversion rate (after removing SU visits which are basically bouncers) is at 0.43%.

The earnings is around $5 for 1000 pageviews (without SU) or $3 (with SU included).

Any thoughts on improving this?
>The burden of proof is not on the Lisp community to prove the worth of its fifty year old technology. Lisp outdates C-based languages by at least a decade, so it really should be up to C and the other new languages to prove their worth.

The burden of proof doesn't change sides based on ...age. Algol68 is older than Haskell, but still most experts will agree that Haskell is better.

As for it being "up to C and the other new languages to prove their worth." that's what I just said. By ratio of useful, must have programs (including code used in space missions), C wins, and Lisp doesn't have much (if anything) to show for.
While the graphic format you link to might be ok for novices who are reading a seminal paper on graph theory but supposedly need an illustration to explain "linear" and "all pairs" (really?). As someone familiar with the jargon I find it increadibly frustrating. I image it would take 10x longer at least to create such a document than writing the prose - not a great use of researcher's time.

In particular the lack of a solid left margin makes it hard to read. Really it's not a paper anymore, it's an infographic.

It seems considerably more wise to educate novices in the jargon, than to re-write every research paper in a novice-friendly over-illustrated manner. After all, how many graphs of "linear" do our novices really need to look at?
In 2008 Nokia's joint-venture with Siemens, Nokia-Siemens-Networks, developed and built "monitoring centres", on-site deep-packet-inspection and Internet filtering infrastructure for Iran and later also for Egypt and Iran. This wasn't just selling custom routers or something, but a large engineering project where they knowingly agreed to aid oppressive regimes in controlling their citizens and abusing human rights. We all know what role these packet filtering systems played in the Arab Spring, etc.

So, Nokia is not very awesome++ at all, in my opinion, and in fact even though what Samsung did was very shitty, it kind of pales in comparison.

In all fairness, two and a half year later, a human rights lawyer contacted them and told them this was not okay, and they stopped doing it. Or, to quote someone on Metafilter: "Big company does something any sane, thinking person would automatically know is immoral. Film at 11."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/22/iran-n...

http://www.metafilter.com/82687/Nokia-Siemens-and-the-Irania...

http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/news-events/press-room/c... (this is their mea culpa, it almost sounds like they learned a lesson, except that it took over 2 years and a human rights lawyer before they stopped helping oppressive regimes with human rights abuse)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nokia+siemens+internet+filtering+e...
One of the core values of any government should be to make available all of it's data freely to all citizens available via API.

Everything being publicly auctioned and the free data available publicly will stop many of the scams of the nature India is going through right now.

I am not sure if any one would, but if someone comes up with a bill that holds the powers-that-be responsible under the "Duty to Report" bill, I would support them.
Atari Arcade brings classic games to the Web with HTML5
A bunch of interpreters for various esoteric languages, together with a framework for interpreter development. In fact, also a bunch of esoteric languages from myself.

I mostly lost interest, because a surprising amount of esoteric languages just doesn't do anything interesting. Uhh, so you are using a stack for values. Oh, and your stack manipulation words a bit different from other stack manipulation words. Big deal. Oh, you are just encoding your program pointer in a weird fashion. Also a big deal.

Those which are actually different then just end up batshit insane, and impossible to capture in one bag. Also this set of esoteric languages is plagued by woeful underspecification, or ambiguous specifications, which make an implementation even more impossible.
Well, the downside of using multiple DB stores is that the logic of keeping everything consistent is in the hands of the developer. So you have to make sure that everything is written correctly.

For instance, if you write to MySQL and Mongo, but your Mongo is down, you'll either have to queue the data item somewhere for a write once the system is back up, or you have a migration system in place that gets everything from MySQL since the downtime and writes it back to Mongo.

Depending on the type of data we have a few easing factors: for some data stores it is not that big of a deal if it doesn't get written to it's 2nd layer (eg. cache) as we can rewrite it the next time it is requested in layer 1.
Show HN: Roofmapper, simple way to map roofs. My first webapp
Charlie Stross on indespensible Android apps.
>I disagree. The negative items are things that people are used to but not necessarily the best solution to the problem

That's what you say, and it might be true or not, but you don't get to use Yegge's list and count positives/negatives when you don't agree with Yegge's priorities.
HN submissions shouldn't point to .tar.gz files.
> So, of the 10 algorithms, at least three are closely related to just matrix theory. Amazing.

"Mathematics is the art of reducing any problem to linear algebra." - William Stein