skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not a Flash developer. But with the exception of this past year, I've gone to Flash in the Can conferences and loved viewing what the Flash community has developed. There are some really beautiful works of art, proofs of concept, games, and even user interfaces developed in Flash.

That said, the only true mass market commercial successes involving Flash are solutions for which equivalent alternatives exist or are very very close to existing. HTML5 solves the video dilemma that Flash was a nice, elegant solution for. In 2004 we were stuck in the quagmire of "Click here for QuickTime, here for Windows Media, or here for RealPlayer". It had a nice 5 year run but now an alternative exists.

IMHO, Flex is Adobe's last stand. Until recently AJAX user interfaces have been a complete pain to deal with. For the record, I prefer the HTML/CSS/JS approach, but implementing an interface using any of the existing frameworks save for SproutCore or Cappucino is a completely different experience to what Flash/Flex developers are used to. Once frameworks like SproutCore and Cappucino truly get mass market acceptance in the developer community (e.g., probably in 5 years time when MS comes full circle with ASP.NET implementing a sane implementation of web forms only using the MVC approach) I think Flash will die.

Apple is correct in the same way they were correct about the death of the floppy disk. They're about 5-7 years ahead of the competition and until then you'll have people complaining about the lack of Flash just the same way you had folks complaining that an iMac didn't ship with a floppy drive in the year 2001 (long after Apple ditched it and long after they were appropriate for sharing files).
Yeah, I thought the analysis was interesting enough to stand on its own. Hopefully people will discard the political aspect and focus on the linguistics analysis angle.
This is clever. You want to have some amount of personal feedback to learn about customers, but you also want to be efficient about handling he bulk of the support issues.
The iPhone didn't stack up well in feature grids either, if you'll recall, there were phones with better cameras, more storage, SD cards, physical keyboards etc.. Apple devices are intended to be more than the sum of their checkboxes (and I would think people would figure this out after the iPhone). It's about "the experience", that's the whole point. It's about the transition from portrait to landscape being smooth and without flicker, it's about the UI moving when you swipe your finger, not a millisecond after.

Maybe they fail at "the experience", in this case that remains to be seen, but please, please stop with these feature grids. They're useless outside of Tom's Hardware, et al..
I tried to do some rudementary research, but without more work it is hard to know if the current owner is the original owner, or just a corp with the same name. I caught ISC as one of these abandoned domains, there may be more.

Oldest Domains:

1. Symbolics.com => Domain Squatter

2. BBN.com => Owned by Raytheon

3. Think.com => Owned by? Oracle

4. MCC.com => Domain Squatter

5. DEC.com => HP.com

6. Northrop.com => Northropgrumman.com

7. Xerox.com

8. SRI.com

9. HP.com

10. Bellcore.com => Telcordia.com

11. IBM.com

11. Sun.com => oracle.com

13. Intel.com

13. TI.com

15. ATT.com

16. GMR.com => Broken?

16. TEK.com

18. FMC.com

18. UB.com => ultimatebet.com

20. Bell-ATL.com => verizon.com

20. GE.com

20. Grebyn.com => broken?

20. ISC.com => Aquired by Kodak who abandoned domain

20. NSC.com

20. Stargate.com => latisys.com
There are other JVMs that now may take more prominence, and whatever OpenJDK is, it's going to outlive Sun.
Only if the SDK supports it. I can't, for instance, put widgets on the lock screen to see how many unread emails I have. Or have the locked device light up due to an event that my background process detected.
The Ideological History of the Supreme Court of the U.S. [visualization]
Actually, it depends a bit on the user. The back lit screen for reading is one of the things I'm most excited about. I just can't see digital paper technologies like the Kindle... they just don't have enough contrast.

A back lit screen might not be great for reading on a sunny day, but for someone like myself, who has had to give up reading actual paper books because I can no longer see them, and is stuck reading only eBooks where I can have a back light and enlarged font, the iPad is exciting. Finally, I'll be able to relax on the couch again and read comfortably, rather than having to sit at my desk.

I do realize I'm in the minority when compared to the overall consumer market, but there are a lot of visually impaired users who would actually benefit from the back light.
My mother and grandmother would be insulted to be told that they need a "simpler" computer. This idea that regular computers are "too difficult" for "normal users" is nothing but pure condescension. Why should we believe that now, after all of the other "simplified computer for 'normal users'/internet appliance" devices to ever hit the market (including Apple's own AppleTV) that this one is going to make it?
I'm just a small solo dev and a Windows guy so I just use MS Outlook. It's not great but it does 80% of what I want better than any other single tool.
Thanks for pointing that out, I've been sitting looking at how that could possibly work for a while.
The first words he uses to illustrate cofounders you shouldn't bring in are "grey hair". If I could recruit anyone in the world as a cofounder, a lot of the top contenders would have gray hair.
I still don't like the iPhone keyboard. I don't perpetually complain about it, I just elect to never buy one.
> I didn't intend to say the method is fascist, just that it reminds of practices that were and are employed by fascist regimes.

Fascists also wore pants, drove cars, ate sausage, drank beer, etc.

While customers may have privacy concerns and expectations regarding their interaction with a company, employee interaction with customers is not an employee-privacy issue.

Remember, employees are being paid to interact with customers. The company is liable and responsible for those interactions so it's absurd to argue that the company has limited access to those interactions because of employee privacy.

BTW - The purpose of a company is NOT to keep employees happy. Doing so may be useful, but that's different.
I would call it "desirability" more than "usability."
They could follow the pattern used for the iPhone, where background tasks which the user should car to know about (Voice Recorder, Phone.app) takes up a double height status bar at the top.
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life." Chapter 25, pg. 198
College in Canada has a different meaning than in the U.S.. Here, it means community college. The equivalent term in Canada for an American college would be university. In Canada there are no universities that I'm aware of that have DB2 on their curriculum. There are definitely community colleges that do have it though.
Pay to become a developer. A-ha-ha! Don't see much future in that!

"What got you into programming?"

"The thrill of paying all those great companies to improve their product!"

(True enough of the great majority of those "100,000 apps" they keep touting.)
Another, probably more detailed article on optimizing Common Lisp code in SBCL:

http://t-b-o-g.blogspot.com/2009/12/brians-brain-on-common-l...

It highlights the importance of profiling code first.
It might be a threat to your/our way of life, but I'm not convinced it's a thread overall.

You can't write a program for your TV or Wristwatch, microwave or land line phone, LCD screen menu system or DVD player.

People can't do surgery without planning years in advance and studying for years in specialised schools, and this has been the case for hundreds of years, yet children still grow up to be doctors and surgeons; and all sorts of other professions which don't have free-home-tinkering-kits available.

If "everybody" wants an iPad and "nobody" cares that they can't program on it, then we're the minority in a tyranny of the majority situation and the only way out is having enough money to pay a company to design your own alternative.

It feels like something is really being lost - a lot of humans world wide growing up as content consumers, not realising that if they could shape the right forms, they could do the same kinds of magic themselves - equals not subservients[1].

But is anything really being lost? If you were a kid today would your nightly alarm clock program have the same charms when run up against your mobile phone's built in alarm? Maybe it's time for software development to grow up and realise the days you could build a spreadsheet in your home are gone with the days you could make cough syrup from home, and the industry needs to become a more professional, 'trained adults only' kind of industry.

In the early days of machine code, software was the electric circuits that rich eccentric people built in their labs. Basic was the valve radio circuits that Feynman puzzled over as a kid. C was the 555 timers and 74xx logic gates.

We were hoping that software would be a new kind of material to work with altogether, each iteration building on the previous work so that as it gets more powerful it still presents a small surface area, stays easy for beginners, kids, curious people to put modules together.

Instead, modern software is the integrated circuits that need years of training to use. It didn't become drag-and-drop coding, it became

NSDocument printDocumentWithSettings:showPrintPanel:delegate:didPrintSelector:contextInfo:

Instead of an OLPC which is both hackable device and the result of hacking at itself, we get iPad - you hack on your specialist hackstation (Mac/PC/...) and view in the iPad browser. Like you make 3D renderings in Blender and view them in a picture viewer, or a nationwide phone exchange which ends in a handset with a pad of numbers, like you design paint in a large chemistry lab and it ends up in a small pot with a brush.

Like many other industries.

[1] I twigged the other day that this is a major difference between me and a hobbyist friend of mine. He treats things with interest as if he is an equal and has every right to learn about them, willing to dive into a subject and believe he can get results. I treat things as nuanced and designed by experts, full of details to be cautious of and traps for the beginner, something to worry about and avoid. I like his style.
The broader take home message of the article: "Don't invent security protocols (e.g., involving hashing) as there can be surprising weaknesses. Find a well-designed library routine that already does what you want."
You can get an intel one- the EEE has a touchscreen version.
So many words to describe a simple idea:

WRONG: build something factoring out potentially reusable parts

RIGHT: build something without factoring out potentially reusable parts. Later when you need to reuse those parts then factor them out. On the third time you need them you will already have a factored out price that can be readily reused.

REASON: while building and then factoring out might be more expensive than just building it properly factored in the first place, most of the time you don't get to reuse those parts so by employing delayed refactoring (or lazy refactoring) you are saving resources overall.
I have the kindle app, and it's not anywhere near as much fun to use as my actual Kindle. It's small, backlit, and slightly less comfortable and intuitive.
Sigh, yet another article touting the free market and asking for large government subsidies at the same time.

It is rather contradictory -- in the beginning it says how rare earth metals are so incredibly valuable and only China has them, and in the end it says well California has a lot of them too but the big mine in California had to shut down because prices were too low. So give us money now.

If the metals are really so valuable, and if prices skyrocket, then the mine in California should reopen. It is possible that the Chinese were dumping the stuff below cost in order to close the California mine, but in that case we should address the issue with existing anti dumping legislation and not with subsidies.
If the iPad makes developers stop using Flash, I'll pay any price Steve Jobs asks.
I agree. I own a computer repair shop. 90% of our customers, all they want to do is surf the web, check email, look at pictures, and keep in touch with the family. The iPad is great for this. If I could give an iPad to every confused PC user who wanders in looking lost and forlorn, a good majority of them could walk out 10 minutes later, knowing how to do all of the things they want to be able to do on the web. Not everyone needs or wants to do all of the things we HN readers need and want to do on the web, so not everyone needs a device that will allow them to do more. For a lot of people, the restrictions actually make it easier.
None of the other explicitly listed encodings are unicode encodings, and the "other" category is tiny. So the statement is still true. Some browsers don't even support other unicode encodings, so this doesn't surprise me. UTF-16 is the only one that even stands a chance; I've never seen UTF-32 used for files, and I've never seen UTF-7 used at all. I suspect UTF-16 is more efficient than UTF-8 for east Asian scripts, but that advantage probably dwindles when content is gzipped.

It's good news that Google are now decomposing ligature codepoints, although I do wish they had a version of their search that was literal; especially with programming-related and other technical searches, the special characters it filters out are often crucial.
McNealy's bittersweet memo bids good-bye to Sun
Before the iPhone came out, I was itching for a powerful phone that came close to being a browser-enabled computer in my pocket. The only devices I could get at the time was WEP browsers with very high data fees. The iPhone brought us a full browser with a $20 unlimited data plan. I bought it the first day it became available. It was a big leap forward compared with its peers. It allowed me to do things I wanted to do, and not just the things my telco allowed.

The iPad has a different set of peers. We're not living in a world where the only tablet devices are the Kindle and Nook. There are actual fully functioning tablet PCs that can run the things normal PCs can. Apple is trying to move us from open devices to a closed one.
An intuitive interface is one that is easy to learn - but it still requires learning. That people already know how to use it is orthogonal to how easy it is to learn to use.
I thought all three were excellent. Of the three Great Gatsby was by far my favorite. How can you not love the typically millionaire who has it all and suddenly kills himself. He should have realized he could have just bought a russian bride.
I liked it. Different people, different tastes I guess. But that's a good thing.
True, but I'm not so much thinking about small bumps as having to hold it relatively still and pointing at your face. With a laptop it's easy, the thing has a large base and even if it's on your physical lap it's not going to move that much, and it's oriented so the camera points at you when at rest. A tablet device on the other hand, well, try it with a small mirror, how long do you want to hold it like that? How jarring would it be to the other end when it shakes (minor steady-cam business aside)?

I could be wrong of course, maybe people would get the hang of it quickly, but it seems like one of those potential features that people look at with their rose colored glasses (like full OSX on a tablet, imo), without really thinking about what it would be like in practice.
For what it's worth, check out the wikipedia page on the RAZR, specifically the section on Cultural Impact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razr. Key quote: "The RAZR has been said to the 'iPod' of mobile phones. Being the slimmest phone during its release in 2004, it easily stood out amongst other phone models. IT has also been one of the most popular mobile phone models since its first release, until being surpassed by the iPhone 3G in November 2008..."

However, it notes this popularity was never matched outside the USA.
Pseudo science: Iraq spent over $48mn on American bomb detecting rods.
WordPress is just about entirely a distributed company, with employees all over the world... It doesn't work for everyone, but clearly works for 37s and WP.

On the other front, it sounds like you care more about your control/ego than you do about the success of your product/company. That's a bad sign, I think. Success is elusive enough. Note: I'm not saying you should take the guy on as a co-founder. But your reasons SHOULD be "I don't know him well enough and he's far away" (both surmountable)... Not, "I can't share my PRECIOUS!" :-)
I love this guy's blog, have since I came across it somewhere on Reddit. It's very interesting to look at how indie games do and Jeff Vogel has really been a great source of that info.

Xbox's indie program looks really cool, especially as a Flash game developer with a background in .NET. The revenue stream looks more clearly and reasonably defined than the various ways to monetize Flash games.
There is such an overhead when dealing with an external company. Integration projects are rarely fun. I postulate that having your hardware designer report to the same guy as the chip designer makes the process much more streamlined. No waiting for contracts / bizdev, being scheduled with competing projects, et cetera. The powervr chip in A9 could be configured to support OpenGL (non-es), but the TI Omap series has it set up for OpenGL ES instead. Now, if you are apple, you could probably get TI to change that for you... but then you're talking about contracts & process management and integration once again. Wouldn't it be nice to just set directions and have it done?
Agreed. The NY Times Article is just plain scary.
So basically you just wrote an article about how us nerds don't get "normal people," and in the process committed the same sin by not getting what a digital picture frame is for "normal people?" Funny
"I never said about removing the jail. Just building a cozy luxe visitors center just outside the wall."

It essentially has the same problem as a jailbroken iPad/iPhone/Hackintosh. There are costs with supporting issues that arise from this if it's official.

"In my idea, people would be running non-official Apple software without Apple support."

Well then why complain when in all likelihood a 3rd party will give you what you want for Apple products - ala unsupported jailbreak?

"You're dead wrong. If the iPad is to become as pervasive as they would like it to, Apple is going to have to open it up enough so that it can operate as a general purpose computer for the small segment of the populace that wants it."

Given the history with iPod, iTunes, & iPhone I'm going to disagree. All of them are closed systems with the same critics. Yet all of these products have been wildly successful despite that. I'm not saying that this would work with any company, but it works with Apple; it's the part of their company DNA that has proven time and again to work. As I've said in previous posts, there was a time when Apple was more 'open'; and it was a total failure that almost took down the entire company.

"There is no technical reason why Apple can't have their "walled garden" and still let a few people do dangerous things if they want."

I agree but there are a myriad of other reasons as to why they shouldn't such as extra costs, making their content partners (movies, music, and books) happy (I suspect this is a really big reason), and so on. It's not perfect for everyone; but it's worked for non-techies, Apple stock holders, and Apple's partners.

"Actually, they are already doing some of this. It's called the "iPhone SDK.""

Then why complain? Just pay the $99 and be happy.

I suggest moving on and helping either the Chrome OS or Linux hardware movement if you really want officially blessed freedom. You're not going to get that from a mainstream console maker; we are a niche audience.
The $99 is a one-time fee. (Edit: Oops, I guess not.) If you don't want to go that route, though, you can bet this thing will get jailbroken in the first month. :)
If I understand correctly, the "fastest program f" is the one which M not only proves to solve the problem, but also proves to solve more quickly than any other provable time bound. That is, it's not so much "fastest program f" as "program f with the lowest provable time bound among programs with provable time bounds relative to the proof system". This is another critical constraint that I should have mentioned earlier - the result really is a lot weaker than the abstract makes it sound.
It's a concept car, at this point. I may never arrive, and there is certainly no promise of price point.

Don't get me wrong, I hope it does, and I hope it's cheap, but for now it's vapor.
It's interesting that UTF-8 has largely achieved its success amongst English speakers and Latin-1 languages--almost everything else has remained more or less static or has a slow downward trend. Since we're not seeing an increase in UTF-16 or UCS-2 or anything else like that, this would seem evidence that the Web, or at least Google's view of it, is becoming even more increasingly dominated by Western European languages, which is itself an interesting idea.
The fervent nature of global warming believers makes it hard to separate political posturing from useful action.

Lets get the data sorted out; not so that we know what to do (that is easy, and almost irrelevant to GW issues - just no one is really bothering....) but so that the politicians can't abuse the figures for their own end.
What about the developer that is considering the readability of the file AS A WHOLE? They would also fit under this category as they tend to re-jig/re-write/refactor a lot of code.

I find quite a few developers on the team I'm working on fix bugs without considering the overall readability of what is going on, making the code harder and harder to read with each fix.
Christine 0.6 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
This happened before with the iPhone name.

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/update_on_ciscos_iphone...
Agreed. Similar instance, used to work with this great developer. He was very talented, friendly, etc. Used to pair with him every day and he challenged me constantly to improve. He also tried to challenge the rest of the team, questioning the way we did things and suggesting ways to improve. He collided with a few guys who'd been there longer. Layoffs came around and he got canned. Now though, he's better off and works at a place that encourages continual improvement.

Sometimes though, the "who is a superstar" becomes "who is your competition" and then it becomes a negative. At least when competition is feared instead of seen as a challenge.
Newsday Explains Why 35 Paid Online Subscriptions Are Part Of Their Strategy
The Remote app is a great way to control iTunes and AppleTV, if they evolve that into a media browser that just tells AppleTV to start playing your content instead of on the screen they've suddenly got the world's greatest media experience.