skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's as good a place as any to start. All real programming is complex, and at least the iPhone has good development tools and documentation. Having a goal in mind is the most important part, and you've got that.
That may have been true in the past, but there's a lot of money invested in data mining past returns to find patterns like that. If stock prices are predictive, who's going to make the better prediction--you, or a team of MIT CS and Physics PhDs with an unlimited budget and years of experience?
Working on a Chrome extension?
hum not sure about this.. It shows my area is dominated by dairy queen yet we have maybe 3 within 50 miles.. There are far more sonics, mcdonalds, ect.
let me first define simplicity. I do not mean it in the sense of lack of unecessary complexity. That is always a good thing. I mean it in the sense of removing complexity (any type of complexity).

My argument's not that simplicity is bad. I'm saying that you can't just strip away things or a single button would always be the best product in the world.

I'm not saying there's an equilibrium between power and simplicity. I'm saying the trick is in getting as much of both as pasible.

I think it's not ludicrous to say that os x has a simpler user interface but you have just as much power as windows. The complexity is still there. It's just well hidden under intuitiveness. But the important thing is that os x didn't get there simply by having less features. Stripping away things doesn't always help make it better. Consider a video encoding tool. You could make the software easier to use by making it a file picker and a encode button. But this easier is relative to the user. You're definitely sacrifing some power. But if you hide advanced controls you can simplify th ui but removing often unused controls while keeping power features like codec selection available. But it's not just about simplifying by removing any and all features that a single group finds unecessary. It depends in your users. Ideally, all the power with all the simplicity.
If you're storing/reconstituting JSON, check out mongodb. It's basically a cracked-out high-performance JSON store.
I can definitely respect that point of view. My view is that people need to play their strengths. Personally my ability as a programmer is stronger than my ability as a political activist. So I choose to donate my time to free software and my money to the EFF. I also choose to invest my money in companies that have a proven progressive stance on patents and copyright (ex: Red Hat [1, 2]). The only direct political thing I do is vote. Everything else is by proxy.

[1] http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html

[2] http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/blog-entry/red-hat-files-new-...
actually, yes!
it will be available next week.
If that's true, then private health insurance is indeed succeeding spectacularly! I don't think that's what you mean though. But if the money alone is the judge, losing $230 billion over 10 years is very serious failure if you ask me. I'm curious what incremental changes could change the failure faster than giving private companies a shot to see what they come up with.
"developed and tested in webkit (chrome4+), screw any other engine."

That kind of attitude won't get you very far in web development.
My only exposure to this has been this thread and the links posted in it. This has allowed me to see Sam, Jason, and Loren in action. I have no chips in this game, so to speak; having never heard of any of these people before today, I'm as neutral an observer as they come.

Sam comes across as thoughtful, tempted to do something foolish and immoral, but ultimately a guy who did the right thing.

Daniel (via secondhand sources) comes across as a fool who may have sacrificed his career over a macbook, but who seems to have learned from his foolishness. It remains to be seen how he'll weather this.

Loren and Jason don't come across as reasonable or trustworthy to me. None of what they've said here or in the linked stories has made me think "these are people I want to go to for information". Jason seems to have trouble taking things seriously and he's made a lot of excuses for himself. Loren just comes across as mean and vindictive. So I guess my contribution to this thread is to say, Loren and Jason, you've created some image problems for yourselves. I know I'll be taking anything I see your names attached to with a grain of salt from here on out.
Reviewing the discussion here, I think his important point is being missed: Due to the supply chain Apple has built through iPod then iPhone/iPod Touch, the iPad is an extremely cost competitive multitouch interface. In fact it's so cost competitive that you might want to use it mounted. Forget carrying and maybe even rotating. It's a (relatively) cheap multitouch interface with great usability and a health programming community breeding future professionals.

Your heart might be crying out that this is not cool or sexy, and therefore incompatible with Apple, but it's a very interesting proposal. I can foresee a potential future where 50% of iPad hardware sold gets nailed down and screwed in.
The fact that the Nexus One is better, hardware-wise, than the iPhone? (Earlier Android devices were intentionally stripped down for the sake of being inexpensive. The Nexus One is not.)
IIRC, the leaked Twitter documents mused on Twitter acquiring CoTweet.

Would have been a great fit. IMHO, Twitter's business model should be CoTweet.
nice n simple UI. But i cant post a deal i found somewhere ? or create my own deal
when you want to save your progress, hit 'save' to store a cookie that remembers your checks. Or, every 10 seconds, it will save by itself.

Later, when you come back to the list, hit restore and the checkboxes will be checked according to the last recorded cookie.

Clear simply deletes the cookie.
Who says that an "enlightened manager" is one who opens his company up to potential litigation by providing honest feedback to any rejected job applicant that wants it?

Potential litigation? Given that (1) I would have absolutely no legal leg to stand on, and (2) I'd rather get another job and advance my career than spend a year suing someone, blackballing myself in the process: why would I possibly do that? If that thought even went through anyone's mind, I'm insulted, because I'd have to be an idiot to try to pull that off.

If your legal strategy, regarding someone who has absolutely no incentive (and plenty of counterincentives) to sue you, comes before your humanity, there's something wrong.

They have no way of gauging how someone will react and there is virtually zero benefit to providing any feedback whatsoever.

There's no benefit to helping out someone who applied to work at your company and might be doing something of interest to you in the future? Really?
As someone who currently works for Corporate IT, I totally share that pain, especially about the inner-platform.

Our current UberMegaProgram is very customizable. When you want to add a new product, you add the fields the product will have (so far so good), and then, there is something called "operations"... which is basically Assembler re-invented. You move data to some registers, do some basic operations... and you're expected to do all the math and validation in that (which is, of course, un-debug-able). I HATE it but since we paid 800000 dollars for it, it's not going away soon.
I skimmed the articles and couldn't figure out what this thing does. Anyone has a tl;dr version? Thanks.
"Employers have no duty to [X]" does not imply "[X] is not unprofessional". No one has any legal duty to be professional.
it's not a serious webapp, I made it for a little short-running contest. As such, I didn't want to spend my time dealing with cross browser issues.

I know that there's no way that I can do that in a serious app.
The claims merely need to be specific enough to not conflict with other patents (excluding the so called "obvious" and vague notion of "been there, done that"). Design patterns in the general sense are patentable, unfortunately.
I agree. I'd say a good 5% of development time on a new Ruby 1.9 project of mine has been spent dealing with strings. I've taken to the idea that as long as _everything_ is UTF-8, then I'll be okay, but good luck enforcing that! Especially since the whole word seems to default to ASCII, while actually _using_ multi-byte chars anyway. I think I've got it now, but no, not really. It just works on my development machine. On my server, where it actually counts, I'm getting garbage where I should be getting an accent. I've spend two days now just trying to figure out how to debug something like that!
Also known as Gops or Goofspiel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goofspiel
Your statement, "by spending $1 to provide a service to a group of people, you increase the size of the economy, and consequently the tax base in that area, by more than $1," even if it were true, is too broad: it applies to services which pay for themselves as well as those that don't. It's not an argument for why government should overcharge city folk to pay for services for country folk.
Just a guess about #2: the programmers might be recommending FogBugz to their bosses with the pursestrings, but the bosses may not like it enough. FogBugz's approach to project planning might be "the only approach that actually works well" (which I believe) but it's definitely non-traditional and takes control of the schedule away from the people who usually like to have that control. So I think there's typically a lot of resistance from outside the development group to adopting FogBugz.
They can't. I have seen so many people come up with we need to change this or that so that my backers can get money they don't deserve.

Governments are huge idiots who constantly gets in your way, but they can't destroy something as important as the internet - too many other companies depends on it to allow them to do anything more than waste tax money.
Microsoft's security chief suggests 'Net tax to clean infected computers
there are several instances of things being synced up. while it is probably true that they sped up and slowed down the video to make it match better, they still had to put effort into creating elements that would sync up, which is neat.
Yeah, that bugged the living HELL out of me.
Looks like a worse than Hibernate orm (nih). And twitter dropped mysql for cassandra.
Thanks, I appreciate the second. With so many products and opinions out there, it nice to have some concurrence in an endorsement.

I know I'm not the only one facing this problem of environmental noise as distraction, although I may be towards the extreme end. If and when I find a solution like this that really works for me, it will be for me one of if not the most effective workspace "hacks" in my toolkit.
That's like saying 10 years ago, no one is forcing you to use Windows.

Right now there is no credible alternative to iPod/iPhone/iTunes. Guys like Google and Microsoft are trying to make a better product. If Apple continues to win by making the better product, that's good for consumers, that's how the free market is supposed to work. If Apple decides to focus their time instead on PREVENTING other people from making the better product, instead of improving their own product, that's evil.
Open Source Software Economics in Pictures
It's an awesome private, invite-only (for now, though you get a 15 minute window every day to signup without an invite) social network-ish site to share and find stuff for designers and developers.
Perhaps the following formulation would be appropriate: if you are not in shape to run, you are not in shape to run barefoot. But I do not think anyone has argued otherwise.

I had an inkling hygienic concerns might be partly underlying your opposition. Even without addressing whether the issue is really of much concern, Feelmax, Vibram and others make shoes that provide protection while allowing for "barefooting." Against the elements? This winter (down to -22ºC) I have been wearing a traditional moccasin with a 4mm flat rubber sole without any problems.

> I'm too lazy to go searching for sources that justify my claim, but you don't have to look far to find some weaker evidence. Look at people who have the muscular strength but not the structural support necessary to walk: they use braces to help restrict motion...

Support braces are an entirely different matter. I would contend that people who are reliant on mechanical contraptions for moving are as a group not the prime audience when talking about running of any kind.

> I guess a more concrete example would be this: If you had to wear a weighted vest while running, would you rather be barefoot or wearing supportive shoes?

I would prefer toe-stepping.

> If the vest is heavy enough, your calves won't support you and you'll be forced to heel-strike. At that point, a supportive and cushioning shoe would be less stressful than barefoot running.

I am not sure this is true at all. Yes, it is really hard to toe-step if you lack the muscle to support yourself, even though exercise will eventually strengthen you enough, but to go from that to asserting that heel-stepping is therefore better is a stretch. I would imagine that weight sufficient to force me on my heels would be highly destructive on joints (hence all such problems obese people face.) If you consider such weight pushed down on an unstable surface - which is what a cushioned shoe is - without the necessary ligament- or muscular control to maintain posture, the leg is virtually guaranteed to be constantly misaligned.
The problem with the data mining approach is that it works spectacularly until it doesn't, and when it fails, it also fails spectacularly.
>> Is this also the end of the StackOverflow podcast?

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/40602/joel-to-quit-t...

He might have meant no longer doing other people's podcasts.
I don't agree with some of Aaron's suggestions, but I enjoy reading and have thought about this some too. I have a FT job, a wife, a 7 yr old and a 7 mo old and I mangage to read 2-6 books a month. Here's what I do:

1. Audiobooks - I subscribe to Audible.com and get books audiobooks from library and occasionally Librivox. I listen on my 20 minute commute, while I exercise, and when I'm doing mundane tasks like the dishes or cleaning.

2. eBooks - I put the icons for Stanza and GoodReader on the homescreen of my iPhone. When I find myself about to tap a game or feed reader or YouTube or whatever I check myself and ask myself if I'm in a good state to read (e.g. awake enough, have more than 3 minutes). I don't feel like I'm denying myself the entertainment of another game of Doodle Jump as much as consciously encouraging myself to opt for something that I generally find to be more satisfying.

3. Books by the bed. Nothing new there. I sometimes squeeze in a little time to read real, paper books before bedtime or when I wake up.

I haven't turned down the thermostat, alienated people, ordered stacks of library books or blocked any blogs (though I have drastically reduced the number of blogs I subscribe to). In fact, I feel like my life is generally the same as it was before I started reading a lot, except for the value I've found in what I read.

If you're curious, here's what I've been reading: http://goodreads.com/zzzmarcus
More broadly there is a set of tools you can use to control piracy:

1. Moving (part of) logic online

2. closed hardware (xbox or iPhone)

3. copy-protection as a way to delay the proliferation of pirated copies

4. Lower prices to decrease the pull

5. Free-ish model (ads, or loss-leader).
Tor in particular is a target of mine once I get out of college (two classes I'm taking should help directly with it). It's in a rather frightful state.

I've essentially made it my goal to make sure privacy is out of the hands of anybody but the individual. Without it, there's no guarantee of free speech. With it, there's always a line of communication. Ease-of-use is one of the biggest cliffs to scale, as plenty of tech exists to make things secure, it just needs to be put in everyone's hands, and made simple enough to be the default instead of for geeks-only.
PG, I am working on a startup in a controversial field. I'm excited about figuring out how to solve the problem that is inherent in the field. I believe our solution will bring great value to the industry but sadly, it might be exploited - albeit legally - by unscrupulous parties and still bring us revenue. It is this last part that I'm conflicted about. I truly believe in many of the hacker principles (that are also common to many users in this forum) but feel really sad and lousy that my system might violate the principles I believe in. So I ask the following question not with a trollish sentiment but with genuine interest in how you deal with similar conflicts:

You seem upset by Apple's latest antic and I am guessing that it violates some of your core principles. Would you take a stand and withdraw your RFS to show your disapproval of their tactics and risk future profits from YC's involvement in iPad startups?
Joel mentions in the linked article that Fog Creek now has 32 employees. Given the hundreds of applicants he alludes to for every open position and the fact that he spends several days a week focusing on his blog I'd say the odds are good that he didn't personally reject you.

Oh, I'm sure of that, but it reflects badly on his company that, when a talented applicant-- someone you'd not want to piss off if you have any future-sight whatsoever-- wanted to know what he could do to make future applications more successful, they wouldn't even help me out in the slightest.
That's an interesting theory. When can failure to respond to mail subject a person to legal penalty?
XoaX.net Algorithms Video Tutorials: Algorithms Collection
Finding more and more on projects that, old fashioned admins are less useful and you need developers to script server installations and automate the infrastructure. Whole new area its quite exciting.
Maybe the label was alright with embedding if they could do a sponsorship deal to sub in for the otherwise lost revenue. (Recall that YouTube only pays the label for video views in a YouTube-hosted page.)
Glad you're enjoying it thus far. I think you're spot on in saying it's not necessarily going to have mass-appeal. I think it fits that very interesting niche of designer/developer blend. Excited to see where it goes from here.
Definitely, but hopefully it'll be too late by that stage for governments to do anything. Personally, I realized a few years ago that I feel no bond with America in particular, and I value ethical government more than I fear running from unethical ones. If guaranteeing they can't control certain things has a cost, I'm happy to pay it.

As to speaking out now, I've already sent off a few emails, and encourage everyone to do everything they can to fight opaque governing. In a (idealized as a) democracy, keeping information away from voters is downright unethical, and goes against its core principles.

Sheeple are not governing bodies, they're weapons for people who want more power. The only way to prevent that in a democratic-styled government is education, and more (healthy) distrust of the government.
Just to be clear, I'm not hating on investors. I just think that often they get a disproportionate amount of credit and glory as compared to the founders who slave away in anonymity for long periods in an effort to create something of value. VC's have their place, but it is not at the center.
I love John Gruber's response to this:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/stand-by-this
3800 is surely high, but your caloric needs go up as you gain weight, so there would be an equilibrium point before 8 tons.
Agreed. While eating less can help, its more about what you are eating.

Eat real food (meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds).
Stop eating processed food. Cut out the grains and possibly dairy.

If you do this (exercise is good too), you will lose weight and not have to worry about how much you are eating.

http://marksdailyapple.com is another good resource
AOL. 1.9's encoding support feels thoroughly wrong to me.
As long as I get a tax credit for each OS X and Linux PC I use, great...

I kid, of course. It never ceases to amaze me how otherwise competent people become so monumentally stupid when it comes to net issues.

How about a real solution: Your bill from your ISP is just more if you insist on connecting a windows computer to their network. That covers the ISP's cost, gives them what they need to fix problems, and provides huge incentive to Microsoft to clean up their act. No laws, no taxes, just a little free market action.
Exactly. Looking at pictures and videos of this UI and actually using it will certainly change ones prior opinion. I thought the Zune ui looked especially awkward. After using it as my personal music player it began to seem efficient and the information hierarchy extremely well thought out.

I think the biggest negative aspect of Microsoft being this late in the game in rebooting the windows mobile line is that theres now an inherent familiarity with the current smartphone interfaces. When all you interact with is an android device all day, the new windows phone ui seems alien. But again; once you use it that perception definitely changes. I know thats my experience as an android user with a Zune. The central question with the new Windows phone is how well does that 'metro' ui scale in the context of a smartphone device.
In Search of Lost Sounds (Why you've never really heard the "Moonlight" Sonata)
Entrepreneurshiet
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-f...
A super-rough number to use is 500kcal/hour.
The problem is that people consume 3300, 4400 or 5500 kcal, not 2200 :)
It'd be easy to say "sure but you're a geek, you just don't
see how easy to use and useful the iPad is for normal
people". But I don't think it is.

Sorry, but you don't see. Heck, I am a geek and I do want iPad, and I know exactly why do I want it. That's because I know what I will not be doing with it, and why "deficiencies" which were repeated over and over since Jan 27 do not matter. No, I won't be doing any programming on it, nor will I be carrying it out of my house often. But there are activities on which I spend a lot of time and for those iPad is just perfect.

I used to be surprised how many geeks missed the point that iPad has IPS screen,
but I just gave up. It is so easy to point what iPad does not have and miss that it does have. Just wait till you can spend some time with the device, and say meh then.
If it's a good book, maybe he can revise and update it, add more chapters, and make a 2nd edition (with a new marketing campaign behind it).
Extrapolating, the same rant applies to all duck-typed languages: the number of possible outcomes for a=b+c explodes depending on types and contents of a,b and c, therefore his first assumption about one dimensional space is incorrect.

This is why most C++ teams prohibit their members to overload operators.
Has anyone else had experience with onlinkbank.com? That's the service which Verity has switched to for their online banking, which uses a single domain for all of their customers it seems (e.g. if You're with financial institution X you access your online banking via https://command.onlinebank.com/X/)

It just looks sketchy, you have same-origin issues potentially, and their UI is horrible leading me to believe they probably don't have high overall code quality.

In addition to setting the passwords as described, they also make the user pad their username with leading 0's because their app can't handle <8 char user names. That's ridiculous on so many levels, I don't need to elaborate why here.
I totally agree that the numbers are off, but your calculation is incorrect as well, because most obese people burn much more than 2000 calories a day. Someone who is about 240 pounds could eat about 3000 calories a day simply to stay at that weight, even more if they exercise a lot. Of course this is not really this simple, people vary, hormones, metabolism etc. all affect weight loss/gain, but the general principle stands.