skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
John Gruber's take on iPhone background apps
from http://daringfireball.net/

direct sublink is: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/march#fri-21-jens

"Another one from the I-don’t-agree-with-it-but-it’s-well-worth-reading dept.

For what it’s worth, I believe the number one reason why the iPhone OS doesn’t allow background processes is RAM. Battery life, CPU sharing, bandwidth — all of these are factors, too, but I think RAM is foremost. The iPhone has just 128 MB of RAM and no swap space. A good chunk of that 128 MB goes to the OS itself and the built-in apps that do run in the background — Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod. There really just isn’t much left over. If Apple were to just allow background processing now, what would happen is that background processes would often wind up getting killed by the OS at some point when the frontmost app needs more memory. From the user’s perspective, it would seem as though background apps inevitably mysteriously fail and stop running. You can argue that you’d rather have that than no third-party background apps at all, but it’s clearly a reasonable trade-off for Apple in terms of consistency and obviousness in the user experience.

Wait a few years for iPhones with 1 GB of RAM and it’ll be a different story."
use a pagerank-like karma assignment (high karma people give more karma). it's better than having a slashdotesque editor. (and the only thing our grahamist overlords would have to do is to kill someone's karma if they go off topic)
> I just wish we will remain a small community

This might be the problem? Simply the size?
Its definitely not RAM.

Android devices with significantly less RAM handle it fine. When a Service is scheduled, it is only allowed to run while resources (battery, CPU, memory) are sufficient to keep the critical processes (currently visible UI, current application) running. The OS has permission to kill off background Services without warning as needed to preserve the user experience.

No, the reason with Apple is simply political.
I'd love to have that.

Kind of a more-intensive, tech version of the Tuesday Night Music Club.

First rule: no bringing your girlfriend, even if she is Sheryl Crow.
> The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers

It depends on how you define 'restriveness'. Sure in a large company it's difficult to make the types of decisions that will affect the whole organisation. On the other hand in a small company you are typically very restricted in terms of the numbers of users who you can make a positive difference on their lives.

Startups are typically experiments to see if there is any mass appeal. Large companies actually change the world.
Keep your software all up to date. For an example, I've seen an old version of a open source calendar be used to send 30,000 spam emails from a server.

Software like Fanstasico can keep your software automatically updated across user accounts.
Hmmmm. Pretty sure unix started as an unfunded side project for a couple of lads. From memory, research on transistors began well before Bell Labs had a hand in their development, IBM didn't give us the relational database; the honor belongs to a university I've long since forgotten. Oh, and Microsoft is funding some of the work on functional programming.

That aside, I agree with your second para.
I did that for most of last year. But you can only do it for so long since all you do is work, then go home and work. Plus it just takes so much longer.

If it's an idea you truly believe in, it may be worth making that your full-time job. But it is a risk, you just have to decide if it's worth taking.
> Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley

Did anyone else find this as funny as i did?

Could you pick a more mainstream brand of shoe Paul?
Anyone use things like AppArmor? I see it routinely preventing attacks on some of the older software we run. I almost wouldn't think of running a server without something like it.
Is gmail down for everyone?
Can't access it since 7:15 am
About an hour a day, averaging weekends in with weekdays. I partly became so interested in Rails because I could actually accomplish things noticeably in that amount of time.
Linux Ramback: faster than a speeding bullet
gmail+gchat working fine here.
No.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mail.google.com
A Sound as Continuous and Dense As Stars
What my Mac’s startup sound can teach us about Microsoft, blogging, the universe, and everything
Personally I think I saw what you were talking about - and by your notes I certainly interpreted this essay differently then some folk.

Yours was a good read - and given other 'coincidences' made me think.

Thanks,
Joe

http://ponderousprog.blogspot.com/2008/03/to-tree-or-not-to-...
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/march#fri-21-jens

The little star at the end of each link is the permalink.
Yeah, I liked this piece rather than the plethora of animal articles flying about lately. One thing I was always curious about was what microcontroller people used, since all the ones I've ever thought to use were quite expensive (not a hardware guy). He does mention it though. Cool beans.
What's your opinion of "Correctness vs. Completion"?
Ever heard of hyperbole?
Just installed Denyhosts. It immediately blocked 6 ip addresses. Seems to be working just fine. Nice tool.
Social networking, IBM, Microsoft etc: the Twitterverse debates
However, if it's important to disallow random access to the uploaded file, you really need to put access controls on it, and store it outside of the HTTP root. Obscuring the filename isn't enough.
2,413 Emails Followup: My good deed done for Mike Arrington
I was in a similar situation and in my case I also had the fourth option:

4. Try not to touch any old projects. Instead try to "own" a new one where you can do things the right way.

There are, however, a few problems with this approach: your will probably be implementing the whole thing alone and will quickly become unpopular with the others.

In my case I ended up implementing a compiler frontend alone from scratch while everybody else were thinking it was a waste of time and we should have based our work on the old code (which, agreed by everybody, was hell of a mess). When time came to implement the backend, I had to bring one of the "old-timers" on board which caused a lot of tension (he preferred to do things the "old way", for example, to indent the generated C++ code manually instead of using the automatic indenter that I wrote).

One other thing that I tried with mixed results was to "recruit" new hires with some sense of design to work with me on the project before they got exposed to the "dark side".

In the end I left that place not the least because of the "us vs you" attitude which was, on the most part, the result of my own actions. I couldn't stand the attitude most people working there had towards software design (most of them were grad students so they weren't there for the long haul). I am now running my own development tools company and find it a much better way to spend my time.

In the end I suggest that anyone stuck in a situation like this get out of it as soon as possible. The extra effort required to make it work is just a waste of your life.
Ah but even so they're selling most of that merchandise at shows that people are coming to, even if the ticket sales aren't raking in the cash for them
I started working on http://muziboo.com last year and then worked with my job for about 4 months. Quit my job and did it along with consulting for another 3 months and fulltime now. At one point, it gets very tough to switch your brains :)

Sometimes you can think of neat features/ideas only when you think for long enough and observe for long enough and atleast I need to be fulltime for that
Hi, could we try debating the content rather than the title?

The sentence in question, "Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist," as spoken by Arrington, is pretty sad. The author has a good point. As a sometime musician, it makes me very sad.

But this sort of devaluation attitude toward music is well known about already. Ironically, it is usually blamed on those dang kids and their crazy Internet making it easy to download lots of recorded music without paying anything for it.

Ironically though, I think it's more the fault of the music business, who for decades have treated music as nothing but marketing material to drive sales of flat round pieces of plastic.
Ask YC: Hobbies as a Source of Frustration?
Now that I am an engineer, I understand the amount of effort required to complete a project. The downside of this is that the natural curiosity that I had as a kid toward playing with electronics/software projects is suffering. To do anything interesting to me requires more contiguous time than I have (and for electronics, more sophisticated equipment than I own).

I secretly believe I'm just trying to recapture the fun I had playing with lego or my Atari 130 XE as a kid; projects were self-contained and could be done in a single sitting.

Does this happen to any of you? How do you deal with it?
It's not just RAM, but it's not political either. It's battery life, I should think. Remember this is a phone we're talking about and if that phone has to be recharged every six hours because some application constantly wants to poll the internet, that's really not acceptable to most users (and they won't fault the app for the poor battery life, they'll fault Apple).
Will Arc surpass Ruby or Perl anytime! Soon or late?
Sorting, searching, filtering, tagging and personal preference should solve this problem

Moral is, this site should add features that solve the problem instead of asking the users to ... just behave!
Congratulations! With your tool, I can finally understand some of my twitter-centric friends and acquaintances.

And most importantly, Thank you for demonstrating the power of a well-executed concept (and showing that it is possible to build something interesting and useful in a weekend.
Mr. Parallel Universe
Paul Graham himself writes good essays with sensationalist titles. For example, "Microsoft is Dead" was a great essay, but he had to explain in the essay itself that he wasn't actually arguing that Microsoft is dead. This seems similar; a sensationalist title that isn't remotely true, but with some decent content.
What's wrong with Netflix this morning?
I can't seem to log on to Netflix this morning. The site seems to be having server problems. I'll be damned if I can't get my next episodes of The Wire.
If you are interested in this subject, then a much more interesting reading about this subject can be read in John Viney's book Drive. I wish I had completed reading that book many years ago, yet I stalled and failed to read the final chapters that mention all that Paul has written but with a lot more explanation as to why things are the way they are. Groups are 7, 7x7 are tribes and beyond that you have hierarchies. Anyone who has worked for or come into contact with these different types of companies, eg. accenture will immediately spot the difference. All software companies function well up to tribe level, beyond that it gets very complicated and unattractive. A succesfull company should always strive to build well functioning tribes and keep hierarcial aspects of a company as transparent and non-intrusive as possible. IT shops that try to reorganise into hierarchies are destined to destroy themselves and if your's is, leave now.
Your example isn't the same thing. Murder would be equal to thievery in your example since murder is an action.
Ask YC: Anybody tried (mt) Grid-Service?
My current server setup cost me last nights sleep, so I'm looking for some alternatives.

I really like what I read about Media Temple's (gs) [1] thingy, because it ssems to be quite flexible. Anybody tried it or has any links to reviews?

[1] http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/
Only the real world is not a race and there is no prize money. If you own a big factory, you get richer not because God gives you a prize for having a bigger factory than everyone else, but because your factory creates wealth, out of nothing.

Wealth does tend to perpetuate itself, as in the above example, but this is hardly lamentable. And "poverty perpetuates itself" is basically a bombastic way of saying "lack of wealth doesn't, in and of itself, create more wealth", which is natural and could never be otherwise.

Of course, that's if we ignore the psychological component of it. But what can you do about that? Go into people's homes and tell them to stop being such feckless idiots?
This is insightful. One should point out however, the inverse does not hold true. Poverty is not a universal sign of laziness or inaction. You can become poor in spite of working very hard. It is important to keep this in mind lest we become completely unsympathetic to those less fortunate, who, in some cases work very hard and yet have nothing.

Also, as an aside I'd like ot point out that material wealth is something that isn't universally pursued. Some people a happy investing in other things instead once their very basic needs are met.
2,433 Unread Emails, I feel your pain
Also, you learn from the mistakes of others. A much less risky approach than learning from your own.
I agree, but many people do a variance of this on the weekend. Where during the week they sleep from 10 or 11 pm until 6 or 7 am. Then, on the weekend they sleep from 2 or 3 am until 10 or 11 am.
i don't think an android comparison is appropriate. different implementation languages, different philosophies, different hardware expectations, etc. for example: "The OS has permission to kill off background Services without warning as needed to preserve the user experience" -- apple would NEVER go for that. while it might be the right thing to do technically, it would badly confuse the user: "why did my app stop working?" apple just doesn't play like that.

and are there any actual android devices available that this idea could be confirmed against? last i heard, there weren't any.
I'm really just replying to the idea that 'murder' doesn't count, or that outside influences cant cause poverty. I'm not interested in internal vs external poverty. To me poverty is an extreme lack of resources such that it impacts on the basics of life. So while you might not rate external poverty as very important, that's all I'm talking about here.
I create wealth by increasing efficiency and destroying jobs. I have made many people redundant and gotten them laid off. It's the name of the game hop from one useful skill to the next or become obsolete.

I don't really care about these lost jobs but saying it's their fault that they become redundant is missing the point. Luck is a large factor in both the generation and retention of wealth. The risk of true poverty limits society’s just as excessive crime by reducing people’s willingness to take risks. Young people are more likely to do a startup because they have lower risk of failure. Losing everything at 25 is vary different than losing everything at 55.

Note: I am not saying we need to do anything with the 3rd world but I feel limited job training and basic welfare help many people bounce back. Spending a small percentage of GDP on such things is an investment that may or may not pay off but saying it's useless as an ideological stance is missing the point. However, the numbers I have seen on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state) suggest that we spend 14% of GDP on welfare which seems insane. Are they looking at SS as welfare?
Paul Buchheit also gives an amazing interview in Founders at Work. I'm sure everyone here knows that book by heart.
Much appreciated.
I did that for about 9 months before going full-time 6 months ago. I'd usually work on the startup for an hour before work and then 1-2 hours after dinner, so maybe 15-20 hours/week.

I've found that my coding time hasn't really increased much since going full-time, and yet I'm vastly more productive. The limiting factor in startups does not seem to be time: it's attention. Having that extra 8 hrs/day to think about the problem - and more importantly, not having to shift gears and think about my employer's problems - makes all the difference in the world.

I've found it also changes the incentives around development and leads to better development practices. For example, I was much less likely to use frameworks or large libraries when doing this part-time, because I didn't have a solid block of time to thoroughly learn the library. If there was a major problem in the design, I'd be inclined to hack around it rather than tackle it head-on, because I didn't have the necessary brain-cycles to hold the whole problem in my head. I'd often cut the design down to what I knew how to do, rather than the product I'd want to use, because that was all I could handle in blocks of an hour.

I don't think it's really speed that suffers when you work part-time. Rather, it sets a ceiling on the difficulty level of the project you can do. So you're fighting over the same problems as all the other folks who're doing startups part-time, while many of the harder problem lie unsolved.
I can't believe this is actually being discussed in technical circles seriously. The limitations around the iPhone SDK are more certainly NOT technical in nature - phones (both smart and otherwise) have had background processing and multitasking for years and has never caused any problems.

Doesn't anybody remember last year's mantra of "the web is the only SDK you need"? The same people that believed that line of BS, and now spreading this updated BS.

Apple is a control-freak company and these decisions are purely political. Jobs & co only wants you to do with the phone what they like, not what YOU want, its just that simple.
Give me your feedback on my news site.
Hi All,

I have created a social bookmarking site entierly using drupal and available modules.please give me your feedback on what you like and what you dont like and how can i improve it.
Still
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btw http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mail.google.com

won't work for this
If a man from a wealthy family background spends six years in college with a trivial income (from a part-time job at the college bookstore, or whatever) and then lands a well-paid professional job, he has jumped from a low quintile to a high quintile, but is not the sort of "income mobility" that most people hope their children will have access to.
Hey, Shawn here - I'm a relatively new writer and I would really appreciate knowing what you think of my first essay. I enjoy improving myself, so feel free to point out style clumsiness, grammar errors, anything that generally sounds silly, and of course give your opinion of the actual content. I'm still an inexperienced software engineer (I've been programming for about eight years now) and this essay is based on what I have observed.

I hope the essay is somewhat enjoyable. Thank you.
Ask YC: which hosting providers have hosted some recent successes into the big time?
i.e. which hosting providers have a proven track record of helping clients robustly scale their server infrastructure as a new service gains traction and becomes a 'big' site..?
Justin.TV’s Birthday Stats—57 Years Worth of Video and Counting.
YC Clone In Seattle
Yeah..the ram thing is a crock IMO. Wasn't THAT long ago that 128 mb was a LOT of RAM. Sure, you have to be careful,
sure you might not be able to do everything you want with fancy bells and whistles but I don't see why it should be a valid reason to preclude background apps.
- Slow to load.

- What's different about this than all the digg/reddit clones? I see you do adsense sharing - you might want to make that more visible so as to attract users. Is swapping out adsense id's like that allowed?
Creating a HTML “friends” page from a Google Reader subscription list
I average roughly the same. The last time I had a dayjob, I did about that amount of work each week, then stepped it up considerably in the couple weeks before a big release.

My problem is that, while working on my own stuff is fun, I'm often too pissed off about the dayjob when I get home each day and I tend to ruminate.

Sometimes I just end up not doing a hell of a lot. But other times I can salvage the rest of my day -- I'll take a quick shower and nap, then plan on spending 3-4 hours at my favorite cafe with a specific set of bugs or features to work on before leaving.
No. But who cares? It's still fun, and a perfectly viable choice.
Just out of curiosity... How many implementations of Arc has pg tried in the past howevermany years?

I don't think any language was written on the first try. Nonetheless, eleven is a pretty amazing number.
Point taken. Perhaps some combination of the sender and subject could be a reasonable approximation? In my own experience, the sender almost exclusively determines the importance or urgency of any email.
IDEA: A Karma "bank" for email.

I set up an account at emailkarma.com (sadly, taken, by Xobni, no less!) as a recipient. I set a default free karma amount (say, 100) for new senders, a default karma amount for unsigned emails (say, 50), and route all my email through the service. I also set up a whitelist of known good senders with an infinite karma balance.

People who email me for the first time will automatically be issued 100 karma points by the system. They have one of two options:

1. People who don't know about the karma system can email me directly, but their emails will "spend" the default amount for unsigned emails. When their balance reaches zero, their emails get de-emphasized.

2. People who know about the karma system can choose to spend their remaining balance with me by tagging the email subject with [karma: pointvalue]. Unimportant emails can be assigned less value, and if they absolutely need to email me, then they can spend more of their karma.

Incoming emails are sorted by date and by karma spend. I can reward relevance by giving them more points to spend, and/or by setting their default karma spend to a higher value. I can punish stupidity by adjusting karma accordingly. Webmail interface, or a thunderbird plugin, maybe?

Senders can view their karma balance for a given recipient and default spend (both uneditable) by emailing the service to prove identity and signing up.

Arrington, for instance, can reward good tipsters with more karma, and punish PR trolls by slapping them with a karma penalty.

You could apply this to other forms of communication, too-- your facebook/friendfeed, twitter, etc., though those would have to be passive (relevance weighted by karma balance, no discrete spend available per post/recipient).
Take a look at the speed of adoption - http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2Cpython%2Cperl%2C+ja...
Very cool. One thing I noticed is that it has "all" messages posted, including ones the user may have deleted off of their Twitter feed... Seems that once it is sent out into the Twittosphere, you can't actually retract the message, even by "deleting" it. So, this makes for an interesting way to see everything ;)
http://coworking.pbwiki.com/ email a couple of them, and I'm sure they'd be willing to help you out.
I don't think it's correct to call this a YC clone, but it's cool to see more startup-investment-related activity coming out of Seattle - there's a lot of great talent and ideas there.