skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are plan to add age and grade based menu soon. Thank you.
Admob has a lock-in on the iPhone ecosystem that's hard to break.
We used Texlive 2008 to generate these worksheet. It's great.
They did. Google's been running mobile ads (first in Japan, then worldwide) since 2006. But AdMob just plain does it better -- nicer interface and significantly higher CPMs for publishers.

I'm sure they also wanted the talent. I've met one or two of the AdMob guys and they seem pretty sharp.
The price seems kind of steep for something that puts ads in iPhone apps. Isn't the whole iPhone app marketplace worth a lot less than 750 million?
The Road To Cost Effective Bandwidth Management
Survival with the fittest: the story of a Google library partner
Looks like a cool app, I would like to see some Rackspace cloud support though.
Nice exit. They had raised $47.2 million in prior rounds, so the multiples were still very healthy even on the last money in from DFJ.
Toward a Slow-News Movement
Is there a feed? (Or do you have a blog independent of the project?)

Awesome work, I'd love to keep tabs via rss if possible!
Nice coincidence as I've just started going through the book "Elements of Computer Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Nisan and Schocken.
The whole mobile advertising market is probably not much bigger than this, but it's growing, and AdMob is the clear leader. I suspect AdMob would be worth a lot more than this in a couple of years if left to its own devices, which is the bet Google is making.
Here's an interesting treatment of the scaling issue which cropped up on HN a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859468
Smell and Memory
Twitter references bring pageviews, while Google News brings .. nothing?

I doubt (have no proof though, would be interested in numbers) that a considerable percentage of visits to a news site is from search engines. One data point: I don't remember when I last googled my way into a news article.
Yes, but programming is about patterns, and, in my opinion, patterns are more simple to spot visually than with text.
It's maybe more important for a kid to learn that than learning about the "materiality" of programming.
Any word whether PEP 380 ("yield from") made it in before the cut-off?
Based on my experience, the US mathematical model is based the dynamic of people getting into good cliques that then give you the support you need to establish a publishing record and tenure. This dynamic definitely does not reward mathematicians for going off an spending a lot of energy on a long-term project. Nor does it reward mathematicians who are inclined to generalize.

For a longer description of my experience, see http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-left-math.html.
عرض التلفونات
Ask HN: How do you say it?
I'm sure I'm not the only one whose introduction to computers consisted of sitting home alone and hacking away and only ever communicating about technical terminology via non-spoken media like IRC. What I wonder is if anyone else consequently developed their own quirky pronunciations for technical terms that differ wildly from convention.

As an example, I may pronounce "sudo" as "sue dough" or say "regex" with a soft "g", but what really makes my colleagues laugh at me is when I pronounce "bin" and "lib" with long i's (as in "binary" and "library").
After reading the PEP I'm still not sure: does it mean that no changes will be made at all, or are "from __future__ import ..." additions allowed (but won't be integrated until 3.3)? [Not allowed - now I see it, my bad]
great move. Most of hosts I use still are at 2.5 / 2.6 levels. This moratorium will indeed give time to catch up. Probably I missed it - but does the moratorium apply to bugs/security patches as well ?
Seems like google could have used some of that 750M to operate at a loss, pay out higher CPMs and attract publishers. It also seems like google could have, in theory, copied their interface or even improved on it. Could it be that google's now too big to make those kind of adjustments once it builds the momentum?

The talent angle of course makes sense, they are both pulling in top tier employees and removing top tier competition.
The opportunity cost would likely be much more than $750 million. Google isn't a nimble, agile startup. AdMob is already a key player in this market[1] serving display ads in apps as well as sites.

[1] Given analysts use AdMob metrics to figure out market shares of various mobile phones
No - it does not apply to bugs or security issues
A one-size-fits all design philosophy generally fails...

But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two.

Uh, perhaps only the same tiny-or-not percentage who go to page two will page down to the bottom of a long one page article. But breaking up the page, you can tell who's seeing what.

Real print magazines would make things more straight forward if they broke up their articles but the approach is pretty well established by now.

Once you yave content the people want, they will work to get it and you've got an incentive to monetize that search. That might not be every site but it's certainly some sites. Everyone's asking how you monetize content that is better than some minimal effort. Multiple pages is one idea...
I'm always terrified that these conversations will unearth a library or technique that will immediately obsolete most of the code in my current pet project.

Thanks!
Gity requires 10.6 because of new Snow Leopard only API's - Grand Central Dispatch and a few others.
depends on your angle. If your product is good enough (or enough cheaper than the competition) deals come to you. On the other hand, if you have a mediocre product, your sales guy needs to be pretty goddamn good.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a bug or security flaw in the language syntax or semantics.

Remember, this doesn't mean that the implementations won't be improved underneath the covers, just the high-level language spec.
Ask HN: Domain registration by proxy.
Can anyone recommend a good proxy domain registration service that I can use so that my contact information is not accessible via WHOIS.

In particular does anyone have any good or bad experience with these guys:
http://www.domainsbyproxy.com/

Thanks.
__future__ additions are banned under this. See "cannot change" point 4
In fact I think I might have misremembered my own story. I had a ZX81 first...

I think you're correct here. I had a ZX81 first too (then various Spectrums, a VIC-20, and a Dragon 32!) and I also seem to remember the ZX81 manual telling you how to draw straight lines first, with FOR loops, and then progressing to circles.

The upcoming generations of programmers and mathematicians are going to be Gods.

Google and Wikipedia are awesome. I would have had my head buried in them all day if they had existed when I was a kid.

But I do worry a little about the next generation of programmers. Whenever a mum asks me what to recommend for her kid, who's fanatical about computers and just wants to dive in and write some games, I'm really at a bit of a loss for something to suggest. I usually go with Python, but it sucks to know that the kid in question is going to have to do some extra work to get things like graphics and audio going.
Fundamental language bugs (ambiguity, etc.) can be fixed. Security bugs will almost certainly be the result of something in the standard library, which has not been frozen.
Oops; I meant to write those in CL, but I forgot about functions having their own namespace (been playing too long in a lisp-1). It should work in CL if you use FUNCALL.

If mquander's explanation isn't enough, you might look at it using terms from the OO world: CAR takes a pair object and calls its 'car method.
It did not. PEP 380 will not see the light of day until the moratorium is lifted. This made me sad while I was writing it, but it is what it is.
But you had to learn about those from somewhere. That's no different, in practice, from today.
'Fraid not, for the moment. Large announcements will be made on the DocumentCloud.org blog, but that covers a bunch of other stuff.

Your best bet for keeping pace with development is probably to follow the project on GitHub.
Very interesting stuff. Our project has been required to work with the ESRI ArcObjects stuff for the past 4 years and I've been dying to get inside of their algorithms. Thanks for resparking my curiosity.
Taking into account the admob and gizmo acquisitions, I cant help but admire google's acquisition strategy. Yes, they have made several acquisitions (dodgeball,jaiku etc.) only to shelve them later, but a lot of their acquisitions (doubleclick, analytics, admob) etc. are super strategic moves - compare this to yahoo's approach over the last few years, which acquired so many startups only to deadpool or offload majority of them.
No, but it's been key in keeping them at the top.
Founder Collective - New $40 Million Early Stage Fund
"The upcoming generations of programmers and mathematicians are going to be Gods. How could they not be with a library like that!"

...because they also have lolcats?

Seriously, there are a lot more distractions these days, too.
ilyak is incorrect, but I'm curious why you feel popularity has anything to do with it.
SnapNames Gets Hit With Class Action Suit Over Shill Bidding
Namecheap offers whois protection for free. Domainsbyproxy is GoDaddy, AFAIK.
IMHO what they bought is not the technology or the team. It's the title "Leader in mobile advertising". You can't have that when you are Google.
I usually say "su-doe", not "su-doo"; "reg-ex", not "re-jex"; bin, not "bine"; and "lib", not "libe". I also say "lin-ux", not "lie-nux"; and "s-crypt", not "script".
I am the same age, and I had a very similar experience, especially with regards to the BASIC manual. I would just go through the list of keywords, A to Z, skipping the ones that didn't make sense at first, and then circling back and starting all over until I had them all. In a way, a limited manual made it easier to circumscribe the problem, and gave my little nerdy self a "goal": Finish The Book.

I guess the same could be done with the information available on the Internet. If someone wants to learn javascript they have all the info they could possibly ever want. There are so many options now. But learning to program is a question of interest and determination, not availability of information.
This guide was enough to get me started on the iPhone:
http://www.otierney.net/objective-c.html
I've got a lot of C/C++ experience, but this was my first look at O-C.

The only thing it didn't cover that I needed is @properties, which is easy enough to google for.

Combined with the excellent iPhone SDK examples and documentation, I'm pretty close to finishing my first non-trivial iPhone app (well, kind of trivial).

I'll check out some of these other links, too..
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=it+is+what+it...

> Used often in the business world, this incredibly versatile phrase can be literally translated as "fuck it."

Edit: tongue-in-cheek
Likewise on all but Linux, which I have pronounced "lee-nux" after a friend showed me http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/
You probably haven't intentionally done it, but let's say you're looking for information on the arrest of Bernard Madoff or the Lehman bankruptcy:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS345US...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS345US...

While it's true that I probably wouldn't search for "xyz Wall Street Journal article" I might be searching for xyz topic and happen upon a result in the WSJ
Will be interesting to see if they innovate on the warm lead the way YC has.
This is a great write-up.

For n-dimensional Hilbert curves check out
http://www.tiac.net/~sw/2008/10/Hilbert/
"The concept of “If the news is important, it will find me” works better by the day. If it matters to me, chances are very good its in one of the twitter feeds I follow."

As with most people who use the Internet primarily to reinforce their own worldview, Mark Cuban must have the intellectual curiosity of a card-carrying dittohead. He and Murdoch deserve each other.
cool - thanks. good to know.
Why I left math
Just two years? I suggest six years.
Well; that's not what I meant when I said it. I would love to see PEP 380 in, but I think that the possible benefits of this moratorium outweigh the usefulness of a new feature only a relatively small populace of users will use over the next two years.

Remember, well above 90% of the users out there are still on 2.4 and 2.5 - even if pep 380 went in, it would more than likely be in 3k only (a few years from widespread adoption anyway) and in a release OS vendors won't ship for a few years.
Is MySpace a Digital Ghetto?  Please Participate in this Sociology Study
Hello HN members,

My name is Nathan and I am working a college sociology project based on the original study behind the recent popular HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685231 - MySpace now a "digital ghetto".

The original study attempted to explain the shift from MySpace to Facebook as a form of online social stratification.

My study will attempt to independently analyze and aggregate the opinions of those who use FaceBook and MySpace. It will attempt to determine why users of social networks prefer their social network over others.

Since I know that there was quite a spirited discussion over this issue in the original HN thread I am confident that this sociological study will also interest you.

If you want to participate then please visit the online survey that I coded and set up for this project:

http://affiliate-script.com/socialNetworkSurvey.php

I thank you in advance for any survey responses that I receive. Please if you have any thoughts, comments, or advice feel free to comment on this thread.

Thank you,

Nathan
That was the point of mixmax's tounge-in-cheek message. Execution matters, ideas don't.
A live link to the survey:

http://affiliate-script.com/socialNetworkSurvey.php
I forgot what BeautifulSoup couldn't do that made me look for something else, but I've been using html5lib for those purposes these days with good results, especially if you need to output modified HTML.
Just curious... Isn't there an easier way to handle this case "from the other side"? I.e. a way to write a class that will behave like a "stacking" generator - if the original generator g1 yields a generator g2, then the control will be given to g2 and g1 is put on the stack until g2 is finished - then pops g1 back. It would be a bit uglier and would require the control code to know about the problem (for x in StackingGen(g1()), instead of for x in g1()) and would remove the posibility to yield generators themselves, but it should work ;) Or are there some other problems with this idea?
the phrase "it is what it is" does not mean "fuck it", but rather "i accept this is beyond my control".
Why kill other people PTSD | My Complaint
You're not supposed to give it a shot. That's the point.
Its possible that operating at a loss would attract ire (because it really would be like the behavior Microsoft is/was so criticized for).
Cliques in math are like social networking in startups: success partly depends on your connections.

Why is one case bad but the other good?
TWITTER POSSES NO THREAT

If you have to rant, don't SHOUT. And if you have to SHOUT, spell it right.
Isn't reverse engineering also protected against by patents?
This will give Perl and Ruby a good chance to pull even farther ahead of Python. It would be nice if "we" didn't learn anything about programming that needs new language features, but we do, and it's silly to omit features that make programming easier.

Oh yeah, it's Python.
Loopt Begins Fresh Mobile Assault With Background Location For BlackBerry
I live in Detroit. There are some nice areas, but you cannot avoid blight for long. I was born and raised here, so I am used to it.
(c) The Estate of Isaac Asimov...

[Edit] Seriously, I used to buy 2nd-hand short story books to get to stories like this (which I've read), but if it has a wider readership this way, but people buy novels, maybe that's copyright's intent?
Tell HN: PG's Trends List from BOS 2009
PG just finished his talk at Business of Software 2009 where he listed trends he would bet on and trends he would stay away from. Here are my hopefully correct notes:

-Trends to bet on-

Innovation

Software

Efficient Markets - More information leads to a new efficient market.

Measurement - You make what you measure.

United States

Silicon Valley

Small Companies

Economic Inequality

Moore's Law

Things on Screens

Server based apps

Super Good Customer Service

Apparently Frivolous Stuff (facebook)

Programming Languages

Open Source

Linux will never be a factor on the desktop

iPhone

Design

Real-Time

Venture Funding

Founders

-Things not to bet on-

Credentials based on institutions (degrees)

Business School

The Government changing

Copyright

Restricted flow of information (everything is getting more liquid)
The apple docs are pretty good once up to speed. Watch the first screencasts from http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php if you like the academic lesson format, that introductory one goes through most of the gotchas with objective-c.
I'm not sure if competition is great on such sites. You want one place to find answers for one topic, like programming-> StackOverflow, sysadmin -> ServerFault.

How is community going to benefit from two sites based on the exact same framework, on the exact same topic ? It will only be duplicating eachother.
It would be rather controversial for me. Twitter search (at least on twitters site) is rather unsophisticated in the way it determines relevance. You have to wade through a pile of retweets to find anything truly useful.

Google news (or other sites like oneriot) do a great job of parsing through ALL of the available news outlets on a pretty quick basis. At the end of the day you end up in the same place (tweets are nothing but pointers to 'real' content in most cases), but I find it's much more efficient to utilize a more sophisticated search tool.

Put me squarely in the camp that the value of twitter is nothing more than ego stoking.
Hmm. Call me when Twitter is sending most sites more traffic than Google. Heck, call me when it sends 10% as much.
hmm... delist my content from Google and instead rely on a company with no business model and that crashes frequently...

hmm....
Interesting, because I initially thought it was an MS thesis and was a little less than impressed. I will say that that was a lot of work for a BS thesis. Porting the GHC is not a simple task!
hmm indeed! :-)
Somehow that makes sense... oh wait, no.

Also, why does the URL need to be human-readable? URLs are for computers. The content is for the human.
not sure why my post got downvoted. the opening is for real. founders of Rent the Runway are good friends.

apologies if this isn't the place for job postings.
One could make the argument that cliques encourage more social interaction -- and subsequently more collaboration. This could be more beneficial overall for the field.
not so fast...net neutrality (insert evil sound effect) will be the big decider.
Eh. People who read sites like his aren't searching for news, they're searching for their current views to be reenforced. Google news isn't good for that anyway (though Twitter can be). Might as well cut off the accidental readership.
I am allowed to write my own function in Java. Having a basic file read in a static function library is more than reasonable. Should it be in the standard library? Yes, but it not being there isn't really a cost.
Its neuroscience children.

I'm waiting for the Onion article.
MP3 Search & Free MP3 Downloads Music - Searchmp3songs.com
Eric Schmidt said at one point he thinks mobile advertising will be bigger than web advertising.
Apple tablet could cement Jobs' legacy
Yes, it is.

The patent system is predicated on the idea of disclosure (indeed, the very word "patent" derives from a Latin word meaning "open"). The idea is that inventors will add their innovative knowledge to the public domain, for which they will receive a temporary monopoly on its commercial exploitation.

Most proprietary software is protected by trade secret laws, which are vulnerable to reverse engineering. Patented software is not, since it has already been disclosed in the public record and is nonetheless protected during the term of the patent by virtue of its monopoly status.
Drat. I do agree with the analysis you posted on your site [1] that it only will affect early-adopters/language geeks and is probably for the best for the python community at large. But two years is a darn long time in the technology world.

It looks like it will be up to the library/framework builders to keep the python hype/momentum going while the language maintainers are playing grown-up and being responsible.

[1] for everyone else's sake: http://jessenoller.com/2009/11/09/pep-3003-python-language-m...
Ask HN: Can everyone be an Entrepreneur?
What if everyone in a society wanted and possessed the skills necessary (for simplicity's sake we knew for certain what these skills were) to be an entrepreneur, would it be possible?

At what population percentage (in your opinion) would the number of new ventures stagnate and the need for labor be too high?
Consent will be required for cookies in Europe
I'm not a zealot for either of the 3 languages, but I wasn't aware that Perl could be considered "ahead" of Python by any measure except libraries.
Really, some MS students would struggle to understand it? I'm an undergraduate myself and I have no real knowledge of Haskell and I found it to be a pretty easy read. Major congrats to the student who worked on it though.
Thanks for the feedback guys. I also just found:
http://www.detroitblog.org/
Some of the pictures on their seem alien to me.
The referenced Wall Street Journal article is here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870374000457451...
Ideally, Programming Questions -> StackOverflow | Business Questions -> Startups.com. Online communities are, in a way, like physical spaces (bar, restaurants, etc). You like one over the other for different reasons: maybe the music, the drinks, the food, the host, maybe your friends hang out there. We'll see how this plays out. Competition is always good because it forces you to think more and more about how to server your customers/visitors better.
Language wars are so pointless. Spend your energy on something else.

Guess what. The programming language you use is pretty irrelevant to success. It's a matter of taste, what other people are using (If you care), what has convenient libraries for what you're doing.

edit: OK I'll bite:

>> "It would be nice if "we" didn't learn anything about programming that needs new language features, but we do, and it's silly to omit features that make programming easier."

Examples? What have we really learnt about programming say in the last 5 years that requires new language features? Maybe it's just individuals that learn things about programming, and change their tastes.
It's important to note that improvements to the standard library and C API are still permitted while the language (grammar) moratorium is in effect.
Yes and no; I actually think a stronger focus on the standard lib and the interpreter is plenty of work to keep the hype running. It's been my personal bugbear to do a heck of a lot of cleanup in that space.

For example, right now there's discussion about a futures library (ala Java's implementation) for inclusion. There's plenty of work to be done there to make sure some of our older batteries are cleaned up, new ones included, etc.

Two years is a long time - but how much of that needs to go into the syntax rather than the standard library? What about more abstractions on top of threading/multiprocessing? An actor implementation? More web technology support?

Python is more than the sum of it's implementation - and even that is fair game (see antoine's latest GIL work as an example).