skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The points I was trying to make (and clearly failed) is that Apple does not have a patent on pinch to zoom, so they couldn't contest the patent on it, because it doesn't belong to them.
I know that it takes time for each ad network to warm up to your app, as it gets a sense of how much traffic, and what kind of traffic you have. Possibly swapping out different ad platforms exacerbates this problem, or makes it take longer for the network to reach its peak. What if you updated your app to switch to another network 100% of the time? (Or used the mediation layer to do this?)

I have no idea what I'm talking about. But there's a lot of interesting tests to run.

Also - and the AdMob guys told me the same thing when I talked to them at google io - my app only has about 30k active users. This is hardly enough (because click-through rates are so low) to be able to find meaningful trends and test them, because the data is so inconsistent and I'm probably not getting high-quality expensive ads anyway.

If any of the above is wrong, then let me know! I'd love know how this stuff actually works, especially as it applies to small-potatoes devs like me.
How was the iOS app store lifted from Linux package managers? The main characteristic of Linux package managers, as I see it, is dependency management. Third-party iOS apps aren't allowed to have any external dependencies outside of the OS, so there is no dependency management. Installing an iOS app is just a matter of downloading it and unpacking it.
Alternatively, if using Active Record/Rails, you can use Large Hadron Migrator gem: http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2011/05/introducing-the-larg...
I'm thinking it's probably a myth - just like the "announcement" that Samsung paid Apple in trucks of small change.
Ask HN: Programming for a touch screen interface?
HN,

In the past, I've been entirely a software programmer and haven't come close to the fence between software and hardware. However, I would now like to experiment with some ideas that would utilize a touch interface.

I shy away from utilizing an iPhone or a laptop's touchpad, though. Are there feasible ways to acquire a touch screen with USB connection - or is there a (relatively) cheap way to create a resistive touchscreen with little prior knowledge?
Show HN: Create pretty charts on the web directly from excel
RO filesystems can be bad, but usually they're soft failures for us:
* Memcache can still work just fine
* Db servers stop responding (and the app handles that fairly gracefully)
* Web servers serve files from a RAM disk, so they keep working

No reason against 10G copper specifically - we haven't had to address the problem in detail yet. When we do, we might choose copper. Depends what happens when it happens :-)

We had a very nasty incident a few months ago, where the drive in one of the LDAP servers died. Well, it sort-of died. It started to time out a lot but didn't go fully offline.
openldap kept running, but when you connected to it, the TCP connection would open and hang.
This meant that all of our servers saw the server as "OK", but LDAP stopped working and caused all kinds of brilliant havoc :-)
One of the most connecting things my son and I share is music.

Of the few things that I remember about my father, a large part is music.

Even if you don't like the music, it still helps you understand. Sometimes it just helps you.
Yeah, this was about as organic as it possibly could've been.

I bought an el-cheapo Android phone from Virgin Mobile and was annoyed that I couldn't check to see how many minutes I have left. I searched on the internet, and others had the same problem, and would post about it (eg, howardforums.com)

So I wrote the app and then posted to those message boards: "Hey, check this out, I created a free app. It's crappy but it works."

(This inspired me to hunt down that forum post. Here: http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/1686978-Intercept...)

It started catching on from there, and it also shows up when you type "virgin mobile" into the android market store.

So besides plugging it on the internet (a few forums, on HN, telling friends) I haven't done that much.

I recently moved to Manhattan, and was in a radio shack buying a top-up card. I was chatting with the cashier, who was also a VM customer, and asked her if she'd ever used my app. I showed it to her, she liked it, and said she would recommend that all of her customers download that app when they buy VM phones. I have no way to know how many sales that generated, but it was a cool feeling!
It's not that big of a deal some hackthon have just business people so what ever help is needed.
Nope, nothing like that.
> You have to believe in God to be hired.

I have the impression you're in the US. If so, this is illegal. You can treat business partners this way, but not employee candidates.

http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html
> there is no .NET dependency that must be satisified to create GNOME applications.

No, but many apps that are part of the "official" Gnome desktop run on Mono.
IIRC, there are issues with the latest Retina MacBook Pro.
I'd love to see control of the "mobile space" be in the hands of individuals instead of large, for-profit and often evil companies. Clearly mobile computing is here to stay. If it wasn't then companies like apple and google wouldn't be fighting so hard for control.

Imagine a decentralized app store where people can make a living without having to deal with apple's ridiculous review process or ideas of what's appropriate. I suppose the major challenge is getting all the non-geeks into this ecosystem and away from iTunes and other privately owned app stores.

This is obviously wishful thinking. However given the importance of mobile computing going forward I think it's worth imagining the best mobile ecosystem possible.
It's actually exactly a 1 second delay:

$(window).load(function() {
setTimeout(slabTextHeadlines, 1000);
});
I'm sure it's great, but my first reaction when I looked up what it was was "oh no, another MySQL storage engine."
> LuaJIT is faster anyways.

This man speaks the truth. Well, actually, I know nothing about Lua. But I do know that Go currently isn't very fast. I mean, compared to highly dynamic languages the performance is fine. But compared to C++ or even modern JVM it's meh.

I feel like there's going to be improvement here, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if the versions of golang used internally at Google aren't faster.

My take has been to use it the way I imagine Google does. If I'm not building something that uses protobuffs and goroutines I do it in Python.
It looks similar to StrokePlay (http://www.strokeplaypro.com/).

The developer has a really good blog describing his micro ISV experiences, but it hasn't been updated recently.
"If the leader of the free world stops by" - sorry, he's what?
I'm near-broke and unemployed.

I can live on <$10k/yr (maybe as low as $6k)

I imagine myself with $10k being comfortable.

If I get a job (working on it), I'd expect $40k for 2013, would not be too suprised at $60 for some crazy tar-sands job. (I'm a mechanical engineer, and/or programmer).

Supporting myself in Vancouver, BC.

I want more. There is no enough. All money over $10k will go to charity. At least that's the ambition.
There's a very big difference between:

on the one hand, being subtly 'encouraged' to write favorable blog posts or reviews via enjoyable junkets, and

on the other hand, being expected to act as a real part of the PR team, wear company-branded clothing, and film promotional videos.

One is normal practice in tech journalism. The other is something quite different, and more aggressive. It seems like the bloggers expected the former - not especially naively - and got the latter via pressure and bait-and-switch.
It was originally targeted to students, but more specifically individuals not necessarily students who want to improve on our particular skill. Over time we found out that our user base was about 80% students in k-12 schools, so I added a lot of tools specifically for teachers to manage lots of students, and I've also started targeting educators more in my site copy. It was very unexpected, with my thinking being that schools had their own paid solutions and would not be willing to use an ad supported product, but I was definitely wrong!
Rust uses the Erlang model. Generally failing the task on error has worked well in practice, although there are times when we have to use result types and pattern matching (basically error codes, but more reliable since the compiler forces you to use them correctly). The vast majority of errors are handled either locally or by failing the task.
Aren't iTunes tracks all DRM-free now? Maybe Bruce has some old ones with DRM and hasn't paid to upgrade them to DRM-free.
My kingdom for someone who can figure out how to solve error handling.

You don’t really seem to want someone who can solve error handling. You seem to want someone who can make it disappear, or at least get as close as possible to that ideal. I feel your pain, but I fear you are asking the impossible. :-(

Some errors are recoverable, and maybe it would be helpful to have default policies like “if the file is read only, have the OS prompt the user to make it writeable and retry” to take care of a lot of the repetitive coding work in those cases. At least then we wouldn’t have to do things like writing a top-level file-handling operation in a loop that tries (in the exception handling sense) to do something, and if any recoverable error occurs, attempts a suitable recovery and goes back to try again. On the other hand, to have some sort of default policy, you’d need something in the semantics of your language to indicate which policies should apply and where. By that point, you might not be doing much better than a try-catch in a loop.

In the end, though, not all errors are recoverable, and that is the fundamental problem. Some errors are fatal, and you just can't carry on as normal or rely on some automatically generated default behaviour, because the semantics of your program are now broken. What would you want to see that you don’t have today in terms of minimising this kind of error handling code or making it easier to test?

I don’t know what kind of testing you have in mind, but one thing I’d really like to see going mainstream is a serious effect system built into the type system of the language. That would be useful for a lot of reasons, one of which might be checking that whatever error handling constructs were available didn’t do things like leaving effects half-applied, transactions open, or resources locked, in the event of a change of plan because of an error condition. I expect some relatively near-future languages will start to pay more attention to formal effect systems as fields like distributed systems, concurrency and security become ever more important in the programming mainstream. But this is a topic far bigger than just error handling...
Start A Nursing Agency Business
The most updated and complete guide on How to Start Your Own Nursing Agency, Medical Recruiting Firm business and the newly improved Medical billing Software.
In defense of Flippa: I bought a site there recently. Checked it out, the owner was a stand-up guy, I even released the escrow early to help him out (he didn't ask for it). He continued helping with the site transition even after he received the money.

So buyer beware but there are some gems in there...
It's occasionally upheld by the supreme court, occasionally overturned. It's defacto legal because it's unprovable. Also, it's worth noting that it's not exactly a panacea - the two big (in terms of scale) uses of it in the USA were northern jurors refusing to convict those who sheltered runaway slaves under the fugitive slave act (good) and the southern jurors who acquitted lynchers (bad). US link is more helpful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unite...

Judges and lawyers hate it, but at worst it's grounds for dismissal from a jury, not a crime.
Keep in mind that when Reddit got acquired, Reddit gold doesn't exist yet. So they were losing (more) money every month.
A while back I deleted my Reddit account and just recently I've created a new one under my real name. I decided that if I was going to post, I would do so as myself and not hide behind an anonymous name. I hadn't really done any trolling in the past, but I'd participated in discussions I certainly wouldn't have participated in if they could have readily been tracked back to me.

But for better or worse, I decided to go the real name route this time.

The result is that I end up commenting on a lot less time-wasting content (and subsequently reading less because I know I won't participate in the discussion and reading often opinionated comments without participating will just frustrate me), and putting more thought into the responses I do post.

That's not to say that I think there's anything necessarily wrong with the anonymity. Sometimes it's nice to give voice to something you otherwise wouldn't because your opinion is controversial or unpopular (and doing business online, one has to protect one's online reputation and what ends up in the search engines). For me, though, it's translated to less time spent on useless AMA/AskReddit posts, more time spent on meaningful discussion, and less time on the site overall. All of these are good things.
It's really beautiful. But it's practically useless.
Aw man, you gotta tell us a bit more about what your app does. Do you utilize facebook connect?

What is the general purpose of the app?
I've used LESS for the first time when the project involved Twitter Bootstrap.Never looked back.

The only downside is probably I never get to use my favorite CSSEdit again.
In 69 days you've submitted the same site 42 times and never commented. Even if you happen to submit something that becomes popular it's only a matter of time till your account and possibly site get shitlisted.
You and I sound like we may be cut from similar cloth. I find Go's approach to error handling -- which is to not to do much about the problem at all -- is better than pervasive use of exceptions but worse than some other possible mechanisms (and on this we may disagree).

Although I'm not saying the language Rust has got it right, perhaps some of the thoughts on the mailing list may be useful. However scarily, my mailing list post -- which only asks how to handle errors -- still ranks on top for "rust error handling" on Google:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2012-March/00145...

Here I mention the Common Lisp condition system, which has been my favorite so far, but the one of the principal authors of Rust mention a somewhat similar but lighter weight alternative.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi was probably on the front page for more than couple of times. Here's one just 2 days earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4462539
Thanks, and sorry the maps aren't useful to you. They're artifacts of the process of trying to understand the world, and maybe someday I'll make it all the way there.
> It does not take locks, other than for very briefly.

A lock (even a very brief one) can be infeasible on a sufficiently high-traffic table, though there's always the possibility of, say, a 30-second maintenance window.

Mysql 5.5 supports atomic table switch, meaning no lock is necessary at all.
Khawrazmi was a Persian Muslim. I stopped reading right there.
Apple didn't even invent the idea - Bose has been doing it for years.

Bose product sounds good, yes, but not as good as their price tag. Bose also severely restricts the way you can use the product - no bass/treble knobs for example. Very similar to Apple.
We're interested in adding support for condition handlers. Arbitrary stack unwinding and/or first-class continuations aren't likely due to runtime/toolchain limitations, but the "register a function to be called on error, which might direct the call to be restarted" style is intended to be supported.
This may or may not be helpful:

http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=tongue+in+cheek

:)
In #13 Networking:
>"If you’re in San Francisco looking for a tech job, you’ll want to be using the latest connection apps"

I've never seen this in the LA community. Is this the norm up north?
Its funny that you say 'slightly'. The demands from apple are 4-5 orders of magnitude what they paid samsung for royalty fees on samsung's patents.
I actually prefer exceptions to Go's approach, mainly because most of my code is structured with the best place to handle errors being higher up the call chain. Exceptions let me do that for free, whereas Go requires boilerplate code all over the call chain.

BTW your posting left out that close() can also fail (eg deferred writes run out of disk space).

And note that none of these really help with testing. In your 'cat' example, I'd want to test open failing, read failing, write failing and close failing. At a certain level the combination of language and libraries know these can fail. Ideally I would like to write zero lines of code to exercise those cases. In practise I usually find out that my test code is larger than the code being tested, and I usually have to add all sorts of instrumentation to force various failure modes which again makes my original code even longer and more obfuscated.
Ahh, right, i missed that. I was distracted from the sub-headings by the big bold responsive headings.
There is no other company that can market a company like apple.

No other company can just show their product without having to say anything about it. That makes Apple unique in such a fundamental way which is exactly why they are the most (or one of the most) valuable company in the world.
You really should have put a mailing list on this page. I'm sure a lot of people are interested in keeping updated.
Neat idea. I like it.
Should... won't.
Using Android to control robots
Just being open source should not provide blanket immunity. This is also hardly some small, independent developers we are talking about, they are very large international companies. IIRC Android Alliance rarely, if ever, accept 'independent' contributions, it is just a dump of source code when they feel like it (Android 3?).

I am a big fan of open source but I totally disagree on this specific case.
What does religion have to do with algorithms?!
Saved Stories?
Hi, I have been using this site for about 9 months now, was referred by a friend. It's a great source of information. At the time, he mentioned that I should create an account to upvote posts that are relevant, so it will automatically save them to your profile, for later review.

I finally succumbed and created an account for that purpose, today. However, when I tried to save a story, nothing happens.

The section of 'saved stories' is blank for me. Is there a limitation to this option?
You're right. I lurk like crazy , but don't really submit other than the one. It's just that everything else I go to submit is always already submitted. Perhaps I just a little behind in finding links. I'm not much of a commenter, since I don't really ever feel like I have anything of value to say. Maybe I need to just try.

I appreciate you pointing it out - I'd like to try to contribute in a positive way, I just need to try to dig up interesting things before everyone else!
Those are the words of a man who works on that which he does not also love.
Something funny is going on - I don't recall doing my reply against this particular comment, I think it was meant to be against a different comment about patents being trivial to work around or somesuch. Probably human error on my part, my apologies.
-i = ignore case

-g = highlight the particular string that's been found by the last search command

-M = verbose prompt

-R = all control characters, 'R' for Raw

-x4 = tabs take 4 spaces

-X = don't reinit the screen when the pager exits

-f = force open any kind of file

-F = end the pager when the end of the file has been reached

-z-1 = use 1 less line for a screen's worth of content
I really like less.js for quick development. Once everything is working, the less code can be compiled and included as regular css.

My toolchain is currently...

python/apache pure json apis server side

knockoutjs/jquery/less client side

This is very powerful, but the semantics of programming are pretty crazy. I have variables and "functions" in my css, data bindings in the HTML, and a massive ammount of js. The js is sometimes hard to structure.

I almost wish there was a single lightweight coffescript style language to replace the big three (HTML/CSS/JS). The "HTML is for documents" idea is already long gone in most of my code.
How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading
Looks like SO thinks this question has been deleted, but I would enjoy reading this. Any other links?
I agree that zero lines of error handling is the perfect solution. Even getting error handling and testing to be a trivial percent of the actual useful code would be a major improvement. At the moment my testing code is around the same size as the useful code plus error handling, and error handling is around 10% to 50% of the code.

I think part of the problem is error reporting is still somewhat shaky. To a certain extent you only actually need to handle errors that occur in the real world. Some languages like Java and Python can get you a reasonable amount of information when an exception occurs, but you still have to find mechanisms to report it back, and chances are you won't have detailed program state or operations leading up to the error. But if you did you could in theory release programs with no error handling as alpha releases (in the original sense, not current marketing usage) and see what shakes out.

> I don’t know what kind of testing you have in mind

Using fdr's example of a cat program, it consists of an open, a sequence of read followed by write and a close. I would like to point the language/environment at that and say "test it" with no further effort. Currently I have to write far more code to test, and then add in instrumentation to force various failures (eg make close return an error). The test code in this example would take considerably longer to develop and could itself have bugs!
I use your script. It's very nice and worth the price, but the script setup is more complicated than it needs to be and the smtp is broken and I'm forced to use phpmailer. Two things I've never had issues with from all the other scripts I've installed on my server over the past 7 years.

I'd still prefer it over SaaS Mail because I don't have re-occuring costs every month and I like being in control of my own email lists and the iframe embedded email newsletter signup is awesome. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm the one that asked you about how to check the database to see if a user had already signed up for a specific category newsletter before adding them to it again. That's another thing you should fix.

3 little flaws but the rest of the script is just sooooo perfect. It's sold over 1800+ times because designers/developers like us HATE SaaS newsletter mailers. We like your script.
Introducing a bold nuclear energy initiative to win an election?
I am potentially interested in this product, but I couldn't help but have a negative reaction to the bare bones website that is currently up. I understand that entrepreneurs need to build MVPs, etc. but a screen with two very small (i.e. unreadable) images and basically no information whatsoever is just frustrating. I hope that feedback helps to make a more informative page.
> I use chrome but this line reminds me of "This site best viewed in Netscape Navigator", which is a tad irksome :(

It depends on the reason.

Recommending a browser because you are using mark up that only this browser knows is bad.

Recommending a browser because that browser is ahead of all the others in terms of spec support is fine.