skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I contest the notion that Usain is the greatest athlete alive. Running in a straight line or with a slight curve (the 200) is great and all, but doesn't correlate with overall athletic greatness. For all we know, Usain's hand-eye coordination could be bunk, he might throw a ball poorly, etc. Probably not, but its not impossible.

For me, the greatest athlete right now is Lebron James. At his size, his ability to move in an agile manner, his body control, his ridiculous jumping and court quickness...I don't think it compares. He shows the complete athletic package night in and night out, and has from a young age.

Usain's ability to sprint is great, definitely the best so far, but I put more stock in overall athleticism in events other than sprinting.
I think the biggest problem here is the barriers that exist to reporting bugs. Often you have to start the program in a terminal for stderr output or look for logfiles, isolate relevant error messages and figure out what hardware or software components are relevant, then track down the developer's bugtracker, register to their platform, maybe wait a day for the registration to be processed, and then open a ticket consistent with their conventions, and hope your problem is something they actually care about.

That's a lot of work for users who only see something no longer working after an upgrade. It's tolerable for people who expect to be doing QA in exchange for getting to use cutting edge releases, but if your users aren't programmers, which is the case with ubuntu, they'll just cuss and delete.
If you can do all the business planning, hiring, technical work, and fund raising you don't need a partner. Sometimes follow on successful founders pull this off. I suggest a partner for a first go of it, and the only way you'll find that person is if you keep sharing your idea (risky yes, necessary I think so).
Twitter’s Acquisition, Chirp & Managing Developer Relationships
I honestly think that I can.. but I feel like things would be so much better if I had a partner to help. I tend to work "lone wolf" because I've had interesting experiences in my past with others. I feel like a company (or at least a small team) can be birthed from this. I definitely enjoy sharing the idea and getting feedback. It's a double edged sword. I applied to this past YC with a friend (on his idea, not mine) and made it to the interview stage. I'm kicking myself for not submitting this idea (although, it wasn't even close to this mature, then), because I am convinced that something like YC would be the exact bit of inertia necessary to push this thing straight into a hail mary.
"because Apple implements their own drivers"?

AFAIK, Mac OS X and Linux share a lot here. Both use (Apple-owned, and GPL/LGPL) CUPS.
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I agree that it is not Usain. I would pick a living decathlete, probably Daley Thompson.

Wikipedia: "Traditionally, the title of "World's Greatest Athlete" has been given to the man who wins the decathlon".
I'm in the same boat. I know obj-c, but wanted to use unity3d for a game and phonegap to leverage my html5/CSS skills. Now, I'm spooked by what I perceive is Apple's prerogative to be arbitrary. I understand needing to cull the 'crapps', and that cs5 may have been the target. But why use carpet bombs when a scalpel would have done the job just as well?
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Well given I already wrote a layer on top of titanium, I'm spewing!
Do you really expect a regime change at Apple? Jobs walks two feet off the ground in Cupertino.
Such a tool has existed long time ago: http://softwarelivre.sapo.pt/projects/mac/wiki/WebPageRender...
White Jersey:NFL Jersey, NHL Jersey, Jerseys Discount, Jersey-discount.com
Other ads are NOT banned--that was in the Q&A session specifically, and Jobs said you can use any package you like.

(I guess as long as it's not collecting data that's user-specific.)
Did anyone else look at the graphic up the top of the page and think "that red gear wheel has completely ruined the machine"?
those are brilliant, exactly what I was talking about, thanks for sharing
Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths
Curious what other platforms you are considering. I chose iPhone over Android because I perceived the latter to be a poor marketplace to sell apps and of fragmentation of the OS. I'm now wondering if I made a mistake or if mobile web apps are actually the best route to take.
I can't speak personally, but somewhere in this video http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX02 Miguel mentions the number of top 100 iPhone apps that use MonoTouch. I think it was about 10.

So based on that - yes, it will affect some iPhone developers, and the argument that this move by Apple is about quality is bogus.
You got it wrong: heresy is a company punishing its customers. If customer wants Firefox GUI s(he) should get it. No worries, Mr. market will enforce that as it did many times in the past, especially with Apple. Jobs' close system philosophy almost killed the Company in the past, maybe it'll kill it for good this time.
Then there is the aviary.com browser plugin where you can get an image version of the website you are viewing and even upload it directly to host (and edit) it on their site:

http://aviary.com/viewfull?fguid=a1c828de-96b6-102d-a9f3-003...

usually they also provide a service where you can go to URLs like this to get an image (the plugin is faster though):

http://aviary.com/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125638...
> I know people like you seem to think that it's an easy binary decision

As with any business decision, you have to weight as many factors as possible. Unless you have some marketing muscle for promoting your app, chances are it will drown in an ocean of similar applications. Worse: in an ocean of applications with similar names and descriptions.

Going the Apple way has never been an easy thing. At least in the pre Xcode days, Macs had a wider choice (like two vendors?) of development tools. I never liked MPW and preferred the Metrowerks tools. On the Mac, you program to a small slice of the pie, but a less crowded one. The iPhone is different - it represents a huge slice of the "people willing to pay for mobile apps" pie, but the slice is very, very crowded.
Show HN: See what's trending among only those you follow
>I always admire high achievers who cop to having worked damn hard to get where they are. The article means to suggest otherwise, but I can't imagine Usain Bolt is anything even vaguely resembling lazy.

Sometimes the truth isn't what we want it to be.

As a 12 year-old without track & field training or experience, he was the fastest boy in his school. His interest was in cricket, but once he got to high school, his cricket coach noticed his exceptional speed and encouraged him to do track. Within two years, he posted a time of 20.61s for a 200 meter race! That's faster than many of the 200m times posted in the 2008 Olympics. In fact, 20.61 would have been fast enough to qualify in 7 of the 8 heats.

He did that at age 15. Think about it.

Gladwell's 10,000 hours yarn is bullshit. There is talent, and Bolt's got so much of it that he's been regularly demolishing more experienced, harder working opponents for his entire career.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/people/Usain-Bolt/biograph...
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSISS99256920080818
Not having pie charts is by design. Grafico attempts to adhere to the chart design principles by Stephen Few, amongst others, who has this to say about pie charts: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intel...
Been in the same situation as yourself before ... If you have the necessary skills, depending on the idea, it could just as long to define exactly what you want to build to someone else than actually doing it yourself.

I think its definitely better to get something you can show people, makes its a lot easier to people involved with the project if they can click around and see what you're trying to do. So if time-to-market is not a big factor just do it whenever you can fit it into your schedule.

I'm more of a developer than an designer and find its easier for me to just build out my ideas in a basic skin, and then have a designer (or myself) re-skin later.

If you're more of a designer, it might be better to add the primary functionality and focus on the UI. Then you can have a developer work to add more features later on, or even recode what you've already built if necessary.
Ask HN: Do YC-funded users participate less/more on Hacker News?
Compared to the average non-YC-funded individual.

My own impression is that participation by the YC family in discussions and submissions is pretty low. Is this impression correct?
No, you got me wrong. I meant "you should convict somebody based on hard proof. If you want to convict somebody based on likelihood, judges and juries - like all humans - have a big problem working with big numbers. To minimize hurtful bad decisions, and overcome this human flaw, we should set a fixed, very high probability."
Refactoring fabfile.py for fast, robust Django deployment
Tell HN: Regarding the silent banning of HN posters
I think something must be done about the banning system. Most of the people I've seen getting banned weren't posting especially high-quality posts, so I can understand the ban itself - but why ban them silently? I regularly see posts, sometimes obviously long and thoughtful ones, deleted instantly because a user was considered banned - and the user has no idea! Can't the ban be limited in time, or something be shown to the user? I think it's awful to make people waste their time on comments like this.

To show the problem concretely, in the past months, as I read HN I've been pasting in a text file the usernames of banned users that I saw posting in threads here and there. Here are a few examples:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomjen2

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=slavingia

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=access_denied

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fatdog789

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=robak

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=phil_collins

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=howcool

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=numbchuckskills

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bugmenot

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=anonjon

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=robak

Just look at the last one. How much time has this person unknowingly spent on posts which all got instantly deleted?
No matter how clever Steve's rhetoric - he's trying to restrict freedom and moderate the behaviour of developers.

Steve; if you were really worried about quality, you could examine the end product and make a judgement based on the final quality of each app in question.

This is a strategic business decision and you're treating developers like pawns. Potentially this move has the ability to stifle innovation.
Maybe it's a silly example, but I have found there have been various hardware integration problems with my x61 various ubuntu installs. Every new release broke something. The first release I installed allowed me to put my compy to sleep but not wake it up. The most annoying release bug was an issue with my wireless card in which it would only stay connected for a few second. The latest release was actually the best I've experienced so far because the only thing that happened is that flash became fucked up, which is pretty standard for flash.

A friend of mine, observing my various struggles with ubuntu (I'm a n00b; he's been running linux since the dark ages, so he was my go-to guy- jedliu on here) was traumatized by my various problems. When he decided to move away from compiling his own updates (Gentoo), he opted for Arch Linux. Instead of having monolithic updates, Arch Linux just updates everything gradually, so you don't have the problems of updates breaking things that worked before as much.
You're mostly correct about it being a fluff piece, but:

> I had to stop to vomit between each sentence in the paragraph.

You may want to avoid the internet if even sort of silly articles like this make you throw up. You'll likely start losing weight in short order as you fail to keep any food down. That, or you could tone down the hyperbole and swearing some.
either use aviary.com or:

all you need is imagemagick

wkhtmltopdf www.google.com google.pdf && convert google.pdf google.png

results aren't nearly as good as the browser addon but it works
Could you maybe suggest a decent alternative? I picked up android a while ago and I definitely have not been happy with Eclipse, but haven't really found anything better either. Especially with all the instrumentation that google provides.
A postive result at the next drug test!
> but we don't have to like it.

developers for the iPhone are a dime a dozen. But there is only one Appstore for the iPhone.
Isn't it funny how many people using alternative runtimes seem to say "I can fully understand why they would ban Adobe/Flash but why on earth would they also ban my favorite runtime"?

Apple didn't make this move because they have some irrational religious hatred against Adobe. They are just betting that a tight control over the technology by which people produce applications for their mobile platform will be advantageous to them. They are fully aware that this is bad for people who have bet on using different technology and I guess is that they just don't care the tiniest bit.
I'm working on a project that does analytics on universities, and Google Chart is the only decent package I've found that meets my requirements.

A lot of these charting libraries use javascript or flash which is fine for user-specific data, but unsuitable for public data.

I need charts to be jpg/gif/png so people can easily copy them to blogs/forums/facebook. If I use javascript or flash charts I'll lose a huge amount of viral traffic.
That's what quite a few programming platforms already do (I know it's the case with Appcelerator and suspect MonoTouch doesn't do it any differently); but these are actively outlawed by the new paragraph 3.3.1: (emphasis added)

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript.

Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited.
I doubt we'll see Firefox using Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, Core Data or any other of a number of APIs available for the Mac platform anytime soon. Because even if Firefox pretends to really well, first-class citizen of Mac OS X it ain't.
Replicate the same in Java, and let's do the comparison.
Because they are always politically motivated, and are direct threats to freedom and liberty?
Hopefully off topic but interesting is OK on HN:

I've developed a strong "allergy" for "traditional" OO; perhaps/probably unfairly, since it's based on a lot of C++ work I did in the '90s, and it's as anti-dynamic (not just in typing :-) as you can get in the OO world (insert Alan Kay's comment here (I think it was about C++)) ... but it's also based on my recoiling in distaste from seriously learning Java for some Clojure related stuff, too much accidental complexity. My tastes in languages run a lot more to the Scheme end of things (T may remain my favorite Lisp dialect and language of all time) so my current language interests are more like:

Play with Haskell since there's so much ferment there.

Learn a pre-OCaml ML so that I can grok all the ML based FP literature from the period before Haskell's ascent.

Help liberate Clojure from Java: as part of the Clojure in Clojure effort, work on what I call Turtle Clojure ("It's turtles all the way down"). While a Lisp traditionalist, I'm willing to "Get rid of cons!" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814632) but I'd like to see what can be done without Java in the middle. I can't imagine that Java tuned GC is optional for something so seriously functional as Clojure, so that's what I'm looking at the most. Maybe an Appel-Ellis-Li GC can be efficient under Xen (it uses VM for read barriers, but traditional OSes don't optimize that path (10,000 cycles circa 1990)).

The thing I find most interesting and challenging in the area of programming is the single address space multi-core SMP problem, which Clojure is very most focused on and is obviously very relevant at a time when I can buy a x86-64 4 core 8 MB shared L3 cache server class chip from Intel for as little as $200.

I have done the mixin thing with Flavors (proto-CLOS) and C++, and, yeah, the pure Java people don't know what they're missing.
It's not that curious. The appstore lets developers crank out tiny apps that users can buy for peanuts with 'one click'. It's the appstore idea which is innovative (or at least, the implementation - I'm not an appstore historian).
It's frustrating that progress sometimes seems to move in both directions with Ubuntu, but I wouldn't imagine that Ubuntu is the only distribution where this occurs.
Round-up of a data centric architecture
"Tonight's conversation with my girlfriend". Yes, well, you know what they say about ideas. Most likely, it's ok-ish at best :) Why don't you share the idea here, or better yet, execute a minimal version and then share?
This is exactly right. Until they see real damage from the decisions they're making in the form of lost revenue and non-record quarterly performances, why not take the strongest "negotiating" position possible. You can always back down later.
Excerpt:

As I’ve argued before, thirty years of research has identified the following three traits to be crucial if you want a rich life:

Autonomy — control over how you fill your time.
Competence – mastering unambiguously useful things.
Relatedness — feeling of connection to others.

Given the theme, I am surprised this has not inspired any commentary. I would think it would resonate with the many folks here who are apparently looking to create the life of their dreams via entrepreneurship.
That article is flamebaiting bullshit. The title is correct but only ironically.
Saying preservatives are bad is like saying fats are bad.

Yes some preservatives are bad for you, but equally well some are good for you. It also depends on the quantity.

Also you need to consider that unpreserved food costs a lot more (delivery, spoilage, etc). Using preservatives means that people from low incomes can often afford healthy food products which would otherwise be outside of their price range. Avoiding food with preservatives for these groups would often mean a far more restrictive and unhealthy diet.

Repeating urban myths about foods (like "preservatives are bad") are dangerous because "popular knowledge" is often decades behind scientific research and can cause people to adopt behaviours which are actually bad for their health. If you want to say "x is bad" then make sure you actually have the research (ideally a randomized trial or a Cochrane meta-analysis) which backs up what you're saying.
Reasonably low ... but I can't see appointing Putin to head the investigation as anything other than a slap in the face.
A demonstration does not require a control. See: Vinegar + water or the 10,000 other "experiments" for children.
Could Price Shopping Lower Costs and Improve Health Care?
Venture Capital Creating Systemic Risk??
Are you saying you're from the US?
From her bio: She is currently heavily involved in the Linux Yarok project as a developer.

So that might explain the biased flamebait.
He's also quite decent at cricket. In a charity match last year he hit Chris Gayle (captain of the West Indies) for 6 and also bowled him out. Being able to both bat and bowl shows a great amount of general athleticism, most people are only able to do well at one of those.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/other_international/...)
Maybe people who are upset about the new rules are not iPhone developers because the iron grip Apple has on that platform? If the rules were more lax those people could become iPhone devs.
Not really. Real cheese lasts long, that's precisely why it has been invented. A good Comté must be 2 years old before being eaten. A true Camembert gets out the doors of the fabric at age 15 days, and can be consumed for at least 2 or 3 months. Even butter can be kept out of the fridge for several weeks.

Actually pasteurised cheese tends not to last as long as raw milk cheese, because it doesn't carry the proper fauna and flora, that prevents the "bad guys" from thriving.
Could someone please turn on Erlang mode?
I just assumed that the image was a projection from the 4-d universe.
Dude, you got a girlfriend, she likes your ideas and supports you. I wish I had that, because it would be how I coped with all the difficulties. Seriously, it seems to me now, that a girlfriend is more important than a co-founder (pg should include this in the questionnaire).
Hmmm, the last two points about humility and "solving the dirty problems" could very generally apply to the Lisp community as well.
LG GU290 Mobile Phone | LG GU290 Cell Phone Review
Do you really need to hire people just to get it started? Hiring the right people isn't easy, and is time consuming itself.
Marketing Your Business Online
Having seen the Flash Lite source code personally, I can verify item #2 isn't flamebait at all.
Earthworms form herds and make "group decisions"
This is not a spiral
What's the reference to the film industry at the end talking about? I'm not active in Python-land, so that went over my head.
It sucks, from one point of view, from another it makes sense. There is only one form of banning, and that's where the problem lies, this is called 'hell banning' for a reason on other forums.

But I can see the 'upside' in that spammers have had a hard time gaining a foothold on HN, for the most part the system is effective even if it is very cruel towards some specific users.

You're listing 'robak' twice btw. He got banned well over a year ago, I can't see anything in his history that would have caused him to get banned so that by itself is pretty weird. Comments like the one he made around the time he got banned are routinely made by members today and nobody seems to get banned for any of that. You have to go back quite far in the comments history for that user, the comment that is the first one where he's 'dead' is:

"well, at least I know now how average Windows user looks and acts like..."

Which is pretty stupid but that's what the moderation system is for, not a ban (and that comment did not get any downvotes).

Some people here think that it is amusing that these users fail the 'intelligence test' that nobody responds to them their conclusion should be that they've been banned. I don't agree with that, it's a cruel punishment, and the arbitrariness with which it is meted out is another sore point.

HN is strange that way, but it works fairly well in spite of all that.
PHP scripting in Erlang
Hopefully less, after all, once you are working on a funded startup your time left over to idle away in online forums is substantially less than for other, less fortunate people!

If it directly relates to your startup that's a different thing of course, but for the most part 'participating in online forums' should take a backseat to hard work.
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Same boat here. For me, this is a really touch choice. I like the SDK and I think the iPhone OS is by far the best mobile OS out there, but I'm not sure I want to back this horse.

When Microsoft was the Evil Empire it was easy to stay away from them because I didn't like their software, but it costs me something to stay away from Apples ecosystem since it's really good. But I'd much rather see the mobile web succeed than the App Store and the other closed ecosystems.