skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference between being an asshole and an Aspie is clear; assholes are completely resistant to hearing about a better way to handle something, and Aspies, go "gee, that didn't occur to me, and I was just looking at it this way, but next time I'll try that." I know Bram pretty well, and when something doesn't work, he listens to his friend's suggestions and tries to add them to his social algorithm. Maybe he doesn't do this too publicly, but would you? In casual everyday life he never throws around status, when he meets people he doesn't say anything other than, "I'm a programmer" if asked. He really usually gets embarrassed by recognition and tries to downplay it. However, I think we've all behaved less than humbly when pushed to our boiling point. The trigger is frequently just the straw that breaks the camel's back, and we all can get pissy. It doesn't meet my high spiritual standards for myself when I lose my temper, but it happens. Jeff18 who posted an actually good suggestion on how to handle this situation, would be really good working with Aspies. That is exactly what they need, and what teachers spend most of their time doing with AS children, modeling different solutions. It was very helpful.
That removing the factor, thought to have been causing autism to appear, did not change the incidences of autism appearing. Thus falsifying the initial hypothesis.
Can you imagine how much bitching the $250 charge would bring?
Yeah unfortunately someone already has it

Edit: I just registered @spamorham for this
Two practical examples of Rack middleware in Rails
Not to mention that having a birds-eye view of the spam situation will let him black list accounts, because a spammer is a spammer for the first user he follows as much as the next hundred.
Some e-book economics
> Since you disagree, how about providing a list of specific experts in political science or economics who you'd let run your life. Better yet, which politicians would you let control your life?

If you put it that way, the answer is, of course, nobody. But in putting it that way, we'd be shifting the discussion away from the original point. Now we're suddenly talking about "people running our lives for us", about our freedom. Respectfully, I would suggest that's a rhetorical trick.

I'm not an American, but I would have certainly trusted president Obama with the healthcare reform job. I'm not saying that I know he's right, I'm saying that I would trust him to make better decisions on it than I would make. Better for me, too. Would I let him run my life for me? I do hope that that is obviously a totally different question.

(edit: note that I never said I disagreed - the "I know what's good for me" sentiment actually does very much resonate with my instincts, too. But that doesn't make it true... and so I think it's not useful as an objection here)
Here's an idea - instead of emailing the report, post it on Twitter: "@arikfr 152 of your followers look spammy, while another 3334 look follow-worthy! http://www.followham.com/show.php?username=arikfr

This way you gain two things -
1. More users will try the service (giving away Twitter username is easier than giving away email address).
2. More chances that people will RT this messages and spread the word about the service.

And as @dschobel mentioned - you should register @followham.
I wish Google could spend some of its ad budget on educating the general public on what a browser actually is. Their current Chrome adverts confuse people like my Dad.
You can't convince fanboys that lack of features will eventually lead to pain for the users.
I have the account @spamcop on Twitter. If you want, I will gladly transfer it to you.
For someone that has a Kindle/KindleDX/Nook: How good is the Kindle/Kindle DX for technical books? I want to buy one (since I am immigrating and will lose all my textbooks).

Is it good for technical books - since the page turn speed is apparently very slow? Will the iPad be better for this?
It allows for multiple windows, which is somewhat similar.
hmmm... didn't think of that either- That would be pretty painful if I buy one...
>The Daily Show, Castle, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother:

Annoying workaround, but Air Video can stream from your desktop.
Wait, a grown adult chooses to take a shit on the sidewalk and you want to blame someone else for this behavior?

My cat has enough self respect to hold his feces if we accidentally close the door to the laundry room for a while.
Mark Pilgrim on The Setup
Every Worker Should Be C.E.O. of Something
Ooh, that's pretty cool. I like the way you receive a "respond" function and call it when you're done. Nice work!
A mathematician, a scientist, and a dean were kidnapped. When their university refused to pay the ransom, the kipnappers announced that they would kill them all, but only after each got his last wish.

The mathematician said he had an elegant alternative proof to the four color theorem and would like to sketch it out. It would only take 1 hour.

The scientist wanted to show his proof that the universe is flat. It would only take 2 hours.

The dean said, "Kill me first."
"Even past the fact that the iPad does not have a camera, it cannot run two applications at the same time. Meaning: talking to my girlfriend, I could not look up a train time while we talked. Result: have to use my iPhone while we video chat. All that in a device that commands a price premium."

How do you video chat using an iPhone, which has a camera on the back?

"Again, we run into a software problem. From what I have seen in images surrounding the iPad, you can only have one tab open at a time. Excellent, if this was 1996. Hell, even Internet Explorer 7 had multitab browsing. Oh, and if that Apple sourced processor is so fast, why the hell can I not use it? Single tabbed browsing is just a plain deal killer for content consumption, period."

The button to switch windows or tabs is located between the forward and bookmarks button. It is located in the bottom right on the iPhone.

"Apple almost got there with this one, copying someone else’s interface for iBooks. But then it hit me again, only one app at a time! I listen to music while I read. And Gmail is never closed. Blast, there goes that."

If you're using the iPod and Mail applications, this isn't an issue, as both of these applications can run in the background.

"Again, when are we going to see HTML5 casual gaming? I love the game “desktop tower defense,” which is flash based. iPad? No."

There are many casual games in the App Store, including many tower defence games (my favourite is Star Defence, but there are plenty of good free ones, if 99c is too dear). This is only going to increase with Flash CS5.
This is exactly what I'm saying, why so many people here on HN seem to be so willing to accept redundancy in a business that is streamlined to provide fast service is beyond me.

Tim Hortons here in Canada holds ~70% of the market share (IIRC), compared to Starbucks' 7% in second place. You can literally order and have a coffee in the time it takes you to pay (one person is on the cash, the other is making your order by overhearing). Today the store close to me made over 300 breakfast sandwiches (bagel/tea biscuit, bacon/sausage/egg or any combination) in 4 hours.

Including redundancies in your order causes complications and the ability to induce error. Why this isn't simple to understand for so many people here, I don't know.

Coffee here in Canada is always served black. Stating 'no cream' or 'no sugar' sounds like 'one cream' or 'one sugar' to the person making the drink (note: NOT the person you ordered from). The person making drinks can have to deal with upwards of 100 coffees during a 10-minute rush, this means less than 6 seconds per coffee. When they get a pre-work rush at 6am, and the staff serving you have been working since 10PM, there's no chance in hell they'll spend 6 seconds listening to you order your coffee when it takes them that long to make it. That 10-minute rush will be backlogged to taking 20 minutes.

I'm not even discussing the people that order like that through a crackly 10-year-old drive-thru intercom and expect their order to be interpreted properly.

Perhaps it's an American thing that orders take needlessly long to be served and are needlessly complicated. I can't order a drink at Starbucks without being forced through an impossible discussion, or listing off a grocery list. Similar happens at McDonalds here in Canada, a simple 2-item order can take a solid 10 minutes to be dealt with. I've seen orders at Tim Hortons of >20 items be processed and served within 2 minutes.
No tabbed browsing in Safari. I'm guessing dozens of tabbed browsers will pop up in the App store almost immediately. Unless Apple rejects them of course.
This guy is a complete idiot, and has obviously never even used and iPhone or iPod Touch.

Apple almost got there with this one, copying someone else’s interface for iBooks. But then it hit me again, only one app at a time! I listen to music while I read.
The sharp edge has been bothering me as well. As for the confusion with basecamp I can see where you are coming from. I was going to replace the screenshot with a walkthrough video soon; hopefully that will make things less similar.
I've always envisioned watching TV on a TV while I have the iPad on the couch doing other stuff.
Can anyone enlighten a cuttlefish about what this means/does?
I don't really get why everyone is talking about Flash and its relation to porn. If the the number of non-Flash playing devices grows, couldn't these porn sites just go to HTML5?(this applies to all other video sites, actually)
> How do you video chat using an iPhone, which has a camera on the back?

He's saying that even if it (the iPad) had a camera for video chat, he would have to use his iPhone to look up the train times because there is no multi-tasking on the iPad.
iPad is really good at doing what it's designed to do, and really bad otherwise. It's not a satisfy all device, as we've seen in the response to it so far.
I didn't understand his objection here. Is it the inconvenience of hitting the "windows" button?

With the iphone's touch interface this is painless and I can't imagine it'll be any worse for the ipad.
Really? What the fuck was it supposed to be really good at doing? Running the iphone OS?
That may be, but in the Keynote they did push the 'you can watch 10 hours of video on a single charge' so they are pushing this as a device to watch video on. If it fails at video, then it's a failure of the device if that is one of its goals.
I don't expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business. But neither do I believe that Microsoft, as we know it today, is capable of being the company that knocks them down.
He was just p'eed off and rightly so. He tried civility. And aired a bug in the system. That's all.
I was looking forward to a humorous example of even a single use case being literally broken, since I don't know how to literally break a use case. Alas, it's just a list of use cases the iPad doesn't meet.
Unless he's talking about using Pandora while reading, I'm pretty sure you can use the music app in the background
To be fair, Apple might buckle on some of these issues in the future, but you're still making a gamble on that if you get the iPad thinking that those features will come later.
Apple uses new standard as opposed to old - same story, different tech
> There are many casual games in the App Store, including many tower defence games (my favourite is Star Defence, but there are plenty of good free ones, if 99c is too dear). This is only going to increase with Flash CS5.

Why make people pay when there's FREE games out there online if only flash were supported. Flash support means opening up to a whole world of preexisting games, rich internet applications, and porn sites.

But not allowing flash creates an artificial monopoly that is the app store.
I did.

Python is a great little language but even after multiple thousands of lines it still looks like the guardrails on the highway are missing, I never knew I was so addicted to curly braces.

I also find it very hard to switch from the one to the other and back again after sticking to one of the two for a while.

My 'preferred' language/framework for more complicated stuff actually does not seem to exist. I can list a whole series of problems with just about any development stack out there at the moment, at least the ones that I've used.

For quick and dirty stuff (throwaway sites or quick tests or prototypes) I still prefer PHP, but mostly because I can rely on a framework that I wrote years ago that makes it very easy to throw something together. It's far from perfect but it's the devil that I know best.

I've made three sites in python/django, it works but the ORM is very limiting and I keep hearing that forms are hell (but I rolled my own forms, so that wasn't a big deal).

I wished there was a clear winner amongst all these technologies, everybody seems to have built just enough to satisfy their particular itch.

Next on the list of stuff to try is werkzeug, another python framework.
The Axitron looks pretty sweet, it's a Macbook modded by Axiotron to become a real Mac tablet computer, the Modbook.

Woz is on the board of advisors.

http://www.axiotron.com
You also can't convince nerds that excessive degrees of freedom are a serious usability problem.

After all, doing six things at once while remembering the state of a bunch of invisible stateful objects -- tabs, background apps, file hierarchies -- is the nerd core skill.

Meanwhile, I would note that Apple has apparently sold about 35 million iPod Touches:

http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling...

... which exhibit the exact same set of "missing features" as the iPad.
I'm sure Steve wasn't an idiot. He definitely designed this product for a specific type of user and it's probably really good at doing that. I just don't know what that is. But I'm certain he didn't slap on a bunch of random features that didn't go well together.
Well, he could also be talking about no flash memory card slot. If you were to watch non-streaming porn on the device, I doubt that you would want it to be in the same place on the device as your regular movies (lest you hand the iPad to someone else that stumbles across them). You would probably want to have your porn on a memory card that you could remove when you are no longer using it.
A historian, physicist and mathematician were travelling by train from England to Scotland for the first time and as they crossed the border they saw a black sheep.

"Look!" said the historian, "Sheep in Scotland are black!"

"No," said the physicist, "At least one sheep in Scotland is black."

"Hmm." said the mathematician. "Of all the sheep in Scotland, at least one of them is at least half black."
That's a good idea, I'm going to start writing it now in fact, thanks.
I'm pretty sure porn sites will adapt pretty fast. Nobody wants to be the last porn site not supported on the iPad.
That's why I liked Perl so much, the community & culture were (are) great.

Take a look at the first issues of The Perl Journal as well.
There are a few places where it seems to me the program would die, but they are surrounded by conditionals that are always false... so I am not sure.

I am downloading Perl 3 and am just going to run the thing.

Edit: OK, yacc is too new, make is too new, the C compiler can't understand 1989 C, etc... so I have lost interest.
I think it's mostly the American tendency to inflate controversy, and it's particularly juicy given that Toyota is the biggest car company and the Camry is now basically the All-American Car. Of course, it seems to me that all the controversy is warranted: I subscribe to the theory that the problem is with the software that controls the engine and transmission.

This is because of my own experience with a Camry that shifts at the wrong times and has unpredictable acceleration or lack of acceleration. Several months after we bought the car (a 2007) we were able to get a firmware upgrade that improved the performance somewhat, but at the cost of gas mileage. Since the car doesn't perform as well as it should (it's nowhere near as responsive or efficient as our '97 Camry was), it seems like the underlying problems still haven't been fixed.

Toyota has offered two other "solutions" for their problems, but neither rings true, and as the LA Times points out, neither can explain all the reported incidents. If Toyota were covering up their inability to find and fix the real problem, this is what it would look like. Here in the US, we've seen a lack of honesty from Toyota that seems very typical of American corporations.
Why does everyone forget about Messenger? With about the same number of users as Facebook, it's hardly a failure.
They also pushed YouTube on the iPhone and video on the iPhone. Both features have been unpractical for me (converting videos, tiny screen, battery drain with 3G video) and the Youtube feature just seems to have been a selling point tacked on.
What's the site written in? If it's rails, check out twitter-auth: http://github.com/mbleigh/twitter-auth
His twitter account says Pittsburgh, PA.
Well, for starters, any inconvenience sucks. Glad I got that out of the way =]

His example of having (AT LEAST) 8 tabs open is not the same as eight windows. Searching through all of them can be quite the inconvenience. I, for example, currently have 14 tabs open, and six applications running. I do not want to search through all of those to get to what should be "another tab." I understand what he's talking about...
It's just a poem, written in Perl instead of English.
perl (ver3 or 5 for the updated poem) can compile it but running the poem doesn't do anything useful.
Taking a step back as an impartial observer,

(1) Sure, Freenode's policy can be improved, because a significant amt. of users think it is a bit stifling. The admins need to figure out how to engage the users.

(2) In this situation, there are solutions more optimal than douche-baggery. If he wanted his nick back, being nice increases his odds. Bram can use a class in negotations 101.

OK - Let's move on with our lives now, don't you need to prepare for the 3/3/2010 YC deadline? If you are bored - there are plenty of single founders looking for co-founder.
If I recall correctly, Perl poetry should parse, there's no need for it to do something useful.
I've seen plenty of smart people make dumb decisions. It's about time he made a dumb one. Kind of like the phrase "We're due for another volcano eruption," I'm not trying to say it's about time we see him as an idiot
Last I checked, Apple rejects anything that duplicates the core functions included on the device. Those include web browsing, media playing and email.
Thanks for this honest response. By the way, forms are also hell with the Zend Framework IMHO.
Ouch, it is the first option; if logged into facebook it seems you can see any old friends list (including ones you can't normally see). The "command" is just to go to the URL in the shell command in your authenticated browser (or to faff about with cookies if you want to use lynx/wget/curl).

FB also removed the option to completely opt out of their application API at the same time they messed this up. Not impressed.
Why did you stop liking Perl? I am just curious.
I think this poem was present in Programming Perl, 1st edition, which covers Perl 4.
The argument against using Flash is that it's not suitable for a low-powered, long battery-life hand held device. My guess is that Jobs is worried that if Flash were enabled, the average consumer would notice a much shorter battery life. The consumer won't understand that Flash is to blame, and will end up blaming the iPad instead.

>Why make people pay when there's FREE games out there online if only flash were supported.

There are also many free games on the App store. Also, with the new version of Adobe Flash, it's a relatively trivial process to turn a Flash game into a native iPhone app.
At the risk of repeating myself: Apple has apparently sold 35 million iPod Touches in a little over two years:

http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling....

Sales are apparently up 55% year-over-year.

These devices do exactly what the iPad does, only with a much smaller screen, far fewer networking options, and (if rumors are to be believed) slower performance.

These numbers are trying to tell us something. Perhaps we should listen?
There are many web browsers and email clients available in the app store today, so I'm not sure where you got the idea that Apple blocks them. This doesn't solve the background apps problem, but there are also many apps that play media.
I've had some previous exposure to python, but nothing mission critical. I just switched from php to python about 3 weeks ago in order to deploy apps on the Google App Engine. My deepest language experience is in frontend Actionscript 3, so Python feels very similar to that in that you have imports, packages, and modules. I do still find myself typing ";" on rare occasions to end lines.

Here are a few things that I got tripped up by:

- I was searching for a substr? function. there is none; instead you do things like str[0:1]

- Dont Count on autocompletion (at least not in eclipse). I was hoping I could duck type things like i had done in php Eclipse and get object info autocompleted. This is not possible, so you have to keep a lot more info about objects in your head. Perhaps one way around this is to try keep all your classes in one module.

- Test with IDLE. I was used to testing php code by whipping up a single page and browsing to localhost. With appengine, and possibly your web server, this isn't justifiable when Python ships with a pretty cool cmd IDE.

hth!
Get paid to take surveys
Well, I don't think we've seen yet how the iPad will manage browser windows. Perhaps when you click on windows, it will be be able to display all of the open windows at the same time in a grid view.
I read the article and it seems like flamebait to me.

The iPhone has what is essentially 8 tabs for browsing. Music is able to be played in the background. Gmail will have push email so how is that different than running in the background from a use-case perspective?

This post does not deserve to make it such a high spot on HN. Not even on the weekend.
...and use cases the iPad DOES meet, but which the poster doesn't realize it meets. Like "tabbed" browsing, listening to music while running another app, and playing free casual games.
Does messenger actually make Microsoft any money?

I have an MSN Messenger account but I never use their client for it. I've always used 3rd party applications.
Tigers and other farmyard animals
I don't understand why this individual is so angry. If it doesn't meet your needs don't buy it. What's the problem? I always feel like people who write this type of stuff just have a really bad attitude because they get so upset over something so unimportant. It's like they're just trying to find things to be upset about.
Funny, this is why I hate perl so much.

Fun to hack around, but then you have to maintain someone else's Perl, or write a large application in it, and the endless facepalming begins.
I absolutely agree that is a very sad event in the history of tech world as Sun was instrumental in contributing to the high-tech industry. A highly successful company was brought down to it's knees due to lack of leadership, strategy and direction. The management team is accountable for it's sad demise!

Finally, it's easy for Jonathan to say to his employees to go home and light a candle because even if he is going to be out of work he is gaining $17+ million from this acquisition. One word - Irony!!!

I wish all the best to all the ex-sun employees!
Have you used Thrift w/ node.js?

There seems to be some JavaScript support for Thrift, this would be a great way to have node.js fit in with ones architecture.

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-550

Also what are you using for your base libraries?

For example one needs RFC3339 date support, can you just plug in something like Google Closure Library?

http://code.google.com/closure/library/