skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is that the diagrams you linked to don't tell you anything about the semantics. For example, according to the python diagram, there is absolutely no difference except for the parameter definition between what is allowed in a normal function definition and a lambda expression. The subtlety that a lambda can only be a single line is lurking in some surprising and dark corner of the language semantics. That is what makes a language difficult: arbitrary and subtle differences between things that should be the same.

Not that the three sligthly different types of callable objects/blocks/watchamaycallits in ruby are a shining example of elegant design. I don't know if ruby or python is simpler (I don't care, scala is even more baroque around the corners than both and I still prefer it), it is just that your syntax diagramms add nothing to a discussion about semantics.
This will never work. Women read trash.
I think it's a lot more expensive than App Engine though. You quickly get into hundreds of dollars a month range for just a few extra features and two running processes.
Minnespark: micro seed capital for (very) early stage Minnesota startup
I have done instance_eval-ish stuff in Ruby. There are some tricky bits when you do this, as it changes how methods with blocks behave when inside other methods with blocks. But I like the way you think!
The tech graveyard is full of overworked, tired, run-down, exhausted people who put in more hours than their bodies could handle. I run into people all the time who are putting in ridiculous hours and getting no where.

Academia too.
As mentioned elsewhere, Apple's technology here comes from buying up FingerWorks (and hiring the founders). If FingerWorks had not been able to secure a patent on the technology they developed, Apple (or any other company) could have simply copied what they did instead of acquiring them or developing their own technology, which doesn't do much to promote the Progress of Science. Indeed, FingerWorks probably would never have been founded if it could not have differentiated itself with patented technology.
Did this happen to you?
No Software Patents in New Zealand?
I'd be all for a friendly (competitive) game every now and then, but if you intentionally play foul on me just to shit-test me, it means I don't want to work for you :)
This article is vapid, banal at best. The author's theories are completely without substance or merit. I doubt he's ever actually hired anyone.

Save yourself some time and read something else.
I see no one commenting on this interesting article has yet mentioned an article on experiment design by a scientist-hacker, Peter Norvig,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that I mention frequently in comments here on HN because

1) it is accessible to general readers,

2) it is written by someone with excellent formal training and work experience in the subject,

3) it links to excellent primary source literature for further reading,

and

4) it gives cogent, thought-provoking examples relating to errors of reasoning that are common even among trained scientists.

Because I like science, and I like science to progress based on firmly verified factual conclusions, I like my friends here on HN to know about the pitfalls to look out for when anyone does experimental research. Thanks for the submission of the latest journalistic article on related issues here, which also gives us a lot to think about and which has elicited informative comments.
Bill Gates's visit to Moscow in 1990 to present russian version of MS-DOS
Yes indeed - I should have written "loses big".
The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open Source
Congratulations Patrick
If previous blog posts and memory serve me, today is a milestone day for patio11 (aka Patrick McKenzie) - his last day as a Japanese salaryman before stepping full time into his 'MicroISV on a Shoestring'.

There are others in the HN community that have been there before, or built much larger businesses, or taken the plunge without first having built a successful side project. But since patio11 is a valuable member on this site, and a contributor I greatly admire, I felt it was worth noting and creating a space for others who might also want to pass on their best wishes.

So Congrats Patrick. I wish you every success. If the adage 'Give and ye shall Receive' were ever to hold true, then you will be the recipient of much happiness.

(And if you don't know patio11, I recommend his blog http://www.kalzumeus.com/)
I've worked with the codePointAt and various traversal methods, yes. They are a pain to get right and most Java code that uses substrings is broken in this regard.

In general practice, however, this is a non-issue. Characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane are not in common use, especially on the web. It's not a perfect programming practice, but it's very pragmatic.

Making everyone pay the development tax of variable-sized characters for any sort of multi-lingual code just means that more code will be written incorrectly.
I, for one, hope not - not specifically Finder, but the file/folder model in general.

I cringe every time I HAVE to drop to shell just to manipulate a specific file the way I would like to.
>It's not wrong because we find it unsettling -- we find it unsettling because it's wrong

You're wrong. In that case you'd have to say that "it's wrong because it's wrong". We perceive murdering a child as horrifying/immoral/wrong because caring for the young is something that was useful for human evolution. For other species of animals this is not a useful strategy an they wil eat/abandon their offspring for the benefit of the rest, in that case would you find it to be immoral behaviour?
There are already plenty of book reading apps on the iPhone that handle PDFs and ePub. I use GoodReader for PDFs.
Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
Physics experiments in the 18th/19th century were hard to setup as well, given the capabilities of the time.
As one of the creators of the programming language Django, which is widely used by Web site programmers around the world...

:(
Nice test.

It does seem that chrome's flash support is quite fast. I pull 75 fps in chrome and 65 fps on IE8 (windows 7 - Core2 Duo P9400); on my linux box, chrome's flash support definitely feels faster than in firefox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest

"Darwin first used Spencer's new phrase 'survival of the fittest' as a synonym for 'natural selection' in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869.[2][3] Darwin meant it is a metaphor for 'better adapted for immediate, local environment', not the common inference of 'in the best physical shape' [4]. Hence, it is not a scientific description,[5] and is both incomplete and misleading."
More importantly, people consider people to be apart from nature. Everyone would agree that dogs have undergone artificial selection- selection controlled by humans. But from a grand-scheme-of-things point of view, humans are just another force of nature, thus it's really just the same old natural selection, survival of the fittest. We just like to think we are something other than nature.
They're fixing this in the future by allowing reserved instances that will always run.
> That's, without debate, a shitty stick. The simplistic solution, "become a VC", doesn't make any sense. 1. Most entrepreneurs don't want to be VCs, and 2. most of them can't join that club.

Well, the examples Derek gave were of starting a bank or becoming a distributor, but that's not the only way to flip the stick. When you've got a rough idea, an unproven business plan, and some smart but unproven people you're going to get bad terms, because the vast majority of rough ideas, unproven business plans, and smart but unproven people's companies flame out.

You could flip that around by working up any of those - turn your rough idea into a concrete, functional product. Prove the business plan (easiest way is revenues). And then after you've had some successes under your belt, you get money at great terms in the future.

The person with less leverage always gets the shit end of the stick. There's usually a lot more smart-but-unproven people with hazy unproven ideas that want financing than there is venture money to go around. Hence, bad terms. But there's also nowhere near enough companies raising money on a solid, proven growth trajectory being run by credible people. If you get that going on, you can raise crazy amounts of money on good terms.

"Flip the stick" means you don't have to accept the position of lower leverage and the bad terms that come with it, the shit end of the stick. There's more ways to accomplish that than just "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".
I wouldn't be surprised if removal of Other OS support was purely a cost-cutting device. There could easily have been some component they removed, or some part they downgraded, that allowed Linux to run on the PS3 Fat. Alternatively, it could be the Slim would have needed new drivers, and they didn't want to deal with that.
Didn't see this category, but for the developers of a startup, an easy to use / free bug tracking system can be found in BugNotes: http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php
I can't imagine being able to complete an animated banner ad implemented in HTML5/JS (or Flex for that matter) in anywhere close to the time it would take within the Flash IDE. Using the Flash IDE, I can also apply JPEG compression to 24-bit PNGs (with alpha channels). I really wish there was a similar alternative for HTML. And as poor/buggy as the font support is in Flash, it's still far better than using a flattened image. The timeline, filter effects and third party tweening solutions also bring a lot to the table.
Large Hadron Collider Sets Record
Some of this advice is actually relevant. I believe Bill Bradley vetted an assistant in one instance by seeing how good of a teammate he was. I'd cite this, but it's from some basketball book from the 60's/70's that I don't have on my desk at work :)
I was going to write about how this article is the biggest crock of shit that I've ever seen, but you capture the point more eloquently. I'm fine with those people that enjoy sport for fun (just as I enjoy WoW) but both WoW and Sports are fucking stupid. They have nothing to do with coding ability. If you can't tell from your interview how your candidate will perform, YOU AREN'T FUCKING INTERVIEWING RIGHT. I've only participated in a few interviews, but I can have a conversation with someone and very quickly determine their coding ability, at least in broad strokes.
RT is one of the most commonly-used ticketing systems in the ISP business: http://bestpractical.com/rt/

I think that even when sharing folders it's important for everyone to have their own account. it's confusing if you have multiple people speaking from the same address. You might be able to do that with gmail by modifying the sender address (with a shared IMAP box with everyone having their own client, the sender address can be set in the client config.)
The point I'm confused about is how a VPS would have helped the original poster. Couldn't the hacker just request a password reset from the (obliging) tech support guys?
http://lighthouseapp.com and http://tenderapp.com for bug tracking and support tools that integrate.
>> you don't see many Chihuahua/Saint Bernard mixes

I'm not so sure about that. My sister once had a Chihuahua/Husky mix that she got from a Russian circus. She looked like a small Husky with brown and white fur. (The dog not my sister.)
>In that case you'd have to say that "it's wrong because it's wrong".

No, that doesn't follow. I could say, for example, "it's wrong because the categorical imperative prohibits it."

It's true that you must eventually come down to some moral assumption or principle which isn't independently justified, but that is the same for everyone in any field of inquiry.

>We perceive murdering a child as horrifying/immoral/wrong because caring for the young is something that was useful for human evolution.

Similarly, you can say that I perceive a desk in front of me because perceiving mid-sized objects in the immediate vicinity confered an evolutionary advantage on my ancestors. But you can also say that I perceive a desk in front of me because there is a desk in front of me. That is the causal account that's relevant to epistemological concerns, and the same goes in the case of moral judgments.

>For other species of animals this is not a useful strategy an they wil eat/abandon their offspring for the benefit of the rest, in that case would you find it to be immoral behaviour?

Most animals don't have a sufficient capacity for reflective thought for questions of morality to arise at all. But for very intelligent animals (e.g. dolphins, elephants, chimps), I think questions about whether their behavior is moral or not genuinely do arise. Certainly, these questions would arise in quite a pointed fashion if e.g. a hyper-intelligent alien species enslaved us. It's clearly not enough to say "they evolved to behave like that so it must be moral." I don't know what to say about these cases, really, but the issue doesn't seem as straightforward as you make out.
Brisneyland
This article is full of flaws.

Finder was just rewritten from the ground up, from scratch. Heavy investment.

Spaces is about windows management, which has nothing to do with Finder. Same with Expose.

iPhone and iPad deal with files, one way or the other.
ive hired people at three companies, just for context, but thanks for reading.

my theories are based on observation, and working/playing with hundreds of teammates and employees over the years and how ive seen on-the-field play translate to in-company behavior.
What's wrong with Spidermonkey and V8?
It may not be dead, but its been in perpetual suck-mode for multi-monitors since its inception.
Think of telescopes.

You can advance the theory of astronomy all you want, but unless you build a bigger mirror to better see the stuff actually going on up in the skies, you won't get very far.
Congratulations Patrick. I hope you enjoy your new-found freedom. Remember not to work _too_ hard ;)
it is not to test "coding ability" at all! it tests, drive, passion, competitiveness, motivation... the skills that are more important in a startup than raw ability to code.

the coder who tries his hardest on every second in sports, is, more likely than not, going to be the better colleague because he/she will do whatever it takes to win.
Do not want.

Limiting the amount of interaction the end user has with a hierarchical filesystem may well be a Good Thing. Increasing the degree to which each application is a black box containing all associated data is a Bad Thing. Making each application responsible for the mechanism by which data can be transferred, archived and synchronized is also a Bad Thing.
If this is more than just hyperbole on your part, it reflects poorly on your guests.

There are badly-behaved people on television shows around the world; to conclude that such people represent their native countries in any meaningful sense is naive at best.
It's easy for software people like us to fall into the trap of thinking that all patents are bad, because software patents have so many problems. (Terms that are way too long for the pace of the industry, too many vague and overly broad patents being granted, patents being granted for what is arguably mathematics, no provisions against patent trolls, etc.) We see and read about mostly the bad side of the patent system, and unless we actually try to find a good side, we'll assume there isn't one.

To give an example, I'm listed as a co-inventor on a pending patent application (though I will never get any royalties from it). The patent is for a type of device that costs more than a hundred thousand dollars to build. The owner of the patent will be a small business that deals with such small volumes that they will mostly have to license the patent to other companies in order to fulfill demand, but they hope to build and sell several of these devices themselves. When the project to develop this device started, most of the experts in the field told us that it was impossible. Now that we've published the basics of how our design works, it would be fairly easy for the large players in the industry to replicate our results without having to buy anything from us. If our patent application isn't granted, then the only way for the company to recoup their costs would be to treat the results of my research as a trade secret. (It's too late for that, though, and I've never signed an NDA.) Going the trade secret route would be a loss for the market, as I've already mentioned that the inventors can't meet the demand on their own. Getting a patent is a good compromise that allows my employer to recoup his costs, but also ensures that our invention can be put to good use.
Yes. I have a 3GS but kind of need a second device with a compass to test a game I'm writing. The only alternative would be a contract-free 3GS, which costs a lot more.
Interesting you brought up FingerWorks. I really like their keyboard. Unfortunately Apple bought it, discontinued the keyboard, and now nobody can make one because Apple holds the patent. How is that innovative?

Anyways, what's wrong with clones? It's time to market that matters. If somebody clones an ipad, or whatever, then the markets will decide who the winner is.

Unfortunately with the bajillions of already existing patents, it is very difficult and costly to innovate in an incremental manner (incremental improvement tends to be efficient improvement) without infringing on something.
My company (Mad Wombat Software) is building software that would be perfect for you. All customer mails go to a single mail address, and you can manage it from there. Every 'ticket' is owned by someone, but you can set up custom views to simulate a shared queue.

It's got a nice web front-end, but you can manage everything completely through email. We'll be going into beta shortly, and we'd be happy to set you up with an account. Contact me at dave@madwombat.com.
There are a few things going on here; I just submitted another story about a very micro seed capital program (minnespark) that was just launched by part of the local tech community: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230144

There's also the Minnesota Cup; I haven't heard many success stories emerging from it, but I haven't looked into it very hard, either: http://breakthroughideas.org/

There's a great tech community in & around the Twin Cities, and definitely more and more interest and activity toward building a startup culture in this area. Cool stuff is going on.
15 Venn Diagrams To Explain The Internet’s Fascination With Venn Diagrams
I'd love to be able to bring in my goodreads or librarything entries. The idea of sitting there and entering all that data in again just makes my laziness ascend.
Should computers have morals?
One's moral judgement can be altered using a magnetic field
This guys seems like he'd be a total nightmare to work with. And that's NOT BULLSHIT.
However the costs to launch a business have also decreased in the mean time, as have the size of angel investments.
Yeah. The command line is dead too. That's what purists believed in 1986. The Mac killed it. Except, it just keeps coming back because it's so danged useful.
beST OF LUCK!
A Summary of "Joel on Software"
Joojoo Tablet: These Court Docs Show Only 90 Preorders (With 15 returned)
Great if you want to freeze your arse off. When I was there it was 30 below. But still, the people are nice.
You completely left out the "if they do happen to play sports" in the actual article, which heavily colors non-sports players view of the article.
I definitely agree that many engineers and programmers play sports... but I also strongly suspect that on average, an engineer or programmer is less likely to play sports than the average person, and more likely to be the kid who always was picked last to play sports as a kid and hence have negative views of sports.
Oblique Strategies - mind hacking toolkit
The point is that the diagrams you linked to don't tell you anything about the semantics

Well, I'd say they do provide a strong indication at least.

arbitrary and subtle differences between things that should be the same

It seems Python would need quite a truckload of such subtleties to make up for the complexity difference reflected in the graphs alone. And since one of its core design-goals is to avoid subtleties like that I think the graphs were a valid vehicle to illustrate my point.

Lambda is ofcourse a well-known wart in Python, but honestly, if we start wart-counting here then I think the comparison would end even worse for Ruby.

For the record: I'm obviously a python guy but have also used rails and sinatra before. I'm by no means a ruby-hater. It's just that I couldn't let the statement "Python more complex than ruby" pass without speaking up. Because, as I tried to illustrate, I can not imagine a metric by which that would be true.
With all due respect, how are you going to distinguish yourself from products like GetSatisfaction and UserVoice? They "grow" a FAQ based on the same sort of cycle, and let the userbase determine the direction and content of the FAQs, which more or less takes the administration out of it from a site owner's perspective.
I hope I'm not alone in really disliking the current over-use of the word 'App'. An 'App' is merely a shortening of 'Application', they are not different things. Even on the iPhone an App is still just an Application.

Postulating that the current model of user's interacting with files mostly because Applications are now called Apps is faintly ludicrous.

On the other hand I think that hiding the intricacies of the filesystem in a user-friendly way would be welcomed by most people that use a computer for non-technical purposes. It certainly reduces the likelihood of problems caused by accidental deletion of config/application data.
What of those who play for the love of the game? Those who think a good match is one in which everyone enjoyed themselves? Those for whom the score exists only as a by-product of what they see as the point - to have a good time? They're not competitive and they it more fun for everyone else. If that translates into their work, they'd surely be far better employees than hyper-competitives.
Excellent point. As frustrated as I am with the limitations of the "file" and "directory" abstractions. Without them, transfer, archival, and synchronization of data would likely be far more difficult than it is now.

Not that the systems we have now are anything to be proud of.
And if said potential employee doesn't happen to play sports, then, to quote the article, "That's BULLSHIT"?
I think that there is a different sort of "inflation" for starting a business. As time goes on technology gets cheaper and more available. Manufacturing becomes more automated, Just in Time stocking reduces capital requirements.

Just because 1m buys less food than it did 20 years ago doesn't mean it can't finance a similar sized business. You can do more with less - there is much more leverage available with computers, SaaS, outsourced manufacturing and online sales than was available in the past.

I don't see any reason why starting a business won't be even easier in 20 more years.
I haven't had cable for the past 4 years. When I had cable, I watched all sorts of crap. Now, I only watch things that I do work to watch. Usually on Amazon on demand, sometimes on Netflix, sometimes on Hulu. It's a pull vs. push thing.

I have a Roku box, but Boxee is pushing the ball forward in getting developers to build for the set-top... which is the right direction.
This is hilariously bad advice. If you go to an interview and they want to start quizzing you about sports, run the fuck away. Jesus!
Police robots everywhere? | Brad Ideas
What I'm curious about: patio11 seems to have developed some formidable experience in the non-bullshit aspects of "SEO" (running actual A/B tests and iterating as a result). The odds are good that that's actually worth more, on a consulting basis, than selling bingo cards. Maybe he'll add some products? Best of luck in any case!