skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is bad for people who have bet on using different technology

Absolutely true.

An intersting thing is that I, and I'm sure quite a few others, would never have guessed that language choice was a "bet" (at least, not this kind of bet, anyway).
Modeling emergent urban planning policy
I started to switch from Windows (which I got stuck on when SCO Unix on a 386 was worse than Win 3.1) right at the time Ubuntu "lost it" with Hardy Heron (8.04) two years ago to the month. From the notes I took at the time:

From the moment they released the first version of the kernel, it had broken error reporting (would just crash without reporting) and had bad lockup problems. This was reported early and ignored through the alpha, beta and release cycles. The obviously unreportable and undiagnosable lockup problem was "patched" by users (for the most part) by switching to the RT kernel.

Various serious problems were reported and closed out without being fixed and reopening them was not allowed, e.g. breaking Broadcom 43xx wireless cards.

The analysis at the time that made the most sense to me was that taking a Debian unstable snapshot every 6 months and then furiously trying to make it stable enough was impractical. My interpretation of the above development management problems was that shipping on schedule took absolute priority, and the whole process reached a tipping point with this release.

Me, I eventually went to Fedora, then to Debian stable lenny because I needed Xen and stability ... and by then the hardware I had bought for this was old enough that Debian lenny supported everything ^_^.

(I can supply plenty of URLs or my entire set of notes if desired.)
UW study: Microsoft accounts for 13.6% of Wash. economy
This sort of thing seems to be a hacker answer to user problems. On the upside, it accomplishes the goal of the forum: To be left the hell alone by people deemed to be troublemakers, and it does it for a minimum of effort and hassle on the part of the moderators. You don't have to listen to these folks whine, harass you, etc. It's ruthless but effective. On the downside, it has other unintended community (and reputation) effects that some folks seem to fail to recognize. If you either don't see those effects or believe that tolerating them is "the lesser evil" compared to what you would have to do for some other solution, well, then silent banning is apparently convenient for the moderators/forum owners.

I'm not suggesting it is wrong or that doing things some other way would be "better". I have difficulty imagining that it's something I would choose to do. What I do has its upside but the downside is that it is labor intensive and emotionally wearing. And my approach has never been tested (at least not by me) as a moderator method for a large, high-traffic forum like this. So I don't know if it is even practical, much less if it would really accomplish the goal(s) behind current moderation policy here. So it is possible that my approach to social conflict doesn't scale well...etc... Which means I'm not terribly interested in judging this as "right" or "wrong" for this forum, much less in some absolute sense. <shrug>
Well the ones I checked posted really dumb things.

It's their fault if they can't figure why nobody ever replies to anything they write.
I'm a developer. I have a simple app in the app store, and I spent time porting it to Titanium so that I could add features faster by using Javascript.

I also have two simple internal apps that my sales people use that I was going to port to JS, then to the iPad, so I could more easily make modifications since none of the applications are performance sensitive. If there were bits that weren't performing, I would code only those bits in Objective-C or change my algorithm. It takes about 10 times longer in days for me to develop in Objective-C. I'm still debating if I want to cancel my iPad 3g pre-order, since I won't be able to do with it what I want, except browse the internet on the can. I'm definitely not going to order the other iPads (~12 sales people) that I was planning to order once my software has been modified. Further, I already put work into full-featured ports, so instead of wasting the work, my apps will be coming to other platforms, although I set out to just increase the speed of iPhone development.

I'm going to write a blog post on this today at some point.
And Sergei Bubka before him. Bubka set 18 indoor and 17 outdoor world records in the space of 10 years, often beating is old record by only 1 or 2 cm. There is no way he would have jumped like that if he didn't get a bonus for each record he set.
Russia Plans a Science City Modeled on Silicon Valley
As it stands this doesn’t demonstrate anything. Even with a control drawing conclusions would be very hard. It’s basically propaganda.
nice article. after reading that i found that this virtualbox article - http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_architecture - made a lot more sense (it goes into implementation details for vb, which isn't addressed in the original article, but which dynamically switches between emulation and virtualisation as necessary)
In which the author's faith in humanity is restored by Hacker News
wkhtmltopdf is excellent software. I use it to generate previews of text/html parts in emails at http://spamalyser.com/
I am an iPhone developer and have no problem with this rule. It makes sense and is in line with Apple's policies before. I think most people won't be upset if they realize that Apple is not a business model, they are just a channel. You can't build a business on Apple because they can shut you down when ever they want either directly or indirectly. The iPhone is the first mobile platform that I created apps for and I have been considering developing for other platforms as well. I enjoy working in Objective-C and this is why I will spend more time with the iPhone/iPad projects.
The specifics of the post may be written in a troll-like style, but the key points are quite valid - I've had very similar experiences with Ubuntu. Running an "apt-get dist-upgrade" update last October entirely hosed support for my (pretty damn common) network card - transferring at anything above about 5Mb/s would lock the network driver. I had to manually discover this, and hand-correct the hosing until they finally shipped a kernel > 2.6.30.

The machine is an entirely standard, off the shelf, Atom based PC. Taking the "Could I give this to a non-IT expert" test, it failed entirely. I'm not saying that this couldn't happen on a non-Linux system, but a) I've never had it happen to Mac or Windows b) Trawling support forums and kernel bug lists to discover the cause isn't good enough for end users and c) Waiting 4 months for a non-hacky fix sucks. As it stands, I could never seriously recommend Ubuntu to a non-tech savvy friend.

I suppose this is just anecdata, but I'm certainly not alone (another friend can tell you a similar story about sound cards, for example).
Maybe you could 'free up' some time in your schedule by working on it with your girlfriend? Then it could be part and parcel of building the relationship instead of just another time-burden interfering with your relationship.

Also, I have found that sometimes not having adequate time to "work" on something means there is more time for it to simmer on the back burner and develop to more maturity as an idea. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the mean time, work on solving other problems (like the money issues) so someday you can focus more on this.
First: what's the idea? It's kind of important to know in terms of giving feedback on how to proceed. Being terrified that someone will steal your idea is common but counter productive and most likely misinformed. Sharing your idea here might get you a partner or at some good specific feedback. Most people here are too busy with their own ideas they hold in high regard to try and take yours and run with it.
How is it good for users? The quality argument is bunk, and the net effect of these new rules is to restrict choice for developers. When developer choice is restricted, does that not also restrict choice for users?
Whoa, common sense _and_ a sense of recent history. Amazing...
No it doesn't. A demonstration doesn't require anything in particular. It isn't like you said, science so it doesn't have any rules. The only thing it is required to do is demonstrate something.

This perhaps demonstrates something very specific but what is implied is something more general about Mdonald's stuff, something it didn't really demonstrate in any kind of way. With a control it would have, provided what it demonstrates is real in some way.
On the other hand the fact that the supply might run dry some day could add value to the product. People buying nixie tube clocks (and paying a premium over LED based clocks) are probably doing exactly because they are odd and obscure and won't be around forever. Lots of companies base their entire sales strategy around the fact that their product is only available in a limited number and after that it'll never be available again.

From reading the article he's not basing his entire company around nixie tubes, rather it's just one of the several niche products he's selling. So it's not like he'll have to close up shop just because he runs out of nixie tubes.
"Objective C and C++" is "Objective C and Objective C++".
Hey, Dude. We should get together in the next week or two. :)

It may well be FUD, but the SEC and DOJ have been launching an inquiry. I first heard about this in WaPo last August: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06...

and re: software architect/manager/director salaries:
http://www.indeed.com/q-software-manager-$140,000-l-san-jose...
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=software+architect++%24140%2C00...
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=software+director++%24140%2C000...
What's stopping someone (probably in China) from making more nixie tubes?
"Never mind that such accusations have never been thrown about when the subject was developing titles for the Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 3, or any other game console. Those developers must not only use the languages and tools the vendor outlines, but typically must also pay thousands of dollars for licensing fees, specialized development hardware, and jump through a variety of other hoops."

You have to pay for development kits, true, and you have to link with the standard libraries, but the language and tools you use aren't restricted.

All the TRCs/TCRs are outlined ahead clearly ahead of time and for the thousands of dollars you get support and a working dialogue between the developer and the platform holder.
There are plenty of innovative startups in Europe especially in the mobile space.

Try having a look at techcrunch's european job board.

Where are you in Germany ? - from what I've seen bootstrapping is considered far more acceptable in Berlin than other parts of Germany.
1) Yes, someone has already thought of your idea. It doesn't mean they plan on executing on the idea. It's the execution, not the idea that matters. It's execution that defines success.

2) Having a partner/co-founder or someone you can bounce ideas off of (besides your bias girlfriend) provides impetus and motivation for someone consumed with the day-to-day of living. If you're having a problem prioritizing your idea along with all of the gotta-eat stuff, then bringing someone in to bounce ideas off of is essential because time is literally fleeting and non replenish-able.

3) Engage other people. Most ideas fail in just this way, because the founder is afraid to share the idea with others. Thinking that person will run off with the idea. The odds of this happening are slim. Most people operate more ethically than that.
So is HN participation frequency inversely correlated to accomplishment?
I do.

I was honestly looking at cost quotes to port a couple customers to a flash multi platform situation, but now that work is shot.

On the upside, quite a few HN people asked for quotes after having similar dreams shut down, but more work from old customers is almost always easier, more predictable and cheaper than dealing with a crop of new potential customers. A few weeks from now I might say different depending on how much we land.

I do think I will use Flash as an Android platform, especially if it has a Java plugin library. The lack of a visual designer on Android is one of it's biggest weaknesses.
If you explicitly tell someone that they're banned then they will just clear their cookies and make a new account. That's for sure.

But I don't think that justifies the act of presenting a completely false world to them in which they are active members of the community, while in reality no one can see their contributions. It just seems dishonest and contrary to the values that made the community strong in the first place.

I think it's a bad policy and should be reconsidered, even if it means that some disruptive people will be harder to get rid of (we can just keep downvoting them like we always have).
From what I can tell, you MUST connect it to iTunes before it even allows you pass the "Connect me to iTunes on your computer" screen. I thought it was unneeded and should have had a "remind me later" at the very least (I didn't buy one, just set one up). Regardless, almost anyone that wants an iPad will have a computer - and the benefit of having a "import everything" option is huge.
Neither would I. When analyzing risk, there is also always the risk that you didn't recognize something as a risk at all. Maybe this is the Black Swan event (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory) of mobile application development... Unlikely but disastrous at the same time...
You could take http://cgiirc.org/ and point it at a http://bitlbee.org/ server.
This is blogspam and also very light on information. Would not read again.
I haven't even heard of some of these Myths. "Apple owes Adobe a living"? "Adobe's gonna get Apple"?

I see consoles as a completely different topic. The iPhone allows any developer to sign up and develop (for example, that 9 year old kid that wrote some apps). I guess if Sony spent a huge amount of resources porting games to Xbox and Microsoft waited until a week before release to screw them over I'd hate Microsoft even more.

Furthermore, I don't like being lumped into the group that "seemed completely cool with Microsoft’s reign over the entire PC market". It sounds like the author believes that everyone who disagrees with Apple's latest moves are brainless Adobe fanboys. I believe most developers (myself included) disagree with the ability to control the method of development rather than the output (review process). It also seems that Apple waited this long on purpose (days before CS5 release) - almost trying to screw Adobe over as much as possible. This screwed over countless developers.
Ironically, with the huge bevy of crap out on the store, I think the majority of cross platform library apps are likely currently higher average quality than the actual "Average App". Unity3D especially raises the bar there.

--Actual Developer
> For general-interest topics, I've never found a blog worth reading.

Check out Arts & Letters Daily

http://aldaily.com
A lot of game companies that have invested in Unity3D. Some of those games are are big sellers as well.
Get some partners – you will need them.

One thing I learned with our startup is that so little of it is about the technology (i.e. “the app”) and the idea, but instead it is all about getting your idea to market. To do that, you need people with good business heads, proven experience, relationships and yes, money. This is typically why first timers are so protective of their ideas where those with a bit of experience realize that there is more value in sharing the idea than there is risk in someone else taking it and running with it. (see comment by mkeblx.) Again, because the idea is not the most important thing, execution is what is important.

Take the computer mouse for example. Doug Engelbart came up with the idea 20 years before it ever came into mainstream use. Engineers and technologists like us seem to inherently believe that good ideas will naturally rise to the top, when really what often makes ideas reach the top has to do more with timing, marketing, and the confluence of many other events that are ancillary to the idea. Was VHS better than Beta? Was Windows better than Apple? Was Word better than WordPerfect?

So, as others have recommended, get some partners. Get other people as excited and passionate about the idea as you are, don’t worry about who gets the credit, and you will accomplish amazing things.

And, how much start-up capital do you need?
Should adults be bribed to do well at work?

Of course! So why not with kids in school?

Throughout high school and middle school, I was mostly a B student. If I got $100 a month to be an A student, I definitely would have been. A few hours more of studying and I would be able to buy myself stuff I wanted? Fuck yes.
I tend to feel this was more about stopping the potential for a move by large numbers of developers to platforms that allow targeting multiple devices with one codebase diminishing the advantage apple enjoys in having exclusive Apps.
Robak reads like the popular music blogger and lawyer Bob Lefsetz:

Robak: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161237
Lefsetz: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/

It's an impactful style but too crude and unnuanced for the predominant INT(J/P)'s of HN, with 76% of Hacker News being an NT.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249

So, not enough intuition and thinking. Too much sensing and feeling. They come across as idiots.
Crazy?

It's just smalltalk mixed with C. Learn those two, it makes total sense.

C#'s only features on the language IMO were: Better XML api's and Garbage Collection. Both of those are actually iPhone limitations, not language limitations.
No One Is to Blame for Anything
I only skimmed through the VirtualBox article but it seems to me it's simply explaining how QEMU works (VirtualBox is derived from QEMU).

The "switching dynamically between emulation and virtualization" is simply what I referred to as "hardware emulation" using dynamic binary translation. Of course, when the host and guest CPUs are the same, you end up running bulk of the original native code pretty much as-is. But because you're dynamically generating the code, you end up causing a trap to the hypervisor for the corner cases.

The VirtualBox article is not clear on what it does when hardware supports virtualization (Intel VT-x ("Vanderpool") and AMD-V (SVM) support) but I am guessing it also does what QEMU does, which is to use KVM (or whatever the equivalent is on other platforms than Linux).

What these extensions do is eliminate dynamic binary translation completely. You only trap to the hypervisor on PIO and MMIO accesses and few other minor cases. But all this is controlled by hardware and KVM kernel subsystem and the hypervisor itself doesn't touch the guest instruction stream.

[ Disclaimer: I'm not that familiar with KVM internals so the above explanation is probably a slight over-generalization. ]
Thanks guys for the sarcastic responses. Maybe I should clarify my question.

For .NET programming I use visual studio, for iPhone I use XCode, and for rails I use Textmate. I have not done any java programming so I was hoping to get some advice from people who have, particularly in the context of Android programming.
These are amazing, thanks.
I hate not being able to reply to dead posts. Maybe I should just turn showdead off...
"Dried foods will decompose over time"

Not in Colorado. Cold, high and dry is remarkably potent combination, stuff will pretty much mummify if undisturbed.
What can you get banned here for? I'm curious.
Support for proprietary hardware is a Linux problem, not a Ubuntu problem. In my experience Ubuntu is better than most distros at making things "just work". No Linux distro is ever going to be as turnkey on any random gadget you just bought at Best Buy as Windows/OSX until the manufacturers start writing and open-sourcing their own drivers.
Actually, that may be exactly why apple is doing this.

Their reviewers are swamped with copious items they think are low quality (their words, not mine, and my solution for them is actually "Care Less").
MX Telecom are looking for devs in London. Mobile messaging and applications for folk like 118118/KGB_ BBC and Twitter

http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/softdev
The instrumentation is still all there. I honestly am an old unix hacker at heart and use a command line and gVIM most of the time. Notepad++ and the terminal might be enough.

Really check out how to use ADB (android debugger) from the command line, it's surprisingly easy.
That's fine; so he'll get downvoted. He'll either stop contributing, or he'll realize why he's being downvoted and change his tone. I've seen it happen dozens of times on HN; many people are willing and capable of adapting to a community.
The problem I have is that you paraphrase. For something so important I think it would be worth publishing the whole e-mail. Unless there's something personal in it that you don't want to share.
Please do not change your password
You are leaping to conclusions here about my statements in order to make your points seem stronger. No one here said that fats are bad, and I never implied that I was in blissful ignorance of the reasons behind adding preservatives to food. Really..... I am willing to make a good bet that you have no nutritional studies what so ever behind you, whereas I, being half a "health freak", have a total of a bit more than 2 years of dietary studies, of which 1 full year had metabolical context. And, please, no vacuous remarks or accusations of being zealously blindsided just because of my use of the term "health freak".
A Calm, Reasonable Argument Supporting Apple’s Anti-Flash SDK Language
Actually the original post url is http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/04/11/gruber-a-voice-of-calm-in-a-mobile-world-gone-out-of-control/
Well, Steve Jobs said it so of course it's true dear.
> The SDK cames with a suite of command line tools that are far more easy to understand then the eclipse crud.

I very much agree with this statement. Here are some resources:

http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2009/01/developing-android-witho...

http://java.dzone.com/articles/google-android-tutorial

http://blogs.nitobi.com/joe/2010/03/26/android-without-eclip...
oh. can you not tell if you are banned? am i banned?! hello? hello!!!?
Any advice on the best phone to get? Droid or nexus maybe? Does it matter for development?

Do i need a developer phone?
ok, so i'm curious now. if i think those four letter things are a pile of bullshit, what type am i?
You can probably use TextMate and ADB in the command line.

http://www.onebitwonder.com/projects/android

For a text mate android plugin
Shout all you want. Nobody can hear you. You're banned!
It appears the author used Python while working for the film industry, see for instance the previous post in the blog: http://artificialcode.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-midlife-python...
Are Some Indian Startups Lacking Innovation?
If you look at the comment history of a banned user, you can often see the very point at which they were banned (because comments posted before the ban aren't killed). It's usually just a single low-quality comment that triggers a ban.
I've had one banned for saying relatively tame things that made the mod defend himself with, "you don't seem to like the site very much." I then created another on the same machine, and it was silently banned before I even made a first post.

Just an anecdote to answer your question. This was about 2yrs ago, for the record.
I like how all three companies have such different business models, but are still successful. Microsoft sells software. Google sells advertising. Apple sells hardware and software bundled together.
And Google doesn't use Go in their production systems.
Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas
I don't presume to speak for HN but the impression I get is that you can be banned for seeming disrespectful, either to the HN institution itself or to other users.