Hacker News Reader

blinkson Android developer leaks Cupcake details

Title is somewhat misleading -- this isn't really a leak, considering anyone with a developer build of the phone (available from T-mobile) could build the publicly-available source:

> Since Android is open source, you can easily download, > compile, and install it onto your phone. This requires > root access of course. Currently due to proprietary > issues, many things are broken running cupcake onto HTC > G1. Broken items include Bluetooth, OPENGL, and etc.

blinkson Google Launches Virtual World (Rooms) Called "Lively"

Um, I work at Google, and I know people that have come into the office once in the past six months.

> Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices

This is just not true.

blinkson Amazon and Google Discover Erlang (IMDB is switching from Perl to Erlang)

Looks like blatant misinformation to me. As to sources:

* Amazon SimpleDB on Erlang (friend of a developer): http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/

* IMDb on Java/Erlang (a job posting): http://www.computerjobs.com/job_display.aspx?jobid=2052172

* Gears on Erlang: N/A

blinkson We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

> They'll probably just add a "Flash" link under "more v", and that's it,...

Just like they do with PDFs? /sarcasm

blinkson Is Google App Engine blocking PayPal?

No. Someone from Google responded to that thread noting that it was a bug, and has since been fixed.

blinkson What sites would you pay to use?

As to paying for Hacker News, there are several community sites that have a low one-time (non-reimbursable) fee for joining. MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/) costs $5 to join, for example. I feel like it makes the community a little more invested in the content, and is worth it overall.

I think that paying for community membership will become more popular in the very near future.

blinkson Probabilistic Assertions: Crashing When Something Feels Wrong

Yay for automated monitoring software. Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/) does this for networks (and is extendable for some other things). At my old job we used Hobbit (http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/) to watch our Java server instances (memory usage, etc.). There’s no reason why these monitoring programs couldn’t be used to monitor internal program statistics, as long as those stats were made available.

Generally you monitor from your internal network, and then provide some hook for the monitor to get information that’s only accessible from there. (SSH or a limited-access URL, etc.)

Monitoring programs are super-powerful and generally complex. Check them out — it’s a good skill to have when working with production software.

(I also posted this on the article.)

blinkson Google Launching ToDo List Product?

From the article, it looks like someone just accidentally posted their own list, and then took it down.

blinkson Ask YC: What do you scrape? How do you scrape?

http://gatherer.wizards.com with BeautifulSoup, the only parser I've found that can deal with this @$%^! HTML.

blinkson Slicehost site redesigned

BW == Bandwidth.

blinkson Come stay at the hacker house in San Jose, Free

I don't think you could have a legitimate hacker frat without π.

blinkson The Feel Good Initiative. Discover new music daily.

Could you add iTunes links? I've got music in iTunes, but not on Amazon. (CDBaby only does the former.)

blinkson Software safety by the numbers

  "Were there significant changes between the previous version of your kernel and the current maintenance release, or just bug fixes," I asked.
  "Well, we changed the compiler tool chain and added a new feature," the client responded.

So, yes, significant changes.

  "Were the changes reviewed for possible side-effects on other parts of the system?"
  "We tested it before we released it and verified that the bugs were fixed."

So, no, they weren't.

  "Is your testing automated?"
  "No, testing is done with a developer observing the test output."

So, no, it isn't.

  "Do tests that verify bug fixes become part of the regression test suite?"
  "No, we have a list of tests that we run for each release."

So, no, they don't.

  "Does your team use a formal version-control system?"
  "We make a back up before each release."

So, no, they don't.

Let's recap. Significant changes without a good long look at what regression bugs may arise, with only manual testing (it worked on my machine!), and no tests added to an automated suite to ensure that older bugs don't turn up again. No source control, so changes aren't tracked, and they have only a backup of the source code before the last release to track development.

Yikes, though I wouldn't doubt that this is better than the average software development project.

blinkson The Feel Good Initiative. Discover new music daily.

Finally, a You Tube for audio. I've been waiting for something like this for some time -- sites like http://virb.com/ are nice, but revolve around the album, which isn't usually how an indie artist really writes.

Now I can put things up as I work on them, which'll be cool.

-- http://thefeelgood.com/blinks

blinkson How to make reputation markets work

It seems to be a Page Rank for social networks.

blinkson Black Swans - unexpected movements in financial markets.

I grabbed this book to read on the flight to Dublin (from Seattle). It's a good read; humorous, but informative.

blinkson Are you on twitter?

http://twitter.com/hackerblinks

Tumblr: http://adam.blinkinblogs.net/

(And, on Pownce: http://pownce.com/hackerblinks/)

(Does this mean I win teh Internets? I have social networking fever. (And the only cure is more cowbell.))

(Need caffeine.)

blinkson AOL Mail was rewritten in Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 and released today. It is better than Gmail.

It seems a little faster, but it's got image ads all over the place.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Gmail.)

Edit: No, after rechecking Gmail's web interface (I use IMAP from home), it seems about the same speed. I'm not sure why someone would think it's better.

blinkson Is Xobni the next Google?

> ... integrated as an overlay with any other social network.

I think that the killer idea here is the "natural" social network. Email, IM, etc., are all used to communicate already. Adding analytics on top of that is genius, and really cool. The search is meh (see OSX's Spotlight), but the stats are sweet.

blinkson Ask YC: Ruby and Lisp devs, please answer this (Not a flame war)

To complete the trinity: hg clone http://ycombinator.com/arc