skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the consumers keep voting with their wallet, and the developers still need to feed their kids and keep the lights on. maslow was right - food and lights will continue to trump philanthropic change as long as things are "good enough". more than developers complaining is apple LOSING those developers and apple losing sales to Android. enough of either will warrant a reaction.
> That's because you had a terrible work environment

That's the average work environment, in my experience :)

> Working at an office generally gives you more focus on what's really important.

I do work from home but with a specific (and very small) area as my office - I'm far more productive here than in the cubicles I used to work.
I've got a list on a blog post of all the different HN mashups people have made. There's more than 10. I think it'd be cool if we had some HN wiki to put them on.
Apt-get for Hardware
You can hardly expect me to read your mind on that point when you bury it in so many other wrong ideas about Erlang, which I note you do not challenge.
Awesome. This is a very interesting project.
8-Bit Map Of New York City
If you do that just on the weekend that's an excellent use case for renting a bunch of boxes in the cloud. In fact, it's one of the few use cases for which the numbers really work out well.
> Instead, they assert that "genes powerfully influence the formation of all traits, from eye color to intelligence, but rarely dictate precisely what those traits will be."

Man, eye color is a bad one to pick if you're making the case against genes being predictive of traits. I reckon you could get something like 60-80% of the world's eye color right based on knowing the descendency of their parents.
I thought about this as well, but really on the long run the cost of renting a dedicated or shared office in my case was just not worth it.

I currently do a mixed approach: whenever I feel I need to 'bike over' to achieve mental separation, I rent a place for the afternoon or the day in a co-working area, or I go to some library (sometimes without internet access, even better :-)

Next year as I move to the countryside with my family, where place is really cheap compared to my current place (Paris/France) we'll keep a dedicated room for product development, and another room for servers/infrastructure (garage most likely).
Acai Berry Supreme Dietary Supplement « AcaiBerry to keep you slim
If I were to agree to such draconian terms there would have to be a huge incentive. This is not the case: http://www.stromcode.com/2009/05/24/the-incredible-app-store...

Entering such an unfavorable contract for mere hope of raking 20 bucks a day? Count me out.
Two Open Source Tools for Photographers
If it's been won and I still receive tons of spam does that mean it has been won by the spammers?
Yes, that was my point. That example of point free programming is just bad and confusing, as you pointed out.

On the other hand, if I try to keep my functions and methods small, I frequently have to write methods which just apply a function to all elements of a collection. In a point free style, I can just write

manyFoo = map foo

And that's it. No loop, no recursion, no boundary issues, no clutter, just the statement 'this applies foo to everything in a list'.

Similar things work for other nicely curry-able problem statements. Imagine you have a higher-order-function traverse which takes two functions, and uses them to transform a binary tree to a value (applying the first higher order function in order to combine the left and right results of a tree and and the other function to turn leaves into values)

Now you can define:

treesum = traverse + toNum
preorder = traverse ++ toList

And so on.

Overall, the best advice I had about point-free style was: "Try to refactor your code to the form "f x = g x" and remove the x, if the refactoring can be done in a painless way". If you apply this, the drill drills well :)
Good eye!

I have to say that I'm slightly confused by this picture. On one hand, the post, the pixelation of the numbers and the support guy story make it sound like it's a real picture, but there's definitely something off, no? It looks like a mock-up to me, but I can't decide if it's just a clean design on a nice display…
Right this means "problems" in the sense that 1+1 is a "problem" not "problems" as in fundamental issues with Django which was my immediate thought. Had me confused for a second, silly preconceptions!

Apart from some slight naming issue they're a good set of posts! I love south to death for data migrating and am surprised they didn't merge it into contrib for 1.2
Not much, since most of the reference points relative to which the property lines are measured will have moved as well.

In most cities those are hollow nails in the pavement that you can set up a surveyors theodolite on.
Whenever I've done this type of stuff, I've just farmed out my article writing to elance.

Some article writing services do pretty much the same thing, being essentially middlemen rather than having talent inhouse, which is why I don't recommend them, but YMMV
There's much better ways to make money as a developer than making $0.99 iphone apps. Compared to the app store, the global software market is a GIANT with its head in the clouds, where as the app store is a molecule of dung encrusted on a pad.
www.iconfinder.net has collections of icons and should lead you to some designers
A pretty poor article, considering it's from an acm.org blog. It's 2010, and his blog post is based only on two studies, one from 2005 and the other from 2008. To explain the two years for which he has no information, he quotes "his personal experience".

Just a few days ago we read here on HN how one nigerian spammer was netting 40M… (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174235). And as it was said in other comments, if spammers are still sending spam, there has to be a reason.
And scrolling very slow in Opera (linux&nvidia), probably thanks to CSS transparency overload and/or very thin gradient images.
To a certain extent this seems like ignorant webcock bullshit.

In many fields, in most cases, there actually is one answer, especially at the K-12 levels that much of education is directed toward. 2+2 = 4. There is nothing to collaborate on or debate in that. There's not time for students to spend hundreds of years going through the process of complete a priori discovery that pioneers in fields of knowledge did.

I'm saying there's a side to this that this post completely ignores and is reminiscent of typical Web 2.0 douchebaggery that is obsessed with rejecting everything old.

Textbook linear algebra and Bayesian statistics are an important part of some of Google's key technologies. I don't understand the complete failure to recognize value when you see it of the kind this post displays.

I am aware of Seymour Papert's ideas about "guide on the side" vs "sage on the stage" in teaching and using new educational technology to make students own their own knowledge. The author of this post is not, or else does not want to acknowledge the people he is aping.

Edit: I think unconferences are a great idea! Recognize when the audience has a lot to contribute and when it's time for one person or a panel to do the talking. Adapt to the situation at hand. I completely support that. What a revolution in American life it would be if we could imbue our children with real intellectual curiosity! Just don't make things so one-sided is all I'm saying.
For context: SMT here is statistical machine translation, not simultaneous multi-threading.
There was a little bit of facetiousness in there, sorry if it offended you.

I haven't seen many +100 vote posts with "why" posts, so I was more thinking about the posts that have no comments, or at least none than really contribute anything to the conversation. I do think "The reason this is a post instead of a link is that I wanted to explain why I was posting it, and what element of the script was relevant." is interesting though. I found your explanation was actually what made me want to comment. I'm not entirely sure your explanation added anything, and you probably would have gotten a better response with just a link and the title you selected.
We use it at both the day job and in my business. It is clearly better than nothing. If I were starting from zero today, I'd take a very close look at JQuery, as I think the web development community is rapidly standardizing on JQuery, which means pre-made things that I want to incorporate are disproportionately written in JQuery. However, I have never been totally unable to find a Prototype moral equivalent for the types of controls I have wanted. (e.g. a color picker)

Your mileage may vary, by the way, but I think it cuts about 90% of the pain out of AJAX development... leaving 90% to go.
Server-side spam filtering is the only thing that really works. Thunderbird can't do greylisting, for example.
I had the good fortune of working under Franz on the translation team when I was at Google. Brilliant guy, but also one of the funniest bastards I've ever met. Great guy to grab a drink with if you ever get an opportunity.
Personal memory devices: right around the corner
It is a bad thing, any enterprise that wants to deploy their own android software to device they paid for now has to choose a different carrier than AT and T..

Its why Enterprises do not use iPhone in the first place..
If you plan to make one, make the radius smaller, but the velocity higher.

The energy stored in this goes by the radius squared. But the centripetal force on the object at the end goes by the radius.

So a smaller faster one is less dangerous, and also requires a less powerful motor (or the motor you have can give you a higher force).

Although the bearings are probably a bit harder to handle when it's faster, the whole thing will weigh less.

On the con side, a smaller one will have a larger difference in force between the top and bottom of the lava lamp, making your experiment less accurate.
> * Facebook Connect is awesome

Beg to differ (IMHO of course): their willingness to change core parts of their API without much (read: any) notification, and their inconsistencies between documentation and implementation caused me much pain. It's awesome that you have access to such a wealth of information, but it's not a mature platform, which it definitely should be by now.
I know most people can't use it due to needing email to be instant, but at least for my personal mail I've found greylisting to work wonders.

What it does is tell the sender that it is busy/something is wrong and to call back later. It then makes a note of this. When the person calls back it will then accept the mail and add the address to a whitelist.

This works because most spammers don't use a rfc complaint mail server and don't care to call back. It is cheaper to just move onto the next target.
We use both jQuery and Prototype together in our app. I love jQuery and would love to use it exclusively, but our architecture was build around Prototype's class extension capabilities, which I have to say are pretty damn convenient. Beyond the ability to make JS much more easily handle inheritance, I haven't found much benefit from it over jQuery.

I'm also specifically annoyed at how it tries to modify the HTMLElement prototype, since that's not allowed in IE < 8, and caused some weird bugs for me (sure, it should be mutable everywhere, but let's be realistic: IE < 8 has a huge market share, and should have code consistency. After all, that's what JS frameworks are for, amongst other things).
How is it an iPad knockoff?

Also, can you call something a knockoff if it comes out before whatever-its-supposedly copying is released?
“Yes, but the smaller caps should have thinner lines.”

That’s not true. Small caps should be drawn so that their line widths about match those of capitals. They should not just be smaller versions of capitals. Both Word and Writer fake small caps by making capitals slightly smaller. That’s just wrong.

“Instead the larger font is thinner.”

As it can be. The thinnest lines of the capitals should in most cases be thinner than the widest lines of the small caps. That’s just normal.
Well, it's not like this author isn't providing evidence to back up his argument. I haven't read The Blank Slate (though I've heard of it, and like to hear Steven Pinker speak), nor have I read The Genius in All of Us, but now they are both on my Amazon Wish List. :-)

Soon... I have finally have the answer to this age-old debate, and I suspect the nuances in it will be enough to fill a book on its own.
I wonder how much the ability to persevere in the face of difficulty is affected by a person's genes?

Exactly. The authors of that famous paper, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," said something along these same lines in their conclusion: that we should begin "viewing expert performers not simply as domain-specific experts but as experts in maintaining high levels of practice and improving performance."
Does Google place any restrictions on the changes that can be made to a phone and still being able to market it as an Android?
And designing for the iPad when you only have the simulator only makes it harder. Sure, it's a giant iPhone, i can imagine what it will be like, but I don't really have a feel for how I'd hold/use it, and the design implications that has.
Two points need to be made here, I think.

First, for extremely talented, highly individually motivated people it's important that they have the flexibility of process to figure out what works best for them. Chances are that such folks will do good work pretty much regardless of any formal process, but working out a system that maximizes their productivity, reduces their stress, and increases their job satisfaction can be very important. Often these tend to be "non-traditional" systems or even unique solutions depending on the various traits of the individual, sometimes people have different ways of working. These are the sort of 99th percentile workers that would be running their own startup if they weren't working with you, they work because they love it and they are not just cogs they are artists, their work is creative and creative work often requires non-traditional work environments and hours.

Second, for individuals with average talent and average individual motivation process tends to be more important. Indeed, process is often a critical element in the success or failure of teams that are primarily composed of average workers, whether developers or otherwise. Many of the non-traditional work environments and work rules that translate into success for 99th percentile workers will result in catastrophic failure when applied to groups composed mostly of average developers.

This is what makes generic advice so difficult. Advice that applies to one group will frequently cause consternation and failure in the other. The advice of Jason Fried, coming from 37signals, often applies only to the first group. Both Jason's advice and this critique from MetaLab are perfectly valid but neither is suitable as blanket advice for every developer across all skill levels and in any organization.

People need to first understand that there is no one-size-fits-all process that will maximize developer productivity in every situation and that different processes are necessary for different skill levels, personalities, and levels of individual motivation. Once that is understood then they can move forward towards figuring out what sorts of work environments and schedules work best for each individual.
2+2 = 4. There is nothing to collaborate on or debate in that. There's not time for students to spend hundreds of years going through the process of complete a priori discovery that pioneers in fields of knowledge did.

This isn't at all what he is saying, I think you misunderstood (or I did). The key points, as I understood the piece:

- Avoid duplicating effort, instead add value, "just as journalists must become more curator than creator, so must educators"

- Rather than educate based on a factory-line mentality, engage with the audience/students, in order to help them learn more effectively, "instead of giving tests to find out what [people] learned, we should test to find out what they don't know. Their wrong answers aren't failures, they are needs and opportunities."

- Instead of getting students to memorize answers or techniques, focus on helping them learn how to find answers and understand techniques, "Google sprung from seeing the novel. Is our educational system preparing students to work for or create Googles? Googles don’t come from lectures."
Apple TV as a gaming plattform ?
Less is analog, fewer is digital.
I've thought about this issue a lot.

I think that the ideal is to have an office with normal working hours and have the staff expected to generally meet those hours (within a couple of hours on the start and end time). However, with this, offer leniency on individual adhesion. For instance, if someone has an appointment during the day, or needs a half-day, or needs a whole day off, or whatever, and that person has no impending obligations that day, simply require a few minutes of notice and then let it slide without Nazi-tizing the operation.

The workplace needs to be concerned with productivity, not draconian enforcement of arcane rulesets. Leniency with the schedule is fine as long as the employee is performing well.

It is good to keep general office hours. Fried's approach as quoted here seems naive and reactionary to me; we've all worked at places where hours have received far too much emphasis, but the right solution isn't doing away with them completely because there's a lot of benefit for everyone involved (clients, company, employees) in having generally-followed hours.

Generally-adhered-to office hours benefit everyone. It's good to have everyone in the same space. It fosters relationships, it results in collaborative creative spurts, not to mention the personal benefits of getting out of the house, "grown-up" time without distraction or the normal demands at home with the family, and so on.

The right solution is compassionate enforcement and a focus on productivity and morale, not absolute compliance with pre-defined generalized rules.

One of my old employers operated almost this way and it was totally awesome ... until the forward-thinking, ex-NSA programmer boss got supplanted by the business-school manufacturing executive. Almost the whole team followed the good boss out of the company.
The 'great man' theory of history is ingrained into most of us in early childhood as we learn about larger than life historical figures such as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Linchon, and the like (obviously I'm an American, but I imagine other nationalities have similar figures). A lot of people consider themselves 'normal', and thus not capable of great things. This is of course bullshit... While everyone may not be able to be a 'genius' as the article claims, most people are capable of a whole lot more than they think.
Page is loading rather slowly for me too.
BTW, how is this monetized?
I think it might be interesting to study when the optimal time to learn addition would be. Different people might learn at different paces, so letting people learn naturally might be a better way for these things to be introduced at the optimal time, rather than forced at some suboptimal time. I think that's the main benefit in free-form learning, and that's to optimize learning by interest.

So for example rather than forcing all kids to learn addition in first grade (or is it earlier?), we could introduce them to more general topics, and allow a bigger range of time for the children to naturally approach those topics. So the some children might develop an interest for it at 3rd grade or 2nd, etc. But it would be optimized by interest, and school would serve the purpose of creating the interest (to induce learning), rather than forcing the learning.
Japan murder rates drop due to weakening interpersonal relationships
"Federal jobs have more limited salary ranges than private-sector jobs, some of which have million-dollar payouts."

IOW if you are average or below, the US govt will gladly overpay you. If you are exceptional, you will make a lot more money in the private sector.
I hadn't looked at it for a while, just thought it was the tool for making dashboard widgets.
What I wish for is that Thunderbird can teach my server about spam. That is, if I flag a mail, Thunderbird should inform the server, and the server should learn. There might already be a standard for that kind of thing, but I am not sure.

I think the server will also need adaptive filtering techniques (like bayesian networks), in addition to the technical filters like greylisting.
iPhone is where the money is at, so developers develop for the platform that can feed them. Sure it sucks that you give 30% to Apple, but 70% of a significant chunk is better than even 100% of a small sliver.

Developers will follow the users, at least initially. Apple delivers the best overall experience for people who don't think of their phone as a computer.

When I get an Android phone next upgrade I'll still keep my iPhone for development.
I am sure the android devs would love to implement that, but there were a few patents in the way...
Dropbox will shut you off without warning. I had a 25mb training video up there for a 15-person startup and my public folder was turned off astonishingly quickly.
This means eating more fruit

this is the single biggest thing most people could be doing for better health. eating fruit, especially in the morning, lowers your craving for processed sugars.
Chocolate UGG Boots Classic Mini 5854 Chocolate UGG Boots Classic Mini
FYI, green tea also has theanine in it, which is relaxing. Not sure how much theanine is found in white tea. If you want the relaxing effects of green tea without the caffeine, you can buy pure theanine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine
Perhaps not really a feature, but: yesterday I submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173147 It sank pretty quickly due to a lack of upvotes. However, despite its low position, it did accumulate 9 upvotes over the last day, which I guess are due to seperate submissions of the same story. From this, I propose the algorithm that decides what appears on the frontpage can use tweaking to weigh submissions heavier than upvotes (perhaps it does?). If this story was truly submitted 10 times, perhaps it deserves a higher position?
We could answer this definitively by seeing if this design came out before or after Techcrunch's design. It's not really worth it though, because the design is generic enough that they could get away with stealing it. It's really more of a case of copying the layout than copying the design.
Easy. Apps which save their state when you close them. Not a solution to all problems (i.e. playing music in the background) but to the user it doesn't make any difference whether that Spreadsheet app she just left to take a note keeps on running in the background or quits if she finds it exactly the way she left it when coming back. (As long as it's speedy enough.)

Users don't want multitasking. They may say so - don't listen to them. They want to be able to do stuff. One traditional way to let them do stuff is multitaksing. That's why they are screaming for it now. But there is no reason why the solution that let's them do stuff actually has to be multitasking. It could be something else entirely.
The "I don't see spam in my inbox" argument misses the real great cost of spam: false positives. Beating spam actually makes the problem worse because the better filters are the more spammers spam, and the more spam there is in my spam folder the harder it is to find false positives.
I think over last years jQuery won popularity contest with prototype.js and other libs. It's very handy and consistent. Lots of plugins exist that provide additional functions.