skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jason should just step up on this one and admit that he made unwarranted generalizations without the first clue what he was really talking about.

I'm sure that if some farmer somewhere said that American entrepreneurs were all lazy hipsters looking to scam venture capital and live like kings while jerking off with technology toys all day he would declare that person to be ignorant. Yet somehow he thinks that he is qualified to declare what middle east policy should be.
Europe is a collection of countries, so your millage will vary a lot from country to country.

But yes for instance in France it's like that: permanent exclusivity is illegal, though short temporary ones are allowed. Orange (illegal) exclusivity on the iPhone was broken in April 2009 and since then all operators are selling it.

Consequence : 2 million iPhones sold in 2009, more than 50% of the smartphone market shares, and 3G networks that have a hard time following the pace...
Close :) BBC model B.
To what degree can my open source software be inspired by this patent?
I see Charles Simonyi's PDFs and presentations on his Intentional Domain Workbench and decide he has the right approach and I want to make a tool like that. So while attempting to start coding it I remember he was talking about 'lazy T2T transformations' (lazy tree to tree transformations), and I am trying to think of the best way to go about that, so I am googling 'tree transformations' and find lots of stuff, but not quite the right thing, so I google 'lazy tree to tree transformation' and on the first page is his patent

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7607099.pdf (Method and System for Reversible Design Tree Transformations)

Now I know that no one can patent the _general concept_ of a lazy tree to tree transformation for a projecting editor with multiple domains, because there are all kinds of ways to accomplish that. But I am trying to figure out, to what degree can my method/system be inspired by Simonyi's without violating the patent or something. I am thinking whatever I end up coding will probably be much less complex than what he has in the patent but I don't know. Anyway I think I should try to understand what he is doing first before coming at the problem blind.

This isn't necessarily part of the question, but I intend to use MIT or some other open source license for my software.
This is why I install Chrome on my family's computers. Set it and forget it - auto silent background update means they'll always have a current browser.
How To Quit Being A Quitter
I really hate these arguments. The argument basically comes down to this:

No one should make *any* smartphones unless they can
immediately top the iPhone. If you can't top the iPhone
on day one, then just don't bother competing at all.

It's one thing to call out hype. It's another thing entirely to say, "X is over-hyped therefore it shouldn't exist."

> But it’s still effectively tied to the smallish T-Mobile cell phone network.

No it's not. So far as I can tell, you can use it on AT&T's network. The only catch is the you can't use AT&T's 3G with it. But this seems to be a one or the other choice. AT&T and T-Mobile apparently use different frequencies for their 3G (T-Mobile's is non-standard), and no one seems to be putting out phone that support both (in my limited research on the topic). This leads me to believe that there must only be chips that support one or the other. In that case, there's no pleasing everyone. If you choose AT&T, you'll piss off a bunch of people, but you'll also piss off a bunch of people if you choose T-Mobile.

> And the Nexus One lacks the convenience of being connected to iTunes.

So... the only phone that will ever appease you will, by definition, need to be an Apple-branded phone.

> The Android app store is a fifth the size of Apple’s.

It's the quality, not the quantity of the apps that matters. Comparing on size alone is useless. There have been a number of articles on the number of crappy and rehashed apps that get poured into the AppStore marketplace by people hoping to use the shotgun approach to AppStore success. And how exactly is Google supposed to remedy this with the launch of a phone? Make the phone iPhone-compatible and hack their way into AppStore access?

> Meanwhile, Apple is getting ready to announce an entirely new iteration of its iPhone in three weeks — the tablet — that will likely make every other player in the market look like a laggard — again.

This is the stupidest thing I have read lately.

> Why didn’t Google offer a phone with both a GSM and a CDMA radio that would work on any U.S. cell phone network?

It's not that simple. See the GSM 3G comments above. I thought that there used to be GSM/CDMA chips. Maybe they were part of that whole Qualcomm lawsuit a few years ago?
Perhaps because they like making money?

It is probably more likely that they don't see apple and the iphone as a direct threat and are instead trying to corner the market on the other three major phone networks in the US.
If you cared about type constraints you would not be using Python (or Ruby, or Perl).
Yeah you are right. It reads as a contradiction. I thought of that when I was posting but couldn't reconcile it at the time. Let me clear it up.

What I meant was it's possible to implement such a system in the framework of a dow30 type culture. The few times that I've seen it implemented, management supported it. But without someone just taking the initiative and doing it, it doesn't happen. The average newly graduated junior enterprise developer with an average lead enterprise developer probably can't pull it off. So it could be enterprise just has to catch up and they are just not there yet. Maybe that makes it a cultural problem, I'm not sure.

No doubt, management has yet to see the light. They want data to show that change in their process and new technology works before they commit. There should be a place for it when management finally realizes it's not a fad but a trend.
To be blunt, I'm not sure. I've spoken with the head of computing at my nearest university and he seems quite excited by it. We may publish a joint paper - not least it will give him an Erdos Number of 3. Failing publication, I'll just write it up, put it on my web site, and announce it in a few place.

What ever happens, I will announce it here for sure.
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As per one of the latest reports on the most favorite programs on television an interesting truth was discovered. One of the toppers in that list was TV commercials. People actually enjoy watching TV commercials. All along, most of us have been thinking that TV commercials and other forms of advertisements are considered an intrusion in people’s lives. This is true but only when the advertisements do not have a creative edge. No one likes to watch a long boring advertisement but there are many people who rush back to their seat when certain advertisements are aired.
For an interesting thought experiment, replace all references to the Arabs with Russians and see if you still think it's bigoted. Like this:

Are their intelligent people in Russia? Sure, they are just not in charge, in jail or they’ve been murdered already.

That's ignorant, of course, but I wouldn't call it bigoted and it would have probably passed without controversy. In fact I think accusations of bigotry say more about the accuser than the accusee.

And the fact is he's right. The absolute best thing for the ordinary arab people that the USA and all the other oil importers could do is immediately stop buying oil. And the unpleasant truth is that every dollar you spend at the petrol pump is indeed a vote in support of those despicable regimes.

I can't stand Calacanis but out of all these shrill voices, who is the one who has acted? And so who is the real friend to the people of the middle east?

Doesn't sound like bigotry to me.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

Monsanto (maker of 90% of genetically engineered seeds, 46B market cap) sued a neighboring farmer for patent infringement after their seeds were found in his field, which he harvested, and later resold as feed...
Requires flash to read an article? Fail.
If you quit being a quitter, you are still a quitter ? :)
Been there for quite some time. I can't agree more - a lot of things are wrong in enterprise world. Couple big ones from my experience:

- Process-centric culture. Most enterprises have processes for making processes. Process always complicates everything. And most people inside will blindly protect the process, so it's really difficult to question it.

- Artificially complicated solutions from "big vendors" (read Oracle, IBM etc). They keep adding new "features" over an over only to have something to sell constantly. I have never seen an enterprise software being simplified. A lot of people inside enterprise will again protect these since their jobs may become redundant if simpler solutions are introduced.
Interesting that you would say they cross your ethical lines. Their tagline used to be "It is more profitable to be ethical." See: http://web.archive.org/web/20070102022215/http://www.rapleaf...
Here's another article from a marketer's perspective giving more detail on how they're using Rapleaf for payday loan leads, amongst other things:

http://www.leadconfidential.com/rapleaf-social-media-data-le...

I've found Rapleaf to be a bit spotty in its coverage, often not discovering accounts on services like Facebook and Twitter that deny API access for the email lookup. I won't pimp my test page for it again (it's on the blog in my profile), but you can also go to their site to see what they have on you.
I'm really really excited to get mine. I've had the 3g Iphone for almost 2 years now, and I cannot wait to stop using it.

Maybe its just the developer inside me screaming, but I cannot deal with Apple and how they deal with the guys who are really making the iphone popular -- the programmers.
"The only catch is the you can't use AT&T's 3G with it."

That would effectively cripple the phone. So while it may be possible to use on other networks, it's really only practical to use on T-Mobile.
i wish i'd seen this before college, but no time like the present!
"Are >>their<< intelligent people in the middle east? Sure, they are just not in charge, in jail or they’ve been murdered already."

Wow.

Pot. Kettle. Black. Maybe?

People should consider using proper grammar when insulting the intellectual abilities of others.
Far more interesting (IMO), would be a constrains based library based on predicates (iterable, hashable, arithmatic-able?)
I guess one just had to make his "counter-article" to the flow of "wow, amazing google phone!!" we see recently.

Of course in itself it's pretty much only a rant, with fallacious arguments, but it fulfills its goal of generating a lot of "how can you say that it's stupid" answers.

I mean, I even clicked on it just for the sake of the title, like probably many did. Mission accomplished, so, people click and react on it.
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EDGE would still work. People bought the non-3G iPhone.

It's definitely a disadvantage though, but to say that it will not work with AT&T is false.
> he would declare that person to be ignorant.

...but not bigoted.
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Yes I'm probably on the same page. THis blogger seems to have been awaiting such a chance to lay into him.

With that said he certainly shows a lot of ignorance (mixed with some truths) but i think mostly it is just classic cultural superiority.
Not to knock Mr. Horne's achievement, but Peter Jennings wrote Microchess for the KIM-1 (a 6502-based machine with 1K of RAM) back in 1976.

Source code here: http://users.telenet.be/kim1-6502/microchess/microchess.html

I had the PET 2001 version (running in 7K of RAM) back in the day, and it played quite well, all things considered.
> And yet nobody seems to be interested.

Plenty of people have formed strong opinions about Perl without learning it. So far, Perl 6 appears little different.
In ruby you can ensure this by calling responds_to?(:method).

So for example to see if some object is iterable, you just check if it responds to each.

obj.responds_to?(:each)
Mark Suster: What Makes an Entrepreneur? Cojones (7/11)
I've been using jashkenas' ruby processing for a simple gui: http://wiki.github.com/jashkenas/ruby-processing . Processing is a pleasure to use once it's liberated from java syntax.
I'm not so sure. The net profit margin of US carriers is half of google's. If they bought or launched their own carrier they would have to reinvent telephony as we know it or their stock and hence stock options would get slammed relentlessly.
Yeah, I've only ever found one bank that had a web interface that let you do immediate transfers 24/7 between accounts and credit cards. Unfortunately it's a 2 branch credit union 300 miles from where I now live, but I still hang onto that account just because.

I know they're not playing with a lot of resources, so I'm always amazed at how much better they are at doing EVERYTHING than Chase, etc.
In fact, just to show what we're talking about, here it is

D8A2FF9AA2C886B2201F1F206A1FC5F3F0F685F3C90CD00FA21FB5709550CA10F986DCA9CCDO12C90ED00720B202A9EED007C914D00B20A20385FB85FA85F9D0BFC90FD006204B034C9D0l4C960110000304000702O50l06101711161215141373747077727571766067616662656463F0FF0l1011OFEFF1DFElEEF2120E1F210B0A0606040404O40202020202020202A6B5305

CA5B0F308EO08D004C5E6F02EF6E3C901D002F6E3501EA00FA5B1D96000
F0038810F8B9A000D5E4900494E695E4180875E595E528E004F00330316
0A5E885DDA90085B5204B0320B20220000220B202A90885B52009022031
034C8017E0F9DO0BA560C5B1D004A90085B46050FDA007A5B1D96000F00
588F0F110F6B9A000D5E2900295E2C6B5A9FBC5B5F003202503E6B560C9
08B01220EA03A21FB550C5FAF003CA10F786FB86BO4C000000A210A9009
5DECA10FBA91085B0C6B0100l60201E03A4B0A20886B6C0081041C00610
2EC004101FC00lF009100E208E02D0FBF0D9209C02DOFBF0D2A20486B62
09C02D0FBF0C7209C02A5B6C904D0F7F0BCA21086B6208E02A5B6C908D0
F7F0ADA20686B620CA025005300320000l201E03C6B6A5B6C9O5F0EB20C
A02708F308D20000lA5B129FOC920FOEE4C0D0220CA023003200001201E
03C6B66020CA02900250F930070820000l2850F0201E03C6B660A20F38B
460A977F550956094503550CA10EB60A5B1A6B618758F85B12988D042A5
B1A220CA300ED550D0F9E0103033A97F69017001B8A5B53024C90810204
808A9F985B585B4204B0320B202200902202E03286885B5A5B4300438A9
FF6018A90060A9FF18B860A6B0B55085B160204B0320B20220090220820
2BA86B3A6B29A6885B66885B0AA68955068AA6885B195504C7003BA86B3
A6B29AA5B148A8A21FD550F003CA10F9A9CC95508A48A6B0B5509450488
A48A5B648BA86B2A6B39A60A6E4E4A0D004A900F00AA6E3D006A6EEDO02
A9FFA20486B5C5FA900CF00A85FAA5B085FBA5B185F94C1F1FA6DC1017A
5F9D5DCD00FCAB5DC85FBCAB5DC85F9CA86DCD01A85DCA20C86B586FAA2
14200202A20486B5200002A6FAE00F9012A6FBB55085FA86B0A5F985B12
04B034C0000A9FF60A20406F926FACAD0F905F985F985B1600000000000
0018A98065EB65EC65ED65El65DF38E5F0E5F1E5E2E5E0E5DEE5EFE5E3B
002A9004A18694065EC65ED38E5E44A18699065DD65DD65DD65DD65El38
E5E4E5E4E5E5E5E5E5E0A6B1E033F016E034F012E022F00EE025F00AA6B
0F009B450C01010031869024C7703

There you go: a fully functional Chess program, with AI.
The reason why people don't like subsistence farming is because current society doesn't allow people to farm very well.

Most of the arable land has been concentrated in the hands of a few, and the technology needed to generate sufficient harvest to weather downturns such as drought or flooding are out of reach for everyone in 3rd world countries.

That's why you can't look at 3rd world country farmers and just say that no one would be able to live "off the grid" comfortably.
First, get your stats right. The biggest oil producer in the world is Saudi Arabia but the next Arab country is ranked at number 8. The US is third biggest. These are 2007 rankings; reference: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_pro-energy-oil-pro... . Oil is not produced in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon. Jordan was singled out by Jason in his comment on the blog and the others tend to be considered naughty countries in various ways. For example, travellers with Syrian or Lebanese nationality are two of the 14 countries dictated by the TSA recently to require full pat-down checks when traveling.

Another thing: the US imports oil mostly from Canada and Mexico. In the top 15, I see only 4 Arab countries at rankings 3, 6, 8, and 14. Reference: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publicatio... . These are October 2009 numbers.

In short, oil being sold in the US being a vote to support despicable regimes in the Middle East is a stretch of the truth. Honestly, this is just what the mainstream thinking is, so I can't blame you for parrotting it.

Finally, I'd like to point out that your "replace with Russians" comment is still bigotry and it would not have passed without controversy.
I been using 1password for a couple months and I love it.
I think you have to read the full paragraph.

"If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories. So my idea is that recursion is absolutely essential to the human brain, and it's a part of the fact that humans have larger brains than other species. In fact, one of the papers at the recursion conference was on recursion in other species, and it talked about how when deer look for food in the forest, they often use recursive strategies to map their way across the forest and back, and take little side paths that can be analyzed as recursive paths. So it's not clear, first of all that recursion is unique to humans, and it's certainly not clear that recursion is part of language as opposed to part of the brain's general processing.

He says Piraha doesn't have recursion and that he thinks recursion isn't essential to human languages (thus in contradiction with Chomsky theories), but that it's part of how the brain processes information.
Not all people feel the need to consume as much as people in richer countries to feel the same amount of happiness.

There have been studies documenting this. Here is a short story from Tim Ferriss which sums this up where he realizes that a Mexican fisherman really has a very high quality of life.

http://www.peterbe.com/plog/the-4-hour-work-week-by-timothy-...
I found this pretty interesting, not sure if it still works:

http://emerging-patterns.com/tmp/CrimsonJihad.png
Interesting... a nice stab but I think there is a critical aspect missing.

t = 0 No one is attacking me

t = 1 I attack someone

t = 2 They wish they attacked me

t = 3 They jump back to t = 0 to attack me

t = 4 (0') They attack me, but there is no "me" to defend. The troops will just do their default actions.

So you have a lot of play against AI.
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"And the fact is he's right. The absolute best thing for the ordinary arab people that the USA and all the other oil importers could do is immediately stop buying oil. And the unpleasant truth is that every dollar you spend at the petrol pump is indeed a vote in support of those despicable regimes."

For the moment put countries in the Middle East aside and think about car companies during this recession. When people started buying fewer cars what did those companies do? They cut prices, offered better terms and did everything else they could to undercut their competitors.

Now go back to the Middle East. If you significantly reduce the wealth going into the region what will happen? You'll create a situation where they begin trying to take wealth from each other in a region where the two things they DO have in abundance are weapons and fuel. You'd end up completely destabilizing the region by causing massive warfare.

And before anyone says "But that will cause the populace to revolt" I urge you to look at the Iraq/Iran war which had a devastating amount of civilian casualties and which in the end strengthened both despotic regimes. When your home has been destroyed and most of your family has been killed you look to protect whats left not take on the government. The most successful violent revolution in history (American) was fought when the population was relatively wealthy
I think they should just get rid of those annoying pop-ups and make a red notification bar to the right of the help menu whenever there is an update.
Why are T-Mo and AT&T the only options? Couldn't you use this on say, Verizon?

(I don't live in the US)
Looking into this, you mean using (use 'mynamespace :reload) instead of C-c C-k - that is a good idea!

It should be trivial to write a ring middleware to reload everything between every request (for a railsy development environment) maybe a version for production use that checks all files for changes every 1 minute or so.
There's another thread on this same topic about how a mere feature list doesn't capture the experience of using an app. It's faster and prettier, for one thing, it has a friends list that is browsable like the iPhone contacts app -- the Android friends list is just a flat list where you cannot jump from place to place easily, so if you want to scroll to z it's going to take a while. You can't handle requests or send Facebook messages with the Android app as far as I can tell, nor even read your inbox. But a mere list of features doesn't capture the entire difference.
Really, the problem boils down to this:

Enterprise software is not written for end-users. It's written for companies. It's not marketed to the people who will actually use it and it's not paid for by the people who are going to use it.

So it should come as no surprise that the incentives and motives that shape enterprise software are completely orthogonal to the incentives for creating good software.
I'm happy to downvote every comment someone makes in an out-of-order thread exchange. I'm not going to look for your comments elsewhere, but if two people get in an argument 6 levels deep, that's going to be 6 downvotes.
Link to the Full ZX-81 Chess in 1K article by David Horne:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/

And here's a ZX-81 emulator to play the actual game:

http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/emulate.php?tzx=0%2F1KZXChe...
When I saw the ZX81 reference I thought surely he meant 3d monster maze by Malcom Evans which was the first 3d game for a home computer (although it did need 16k of RAM).
I've got a beta account to Quora - and found the interface, client side tech to be pretty powerful for collaborative knowledge building. More structure than a wiki, or mailing list, but flexible way to build knowledge.

I agree with the review impressions
"Quora is a little like Aardvark, the social Q&A service founded by ex-Googlers and rumored to be in Google's acquisition sites, and it's a little like Stack Overflow, the carefully crafted Q&A site for programmers that's shot through the roof with reader interest. It's definitely different though."
Yes, but it annoys me to read that kind of "overlooked" ideas over and over again and never see the issues discussed by the author.

If Evan Williams tells me to be narrow, maybe he could also tell me how not to be just a tiny feature of some powerful entity's app, waiting to be replaced as soon as my app gets traction.
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I can't imagine Twitter is looking to be acquired.
Amazon Kindle DX is now available internationally with Global Wireless
The US is typically quite a few years behind when it comes to things like this, so maybe it's news to some Americans.
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Verizon & Sprint use CDMA instead of GSM, which AT&T & T-Mobile use.
I've been using evidence.js so far, but this looks much better organized (and can be more easily integrated with other environments)
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