skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the existing standard front, there is Universal Plug and Play (http://www.upnp.org/) that aims to "to enable simple and robust connectivity among consumer electronics, intelligent appliances and mobile devices from many different vendors." I haven't played with this stuff at all, but there appears to be fair amount activity in this space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPnP_AV_MediaServers

I don't know how much of the example scenario you could implement within the confines of UPnP, but perhaps it could be part of the solution.
I think Apple fixed it?
Looks like they already did. For Posterity, here's a screenshot:

http://visualmotive.com/etc/apple_xss.png
we also need the datastore to be highly available and limit the risk of data loss as much as possible: MongoDB has this area covered really well

Ahem, don't want to rain on anyone's parade but I'd be very careful with such claims (which the mongo guys don't make!). The risk of data-loss is pretty high with mongo (when compared to a traditional RDBMS) as there are no defined sync points or a WAL - it only syncs to disk on shutdown. That means when your machine crashes you're almost guaranteed to lose the last n changes where n can be a very large figure depending on your usage.

In reality that means you can only rely on the contents of your last mongodump to be truly persisted. Everything else is to be considered volatile.
but can be achieved in the home with a hygenic midwife and surroundings
Someday our phones will be so tuned in to our locations and preferences that we'll see maps that show only the places we're really interested in, a la

http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/newyorker2.JP...
Ask HN: What web-hosted Source Control Service do you use?
Hi,

What source control service do you use?

Does it let you download all of your metadata in case you want to switch to another service or your own Subversion/CVS? I tried Github but it didn't let me download comment metadata, so decided to abandon that.

(I want to support group development for a new site in python/GAE, http://www.appenginecash.com/ )
Disappointing review.

From the article:

Andy Nulman is Mr. Surprise. Go read his blog on surprise. But come back, ok? Better yet, stick around here for awhile, but bookmark his blog link in a separate browser window or tab for later enjoyment.

This article starts off with the above desperate-sounding request, which reminds me of a 1996 web site ("Please resize your browser to be <--- this wide --->"). It then goes on to make an assertion ("People will pay for surprise"), and then offers four "laws" of surprise which aren't really explained--what does it mean to say "Balls Beat Brains"?

Mr. Nulman may have written a great book, but this review really does him a disservice.
It looks like they just removed the functionality. So it is fixed for now. It was fun while it lasted. ;)
World of Warcraft ordered to shut down in China again | VentureBeat
The uninhabited land is all called for, residing in a country/under a government with its laws, etc.
Ask HN: Review my site: Pikk.com
Pikk ( http://www.pikk.com ) is Digg meets PollDaddy. Users submit stories with simple two-choice voting (thrive or fail, for example). Stories with the most votes make the front page (and decay over time, so there's always fresh content).

Bloggers can also use Pikk by embedding a voting widget so their readers can vote without ever leaving the story they're reading. They get linked back from Pikk, so there's two-way traffic.

That's Pikk in a nutshell, please check it out and tell me what you think. I'll be officially launching in the next week or so.

Thanks a lot,
Kevin (kapauldo)
Not sure what this means. I am the author of Ghostery.

Can you explain what you mean?
I agree. "Google it" make sense. "Bing it" makes sense.

But "Duck it"? Somehow the name feels a little off to me.
Bookmarklet to augment your GitHub dashboard
Not really. Anyone with money and a willingness to invest doesn't have trouble making connections. Their problem is making the right connections. Having a small but high-quality network is far more valuable to them than having a large network of people who waste their time and resources.
Developing Games for Android
I can relate to not feeling real- home doesn't feel quite like home.
Anyone have a screenshot? I seem to have missed all the fun.
I loaded up this classic video in Safari:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsSHlCDIzNg&feature=relat...

and watched the resource use. While the video was playing, the minimum CPU use from Safari was 48%, with frequent spikes above 60%. As soon as I closed the tab, CPU use dropped to about 2% and stayed there. On a laptop with a full charge and power-management profiles to optimize usage you can get away with this; on a power-constrained mobile device you most certainly can't.
Yeah Maven has been a tough road to say the least. Some time soon I want to just sit down and go through some of the maven tutorials/docs out there and lock in on getting comfortable with it, since it seems so popular.
Give yourself Pyro [ X-Men ] mutant powers...
I know what you mean. Compared to the lax and bogus security at many financial institutions, and the credulity of the victims, I almost sympathize with the crooks.

Almost. If they were ripping off casino billionaires by means of ingenious gadgets, it would be one thing, but these guys are taking the life savings of marginally employed people.
Yep, it turns out that he "sold out" the same way Jobs "sold out" NeXT to Apple.
Parse Atom and RSS syndication feeds in Adobe Flex
Perhaps "impossible" is overly dramatic, but "economically impractical" may, in this context (general purpose networked computing), be the same thing.

It seems to me that "five nines" is achieved more often with careful use of definitions, rather than careful engineering. Low-hanging fruit are scheduled maintenance and degraded performance.

Otherwise, wouldn't Tandem have been wildly successful?
Yeah, but I really didn't want to click a link to a known scammer site. I was hoping the instructions could be posted somewhere clean and safe.
I've long used Eric Meyer's HTML slide show format:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
http://i.imgur.com/OfdDC.png
Too much non-story "stuff" - at full screen height I get 4 stories on the front page. HN gives me 26. Clearly you can't go as minimalist as HN, but I really think you want to do better than 4.

Also, do you want to ask people to vote before they have even read the story?

Cute how the karma up/down text changes with the situation though... is that done automatically or by human?
From the mailing list, my impression on the most frequently asked/discussed topics:

* Laziness: Does something hold onto the head of a list or does it drop it. Memory characteristics of the same. Unexpected memory usage.

* Compilation: When and in what way is clojure compiled. How to do AOT. How to produce named Java classes. How to create executable JARs.

* Java interop: Given a java snippet, what is the closest idiomatic clojure. What library is used to do foo.

* Performance: How can a snippet of code be made to run in less time. Why should or shouldn't a snippet of clojure be faster. What is the typical speed relationship between a piece of Java code and a piece of clojure code. How to type-hint a snippet of code. What can/cannot be type-hinted. What are and how best to use transients.

I feel like those topics account for a large percent of the traffic on the list. I'm certainly leaving things out. All of the above have been dealt with at one time or another on the list.
I think you want to elaborate on your question. What comment metadata are you talking about?
Ask HN: Review my app: tweetrad.io
Not just limited to phone technologies. I think there is a larger trend of pandora-like predictive analytics soon to seep into our connected lives.

In Soviet Russia, you don't browse the web. The web browses you!
Clojure: Where’s the Elegance?
I like the concept, seems best suited for low-volume stuff. it would get annoying listening to updates at the normal frequency of stuff on Twitter.

I didn't look too deeply at it, would be very very good to be able to filter out dupes (ie: exclude any RT's).
A joke worthy of HN?
Complexity costs. It costs money and it costs downtime. Look at Google: they have redundant everything, super-smart people, super good operations and still have some downtime.
"V" for the 00s
Ask HN: What do you want out of a SMS gateway and API?
Hi, everyone!

We're thinking of putting together a new SMS API specifically catered to application developers and hackers. Our platform can handle two-way messaging, advanced routing, subscriptions and keywords, etc., but we've found that most of you don't really need all that additional "stuff". So we want to know what it is that you _do_ want out of an API.

Is the major determining factor the features of the API? Is it the price? Deliverability & reliability? Simplicity?

Is it something in between our platform with SMPP binds <http://privatelabelsms.com/api/> and PennySMS with SMTP connectivity <http://pennysms.com/docs>?

We'll take your feedback into account as we move forward.
Tweetrad.io is a fun little side project that converts twitter feeds into audio using text to speech.

We use a distributed network of converter bots to handle the work queue. Jobs are placed on the queue via api calls from the javascript client that interacts with twitter's search api directly in order to avoid rate limiting of a centralized search server. Our app server is a lightweight Sinatra service that handles job queueing. We stream the audio directly from our nginx web server as they become available via the conversion process.

We are trying to decide if this app has a real use case or if it's just a fun thing. One of the ideas we are thinking about is an iphone app for keeping up with your tweet stream on the go. We would love to hear your feedback.
Links:

Our API http://privatelabelsms.com/api/

Penny SMS http://pennysms.com/docs
I was actually a bit dissatisfied with how slicehost (part of rackspace, or at least using their DC) handled this last night.

If something like this goes down, I want to know what is up within minutes of it happening. At least a "Yeah, things are going wrong. It's our fault, not yours.". I checked slicehost's website but...nothing. The only way I even knew that others were having a problem was by checking twitter.

Seriously, guys...one of the things behind the pane of glass that says "break in case of emergency" needs to a sheet of paper with big red bold letters on it that says "TELL THE CUSTOMERS WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW! DO NOT WAIT!"

/yeah, yeah, I'm over-reacting. It's just really frustrating to be completely in the dark when something goes wrong, even if it is only for a few minutes.
New phone includes web, email, translator, coffee maker, and harmonica
It's bold, it's funny, it's not real, but I want one anyway.
"just" XSS?
That's a pretty good argument for not paying by the hour and/or not using consultants.
I like the arstechnica pie chart at the bottom. I'm guessing a large percentage of their IE users are in fact tied in by office systems and such.

I suppose it's a credence to a tech site that its readers are overwhelmingly tech-orientated compared to the widespread market.
Never, I hope. As someone who actually touches the hardware in datacenters, ever, I'd like not to have the added fire and hazmat risk of that much lithium and non-EPSable power everywhere.
why are you okay with non-ecc in your firewall? not all traffic is checksummed, corrupted packets are bad as anything.
1) AdWords

2) Call up a few and offer a free copy in advice for marketing advice.

3) Talk to plumbing supply houses in the area about carrying it and offer them a cut of sales.
can you take the feed from the longest poem ever website? i'd love to hear that. even better if the voice can become less robotic.
The Power of Race
The innovation makes sense, but what does authenticity even mean, in this context?
No problem. Great site. I always welcome better search technologies.

In regards to the filtering I think allowing the user to do a bunch of cross-filters would be of immense value. Factors like type of website, author, creation/update date, etc. help bring the results down to another level of granularity.

This won't be useful for all searches, but would really help optimize certain types of queries (e.g. seeking an answer to a specific problem).
This is such bs. Firefox outstripped IE6 a LONG TIME AGO. To back up my argument, we get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, spread around the world. IE6 gets about 3% of our total traffic of about 20 million per month. Firefox(overall, mainly 3.5 and less than half of that 3.0) are at 33%. IE(overall) is about 48%.
The Missing Theory of Refactoring
I would set up a product website, do the minimal SEO work and run an Adwords campaign going after the easiest segment of your market. The easiest being the segment of small businesses that has the biggest pain and thus the biggest need. If they are small business owners they aren't 'living' on the Internet like most techies. They don't use Twitter, Facebook, etc. If they are desparate enough they will use a search engine to find something. This will help kick start your marketing and it can be running while your at work.
The story I heard years ago is that SPRINT originally was an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal NeTwork.
hmmmm - good point, i hadn't thought of that, so you're saying the first impression should be more dense with stories.

users can either "thin slice" and vote with their gut, or they can click the link and read the story, then vote (most links are pops).

not sure what you mean about karma up/down text, can you clarify?
it's not practical to put an electric generator and engines, which are much, much better, in a plane or car
Actually, that's exactly how the Chevrolet Volt works.
I heard about OpenLaszlo - http://www.openlaszlo.org/ - a few years ago, but I never got around toworking with it. It emitted Flash & Dynamic HTML.
How long does it take to fail over to a second data center? Can you do it in less than 26 seconds? I can't.
While this is possible, it requires shared storage, which is a single point of failure, and can be quite expensive. None of the VPS providers I know of support live migration. I know I don't.

Also, live migration doesn't help you of the hardware dies. (I mean, if the host is using shared storage, it is easy to bring you up on a new host, but you still crashed. you can run a dedicated off shared storage, if that is all you want.) You can only 'live migrate' off a 'live' host. Now, if you wanna get really expensive, vmware (and xen, if you want to do some patching) has the capability to essentially 'live migrate every Xms' - the idea being that they never bring up the second host unless the primary host fails; but it's ready, and only Xms behind. (they do some things I don't understand to insure that I/O to the shared block device is in sync) This is very expensive, though, because not only do you need to pay for 2x the hardware, you need a vmware license. (or to run a non-standard xen)

A dedicated server with mirrored drives and ecc ram is likely going to be more reliable than a VPS.
This is complete bs, just some uninformed pythonista spewing biased crap.
I've heard the phrase "web of trust" and googled it, but found something very different to what I have in mind.

There is a tradition, going back to The Well, of having a serious adult forum invaded by children and their poo, pee, belly, bum posts. The adult forum resists and is destroyed.

My idea is that the different users are all legitimate and that success comes through coexistance. By coexistance I mean obliviousness. Chrome-Dome posts a cerebral contribution of great erudition. Chuckle-Head replies with vulgar mockery. In a traditional forum Chrome-Dome is driven away by this. The traditional response is to try to find a way to drive Chuckle-Head away instead.

The problem is that it is Chuckle-Head who is the popular figure, read and admired by hundreds of lame brains. Chrome-Dome is read and admired by dozens. So systems of voting and karma end up reflecting the fact that the mob greatly out numbers the elite.

The vision driving Outer Circle is that Chrome-Dome is happy with a white list of authors of some intellectual pedigree. If Outer Circle is a success, with millions involved, Chrome-Dome's, err, corner of the circle has thousands of authors, more than he can actually read, so he never gets round to expanding his white list to the point that he sees Chuckle-Head's post. Chrome-Dome is oblivious to the vulgar mockery around him and is not driven away by it.

Simultaneously, no administrator is banning Chuckle-Head, and Chuckle-Head is not retaliating by organising a DDoS of the site. Why would he? He has white listed his mates and is larking about, mocking the occasion boring adult he stumbles across, and enjoying acting his age.

The goal of Outer-Circle is the coexistance of incompatibles through invisibility.

Suppose that Middle-Brow, whom Chrome-Dome reads, comes across Chuckle-Head's vulgar mockery and replies to it, complaining that it is rude. We don't want this making it visible to Chrome-Dome. That would be a failure of invisibility and might drive Chrome-Dome away.

On the other hand, Chrome-Dome isn't reading all the replies to his posts. Ordinarily when Middle-Brow replies to a reply to one of Chrome-Dome's posts, the Outer-Circle software should promote the middle post to Chrome-Dome's attention, least there be a break in the threading. So the fine detail, of letting Middle-Brow control whether his replies do or do not implicitly endorse the comments to which they are attached, is actually essential to the overall plan.
5 New Technologies That Will Change Everything
I've always liked the prospects for an augmented reality car windshield.
Asimov's Nemesis doesn't really have anything to do with the topic of this article.
Three ideas you may like to try:

1. Pay (commission only) to people to sell for you, your time is money, so if you pay a "fair" commission you'll all end up winners.

2. Put together a point of sale promotion which can be displayed at plumber, locksmith etc suppliers' counters. Of course, you may have to incentivate them as well.

3. Do some paid internet marketing with keywords for common problems that they might be searching for. Of course, that will only capture the internet savvy ones.
... and what kind of site do you run? I think this means averaged over the web. If you're running anything remotely technical you have a very different userbase than, say, Yahoo!.
Because it does not try to keep up with the fast-paced, complex flaws of Rich Internet Apps written by people who have no knowledge of information security and are only interested in getting attention for themselves and their shitty start-up.
It should probably be noted that this is not a real phone but rather some sort of abstract promotion for Nova Scotia, Canada.
Sounds good in theory...

However, in a couple of my career cycles I've managed data centers and/or server farms upon which lots and lots of companies relied.

Many times these unexpected outages are not always easy to diagnose even a rough root cause quickly. Sometimes you don't know if it's your issue, or an upstream issue, and so on.

So, you put out a statement 5 seconds after and outage, and, oops, you misdiagnosed it. Now you get to deal with the shitty customers who want to play 1000 questions about why you told them it was a transfer switch when it turns out it was really a main breaker. Not that it matters much in the end.

You're damned if you do, damned if you don't, but most of the time it's better overall to release an accurate statement later than a wrong statement early.
Rubyists.EU: A haven for all the European Rubyists
At the beginning of October 2009, we embarked on an initiative sweeping in both scope and ambition. After countless frustrated attempts to connect and establish better communication with Ruby/Rails User Groups in Europe, we came up with the concept of Rubyists.EU ( http://rubyists.eu ).

In its gist, the Rubyists.EU ( http://rubyists.eu ) initiative is a free of charge communication platform that aims at promoting awareness, enhancing assistance, and further boosting cooperation and collaboration among individual hackers and User Groups in Europe.

We would like to invite all the Rubyists in Europe to join this adventure by registering their User Groups and following us on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/rubyists_eu ), LinkedIn ( http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2400973 ), Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/pages/Europe/RubyistsEU/188196555796 ), and Google Groups ( http://groups.google.com/group/rubyists-eu ). You can even fork the source code from our Github account ( http://github.com/rock-n-code/rubyists.eu ).

We are looking forward to seeing how your participation in the Rubyists.EU ( http://rubyists.eu ) initiative can shape the vision and influence the development of both Ruby and Rails in Europe!
That should tell others that the people who know the most about computers tend not to use IE.
The future of schooling may lie with video games
I want to use it to have Mr. T read my status reports... is that possible?
I work for a company that runs ecommerce stores for major companies. Unfortunately 80% of these companies still use IE6.
I can't believe I've been wasting my time with this Python nonsense. From now on, all my developer tools will be named after some reference to the catacombs of hell.
I like it, but you should be able to turn off the words "X wants it to be known" and just read the headline
Agreed. Just as another data point, justin.tv still gets a little over 8% of its traffic from IE6 users.
MySpace Says Zero Tolerance For App Scams, Changes Terms Of Use
14 years of MSN home pages
It's certainly fun. Love the little touch of the white noise when tuning between tweets.
Thereby rendering it unusable by people who want to create RIAs yet have deep knowledge of information security?
Pretty sure the past tense is "bung."

Not that this is much of an improvement.
I like the concept!

I assume the "music" in between readings is supposed to sound like the radio is tuning for a new station? If this is the case, it's a neat idea, but it was a little frustrating because you want to hear the music, but it's not clear - although I'm not sure on any better suggestion (i.e. elevator music, muzak..lol).

brk 23 has a good point about filters, that would definitely make it more usable.

Nice work! Haven't seen any other fun web integration of text-speech like this (I definitely don't count dictionary.com pronouncing words for me as fun!)
Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?
Sony's Xperia X10 promo video launched today
Okay that is awesome. I love the radio sound.

One issue: When speaking the number $44B, it was pronounced as "4 B" as in "four bee"
Fun with naming conventions
Controlling Corporations: Stockholders vs Stakeholders
Hate to say it, but Firefox on OpenBSD is as vulnerable to this bug as any other browser. Of course, I doubt OpenBSD users have iTunes accounts...
1) don't use email like pennysms does (I'm guessing they mass email all the email address a number could have at any carrier, there can only be one "hit")

2) give me my own dedicated number. i don't care if its 10 digits

3) price and simplicity are my two major decision factors, with price far and away #1.
Mr. T probably can't but you might be able to have Dr Who read your status reports http://tombakersays.com/ .
More info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate_(phone)
http://www.pomegranatephone.com/novascotia.html