skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd also be curious to hear from anyone who has some hands-on experience with the emulator. From reading some of the documentation they've put out and watching a webcast about Pre development, it looks like building Pre apps is more or less like building web pages. On the plus side, this means they're easier to build than an obj-c gui. On the minus side, you have to use javascript for logic.

I'm predicting apps on the Pre will look a lot more like web pages and a lot less like desktop or iPhone apps. I wish you could use c/c++ and opengl on the Pre -- that's what would get me really excited about it as a platform.
never base a business plan on educating the public. :p
Meditating On The Future Of The Mozilla Store
I would suggest the icons on the left side of the weather (I didn't even see them the first 2 times I looked and I felt they were missing). I don't mind the vertical presentation but I would suggest you do something to distinguish the days such as different background colors. Right now they kinda blend into each other in my opinion. A simple fix to put the weather as the highlight of the page would be to put it where the comments are. Most people read left to right.
Sun has a habit of using JavaOne to beat developers over the head with whatever shiny, new idea is perceived to make it the most money (or, in past years, will cause analysts to increase price targets). Schwartz loves to talk about "billions and billions" like Carl Sagan, but his numbers are irrelevant when it comes to predicting partner revenue. His reasoning is much like that of an entrepreneur saying, "If we only capture one percent of this market..." Nevermind, in this case, that there are fewer and fewer reasons to build a desktop app instead of a webapp.
True. It just seems that their website should be a little more usable given who they are and the amount and nature of information they need to disseminate.
Yeah, that made me gag too... their PR department is really over-selling things. They also overlook a very embarrassing fact: in spite of all those "users", I bet they have almost no brand recognition whatsoever with at least 75% of them. Most average consumers install Java because some website told them that they have to and they've long since forgotten about it (or at least until the updater nagged them from the Windows task bar that updates were available).
I don't know everything about how phonegap works, but I gather that you embed your javascript code in the application (as opposed to downloading it from a webserver) and this code is loaded and run by the phonegap host app code when your app is launched.

Imagine a poorly written application that inadvertently allows it's javascript source to be modified by a third party. This third party then would have the ability to exercise any of the api's exposed by the phonegap host process. Again I'm not intimate with the functions that phonegap exposes, but I can imagine a few parts of the native SDK that you wouldn't want intruders probing on your phone.

This is why Apple doesn't allow all of the SDK's tools to be accessed via javascript running in the browser (Safari) they provide. They do expose some native controls (as can be seen on iphone optimized websites and apps) but there is a limit and I imagine this is one of the reasons.
I'm going to add this article to my bookmarks on web site monitization. It appears that a good way to attract traffic is to pattern a site after a British tabloid. Prominently display a gorgeous girl (even with her clothes on!), along with whatever might be of interest to the real target audience. Grab those eyeballs.
> It strikes me as obvious that critical thinking ability is best trained with math.

Writing a cogent and convincing argument is not a problem that can be solved with linear algebra. Ethics is not the differential equations of competing interests. That you would consider a good math education to be a core component of critical thinking appears to serve as an example proof of why engineers are poorly trained in critical thinking skills.
I love it!! Its got a great sense of style and does one thing really well. I wouldn't have bothered with comments personally because I live in SF where we have no weather to speak of. Sometimes it's chilly, sometimes its a little warm, but that's about the only extremes we have and I see no reason to UGC it. The location detection was spot on for my desktop (much better than Wolfram Alpha that thinks I am in San Jose - as if!!!)

It didn't work on the blackberry, the ip address could not be resolved to a place (for very good reasons outside of your control)

If I were the designer (you!) I'd loose the comments and make the actual weather info more prominent and maybe more data if you have it. For me, its about weather not what people say about the weather.
Black Swans in IT
IRobot Rolls Out Pocket-Sized, One-Pound Machine, Ready to Swarm
Twitter is retaining more users than Nielsen thinks
Most and Least Affordable Cities To Live In
Leila and Paul bootstrapped the company from day 1 and have paying corporate customers.
On the minus side, you have to use javascript for logic.

That's not really a minus, in my opinion. Most of the problems with Javascript are really the DOM and lack of libraries, and I don't have many problems with the DOM these days due to jQuery and friends, so if they have the libraries...
Have you considered using Facebook connect to make the page more relevant? Local comments can be fun to read once in a while but if a friend has left a comment I definitely want to see it. Just make people log into facebook to leave a comment. You can also tell me what other friends have "been interested in" the weather at the location I'm looking at.

It also gives you a clear method of expansion (ie. into facebook through mini-feed stories and stuff).

I like the page. It's very simple and to the point.

Love the page. It's very simple and nice.
FFS people, submit your Please Review as a link, then immediately copy/paste your description as a comment.
With over 500 articles, I've played around with format quite a bit. I enjoy doing creative and new things.

The problem is that the eyeballs you grab don't always monetize that much. You end up with this impedance mismatch. But maybe I'm wrong -- perhaps the PayPal link I added might actually work!

It's not just tabloid-related. It's much more along the lines of keyword density, which the article goes over. For instance, I wrote an article on Global Warming http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2007/05/did_walt_disn... that had a picture of Walt Disney holding an early version of Micky Mouse. It was a lengthy article and I was trying to make a serious point.

If you google for pictures of Walt Disney, there's my blog up there at the top http://images.google.com/images?q=Walt%20Disney&oe=utf-8...

To this day I get 30-50 hits a day from people looking for pictures of Walt Disney. They read the article title (of course not the text!) and then make inane comments about global warming.

So the strategy might be good for bringing people to your site, but for what purpose?

I'm telling you, I should have gotten into porn.
And how much dough do the font-designers see? Virtually nothing. Designing typefaces is one of the lesser paid design professions, albeit being one of the hardest if you want to do a good job. Foundries are just another one of those music-newspapers- obsolete by digital age industries.
well this looks quite interesting!

edit:
ok I'm watching the video where you, or someone, is explaining the service. I was wondering how limiting is the access to data? I'm under the impression that you crawl the web no matter what and clients piggyback on the crawl stream and do analytics on it. So, who makes calls on web crawling method, I guess you? What if a client wants to crawl and analyze only a specific domain, country specific, for example? And how often and what exactly gets crawled? Lets say a client wants to implement a news.google.com or google alerts (or even tineye) - just as an example - it would analyze a web crawl stream from you and get data out of your system to their servers for utilization? How would such a, presumably large, data get transferred over to the client? What is provided as crawled data? Only a html stream, or the whole page that includes js, css and pictures? Or would a client need to get image links from your crawl and get images themselves? Sorry for lots of questions and incoherency :) but it does look interesting.
I've been following @yongfook for about a year. I don't think there's any formal connection between him and 37 Signals, though he seems to be an enthusiastic, open student of business/design/UX, frequently linking to and sharing thoughts about things he finds interesting, including 37 Signals stuff (and Ogilvy and art and food...).

I agree that the shopping experience is extremely close to that of 37 signals, but given that the thing he's selling (URL shortener + analytics + campaign/goal monitor) is unrelated to any current 37 Signals products, it doesn't feel "too close" or disingenuous to me.

Also, he's the primary developer of the open source activity stream/ blogging tool Sweetcron, so there's another reason I give him the benefit of the doubt. He seems to have a healthy respect for the creative process.
Writing lengthy and well cited papers is a bad habit I developed in humanities classes.

Your paper must be at least $N pages long, and must cite at least $P primary sources and $S secondary sources.

Writing papers which are as concise as possible (without being unreadable) and minimize external dependencies is a skill I learned in math graduate school:

Your paper has been automatically rejected due to a length greater than 4 pages.

While interesting, your paper will only be accepted if you clarify the following unclear points.

I learned more about good english writing (as opposed to writing content-free puffery) from coding than I did from humanities classes.
"rely on Wolfram Alpha to either give you the right answer (depending, of course, on the accuracy of its own index), or no answer at all."

This is wrong because of weaknesses in query parsing/explaining. I tried out Archimedes's sand-reckoner problem (how many grains of sand it takes to fill the solar system); it rephrased my query as "planets volume / volume of a small grain of sand" (which sounds reasonable) and gave an answer off by 17 orders of magnitude, taking "planets volume" to be the volume of the median-sized planet among all the planets. Its query explanation didn't link to any explanation of "planets volume", so I had to make that a separate query to find that out.

They could solve this problem with a better interface to its understanding of your query.
This is very interesting, so I'm not sure why it is dead... I had a similar experience with people going to my site from "girls gone wild" searches. When I searched Google Images for "Girls Gone Wild" a picture from my site came up in the top 10 results. It turns out it was just a picture from a party I had attended where one girl was straddling the other in some kind of horse play -- the photo name was girls_gone_wild.jpg.
so do you like it or love it?
Bookmarked!

You may want to add a small "change city" link at the bottom of the city name that's in a huge font. That's the first place that I looked.

Also, I like the font sizing, but I think the emphasis is backwards. The weather should be in the bigger font and the city in the smaller font.
Odd. My experience is just the opposite.

I think you might have been more content at a trade school, not University. They have different goals. Pressure to dumb down the University to serve as simply a cog feeder for business has always been there.

I have a degree in biochemistry, formal and informal training in computer science, a minor in English, fluency in a foreign language I learned at university...and then this silly professional degree.

My science and professional degree == the critical thinking skills I frankly could have obtained, free of charge, learning automotive repair at my local community college.

Humanities work == understanding and appreciation for how different people(s) think, exposure to the "why" rather than just the "how", development of a yearning to create, deep appreciation for the things that make life just a bit more than our checking accounts: reverence for nature, beauty, compassion, truth.

And yeah, an ability to think far more critically about things a little heavier than syntax errors, an ability to weigh evidence, work with these nebulous, imperfect, non-Platonic things called people, and make correct, critical decisions that incorporate science, ethics, economics - choosing harder rights over easier wrongs.

To paraphrase a fellow Dead Poet, there's a hell of a lot of 6 inch pipe to lay out there. It will pay well. You'll revel in the comforting, solid duality of pipe and wrench.

You may come to that end pipe cap wondering if that was all.
I find it convenient to have the description always on top like this. If it's a comment it'll probably end up some way down the comment list and it might not be obvious what it is.
Neat.

a billion light years / average height human * (1/9) furlong / age universe = 1.01 c (speed of light)

Very neat.
Phil specifically addresses the idea that he is dissing RoR in a comment.(emphasis mine)

"Angry Rails Enthusiasts Whose Comments I Deleted: A lot of the comments were of the form “Your assertion that it is impossible to build a responsive Web site with Ruby on Rails is wrong. Rails is in fact great if programmed by a great mind like my own.”

The problem with this kind of comment is that I never asserted that Ruby on Rails could not be used effectively by some programmers.

The point of the story was to show that the MIT-trained programmer with 20 years experience and an enthusiasm for the latest and greatest ended up building something that underperformed something put together by people without official CS training who apparently invested zero time in exploring optimal tools.

Could some team of Rails experts have done a better job with mitgenius.com? Obviously they could have! But in the 2+ years that our MIT graduate worked on this site, he apparently did not converge on an acceptable solution.

My enthusiasm for this story has nothing to do with bashing Ruby or Rails. I like this story because (1) it shows the fallacy of credentialism; a undergrad degree in CS is proof of nothing except that someone sat in a chair for four years (see http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2007/08/23/improving-unde... for my thoughts on how we could change the situation), (2) it shows what happens when a programmer thinks that he is so smart he doesn’t need to draft design documents and have them reviewed by others before proceeding (presumably another set of eyes would have noticed the mismatch between data set size and RAM), (3) it shows that fancy new tools cannot substitute for skimping on 200-year-old engineering practices and 40-year-old database programming practices, and (4) it shows the continued unwillingness of experienced procedural language programmers to learn SQL and a modicum of RDBMS design and administration, despite the fact that the RDBMS has been at the heart of many of society’s most important IT systems for at least two decades."

That is exactly what I understood from the article.

I don't see any rails bashing in the original article and you would have to cherry pick phrases to get that idea. I read the HN comments first and thought phil had gone off on a rant against RoR t judge from some comments here.

that will teach me to read HN comments before reading the original article!
Can you point at examples? The examples on the standard page are still standard concurrent programs (http://code.google.com/p/stacklessexamples/wiki/StacklessExa...). I'm sure an example of stackless in, say, indexing text would be most appreciated.
you are misusing the word 'theory'.
and you are completely butchering the scientific method in the idea you propose(what you propose is not a theory.. nor close).

Mitch Kapor also did not have a theory.. he had an 'idea' an 'hunch'.. but not a theory.. theories have been proven by rigorous reproducible testing.. it would been hard for him to have done that; because lotus 1 2 3 .. was a completely new revolutionary idea. If he had spent the time to come up with a true theory based on years of testing with consumers.. diffrent types of UI's etc.. well someone else would have beat him to market..

there is nothing wrong with working off of hunches.. and in fact probably the fastest way to market.. and if your hunch doesn't work then come up with another idea..

companies that work off of proven ideas, and theory.. are large companies looking to make steady growth..

you wanna make millions.. fly by the seat of your pants.
that and buffett has been outspoken against quants. he has also been accused of 'being in the right place at the right time' or 'lucky' quite a few times, but this is not the case.

another good book on buffett which has some sections dedicated to buffett vs quants and buffett vs 'its all luck' ppl is "The making of an American Capitalist" (http://www.amazon.com/Buffett-American-Capitalist-Roger-Lowe...) -- first book I got on him, perhaps the best (got snowball, haven't read it yet).
Is it ironic that the authors goes on and on about the limits of HTML, presents a solution but doesn't actually show it in use. You're only given links to download Cufón and an HTML sample to cut and paste.

... anyway I'll just stick to the good ol' fashion img for a title with an alt tag if I need to have "fancy fonts" for something. It's not slick, but it is simple and reliable.
Does cost of living translate into cost of startup? Does it matter much?

I think if you can pay yourself (startup owner) less but still maintain the same standard of living, that's a great advantage.
If lottery tickets are generated randomly how does the person in front of you winning decrease your chance of winning?
Stephen here at Mint.com. Mint does not send those types of alerts. We do use a third party to deliver our text alerts via all the carriers. I'd really like to learn more about these text messages about a "cash advance" so please email me at smann at mint dot com so I can research. Thank you.
I like it! Add a link to the radar and I'll use it. -- I like to see the radar in motion so I can see the rain coming...
... but guys have you seen the TinEye widgets? i bet you haven't:http://tineye.com/widgets/display my favorite is the angry baby of course http://tineye.com/widgets/display?baby
Does anyone remember the name of that free and open index of the web that some folks are compiling? They let you download it; it's like a terabyte. I think they are out of Seattle or Vancover. Anyway, it would be interesting if 80legs could make that available for searching.
disclaimer: i made goingtorain.com

i would make the current day's forecast bigger, since that's probably what most people want to see. the current conditions are not as important since you can easily see whether it's currently raining or whatever without going to the site.

also, what kind of comments are you expecting for visitors to leave? i would think that spammers would quickly fill them up with junk and drown out any useful ones, but i can't really think of what useful comments others would want to read on a weather site.
Ask HN: Who killed my article?
So I spend all morning writing a technology-related article that has pictures of a cute girl on it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617050

The girl is related to the story, which is about search engine optimization and blog traffic.

Is there some reason this was so distasteful as to deserve being killed? If so, why?

I re-read the site guidelines. I'm not complaining. I'd just like feedback so we're all clear about what principle was being violated. If it were politics, or link spamming, or some other terrible thing, sure, but attractive people are no longer allowed inside a technology-related article? Huh?
I don't think they should plan on too many premium subscriptions in the U.S., Napster does this now, and they even recently went to $5 a month, and you don't hear too much about them. I think anything "youth-oriented" (music, Facebook) will need to live or die on ads because the kids don't have credit cards and don't want to ask their parents to pay for this, especially if the parents know they can "get it for free".
PhoneGap doesn't appear to expose any of the Private API's however it does expose parts of the SDK that are not normally available to web-based applications when run via Safari. I have a post above that elaborates on why Apple may find this objectionable.
With GT right there I'd imagine its off the charts.
Seattle has a lot of dead spots on AT&T & T-Mobile and Verizon's EVDO network (last time I checked about a year ago) had a lot of dead spots as well (their EVDO is on a different band from the voice). Sprint's customer service has historically been terrible but their data network is really good, I've used them for EVDO for twoish years and usually get at least 1.5Mbps down / 500Kbps up wherever I am.
There are already stories of Google becoming more bureaucratic. For example, I remember Paul Buchheit mentioning in some talk about how he first joined Google because the previous place he was started to suck...then sometime later, he left Google for the same reason.
Is Microsoft Bundling Silverlight?
Not exactly. The measurement was of "value-perception" -- Yes, consumers are starting to view Macs as luxuries, but there's no evidence of a causal relationship between that shift an Microsoft's advertising. For instance, a similar trend was seen when asking individuals whether or not household goods (microwaves, dishwashers, air conditioning, etc.) were luxuries or necessities. What would Occam say?

Link to the Luxury / Necessity study: http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/733/luxury-necessity-recessi...
Edit to comments below: but that is not what he does; he does not use his directorial power for leverage, he just goes ahead and does it without even telling anyone. If he is so confident about his position, why doesn't he tell people and then do it anyway? I don't know the legal implications of liquidating a business, but that whole paragraph read as "I did it because I could and so should you". I guess I am still confused as to the moral of the story.
World Oil Production Forecast - Update May 2009
Kareena kapoor - News, Videos, Pictures and more
Being an European (albeit probably not the standard one), I don't really sense the "cheapness". The ad to me is just saying: "why pay more if you can get something that does what you want for a lot less?" (which I agree on, and it's basically the reason I don't own a Mac).

The issue as I see it, is more about being practical and not just falling for trends or overpriced quality. It's like buying expensive branded clothes or non-branded ones. Is someone who doesn't buy Nike, Versace, Gucci, whatever brands being cheap or simply being consequent with their real needs?
Yeah, Google already functions as a basic calculator and unit conversion tool.

Out of curiosity I tried seeing the the calories burnt were any different for a 60 year-old man or 9000 year-old man. Apparently, they aren't.

http://www28.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=running+4mph+30+minut...
I was about to comment on the article when it went dead... I'd like to know about this as well. I didn't read anything offensive in the article, although, honestly, the number of pictures of the girl seems a bit gratuitous
if the community flags it enough, it'll typically get deleted. you probably brought on the flags.
I had an ultimate fallback for high school physics. Start putting stuff in likely equations where the units work out to the desired answer. That always worked, save for two or three occasions. Unfortunately, once I figured that out, that let me be lazy and kept me from learning as well as I should have.

When Wolfram Alpha starts solving word problems, time to start worrying. Not about machines rebelling, but about cheating in grade school math classes.