skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really don't think he wrote a split review because he's worried about fanboys.

I think it's just what he said: people really seem to love or hate the iPad, based mostly on their background.
If it's a directed graph, why not use a graph database?
Woo Hoo,

Parent is the best explanation so far why brain dead machines won't win.

I remember a Bus-to-RV conversions Web BBS ten years where one poster wrote a DOS program to calculate the optimal Bus conversion layout.

This is why all attempts to make a simplified limited computer over the years have failed. Ordinary people need the full flexibility of a computer. Make it simple to use, but not limited.

Yes...

Yes, they failed, from Al Gore's "Information Super Highway" to the original AOL on down. Thank God. Richard Stallman's Right Read based it's description very directly on the publish specs of the Information Super Highway. But Stallman didn't sink it. The demands of ordinary people, which only an open net could satisfy, were what defeated it.
here's a good answer for you http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061007233502AA...
The HN community is often trying to be blunt and frank to give you the advice that they think you need. This is a community with many high-end programmers who probably look at your project and think that they could easily recreate it in less than $10k worth of time (probably not true, but whatever).

My immediate reaction is that you need to ditch your eternal beta and immediately offer a paid plan. Make the trial really limited. Talk (in person) to potential clients and really try to really sell this thing.

As long as it is in eternal free beta you have no real discernment between casual and paying customers. You have no money to make it worthwhile to you, you have no advertising budget and no credibility. Sure, turning off "free beta mode" is hard, but better to do it now than to work for years (has it been since 2007?) under the assumption that all you need is more features to make a profitable business.

It is a pity that you want to drop this product in its entirety. If I were you I'd either walk away from it to get a break or spend all your effort on the static sales pages, a billing system and advertising until you have some paying customers.

On the website front:

You really do have to get people to try out the dashboard for Timmy. You should have a really easy demo dashboard. If you want to do more coding you could add a Javascript test box where you can talk to Timmy on-line. Getting people to talk to Timmy using MSN is your first hurdle.

None of the features sound compelling. You need to isolate the one call to action that works for most of the potential customers you have personally talked with and put that on the front page. Right now it feels weak - no feature there calls to me. I can already track my time, so why use your solution (tell me). Instant communication and notifications sound like the features of MSN itself - come up with something that really is difficult to solve that Timmy can solve.
Unicornify (Unicorn Identicons)
My favourite part is the "How does it work?":

http://unicornify.appspot.com/making-of

I love how they put it in 3D space and then rotate it. Genius!
See, I find it puzzling that appearing to be needy can be anything but negative and I can't fathom how it can be confused with openness.

Anyway, what your response tells me is that you are willing to invest more time in people before making decisions about them. That's fine, but don't expect most people to be like that, especially on a dating site with thousands of members.
Hmm. I am as bewildered by this as the author. Why would anyone edit shell scripts with notepad?
Project Voldemort uses BerkeleyDB Java Edition as one of the storage engines (the most frequently used one). Java Edition differs from the C version in being log-structured (very fast writes, at the cost of somewhat slower reads). In one deployment, we're able to store ~130 gb per node data (each node having 32 gb of memory, 18gb of it going to JVM heap, 10gb of the JVM heap going to BDB cache), while having average read latency times (which include the overhead of decoding a request packet) of <1 ms (with some outliers due to large value sizes, etc...).

I should add, this is also while using a single bdb environment for all partitions that belong to a node -- note the most efficient way to store this data (bdb je 4.0 does support sharing a cache between multiple environments, so we might move to separate environment per partition model). We've also built the distribution layer ourselves, rather than use the built-in HA features, but if I recall correctly, the first version of Amazon SimpleDB (prior to Erlang re-write) was built with BDB-JE HA (not to be confused with Amazon Dynamo, which is built on regular BDB-JE and provides its own distribution mechanisms).

Overall, we've found that BDB-JE performs best when there's 1:5 ratio between memory and data set size. With JE (as opposed to classic BDB) the issues are: Java implies a certain vertical scalability limit (due to GC pauses with very large heap sizes, however the GC does get better with every release), log-structured B+Tree is great for writes, but might mean more seeks being made for reads (especially if you were to use range query functionality).

Licensing might be an issue if you're shipping a commercial product to customer site. It doesn't matter if it's used on your own servers or in an open source project (and unlike GPL, the BerkeleyDB license is compatible with Apache licensed projects). The licensing also doesn't apply to Perl/Ruby/Python/other dynamic language bindings for BerkeleyDB, you're free to package them (and then request the customer to install BerkeleyDB themselves, much like you would with MySQL).

In short, it's a great solution if you fit its use case. I should also add that interacting with the Sleepycat people online (e.g., on the forums) also makes you forget they're a part of Oracle.
Like something straight out of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Awesome.
You're saying geometric data, but it's only points right? Is "GiselleDB" B-Trees on the geohash? And spatial queries are limited to 'nearby' so far, right?
Look, I'm an American, and having lived elsewhere, I've been bitten many a time by this kind of thoughtless antipattern. And when I am, I don't think, "Oh my, this Web designer of uncertain origin didn't study his field," I curse, moan, and wail, "Stupid bleeping Americans have failed again to understand the complexity of their world!"

I don't know where you're from, obviously, but having grown up in Indiana, I'm all too aware of the oblivious American nature, and I find the original post entirely justified in its tone. As far as I'm concerned, the defensiveness here is good ol' American exceptionalism at work, and anybody who wants to have global business had better get over that.

I second or third the notion that a nice library would be a Good Thing.
Books in German. Also contact information as a freelancer for translation agencies, who really should know better (but their Web designers often don't). But your joke was very funny.
A terrifying fear of vim modes, maybe. I guess people stick with what they're used to. I don't know, I'm trying here, I really am.
For the US, the USPS can help you with some of that.
Someone should write a bookmarklet to automate the process.
The only excusable reason I can think of is a "one-off" edit on a foreign computer that doesn't already have your editor of choice installed.
WTF,

You should get an error condition from dereferencing a null. When you're debugging your code, that error condition should be nice and verbose. Once you're shipping, that error condition should be very short and simple and should almost never occur. Trust me, your customers will not help you debug your code.

Test Driven Development and Design By Contract AND traditional software engineering all agree - FAIL EARLY AND OFTEN in your test suite to avoid later bugs. It is WRONG to let errors float around in your program logic, WRONG.

I went from C++ to Rails and back to C++. Is Rails reasoning trying to seep into C++? HELL NO!, The C-parts of C++ are serious and won't stand for this shit.
I'll echo that. Flatland was a great read.

http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Flatland-Romance-Many-Dimens...

The above is the version I read with a ton of great annotations and stories about the author Edwin A. Abbott. I'd highly recommend it.
How unexpected.
holy cow, never knew you could make so much from a wordpress theme.
The Cartesian plane is in ℝ^2. Any point can be expressed as a combination of (x,y) where both x,y ∈ ℝ. That means that both x and y are members of the set of real numbers.

A 3D graph is in ℝ^3. Any point can be expressed as (x,y,z), where x,y,z ∈ ℝ.

A 4D graph is in ℝ^4. Any point can be expressed as a combination of (x,y,z,w), where x,y,z,w ∈ ℝ.
Unfortunately, human vision is limited to three dimensions, so only four different perspectives are available (4 choose 3): (x,y,z), (x,y,w), (y,z,w), and (x,z,w). Moreover, the 3D must be collapsed into a 2D for presentation on the screen.
Without "To" field you risk to forget who you are angry at.
Steve's body position looked awkward too. He really had to get his legs crossed tightly and keep his leg near his body to prop that device up so it was facing him.
The 5 Worst Things to Learn from a DNA Test
I know this is off-topic, but Modern Family is a very, very well-written show and I'd recommend it as a distraction. I usually make sure to keep up with it on Hulu.
Prefab: Implementing Advanced Behaviors Using Pixel-Based Reverse Engineering
Does Notepad support large files nowadays, and line endings other than CR-LF? Because for a long time Notepad definitely did not Just Work.
What's odd in starting with an example as to why it's easy to dehumanize someone in customer service and then saying not to do it? The choice in phrasing and imagery was intentional, if perhaps a bit clumsy.
Homunculus
Ask HN: How many have learned a language they hated just to get a job? 
I'm an undergrad about to graduate here in December and I can't express how frustrated I am 'weeding through' all the .NET, C#, ColdFusion, J2EE, ASP jobs within 25 miles, not only on the obvious job boards, but on my School's Engineering job board as well.

I could very well be looking in all the wrong places (openings within my commute), but if I can't find an opportunity I can properly invest my talents with while working along side other developers/designers than going to sink my time learning a language I'll probably end up hating.
Yep. Hardware decoding for H.264. The radio (3G, Edge, or GPS) is the number one battery killer.
It would be nice if everything did, but some major pieces of software don't. For example, the Java I/O library:

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4508058

This is one of those problems that also won't be fixed to preserve (bug) compatibility.
Concord Replica Watches Replica Concord Watches
This is just throwing red raw meat to the tin foil hat crowd.
Tried to pre-order one (from AU) via Shipito but it was cancelled because I used a freight forwarder. Anyone else trying to get one early from overseas and had more luck? (Would rather not ask a friend to do it as it's a bit of a pain for them mucking around with shipping, etc.)
It seems obvious the iPad is directly aimed at the larger net book market instead of the relatively small digital reader market. Not many people are going to carry and iPad and a laptop. If the iPad is a device you buy instead of a net book, which by extension is a device you buy instead of a larger more functional laptop, Apple may not have an uphill battle here. Net book customers have already decided they don't want to spend $1k+ on a laptop, they can live without an optical drive, they can adapt to a small awkward keyboard, etc. In other words they are people who have already started to abandon the idea of a computer as being a fully functional all encompassing device in favor of form factor, price, and portability. So I think Apple clearly has a big market but they'll have to stress the things the iPad does better than a net book. Multi-touch web browsing, gaming, better battery life, better build quality/design, easier to use, no malware/spyware problems, etc. They'll need to quickly fill in the remaining gaps of functionality before customers have the dreaded "oh it doesn't do that?" experience.
Because they just created a plain vanilla Windows install in a machine not connected to the net? And various pathological EOM apps still use something like a shell script?

(the reverse of this is kind-of the only situation in which I use vi, which none-the-less I can use...)

Shit happens...

I mean, the degree to which users wind-up wedded to the default applications in a given OS should not be underestimated or chalked-up to "morons"...
Solving the JavaScript Memory Management Problem
Thanks - something we need reminding of from time to time
Mistaken ancestry? That's one of the worst things for Americans? Really?

How about significant genetic overlap with your significant other? Or you carry hereditary diseases that you'll pass on to your children? Or that your DNA is partially composed of frog's DNA? (Why do you think those dinosaurs were so angry?)
You have a very good memory.

eLance, et all, fundamentally solve the problem "A customer has work available and doesn't know who can perform it to their specifications at their price point." For that, they take some money and give some headaches (e.g. wading through a lot of bids by companies which I would not consider using, which is a time cost of outsourcing that provides no direct value to me).

As my blog readership has grown, I've gotten to the point where just announcing I have work available will result in a handful of very talented people writing me telling me how they plan to do it. No middleman cut, no paging through 17 screens of Yes Sir We Can Make Your Site In HTML and CSS.

I love outsourcing, and I mostly love the freelancer sites. I just have a better alternative these days. If I didn't I'd be back on them in a heartbeat.
OK, but most of the UNIX toolchain handles it just fine. Even cat knows not to output the BOM to the terminal :)

Emacs and Perl are also fine. What more do you need?
You should see Thesis. Dude's minting it.
(don't miss the code: http://github.com/280north/cappuccino/commit/6678bba94f7778b...)
A Mini-Case Study in The New Economics of Advantage
As other people have mentioned, Apple consistently understates the battery life of their products in market copy while also pointing them out to be longer than those of competing products.
Who gives a damn?
Learning a language you hate takes you very close to hating the entire job, which is no way to work. Never settle for that, life is too short.

Keep working on side projects that do interest you, and make them public, so that it's always easy to show prospective employers what you can really do. Spend your time boosting your skills and having fun, even if your first actual income comes from something completely different, like mowing lawns.

One thing about programming is that it can be done from anywhere; try applying for a job that's outside your local area, and see if there are any that allow remote work. Some companies won't offer this unless you have years of experience, but some might do it anyway; it all depends on how good they think you are.
finger prints everywhere, illegible in sunlight, poor ebook selection, too heavy for extended use, miserable typing experience...seems like these points would apply to "Everyone Else" as well, no?
TL;DR version: Welcome to April Fools (gah, tomorrow is going to get annoying)
This is getting ridiculous. It's EVERY SINGLE wired.com headline. There is another one here about the bush administration wiretaps that says "Bush Illegally Wiretapped Americans." They constantly have the deniable "oh we were just shortening it!" but it's completely misleading. This actually implies people received and were dissatisfied with the product.

If you run a small blog and you use explosive headlines it's one thing, when you're wired it's kind of tacky.
Yeah but you have to appreciate an April fools joke that comes with a working implementation :-).
First, I would like to say that I don't believe in Astrology in any way shape or form.

With that out of the way, how much more rational would someone who does believe in Astrology sound, citing something similar to this that says people's personalities vary by their birth date because of change in the earth's magnetic field throughout the season and its impact on the development of the brain?

Just food for thought.
In it's defence it was exactly the same when he first demonstrated the iPhone keyboard.
Knowing the type of information someone searches for on the internet will tell you WAY more about them than the URLs they TYPE. To access specific sites, many people use bookmarks\links anyway.

Microsoft's argument is akin to saying: Beware of using the new electrical mixer! It includes the option to use electricity, and electricity can cause electrocution. Use our hand operated mixer instead, it does not have that risk.

For this article to bee considered to have any substance, Microsoft would need to claim 'This specific electrical mixer causes electrocution' aka 'Google circumvents it's option to disable submitting usage statistics by exploiting the auto-complete feature to store a copy of your browsing history'. They are not making that claim.
Memo To News Sites: There Is No Future In ‘Digital Razzle Dazzle’
In Walt's review he says Safari has no tabs, but the iPad guide videos shows an Exposé style tab feature. Obviously he missed that bit.
I know this is a joke, but this seems to be one of those "the truth is stranger than fiction" things. No, they did not implement manual memory management in Javascript. But yes, they did in fact re-implement the Mac development ecosystem entirely in the browser.

Extremely powerful or extremely insane, I still can't decide. One things for sure, I certainly don't think it was necessary to go to the lengths they have to implement applications for the web well.
Very cool hack. I especially love the inclusion of the Perl code to "use" it, as if leaving it out would leave people thinking "this is cool, but how can I use it in perl?!"
Has product placement / in-show commercials become this obvious on TV? If so have they cut back on the regular commercials at all? Not saying it's a bad thing per say I'm just curious. I think it definitely captures the early adopter experience nicely. Better than seeing some generic 30 second spot in heavy rotation.
US Debt now a Foreign Policy Problem
Ok, it wasn't perfect, but the only time CR-LF was an issue was moving to Unix machines, so I made a habit of doing dos2unix/unix2dos or perl one-liners. I suppose I should redact my use of just works. Notice you capitalize it and I don't- I think that explains everything.

Just Works: No user intervention required whatsoever, could be used by a 2nd grader with no prior knowledge

just works: does it's job with perhaps a bug or two that can be worked around
They upgraded Wordpad. I get the feeling Notepad was left alone because they do not feel it needed upgrading or debugging. Wordpad's goal always was to be a document editor, while Notepad is a text editor, and it certainly edits text.

Seems like this could well just be a classic case of one person says 'This is a game-ending bug!' and the other person saying, 'Wait, what? That 'bug' is in the spec!'
One more thing to note, is that at the core of what 280North has done (with a Herculean effort) is traded something close to lisp for something close to Smalltalk.
that's a lot of code for april fools....
Oil in Big Macs: Decade Edition
Shock: Private Equity Company Plans To Do Something Useful
Much of U.S. Was Insulated From Housing Bust
I was expecting some product placement à la "24" (or many others, "24" just came to mind first) where the products are used like they were designed to be used, but it just happens to be this or that brand. The focus is not really on the product. Kind of subliminal in a way.

But this looked more like a commercial than anything else. I don't mind when Apple pays production companies to have someone use a MacBook rather than a Dell, I do when they make sure the characters praise the product.
An interesting thing about the review is that the photo on the left shows a person using an ipad on rack with one finger. With a bit of reflection, it should obvious that you would not want to use a computer for even a minute in such a fashion.

This hardly seems like a hard-nosed, critical appraisal: "The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget." "brighter brights" and "whiter whites" indeed.
That dialog box is a linguistic nightmare. What's with the OK and Cancel buttons? I thought Windows was changing to "Save" and "Don't Save" like they should have done all along.
I'm missing the reference here. (and it seems that there are too many Max Klein to get help from Google) Do you mind explaining what that means?
4G satellite company takes aim at cell carriers
I hope Walt's right, but I just find that so hard to believe.

I agree. The benefit of being able to rest one's fingers on a physical keyboard and feel each key seems rather obvious to me. Moreover, I doubt the iPad virtual keyboard is any less cramped than a netbook keyboard.
Extreme stress has effect on DNA
I prefer to think of the internet as force of harmony and understanding, allowing us to achieve unprecedented new levels of brutal interpersonal honesty, you douchenozzle.
An odd job description
I just wanted to tell you that what you've learn in other languages are usually usable in many languages, even if it's not standard procedure. For instance, with C++, you can use Boost and use foreach with a (kind-of) lambda. It's not a real closure, but still, my point is that don't dismiss things of your favorite language when you need to use other ones.

I remember implementing a genetic algorithm in C++.. I used a functional way of doing it and it turned out to be a real pleasure. I even made it multi-threaded using a STL-like threading library which encouraged a functionnal style.

And also, don't forget, by learning new language, it will make you a better programmer, period. There are also way more than "programming" in a software job.

Communication between developpers, Communication with the client, designing a robust system, etc. Implementing in your not-so-favorite language might only be a small pourcent of the real job.

That was my 5 cents on the subject :p
They have niceish REST Apis, but only support OAuth for authentication. Have you ever tried out an OAuth protected API from the browser? It's bloody hard! (Google has their OAuth playground, but if there is something similar for other sites I haven't seen it)
This is like one of those moments where you are quickly brought back to a painful memory from a more troubled time in your life, so distant in mindset, if not time itself, that it has faded to be less a memory of life itself than that of a bad dream.

You shake it off, and it recedes back into the cobwebs, not to be jarred again until the next time something flies by in your RSS feed about a new Microsoft product or feature that is a poorly conceived sugar-coated re-implementation of cron, grep, sed, bash, vim, awk, ssh, unix pipes, or lisp.

Yes, I too was once a full-time Windows user.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tisD1FOEpfU

Please watch this video and then come back and tell me it's a worthy contender.
/Smalltalk/Objective C/