skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most likely, there were Marketdroids. The same people who would clutter up Microsoft's packaging until it looked like a marketing/buzzword junkyard.

http://www.ipodobserver.com/story/25957

It's much the same phenomenon as groups jockeying for under-hood space in GM cars of the 50's. The more your group gets, the bigger its prestige. You get the Tragedy of the Commons, and the needs of the customer are lost in the process. In the case of gadgets, it's the buzzwords on the package/cool to implement features.
Good one!

What boggles my mind is that they didn't care at all about the user experience when they introduced this monstrosity. Not seeing URLs when browsing Digg completely destroyed my user experience.

I'm guessing more and more people will log out and browse it that way.
The only problem I see with this analogy is that Microsoft makes money when developers pull new users onto their platform ($50 per Windows license), which makes it a much more symbiotic relationship.

I am interested in seeing if these Twitter apps are still going to be pumped out in such a ferocious speed once Twitter starts to charge per use of their API.
New York Times Roars. Too Bad They Live In Oz.
Ditto. I asked for movies like wargames, military, strategic, nuclear, and it was way off. It gave me movies like Meteor. I was expecting things like By The Dawns Early Light, Threads maybe, things like that.

Sorry, complete miss.
Facebook has had the same feature for a while, so it must have looked attractive and maybe even innocuous. But Facebook only has logged in users.
We Didn't Start the Flame War [video]
Sociology papers online
Characteristics Of Successful User Interfaces
"Apple tax" report backfires on Microsoft
Once you're logged in, it's simple to opt out.
Hats off to digg. That's a very fair solution that takes into account all the concerns raised by the community.

If I'm digg, I see the DiggBar as a huge success, even despite the backlash from content producers and SEOs. I don't use digg often, but when I do the DiggBar improves my overall experience.
Ask HN: developing for iphone?
Hi everybody,

I want to ask if anyone has tried developing for iphone. how steep is the learning curve for objective C, development tools, etc if you are coming from C,C++,C#, Visual Studio, Eclipse?
It depends.

Most people have already paid their taxes and just have to file some paperwork confirming it. Many people have overpaid and if they don't fill out that paperwork, the government gets extra money. The IRS isn't going to care much then.

If you owe a small amount of money (probably the most likely case) they are going to care, but it's just not worth their while to deal too much with it. By small amount of money, I mean like $100. At that point, they'll want you to pay it, but it might cost them more to get you to pay it than the $100. Having a staffer spend 3 hours dealing with you would probably wipe out that $100. So, they'll take measures to make you pay, but they aren't going to waste too much effort.

If you're underpaying your taxes by a good deal, they'll make your life hell if you decide to brush them off.

The IRS operates similarly to how you'd expect - some things are worth their time, others aren't. Yeah, there are always humorous stories about someone getting a bill for less than a dollar, but overall the IRS wants to spend its time chasing the money. That means going after the egregious violators who are rich because those are easy to spot and have the most benefit to them. Going after someone earning $50k who forgot to report $30 worth of interest income on one of their bank accounts just isn't worth it.
A few examples:
1. Compose and email to a friend in gmail. Type an address, then select it. Bring up taskfox, type "map this" (without hitting enter). A preview from Google Maps will appear. Scroll & zoom the preview to where you want it, then click "Insert". The map image will be inserted into your email.

2. Navigate to http://www.nec.co.jp/ . Highlight some text you are interested in. Invoke the "translate this from japanese to english". The text is translated in-place, on the page.

3. Twitter without even opening a new tab!

etc.
I wonder how state residency is enforced. NY has very high state income tax and I'm thinking of getting an apartment there while keeping my house in another state - how do I make sure that I won't be counted as NY resident?
then you're not a patriot
I got a PhD but never found my voice writing as an academic. For a while I thought I was a bad writer, but I spent a year or two, a few years later, where the bulk of my income came from writing. I found it was more profitable to write software than to write computer books, but that was when I realized the problem was in academic writing, not in me.
Walking away doesn't work if all companies are the same (and they are).

As soon as you start negotiating, they'll know you got the info from your friend (these HR people are not dummies even though they don't code :)). Don't tell them though; given them plausible deniability. Say something idiotic like you looked at cost of living and think that this is too low or something; just give them a excuse to up their offer.

Since they like hiring in pairs, you have some pretty good leverage. Go for it, you'll probably succeed.

I learned the hard way that all salary offers are open to negotiation (even if the person making the offer claims that it's not).
Since the reign of the Qianlong Emperor and King George III (rough contemporaries who both had long reigns), Britain and the West in general has plainly been more powerful and more influential than China. But that is a recent change in the balance of power. There hasn't been a lot of interaction between China and the West, but in Marco Polo's day China was much more impressive.
Don't get a NY state ID. You have to file paperwork to become an official citizen of New York (eg, your primary residence). My wife and I had to do this when I moved from Ohio to NY for university. Naturally, I'm not a lawyer/accountant/etc; contact a CPA for full information.
The hiring in pairs could be your key leverage: if you negotiate hard on this point, they might fear you walking away and thus your friend walking way (thus them losing both of you). So find a way to exploit this weakness in their system very politely.
Coding problems, logic problems, and the joys of job hunting
this may interest you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
To be analogous to MP3, it would need:

- Enabled distribution by overcoming bandwidth issues
- Has been superseded by superior technology,
but the majority think it's good enough already
- Is seen as "open" even though it's proprietary
- Because of the above, has become a defacto standard

How many of the above does SQLite fit?
Not sure why you got down-modded. I agree with you about the maps, and am trying to tweak the clustering algorithm to be a little smarter about which zoom level it's at, how many places are in an area, etc. Also, yeah, that wording on the front page is weird. Oops.
IPhone RFID prototype is very cool
Ask HN: An early client wants to pay for our SaaS offering using revenue share
We were able to land another early client for our SaaS offering and in negotiating the price I was surprised that he proposed that I lower the monthly fee in exchange for a revenue share payment model. His reasoning behind that is to give us a stake in the success of his business. That way we have an incentive to continuously look for ways to optimize his business process through our offering. The problem we are facing is defining the metric that reflects our software's impact on his business from which we will have a % of; is it the difference in net profit before and after using our software, or something else. If any of you faced a similar situation before, I would appreciate it if you could share that experience.
Our Ears May Have Built-In Passwords
Are you the bottleneck?
Have you had a chance to test Tokyo Cabinet?
This is such a perfect example of what I was talking about that I shall thereafter think of this as the Godfather II problem :-)

In a way the real triumph in this area is Pandora / Music Genome Project. It is interesting to think about whether and how such a thing could translate to movies - in other words a visual and verbal medium. I certainly don't think micro-genres is the right direction.
I've heard the same, though I'm not sure if they retroactively apply it to a long-running instance, prorate the rest of the billing period at that rate, or simply convert to the new pricing scheme for the next billing period.
Even if it's not technically worth it, they may do some amount of going after tiny infractions in order to "send a message." Their focus on efficiency or patriotism seems to vary with administrations, and it might be too early to determine how it's going to shake out under the current administration.
Ask HN: browser share on your website
For tripntale:

Chrome - 5%
Safari - 5%
Opera - 4%
Firefox - 35%
IE - 50%
- IE 7 = 64%
- IE 6 = 29%
- IE 8 - 5%

So i'm glad that IE has gone down to 50%, how about your websites?
Isn't Twitter's role to do with subsidising the cost of sending thousands of SMS messages? Rather than the actual software that sends them...
It's also worthwhile to note that while creating m1-large instances in [our] us-east-1a zone, we've been hitting insufficient resources exceptions when attempting to bring up instances. Now's an excellent time to apportion for mission-critical instances which come up and down with regularity, it seems like.
Hi ajju,

I wrote the blog post, posted to HN, and then sent out a tweet to my friends which might explain some of the new users. I recognize a couple of the commenters, and FWIW they are entrepreneurs that have technology companies. Here is the tweet:
http://twitter.com/chriscera/status/1527260033

The purpose of the article is to point out that the core of the Vuzit viewer is our reliance on web services. Another topic is that anyone could write their own viewer using our web services. The last point is that we only used our published APIs to build our Viewer and our website. My understanding is that nobody else in the marketplace has designed such a technology, and is offering it as a commercial service.

I would love to hear more comments on our Technology and Company. Do you care that it's made from AJAX vs Java vs Flash? Do you care that it's based on Web Services? Would you use it for your website, product, or service?

Any help from the HN community is greatly appreciated! Best, -Chris
These are good to keep in handy. In particular, this one: "The integrity of an email message cannot be guaranteed. If a received message seems out of character for the sender, double-check before taking it seriously."

I've come across too many people & organizations who blindly swear by the integrity of an email: "But look, it says right here it was sent by XYZ!"
This would be one of those slight improvements that really makes a difference: if your phone can unobtrusively check if it's next to your ear while ringing, it can just answer if you pick it up and hold it like a phone handset. It sounds like a trivial thing, but I really would prefer that my electronics did more of this figure-out-what-he-wants stuff.
McKinsey: Data Centers Are Cheaper Than The Cloud
How can you not upvote someone who spent $30 on data sorting?
the only way i would even consider this is if you could strongly and cleanly define some very clear-cut metrics and compensation levels based on them. ensure that you're getting compensated extra for what is effectively guaranteeing different levels of results.
Because people find it useful, it seems its easy to forget it was called SQLite for a good reason.

The original purpose was to have lite embeddable sql for apps where it simply did not make sense to have to set up an additional piece of infrastructure (eg mysql). E.g. as a store for app config, as an "app file format", or even for lite qtys of relational data where setting up a mysql would be too much of a hassle.

Thinking SQLite should compete with eg MySQL on large data sets, complex queries, high concurrency etc (ie all the cases where one would normally expect to set up a separate database server), to me just seems way outside of SQLite's intended purpose.

As to HDD crunching; I venture if SQLite is used for the domains it is intended for (eg as app file format), this should not be an issue if developers think about how they're using it.

E.g. if one is in the habit of doing a tmp-write, fsync, atomic rename for every atomic change an app would usually make to its files, then one would expect significant HDD crunching anyway if one is doing this with extreme granularity.

Ie with SQLite used as app backing store, the question should be what the extent of a transaction is, before one calls commit()

For these intended domains, I'm not convinced that in-memory pre-caching for the sake of batching/deferring writes is the way to do it at all, but rather to think in terms of the commit() corresponding to the point at which the app otherwise would want to atomically update its file.
I'm not a Twitter devotee personally but if they're right and Twitter keeps growing eventually competition is going to spring up. I mean, imagine a company having a monopoly on e-mail and having to build a system robust enough to handle every e-mail sent worldwide. It wouldn't be possible.

Given that it makes a certain amount of sense to start working on an open source protocol now so that it's mature when/if Twitter competition starts to spring up.
don't worry about it too much. report and pay taxes on things that have a paper trail, don't for things that don't.
under reporting things for which there is a paper trail isn't worth the effort.
//'when he asked me where I saw myself in 5 years I did say that I wanted to start my own business.'

The article does warn: '"I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie....I lie to any government official."

Some bosses or people should be treated like govt officials.
The first hint for you that this isn't hacker news is that it's on collegehumor.com.
Sounds like they've been doing PR with their new funding round...
Hats off? They told everyone to fuck off and then apologized. That doesn't require accolades. This shouldn't have happened in the first place, it was quite obviously slimy.
These guys are based at the same co-working station as us, Station-C in Montreal, and they seem to have an idea of what they are doing.

Following the linux model. They install micro-blogging on companies intranets and then do service for them. Not a bad idea, won't be the next google, but it is a niche market that seems ripe for the taking. A lot of companies want to use twitter like services, but are not comfortable going online.
Nice jujitsu there. You previously wrote "steve jobs never said that web apps were a replacement for real third-party apps." jacobolus pointed out several places where Jobs unambiguously drew comparisons between web apps and native apps. Now it's "nowhere in there does it say that there will never be a native-app sdk."

You're right in that Jobs clearly was not ruling out native apps. But his comments pretty clearly imply that web apps on iPhone make native apps unnecessary.
If you want to get your feet wet in Objective-C and Cocoa-like API's (assuming you don't have a Mac), I suggest taking a look at GNUstep: http://www.gnustep.org/.
Can't tell sarcasm I see....
Exactly. We are only contemplating this offer because we believe we can help his business grow by using our software. Our struggle is in pin pointing those clear cut metrics that ensure we are properly compensated based on the impact of our software.
Hey Chris,

Vuzit itself looks like a useful service. What I am not clear on is what value someone would get from writing their own viewer to embed in their website when that seems to be the hardest task they would be "outsourcing" by using your service. Is it to customize the look and feel (possibly by using a technology like Flash as you suggested)?

It's great that you guys have an API. I'll take a look at it when I need to embed docs on a web page.
It's a brilliant and thought-provoking video, though.
I've been using Conkeror for about four months now, and while I like the Emacs-like interface and the ability to mess around with the presentation of pages, there are definitely a few warts

1. I had no idea how much I relied on the throbber icon until it was gone. For a fairly new piece of hacker-ware, there are surprisingly few usability glitches, but this one makes up for most.

2. Emacs lets you display any buffer (browser tab) in any desktop frame ("window"). This is the only intelligent way to manage this relationship, and the fact that browsers effectively restrict tabs to the frames where they were spawned is what made me try Conkeror out in the first place. For the moment, though, Conkeror is like Firefox, although the developers seem to be working on it.
I'm just curious about the food industry, I don't want to get into some debate about people's philosophy of government. I'd be interested to hear if anyone actually knows something of what it takes to sell canned food.

> so long as no one or nothing is being harmed in the process.

Ever had a case of food poisoning? I had a Subway sandwich once, where I think the mayo had been left outside in the Arizona sun, and boy was that a mess for the next 24 hours. Whether you support regulations or not, food is something people need to be careful with.
I only regret not being able to upvote this more than once.
JINX!
It's almost exactly like writing out HTML. The advantages are that you're writing something that your editor and your program can understand. The editor can highlight things appropriately, the program can insert or delete html easily since you've encoded it as a standard data structure.

Also, you may not have noticed that even though it can handle the data in tuples, if you write it in list form (as in your comment), it's trivial for a program to add extra items enclosed in a particular tag. So if I have:

x = ["ul"]

I can just append elements to x to fill out the list:

for i in range(10): x.append(["li", "Item %s" % i])

However, I don't think that it's _quite_ as painful as writing HTML... You don't have to worry about closing tags, for instance. That said, I really wish Python could deal with barewords in data structures, because that would really clean it up otherwise.
"Enterprise microblogging"?

And there is a company selling that?

And there are companies buying that?

I'm not sure if I want to laugh or cry right now.
How is the comparison not meaningful? MapReduce and parallel SQL implementations (e.g. Greenplum, Teradata) are competitors, and are typically used for precisely the same task (large-scale data analysis). They obviously differ in some ways (which is what makes a comparison interesting), but your suggestion that "MapReduce doesn't even come close to being anything comparable" is just uninformed.
Only listened, as I'm working. Seems to be missing a few things: over 9000, heroic women, "I'm a pwncat now", casual sex, metaflame, "series of tubes", the "subtle X troll" construction, et al.
Learning POE: HTTP-2-MUD proxy
So a couple of thick sheets of plexiglass and machine screws/spacers just don't do it anymore?
Have a hard time believing you. The tweet was 39 minutes ago (as of now) but all the comments were made much before that.

The topic was interesting to an extent, but you could have avoided the spammy comments.
It is known that companies are, usually, more resistant to the inovation.
I just remember the company I worked for some time ago: they switched from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 last year :)...
I know a company which builds educational products...yet it doesn't support Firefox! Firefox which has 20% of the market!
Another company just upgraded their Internet Explorer browser...switching from IE6 to IE7...

So, give it some time...the enterprise will catch up eventually with Twitter like stuff. Too bad that, at that time, something new will be out there...and they have to play the cat and mouse again.
Better yet, be the middleman! Implement a marketplace where people needing a part can hook up with people willing to fabricate it. Outsource the actual work and the fulfillment and the risk, and just take a small cut of each transaction.
All good suggestions, thanks. :)
Digital Citizenship
PostgreSQL 8.4 beta 1 - Short summary of new features
I do a lot of newspaper reading, and there's been a twitter story at least twice a week for the last month, including a couple front page blurbs.
Based on my experience - Revenue share deal with a bigger partner never works out. Unless they invest upfront and their skin is in the game, they'll not too be worried about monetizing your efforts.

My suggestion - Ask for minimum guarantee before you invest your time & effort doing it.
Well, that's what I was thinking... If you have the 3D design knowledge, you could use these services, spec the part, then offer this it up for people that have broken plastic pieces around the house.

Hell, most of it is probably already spec'd in a manual somewhere, and just needs to be obtained.
http://www.google.com/url

sa=t

source=web #ok

ct=res #?

cd=7 # 7th link in the results_list

url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm

ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN

rct=j #?

q=flowers

usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w

sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Anyone want to guess as to the meaning of the other parameters?
Why do they need 2 hashes?
and a signed hash?
Here's the gist: the viral coefficient has a direct impact on your effective cost of acquisition. Even if you're not "viral" increasing your viral coefficient to 0.9 has an impact on your paid strategy.

In fact, there's a good argument that this is a better way to grow than trying to get viral as quickly as possible.
Many good points! I agree on most part.

However, from what I've seen - even while you do a transaction, SQLite seems to write a "journal" file (which is still I/O and still slow).

I'm also not saying mySQL should be used for app file format (that would be pretty dumb), but rather challenging the original article's premise that SQLite (as mp3) is one-fits-all solution. There are many solutions for many situations and SQLite is far from being universal solution.
Hi ajju,

Thanks for the explanation. You're correct about outsourcing, and this is the #1 reason why we have customers :)

We often get requests to build something specific for a mobile device, customized skins/toolbars, annotation tools, exporting forms, etc. It's impossible for us to do everything, so we changed things around a bit to allow others to build their own interfaces on top of our own.

We will continue to enhance our viewer for our core audience, and we will focus on areas that we believe we can deliver the most value.

I'm hopeful that with our new approach, it will empower other products and services to use 90% of what we have built and add the last 10% themselves.

I hope that clears it up, and thanks for the feedback. -Chris
Do people really queue up at the post office still? I do all of my taxes online. Granted, my income is low enough that the federal TurboTax online is free, and the state I'm a resident in has its own online system.
A good way to make money for those guys...intranet microblogging.
No, actually this is the first time I hear about it. Thanks for a pointer - I'll look into that.

Although the LGPL license seems like a downer - if I understand it correctly it means that either I should distribute my software as open source or compile that particular library into some kind of external .dll, right?
Company Body Slams Prostate Cancer - Stock Goes Through the Roof
some of that stuff can be found in the Richter Scales parody of the same Billy Joel song...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

The college humor vid reminded me of this.
PostgreSQL 8.4 Beta
PERL is dead. Long live Perl.
Twitteronomy