skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your point is 100% valid and probably completely against the philosophy of YC. But it would be a perfect (evil) plot for an incubator called Black Combinator (instead of White-Combinator :-)
Writing Unit-Tests for Java in Groovy: Not so brilliant after all?
In order to achieve the goals of TDD, unit-tests should be written in the same language as the underlying code.
I wasn't trying to make a point about the use of intuition, this was just a hypothetical example. I could just as well have constructed a hypothetical scenario in which, say, asking a five year old kid turns out to be the most effective method of investigating the world. Surely, even if this turned out to be an effective method, it would not be scientific.
Layar Reality Browwer for Android
Probably the single biggest growth stunting problem with the Android platform is the lack of a good advertising campaign. Google, and the handset makers, are allowing Apple free reign of the air waves. If you didn't follow technology it might be easy to believe Apple is the only company selling SmartPhones with third party apps. Google needs to spearhead the campaign and show off a few different Android handset and some applications and generally put their stamp of approval on it. They certainly have the money for it. The lack of aggressiveness on the part of Google with the Android platform has made me question their commitment to it from day one. There are many examples of a first mover taking an insurmountable lead in an emerging market. Google should fight now or it may be a lost cause. Apple is selling A LOT of iPhones.
I've sent one of the patches so far, yes.
"People are flooding out of New York into San Francisco in droves, so trying to be superior with the slogan, “We are just as expensive!” is kind of dumb."

It's only dumb if you like NYC expats coming into SF in droves. Zed's reasoning starts with a questionable supposition.
He's missing the #1 area where you can compete with Apple (at least for now) and why I think the Palm Pre will do well: carriers. Most people, even high-end smart phone users, choose their carrier first and their phone second. You'd lose sight of that reading TechCrunch or Engadget too much, but talk to people in middle America and you realize it's overwhelming. Be it due to laziness, marketing, employer discounts, customer satisfaction, not understanding how simple number portability has made it, whatever. I'd bet for every person who has bought an iPhone there are 1 or 2 who at least would consider it if it were on their network.

The Palm Pre and Android are both at a huge advantage here. That may not be true when Apple's deal with AT&T runs up though, but for now it's easily the biggest competitive edge available.
Emphasize that Android apps are background-capable, and that there is no centralized App Store under one company’s ironclad control. There are no tales of rejected Android apps because there are no rejected Android apps.

As much as Apple mucks things up, it isn't without reason that Apple made the apps-in-foreground-only design decision and put so much effort into controlling what software goes on the device.

Unless the Android is going to be marketed to people who care to check which of their background processes has a bug and decides to eats up their battery every once in awhile, there's a big advantage to having apps "just work", even if distribution of those applications is a pain for developers.
"More importantly, the general feel of the technology scene in SF has almost zero douchebag in it."

++0
Are Prepared Foods Making Us Fat?
See: http://delicious.com/help/tagometer

In particular, I use the one which includes http://static.delicious.com/js/blogbadge.js
Crockford's talk on JS - Good Parts
Having a single email address at the top of an email, necessitating parsing or eyeballing the content to understand the intentions and then forwarding it on to the appropriate people is surely more work, and less efficient, than the alternatives.

It's conceptually easier to streamline support via a guided on-line process or knowledgebase type repository. Users can often answer their own questions, or if not they can at least be pointed at the appropriate department. I'd go as far as to say a large retailer would appear more incompetent if my only access to support was via a single email address.
Huffington Post Adds “Social News”
Yes, when I need to use it I, I sign/encrypt my emails with GnuPG
I just realized that:

A) I don't even use delicious for anything but storage, basically; it's where I keep most of my browser bookmarks, via a plugin in my browser.

B) If delicious isn't making money hand over fist, it may not survive more than a couple more years.

I need to back up my delicious bookmarks, post-haste.
These kinds of posts have never really resonated with me. I know about a dozen different languages and use 3 of them 99% of the time. They all have their pros and cons.

I may be in the minority here, but I've never really cared as much about the language as the task at hand. Sure, some languages are better than others for different things, but you can do almost anything with almost any language. I'm so concerned about getting the result to the customer that I forget how much less I'd be suffering with different tools.

Now if there were an article entitled, "How I grew to hate every practitioner of computer languages," that might be a different story :-) I've seen great code and horrible code in every language. I'll take great programming in a crappy language over crappy programming in a great language any day.
Schneier on Security: Intelligent and adroit

Schneier on Videogame Terminology: Somewhat lacking (but we'll let him slide)
Ah. Apparently my HN Toolkit is old...

Thanks for the update.
Based on my experience, some people (ugh weasel words) can not cope with the idea that humans might be made of the same mental or physical patterns as both other animals and inanimate objects. The notion that there is something 'holy' about each person that transcends our physical selves is pretty central to the Abrahamic religions.
A friend of mine always dreamed of having a similar app, but where you could keep track of multiple girlfriends. More importantly, you could select in the app which one of them you were with at any given time, which would remove any trace of the others from the contacts, texts, and recently called list.

That would be worth 99 cents...
No because I don't consider any of my data important enough. Nor any emails etc etc.
The only thing worse than crap on the front page is complaining about the crap on the front page.
As a recent Android convert, I am confused by all the "issues" that people keep mentioning. Everything on my phone Just Works. When I change the color of a calendar on Google Calendar, the color on my phone's calendar widget changes. When I change a contact on my phone, GMail and Google Voice update almost instantly. When I dial a number on the normal dialpad, my call is automatically routed through Google Voice. When someone who is not in my contacts calls me, a little message pops up with the White Pages lookup results. (This is a third-party app.) When I feel the need to tweet a picture, I click a button, the camera turns on, I take the picture, write some text, and my picture and tweet are posted. When someone messages me on Google Talk, and my computer's Jabber session is idle, my phone makes a noise and I see their message.

I was on the train today, and wanted to catch up on HN. I read five or six articles, and all of them rendered perfectly in the included browser.

Basically, this is what I consider an absolutely perfect phone experience. I could not be happier, as an end user. (And as a developer, I am really really happy.)

I am just confused as to what these iPhone converts are doing. I think they are expecting an iPhone clone instead of a completely different smartphone.

One more thing. I found this comment especially ignorant:

Android suffers from the same issues that have plagued Linux on the desktop for years: the lack of integration between software and hardware, buggy and under-featured applications, a lack of attention paid to user experience issues. The encouraging openness and bits of innovation in Android are overshadowed by mediocrity.

What does this even mean? I see perfect integration between my apps (and the Google apps on my computer), and of course, the underlying OS kernel has no effect on the user experience unless it is really bad.
No, I would not want to live in such a world, but it has nothing to do with self-worth. I don't want programming to be a required skill for the same reason I don't want chemical engineering to be a required skill: most people don't need it. Most people need reading. Most people need math (despite the fact that it IS a required skill yet almost no one can actually do it). Most people need composition skills. Hence, the three R's (that would be reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic for those who aren't familiar with the phrase). Most people can also benefit from a basic understanding of history and science.

Programming and chemical engineering though? I see no reason for everyone to learn those. Computer usage, yes. Programming, not so much.
The article quotes Peter Norvig:
When a published paper proclaims "statistically, this could only happen by chance one in twenty times," it is quite possible that similar experiments have been performed twenty times, but have not been published.
As We May Think (by Vannvar Bush)
These are mine:

Making The Leap From Consulting To Web Product Company: http://bit.ly/120FwV

Get Scientific: What to Track to Grow Your Business: http://bit.ly/1IcQ2P

Any other Hacker News people submit panels?
We're half way there, but it's missing the automated messaging aspects of girlfriendapp. I wonder how girlfriendapp displays who the messages are from, AFAIK the SDK doesn't allow for tight integration with SMS. Nevertheless, ideas are stirring for future features. :)

http://blackbookexclusive.com

disclaimer: my app.
How legal is it for Amazon or Airlines to give out this information?

How legal is it for schools/companies/etc to give out information about contacts to the Police? Why is it illegal to give out the record but legal to say that there was activity?

It seems that these tactics are quite shady in terms of legalities. Why should I get a warrant for X if I can just ask his vendors?

Why would someone have to subpoena your bank records but have Amazon up for grabs so to speak?
Mongrel, "Rails is a Ghetto", Lamson; in that order.
I can correlate the "strongly recommended TI part," having graduated HS in 2001. I used an HP-48GX and yes, at times, it was hard to adapt the teacher's instructions. My friend and I both had 48's, and we helped each other work it out. When we got into symbolic manipulation, statistics, and inspecting 3D graphs, the HP left the basic TI models in the dust.

But yeah, no problem using a HP graphing calculator when I was in high school; took trigonometry, AP calculus, AP physics, and the SAT all using that calculator. Even had a full year's trig notes stashed in there, though I honestly didn't use them on any exams; just handy for calculus homework.
It has been available for pocket pcs for the longest time and on Nokia as well.

The interesting bit though is that in most places where you'd use the tomtom devices you want your phone to be independent of them, I would definitely not want to give up the tomtom I've got and my phone for a combined function device.
Because we can't downvote articles.
A great language will make crappy programming harder.
Of course programming languages involve trade-offs. Concrete syntax trade-offs abound, but more important are semantic trade-offs. Many are of the form feature vs. performance. Dispatch? Memory safety? Laziness? Otherss are more complicated, like those involving type systems, which are formally complex while affecting the informal "feel" of the language.

I think it's specious to suggest that the problems in programming language design and implementation are illusionary, and that we could somehow code "the way would we [sic] like". The language of computation is extremely subtle, and the process of building abstractions over our computers' basic operations is still more subtle. We are not done exploring possibilities---nor, I suspect, will we ever be.
Signed copy of PG's "On Lisp" (out of print) - for charity
Autographed, new condition, from the box PG got when the book was published. The book goes for over $200 without an autograph as its out of print and quite rare. Its being auctioned off for charity by YC-funded startup Listia. If you do buy credits to bid, but do not end up winning, we can refund your purchase in full. enjoy!
A very cool dude and his ski clothing company: Klaus Obermeyer
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Obermeyer
Mexican food is only good in Texas, London is more expensive than NYC, and the SF weather is the nicest of all.

Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock.
Sounds like Alan Kay is looking at the world of business through a pinhole in the floor of his car when he'd be better off looking through the windshield.

Anybody can automate payroll, inventory, order processing, etc. In fact, almost everybody has. I call that "striking out the pitcher".

But only some people have figured out how to use sophisticated software to run simulations, mimic real world processes, and as Michael Gerber puts it, "Work on the business instead of working in the business."

Apparently Alan Kay doesn't see many of these businesses. He should. Because they're the ones who'll be left standing while the "automators" wonder what happened.
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Obermeyer
find a hosting service somewhere, run your own proxy and gzip everything on passthrough ?

Shut off image loading ?

Adblocker ?

Local proxy with a fat cache ?

Lots of stuff is dynamic though, for those only the gzip trick will work.
I am greatly intrigued by this and would love to see an analysis, but 5 hours since posting of the article seems too soon for anything that Google provides to me. I wonder if the Toys'R'Us sales deal expenditure was written up two quarters previous?
A quantum arrow of time?
Most people, even high-end smart phone users, choose their carrier first and their phone second.

I think there is a lot of truth to that, but I also have seen a big shift since the iPhone. Countless friends and colleagues of mine have said something along the lines of "I would never use AT&T if it were not for the iPhone."
Just out of interest, how would you justify the $4.99 price tag? It seems unusually high.
I did -

Mind Control: Psychology for the Web: http://bit.ly/HUyl9

Difficult Domains: Alternative Databases for the Web: http://bit.ly/9sK0a

(Hmm, guess adding "for the Web" wasn't required after all :)
Online stores group products by who sells them.

One of the challenges of abstracting this layer is that who sells the product still adds or subtracts value from the purchasing experience because of those mundane details (shipping speed, reliability, returns, etc.).

There are various ways of dealing with this. Amazon [1] is already active in this space using what you might call the "user review" model combined with enforcing some exacting standards on their vendors. Already having a huge channel of course made it easier for Amazon to get vendors to accept this.

[1] Incidentally, I've never thought that Amazon did a great job with sorting products within its general categories, so I always search instead. But I do wonder, how many more people would window-shop at Amazon if their sorted product catalog was more interesting?
That is brilliantly awesome. If they had someone within the company come up with that idea, they better be holding on to him/her as hard as possible.
Top jQuery Plugins (according to reynoldsftw.com)
Interesting angles:

1. NBC has recently rolled out a network of local sites, NBCChicago.com, for example. These sites are using data from Fred Wilson's Outside.in, an EB competitor. Will they roll with Everyblock data now? I'm not quite sure what the relationship between them and MSNBC is. It could be quite tenuous from what I can tell.

2. If the code was open-sourced, what was sold?
I'm not sure if that's a low upper-bound. He's complaining about an attribute access speed - but he's not trying to fix it... missed a great opportunity for __dict__ usage.

From a quick py2.5 benchmark:

noop 0.3s
class_create 0.76s
with_dict 1.68s
without_dict 2.06s

Functions tested 1,000,000 times - noop is an empty function for comparison; class_create is just x=A(); with_dict and without_dict create a class each time, assign 3 attributes, then read the same 3 attributes. with_... does it on an object that lists the attributes in __dict__, the other one doesn't use __dict__ and assigns attributes in the constructor.

So... 1s (without the constructor and loop time) for 3,000,000 attribute reads and 3,000,000 attribute writes. Slow? Is he sure that it's the attribute read and write that's causing the problems? I'm not sure if I believe that without some more details - especially if he works with some documents that look like they're on some external storage (disk / db / whatever).
Could spam email help me win big at the Casino?
Low price ? I'm amazed it fetched that much!

They're roughly 250K uniques / day, that's an amazing amount of money for such a small site.

The way they've been emailing people they should have been bigger than google by now...
The Sculptors
Ask HN: Review my idea: Python programming by voice
I want to solve speech recognition for programmers, so that we can create and edit source code efficiently without using a keyboard or a mouse. This will be great for RSI sufferers (unless voice also fails because of overuse).

Accurate speech recognition is a hard problem because human language is very ambiguous. As far as I know, there's currently no working solution for programming by voice in any programming language. DragonDictate or NaturallySpeaking with custom macros may come close, but it's difficult to set up. I found some related material, but most of it seems to be either academic research or unmaintained software.

Initially, I'm going to focus on speech recognition for Python. I know there's probably a bigger market for C++ or Java programmers, but Python code is more similar to human speech and is rather concise, using fewer lines of code than Java for the same task. Python has a large standard library which we can pre-parse and digest to reduce ambiguity during recognition.

Python's interactive interpreter with speech recognition and voice output would make an awesome demo. You could say "three times five" and the computer would respond with "fifteen". Or you could say "from time import localtime (pause) call localtime without parameters slice the first three elements" and the system would say "two thousand nine eight seventeen".

The entire speech recognition software could be free open source, maybe based on CMU Sphinx-4 (which is in Java). The business model could revolve around a web service that lets people upload their utterances (snippets of recorded speech) during or after their programming session. We can use these files to improve the recognition engine and train the speaker-independent acoustic model. So the recognition would get better over time, but speaker-independent models only work for some "standard" pronunciation without too much accent.

For a small fee (e.g. $49) users could download their personal acoustic model for improved accuracy, which would be generated from the voice snippets that they have uploaded. The model training process needs several minutes or even hours of CPU, but an email could be sent to the user when the model is ready for download. When the software improves over time and they have recorded more utterances, they can pay another fee and generate an even better model.

If I can get speech recognition for Python code to work, maybe SQL or bash could work too (both support auto-completion, which can be useful for reducing ambiguity).

Please let me know what you think. I'm planning to implement a simple demo in Seattle during the next few weeks. Want to brainstorm with me over beer or coffee? We could be co-founders if we work well together.
I'm having trouble explaining it in words, but I'm thinking of it as more of a funnel you aim at than a discrete beam.
From a business perspective, making a Porsche-caliber android phone doesn't make too much sense for Google. As far as I know, their business objectives include

1) getting as many possible people online with their cellphones searching the web & clicking ads,

2) stealing Windows Mobile market share,

3) and selling android apps to as many people as possible.

And I believe, in that order.

Besides, I like being able to replace batteries, sim cards, and sd cards on my g1.

edit:formatting/typo
This was the most interesting nugget from the article:

"The total global toy market declined somewhat during the first half of the year," Lego said. "The total figure, however, represents significant regional differences -- English-speaking markets reported a decline, while most European toy markets grew during the period."

Any ideas from the HN community as to why this was the case? I thought the US was mostly in the same boat as Europe when it comes to recession/consumer spending. Or does this reflect a cultural difference?
I co-founded (and since left) eduFire, one of the companies mentioned in the sidebar to this article:

http://origin-www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/5-startups-to...

It's amazing to see how many people have become aware of the massive opportunity to revolutionize education since we started eduFire in Jan 07. In 07, the institutions weren't going to innovate, most VCs (esp Bay area folks) had no idea about the size of the edu opportunity or customer willingness to pay.

Two years later we've got USV's hackedu conference, articles in FC, edu reform making the national agenda, and all kinds of interesting edu companies being funded. Interesting times!
hey Ed, you're 'duping' yourself :) :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745294
FluidDB Launches
I was thinking the exact same thing, but for writing. Well said.
I enjoyed reading the article, and the resulting recognition that to "really disappear" is diametrically opposed to what we'd normally seek around here:

- Brand Ownership vs Brand Abandonment
- Search Optimization vs Search Pessimization
- Collect User Metrics vs Stay Out of Site Logs
- Networking/Meetups vs Self-Imposed Exile

It was intriguing to look down that alley, but I wouldn't want to live there.
I think that the reason for this is that businesses are very reluctant to adopt revolutionary technologies. They are much more comfortable with technologies that offer a small and defined improvement over what they are using (eg. typewriter to word processor).

If you pitch something completely new, many people will look at you like you are from Mars. My startup's product has the potential to drastically improve the profitability of a lot of businesses. However, when we pitch it for what it is, people tend to react fairly violently, because it runs counter to a lot of their intuitions.

In order to get any traction, we have had to pitch it as an incremental improvement, with the real game changers hidden behind the scenes.
From a business point of view, one of the impressive things about this is that all the IP rights protecting Lego's core product lines expired long ago. They can't stop anyone from making plastic bricks with bumps in exactly the right places to interlock with Lego bricks.
Er, when the G1 came out, it was already ahead of the iPhone for many purposes: copy/paste, background apps, real keyboard. The newest iPhones have one and a half of those (push notifications being worth some fraction of real background apps), and if they came out with an iPhone with a hardware keyboard, I'd consider buying one.

In the meantime, though, I'm waiting for the Motorola Sholes. :) I just hope they don't mess that up.