skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ultimate Virtual Goods & Ad-Serving for iPhone/Android
Hi everyone -- please let us know if you have any feedback, questions, or thoughts: partners -- at -- tapjoy.com

If you're an iPhone/Android publisher, we'd love to work with you!

-Lee (YC '07)
So you mean a meta-circular OOP implementation, where the hosting language already has car, cdr and cons. Alright.

I thought what you wrote was supposed to be a primitive implementation of the functions.
I think this is PR.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

And I have great respect for the person who secured $2m in funding for an url-shortening site.
Perhaps I'm late to the game but why not take a good look at the Gem/Gemcutter Ruby packaging and distribution system?

The Ruby folks have done a few iterations of packaging systems and have pretty much nailed it.

Might be worth studying the whole 'gem' system (discovery, distributed publishing, versioning, dependencies, uninstall, etc).

http://www.gemcutter.com
Probably because 1.9 isn't completely backwards-compatible with 1.8.

People were also upset by two things. First, some 1.9 features were backported into 1.8.7, meaning an upgrade from 1.8.6 to 1.8.7 was sometimes painful. Second is numbering confusion. Ruby used to use even numbers for stable releases, and odd numbers for experimental releases. So 1.9 should be experimental, and 1.10 or 2.0 stable. But for various reasons, they didn't want to go to either 1.10 (ever) or 2.0 (yet), so 1.9 will be used for production releases. It has taken a long time for Ruby folks to realize that they should be using 1.9.
Wasn't that stated in the 1.9 -> 2.0 plan? I seem to remember that code would be broken by the 2.0 language.
So if you look at who's doing this on a daily basis, it's obviously people who careless about the ecosystem and are in it simply for short term gain.

That being said, does Apple really feel this is going to curb spam and gaming of the AppStore? These same developers will simply pull their existing apps off the store and repost them as brand new builds. Spammers have no morals, it's a joke to think otherwise.

Ultimately I think it's a good move on Apple's part but I don't think it's going to fix the inherent issues with the abundance of useless apps at the expense of hurting indie developers who don't have the margins to afford marketing expenditures. As it stands, publishing an update is one of the best ways to drive sales for indie developers. I wish Apple would segment the store into a) Apple hand-picked and b) everyone else. The featured sections are far too limiting for the number of quality apps that are available.

In the meantime, please enjoy Hot Girls who Fart LIGHT edition!
http://appshopper.com/entertainment/hot-girls-who-fart-light
It's important to keep in mind that one of the reasons it was "easier" to program back in the day is that you had so many fewer options. The flip side of not having to install anything is not being able to install anything. BASIC was cool, but once you hit its limits (which was very easy to do) you were kinda screwed. Sure, you could learn machine language, but that was a lot harder than running Python or Javascript.
People would use it because it is an amazing search engine.

I never use google for news, and I will use google even if bing pulls this little(big) stunt.
I love the comments:

"As a general rule it works best if you keep gov out of private (Panera like) businesses."

The right wing has such intelligent-sounding advocates!
This reminds me of the Vimeo move to disallow gaming videos. They wanted Vimeo to be for "creative expression", and straight said they didn't think game-related videos met that test. Original 2008 blog post here: http://www.vimeo.com/blog:140

I think some of the iPhone's gaming success is the market--players demanding more games--but some of it is also the lure of game development itself. If the whole point of the App Store was to let developers make whatever they wanted, and they want to make games...isn't that kind of the point?

(And yes, it is pretty naive to assume all iPhone games were made for the love of it instead of trying to cash in on a gold rush).
In the words of William Gibson: "The Street always finds its own uses for technology."

Only in his vision, those uses were mostly dark and gritty. In real 21st century, we find a lot of those uses cutesy and banal.
>The ipod wouldn't be particularly hard to reverse engineer. Should a third party be able to simply copy the ipod in order to cash in on Apple's brand equity?

Yes -- see the history of the IBM PC for perhaps the most famous example.
Meteor Blitz does an awesome job with its controls. (Emulating two analog sticks in the lower corners.) It's like a cross between Asteroids and Robotoron. Once refinement like that, plus a little design savvy, make it out into the programming community in the form of libraries, you'll have a more consistent level of quality.

Design savvy: minimalist. Get as much as you can out of just one or two control elements, plus a few accessories.
"Language wars are so pointless. Spend your energy on something else."

I think flamewars on languages are painful and wrong, but not pointless. Programming Languages are how we frame our thoughts about problem solving, and I think too many people go with the theory any language is ok.

I hope for the sake of language design that the last 5 years would teach us a lot. Heck, for starters how many languages really have a good story about the multi-processor hardware that comes standard these days. I think leaving that solution to libraries really hasn't served us well.
robots.txt as ransom note

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTe15DEWp30
If The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will lose 25 Percent Of Its Traffic
Definitely switch from mod_python to mod_wsgi. Also try setting up Nginx as a proxy to Apache, using Nginx to serve static media and Apache(+mod_wsgi) for only serving up the dynamic pages.
I'd join the military, as long as you have non-financial reasons to do so. Then, you have a bunch of options -- get out after your contract, go reserves/ng, or retire after 20 and have a second career.
Microsoft Facebook SDK Overview
For the love of God, take your time.

Absolutely. If you really want to learn, you'll do far better by apprenticing than by studying in the classroom. Check out Corey Haines (http://www.coreyhaines.com/) for inspiration.

Then, if you want a little more formal understanding, go back to school. But don't go until you've worked for a while - like 10 years.
There was a TED talk by an Indian neurologist who said that placebo works even if you don't believe in it.
2010 Tesla Roadster Sport first drive
Please instruct your httpd to serve *.py files as "text/plain". Right now it's forcing a download. Win32 FF.
Not just LOLCAT, DailyWTF, etc. but also HN, Slashdot, etc. Not just I waste a lot of time reading the articles, I probably waste more on reading the comments... while keep delaying work at hand.
Be everywhere now
Firefox 3 no longer has this problem: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/interfacing_with_the_xpcom_...

Reference counting GC is the problem, not closures.
Bluetooth and Hearing Aids
That doesn't mean you should be shipping the version of Firefox released when you last did a freeze, whether that's 6 months or 3 years ago. Even worse, with the way the freeze cycle is done in practice, they need to stop all updates even for bleeding edge users for several months (Ubuntu) or 6-18 months (Debian).

In a rolling release system you don't have to have a single imprimatur of package approval. At minimum everyone implements it with at least 'stable', 'new', and 'fucked' markers for packages, and you can go way further with multiple repos and overlay semantics.
In your experience/opinion, does Dixon's argument (in the OP) hold water?
And another thing (just got back from downtown having my wife drive so i could "navigate")--he does not mention the turn-by-turn navigation provided by the android, out of the box, no charge. Or the separate but related functionality of plotting your route on google maps and have it pinpoint your location within 6 meters (maybe better).

Oh, and the surprise at the end of the journey when doing the navigation by home is that it showed a street view of my home as we turned into the driveway. I did not expect that.

I don't know, but don't think the iPhone has that for free, but I could be mistaken.
Also don't forget the uses that haven't been thought of yet.
You may be interested in my more detailed writeup of morton codes here that was briefly mentioned in this article. It also comes with Python code.

http://www.codexon.com/posts/morton-codes
Ok, ok...I get it :)
Ask HN: Web Service for Local Business Directory
I'm looking for a web service to get local business listings.

Yelp is too restricting that it only allows you use their data in real-time and you cannot store them.

Yahoo Local Search meanwhile only allows it for non-commercial use.

Google Local Search API only does Javascript/Ajax.

Thanks.
Getting Closer to Google Closure
Fountain of youth for 2 dinosaurs, I say.

Microsoft could lose relevancy if it doesn't gain a foot hold in the "markets of the future."

We are all familiar with the woes of the publishing industry.

The press could form an exclusive partnership with Microsoft to take down Google.

I wonder how risky this is considering you would still have indirect links to the publishers' content via, for example, blog posts or sites like Hacker News where there is meta-discussion of the content of those sites going on.
Poor 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son. 406 updates and all I got was this lousy book deal. http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/
If you are right about the government starving for innovative technical solutions, it is hard for me to envision how startups can help with this. I see government, in its smallest procurement/technological acquisition like the enterprise solutions, and at biggest, military-scale procurement efforts.

The great, smart tech sell to the government would be of what is called the "long sell" variety, where the sales cycle is measured in years.
Only 72, but they are hilarious as hell. Quality, not quantity.
I'm amazed at how far technology has advanced..even since I was a kid (I'm 28). I just got an HTC snap and I loaded it up with a bunch of old game system emulators. I can now play NES, SNES, Neo Geo, and any other game system that I played as a kid...right from my phone.
It's a great story -- especially since Shit My Dad Says is hilarious -- but this does more to prove how desperate the networks are for hits in the 18-34 demographic and how poor their judgement has become (see 'Cavemen') than it does to prove anything about Twitter talent shining through, etc.
The Internet is killing storytelling? What?

http://www.fanfiction.net/
http://www.fictionpress.com/
http://www.scribd.com/
(And lots of others...)

I rest my case.
I would offer that in any regulated system you can excel by ignoring the regulations if others insist on adhering to them.
Creating your first PHP JPGraph application in under 5 minutes
Great site! I just checked it out and couldn't stop reading.
Just looked up the latest balance sheets. GOOG has $12 billion in cash, MSFT $6 billion. And GOOG had positive cash flow in their last quarterly, MSFT was negative.
Watching Yankees Spending
Yes I know, and you can retrieve the FLV file from your cache too. Sorry for using the wrong technical term but for the point at hand it is irrelevant.

Actually it'd be more in YouTube's interest to control the playback experience since they use HTTP streaming, since the stream is less controllable by itself.
I don't think he moved as far away from it as you believe. Marx's particular approach to the labor theory of value is key to his philosophical ideas about exploitation and alienation. And subsequent Marxists placed a great deal of emphasis on it, especially Rosa Luxembourg.
Synaptic is a major improvement over the original apt tools -- while it's slower, it actually handles dependencies correctly most of the time, and doesn't throw anal-retentive errors.

Unfortunately, the underlying apt system has plenty of shitty behaviors that aren't even related to Debian's shitty packaging policies or the hostile original implementation:

* Only one process can even read the db at a time!
* It's extraordinarily fragile
* Loves to crap out at the slightest network failure
* Will corrupt its database on SIGINT
* Hamhandedly muddles up installation and configuration
* Does not handle optional dependencies well
* Poorly handles only part of the 'alternatives' problem

A lot of its failings are rooted in the assumption that installation will be fast enough to be interactive, so why bother?
Horacio Felauto - Business Networking on Ecademy
Link Building promotion
Use social bookmarking sites to place high quality backlinks for you. Create free blogs on different web 2.0 sites to enhance your backlinks.
That 25 percent of their current traffic comes from Google does not necessitate that they will lose 25 percent of their traffic if they block Google.

There are numerous reasons why this is true, and I'll give some of them, but the basic point is that nothing is that simple.

1. What percent of that Google traffic is coming from "I'm feeling lucky" hits by just typing "wsj" or "wall street journal" into the address bar? Presumably the people doing this could figure out how to find wsj.com without this feature.

2. What percent of that traffic is accidental search bar queries for wsj.com instead of address bar queries? I do this all the time, and once you're at the Google results, it's quicker to just click the link there.

3. How much traffic will be gained by blocking Google? It would be silly to ignore the fact that since this will be a big decision, people might check out wsj.com just to see how things are going since the Google block. People may also be impressed with the courage and more likely to trust and use wsj.com in the future.
Yes this does strike me as being odd. I have source code for a video game demo that Apple made and provided to developers if you asked them nicely for it. There were two sessions out of a 5 session long day (I believe) dedicated specifically to OpenGL and other game related technologies.

One thing Apple has been very good at with marketing the iPhone is specifically not pigeon holing it as a device best used for a specific task. Their whole campaign right now centres around the premise that the iPhone does just about anything. Contrast that with the Blackberry which people pigeon hole as the device for business people and folks that like a keyboard.

Perhaps Apple isn't promoting the iPhone as a gaming platform to the fullest extent that it can. But this may very well be by design and should not be confused as Apple being ashamed of it as a gaming machine. Apple just wants the iPhone to have the universal applicability of the PC and corner other smartphones like the Blackberry, into being to its PC what electronic typewriters were.
If you need to break the addiction, read a few pages looking for misogyny, bigotry, and casual discrimination against various sorts of people. Your habit'll break by sun-up.
Shitmydadsays has become one of the best parts of my weekly routine. It's not just how funny they are: There's a poetry to how he speaks that's as good as any one-liners I've ever read.
Yea you're right. Who these days come up with great software idea just to get a patent? We create new technologies because we know there will be great rewards (or other motivations), and we get the patent just to protect ourselves from the patent system. Therefore the patent system at least in its current state is purposeless.
This certainly seems like a positive step towards finding a lucrative revenue model. Is there any way this will hinder future "Irans"?
As someone playing with several different language ideas at any given moment, this was great to read.
I remember there was this company that had exclusive deals with content providers, in the early Web days. Oh - AOL - that was it. In fact I think I still have one of their CDs lying around somewhere.

I remember Scientific American being behind the AOL-wall, and thinking damn, SA should really be out here with everything else. But I also remember thinking there's no way I'm going to pay AOL for anything when there's so much else out here beyond the walls. And that was in the early Web days.

Today I can't believe that anyone would disassociate themselves from the World Wide Web, when virtually every potentially walled-off property has fistfuls of just as good competition out here.

Maybe with Bing it won't matter so much, as any browser can display results from multiple engines with the right add-on, or anyone can provide a web-app to do so. So the only people who will care about how this plays out is MS and Google; the rest of us will continue to just search and consume.

Murdoch's flirtation with building a giant tree-fort (NO GURLZ ALOWD!) will probably end up being an example of a doomed Maginot Line. "Rumble-rumble-rumble ... What's this? (It's a pay-wall, sir) Well, drive around it!"

I think, though, the most comprehensive attempt at re-enacting AOL is FaceBook. Sure, lots of people are in FaceBook, just like all our grandparents were. But there's still a lot of people outside of FaceBook, and anyone selling or renting content inside FaceBook isn't reaching any of those outsiders. And there's plenty outside the FaceBook wall to keep people busy and happy and informed (and blissfully un-poked).
The leverage of having tons of money obtained from their monopolies. For Microsoft to "offer more revenue" they would have to pay the money straight out of their own coffers. It's unlikely their non-monopoly divisions (which are barely profitable) could support such a scheme.
a) Apple hand-picked and b) everyone else

Apple-as-kingmaker (a sort of frequent model in Mac development, incidentally) is not obviously advantageous to indie developers. It works fantastically for those who are turned into kings, but it also guarantees that 99%+ of the population will remain serfs.

I tend to think "gaming the App Store" is another way to say "giving Apple what they want". The problem is, well, Apple wants churn. (Or, if they don't want churn, they're incompetent, because they've designed a near-perfect system for encouraging it. I don't think Apple is incompetent.)

Pick your favorite useless app which costs $1 and only hold's someone's attention for a day, while they show it to friends to say "Hah, look what I can do with my iPhone." Maybe your favorite example is farting, or a flashlight, or jiggling various bits of the anatomy, whatever. Whatever it is, if it causes someone to talk to their friends and say "Hey guys, look what cool things I can do on my iPhone which you can't do with your lame phone" then that app is anything but useless to Apple.

Many people think that the App Store sells applications. To quote the best line of a bad fantasy TV show: That is its function, but not its purpose. Its purpose is to sell iPhones.

(Ditto for iTunes.)
Yes, this really surprised me, especially after hearing Schiller get on stage and just gush about how unexpectedly successful the iPhone / iPod Touch platform has been for gaming.
"Son, it doesn't take a fucking genius to make up bullshit
people agree with, add 'fuck', then slap on an old-man icon." ~ Dad, saying shit

http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/statuses/5427392585
Though you really said it all, anyone who feels like reading a long article that says the same things:

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
They should make a Don Draper spinoff version.
Doesn't quite seem like it's reached that critical mass needed to be really useful
They wanted to get on that list, because getting on that list means increased sales.

Now to get more sales, they have to release more apps. I guess this is good for apple, but more releases generally means lots more crap.
I think there's a way to cycle in house ads if the space would otherwise be given to those free government ads.
Alternatively, strategies like this could segregate users on search. Football and Nascar on bing and an entire class of citizens have left Google. Makes me think of Myspace and Facebook.
Not true if you use objects as namespaces -- it is capable of reducing a.b.c.d to one access, particularly with inlining, and this construct has a runtime cost in JS.
http://whatwoulddondraperdo.tumblr.com/
Thanks, found another member of Amesoeurs with a solo album there.
It doesn't bother me at all unless each page is < 500 words or something. A giant slab of text turns me off.. too long to read, etc. Cut into bite size portions of a minute or two each, it seems more readable, even if it's really more annoying.
It's the 21st century. Just because the mainstream isn't actively engaged in your favorite form of it doesn't meant it's dead.

Heck, even if every native-born English speaker stopped writing and reading novels, there's a good chance that some community of Japanese Otaku would arise to lovingly curate it forever.

The 3 minute pop tune didn't kill the symphony. Just because it's not what the mainstream is doing, doesn't mean it's dead. Note that classical music has found a new home, appreciated by the mainstream in movie soundtracks. Your community might be waning, but it won't die. Sometimes, a downturn can even be a blessing!
Thanks for the recs, I like them both. Agalloch reminds me of Ulver.
Missing Neville Brody. Not sure why the big focus on techs either.
To be honest most non-casual games on the iPhone suck. And I rarely spend any time playing games on the iPhone. It just wasn't designed to be a gaming device. As great as the touch screen is, controls usually end up sucking. There's no way most people would ever see it as a gaming device. It may play games better than other phones, but it's other features still outweigh it in its definition.
Looking at one example, the one that favors your opinion is useless. Yes, sometime this works, sometimes it doesn't.
LinkedIn copies Selective Twitter: #li syncs tweets to your LinkedIn status
Yes, mod_wsgi rules. For maintainability, reliability, and performance, everything else pales when it comes to serving up Python apps.
Have you heard of Debian stable, testing, unstable, and experimental?
I am confident that within the next 40 years we will take one of these technologies beyond the theoretical -- we're going to find an exoplanet with conditions that support life and it's going to set off an extraordinary scientific mission.
Twitter and LinkedIn team up. Just like peanut butter and chocolate?
Ask HN: How do Internet businesses get around foreign registration?
First, a bit of background for anyone unfamiliar:

Foreign registration is the requirement for a corporation based in one state to _register_ to do business in another state. You can incorporate in Delaware, for example, but there is a registration requirement to do business in California.
Two things seem clear to me: First, internet businesses do commerce that is very often out of state, and second, it seems highly unlikely that they register in every state they do business in.

So my question is this: Am I misinterpreting this part of the law? Or is it just not enforced too strongly?
OS X 10.6.2 Is Out, No Atom Support
Twitter, LinkedIn Cut Deal - We're Still Waiting for the Big Announcement
If you are looking for specific service I think you can give redbeacon a try. fyi - They won techcrunch 50 this year. http://www.redbeacon.com/
Firefox flaws account for 44% of all browser bugs
So Dave bitches about Paul Carr using two articles to prove a trend by using one article to prove a trend? :-)
Somebody send this to the IPCC
I have met far too many C programmers who just thought of the compiler as "magic." We're already way past the point at which "the product produced is not entirely understood."
We've been using FPS and it's not ideal. The only way to get credit card info is by directing your visitors offsite to a co-branded amazon page.

We've also had quite a few problems getting our transactions to complete - about half of the transactions from this month are still pending.