skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good question- it's both, and the color scheme. If you pull up the Book category, most of the icons suck- plain, generic, bookcase after bookcase. So, a big red icon that also states FREE prominently is sure to get stand out.

Based on how we moved up the list, I attribute most of the sales growth to increased visibility from our icon as we moved up the Top 100 list, assuming that search traffic from things like 'Free Books' would remain relatively steady.
"....we’ve gone from having a graph-store to having a proper graph database..."

A graph database and a "triple store" in semantic technologies are essentially the same thing. This company makes some very aggressive claims that allegrograph, Jena, Oracle (with Spatial), sesame and others (including the korean arm of my current company) have also made. Typically, such claims fail to live up to the marketing. I wonder how this solution compares to these traditional triple stores?
They essentially said "ohh, we don't mind the 'swear' words, just the really bad ones"

Fuck that. It is exactly the same thing, but the lexicon has evolved.
If someone argues that Emacs is based in Lisp the you come back with the much stronger retort that Vim is scripted in Vim Script.

At least the people who write scripts for Emacs do it because they like the editor and enjoy extending it with (Emacs)Lisp. The people who write scripts for Vim do it because they love their editor more then they can't stand Vim Script.
Netless - an attempt to subvert corporate / government control of networks.
they mean it as in, it senses how hard you pushed or are pushing a key. sounds like a piezoelectric keyboard. but, there will also be blowback with respect to people who prefer their keyboards to have the button-click feel of typing.

but, i wouldn't be surprised at all if they did at some point in time attempt to patent the keyboard.
Implemented on the front page of Directed Edge

http://www.directededge.com/
My twitter is down. I was going to ask all of you to add me to keep me updated, but I suppose that won't work. Add me later then http://twitter.com/colleenannhayes
How much RAM was on the card? 64bit numbers * 8000^2 = 512 MB. Granted today you can have 4GB per card, but back then you where probably stuck with a fraction of that.

Still, PCIe 2.0 x16 is limited to 8GByte/s so I guess the real question is how many matrixes where you multiplying?
Shark Week – Kikolani and CornerScribe | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
I wonder if the source of the attack might be related to the massive DDOS that took out SoftLayer's DNS servers last Tuesday. A massive volume of mal-formed UDP packets (~500k/second) from a very large number of IPs managed to bring down a distributed anycast based DNS system for approximately 18 hours.

Seems odd to have two huge scale attacks launched within 10 days if they aren't somehow related (testing or proving out a botnet, etc...).
how we make $350/day without marketing

Designing a logo which stands out compared to competitors around you: I would say this is a textbook case of marketing.

Having said that, it is clever using a free marketing opportunity like that, and, even better, being (one of) the first to realize there's a huge opportunity there.

All I hope is that I won't be asked to punch any monkeys while browsing the AppStore any time soon. :)
Rich web interfaces a SproutCore intro by Mike Subelsky at JSConf 2009
reddit, digg if i'm bored. Bensbargains.net
Apple used to be smart enough to understand that most voidable actions weren't the root cause of problems with their devices. It wasn't long ago that you could even disassemble your Powerbook and not void the warranty unless you really cocked something up. Now they're coming up with any excuse imaginable to void your warranty. This goes hand in hand with Apple steering away from their traditional intelligent consumer and going after the overprivileged teenager market.
The more I am reading about new apple patents, the more I am inclining towards the fact that beating an iPhone is going to be extremely difficult.

There has been a lot of complaining against the appstore, FCC starting an investigation, apple rejecting a dictionary app and what not, but still no one has come close to beating an iPod yet, with all what iPhone is offering, and the patents apple has applied it seems like it is going to get more and more difficult in the future.

my 2cents
High Performance Kick Ass Web Apps by Stoyan Stefanov at JSConf 2009
Rejected by Apple, iPhone Developers Go Underground
Building Apps In CouchDB By Chris Anderson and Jan Lehnardt at JSConf 2009
but if u look from the positive side, I would love to have those sensors on my iPhone with all the important information protected. I used to own a thinkpad with hard disk protection and loved that feature.

I dont know why people just want to look at the bad side of things.
Comcast Speeds Up Its Superfast Broadband Deployment
I've been in enough situations where direct messaging on Twitter has the best and most efficient means of communication to dismiss Twitter not serving a need. Yes, the utility of Twitter is almost always overblown by the media, but we shouldn't underestimate how many use it as part of their regular communication workflow.
Joyent Smart Platform at JSConf 2009
Team Apart (YC S08) hits the right price for collaboration: $0.00
Hey guys, I have 50 invites for hacker news. First come, first serve: http://teamapart.com/signup/hackernews
You should have enough karma to turn this into a poll, I think you should do so.

I'd simplify your professional 6services into independent professionals since these are individuals that are either in business for their self or for in business for either some type of firm or agency. Independent professionals would not only incorporate bankers, lawyers, accountants, etc. (as providers of service) but also creative professionals as well.

Interesting start nevertheless, I personally would add education, nanotech, and possibly robotics to that list as well.
The timing is all wrong for that analysis to make sense. It's much more likely to be a script kiddie trying to build "street cred." Or an extortion attempt ("pay us, or we take your site down").

If I were an attacker, though, I'd attack for a bit, then back off, then attack, then back off, and so on. Intermittent disruption is far more annoying for the users than a sustained attack.
The point of the ID Card is to make people _feel_ safe. The point of the Daily Mail is to make people _feel_ scared. So this article is not surprising.

Note I'm not saying the card makes you safe or that the Daily Mail actually puts you at risk. It's all about how you feel.
I think you're right to warn people, but I don't think you're right to equate the two very different kinds of pain.

When you are "forced" to do something for someone else you feel not only the pain of the task, but bitterness and indignation as well. When you're doing it for yourself all you feel is the pain of the actual task, which is not nearly as bad.

The difference between wiping your own ass and being forced to wipe your boss's ass.
Ask HN: Any robonova users here?
I have just ordered one and am curious what my favorite group of hackers thinks about them. Any cool hacks? Any neat sensor tricks? Have you programmed one to pull your cats tail?
I don't like the idea that reviewers are doing their best to try and make my apps fail approval. That comes across to me as a developer that Apple doesn't want me to succeed.

Just to present an alternate viewpoint, where app reviewers manage to do good: That depends. If the reviewer was trying to make my app fail by crashing it — and managed to do so — I'd want to hear about it and have it fixed before I heard about it from the public.
I've been trying to make a point of reading more IEEE Spectrum articles lately.

They're well-written and seem to be scientifically accurate - a rarity on the web these days.
Ajax Secure Service Layer
The obviousness of solutions isn't overrated; rather, the obviousness of the problem domain is what's overrated. Great ideas solve problems people didn't even know existed. When people know about the problems, the solutions are much easier to find, and it's one of the sources of second-mover advantage: discovering a good problem doesn't necessarily mean one comes up with a good solution.
but they _did_ hack the card, and that is a fact. doesn't that give a bad impression (may be not scared)?

hopefully this'll make the gov implement better security measures, should they decide to go ahead with the card.
Shareaholic for Firefox: Firefox add-ons
Looks good, however, I don't know how secure users will feel without the indication of security from the browser. Though this is clearly useful for logins, but probably not for e-commerce.
You are right, I don't know that, so while I can't falsify the anti-amphetamine claim in a rigorous scientific way, I can still point out that not all amphetamine users are spending their late night tweaking sessions on mindless tasks. That should be enough to at least spark some curiosity about the drug having some possible benefits, at least in moderation.

I think it comes down to a matter of values, i.e. the long-term constant health of your physical brain vs. the benefit from getting extra bursts of energy to focus on immediate work. Not something science can really answer.
Yes, nothing signifies "free books" like a Soviet hammer-and-sickle.

Who knows where the world would be today if the USSR hadn't kept the flame of publisher freedom alive through the darkest days of the cold war, when dissidents had to smuggle mimeographed copies of banned books into Paris, London, and New York.

Wait, that's not how it was?
Image galleries | FoxieWire.com
I may just be a little absurd pointing this out, but is it really necessary to use twitter speak to preface a reply when the formatting of the conversation implies your target?

I know I am being pedantic and this is not adding much to the conversation, but this has been slowly creeping throughout the internet, much more lately, of the use of twitter speak in seemingly unnecessary places. What influenced you to use it? Is this a good way to track the influence of certain social networks, by their adoption of common idioms in other disparate networks? Can we follow through this idea and scrape networks to find where idioms are being generated and pinpoint hot-spots of the internet?

Ah, this is just opening a can of worms for such a simple style guideline, but what are your thoughts on this anyway?
My suggestions based upon years of running my own business and working closely with entrepreneurs:

Never launch out on your own if your primary motivation is to escape a dreary job or career path (it is OK if wanting to leave a bad job is an incidental motivation for doing something you would otherwise want to do). Always build from strength. Always count the cost (which is great) and the risks (which are great). Weigh this against the rewards, which are potentially great (greater financial return, independence, pride of achievement). If you see a good opportunity before you, and your eyes are open to the downside, then by all means venture forth if it makes sense to you.

I have elaborated on these points here: http://grellas.com/faq_business_startup_013.html ("Tips from a Business Lawyer on Becoming a Founder").
My wife works in development. Her theory is insightful and simple: she says mortality from disease (even until age 20) is VERY high for poor people (I know of a poor 10-yr old who died of rabies in India, which is extremely uncommon among the middle-class of India). So they're being rational by having more kids.

Which is why development reduces fertility; people have higher confidence that their brood will survive into adulthood even if it's smaller.
Settlers (and Seafarers, and Cities & Knights) of Catan is a great game. My girlfriend and I also like Ingenious. It's a very simple and quick game (and the only one I've found that's still interesting with two players), yet there is some fairly interesting strategy to it.
A quick search on Wiktionary.org easily turns up a number of offensive “urban slang” terms that you won’t find in popular dictionaries such as one that you referenced, the New Oxford American Dictionary included in Mac OS X.

We're totally fine with established rich white vulgarity, but new poor black vulgarity? Come on now, that's just crossing the line.
That's Facebook. Twitter has no such policy.
The problem here is two fold. Apple conduct a deliberate search for swear words and slang, find it, flag it to the developer, and bounce the app. Technorati goes mad, sets the blogosphere alight with vitriol and damns Apple to hell, scant months after worshipping the self-same company. Alternatively, Apple fail to conduct said search, pass the app, and someone's rosy cheeked darling is caught scanning naughty words on their iPhone. Consumer advocacy groups and parental groups set the blogosphere alight with vitriol and damns Apple to hell. The honeymoon for Apple is over. They fought, they gained market and mindshare, and now they find themselves in a position where their former fans wish to slay them, and they're high profile enough to piss off the non-techs who buy their tech. Will be watching the Apple hate with interest in the coming months, same as with the Google hate. How we do loathe a victor.
There will always be decisions which seem arbitrary and subjective in these situations because what's going on here is a very rough categorization with no room for nuance. And the very idea of age as a measure of appropriateness is pretty arbitrary to begin with, after all.

Parental controls and ratings are a quagmire. And the more technological the product, the stickier it gets.
Yes, thought the examples they give are all with static data. It took a fair bit of massaging (and using undocumented features) to get it work with dynamically querying data. The connection code is here for the curious:

http://www.directededge.com/js/wikiviz.js
Review: Touchatag RFID System
Adobe Wave: Get Visitors To Return To Your Website
Is your friend of the belief that ideas should be patentable?

That I can use any idea I want to “build my product” is what has allowed our society to evolve to where we are. And when I grab a dozen ideas from the public domain I will refine these, maybe add a few of my own (original) ideas to the mix, and in turn inspire others.

I actually know of one original idea I had which has inspired the creation of other products, and I am honestly happy about that. This is how things should work! Also, this “original” idea of mine was really just taking an idea from another domain and use it in another context :)
Twitter is basically a phone book. Imagine loosing your address book on your iPhone or blackberry; you'd be lost. Direct messaging might be a great way to communicate with people, but that is mostly because that direct message then gets emailed and texted to the individual.
I've actually seen a BBC Horizon documentary a while ago, "Do You Know What Time Is?" [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fyl5z], that also talks about this. On top of all the theoretical background, they interview people at the US Army that manage the GPS sattelites, and show how they have to resync the internal clocks every day because of this.

Worth a watch if you like this kind of material.

EDIT: Sorry, I believe it was a different episode: "What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity?" [http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband...]

Here are the online video links to both episodes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3aYKAJEVfQ

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-421765295887486158
Advertising serves two related but distinct purposes:

1) Trying to get immediate sales, as part of selling a good;

2) More important is marketing - building longer term awareness of brands, quality, and availability of goods.

When people downplay the effectiveness of advertising they are almost always thinking of its effectiveness at selling, where its major benefit to a company is through marketing.
I've seen these bots with my own eyes and they rock - http://damirhorvat.blogspot.com/2008/08/visiting-valleygoo.h...

And the anybots crew... such nice people! Visiting YCmbinator and Anybots office was really cool. Thanks guys again for nice presentations and for putting our pictures on your wall of fame! Thanks and all the best. Damir
Thanks for the additional info.
You're right, I forgot to account for the fact that the 250 downloads is a "world" total and not the "US" total. Do US sales generally account for roughly half your sales. If so, 8th place at 125 downloads is still pretty good for the "Books" category.
I don't know about taking to too far, even if it is a rather pessimistic (or even realistic) view of things. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and a lot of people don't realize that. They only know what they see in the movies: lots of money, fast cars, etc. I know I fall into that same mental trap sometimes.
Retrospectively, this "content" flagging could apply to Mail, Safari, multimedia apps etc, so I guess my argument doesn't hold much water. I do maintain that the brouhaha and anger at Apple at the moment is interesting to behold. 'Scuse me while I return to panel beating FOSS from source onto my belligerent MacBook ;)
They know the capabilities of the machine that will produce the part.

It is a misunderstanding of the process to think that slapping geometric tolerances on a drawing will change the part. If the process specified produces the desired part within tolerance then there is no need to specify it further. If the process can not produce the part reliably then adding tolerances to a drawing is not going to help. They do mention the one functional specification they need -a press fit into a bearing
You've never read Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. He writes eloquently about how we seem to believe that the only truly real people are those we see on the big screen and if by chance we come into contact with one, we often feel more alive...
I was expecting stats on network activity and got pictures of equipment and beer. Did I miss something?
I love the MakerBot guys and I can't wait to grab one of these machines for myself. As soon as I can justify the price ;)
If the above is the only reason to quit PHP I would advise against doing it. This is a rather small issue, you could switch to other languages and have any number of small issues. Oh, somebody monkeypatched this built-in function, should have used .equals() instead of ==, so on and so forth.

There are plenty of good reasons to switch to a different language, but in this case I would highly suggest holding out for something a little more extreme.

Although as an avid PHP devloper who has chased down his fair share of coercion errors, I feel your pain.
> The Team Apart founders were members of Y Combinator’s class of Summer ‘08, though the company has moved on to an entirely new project than the one they were initially working on while at YC

is this the new project?
Your Mom’s Facebook Status: I’m Crunching Climate Data
Apple’s Schiller Speaks On Censored Dictionaries, Ignores The Bigger Issues
> Entering a meeting involves simply clicking a link — there’s no plugin needed (it’s based on Flash) and the service is free.

Isn't Flash a plugin? My iPhone browser seems to think so.
As someone who beta tested this numerous times, I can tell you this is some ridiculously slick virtual meeting software. It reminds me of the Microsoft Surface a bit, the way you can manipulate stuff in and out of focus and so on. Very cool stuff.
Facebook Problems Also the Result of DDoS Attack
Cool. Portable enough that they bring their own suds packed in dry ice.

Also I was pleased to see that they are using open/bsd with pf as the firewall.
Yeah. I got that, and learned, once again, that RTFM was not part of my skill set.
The contest page (http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/) talks about being based on the "Infinite Mario Bros game by Markus Persson .. with the added benefit of endless random level generation".

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the sorts of levels that this program generates never have conditions where you must backtrack and take a different path, to complete it. Especially after seeing a few examples in these videos.
Just be grateful they're not calling it MSDOS.
Ask HN: Anyone have hacks for focus & concentration?
I know I would be 10x more productive if I just followed through with everything. Don't like ADD drugs or caffeine. Having a startup is tough b/c its completely unstructured and time management falls squarely on yourself. Anyone else who's easily distracted have tips?
David Pogue: Is Google Voice a Threat to AT&T?
Gruber is uncharacteristically imprecise in the paragraph you quote.

If you look at the parental controls interface on your iPhone (Settings -> General -> Restrictions), it's obvious that Safari, Mail, YouTube, and so on can be individually restricted. There's also the more general option that allows restriction of third party apps based on rating.

The goal of the parental controls is to secure the device against anything that goes beyond a given rated standard. That explains these decisions that seem silly, like requiring an adult rating because if you search for 'fuck' you get a definition, or because an app provides a webkit view of a totally innocuous wikipedia page. These are security holes that an enterprising 12 year old who wanted to circumvent the parental controls might be able to exploit.

Yeah, you have to turn off Safari and YouTube and the rest to get a fully locked down phone, but you can do that. Doing so might be lousy parenting, but that's not at issue. The parental control feature is designed to allow a complete lockdown, that's what Apple claims it does, and the app review policy has to be strict, or it won't work.
Landing Page Design Tips
JRuby tends to be faster than C Ruby. Ruby code gets (or can get) compiled down to Java classes. It's still not as fast as actual Java, but quite peppy.
The source for the story, as are many things about SCO, is http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090805144623275
The free market answer would be, if you don't like it don't buy an iPhone. That's great, but as technology marches forward there can only be a finite number of companies with the skills and resources to create smart phones, Apple being one of the nicest offerings.

The key here is "one of the nicest". Is it nice if they use your money to control what people can and can't think? And anyway, there is Android, which is just as nice as the iPhone.

I really don't see any major differences between the iPhone and Android, except that Android has the notification drawer and the iPhone shows notifications on the app icon. They both have fine apps available in the same areas, with Android leaning towards more useful apps, like IRC in the background. The basic functionality is the same (except I can use Google Voice for my calls), the browser is the same codebase, etc., etc. So anyone that says they "have to have" an iPhone is probably wrong; Android will get them everything the iPhone has, minus any Apple evilness. (HTC makes nice phones.)
For YSlow users, a buddy of mine (actually, he's kind of a jerk) is working on an interesting project that lets you run automated YSlow tests (using Django and firefox and various other wizardry things)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webdev:Cesium

/shameless plug :)
Way to go, nutpuncher!
Don't Stop Supporting IE6
The sound of a million Daily Mail readers spilling their cornflakes: With a few more keystrokes on his computer, Laurie changes the cloned card so that whereas the original card holder was not entitled to benefits, the cloned chip now reads 'Entitled to benefits'.
I agree with that but someone who has parental controls enabled may not. That's why the feature exists. The "dirty words in dictionaries" battle has already been fought in schools and libraries and it seems Apple is taking the same route. Some words are OK, some aren't. It's not as though an NC-17 rating on the App Store really causes any problems for a developer unlike a movie getting an NC-17 rating which is a big deal still.