skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What exactly is 'bug software'? and what error reporting do you turn off? Are we talking disabling/muting syslog, or perhaps masking interrupts or "handling" all exceptions/signals with a no-op type handler?
I have used google app engine for several projects. Most recently for http://www.smstweet.in This basically helps Indian mobile phone users to update their twitter status by sending a simple SMS at negligible price.

Overall I feel GAE is very good to quickly validate your core ideas without having to worry about scalability at all. In SmsTweet I created the app in couple of days and as traffic grew, started optimizing little by little by using Tasks and Memcache. Yes there are a tonne of restrictions if you chose GAE, but there are decent workarounds for every one of them. You also have to learn stuff specific to GAE (datastore, tasks for example), but I guess they are trivial to pick up.
And finally if your application does pick up traffic you can easily convert it to paid version and pay only for the extra traffic that you get. So a win win situation for you.
Very well put. I don't even know how other comapanies can overtake apple when they are constantly playing catch up. Google and others are behind in mindshare, marketshare, app installs, usability, buzz...
Yes, stuff like this can be trivially done with shell aliases and functions.
Nicole.kern@gmx.net
Typed in out of a cheap newsprint magazine, even!

Apple wants to kill the "power user" dead. Every one uses the system on the same clear, easily understood terms. A fraction of those users will be developers, but even they will use the device itself as users in the same way as everyone else, not as wizards. Some people see this as Harrison Bergeron, but I sure don't — the people they're 'handicapping' didn't know anything in the first place, they were pretenders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
And after you publish you work, Facebook can't threaten to sue you if you don't delete your data. They just have to do it, which they probably won't. (And if they do, the world benefited from your work already, so the damage they can inflict is minimal.)

The idea is to keep Facebook from knowing what's going on until the last possible moment, so they can't interrupt you in the middle of something. Once you've published your paper, then they can know.
High-IQ risk taking does not just come from the school system or immigration. It also comes from the freedom to fail. Increasing the safety net and taking the edge off failure will help people step out on the tightrope.
Technically, I think the title is very accurate.
The fact that Shareaholic has an option to turn it off, makes it less sinister, but in my book, collecting my surfing statistic is spying on me.
The post states facts, and doesn't bash Shareaholic.
Why can't the future be something that augments instead of supplants?
Personally do mass cooking, picking up ingredients either from a farm shop or if I'm short on time from one of the veggie box schemes.

Started off with big chillis and curries, making 6 times the amount I would normally do and freezing the rest. Now also do pastas and soups. I make sure to give some extra sauce as well as try not to use a microwave for the reheating. A meal is as simple as getting out of the freeze the night before and reheating whilst I surf the web.

Breakfast:have scrambled eggs on brown toast with an orange.

Snacks: fruit or peanuts.

Healthy food every day and it's quicker and cheaper then cooking properly every day.
Maybe, depends on the details. I wouldn't be ideologically opposed to it. I just don't want to spend much time dealing with the nuts & bolts anymore. In my case I work with technology 8-10 hours per day for my job. The last thing I want to do is come home and micro-manage my own stuff. With most of these closed platforms what we really are talking about is a managed platform where a company takes responsibility for the end user experience. This is about the same as a company hiring an IT department to lock down their office desktops to improve security and increase workers productivity by creating a trouble free, consistent, environment for them to work in. There's nothing wrong with that. In the end, as the consumer, I get to make the choice what type of product I want. I think it's kind of a downer that someone would oppose my ability to make the choice to buy one of these managed platforms because they don't like them. I certainly wouldn't want to stop people from being able to dig into the nuts & bolts if that's what they want. If we can have some hybrid of both I'm all for it but it seems very difficult to strike a good balance.
I'm sorry if I came off as attacking you: there wasn't any intent to do that. I just was trying to point out where I think you misread Winer's article, which is in the grand scheme of things a pretty minor mistake, probably not even worth the downvotes. I certainly wasn't trying to make it personal.

I think one issue may have been that what I wrote in my post was just the first two sentences; the whole second paragraph is cut-and-pasted from Winer. In that paragraph Winer himself comes off as pretty aggressive, and by quoting all of that it may have made my comment read as more caustic than it was designed to be. (though I guess we should heed techiferous' point about tone on the internet and give Winer a little benefit of the doubt here too!)

This community (and discussion forums in general) is only useful if we sometimes can correct each other's mistakes and use evidence to argue against each others' positions. However, we should always do so in ways that never make it feel like anyone is being attacked, and it's my bad if I fell short of that.

I sent Aaron a direct message on Facebook already saying all this, but I wanted to clarify for everyone else here, especially anyone who flagged my comment: I was somehow locked out of HN starting sometime shortly after I made my original reply to Aaron and ending just a minute ago. My best guess is that this must have been caused by some mechanism triggered when several people flag your post but a mod hasn't decided whether to ban you yet. Just speculation, though: it's also possible my co-founder logged into my account and turned on noprocrast as a subtle message to get off HN and get back to work! :) That's actually pretty good advice that I'll be following now. Have a good few weeks, HN.
I think one thing that ought to be dealt with first before any RISC-CISC debate is what exactly defines either one. Some attributes commonly identified (in my experience) with RISC machines include:

- Fixed-width instructions (generally 32 bits)

- Explicit load and store instructions with arithmetic being performed only between registers (hence RISC architectures sometimes being called load-store)

- Large register files with few or no special-purpose registers (MIPS HI/LO registers being an exception to this one, for example)

Other common (though perhaps less "defining") traits: three-operand instructions, relatively few/simple addressing modes, procedure calls often done via "branch-and-link" instructions, etc.

But...

> A RISC processor is a processor with no microcode virtual machine level.

Huh? I've certainly never heard that before. In fact, I'd say the RISC/CISC dichotomy is primarily (if not entirely) an attribute of the ISA, not the microarchitecture implementing it. It's generally pretty easy to look at e.g. a PPC or x86 instruction set and classify it one way or another; in terms of internal implementations though, the lines have gotten so blurred (in both directions) in modern machines that I don't think it's real meaningful to talk about RISC vs CISC anymore at the microarchitectural level, frankly.
Primary and secondary school should provide enough education to get you started and after that get out the way. We make choices in eating because we are knowledgeable enough to decide what makes a good choice. But the curriculum of schools is just insane. Fatter years, they add more classes, leaner years they cut back to the basics. The kids are caught in the middle of these 12 year experiments. And the results can't be seen for atleast 20 years.

Some schools want to prepare students for college and others just want to get off the D-list of NCLB.

If anything schools should do what they were outlined to do 200 years ago. Provide a baseline of education. If you want additional classes provide them after school or on the weekends. If you've passed the baseline then there is no need to stick around for 2-3 years. Get out, go to college or get an apprenticeship.
We're using app engine for www.jukaroo.com. We've been using it for a year now and after a lot of invested time are migrating away. The number one reason to use it is the one click deploys but we've found that time saved there is lost working around app engine's quirks. The service is buggy (set a page to refresh every ten seconds or so and watch how many random 500's it will throw - there's a monkey patch floating around for the random datastore timeouts that are partly to blame). It's also slow compared to other setups I've used (currently running vanilla django at webfaction). The limitations are many and absolute (dig around but off the top of my head no threading, no long running threads, no push, no naked domains, no python c libs, no ssh no advanced image processing, no support, no support and no support).

Core apis I've had to patch: imaging (black lines on edges of pics), datastore (random timeout errors), inbound mail (improper body and attachment handling) and probably others that I've forgotten about.

There is also no portability at this point. I've seen one project that will run an app engine app on ec2 but I haven't used it.

I think it's a cool project but if you want the unhindered ability to build really good products I can't recommend it. Also don't mistake app engine for a hosting company. The experience for us has been 'you are lucky to be using our nifty cloud' and not 'thanks for your business, we're here to help'.
It takes about 5 minutes to jailbreak an iPhone. I expect similar, and add'l on the iPad. So enough with these "the future of computing / young programmers" are at risk because of Apple.
no.

Same for a cell phone. No.

Same for a car. No.

Same for every crap. No.

I would open an exception if there was some free service. I am considering the kindle because of the free wikipedia all the time.
> I've certainly never heard that before.

It's because we've adopted (or rather, co-opted) the terms to refer to things that shared phenotypical traits with their progenitors, but no longer held true to the original definitions. In reality, RISC originally just meant "exposes its microarchitecture as its instruction-set architecture." All the other well-known properties of RISC machines were effects of this decision. But these days,

> the lines have gotten so blurred (in both directions) in modern machines

...that, like I said, there are very few RISC processors under the original, theoretical definition of the term (and it's probably alright to just use "RISC" under the new definition, since only the embedded programmers will complain.)
I remember in one post PG mentioned that his solution to procrastinating on the internet was to get a separate computer to do all of his non-work-related internet browsing on. If I'm remembering correctly, that's the only thing he would use this computer for. It was at a different desk and so whenever he would use it too much he would feel something wrong.

I think I will try implementing something similar with my iPad, and see how it works.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mokmnbikneoaenmc...

this one boosts my productivity
Yes. For a slightly unusual demo of this functionality, in October 2008, we released our "DIY iPhone-controlled R/C car" video tutorial:

http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/rc_car/

in which we used the iPhone Javascript API to capture touch/drag events, and sent them (via a laptop, and then a microcontroller) to a little toy car's transmitter. No SDK use or jailbreaking required at all. However, we had to rely on proprietary Javascript events, and had to include a laptop on ad-hoc wifi to relay the messages. Apple's restrictions certainly lead to major tradeoffs, but we were able to build something pretty neat and accessible regardless.

As a side note, they've locked down both the dock connector and the Bluetooth interface very tightly. Just buying the $99 dev license doesn't allow you to develop for either of those interfaces -- they have a separate "Made for iPod" program for that. The $99 isn't an insurmountable barrier for hobbyists who really want to tinker, but the "Made for iPod" certification probably is. (Some companies are using the audio input/output to hack around this restriction.)
Yea the launch was a disaster. They were definitely stretched too thin at the time. I've heard some people have had issues still but it has been perfect for me since I got it around the launch of the 3GS.
It's possible that Facebook shut this guy down because they don't want competition when selling their data. The notion that this information is publicly and legally accessible may take away a revenue stream from them.
I have also been getting into tries recently (last 6 months) and if you are interested in learning about them I recommend Sedgewick's Algorithms in C (parts 1-4) for a good introduction to the subject. Available on Safari if you have access to that.
As far as I can tell, the "stats monitor" feature is not advertised on the front page. In fact, I tried navigating the site for a while but couldn't hit the Firefox welcome/upgrade pages that contain the disclaimer.

Most people upgrade their plugin via Firefox's addon manager, and skip the "what's new" page that opens up. This is because we trust whoever made the plugin to not introduce any malicious behavior in future updates.

Judging by the intrusive nature of this feature, I believe it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Apple’s photo software already has face recognition and its video software already has good image stabilization. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were spin-offs of work towards precisely this.
By definition?
Examples for sinatra like frameworks
I agree completely, maybe because I just don't understand their argument. It may not be as open but having young people see such an exciting and well-polished gadget shows them what's possible and that they can help build something better someday. There will always be people that by their very nature need to know how things work, even if it takes a long time to figure out. Seems inspirational to me.
I use templates.

My Perl template is:

use MooseX::Declare;

class $classname {
}

My Haskell template is:

module $module where

If you need anything more complicated than that, it's time to write code to fix the problem, rather than have your editor type the same text again and again and again and again.
If you actually look at what Steve Blank has written, it says that you need lots of funding to enter a new market. Paypal did just that.

Therefore 'Lean' in this case means 'Tons of Money.' Its a theory that means more than its title. Maybe its wrong, but this article fails to even discuss it.
I liked the idea that if an immigrant create a company that gainfully employes 5-10 people, they get a green card.

That would get more entrepreneurial immigrants come and stay in the US.
Interesting. It was readable on IE/Chrome/Android Safari though they all look different. Oh web, where did we go wrong with you. Maybe after iPad, Steve will work on getting web font support up to the 1984 Mac level.
God I hope not. I hope some day I wont have to use HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a serverside language just to write an app.

I'd like to just use one language and hit all platforms.
well stated.. though with Facebook I doubt they would implement something so bold
Apple iPad Delivers on Entertainment, but Lacks Productivity Punch
I will argue that a properly implemented tries are more compact but not necessarily faster than hash table. The fact is, there are some badly implemented tries which even worse than hash table in term of memory consumption. Also, I'd like to point out the actually trie implementation may not have a fix k child node. I most often use k = 256 or 512 for the first few layers and 4~8 for the last few one in order to get "hash table" like performance for the first few layers and "tree" like performance for a deeper lookup.
How much happier would he be if he were a billionaire?

Decidedly less happy, I think. For one thing, it would be virtually impossible for me to find Ms. Right without the money thing creating an adverse selection problem. I'd also virtually have to have People, because you simply can't be a billionaire without having People, and I prefer to spend my time with people rather than People if you catch my drift. I don't want to ever have my own accounting office.

I've been doing sit-down-think-this-year-through budgeting for the first time in several years (because a salaryman has virtually no need of budgeting: you're paid exactly enough to live the salaryman lifestyle and since you don't have time to do anything else what the heck would you need money for). There is a gap between my new means and my desire (e.g. I'd like to be able to travel abroad three or four times this year and my current income will not support it), but it isn't a ginormous gap and I expect to close it fairly quickly. So there's a marginal happiness return on income for me up to, oh, call it $80k a year. Throw in a nice young lady and a bit of support for my family and I might even have a marginal happiness return up to $200k a year. After that, it might as well be WoW gold for me: having the number increase over last year makes me happy because it means I'm doing well at the game, but it won't have a significant impact on my life.
3D viewer + The Elements for iPad = stereoscopic scienceporn
For smallish (one or a few files) library/API/snippet type stuff, I kind of like the style of putting the authors and changelog at the top of the file, along with brief documentation of using it and a statement of license terms. Bigger libraries will of course have separate ChangeLog and README files and such, but for one-file stuff, I often just end up copying the file into my own project, and it's nice when it's a self-contained file with the relevant info all in there.

How common that is might vary in different programming languages. It's quite common to share Javascript code by just swapping standalone .js files, and it's not uncommon in the Lisp world either.
the "political problem" is that those enacting the political system are unavoidably susceptible to the same modus operandi which capitalism prescribes for the economic system - the self-interested pursuit of wealth.

"Economic and political systems are conceptually different, though there is a lot of feedback between them."

this reminds me of wave particle duality. energy/matter qua wave is conceptually distinct from energy/matter qua particle. but there is no question of "feedback between them". "they" are both just analytic vantages on the same singular phenomena.
Thank you for putting the conversation back in the civil tone!
I hear what your saying, But if you look at the iPad as the future of computing it does seem a bit bleak, what you can do with a full featured laptop is much different then what you can do with an iPad. sure you might be able to unlock it or mod it in some way but I would see it more as novelty hacking compared to what you can do with your laptop or desktop computer. an iPad is just a simplified computer made for a specific kind of interaction, not nearly as dynamic as the "stove"
Don't Code in Secret
I descend from hundreds of generations of intelligent beings who conquered the world using tools they could understand and improve. I refuse to have some vendor demote me to a lesser species, no matter how shiny the beads are.
The Soloist
Missing link between man and apes found
I don't know why the ideas of market-provided educational services are considered so radical and receive so little consideration by smart people. I find the arguments for school choice and loosening the grip of the education monopoly very compelling. And the example of programs like the DC Opportunity Scholarship Fund are very powerful (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7FS5B-CynM). But these ideas have very little uptake. There seems to be no political will to do anything but what we have been doing all along, except try harder.
I'm a .Net developer and this is based on light work with it a couple years ago so...

It wasn't great. Developing modules was confusing and overly complex. The documentation was horrible. The data access stack was plain stupid if you follow the "correct" way. It's written in VB.Net and many of the examples were in VB.Net. (the VB.Net thing was a big reason I didn't continue)
It's a major step backwards for information junkies like myself if more content gets locked into apps. Search and linking will be threatened. However I think it will regulate itself. If you can't find content, you won't consume it.

I disagree with the article's claim that "What's even better is that gone will the need to publish content that has to match ever browser on the planet." It's actually going to get worse. Content apps are like yet another browser to support. You can't operate under the assumption that most content consumers will have iPads.

I think apps are a fad to an extent and providers will tire of supporting multiple platforms that way.
And if only Heroku still had their original product still integrated (a web based code editor), we'd be all set.

I write and run code every day, but rarely in front of the machine it executes on — even the editor isn't running on the machine I'm typing on. I live in browser tabs and terminal emulators displaying remote GNU Screen sessions.

When I have a terminal emulator compiled for Google NaCL (even if I have to port it myself), I'll be living exclusively in browser tabs.
My favorite bash.org quote is relevant here.

<glyph> For example - if you came in here asking "how do I use a jackhammer" we might ask "why do you need to use a jackhammer"

<glyph> If the answer to the latter question is "to knock my grandmother's head off to let out the evil spirits that gave her cancer", then maybe the problem is actually unrelated to jackhammers
It's not like Apple is going to win 100% of the market, and the other competitors are not following suit with a closed system.

We'll always have choice - Google's entire strategy was being the opposite - open source, open apps, etc. There are dozens, if not hundreds of Android tablets, and concepts coming in the next 18 months, not to mention Windows 7 mobile etc
Obama birth certificate
why is this such a problem? it would seem the person without anything to hide, and yet who is obligated by law, would not hesitate to clear this matter up.
The iPad is not a Tablet Computer
1. funny! but doesn't surprise me :)

2. I like how even the name Silverlight pretty much tells you it's their Flash knock-off: silver + light = bright light or lightning = flash. It's like they're thumbing their nose and saying "neener-neener!" to Adobe.

Quick Wikipedia read on WPF made me think of similarities to Flash and Apple stacks. But there can be non-malevolent explanations for this, and I don't know a lot about WPF (since I now try to keep my brain non-Microsoft, for efficiency's sake), so take with grain of salt.
The average consumer doesn't understand the current open model of computing and some are very afraid of it. Let's just accept both models are going to co-exist and there's nothing wrong with that. When people say devices like the iPad are the future they are probably just link baiting. Devices like the iPad are simply adding diversity to the market to reflect the huge influx of new consumers with different needs. The PC operating systems we use today are all based on usage assumptions of 20-30 years ago when computers were primarily expensive scientific & business tools.