skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what - that was a pretty mean-spirited comment you made to me, Zarathu. I don't appreciate it and I think it makes you look very, very disrespectful. You ask our advice and I posted what I thought was a helpful comment. It's fine not to agree with my comment but you were out of line with your personal attack.
"X" is the future is a common figure of speech. It's not necessarily implying what you describe as "paints of a picture of the future where Apple has replaced Microsoft as the 800lb. gorilla of the software industry" -- it simply means that "X" has some quality that signifies a particular future.
The book he mentions is the best book I've read about software architecture that will never be found in the Technical/Computer books section. I've given away at least five copies as Thank You gifts. The beauty of the book is that he presents such a convincing case for the importance of adaptability and a core architecture to enable that - that you start to view the codebase you are working on, heck, even your life through the perspective of: "what decisions am I making now that might impact the ability to change"
"making progress on my own project is making it harder to sync up with potential cofounders"

never thought of that, thanks for sharing! I guess working startup life hours would make it hard to really connect with someone. I would suggest trying to take at least a couple hours out of your day to do something social (events, other interests, sports, etc) and really take the time to disconnect and meet others. You never know where your co-founder will be.
My company as well sells about 80% to the government. Government contracts are not really that big of a deal.

I'd say that our commercial customers are quite a bit higher touch than our government customers. The government also seems to have a much better handle on their business processes than any of the fortune-500 companies we deal with.
And graphic novels have had a hard time breaking into bookstores for just this reason—most people treat them as "an inferior version of a book," when they're really an entirely different medium, like a film is to a play. e-Readers will be the greatest boon to graphic-novel distribution since their invention, I think. That says nothing either way about books, though. :)
I've been using a mood hack recently which has been working great for me. It might work for you too but no gurantees as everyone is different. So the hack goes like this. Whenever you're feeling down or not particularly cheerful, force your face into a smile, a really big one and hold it for 30 seconds. Really tense up your facial muscles like you're flexing your bicep, but on your face. Empty your mind of all negative thoughts. At some point during the 30 second hold, you'll feel a little happier. The muscles will trigger a release of neurotransmitters like serotonin and other happy chemicals.
Intriguing. Somebody secretly took apart the 3G model and found this:

http://i.imgur.com/It9To.png
Are you serious? Capitalism is just as bad as anything else. The problem that capitalism perpetuates is the constant exploitation of the lower echelons. How is that so much better? Also, where is this built-in institutional destruction that you speak of?
"Unpaid intern" doesn't mean "unpaid full-time intern." You could intern, unpaid, while working other jobs.
Well, it has survived APL and TECO....
Miagakure: A puzzle-platformer in four dimensions
Hasan Luongo Joins Webvanta as Director of Marketing
That and the line

"Scientists, though, perhaps because of their desire for accuracy and precision have had the worst luck of all in pinning down the truth of the universe."

convinced me it would be a waste of time to continue with the article.
The issue isn't the technical merits of C#. It's the degree to which a Microsoft technology can be trusted as the foundation of the free software desktop. As Miguel himself has recently grudgingly admitted, Microsoft's own ambiguous stance on this issue has limited the uptake of Mono.

It's one thing to suggest peaceful coexistence with Microsoft and quite another to suggest getting into bed with them. I for one am glad that nothing essential in my Gnome desktop requires Mono.
how'd u come up with 22? or are you just being facetious?
I'm going to use this with Dropbox to create compilations of Reference materials. (PDFs of music and programming references.) I'm also going to use this as an eReader and a test machine for iPad development. (EDIT: Correction, I am using it as an eReader with the Kindle App.) I'm going to use it as an electronic travel guide. (I can use the flap from the Apple case to help me with daylight readability, if needed.) I have a 3G mobile WiFi hotspot, so I'm also going to use it to research products while in the store -- far more comfortably than on the iPhone's small screen.

Basically the iPad will be put to most of the tons of uses I've found with my tc1100 Windows Tablet, but in a form factor that's half as light, much brighter, a battery life of "don't worry," and unencumbered by a stylus.

Skype works great on this thing! Having a jailbroken iPhone 2G with the Google Voice app on it as a companion is great. I'm notified of a call when my phone rings, and I can just switch to Skype on the iPad in time to receive the call. (Did this when my Dad just called.) Can't get my Plantronics 510 to sync with it, though. This thing is going to save me prepaid T-Mobile minutes!
I'm shocked, humans and human institutions act in their own self interest?

If an institution's strongest aim is e.g. profit/preservation (as it often is) then of course it is trying to preserve or create conditions where the product or service is attractive. This often includes undermining better solutions.

Just look at the lobbying money flowing through Washington DC for blatant examples. Other situations are more subtle.
The right spirit... for him. I do not share his view. I agree that it is not a "zero-sum game", however, Microsoft identifies Open Source as the "enemy" (add your favourite Ballmer's quote here).

I respect Miguel's opinion, but I will not follow his C#/Mono "vision", as I prefer vanilla C, or in case of needing higher abstraction, use Lisp, Perl, Python, or Bash.
The problem that capitalism perpetuates
is the constant exploitation of the lower echelons.

"Under capitalism, people exploit people. Under socialism, it's the other way around!"
I've done enough one-off consulting projects to know that's completely bullshit.
"It created awe and generated desire from the moment it was unveiled."

interestingy enough, I heard a lot of people saying the exact opposite: that the iphone was a flop, and on, and on. Actually, a lot of 'gurus' still say that kind of stuff today (specially a lot of high profile Nokia fanboys/evangelists)
this is my new gig, we are launching v2 on Monday. Webvanta is a hosted cms for building powerful websites without the pain of backend code and servers. on the dev side its a rails app.
Luckily the world seems to be so that the things that have to be fast also happen to be relatively easy to parallelize (most tasks using huge data sets, rendering, matrix operations, ...). What are applications that have to be fast but are not easy to parallelize?
One point of view is that we are pretty close to optimal. Here is another perspective from:

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Kay says:

Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark—on roughly the same system,
roughly optimized the same way,
a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today.
Moore’s law has given us somewhere between
40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time.
So there’s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency
that has been lost by bad CPU architectures.

The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture is —
that Moore’s law will take care of you—is totally false.

From my point of view garbage collection, JIT compilation, and late binding are valuable and the hardware is leaving to much to the VM's.
Check the experience reports from CUFP for such examples:

* http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry#Haskell_i...

Barclay's Capital has written a journal article on why they use FP (Haskell in this case): http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3331
> Today, with the optimizations and internal RISC conversions that take place, CISC vs RISC isn’t really about the performance any more. It’s about the business, the politics… and the power consumption.
Settle down, it's meant to be amusing and I'm not insulting you personally. Unless you call yourself a solutions provider?
Has anyone found meditation to be useful as a way to increase their attention span? I'd be curious to hear the results. It seems that practicing the ability to focus on nothing may improve your ability to focus on one thing. I have an admittedly shallow understanding of what meditation entails, though.
ARM itself isn't particularly interested in that; that much I know - though I haven't had any "inside info" for as much as 5 months now :-).

They've spent the last few years gearing up for defeating intel in the higher-end-smartphone/netbook space.
No, but responsibility is a cure for the negative effects of drinking, like running over a kid or dissolving your marriage. Some people are just too retarded to be responsible. That's the point.
That's cool. Very efficient assembly.
You're looking at the wrong end. He's saying that companies compete with each other and try to undercut one another, which allows some smaller companies to solve the problems allowed by the larger companies. These smaller companies rely on a problem still, but a smaller one (to convince people to switch, and thus get income, it must be smaller).

And you're talking about something totally different as far as I can tell, so it's not a very good critique of his point.
Perhaps, but it doesn't address my two big issues:

1) I fully accept that .NET/C#/most especially the CLR are great ideas. Which I care not a whit about because Microsoft's ownership of them makes them things I cannot trust. For me the technical line of demarcation was in fact the orphaning of VB6, see Joel for more on this. Legally, at about the same time, see #2:

2) When he says "For open source to win, we do not need Microsoft, Apple or proprietary software to lose." he's leaving open a terrible logical hole, since it is not at all clear that the reverse is true.

Maybe Microsoft can't win without open source losing. Microsoft's war to the knife against Linux, by proxy (e.g. SCO) and otherwise, argues that it doesn't see the world in the way de Icaza implies.
Shareaholic Contains Spyware
That's not true of all kinds of debt. Student loans, which lots of young med school and MBA grads seem to have in the 100K+ range, cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. This hurts the country and the world. Surely there have been a few med school grads who would have founded great wealth producing startups had they not been compelled to practice medicine to pay off their loans.
This has been referenced in XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/721/

There is nothing much on the page though. The game has not yet been released, and there isn't any video preview.
Woot! American dream.... so so sad. Too many people are living life like this, not fun at all.
I really want one too, but most of that is indeed from the fact that all my buddies are picking them up, and it seems like a nice gadget. For someone like my mom, grandparents, this is a perfect device. My grandpa has a shitty old WebTV for his email, because it uses a familiar interface (his la-z-boy and tv dinner table), but I could easily see him picking this up, opening emails with his finger, etc...

For me though... it's a novelty. I live in my Macbook Pro, so I don't need another webkit device to play around with on weekends. Although.... it would be really nice on plane trips. That 10hr (12hrs by David Pogue at the NYT) battery life (playing video) is going to be a game changer for sure. Tie that in with Netflix streaming, and you've got a pretty sick portable movie machine! Hopefully they do some kind of client-side caching "offline" mode, so you can get a streaming movie stored for a flight.
People waiting for the first Mac didn't know how they would use it either. Look how far we've come.
To me, "could not say how they would use" is entirely different from "could not precisely say how they would use." Call it editing for length, but it does change the title's meaning significantly.

The first implies - potentially - that I may have no use for this thing, but I'm such a fanboy that I'm spending the $500+ anyway.

The second version says to me, since the iPad is a cross between an iPod Touch and a netbook/laptop, I may have a bunch of ideas on how I will be using this thing in the future. However, I cannot nail them down precisely because I haven't owned anything like a tablet computer in the past.

And we wonder why so many public figures get annoyed when they are misquoted or their quotes are taken out of context.
Great, yes, but not original ideas (Java/JVM).
Yes, but so many people are focused on being a better MS (say, in the desktop software space) they're forgetting the larger game (that desktop software is shrinking itself, meanwhile lacking an installable current-release version its default web browser).
And why would you want to use those? Ancient hardware? But if so, is there a reason why you should use ancient hardware?
And your point is?

Java/the JVM wasn't even Gosling's first bytecode system (that was as far as I know his MockLisp for his 32 bit Unix EMACS).

Come to think of it, a Common Language Runtime wasn't a particularly common idea at the time. There have to have been some ... there were some common bytecode engines, but not common libraries as I recall ... so maybe it's somewhat more original than you and I automatically assume.
Ask HN: So what do you guys think of DotNetNuke?
I'm being asked to give business advice from a technical perspective (cost, ease of maintenance, etc..) to a client about their platform which is currently DNN. I've done all of my web development so far using the LAMP stack. Can you guys shed some light on DNN for me? I know a little, but HN seems to always know more than I do about, well, everything. What say you?
Thanks for the links. Looks like some good afternoon reading.

It's interesting that the Barclay's article discourages overuse of the point-free style. In my attempts at learning Haskell I've also found heavy use of this style can make Haskell code hard to understand.
If the apple data center in NC is being built anywhere near the research triangle (and why wouldn't it?) - the electricityy is likely not coming from the coal plants but from Sharon Harris nuclear power plant.
Rethinking Programming Language Tutorials
You don't need capitalism to have what you just described. When people bundle economic and social principles together that's when capitalism turns into what I described because under the banner of capitalism politicians refuse any social policy that runs counter to free market principles. In fact half of capitol hill has made this their battle cry.
How does on contact you off-list? I can't seem to find an email address for you.
"People under people, exploit capitalism" - that makes no sense dude.
Yes, the new bankruptcy system tries to eliminate that option for people making more than the average. It's an extremely bad reform, as it hits higher income people trying to take risks and build businesses.

Here's what to do if you're caught in that: decide to declare bankruptcy, then figure out a way to establish a six month period with your income below your state's average. Quit your job, stop paying yourself a salary from your company, whatever. If you've got to feed a family, make a mortgage, pay for your kids college tuition and otherwise support an above state average lifestyle for people you love... I don't know. Consult a good bankruptcy lawyer, and if they don't have a solution for you, ask them directly for a recommendation of a lawyer who will help you to beat this system.
2GB of RAM was what impressed me the most. I was expecting 1GB at the most.
How much heat is it generating turning the entire LCD matrix on at once?
No, I'm not paying attention, because I understand how the media system works. It's meant to play on your emotions. Not on the truth. If you're patient and realistic, the world is a nice place.

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4508
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Educational_attainment.jpg
http://www.enn.com/energy/article/37908
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061204-moon-...

Just give it enough time. The economy will recover, as will NASA's budget. Crime will keep falling. The "third world" is shrinking rapidly. Population growth will come to a halt. Renewable energy is already the primary source in some countries. Nature will adapt to the changing environment. etc.

It's just the information age that's bothering you, you're letting things get to your mind.
Personally, I can't wait to use the iPad to research and write up my speculations on Apples next device.
When I saw your title, I read, "People waiting in line for the iPad could not say how they would use the tablet computer" is very different from "many people waiting in line". One implies there were many people who did know what they would use the iPad for (in fact, it implies most people knew what they would use the iPad for, as many < most). The other gives no sense whatsoever of how many people don't know, and could just as easily be two guys or 90% of the people there. It is also very easily misread as "The people waiting in line...", implying all, or almost all. The title you chose also implies that that paragraph is the emphasis of the story, which it isn't. The emphasis is on the enthusiasm of the people. I don't think you meant to misrepresent the article, but I do think you inadvertently did. Even minor changes in titles can change their meaning drastically. The simple thing to do is not change them.
If you were a police officer or a fireman, would you not date because you might get injured on the job and you'd want to spare them the grief? See how ridiculous that sounds?

I enjoy relationships not for the length of time I'm with someone, but because they give me a zest for life, make me smile all day, and make me really look forward to exploring the world with someone I love.

I have friends with HIV/AIDS -- now THEY have a very hard time in the dating world. Consider yourself lucky :P
> The laptop isn't really a lesser desktop. It can do anything a desktop can do, but with slightly worse performance.

Not even necessarily the case. I doubt I'd notice a performance difference if all I have open is a terminal window, a web browser and a text editor - which is usually all I need for work.
Tweets in wordpress Posts
"Globish is not about the making of a 1500-word vocabulary, but about the way in which Indians, Chinese and many Africans are now turning to English as a liberating and modernising phenomenon (last year, the government of francophone Rwanda not only applied to join the British Commonwealth but also declared English to be the official language of the country)."

Fascinating article. The use of English (in the form the author describes as "Globish") as a worldwide interlanguage is still growing very rapidly.

After edit: This link from the submitted article

http://www.jpn-globish.com/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=120

is helpful as an example of what the author is describing.
My iPhone has never flashed this message. I have never seen an iPhone or heard of an iPhone flashing this message. It exists in case an iPhone gets over heated, say if you were wandering around in the Mojave. The existence of the message is far preferable to the possibility of a melted iPad/iPhone if you took a field trip to a foundry.
This comic touches on something that's been bugging me lately: perhaps middle-class wage stagnation can be partially attributed to readily available consumer credit (credit cards, mortgages, financing for all big ticket items, etc).

It feels like easy credit removes much of the incentive to push yourself to earn more money. You can live the life you want to live (temporarily) through financing, and deal with the fallout later. I know several people who live like this - their career trajectory closely follows when they've reached their "limit" and have teetered on bankruptcy.
I think it goes a bit beyond "keeping a close eye on"...

Apple's employed Chris Lattner (the creator/primary author of LLVM) for a number of years now, and I think LLVM is widely regarded as being a pretty major part of their plans going forward. (And it's not just Apple, either -- Nvidia's using LLVM for their OpenCL implementation, for example.)

As for x86 vs. ARM...in the high-performance single-core/multi-core area (up to say, 8 cores or so), I think x86, ugly as it is, is likely to remain entrenched. There have been a hell of a lot of dollars and man-hours pumped in to making it (single-threaded) fast over the last couple decades, and in that area it may actually have some technical advantages over a cleaner ISA (such as ARM, though ARM isn't exactly the epitome of RISC purity). Two things off the top of my head -- a) the instruction encoding, as insane as it is, allows pretty dense code, meaning good I-cache utilization, and b) the two-operand instruction format simplifies dependency-checking and forwarding logic, for which hardware costs run O(n^2) (where n is proportional to operands-per-instruction and issue width).

In the "manycore" area though, I think the power and area costs of decoding the x86 ISA will be a more significant disadvantage (this may have something to do with why the power consumption of Larrabee prototypes was rumored to be so enormous). Tilera, for example, makes manycore chips based on MIPS, which I'd say is a somewhat cleaner ISA RISC-wise (meaning better-suited for small/efficient hardware implementation) than ARM.

So, if manycore is indeed the future, I'd say there is definitely hope for avoiding a completely x86-monopolized world...
Nah, I'll just see them on Youtube.
There's a NYT article from Thursday with better man-on-the-street sentiments: “Where am I supposed to use it? Am I supposed to use it on the bus — and get robbed?” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/technology/personaltech/02...
I was always under the impression that meditation involved focusing on NOTHING.

Not that it wouldn't help.
I'm using it for small, very low-traffic projects, so I'd also be interested in hearing about larger sites using GAE. Also curious whether they're using Python, Java or something running on the JVM like Clojure.
If you would read the update to the article that those images are from, you would see that the differences are due to OS X and Windows using the same information differently. Neither one completely ignores any of the hinting or sub-pixel information. The Windows font renderer is optimized to improve Microsoft's idea of readability on moderate-resolution displays. The OS X font renderer is designed to preserve the look of a font more, so that your screen is a more accurate reflection of how it would look on paper. In reality, the readability of large amounts of text is substantially the same across both platforms. (Spacing issues, such as the differences between Word and TeX, affect readability far more at typical desktop resolutions.) The stylistic differences are simply large enough that it can be distracting when you are used to one renderer and you end up in front of another one.
one feature you could add is showing the current time for a given area (google does that), i.e. if i look for 'time australia', a box showing the current time for the different regions of australia could show up!

btw, great work, ddg has become my search engine of choice (bundled with yubnub ;) )