skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But is the app store (like Microsoft Windows) a good thing from the perspective of the users? App store makes it easier to buy software for the users. Even if it makes life harder for the developers. It also lets developers get paid for stuff that otherwise might be hard for them to get money for.
The photo uploader on facebook has always been lame, taking ages to load and often crashing. It's a classic case of over-engineering. I've always ended up using the simplified uploader, which is much more straightforward.
Towering plan for new S.F. skyline unveiled
Download Google Chrome OS for VMWare or Virtual Box
I think they should start with memorization, and let each individual develop they own heuristics and shortcuts. When those abstract shortcuts are enforced and don't match with the ones a person is already using, it can get confusing.
People have been installing their own software for decades. I don't see why it should be any different on a smartphone.
Google unveils Chrome OS
It seems to me that the goal of the App Store is to not only provide a convenient location for consumers to purchase apps (and therefore to act as a source of revenue for both Apple and their clients), but to also help ensure a quality experience for their customers. This process has some major benefits; the process, however, is poorly implemented. I think most people would be just fine with the App Store if the approval process had quicker turn-around time, or at least predictable turn-around time.
Has PC gaming lost it's way?
I'd like an explanation of what all the things on your profile page do. I think it's mostly covered, but what does "delay" do? Measured in seconds, minutes, or what? Even just a mouse-over would help.
Road midget sighting: golf cart on streets of San Francisco?
[No mention of longitudinal studies or long-term side effects.]

But as was also reported, the swine flu vaccine was being developed in a rush; there just wasn't enough time to study the long-term side effects, and the parents who worry about the vaccine not being safe can be actually right. But I doubt Seth cares about that, all he thinks about is how to market it.

Now I don't say it is wrong to get a vaccine, but I think we should be careful to not be influenced be marketers and ignore other facts.
Startup Atlanta to boost tech ecosystem
Town to photograph every car that enters and leaves
Many people'd disagree with you about what clutter is, I suspect.

Take a site like http://informationarchitects.jp/. They're a firm who specialise in news design: unsurprisingly, their site uses rigid typographic hierarchy underpinned by a grid. It feels really uncluttered to me, but it's clearly taken a lot of work to achieve that.

Then take Craigslist, which is the other extreme. There's no graphics at all, but it's an amazingly cluttered layout.

Both Reddit and Hacker News are nearer the Craigslist end of things than the iA one. None are the acme of good web typography. That's fair enough - Reddit, HN and Craigslist are all huge successes in their niches. However, the design decisions (or choice not to make any design decisions) do affect the tone of a place.
I already jailbreak and install software on my iPhone, so the answer is yes, absolutely.
I'd say: let market decide. If your app is not good, you won't make any significant amount of money on it, no matter if it is pre-approved or not.
Right. I think this really sums it up.

My answer to the original question is, "No, but I would if I'd seen it before." The children, presumably, have seen it before.
An investor can get a meaningful return the same way you always could while investing in a company: by sharing the profits that the company makes over the life of the company. This means the investors are motivated to provide advice/connections/decisions that benefit the corporation over the long term, rather than concentrating on short-term solutions. I think it is a much more positive way of growing a business, but it seems like no one is interested in that anymore, either because they have no actual faith that what they do is valuable/viable long term, or because they are impatient. I don't see what is offensive about the article. It just points out what the trend currently is.
How about if Apple could certify the apps instead. Developers can pay to have confirmation from Apple that the apps is safe, but they don't have to.

That way users have the choice.
Initial Public Offering drip... that's what your domain means right? ;)
I see a whole lot of programming and absolutely no functional, technical, or graphic design. This isn't "learning how to create web applications", this is "learning how to be the last team member on a web application project."

This is a problem that I have with the current state of "software developer" programs at most of today's universities, be they Computer Science or Software Engineering degrees. They give the student the impression that they actually know the subject by the time they graduate when they've really only taught the easiest, smallest part--the programming, and usually rather poorly.

Most graduating computer science students are going to go into a software development position, probably web development, so it is good that Stanford is at least introducing students to the, erhm, "unique" challenges that crop up in web dev. But they're missing some of the most important lessons, like what a project life cycle looks like, why the principles of security must be the 1st consideration, not the last (how many times do people make a thumbnail project with no auth or permission mgmt and then graft it in after?), how to design a non-trivial database, how to make pages that look somewhat decent (and no, it doesn't take an artist, you can easily do a site survey and just ape the current trends, something any copy-pasta programmer should be able to do), how to approach a project as more than just a seat-of-the-pants hacker. Some programs touch on all of this stuff, but they never inculcate them as essential elements, they are all presented as tertiary to programming.
seems to work for Android.
The importance of institutional redundancy
I think this is a brilliant idea.
Risky Real-Time
The real-time web has created numerous benefits but has also introduced a set of tricky new risks.
>>I prefer radio over pre-recorded music; it reminds me I'm not alone

I used to keep the TV running in the background -- just to get a feeling that i'm not alone.
Take Chrome OS for a test spin
The number of new hires (all but one, and that kid actually turned out to be a college dropout. Unfortunately the company got rid of him even though he knew his stuff because he lied about having a 4 year degree) that I've had to teach what a prepared statement was has been really rather ludicrous. In a basic CRUD web app, there should be no reason to be building string-based queries, ever.
Microsoft already have something close to the kernel only product you propose that they create in response to Chrome OS - Microsft Server 2008 Server Core.

I don't think that it can start in 7 seconds - and that's without having .Net, Silverlight and IE support.
Anything that's not covered in the SDK documentation is off-limits, even if Apple themselves are using the calls in their own apps. This is what the Whole Joe Hewitt / Three20 debacle was about: http://joehewitt.com/post/the-three20-project/

Web API calls are mostly a 17+ rating problem: if you load anything over the web that could potentially be 17+ you have a problem.
Yes, I do it on my computer all the time... I did it on my older smart phones as well. If an app was buggy or crashed a lot, I uninstalled it.
Algorithm for sorting of comments on hacker news
How does the algorithm for sorting the comments in a given thread on hacker news work? I get the feeling that new comments that come in late don't stand much of a chance to stay at the top relative to old comments that got voted up. Doesn't it need to be weighted based on how high it got rated up relative to the time it was posted and how many other ratings took place during the time it was up?
I worked from home for two years and will soon be doing so again. I think sometimes the key to working home is occasional gross inefficiency. It's almost replenishing depleted mental reserves. If I started feeling causeless frustration, I'd take a day off and vegetate: watch bad tv, lay in the park without doing anything, go out with friends, go to a bar, etc. The next day I was usually reinspired...although sometimes it felt like I was inspired again because I felt like I spent a day wasting time.
Ask HN: Should I open up my apps data so anyone can use and derive from it?
I've built a site for climbers called Bouldr (http://bouldr.net) - a worldwide, user editable guidebook for climbers.

Recently, I've been toying with the idea of making all of the data that has been submitted to Bouldr open (Creative-Commons) to everyone in the form of a downloadable archive as well as an API.

My thinking is that if I make the data available in a similar way to how Stack Overflow already does, then more climbers will be motivated to contribute, and more interesting uses of the data will come to light.

My only concern is that I may inadvertently kill my site to death by overlooking some glaring reason that this is a bad idea.

So my question is: Is opening up the data from Bouldr a good / bad / stupid / dangerous idea, and why?

Cheers!
I'd treat them the same way I do apps on other systems: I'd avoid ones that I was unfamiliar with or that came from an untrusted source, but if a general consensus developed that something was good, I'd go ahead and download it. Quality applications seldom turn out to ALSO be malware without people knowing about it, so this strategy works pretty well for me.
I install "non-approved" apps all the time on my G1. One of my favorite apps pdanet isn't even on the app store.
Perhaps they could incorporate some homomorphic encryption so that your data can be processed in the cloud without it being readable.
Link to site: http://bouldr.net
The Rise and Fall of Empires
What Information Should A Project Page Contain?
I met my girlfriend on ok Cupid over a year ago within a week of signing up. The site was a lot less spammy then, and most would say we just got dumb lucky.

I've done other sites and while pictures matter, if you're not a 4 or 5 not coming across boring or desperate will make you a 4 or 5 in comparison.
Pretty cool!

It seems to cover a lot of bases, too: a student's HTML must validate, she has to get her feet wet with at least a little bit of JS and Ruby, she'll have to open up Photoshop at least once--a pretty well-rounded picture of a project lifecycle.

It might be neat to add an additional project onto the end on deployment, so students would have to muck around on a command line a little bit, configure Apache, etc.
I don't think you should feel guilty. This is the nature of our work. There are days where you "feel" it and days where you don't. There are days when there is a lot to do and there are days when you're in a holding pattern to see what's happening with something. At least here in Pennsylvania, the state labor board actually recognizes this fact and has classified software development professionals as "salaried, exempt" status, meaning there is an expectation of huge variation in hours worked, sometimes plus, sometimes minus. Unfortunately, most employers just use it as an excuse to force employees to work constant plus with no overtime pay.
Google adds Automatic Captions to YouTube
VC: How a great entrepreneur deals with complexity
Reverse engineering your own designs as a product road map
Certainly the acquisition was great for them, but I think it would have been a different story if they'd gotten better support from Conde Nast.
There is a balance that can be found if you want to commit to a 10-20 year business, but I'm not huge a fan of profit share plans in an early-stage company because they take away the most critical resource which is reserved for growth and/or survivability (like when the market retracted and VCs were on the sidelines).

Also, most entrepreneurs I talk with have a ton of ideas... after about 4-5 years I think it's in a lot of peoples blood to start something new and let the expects take over growing the company from 70mph to 90mph.
I _am_ obese and I don't buy it either. I've lost 40 pounds over the past 3 years following a scaled down version of the exact same plan as in the post. And I've gained 5 back over the past 3 months by being lax.

There are many people who do have legitimate health problems that cause obesity, sure. But the vast majority of us fat folk (I still hover around 280) eat too much and move too little.
Divorce, Reddit-Style: How a social-media dream deal with Condé Nast fell apart
With HTML 5 browsers should be able to access CPU processing power and other parts of the computer previously available to only native applications. So this is possible.
This looks very good. I think it shouldn't necessarily be JQuery centric, but a JavaScript abstraction in the sense that HAML and SASS reduce the verbosity of HTML and CSS. I personally do the worst thing when I write JavaScript by omitting semicolons, but I just can't see through all the punctuation clutter, and I don't want to make all those un-necessary keystrokes.
I also omitted "this" keyword whenever possible in OOP ActionScript, but PrototypeJS OO programming makes me do it. I love how the Ruby scope deals away with that.
Unfortunately in order to download the OS, it appears as though I have to join "a social gadget platform" - whatever that is.

I'll wait for a download with less attached baggage.
The web is full of all kinds of crazy, so you never really know. Hacker News less so, but still ... (I guess even 'A Modest Proposal' would be in dire need of emoticons if it were first posted on the web.)
It would be difficult, I think, to WFH if you lived alone. Except for doing charity work, my wife is usually at home, but does not interrupt me while I am working. Having friendly neighbors and friends who live near by is good also.

I used to work exclusively in my home office, but transitioned to also working in other rooms, and sometimes on our deck. I think that I take a productivity hit doing this, but it is fun to mix it up re: working environment.
Sure, if it works for others, I have nothing against them using it. But don't force it on kids and make them hate maths.

Another silly thing I read about is associating numbers with animals. So "1" is the crocodile and "2" is the elephant or whatever. I can only say - wtf? Just another example - numbers are numbers, not elephants...

I just think to understand maths is to REDUCE the number of concepts (that's the beauty of maths). A lot of teaching concepts seem to increase the number of concepts instead.

I am not a teacher, though.
In addition to my iPhone, I have an Android device. None of the applications on the market are approved. Before this, I had a blackberry(pre app world), and none of the applications on that were approved either, and prior to that the Palm Treo apps didn't have any special permissions either.

I'm sorry, but for a supposedly smart group, most of HN seems to forget about critical thinking when it comes to anything Apple or Jobs says. Programmatically, the iPhone is the most restrictive SMARTPHONE out there and it was the one that introduced the sad "innovation" of restricting a smartphone.
While we wait for the market to decide, years might pass, and in the meantime we're stuck with a suboptimal solution.
Google Chrome OS available as free VMWare download
Kinda like what Java Verified and Symbian Signed have been doing for years?

A cryptographic signature (with an Apple-run signing authority) also ensures that your apps haven't been tampered with by a third party and (in theory) should let you track down the owner of an app if it turns out to be malware.
PSP-3001 is real, and you found it...
AirBnB (YC W09) Adds Groups, Locations All Around The World
Top 10 Blackberry Troubleshooting Tips
Have you checked out Oxite/Orchard? There's a new build coming next month that MSFT is going to really push.
Why does everyone assume this is a tax issue?

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...

I count only 9 states with higher tax revenue per capita.
Orchard: http://orchard.codeplex.com/

Oxite: http://codeplex.com/oxite
Microsoft Donates ASP.NET Ajax Library to the Codeplex Foundation
Ambient Life – Animated Vision Of The Future
Could you explain to the layman how this compares to the web server that ships with Tornado? I mean more in terms of usecases rather than performance. Also, the entire Tornado stack is written to be async and non-blocking. If one was to use something like plain vanilla PHP behind your nginx module, would one get the same result? Cheers.
Which open source search engine do you use instead of Google?
How to Create a Zpool and Zones in Solaris ?
I see you conveniently left out California's low property taxes (0.48% of home value, on average; ranked 45th out of 50 states; see http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/PropertyTa...)

That these rates are very low is no surprise: The rate of property tax increase has been pinned by Prop 13 since the 1970s, such that these tax rates tend to lag the rate of inflation (let alone the rate of housing price inflation) over decades. [1] The side effect is to gradually push the tax burden toward income and sales taxes.

As for "overall revenues from taxes": That bullet point is meaningless, since CA has the highest state population by far -- 50% higher than the second-most populous state, Texas. "Tax yields per citizen" is better (although it would certainly be nice to see a number: do you have one, with a citation, and a table of numbers for other states?) but also needs qualification: Despite its huge population, California ranks eleventh in GDP per capita (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_...) which is to say that Californians on average create more wealth than 80% of Americans, so naturally they can afford to spend more. And, of course, "tax yield per citizen" is a big sloppy average over everyone in the state, glossing over the shape of the tax brackets and of the income distribution. The income distribution in California is not exactly flat. And (to use a cartoon example) a hypothetical county consisting of twenty people making $50,000 per year and one millionaire will have an unusually high-looking "tax yield per citizen".

---

[1] I believe they might, eventually, keep up with inflation, but in a very weird way: They only reset fully with a change in property ownership. My understanding is that if you don't move out of your house your taxes stay low, but when the house is sold it can be reassessed. So property taxes do go up at some rate, but in the same way that Monterey is gradually moving farther away from Fresno: very little for many years, but with a big jump every now and then. It makes buying and selling property very exciting, and I'm sure it provides work for accountants.

Of course, I'm not sure how this applies to corporations. Given that corporations can "live" forever, it might be that real property taxes are in fact destined to shrink over time.
Of course. Similarly, I would very much dislike if Apple required Mac apps to be distributed through iTunes. It just doesn't seem quite as absurd on your iPhone because you never had it another way.
> Any emacsen around that could shed some light on

Minor note: "emacsen" refers to various and sundry implementations of Emacs, not users of emacs.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Emacsen
Sadly, it is typical of journalists to see themselves in this way, and to see anything that threatens the system that gives them so much love in a negative light.

Ironically, after how they covered the Iraq war, it seems it it is the fourth estate that has sold their soul.
They've also changed the license to BSD.
There is a very long way form audiophiles to people who delay giving hastily developed precautionary drug against illness that has 0.02% mortality rate on diagnosed patients.

Audiophiles are just people who pay vast amounts of their expendable money for feeling well. They are just plain stupid because if they changed their friends and forgot the audio thing altogether they'd feel well at no cost.

Cautious parents just show reservation and that is not stupid at all. Especially taking into account in haste preparations of the vaccine, major amount of money that is going flow to pharmaceutical companies and information noise generated by the media.

You don't want to be early adopter of potentially buggy solution if your kids health is at stake.
"Android is an orphan; Google doesn't really care about it"

Couldn't agree more.

The documentation is incomplete, support is horrible and there is no way to even view my Android 2.0 app without a DROID.
YouTube introduces automatic captions for deaf viewers
now I need to find another computer to stick it on to test...great...
Am I the only one who feels that it shouldn't be called "Emacs" if it doesn't have Lisp inside it? (Not to be a Lisp fanboy, but that seems to be the defining feature...)
> PS if I was marketing the swine flu vaccine, I'd name it after a kid who died last season and put her picture on the release form.

Ah the old "Buy our stuff or your kid will die like this one" pitch. Always works.
Unproductive days are the hardest thing for me to deal with as well. One thing I have done that helps me is to leave and go to a coffee shop the instant I start feeling unproductive. The 10 to 15 minute drive there usually helps me get back into the right mindset. The coffee aroma and an environment where others are working or appear to be doing something productive is also helpful.
It is possible, but it takes some serious thinking.

A couple approaches:

1) Support an open source project because it reduces the competition's advantages. E.g. IBM supporting Linux to reduce MS' advantages. If you're a startup looking to fight somebody big, you can use OSS as a tactic to level the playing field somewhat.

2) Break up your offering into proprietary and open parts. The former should align with your (hopefully unique) strengths, or maybe legally protected methods, the latter should be code that compliments it but is not strategically important. The open source aspect gets you attention, users and hopefully code contributions. The proprietary aspect you sell to customers who are happy to pay for e.g. convenience, speed, quality, user interface, attention to detail. An example is Apple supporting various non-core open source projects, like Webkit or FreeBSD, that they build on top of.
inspiration and life path seeking? a little too rich a dish for my liking
That was why Stephenson described Apples as "hermetically sealed" in "In the Beginning Was the Command Line..."
ForgePlucker starts using BeautifulSoup
Also no friends. :(
Venture Fund Uses Lottery Model
Yes and No.

I wouldn't be totally happy about it; it would require making individual decisions of trust for each program.

I think the app store is broken for independent developers but not completely for users and larger companies.
Don't you know what VMWare is?
Everything is a political issue. Dividing limited economic resources is done according to political power.
3 Tips to Healthy Eating For Stay at Home Moms
You are asking this question on HN. You will learn very little from that. We are not a representative slice of the iPhone or Android markets.
From the FAQ at http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

How are stories ranked?

On the front page, by points divided by a power
of the time since they were submitted. Comments
in comment threads are ranked the same way.

There are many tweaks that have been suggested, and some have been tried. It's certainly true that bad timing can lead to submissions and comments sinking without trace, but in general the feeling is that the existing system works well enough and with few surprises.
Looking for Blog Video Producer/Writers
blog.gothammediaventures.com is looking for shooters to produce quick interviews/coverage and contributors. Pls contact gordonplatt@yahoo.com
How Do You Evaluate a Data Center?